As William Perry, former secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Tom Collina state in The Button: “Within minutes, with just one phone call, President Trump could unleash up to a thousand nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It would be the end of civilization... For President Trump, starting nuclear war is about as easy as sending a tweet.”

US policy, which invests “sole authority” in the president to launch nuclear weapons, crystallizes the utter absurdity of the nuclear predicament that we have lived under for 81 years. Contrary to popular belief, there is no “button.” Instead, there is a military aide, who carries a 40-plus pound briefcase, referred to as the “nuclear football” (officially called the Presidential Emergency Satchel), which follows the president 24/7/365, whenever he is away from fixed command centers. The fact that the president can use the football to launch US nuclear weapons at any moment, day or night—without having to consult or listen to anyone—beggars belief. Clearly, the ability to start a nuclear war that could destroy most life on Earth should not be entrusted to one person, especially one known to be erratically capriciousness and highly unstable.

Inside the nuclear football is a secure communications device that allows the president to order a launch, as well as a “Black Book,” outlining pre-planned presidential options for targets, delivery systems, and estimated casualties. It originally contained a heavy set of war plans, but after Jimmy Carter complained that it was too complicated for the extremely short time frame, it was simplified into a menu of strike options for either limited strikes or full retaliation, presented as a “one-page, cartoon-like menu.” One of Clinton’s aides quipped that it was like a “Denny’s breakfast menu.”

There is also a small laminated card, called the “biscuit,” with unique codes which are used to establish the president’s identity. If the president were to decide on a nuclear launch, he would read the codes over secure communications to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon or one of its alternates. Once authenticated, the president's will is converted into a “highly encrypted, time-sensitive message called the Emergency Action Message, which includes the authentication codes, the strike option, timing details, and the codes to unlock the weapons.” It is then transmitted by the US Strategic Command Headquarters located in a bunker under the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, again by secure communication, to land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launch control centers, ballistic missile submarines, and air force strategic bombers, each with their own authentication and launch procedures. A full nuclear launch order can be executed in 5-15 minutes.

The only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Presidents often keep the biscuit in a pocket, which has presented problems: Carter inadvertently sent his to the dry cleaners in a suit pocket; Clinton lost it altogether for several months. When Ronald Reagan was taken to hospital after an assassination attempt, he was stripped of clothing and the biscuit was later found by the FBI in a hospital trash can.

Once the nuclear football is opened, the president would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information inside, review the options, and make a decision. Other sources suggest it would be six minutes. As Reagan lamented: “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon? How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”

Indeed, there have been concerns about several presidents during the nuclear age: John F. Kennedy was on heavy pain medication for back pain; Richard Nixon was drinking too much due to the strain of the Watergate investigations. (At one point, he threatened, “I can go back in my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”) Lyndon B. Johnson alternated between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. At the end of their terms, Reagan had early-stage Alzheimer’s and Joe Biden’s clarity of thinking has also been questioned. But of all the 14 presidents who have been in office in the nuclear age, Trump’s stability has been the most extensively questioned. As reported by The New York Times, “Never before in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.”

Most presidents had previous experience with nuclear issues: 9 of 14 had military experience before taking office; five served as vice president; several served in other parts of the executive branch; and more than half, in Congress. Trump had none of this prior experience.

When Trump took charge of the nuclear football for a second time in 2025, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who had previously introduced legislation to Congress against “sole authority,” stated:

As Donald Trump returns to the White House, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress’ constitutional role is respected and fulfilled. We must put guardrails on presidential authority to start nuclear war. We must never again entrust the fate of the world to just one fallible human.

Upon receiving a nuclear briefing just before their inauguration, presidents are often horrified by the awesome responsibility. Dwight D. Eisenhower was “visibly shaken”; Kennedy asked, “And we call ourselves the human race?” Carter recounted that, as president, the horror “was constantly on my mind.” George H.W. Bush stated, “I had no idea we had so many weapons... What do we need them for?” Barack Obama told a close adviser, it was “one of the most sobering experiences of my life.” Trump said, “a very sobering moment... very, very scary.” But as Perry and Collina comment, “While that statement might sound reassuring, Trump also asked, on several occasions [during his first term] ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’”

Indeed, during both terms, Trump has occasionally appeared to threaten their use. In 2017, when he and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were in a tense standoff, Trump said: “North Korea, best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” When Kim boasted that his nuclear button is “always on my table,” Trump tweeted in return, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is much bigger & more powerful than his, and my Button works!”

During the current ongoing war with Iran, Trump has also made a number of extremely ominous threats, the worst of which was probably on April 7 when he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Following this post, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to the White House physician on April 10, citing the above comments and requesting an evaluation of Trump due to “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening tantrums.” No answer was received.

On April 14, Raskin submitted legislation to Congress to establish a nonpartisan “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.” Such a mechanism is allowed by the 25th Amendment as an alternative to the vice president and Cabinet deciding whether the president should be removed from office (which is currently unlikely since Trump’s Cabinet members were selected because of their extreme loyalty). The legislation is still in committee.

On June 18, Raskin again wrote to the White House physician demanding that he comply with his previous request; provide a complete list of all medications and dosages; identify each of the 22 medical providers and their specialty that Trump saw during his May 26 examination at Walter Reed; and publicly release the complete results of this visit—again, without response.

Although the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” forbids psychiatrists from offering public opinions about the diagnosis and mental health status of public figures they have not examined, many have argued that the rule is poorly conceived and that there is an overriding “duty to warn.” In this spirit, a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists, and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on April 30 of this year.

They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility... claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality.’ Severely impaired judgment and impulse control... Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.”

They conclude:

It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline... For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

On six occasions since 2016, Markey and Lieu have introduced legislation entitled the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, which would reallocate the responsibility for launching nuclear weapons from the president to Congress when the US is not being attacked. It would require Congress to explicitly approve any first nuclear strike by the US before federal money could be spent on the attack. So far it has not been adopted.

If the Democratic Party wins a majority in the next Congress, the Markey and Lieu bill or Raskin’s bill could be passed. If the latter is adopted, the use of Article 25 might become politically possible. Alternatively, it is also remotely conceivable that Trump could be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. But the concern remains as to whether this is soon enough to spare the world the possible use of Trump’s “sole authority”—given his deteriorating cognitive abilities.

Of course, the only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

As Jonathan Schell sums up in The Fate of the Earth: “The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point—that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment—is a fact against which belief rebels.”

I inherited a few things from my father, who, as the story goes, when I was a baby in Transylvania, swam across a frozen river to escape communist Romania, toward a faith that we could forge our own brave futures, free from ethnic oppression. I inherited his unruly curls, refusing control and predictability. I inherited his sometimes comic rage at injustice. I inherited his love of the beautiful game, its history, its ever-evolving, complex entanglements with state and power. His faith that people who have little can stand proudly against nations who have stolen their wealth, and refuse to back down.

He is no longer here for me to talk to about the World Cup. And this impossible and forever grief has been opened fresh as I try to imagine what he would say about what we have watched unfold in the 2026 games. There is a chip inside the ball now. It hums at 500 times a second, registering contacts no eye can see, no crowd can feel, no player can dispute. It enters the conversation as an indisputable, objective data point, asserting authority over anyone and everyone. On the third of July, in Toronto, that sensor ended Croatia's World Cup. Joško Gvardiol had bundled home what looked like an equalizer 13 minutes into stoppage time, and for a few delirious seconds the stadium believed. Then according to officials the sensor detected the smallest brush of a teammate's hair against the ball, on its way to the man who set up the goal. FIFA officials decided it was enough to call it offside. The goal was erased. Portugal advanced, 2-1. A machine had registered what no human present could, and in registering it, unmade a moment of collective joy.

FIFA insists the call was correct. Perhaps it was. I can’t say, the beautiful game is rife with instances when fans felt distraught by calls refs have made. But I can say that this is different. We have built a tournament where correctness is now adjudicated by inertial sensors and video rooms and it lies beyond dispute. Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan chronicler of the game, warned us. "The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail," he wrote, "the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable." The chip in the ball is the technocrat's dream: a game with the unforeseeable engineered out. It is not just that the game has been made less human under the guise of objectivity. It is that the fantasy of objectivity itself has become the cudgel.

Objectivity as Disguise

Here is what I am reflecting on, wishing I could discuss with my dad, at the close of this tournament: The promise of VAR was never really neutrality. It was the appearance of neutrality, which is a different and more useful thing if you happen to hold power. The appearance of objectivity is not a side effect of the manipulation; instead, it is the mechanism, because a decision the machine is presumed to have made is a decision no one thinks to question. A goal-line sensor cannot be bribed. But the humans who decide when to consult it, what angle to review, which foul to freeze and which to wave through, can be, and the data increasingly suggests they have been, whether by conscious design or the gravitational pull of a superstar's fame and the money this can make for FIFA.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness.

Similarly, there are echoes of this pattern in Egypt against Argentina in the round of 16. Egypt led early. Mostafa Ziko put the ball in the net for what would have been a two-goal cushion, and VAR chalked it off for the faintest infraction in the buildup. Late in the match, with Egypt still level, a shove in the box went unpunished by the same system that had been so exacting minutes before. Argentina scored in the 90-second minute and advanced, 3-2. Egypt's football association filed a formal complaint. Their coach made clear the issue when he said his team had suffered an injustice, and suggested that FIFA needed Lionel Messi to keep playing. Analysts who reviewed the tournament's VAR data found that Argentina and Mexico received the most favorable review outcomes of any teams at the tournament, while Croatia and Iran received the least. From this data it appears that a system built to remove human judgment from the game continues to produce outcomes that track, with uncomfortable fidelity, who those in power most need to keep around to increase earnings.

The instances telling this story are culminating into a chorus. In an Iran-Belgium match, a goal was disallowed because VAR determined that an Iranian player's rear end, not his foot, not his knee, but the curve of his backside, had drifted a fraction past the last defender. It was, on its face, absurd, and it was also revealing, because it showed the machine doing exactly what it was built to do: finding a violation so microscopic that no stadium, no broadcast, no human referee running at full speed could ever have called it in real time, and then presenting that finding as more true, more final, than what 40,000 people had just watched with their own eyes. Such instances, of which there are others, are leading fans and experts alike to ask whether VAR had gone too far. In this variation, football survived for 150 years on the premise that referees would sometimes be wrong, and that this was a condition of the game being played by humans, for humans, at human speed. It appears that under the guise of taking away the possibility of human error to allocate the decision to VAR, we are simply relocating the injustice somewhere less visible and giving it a machine's alibi.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness, and a system that claims the first while abandoning the second is more dangerous than one that never claimed either, because it forecloses the argument. You cannot appeal to a sensor's conscience. What we need, and what this World Cup has made painfully clear we are losing, is the return of human judgment, fallible and accountable and answerable to a crowd, back into the center of the game. And this goes for on the pitch and off the pitch.

Breaking the Rhythm to Cash In

If you want to understand who the 2026 World Cup is really for, watch what happens 22 minutes into each half. The rhythm is interrupted, and the play stops. Not because it is dangerously hot, though with climate change it too often is; the breaks run on schedule even in roofed, air-conditioned stadiums. They stop because FIFA decreed a mandatory three-minute "hydration break" in all 104 matches, "regardless of heat conditions." It is the first World Cup in history to do so. Officially, the line is that this is about player welfare, but if we follow the money a different story emerges.

Soccer, alone among the major North American television products, historically offered almost no in-game commercial inventory. Ninety minutes, two halves, no timeouts to sell. The mandatory breaks changed that overnight, manufacturing 208 guaranteed advertising windows across the tournament and restructuring the game into four quarters, conveniently familiar to the American fan and the American businesses FIFA is courting. Media buyers estimate Fox Sports alone stands to reap a minimum of $250 million from these breaks, with plausible figures running to half a billion. Former England defender Gary Neville called it what it is: a "stealth advertising break."

Heat is real, and climate change is making it deadlier. Here, a genuine safety concern has been laundered into a revenue engine, and the game's rhythm, its uninterrupted, breath-held flow, the very thing that distinguishes it, has been sold for the price of a commercial slot. Once you see that the game's own rhythm is for sale, the question is no longer whether other decisions are being bent, only which ones, and in whose favor.

What Lawrence Did

And yet, capitalism did not manage to buy everything. Not everyone in this tournament was for sale, and not everyone who showed up did so for the sponsors.

Algeria, making the trip to the American Midwest, chose the college town of Lawrence, Kansas as their base. And Lawrence welcomed them with open arms. The University of Kansas marching band learned and played the Algerian national anthem. A local artist built a massive Algerian flag out of organic materials. No hydration break manufactured that. It happened because people decided, without being asked and without being paid, to open a door.

That reminder of who we are is also a gift we received from this World Cup alongside everything else this tournament has shown us about who is trying to own the game. There may be polarizing narratives that cultivate a sense of suspicion about people who do not think like us or look like us, but the world is filled with people who look at the visitor and welcome them with a song that reminds them of home.

The Trump Card (vs. the Red Card)

Oh and perhaps the least surprising of all the events from this World Cup was the phone call. Folarin Balogun, the United States' top scorer, a Black, American-born son of Nigerian immigrants, playing for a nation whose president has spent the year trying to end birthright citizenship, was sent off against Bosnia on a red card, triggering an automatic one-match ban that FIFA had repeatedly described as beyond appeal. Days later, that unappealable ban vanished. FIFA invoked a probationary loophole to suspend the suspension, clearing Balogun to face Belgium in Seattle less than 24 hours after the decision. It was the first time since 1962 that a red card issued at a World Cup did not result in a suspension.

Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to ask for a review. He then thanked FIFA publicly for "reversing a great injustice." Belgium's football association said it was "astonished," and UEFA called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable." Speaking from the White House, Trump said he hadn't known what a red card was until this happened; once he found out, he said, "You got to be kidding," and picked up the phone.

Trump may think he can do anything in this world, but the consequences are ours to carry and ours to refuse.

Infantino had handed Trump the inaugural "FIFA Peace Prize" the year before, an award invented, it is hard not to conclude, to flatter a notoriously fragile ego. And a supposedly ironclad suspension dissolved within days of a presidential request, reshaping how an opponent could prepare for a knockout match. When the game's governance rearranges itself around a head of state's preference, the fix does not have to be spoken to be real. Of course, this is all according to the script of authoritarian power hoarding that the Trump administration follows.

The United States lost to Belgium, 1-4, eliminated in the Round of 16. Balogun played, amid a firestorm no team should have to carry onto a pitch, and the US was outclassed from the opening minutes to the final whistle. There is a version of this story where I tell you the team was cursed, or simply outmatched, and maybe some of both is true. But it is hard, watching that scoreline, not to think of everything this team had earned up to that point, the grit against Bosnia, the composure that got them here, and everything Trump's intervention cost them in return: a level playing field to lose on, if lose they had to; the dignity of an opponent who did not have cause to call the whole thing rigged before kickoff; a story about their own merit instead of a story about a president's ego.

The team was better than the man who could not let them face Belgium without first bending the rules in their favor. He gave them a phone call. He did not give them a win. That, too, is a lesson: Intervention dressed as favor still costs the person it claims to help. Trump needed his own father to intervene to keep him afloat as a young man, bailing him out with millions he did not earn. He does not seem to understand that a team should not be, and cannot be, rescued into victory. It can only be robbed of the chance to win or lose on its own terms. Trump may think he can do anything in this world, but the consequences are ours to carry and ours to refuse.

The Public Riot of a Thing

Another thing I inherited from my father (who much like Maradona, was also a scoundrel and a genius) is my love of history. And if we look at the history of this sport we find that football never really belonged to the corporate sponsors, the technocrats, and the authoritarian strongmen. It has a dispersed history, thousands of years old; ancestors of the sport were present in pre-Hispanic American culture and in ancient Rome. Before it was standardized into the sport we know today, football was a folk practice, a public riot of a thing in which entire English villages chased a stuffed ball across open country and used the chaos as an occasion for popular justice.

What ended the people's sport was the enclosure of the commons, when the English parliament converted collective fields into private profit and the gentry moved to regulate the festivals of people they had just dispossessed. The standardized game that followed, codified in the elite schools of the 1840s, was explicitly a tool of order: a way to discipline boys and, later, to keep factory workers fit for labor and distracted from dissent. The chip in the ball, the hydration break timed to the ad break, is only the enclosure's newest fence, an attempt to measure and monetize the very unruliness that made the commons worth having in the first place.

And yet. Every attempt to control the game produced its own resistance. Scottish workers, migrating for wages, carried with them a "combination game" of passing and possession, a style rooted in the cooperation and solidarity of the factory floor, set against the individualist "kick and rush" of their bosses. When the First World War pulled men into the trenches, women took their places in the factories and on the pitch; the Dick, Kerr Ladies drew 10,000 spectators to a charity match in 1917, only to be shoved back into domestic invisibility once the men returned. And in Brazil, where the colonial elite first played football in whites-only clubs, Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous players took the imported game and reinvented it. Arthur Friedenreich, son of a German businessman and a Black washerwoman, fouled without protection because referees refused to blow the whistle for him, learned to weave and swerve and vanish from contact. That is where the dribble was born. The dribble developed as an act of survival and resistance, a body making itself impossible to catch in a world built to exclude it.

History has a wonderful way of exposing commercial breaks, all-knowing sensors, and presidential phone calls for the small, ridiculous things they are. The game has always been a site of capture and a site of escape. Maradona was a genius and a scoundrel, the hand of God and the man ruined by it. We should not sanctify the players or the fans or the game itself. The Egyptian ultras who helped topple President Hosni Mubarak, who stood in Tahrir Square and paid for it with their lives at Port Said, also carried their own contradictions. Everything is a story of everything. There is no pure resistance untouched by the thing it resists.

But there is always resistance. That is the point French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about brilliantly: Where there is power, there is resistance, not outside it, but woven through it. The disciplinary schoolyard produced the combination game. The colonial clubs produced Friedenreich's dribble. The chip in the ball, and the biases it has laundered into data, produced an Egyptian federation that stood up to corporate oligarchs, and a Kansas college town that decided, sensor or no sensor, to throw a party for a team it had no obligation to love. And this summer, a nation of half a million people produced something no sensor could measure at all.

Cabo Verde

The Blue Sharks of Cabo Verde had never been to a World Cup. Ranked 67th in the world, they drew with Spain, scored their first-ever World Cup goal against Uruguay, and clawed their way out of the group as its runners-up, the first debutant to reach the knockout stage since Slovakia in 2010. Then, in the Round of 32, they met the reigning champions, Messi and Argentina, and refused to be a footnote. Messi scored early. Cabo Verde equalized in the second half. Argentina retook the lead two minutes into extra time. Cabo Verde equalized again, in the 103rd minute, when Sidny Lopes Cabral curled a shot into the top corner that made me want to kneel on the ground in a prayer of gratitude. Then in the chaos of bodies clashing deep in the second period of extra time, mere minutes from penalties, Argentina scored to survive, 3-2. The reigning champions of the world barely avoided the biggest upset in World Cup history, against a nation smaller than most American counties.

And Cabo Verde was incandescent. They were brilliant. They played the beautiful game with joy. A tiny island nation, a former Portuguese colony, had stood on the largest stage the sport offers and refused fear, anger, and pettiness. They embodied joy. No sensor could register what that meant. No commercial break could sell it. No phone call from any president could reverse it.

Football, no matter how much authoritarians and corporate greed try to stifle it, is the art of the unforeseeable. Just as we are.

And then the final offered us an impeccable microcosm of the metanarrative. Spain beat Argentina 1-0, a tournament of collective, patient, disciplined possession culminating in a team that simply held the ball and refused to be provoked, that stayed connected until the opposition frayed. Argentina was formidable and proud, and played most of extra time a man down after a red card. This was no clean fable of virtue over villainy, only two proud teams and their contradictions. On Sunday we watched lessons unfolding on the pitch that we need to hang on to during these times of rising authoritarianism: hold your shape, keep the ball, don't let the other side bait you into their game, and the pressure eventually tells on them, not you.

And there, lingering in the confetti where he did not belong, was Trump, booed as he took the stage, presenting the trophy and then refusing to leave it, until Infantino had to usher him aside so the winners could have their moment. Two Argentine players declined his handshake. And by the next morning, Spain's football federation had posted its official victory photo with the president cropped cleanly out of the frame. Trump could not bully himself into the celebration of the victors. He did not earn his place on the podium. And the Spanish team preserved their joy and made sure history would center those who earned their place.

The powerful will keep trying to program the game down to its smallest detail, to meter its joy, monetize its pauses, and bend its rules toward whoever holds the most valuable tickets and the peace prizes. Yet. The ball keeps moving in ways the sensors did not predict. The dribble keeps being invented, on waste ground and back streets, by people the game was designed to exclude. Football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. It was never theirs to own. It was always, at its heart, ours.

My father, after working third shifts at a car parts factory in the Midwest, would stay awake to watch the World Cup, screaming at judgments refs made, screaming at the striker who refused to be a team player and let others score who were in better positions.

What would he say, the man who survived torture by an authoritarian state, the man who risked everything so his children could join him eventually in the "land of the free"? I can't say for certain. I did not inherit his gift for spicy gab; my father was hilarious, with a fantastically foul mouth and a searing sense of humor. But maybe I can tap into that sometimes-comic rage. Trump is a grifter, and state leaders and corporations regularly buy his favors. He has tried to ruin everything meaningful about this country: our excellent higher education system, our ability to coexist in diverse joy and learn and create and build together, our immigrant sisters and brothers, our trans sisters and brothers, any of us trying to survive by working hard. He has mocked our love of this world and of each other. And now, no surprise, he is trying to squeeze the soul out of this sport too.

But my dad and Eduardo Galeano are both right. Football, no matter how much authoritarians and corporate greed try to stifle it, is the art of the unforeseeable. Just as we are. They have not written our future. We are writing it. Football is just another reminder that yes, things are entangled and complicated, and our gods are also scoundrels, and a sensor can be wrong even when it insists it cannot be. But we are the ones writing what comes next, and the unforeseeable, stubborn and ungovernable, is our power too.

Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.

Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.

To hit the basics: Roughly 1,000 wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one pictured above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:

“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.

She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs, and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.

Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.

“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”

“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”

As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out:

It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes... it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.

It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.

So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger Western project of settlement and control.

But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city.

But of course the border with the US does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:

Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.

By 5:00 pm, Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”

Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.

Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual:

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.

Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires:

Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:

We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!

Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”

The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “You gotta clean your floors.”

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data:

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1°C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.

As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work:

The boreal is on the order of 3 million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the Earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck:

As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.

The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”

Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday:

“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40% of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”

None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia:

“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.

This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help:

“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.

And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons:

“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.

While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the Earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner:

In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day—an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.

Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.

But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: Smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday, but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented:

Eleven US states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.

And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April:

Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them:

“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.

America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its Prime Minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes, “As the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as 'nation building.'”

So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.

Evidence keeps piling up that the long-claimed bipartisan consensus on US support for Israel is dead. Almost daily there are signs that Israeli behavior and the heavy-handed tactics used by the pro-Israel lobby to browbeat elected officials into unquestioning support for Israel are being rejected not only by Democratic voters but increasingly by elected Democrats as well. Events this past week make this clear.

When the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine was forced to withdraw because of allegations of sexual assault, pro-Israel groups were initially relieved because he had been a harsh critic of Israeli policies and had called for eliminating their military aid. The relief was short-lived, however, since all of the leading candidates vying to assume the Democratic slot on the ballot have now adopted the same views—charging Israel with genocide, calling for an end to military aid to Israel, and rejecting support from the pro-Israel lobby. These aren’t positions most of these candidates had taken before, but they know that if they want to win the Democratic nomination and the November election these are positions they must now embrace.

Even Democrats vying for the presidency are demonstrating their willingness to establish independence from what had been the pro-Israel consensus. Gone are the days when a candidate would make the obligatory pilgrimage to Israel to meet the prime minister, hug victims of Arab violence, and visit the Wailing Wall. Now they compete to show just how critical they can be.

Rahm Emanuel, a long-time fixture in US politics and supporter of Israel, traveled to Tel Aviv to deliver a highly publicized speech sharply critical of Israeli policy. His speech was overshadowed by Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) who visited the West Bank, where he was detained and harassed by menacing armed Israeli settlers. Khanna received more press coverage than Emanuel’s speech. This will, no doubt, continue as Khanna makes the media circuit, relating his eyewitness account of the repressive circumstances that define Palestinian daily life under occupation.

Change came slowly, but not before too many careers were destroyed and too many innocents lost their lives.

Because Emanuel and Khanna are potential presidential contenders, the fact that they chose to make these visits and criticism of Israeli policies a key part of their opening volleys spoke volumes about where Democrats are on this issue.

Just a few days later, back in Washington, two votes in Congress added further weight to the case that there is change. In the Senate, Democrats presented a united front to block a Republican effort, supported by Israel, that would have merged US and Israeli military and intelligence cooperation. It would have replaced aid to Israel with guaranteed cooperation and co-production of military equipment, thereby eliminating the ability of future US administrations to limit unacceptable use of US military supplies.

At the same time, the House of Representatives voted on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have cut the annual $3.3 billion US aid package to Israel. This measure was supported by a slight majority of Democratic members of Congress. It wasn’t just the vote that was important. More revealing was how Democrats got to this vote and how they addressed it.

The amendment to eliminate the annual aid to Israel had been initially introduced by a Republican member who recently lost his primary contest owing to a $12 million outlay from pro-Israel sources. That the Republican Speaker of the House allowed the amendment to come to a vote made some Democrats wary that it was a trap, intended to hurt Democrats with pro-Israel donors and Jewish voters in November. In such situations, when controversial votes are to be taken, the party’s congressional leadership takes charge to mobilize their members to vote a certain way. Because the Democratic leader in the House had just received a rather substantial contribution from pro-Israel sources to support electing Democrats in November, it was assumed he would urge his members to vote against the amendment. Instead, recognizing the deep divide that existed in the party, he announced that while he would vote against the aid cut, other Democratic lawmakers were free to vote their conscience. Equally telling was the fact that the Democrats’ No. 2 in the House and the former Democratic leader both voted for the amendment to cut aid.

In their speeches explaining their votes against aid to Israel, most expressed their outrage at Israel’s behaviors, saying that the US should not be complicit in funding what Israel was doing in Gaza. Others cited their disgust with the Israeli prime minister. And a large group of the members who voted for the amendment noted that the money going to Israel to kill Palestinians could better be spent at home to support schools, healthcare, and other domestic priorities.

None of these arguments could have been made even a few years ago. While public opinion, especially among Democrats, has long been critical of Israeli policies, only a handful of elected officials would speak out. They may have been upset with what Israel was doing, but they did not dare voice their concerns in public or vote contrary to the wishes of the pro-Israel lobby. A few factors account for this change.

First, the mass killings of Palestinians and the devastation of Gaza have been viewed by voters in real time. Social media platforms brought this reality directly to the public, unfiltered by establishment media pundits or political propagandists. Equally important is the fact that voters are in a rebellious frame of mind. Both Republicans and Democrats are rejecting their establishments. That’s why Trump was able to win over a majority of Republicans. And it explains why Democrats are turning their backs on party elites and the big money interests who have dominated their politics for decades. Rejecting American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “dark money,” and the taboo against criticizing Israel are part of this shift.

In the face of these developments I can’t help but think back four decades ago when I was warned that if I said the “P word” (meaning the Palestinians) at the 1988 Democratic convention, I would be responsible for destroying the party. When I did say it in my speech to the convention, I was asked to withdraw from the party for fear of the backlash that would follow. Change came slowly, but not before too many careers were destroyed and too many innocents lost their lives. We’re in a different place today, and it’s important we recognize it.

The chronic prevaricator and delusionist, President Donald J. Trump, knows the worse his outlaw actions and mouth are, the less likely the Democrats in Congress are to impeach him.

The Democratic leaders, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), like Trump, oppose impeachment drives but for different reasons. With Trump the coming weeks are only going to get much worse, domestically and abroad!

Let us recall that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her Democrats impeached Trump in 2019, over the Hunter Biden-Ukraine deal demanded by Trump, and in 2020 over the January 6th insurrection and attack on Congress. Both Senate impeachment trials failed to get the two-thirds vote required to convict Trump.

Why aren’t the Democrats demanding impeachment back home, where some 60% of the people favor this “You’re Fired” remedy, including 84% of Democratic voters? In a poll taken a few months ago, 59% of the people agreed with the designation of Trump as “a dangerous dictator.” Why has Hakeem Jeffries opposed House Democrats, almost all of whom favor impeachment in principle, signing on to veteran, centrist Congressman John Larson’s (D-Conn.) H.Res.1155 Articles of Impeachment?

Trump has mastered pushing expectation levels to their lowest depths in American history.

Capitol Hill reporters should ask that question why the Democratic leaders are dragging their feed on impeachment. Maybe it is because the GOP could claim that prior Democratic presidents have committed impeachable offenses. But the counterclaim is that no president in history has committed such egregious offenses, daily, doubling down when challenged. Trump brags about his outlawry, his mantra being “doing whatever I want,” aided by the US Supreme Court’s six Injustices (see Trump v. United States 2024).

The Democratic leadership says, “We don’t have the votes” in a GOP Congress. But to get the votes, you have to mount a relentless drive. Impeachment efforts around the country have collateral benefits, such as giving a demanding, angry electorate an answer to their question: What does the Democratic Party stand for? Impeachment is a mobilizer for get-out-the-vote efforts, for educating and energizing the people back home who want fighters for them in Washington, DC, not pussycats among the Republican carnivores. That’s why bold under-funded progressive primary candidates are starting to win against entrenched Democrats.

Compare the GOP to the Democrats. Republicans, in the minority when the Democrats controlled the House, took their repeal of Obamacare to the House floor over 60 times and lost. Still, they made their point, again and again, until they won the House and, with Trump, moved to make using Obamacare and Medicaid more difficult. As the great workers’ champion, Eugene Debs said, you have to endure losing and losing until you win.

Another explanation for the Jeffries-Schumer crowd is that pushing impeachment creates conflicts and turmoil that goes contrary to their top-down control discipline. They have their narrow and often flawed strategies to win elections, without alienating Wall Street. They also don’t want other variables to rock the boat, including an Impeachment article that raises their complicity with the Netanyahu genocide in Gaza-Palestine and the war against Iran.

When asked about Impeachment, Jeffries replied, “I don’t want to get ahead of that discussion.” What? The mega arsonist is burning down our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands every day, with tens of millions of Americans suffering and endangered, and their political leaders are saying, “Now is not the Time,” contradicting the wishes of the vast majority of their voters.

It is not just the lack of basic political fortitude and self-respect by the Democrats. In recent years, before and including Trump, before and including Elon Musk and his criminal DOGE rampages, there has been a destruction of basic norms and public levels of expectations by people vis-à-vis their political and corporate dominators. Lowering public expectation levels amounts to a get-out-of-jail pass.

Trump has mastered pushing expectation levels to their lowest depths in American history. He can lie, cheat, defame, corrupt, and wreck everything he feels challenges his egomaniacal-driven greed, arrogance, and lust for illegal power and ignorance. Trump’s polls remain in the mid-30s amid all the fake promises and current lies he peddles about his non-existent Golden Age for America, with its booming economy. He even claims falsely that nations are falling all over themselves to invest trillions of dollars in America. (See “Medical Concerns About Donald J. Trump and His Fitness For Office” in the April 30, 2026 Congressional Record.)

In the past, Americans had higher expectations for government officials. For example, Sherman Adams, chief of staff to President Dwight Eisenhower, had to resign in 1958 after accepting a vicuna coat from a textile industry friend who was facing federal regulatory investigations, even though there was no quid pro quo for the gift.

Or in 1987, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) had to suspend his presidential campaign because of accusations of womanizing. A picture of Hart, a married man, with a young woman sitting on his lap on a yacht raised a furor. In 2016 and 2024, Trump, the worst, most boastful sexual predator in American political history, went to the White House as president.

Ronald Reagan, a grade B actor, broke new ground when he became California’s governor and then president with a winning smile and optimistic, patriotic rhetoric that so diminished people’s expectation levels about what they needed and wanted from an American president.

So low were their expectations, including those of the media, of Reagan’s intelligence and knowledge that he became expert at obliging them. Mark Green, in his great book Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error, gives many examples of Reagan’s ignorant statements, words, and jokes that would have sunk previous politicians’ prospects. (See: https://nader.org/1983/12/02/ronald-reagan-reign-of-error/) Reagan dismissed criticism of his polices or actions with a laugh inducing people to say, “There he goes again.”

It all comes down to the civic self-respect, knowledge, and engagement of the citizenry, starting with civic history and skill courses untaught in schools, with parents being circumvented by harmful direct corporate advertisements to their children, now addicted to over five hours a day on their iPhones and similar environments for growing up powerless.

There is a glimmer of hope. Tyrants and fascist dictators always overplay their hand. In Trump’s 26-minute televised speech on July 16, 2026, he showed how desperate and depraved he is. Trump wants to usurp state control of our approaching elections. This time, he didn’t begin to fool the media, so off the wall were his fabrications and phony accusations.

Typical is the Wall Street Journal’s summary of his ravings: “ [T]rump didn’t provide any evidence of voter fraud, prove that people had cast ballots in the US who shouldn’t have, or reveal that election outcomes had been altered because of interference.”

The Fuhrer in the White House, who said in January there should not be any elections in November, may have met his comeuppance. Even his core MAGA crowd is shrinking, according to polls.

But Trump still has something to teach his feeble Democratic opponents. He will never give up his many nefarious plans to disrupt the elections with his false claims and his possible invocation of the Insurrection Act to seize the states’ election data and machinery.

Voting in the upcoming election is a right and a duty. The consequences of not using your vote to send dictator Trump and his Republicans enablers the message that our democracy and the rule of law will not be subjugated by a dictator and his criminal gang.

(For more information on our civically-led Impeachment Symposium on Capitol Hill on July 22 see Nader.org/Impeachment.)

In the age of deepfakes, AI, and shameless political spin, it has become nearly impossible for Americans to trust that anything they see or hear is real. Politicians and other bad actors exploit these tools to twist narratives, while viral videos spread unchecked. The prudent response is to consume news with healthy skepticism—assuming every clip or quote may or may not be true until verified. The result? Widespread cynicism where outrage feels pointless, discourse stalls, and society grows numb to genuine issues.

The post Keep Calm and Keep On Shutting Up appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As fans gather for the FIFA World Cup final match, pitting Spain against defending champion Argentina, New York City has been engulfed in a shroud of wildfire smoke.

At the same time, thousands of wealthy fans are arriving in luxury private jets, the most carbon-emissions polluting form of transportation. This seems an appropriate image for what may prove to be the most polluting sports tournament in world history, thanks in part to private jet excess.

The wildfire smoke, from several hundred uncontrolled blazes across Ontario and northern Minnesota, have contributing to air quality emergencies across the northern U.S. On Thursday, the city of Detroit registered a whopping 724 on the Air Quality Index. Index ratings over 300 are considered a health emergency for all living things.

Scientists are often cautious about attributing blame to climate change, but there is little doubt these wildfires are supercharged by global climate change, as forests dry out and atmospheric rain cycles are disrupted.

On Saturday, the air quality in East Rutherford, New Jersey registered 157, an “unhealthy” level. The pollution index is anticipated to improve for the Finals, with weather shifts and a thunderstorm scrubbing the air. This may bring the pollutant index to 100, considered “moderate” but posing risks for sensitive groups including older adults, children, and those with lung or heart disease.

Compounding the injustice, ordinary fans, taxpayers, and the flying public subsidize the pollution spewing activity of the high-flying private jet class. Private jets don’t chip in their fair share of the cost of airspace, let alone their environmental impact. And last year, the U.S. Congress slathered on more tax breaks for private jets and their ultra-wealthy users.

These tax breaks don’t even address the biggest subsidy: the ability of private jets to avoid any responsibility for the health and environmental costs of their pollution impacts.

With an assist from our new IPS Private Jet Emission Tracker, designed to assess the impact of special events, we know that thousands of private jets have already attended the first 102 matches of the FIFA World Cup. Prior to the final match, the private jets attending the tournament have spewed an estimated 136 kt of additional carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the equivalent of driving 31,723 gasoline powered cars for a year. The Tracker looks at private jet activity in match-host cities over five years and documents the spike in activity.

In our assessment, Red Card for Private Jets at the FIFA World Cup, we document the excessive emissions and the costs to everyone else. We call on FIFA to ban private jets at matches and live up to their pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040.

FIFA should also stop designing tournaments that span continents and cater to the ultra-wealthy private jet class and not ordinary fans. The 2030 FIFA World Cup will be played in six different countries, with most matches in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. But in honor of the 100th anniversary of the World Cup, the opening matches will be played in the South American nations of Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay.

FIFA is clearly competing to produce the world’s most polluting sport competition. They must do more to protect the players, the fans, and our planet. The World Cup belongs to everyone, not just the private jet class.

Mohamed al-Wahidi, 57 years old, a husband, father and grandfather, spent his days doing what aid workers do in a place with almost nothing left: clearing rubble, reopening roads, repairing a leaking pipe, filling a community water tank, or building tents for families with nowhere else to go. In his spare time, he carried out a “perilous project” setting up screens and generators across Gaza so people could watch the World Cup. On the eve of Egypt's match against Argentina, Israel killed him along with the 33-year-old taxi driver as well as two young brothers, ages 8 and 10, walking nearby. Israel's military said it was investigating “the incident.”

As it almost always does, Israel commits murder first, then trumps up a pretext after the kill.

Al-Wahidi is one name in Gaza's daily killing rituals under the supposed ceasefire. Israel has murdered more than 1,100 Palestinians in the Strip since October 2025—265 of them children. Not a single Israeli civilian has been killed on the other side. This is the "peace" Trump's board is managing.

Nearly 1 million people remain trapped in tents through a Gaza summer where temperatures reach 35°C. Season after season, they are left exposed to the elements: first a freezing winter, then the merciless heat of summer. Families survive in tent cities or beneath dangling concrete slabs in destroyed buildings. Meanwhile, Israel continues to block shade nets and plastic sheeting at the border, just as it blocked warm blankets during the winter.

This is what the Board of Peace normalizes: an occupying power expanding while a one-sided truce remains in force, a starvation policy rebranded as a stabilization success.

Children bake in tents, while Israel keeps pushing the civilian population into smaller corridors. When the so-called Board of Peace was formed, Israel occupied 53% of Gaza. A month later, 60%. By late May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to seize 70%, squeezing 2.3 million human beings into an ever-shrinking cage away from all the farming areas. Energy Minister Eli Cohen has said the quiet part out loud, telling Israeli radio that Israeli control will keep growing “until we reach 100%.” The next phase envisions corralling Palestinians into fenced “humanitarian shelters” near the ruins of Rafah as part of the ultimate ethnic cleansing program, cynically marketed as a “plan for free movement.”

Concentration camps built on the same mechanisms Nazi Germany used to cage Jews in World War II. A United Nations independent commission of inquiry released this summer found that Israel's killing of children in Gaza is not collateral damage of war but part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity of Palestinian society. Acts that meet the legal definition for war crimes and the crime against humanity.

Israel has murdered or injured more than 10% of Gaza’s population since October 2023. At least 20,179 children, more than 5,000 under 5 years old, and another 44,143 injured. The number of murdered children is one-third of the total number of dead Palestinians in Gaza. The commission documented children shot by snipers and quadcopter-mounted rifles with a precision that ruled out accidents and cited Israeli soldiers' own testimonies where soldiers celebrate and congratulate each other after murdering civilians. The commission called Gaza the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child.

In June, a father named Bahaa Abu Al-Ajeen watched an Israeli soldier kneel and shoot his 3-year-old son in the head as the boy cried in his arms near Deir al-Balah. In April, 9-year-old Ritaj Rihan was shot through the mouth while standing in a classroom tent waiting for her teacher. These are not outliers under a ceasefire. They are the continuation of an Israeli genocide under the shadow of the ceasefire.

When Israel and the US launched their war against Iran at the end of February, Israel closed every crossing into Gaza outright. Not because there is any connection, but because of Israel’s malevolent nature and because it can get away with it under the fog of war. Weekly truck deliveries collapsed from an average of roughly 4,200 down to just 590. Kerem Shalom and Zikim remain the only crossings still functioning, and even now, roughly half the trucks arriving from Egypt are turned away rather than unloaded.

As of now, aid volumes have never recovered to where they stood before the Iran war, let alone reached the minimum the UN says Gaza needs. Four UN agencies have already warned that the famine the ceasefire was supposed to end could return without sustained access. Sixty-eight percent of Gaza's population is now burning garbage to cook because there isn't enough gas. Not one of Gaza's 37 hospitals is fully operational; only 19 are even partially running. Nearly half of essential medicines are out of stock, and Israel is delaying the surgical equipment needed to treat the more than 43,000 people left with life-changing injuries. More than 40,000 people who will likely become permanently disabled for lack of treatment are another phase of Israel's silent genocide.

The Board of Peace's own six-month progress report claims aid distribution rose 70% and that basic food needs have been “stabilized” for the first time since 2023. In the art of euphemism, 70% of zero is zero, and basic food has “stabilized,” meaning shipments are entering regularly, but not that it is adequate. Conspicuously absent from the report is any mention that aid truck deliveries have never returned to their pre-Iran war levels and remain well below the minimum the UN itself considers necessary.

The board's own biannual report to the Security Council spends its pages blaming the Palestinian resistance, with no mention of an occupying army that has pushed past the ceasefire's demarcated line, nor Israel’s order to aid groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam to choose between handing over staff names to a government that targets humanitarian workers, or ceasing operations in Gaza entirely.

Even how to count the murdered journalists is contested. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) was pressured to redefine who qualifies as a “Palestinian” journalist. The move was intended to give Israel a license to kill Palestinian reporters with impunity. A CPJ board member who objected to considering Israel's request was removed within days of protesting publicly. The board ultimately kept its definition intact, but only after stripping 20 murdered Palestinian journalists from the count.

This is what the Board of Peace normalizes: an occupying power expanding while a one-sided truce remains in force, a starvation policy rebranded as a stabilization success, concentration camps as a housing plan, ethnic cleansing as free movement, and a licensed death toll that keeps climbing with impunity.

A grandfather who wanted nothing more than to give displaced families an hour of joy watching a soccer match instead became another name on the ever-growing list of genocide victims. In Gaza, where “the essence of childhood has been destroyed,” even the smallest acts of humanity have become acts punishable by death.

Peace was never the board’s plan. Genocide management was.

Has mass delusion overtaken America’s collective consciousness and eaten into its soul? Rather than “America the Beautiful," are we becoming “America the Delusional”? The question sprang from speculating that many of my fellow citizens might agree with statements that expertise and evidence have clearly undercut. Would a majority think there was truth in them?

After reading these statements, ask yourself if my concern is warranted.

• Technology will protect us from the ill effects of climate disruption.
• Next generation Americans will be able to maintain the standard of living they have now.
• The Earth will provide sufficient food and shelter for a population exceeding 8.3 billion.
• Vigorous enforcement of national borders and deportation of illegal migrants will stem mass migration in the US and across the globe.
• Fatal shootings in America will decrease as guns become more widely available.
• The US dollar will remain the world’s dominant currency.
• Black people and other minorities are narrowing the economic gap with white people.
• The US President is the world’s most powerful government leader.
• American universities and research centers will continue to be regarded as the best in the world.
• The American diet is comparatively as healthy as that of other developed nations.

Having enumerated them, I pondered the toxic effect of such delusions on the soul of our nation. That Washington has mounted a ceaseless campaign of disinformation, on everything from the Iran War to voting integrity to the Reflecting Pool, only adds potency to the poison.

A nation’s soul, writes Gary Kowalski, is its “capacity for valor and visionary change.” Valor springs from confronting fear or pain with firmness and a realistic sense of one’s challenges. Visioning similarly involves the courage and wisdom to chart one’s future course with both creativity and a realistic take on present circumstances.

Nourishing the soul of this nation for 250 years has been its idealistic aspirations and its remarkable natural endowment. Mount Rushmore is a fit representation. All four leaders depicted there exhibited valor and vision on behalf of America’s unique assets, both prior to and during their presidency.

In contrast, the present leadership in Washington has moved aggressively and efficiently—and with venality and myopia—to lay waste to our noble aspirations and our natural endowments.

Our soul is on “life support.” Democratic self-governance and equality of economic opportunity, two pillars of national aspiration, are evaporating month by month. Calculated governmental action—and inaction—are accelerating the arrival of climate-related disasters and diminishing our natural capital.

Despite a grim present, future restoration of the nation’s soul is possible. It begins with each of us accepting in large part the unreality of the contentions listed above and helping leaders and their constituents chart a course within that frame. Whatever form our civic engagement takes, seeing ourselves as unabashed truth seekers is essential. Valorous action and visionary change derive from a firm grasp on what is real, not what is fanciful.

Motivated and supported by allies, we can make a difference. All it would require is each of us focusing on a delusion or two, and through writing, advocacy, or group action, promoting clear-eyed resilience over wishful thinking. Project Soul Restoration begins individually, takes root locally, then spreads regionally and nationally.

Break the mold. Take on the mantle of “influencer” on behalf of the nation’s soul!

As rising food prices continue to strain household budgets and food insecurity remains a persistent challenge, a successful Seattle program is attracting national attention. For over a decade, the city’s Fresh Bucks initiative has helped lower-income families afford fresh fruits and vegetables through targeted food assistance. Now, Congress is considering whether to test that success at the national level.

Seattle launched Fresh Bucks in 2012. The initiative seeks to “eliminate disparities in healthy food access for communities most burdened by food insecurity, economic hardship, and environmental injustices,” according to the program website. Specifically, according to city data, Black and Hispanic households in Seattle are twice as likely to experience food insecurity—which is defined as “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways” by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Today, Seattle’s Fresh Bucks initiative serves approximately 17,000 income-qualified households each month with benefits dedicated to purchasing fruits and vegetables. Research suggests the investment is paying off. A 2025 study by the University of Washington found that participating households experienced a 31% higher rate of food security than comparable households without the benefit. Additionally, the City of Seattle’s food insecurity dashboard shows aggregate declining insecurity rates since 2018.

The Fresh Bucks program also improves diet quality—not simply by increasing the quantity of food families can buy, but by making nutritious food more affordable. According to the same UW study, Fresh Bucks participants were 37% more likely than households on the program’s waitlist to consume at least three daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.

Those gains matter because access to healthy food remains deeply unequal. A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that healthier diets rich in fruits and vegetables often cost significantly more than heavily processed alternatives, which creates a financial barrier that affects lower-income households most. When income determines access to nutritious food, it reinforces broader inequalities in health and well-being.

Community leaders in neighborhoods served by Fresh Bucks say they see those challenges firsthand.

“In White Center and historically underinvested communities across King County, we see every day how rising grocery costs continue to strain working families, seniors, immigrants, and households already navigating increasing housing and living expenses,” Aaron Garcia, executive director of the White Center Community Development Association, said in a press release on new legislation to expand the program. “Access to healthy, culturally relevant food should not be determined by income—it should not be considered a luxury,” Garcia said.

White Center illustrates why programs like Fresh Bucks matter. One of the Seattle area’s most diverse communities, more than 61% of its residents are people of color and 27% were born outside the US. The neighborhood was historically targeted for redlining, which continues to shape poverty rates and income inequality across the Seattle region.

Census data show White Center has below-average household and per capita incomes and a poverty rate higher than the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan average. Residents of South Seattle, including White Center, face disproportionately limited access to grocery stores offering fresh, nutritious produce. Some advocates describe these neighborhoods not as food deserts, but as examples of “food apartheid”: the racial, geographic, and economic inequities that stratify society and dictate who has access to healthy food and who is relegated to nutritionally deficient diets.

Fresh Bucks was designed to confront those disparities in Seattle by making healthy food more affordable for families who have historically faced the greatest barriers to accessing it.

On the national level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose congressional district includes Seattle, argued that the city’s local innovation can become a model to address broader food insecurity.

“[…] Seattle is once again leading the way with the Fresh Bucks program, which is successfully keeping people fed with nutritious food and reducing hunger,” Jayapal said. “We must pass this legislation to expand the program nationwide and get families in every corner of the country healthy produce they can afford.”

Jayapal introduced the Fresh Bucks for Fresh Produce Act on July 2. Modeled on Seattle’s program, the legislation would establish a pilot program within the US Department of Agriculture, providing households earning 80% or less of their area’s median income with $60 each month to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.

The proposal comes as federal food assistance is moving in the opposite direction. Recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has fallen by more than 4 million people after Trump’s budget reconciliation bill passed last June—roughly a 10% decline. Meanwhile, the Trump administration recently eliminated roughly $1 billion in food purchases for schools and food banks by ending the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program.

Other federal policies have also increased food costs. As The New York Times reported in May, executive tariffs on imported steel have driven up the cost of canned fruits and vegetables, because packaging accounts for roughly one-third of wholesale prices. Those increases disproportionately affect households that depend on affordable pantry staples such as canned corn and beans.

Public opinion indicates opposition to these trends. A 2025 Data for Progress survey found broad bipartisan support for SNAP and other efforts to help families afford food. A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.

The proposed federal pilot would allow policymakers to test whether Seattle’s results can be replicated elsewhere. After more than a decade of implementation, Fresh Bucks offers evidence that targeted investments in healthy food can improve food security, increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and help reduce nutritional inequality.

That evidence is especially valuable as the USDA has suspended its annual report tracking food insecurity, making it more difficult to measure the full scope of hunger nationwide. Seattle’s experience suggests that local governments can serve as laboratories for policies that address inequality—and that successful municipal innovations may provide models for broader adoption.

As a community organizer and environmental activist for over 15 years, I’ve often used the metaphor that “we are spinning on a hamster wheel.” That phrase gets mixed reactions. Some nod in agreement, and some get angry. The truth is not always easy to hear. I understand that from my own experiences.

In 2012, I learned that fracking for natural gas and oil was happening in my community. I started researching fracking, and found out about air pollution, toxic chemicals being injected underground, threats to water, farmland being bought up at an unprecedented pace, and tax incentives subsidizing all this. And in the end, the community wouldn’t even have lower energy costs.

The fracking boom was hitting communities all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado—anywhere the fossil fuel industry sniffed out profits—and people were angry. So my neighbors and I tried to use the tools we had been taught we have in our supposed democracy.

We went to local and state officials, regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Health Department, and environmental organizations. With help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), we passed a citizen initiative to ban fracking. The people voted for it—but then two drilling companies sued to have our democratically enacted law overturned for violating their corporate “rights.” The court agreed with them and overturned our law.

Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment.

Afterwards, I convinced myself that it was our fault. I believed that if more communities took action like we had, positive change would come. So, I started organizing with other communities across Ohio and in other states that found themselves in the same position. But the same cycle of corporate power overriding the people was repeated over and over. The people in these communities had no legal authority to stop fracking.

Some communities, like New York, banned fracking. However, they didn’t ban the use of fracked gas, so my community and many others were sacrificed to make sure Times Square stayed lit up. No offense to New Yorkers, but that’s the hard truth. It is how the system is set up to work.

Other communities turned to regulations. People convinced themselves that if frackers had to have further setbacks from schools and homes, we’d be protected from toxic water injections, airborne chemicals from waste pits and hundreds of trucks, and water depletion due to the between 1.5 and 16 million gallons of water used for each frack well. Communities enacted stricter regulations, but the harm continued.

It became all too clear that we the people were indeed like hamsters spinning in a wheel. All the tools that we grew up believing would protect us and our communities didn’t work. They were just diversions to keep us occupied as the government and the fracking industry drilled well after well.

Now it’s 2026, and communities are up in arms again over an issue that causes many of the same harms as fracking: data centers. I get calls and emails every week from communities all over the country with people sharing concerns—farmland being purchased at unprecedented rates, massive water withdrawals, air pollution and toxification, astronomical energy usage, skyrocketing power rates, and tax subsidies for mega tech corporations. Sound familiar?

It reminds me of the Aerosmith song, "Same Old Song and Dance." The song is about how the “justice system” does not apply equally to all. The band wasn't singing about fracking or data centers, but it may as well have been. Whether we use metaphors like spinning in a hamster wheel or cliches like “same old song and dance,” this is how the system is set up to work: It protects industry, capitalism and the profits of a few, not the people and environment. Folks fighting mining, toxic waste, big agriculture, industrial energy of any kind, clear cutting of forests, plastic pollution, etc. are all trapped in the hamster wheel.

We must jump out. This will take facing hard truths, like the fact that holding up signs in front of public meetings, writing letters, and giving testimony to regulatory agencies won’t protect you and your community. Once we can begin reckoning with these truths, maybe we can turn toward each other and turn away from the existing system. Maybe we can free our imaginations and creativity to experiment with new ideas. Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment rather than jumping back into the hamster wheel. Maybe we can start being effective.

My colleagues and I at CELDF have some ideas and would love to talk with you to share our experience and to listen to yours. If nothing else, we can be here to soften your landing when you finally decide to jump off that hamster wheel.

Even as the Pentagon mulls culling its combatant commands to reduce its bureaucratic bloat, lawmakers are itching to prop up another one — based on robots and AI.

Combatant commands like CENTCOM (Central Command) and AFRICOM (Africa Command) — sprawling military headquarters which oversee operations and activities across their assigned region or function — are notorious for their high operational costs and continued pushes for more responsibilities, including entanglements abroad.

The Department of Defense has weighed paring the commands back in response, floating restructuring plans last December that would reduce their number from 11 to 8. But lawmakers are going in the opposite direction, pushing for a new combatant command they say will speed up the military’s uptake of robotic and autonomous systems.

As experts tell RS, the new command is poised to create more redundancy, waste, and inefficiency — and the mission creep that comes with it — while stifling efforts to deploy such technologies in practice.

Embracing the future of warfare?

Tucked into the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, a provision called section 917 would allow for the creation of a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command (RASCOM).

By centralizing oversight over autonomous systems, lawmakers hope RASCOM will help the military adopt them as quickly as possible. In particular, they aim to overcome difficulties that have plagued previous procurement efforts.

In a press release, SASC chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) hailed the prospective combatant command as a means to help the military “embrace 21st century warfare.”

RASCOM “would standardize the way the entire armed services use unmanned systems in combat,” Wicker wrote, The armed service branches would be able to set up offices within RASCOM, “ensuring that [they all] adopt the latest systems.”

Runaway bureaucratic bloat

But another combatant command would be at odds with the Pentagon's stated goal of reducing its sprawling bureaucratic overhead.

DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth “has righteously complained about bloat in the GOFO [General and Flag Officers] corps, saying he wants to cut the number of [four-star generals] by 20%," Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told RS. "Another place to park a four-star and his buddies flies in the face of that.”

A new combatant command would also take up work the Pentagon is already doing through its deployment of uncrewed systems across its operation. And, as Jennifer Kavanagh, Defense Priorities’ director of military analysis, tells RS, the administrative structure needed for a new combatant command will “duplicate functions provided elsewhere, including at the leadership level.”

What’s more, combatant commands rarely remain limited to their original missions. Instead, they often push for greater budgets, more responsibilities, and more sway over the direction of U.S. military policy.

“If RASCOM is created, it will face the same institutional incentives to expand its mission,” Gary Sampson, a national security strategist and retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence and international affairs officer, told RS.

“Just like the Navy pushes for Naval spending and CENTCOM pushes for wars in the Middle East, RASCOM would act as a sales team for robotics and autonomous systems,” Logan predicted, referencing CENTCOM officials’ persistent support for continued U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. “That is the job of companies who manufacture autonomous systems, not the U.S. government.”

Standing up and maintaining another command would also be costly. “This is the last thing the Pentagon needs given its already massive budget,” Kavanagh said.

And, once established, RASCOM may prove difficult to get rid of. As Dan Grazier, who directs the Stimson Center’s National Security reform program, tells RS, “there would be entrenched interests that... have a stake in seeing it continue.”

“Even if the [command’s] headquarters is stood down later, many functions, personnel, and institutional interests tend to persist and migrate elsewhere,” Sampson said.

Throwing a wrench at military preparedness

Beyond concerns over bureaucratic bloat and mission creep, experts observe that RASCOM’s proposed organizational structure could create other operational problems.

For example, most existing combatant commands are organized around geographic missions, or by function. In contrast, RASCOM would be structured around a class of tools.

Brandon Carr, a senior studies associate at the Quincy Institute, tells RS this “logic is well-intentioned” but “likely to be counterproductive.”

“So many future robotic and autonomous systems will become part of an individual service member’s personal equipment,” Carr said. The “technology does not lend itself to a unified command with centralized control.”

To best promote innovation, he said, “robotic and autonomous systems should be integrated and deployed down to the lowest levels of each service.”

Others contend RASCOM’s centralized approach could hinder autonomous systems' use on the battlefield.

David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, wrote last month that a combatant command “would risk centralizing control in a way that makes [autonomous] capabilities less responsive to the commanders who need them most.”

That could create a “seam in command and control” that adversaries would exploit in combat, Deptula wrote. (The Mitchell Institute is financially supported by weapons contractors.)

More broadly, Grazier cautioned against an over-reliance on autonomous systems, warning that adversaries will inevitably look for and leverage their weaknesses.

“We’re spending a crazy amount of money building this robot army. When it’s disrupted [by enemy combatants], our skills to operate without it will have atrophied,” Grazier warned. “We’re actually building in the means of our own defeat.”

In an era of high prices for fuel, food, and housing, an extra $4,000 could make a lifesaving difference for many families. But instead, that’s what the average household had to shell out for the Pentagon last year.

That’s right: The average US taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.

For the growing number of working poor in the United States, that money can mean the difference between making rent or falling behind, or between being able to afford an emergency trip to the doctor or going without care.

Money directed to the Pentagon represents nothing but betrayal for many Americans. A large majority oppose our wars, especially the latest conflict in Iran. And roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget flows to for-profit contractors, fueling the billionaire (and now even trillionaire) class.

The person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget.

Take SpaceX, one of many companies built on government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. Elon Musk’s company would not exist without US taxpayers. As early Tesla investor Ross Gerber put it, “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government.”

Early investments and contracts from the US government helped propel SpaceX to success, while continued awards from the Pentagon provided the stable revenue that made the government one of Musk’s largest customers. The company is now valued at more than $1 trillion. Private investors alone did not make Musk a trillionaire—taxpayers across the United States did.

But Musk isn’t the only person who made himself rich off the backs of American workers.

Lockheed Martin receives over 70% of its revenue from US government contracts. The numbers for Raytheon and General Dynamics are similar. These military contractors simply would not exist without the taxpayers—and a new $1.5 trillion budget would send hundreds of billions of dollars more to people who already have more than most Americans could even conceptualize.

At the same time, while taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex, the jobs those industries are allegedly providing are in decline, with the war industry creating over 2 million fewer jobs than it did 40 years ago.

Worse still, under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed a year ago, the money for these ever-rising Pentagon budgets comes directly from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other programs that help Americans make ends meet.

Under those cuts, millions of Americans—including children—have lost SNAP benefits already. And that’s impacting not just families but the farmers who helped feed them.

SNAP benefits were “guaranteed money in the pockets of farmers,” said Reese Amxy, a policy organizer at the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. But 150,000 people in the state have already lost eligibility.

It’s not just Illinois. Arizona has seen the steepest decline, with 50% of recipients—nearly half a million—already losing benefits. Louisiana (21%), Florida (20%), Oklahoma (16%), Virginia (16%), Texas (14%), Wyoming (13%), and Arkansas (12%) round out the rest of the hardest hit states so far.

Yet the person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget. This is Robin Hood in reverse. Worse still, the weapons those taxes buy are often to use to kill children like ours in Gaza and Iran.

The weapons and tech CEOs that would benefit from the massive war budget, and the politicians bought off by them, seek to keep this cycle going next year at an even grander scale. Americans need to demand their lawmakers say no more Pentagon spending—and invest in the things that actually keep our communities safe instead.

It’s no secret that the climate negotiations are failing. The simple fact is that the carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to rise, rapidly and along a pathway that threatens—but does not yet guarantee—true catastrophe.

That said, there’s little agreement on why the climate negotiations are failing, or what their role would be in the emergency global transition that’s so desperately needed. Such a transition will have to be very widely accepted as fair if it is to have a chance of success, and the negotiations as we have them are hardly rising to the challenges of global climate justice. Is this likely to change soon? Perhaps not, but such a change is both necessary and possible, and the goal has to be to increase the odds.

One promising way of doing so is to concentrate effort on launching a global push to phase out fossil fuels—that is, a phase out of both fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and the simultaneous development and global deployment of a fossil-fuel free energy economy. Such a phaseout would not solve the whole of the climate problem, let alone the still larger ecological crisis, but it would make solutions possible. The phaseout challenge is one that, as Dwight D. Eisenhower used to say, is “big enough to solve.”

The Road to Santa Marta

The story of the climate negotiations can be told many ways. I like to tell it as a story of failure, and renewed effort, and late, inadequate, steps forward. Such a process gave us the foundational United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement, and the hard-won breakthrough at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where the world’s nations agreed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” The question is if the current impasse, which settled in after Dubai, will play out in similar fashion.

How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?

But first, know that a great burst of joy accompanied the Dubai agreement’s inclusion of the words “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” It broke a firewall that had held for decades, one in which a blocking coalition led by the Saudis and the American oil companies, playing a long and Machiavellian game, was able to keep fossil fuels from even being mentioned in a formal COP decision.

This silence has long been excoriated by climate activists around the world, but its origins are too seldom brought to light. To see them, drop back to 1992, when the Framework Convention was being finalized. Back then, the world’s climate diplomats were able to make substantive decisions. Some of these, like the agreement that countries would act in proportion to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” were inspiring and visionary. But the founders fell short in at least one enduringly negative and perhaps fatal way—they were unable to agree to a majority, or even a super-majority “last resort” decision-making system. They got close, but the fossil coalition blocked all paths, and the result, by both default and design, was consensus decision-making.

Consensus decision-making, alas, is a special kind of problem. It appears to be a commitment to deep democracy, yet in practice it means everyone has a veto, which is not exactly what you want if you’re trying to negotiate a life-or-death global transition that requires the interests of wealthy and powerful minorities to yield to those of the global community as a whole. On the contrary, it empowers blockers, allowing them to endlessly force the deletion of ambitious text, and thus it keeps both fossil phaseout (which is blocked by the fossil cartel) and meaningful finance reform (which is blocked by the wealthy countries) forever off the table. Over time, it has driven the negotiations into a realm of shadow play far divorced from the realities of the actual world.

It is difficult to pinpoint the original sin here. The Saudis, after all, have a point. Their economy is indeed threatened by any phaseout of fossil fuels. So why should they not fight like hell to preserve their power and their privilege? Everybody else does. But there’s a deeper problem as well: the climate finance problem, which continues to loom forbiddingly over any possible international climate accord. Ultimately, the deadlock in the climate negotiations is defined by the intransigence of the Global Rich, most of whom reside in the Global North, on key justice questions—finance in particular. Bluntly, the rich refuse to pay their fair shares. This intransigence makes any real breakthrough impossible, in part by empowering blockers on all sides.

At COP30 in Brazil, push came to shove. After a large group of activist nations failed to land an agreement to negotiate a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels, those nations, many of them frustrated beyond words, made a new move. Led by Colombia and The Netherlands and with a great deal of support from civil society (the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative in particular), they forked off a more informal process, which launched the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia.

Santa Marta seemed immediately to be a game changer. Here, for example, is Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Treaty Initiative: “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break—all that pent-up experience, knowledge, and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

The hope is also strategic. With President Donald Trump’s people in control of the US government, and doing everything in their power to undermine both the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention itself, everyone could sense the opening. Which is why Santa Marta, as climate diplomacy’s favorite play-by-play announcer Ed King noted, was “weirdly” optimistic. One observer even described it as an “euphoric” experience.

Beyond any review of the formal takeaways, Santa Marta was a conference of the hopeful: 57 countries (plus California) representing about a third of the global economy, were present, and they all represented countries, or factions within countries, that wanted to face the fossil energy challenge. The US government, obviously, was not among them. Neither were the Gulf oil states, or Russia, or (more controversially) China and India. There was no formal negotiating. Civil society had its venues and made its declaration (a heroic synthesis), the academics had theirs, and a high-level science panel set the stage. The official discussions were universally reported to be congenial, even when it came to the equity question, which is always a reliable source of inconclusive discord.

The second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels will be chaired by Tuvalu and Ireland. It will be in 2027, after COP31 in Turkey, which one way or another will have to react to Santa Marta and its outcomes. Moving forward with the transition is now on the official diplomatic agenda. Formally, this means defining national phaseout road maps and a global phaseout road map to plug them into. In reality it means much more, because even good road maps will mean little unless they’re accompanied by the financial and institutional breakthroughs that could bring them to life.

The Santa Marta Breakthrough

How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?

The good news is that the renewable energy revolution is finally arriving in force, and this has made countries of all kinds willing to countenance a sharp break with fossil energy. Thanks in large part to China’s immense commitments to electrification and mass manufacturing, the cost of wind and solar, and the batteries that convert them into “firm” baseload power sources, has plummeted.

The US-Israeli war against Iran has accelerated the renewables buildout, by convincing countries to prioritize domestic energy production. Fadhel Kaboub, a prominent southern observer of today’s geopolitical ferment, put it well: “A world less dependent on oil would be less vulnerable to the weaponization of tanker routes, refinery disruptions, and sudden fuel-price shocks,” adding that “a renewables-based system does not make peace automatic, but it does make energy blackmail much harder.”

To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace.

Further, the global renewables boom, which began before the war, may well be reaching its own inflection point. Solar evangelist Danny Kennedy cites 2025 as the big year, because that’s when China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—together reached a historic tipping point. “For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers.” Then, in 2026, as the war dragged on, China’s solar exports hit all-time records. “This is not charity. It is commerce. It is nations choosing energy security, economic agency, and lower costs over the inherited architecture of fossil fuel dependency.”

There are provisos. China and India still struggle to avoid new coal even as they scale up renewables. Also, China’s clean energy technology dominance, coupled with the Global North’s political inability to adopt robust industrial policies, seems destined to deepen deindustrialization and despair, particularly in the United States and Europe. But, though critical, these remain only provisos, because China’s mass manufacturing prowess shows a way forward. In fact, as the cost of electrification has dropped, it’s become difficult for the fossil cartel to convince the world’s people that their dreams of prosperity—or even stability—depend on the continued burning of coal, gas, and oil.

Alas, technology alone will not stabilize the climate in time. Renewables are displacing coal in particular, but the oil and gas story is more mixed. Thinktank Ember’s view is authoritative: “if demand and clean electricity growth continue at their recent pace, then fossil fuel generation will plateau before starting to decline consistently from the early 2030s.” Which is great, but not even close to fast enough to hold the 1.5°C line. To do better, it’s also necessary to stop fossil fuel extraction—drilling, fracking, and mining—as the second front in the phaseout battle, the second blade of the scissors.

This imperative has been obvious for decades. In 1998 at COP4 , Oilwatch, Amazon Watch, the Rainforest Action Network, and Project Underground launched a campaign to stop new exploration to avoid breaching the 1.0°C limit. The difference, 28 years later, is that the world has retreated to a far more dangerous 1.5°C goal, and could well retreat again. Moreover, the demand to “keep it in the ground” is now coming from the main stage. At Santa Marta, the science panel’s “action recommendations” included “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “prohibit[ing] fossil fuel advertising.”

It’s easy to see why local communities that directly suffer the pollution, corruption, and abuse that typically accompany fossil fuel extraction have long been demanding its abolition. But why did it take so long for global actors to come to the table, and does their arrival indicate that the tide has definitively turned?

Probably not.

Pause to consider how the goal of “halting all new fossil fuel” investment would sound among the good citizens of Houston, or Oslo, or Riyadh, or Basra, or Moscow. What’s the way forward for nations whose economies are deeply entangled with fossil fuel revenues, or people whose lives are dependent on fossil fuel jobs? Such questions could be glossed over at Santa Marta, but they cannot go forever unanswered.

At Santa Marta, the signs were, as Orwell used to say, in front of your nose. Colombia represented the Global South and its co-host The Netherlands represented the Global North, but both countries will have very difficult times escaping their entanglement with fossil fuels. Colombia exemplifies the predicament of poorer fossil exporters: Over 75% of its energy demand and 35-50% of its export revenues are met by fossil fuels. The Netherlands, for its part, is far richer, and is not a fossil fuel exporter, so it will be far easier for it to extricate itself from its fossil entanglements. Easier but not easy: The Netherlands relies heavily on fossil fuel distribution and refining—the port of Rotterdam is Europe’s primary oil and gas gateway.

To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace. At an absolute bare minimum this means eliminating the subsidies that promote fossil fuels. In practice, however, even this entirely rational reform slams directly into the stranglehold that fossil capital has on all countries. One excellent example is the so called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost future profits if they move, however timidly, to regulate away even odious advantages that these companies have built over the years to maximize their profits. It’s an absurd and entirely corrupt legal and economic barrier to phasing out fossil fuels and, incidentally, it’s one that The Netherlands helped create in the 1960s. The ISDS was explicitly on the Santa Marta agenda, but was reduced to one meaningless sentence in the formal takeaways: ISDS “by some were perceived as creating barriers, while the extent to which these barriers are perceived varies.” Asked to explain this rather evasive blather, Dutch Minister and co-host Stientje van Veldhoven said. “This was not a negotiating conference, and therefore different parties, different countries have different positions.”

Sooner or later, a serious negotiating conference will have to take meaningful positions on ISDS, economic diversification, external debt, and many other difficult issues. To that end, it will have to distinguish the core problem of extractor dependence—especially in poorer extraction nations—from the broader problem of economic entanglement. Because all nations, rich and poor alike, are entangled with fossil fuels. The crucial step is to put the interests of the poor ahead of the entanglement of the rich, even as the world’s people struggle to face the realities, and the necessities, of climate stabilization.

One immediate question, as Tuvalu and Ireland prepare to host the follow-up conference in 2027, is which countries to invite. Santa Marta was widely praised as a leadership conference, but its attendees included countries, including co-host The Netherlands, that do not seem likely to halt fossil fuel expansion anytime soon, at least not voluntarily. And this while China, the undisputed leader of the clean energy transition, was not on the invitation list. Which is why one well-known, long-time activist (anonymously) suggested to me that the recent UN General Assembly vote on the International Court of Justice climate ruling might offer a convenient and logical first screen for admission to future conferences. Only signers would qualify. Eight countries, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, voted against the ruling, but another 28, including India, Turkey, Qatar, and Nigeria, abstained.

Sorting out this problem would be a step forward. But the real game changer would be for a wealthy major extractor to repudiate fossil fuel expansion. One would do, though such a repudiation would ideally be followed by a working consensus that fossil fuel extraction (and not just its expansion) must end first in the rich world. Alas, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Norway, The Netherlands, and Brazil, all countries that attended Santa Marta, continue to expand domestic extraction, while the UK, France, and Italy are home to major corporations with growing international operations. All this must stop, and soon, and there will be no real breakthrough until it does.

The Structure of the Challenge

Santa Marta launched three work programs:

1. Develop national fossil-fuel phaseout road maps;
2. Transform the global financial system to support the transition away from fossil fuels; and
3. Advance toward a fossil fuel-free trade system.

The details are many, but the real challenge is that any program must be executed within a profoundly divided world that is pressing hard against physical planetary limits.

Given this, any workable phaseout strategy will stretch the politics of the possible to the breaking point. How could it not when the climate system is already destabilizing? Much of the relevant science leverages the notion of the remaining emissions budget—the total amount of carbon dioxide that the world can still emit before crossing a given temperature threshold—and, for any Paris-compliant temperature, this remaining budget is perilously small and rapidly shrinking. Indeed, fossil-fuel emissions must very quickly be drawn down to “real zero” and this will be impossible unless the extraction of fossil fuels ceases.

The second challenge is extreme inequality, which comes to us in two dimensions: between rich countries (the Global North) and poor countries (the Global South) and also between rich and poor classes, in all countries. Yet everything will nevertheless depend on an ability to cooperate in a robust solidarity that can resist the attacks of the fossil cartel and survive even as climate-driven damage and destruction decisively increases. Such cooperation to navigate the turbulence of the climate transition is unlikely without meaningful steps toward a global safety net and paths forward for the world’s poor.

Fossil fuel extraction must be phased out at a breakneck pace with almost complete cessation by 2050. Similarly, the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure must stop immediately. There’s no room—even in poor countries—for new oil and gas fields or coal mines. All effort must go to the construction of zero-carbon infrastructure.

Yet none of this is even conceivable unless the overall effort is very widely accepted as fair. This judgement will be made in many ways and many places, and not in abstract terms. For example, the tension between “phasing down” and “phasing out” fossil fuels is anything but abstract, and it won’t be easily reconciled. At Santa Marta, the “oil-rich African nations” insisted they would keep drilling as they transitioned to renewables. Onuoha Magnus Chidi, an adviser to Nigeria’s regional development minister: “Not phasing out—phase down. That is the message… We are phasing down, and we are saying that there should be early planning. It must be fair to all.”

I find his point impossible to dispute. The alternative has to be: If a phase-down strategy is pursued with adequate ambition, and if it takes proper account of both the North-South and rich-poor divides, then it becomes a phase-out strategy that can honestly be defended as being “fair to all.”

Chidi put his answer in concrete terms. “People are going to lose their jobs… How are you trying to re-engage them in other sectors?” he said, before stressing the need for debt reform and other financial assistance to make such change possible. Countries that are highly dependent on extraction will need more time to disentangle their societies from fossil fuels and build new economies. This will be extremely difficult even in rich countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia, but far harder in poor countries such as Nigeria, Iraq, and South Sudan, where fossil fuels account for large fractions of national revenue.

Given these challenges, what’s the way forward? This is the central question of phaseout justice. Fortunately, this question, too often treated as subsidiary, was taken seriously at Santa Marta:

The countries present in Santa Marta still have structural dependencies to overcome, including fiscal dependencies, debt constraints, the dependence of the financial architecture on fossil fuels and the need to enable fossil fuels-free trade systems...Transitioning away from fossil fuels is more than replacing one energy source with another. It requires broad economic transformation to overcome structural dependencies, overcome debt constraints, expand reliable energy access, and support diversified, resilient economies. This must be planned with workers and communities, ensuring a transition that is fair, rights-based, and delivers tangible benefits for marginalized groups.

To give poor extracting countries a chance to rapidly phase down, rich extracting countries must very quickly phase out. In fact, to hold to the 1.5°C limit—really, to minimize the time spent in 1.5°C overshoot—the richest fossil fuel extractors like Canada, the United States, Norway, Australia, and the UK must abandon extraction by the very early 2030s. This logic is inexorable; it holds unless you’re prepared to accept a catastrophic level of warming or assume a magical level of carbon dioxide removal. To hold the 1.5°C, or anything close to it, even poor fossil fuel extractors will have to phase out quickly, which they will not be able to do without support from the rich world.

System Change

In his speech to the Santa Marta plenary, Colombia’s former President Gustavo Petro went beyond the usual practice of reading out a bill of complaints against fossil interests. ”There is inertia in the power and the economy of this archaic form of energy—fossil fuels—that lead to death. Undoubtedly, that form of capital can commit suicide, taking with it humanity and [other] life,” he said, going after fossil capitalism itself. “The question that needs to be asked is whether capitalism can truly adapt to a non-fossil energy model.”

This is exactly right.

The world is threatened by a suicidal form of capitalism, yet it is simultaneously clear that the reforms necessary to stabilize the climate, while momentous, do not demand wholesale revolution. Mandatory extraction limits, in particular, do not require an end to private property, though states strong enough to direct investment do seem to be necessary. Those devices must prove sufficient because there simply is not time to shift to a post-capitalist world. The goal has to be to shift to another, non-suicidal form of capitalism, assuming that such a thing exists.

Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done.

The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world. To that end, there is much to reconsider, beginning with the global finance architecture and, just as fundamentally, the fact that so many countries, so many elite cabals, and so many techno-economic systems have long co-evolved with the fossil cartel, and have become inextricably entwined with it.

Ultimately, because it is essentially political, the climate challenge is solvable. Formal negotiations could indeed push further the ball Santa Marta set into motion, and by so doing restore faith in multilateral governance, without which there’s no chance of success. But the truth is that the Tuvalu-Ireland meeting could just as easily degenerate into another pointless talking shop that fails to take any meaningful, galvanizing steps. This outcome must be avoided at almost any cost.

Fossil capitalism won’t yield to half measures. Neither market signals nor pipeline protests will reduce emissions at the necessary pace. Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done. Technology, science, industrial policy, and global climate justice are going to have to line up on the same side, and even then something else—international solidarity—will also be required. But given that under capitalism money makes the world go round, there will be no meaningful international solidarity without international finance.

Many older environmentalists, myself included, have been trying to warn our fellow human beings about the danger of global warming since the 1980s.

Back then, there were fewer signs that what the vast majority of climate scientists were already saying about the then-looming crisis would come true.

Over the years, we’d be more likely than people around us to worry about summers getting hotter than they had been in our childhood. Or storms getting more intense. Or getting less rain where there used to be more and more rain where there used to be less. And so on. But the real dangers were still in the future, and many people have trouble processing dangers that are not in the present, we understood.

And we did what we could for 40 years.

We have a Republican administration, working more directly for the fossil fuel industry and other related destructive and antiquated industries than any other to date, that seems determined to do as much damage to the planet as it possibly can while in power.

And it wasn’t enough.

And now global warming is definitely here. And it’s gotten so bad so fast that this week many of us on the East Coast were treated to two major manifestations of the climate crisis that is upon us like a wolf burying its fangs in our collective neck: Another of the increasingly frequent “heat domes” that translate to increasingly horrendous heatwaves plus terrible smoke from wildfires in Ontario.

And the smoke was so bad that it actually mitigated the heatwave. Something so messed up that few of us who aren’t, say, trained geophysicists have ever conceived that such a thing could happen outside of a major volcanic eruption in our hemisphere… like the big one in Iceland in 2010.

So where do we go from here? Well, things aren’t looking good.

We have a Republican administration, working more directly for the fossil fuel industry and other related destructive and antiquated industries than any other to date, that seems determined to do as much damage to the planet as it possibly can while in power. We have a Democratic Party that is better on global warming, but not that much better, hoping to retake the federal government. We have other political forces more committed to bringing the “drill baby drill, burn baby burn” crowds to heel—like the Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America. But they remain very small relative to the population (outside of DSA’s impressive base in New York City thus far) and hemmed in on every side by the major parties. And most of the largest environmental organizations have simply run out of steam.

Major advances in several areas of science and technology are likely sufficient to allow humanity to at least blunt the worst effects of global warming. And some countries are funding such research and working to meet self-imposed climate targets. But most are not, least of all the United States. Which “is the second-highest climate polluting country, responsible for around 12% of global emissions,” according to Yale Climate Connections. The highest being China, a nation that is also doing much more to remediate global warming than the US. Nor is the best science useful if it’s not deployed. Even as the pollution responsible for warming continues to get worse year by year.

Do I know some magic path out of this morass? No. But I will tell you this: Everyone needs to consider spending at least some time every year doing what they can to improve the climate or soon events like this week’s convergence of bad global warming outcomes will become both commonplace and unstoppable.

Just like all of us environmentalists have been saying all along. In the public interest. Not for personal gain. Unlike what the climate scofflaws profiting from the destruction of human civilization have all-too-successfully propagandized far too many Americans into believing.

Mull that over while you wait for the smoke to clear and heat to subside… until the next “smokewave” and the next heatwave.

And the next and the next and the next and the next…

The original version of this article ran on July 17, 2026 at BINJ.News.

Plans for one of the world’s largest blue hydrogen and ammonia projects have collapsed, wasting billions of dollars in a risky bet that frontline communities resisted for years. Despite "clean" marketing, the project would have relied on dirty fracked gas.

The gas and chemicals company Air Products canceled its proposed $4.5 billion Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, wasting $2.9 billion—more than half of the overall cost—after concluding the project no longer met its financial expectations. Once promoted as the company’s largest US investment—and the world’s largest carbon sequestration project—the cancellation is more than a corporate setback. It is a signal of the end of the so-called "low carbon" hydrogen hype despite years of industry promotion, generous public subsidies, and claims that these technologies can be used to tackle climate change.

This retreat shows that these projects and their false climate solutions are not just unpopular, they’re also a major financial risk to companies, investors, and communities. For Louisiana communities that opposed the project from the beginning, however, the announcement means something else: proof that projects portrayed as inevitable can be stopped.

A Flagship Project That Never Materialized

When Air Products first announced the project in 2021, the company described it as a transformational investment. Their plans included the production of 1,700 metric tons of hydrogen per day from fracked gas with up to 95% of emissions mitigated through carbon capture and storage (CCS). They planned to pump the hydrogen—called "blue" hydrogen due to the addition of CCS—through a pipeline along the Gulf Coast for refineries and petrochemical plants, or turn it into ammonia, which is a toxic, fossil fuel-derived chemical—used primarily as a fertilizer.

(Graphic via CIEL Ammonia Factsheet)

That vision quickly began to unravel. By 2024, Air Products was already seeking partners to offload parts of the project, including the ammonia and carbon capture components. In 2025, it entered advanced negotiations with Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara. By mid-2026, both companies announced the project had been abandoned, citing financial concerns and an inability to find customers for a speculative market.

The cancellation reflects a broader reality: Despite billions in public funds and years of political backing, many blue hydrogen projects continue to struggle with rising costs, uncertain markets, and technical challenges.

Why This Matters Beyond One Company

Air Products is not alone. At least 45 hydrogen and ammonia production facilities have been proposed in recent years across the US—mostly clustered in Texas and Louisiana—with only one making it to the construction phase, and many more on hold. Although more than 80% of ammonia produced in the US is used to manufacture fertilizer, much of the proposed buildout depends on speculative markets—including using ammonia as a shipping fuel, hydrogen carrier, and energy source—none of which are possible at scale today.

To make these projects appear climate friendly, companies increasingly market them as "clean," "blue," or "low-carbon" by pairing fossil fuel-based hydrogen and ammonia production with CCS. Yet, CCS has repeatedly failed to deliver emissions reductions while putting communities at elevated risk for pollution and related disasters. Despite that record, federal carbon capture subsidies were expanded in 2022 and again in 2025, potentially leading to the transfer of $1 trillion in public funds to private corporations over the coming decades.

The collapse of one of the industry’s flagship projects should prompt investors and policymakers alike to ask whether this business model is built on wishful thinking rather than sound evidence and economics.

Louisiana Was Forced to Bear the Risk

Air Products’ proposed Louisiana Complex would have consisted of a hydrogen and ammonia plant in Ascension, Louisiana, with 38 miles of pipeline sprawling across five parishes, connecting to one of at least 10 separate injection wells underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would have formed part of a larger effort to transform Louisiana into a national hub for CCS.

More than just a proposed storage site, Lake Maurepas is an important estuarine ecosystem beloved by locals for recreational activities like boating, fishing, and wildlife observation. One of the nation’s largest forested wetlands borders the lake, supporting wildlife, commercial fishing, and local businesses. For generations, communities have depended on these waters—not simply for income, but as part of their identity. From the moment residents learned about the Air Products project, they organized against it.

Today, more than 30 CCS projects are under review across the state by the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy. Many would be built alongside communities already burdened by decades of petrochemical pollution in the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, known locally as Cancer Alley.

These communities have long borne the health costs of fossil fuel development. Siting this experimental and knowingly dangerous CCS technology alongside frontline communities already overburdened by industrial pollution would force them to shoulder another layer of industrial risk, while companies stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in public money over the next 20 years through a federal tax credit.

This Isn’t the First Time

The failure of Air Products’ vision is not a surprise to anyone watching the proposed CCS buildout; the ballooning costs and failure to deliver on ambitious promises follow a familiar pattern.

The Kemper “clean coal” project in Mississippi was once celebrated as the future of carbon capture, claiming it would capture 65% of emissions from the power plant. Originally budgeted at $3 billion, the costs of the project more than doubled to $7.5 billion over the seven years of its construction (2010-2017), before the carbon capture system was abandoned altogether. Despite the massive investment, the Kemper facility never operated as promised and was partially demolished in 2021. Local residents are still paying for the corporate loss from this experiment through their electricity bills.

The failure of the Kemper project should have been a warning for future investments and should have prompted the more fundamental question: Who bears the cost of these projects?

While Louisiana leads the nation in oil refining, natural gas production, and chemical production, the state consistently ranks among the poorest and least educated states in the US. CCS projects will no doubt add to the unequal environmental burden that the state population is forced to bear for the benefit of corporations. While many of the hardships can be quantified, the joy and love for the land by its residents is immeasurable. There’s no metric that captures the experience of paddling a canoe across Lake Maurepas, seeing alligators bask in the sun, listening to birdsongs echo across the wetlands, or watching the flotant—marsh grasses that float on top of the water—bob with the waves.

An alligator basks in Lake Maurepas, Louisiana, US. (Photo by Jessi Parfait, CIEL.)

For the communities that have called this place home for generations, protecting the lake has never been about stopping a single project—it has been about safeguarding a way of life. The cancellation of the project is a victory not only for the hundreds of community members who organized against it—showing what is possible when people stand together to fight against false solutions—but also for the future generations who will continue to enjoy this remarkable ecosystem.

The cancellation is also a major win for communities that spent years warning about the project’s risks. Concerned residents across the complex’s planned footprint partnered with environmental groups to speak out at public hearings, organize neighbors, and challenge permits, refusing to accept that the project was inevitable.

Their persistence mattered. For years, the fossil fuel industry insisted that carbon capture represented the future—that projects like this were necessary and unavoidable. But as James Hiatt, founder of For a Better Bayou based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, put it:

Air Products pulling out proves that nothing here is inevitable. Industry wants us to believe these projects are a done deal, that our voices don’t matter. They do. Elected and regulators didn’t hand us this win; community pressure did. Consistent, persistent organizing works.
A Warning for The Future

Air Products’ withdrawal is not simply a failed investment by one company. It is a warning to policymakers considering whether public money should continue subsidizing projects that repeatedly fail to deliver.

Communities increasingly reject being asked to bear new risks in exchange for promises that never materialize. And this failure is likely not the last ammonia and CCS project to be canceled. Even now, many projects are on hold or delayed, further signaling to companies, investors, and communities that they are a bad bet.

The cancellation also sends a broader message: Expensive, speculative technologies designed to prolong fossil fuel production aren’t fooling anyone and companies pushing these risky projects will be footing the bill.

The world has united for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stadiums have been filled with songs, flags, and the shared joy that football uniquely creates. Millions celebrate the beauty of a sport that claims to unite humanity across borders, languages, and politics.

But with the final game approaching, a question hangs heavily over the tournament: Will there be any tributes for the 567 Palestinian footballers reportedly killed in Gaza since October 2023?

The latest name on that list is Saleem Al-Ashqar, a Palestinian goalkeeper from Al-Qarara, near Khan Younis. He was 32 years old. According to reports, he was not on a battlefield. He was riding a motorcycle, searching for cooking gas. He had married only months earlier, in January 2026, and was waiting for the birth of his first child. Israeli forces shot and killed him.

In February 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, FIFA acted with remarkable speed. Within days, Russia was suspended from international competition and excluded from World Cup qualification. The decision came from widespread recognition that sport could not be separated from a major violation of international law and human suffering. FIFA described it as necessary to protect the integrity of football and to stand against violence.

When the final whistle blows at the 2026 World Cup, millions of people will celebrate the beauty of the game. They should also remember those who were denied the chance to keep playing it.

But if that principle applied to Russia, why does it not apply consistently elsewhere?

For nearly three years, international organizations, human rights groups, United Nations experts, and legal bodies have documented immense civilian suffering in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Homes, schools, hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions have been destroyed. The sporting sector has not been spared. Football fields have become rubble, sports facilities have been damaged and destroyed. Coaches, referees, administrators, and players have lost their lives. Despite all of this, the Israel Football Association remains a full FIFA member.

The consequences of this selectivity are devastating for Palestinian footballers. Their deaths rarely make international headlines. Their names are seldom known beyond their communities. The destruction of Gaza's sporting infrastructure receives little attention compared with transfer rumors, sponsorship deals, and tournament news.

Imagine a World Cup qualifying group in which half the players were dead. Imagine a national league where stadiums no longer exist. Imagine trying to explain to a child why their favorite goalkeeper will never play again because he was killed while searching for fuel to cook a meal.

Football is built on memory. Every World Cup honors the past as we remember legends who lifted trophies decades ago. Stadiums regularly hold moments of silence for victims of disasters, terrorism, and war. We place black armbands on captains’ sleeves because the sport understands that you cannot simply ignore loss.

Now that 567 footballers are gone, will we have a moment of silence? Will giant screens display their names? Will commentators mention that an entire generation of Palestinian players was cut down before it had the chance to compete? Or will the tournament proceed as though those lives never existed?

Tributes matter because they acknowledge humanity. They tell grieving families that the world saw their loved ones and that their deaths are not being erased.

If FIFA is unwilling to suspend the Israel Football Association, it should at the very least publicly recognize the Palestinian footballers who have been killed and commit to rebuilding the sporting infrastructure that has been destroyed. Their silence is a choice, and it speaks volumes.

When the final whistle blows at the 2026 World Cup, millions of people will celebrate the beauty of the game. They should also remember those who were denied the chance to keep playing it. The empty seats belong to them.

On behalf of those Colorado Congressional District 8 constituents who rely on Medicaid benefits to access healthcare, your neighbors who are part of the Mountain West team for Social Security Works want to help you give Trumpublican (trum-pub-li-kin) Rep. Gabe Evans the boot. Gabe voted for your benefits to be slashed because of his deep devotion to his own well-being, not yours. Gabe thinks cutting your access to healthcare is “cost cutting,” or so he claims as his reasoning behind voting for what his boss, Donald Trump, required his Trumpublican minions to do. Gabe chose your suffering to appease people in DC, and he did not give a second (or even first) thought to what might happen if he cut healthcare access for as much as 28% of his constituents (and up to 43% of the children in CD8) who depend on Medicaid. We must give Gabe Evans the boot this fall.

Gabe is not a true representative who ought to find his glory in the US House of Representatives (aka the People’s House). “We could write shame on you, Gabe,” but we don’t think a person who sees his constituents lose healthcare access and calls it cost cutting can be easily shamed. Do you? While the people in CD8 in Colorado barely elected Gabe in 2024, now they have a much more accurate sense of his loyalties.

Let’s look at what Gabe says about himself on his campaign webpage: “Congressman Gabe Evans is a conservative leader who has spent his entire life running toward challenge. He represents Colorado's 8th Congressional District, where he is fighting to secure the border, strengthen public safety, and make life more affordable for hardworking Coloradans.”

Is he writing about the Utah border or maybe that scary Four Corners part of Colorado where folks from all sorts of other states might creep in, or is he referring to The Southern Border way south of Colorado (between Texas and Mexico) that his boss, Trump, wants him to highlight as very, very dangerous to the people of his own district? So, this, then, was one of the things that was his reasoning for cutting Medicaid benefits? To have enough funds to protect CD8 from the scary border and the scary people who might come to CD8 from the scary border, Gabe cut healthcare access.

Gabe needs to get the boot. Those of us fighting to protect the social safety net not only for future generations but for our own neighbors, friends, and families right now are a much larger group than those who would harm us. The Mountain West Team of Social Security Works invites you to learn more about CD8 in Colorado.

So, who can we vote for as a smart alternative to the cruelty and misguided loyalty Gabe offers CD8? Manny Rutinel is the Democratic candidate for the CD8 seat. Manny could use strategists who know and share the outrage of his future constituents about the healthcare mess this nation is in, and it’s way past time for him to advance a sane and clear healthcare message. During a recent primary election debate televised throughout the Front Range of Colorado, Manny stumbled a bit on his healthcare policy ideals, like many politicians do when they fear attacks from the powerful health industry. Yet even in that debate, Manny did not say cutting healthcare access would be his plan.

Manny Rutinel is a young Colorado state legislator raised by a single-immigrant mom who has all the appropriate tools for success in politics. Yet he responded inelegantly to a debate question about his previous position during his college years in support of single-payer, Medicare for All financing for healthcare. Most of us can point to our college-aged opinions and ideas as subject to modification as we aged and as we gather more information upon which to base those positions. It’s not selling out; it’s maturing. Manny believes in access to healthcare—period.

Offending or alarming any healthcare industry interests in his district could spell disaster for him, and Manny knew that. I waited for him to formulate an answer like President Barack Obama once said about single-payer. Obama said that if we were starting from scratch, there is no question that single-payer (not government control of healthcare – just one public pool for insuring everyone) would be the best system to design.

But we are well beyond that, Manny might have said. He needed to clarify and broaden his position – but instead he panicked and denied any lingering support for single-payer, and that will haunt him until he clarifies his intentions to truly represent his district. We know he will represent people in CD8, and he is not a Trumpublican. Manny intends to fight not only to restore lost Medicaid funding but also look to a better, more equitable and less volatile healthcare system going forward, and he looks forward to a rich conversation with the healthcare industry leaders, doctors, nurses, caregivers, and patients in CD8.

Might a CD8 community of healthcare interests support a form of single-payer like Medicaid or Medicare or the VA with modifications and improvements? Sure, and might it be something we haven’t even mapped out yet? Of course it could. Even in nations around the world with universal health programs for their residents, healthcare programs vary greatly—but Manny supports making sure everyone can access healthcare when they are in need, and he should say that every chance he gets. There is still time, and Manny will win on this issue by a margin at least equal to the number of people Gabe decided could be sacrificed to the Trumpublican alter—and that will be a marvelous win.

So, in this piece, I want my Common Dreams readers to meet Manny and offer him support, courage and stamina to follow a courageous path upon which so many lives depend. In this political moment, we all understand the enemy. Now we need to surround one another with grace and courage as we lift imperfect Americans, imperfect politicians, and imperfect humans with our effort. Lives depend on it. Our democracy does too. So, let’s “Give Gabe the Boot.”

By Ralph Nader July 17, 2026 The chronic prevaricator and delusionist, Donald J. Trump, knows the worse his outlaw actions and mouth are, the less likely the Democrats in Congress are to impeach him. The Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, like Trump, oppose impeachment drives but for different reasons. With Trump the coming…

Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW last night:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him last night, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Leticia James to Adam Shiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued the day before yesterday.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.