Trump’s Climate Policy Rollback Plan Relies on EPA Rescinding its 2009 Endangerment Finding, But Will Courts Allow It?

Gary W. Yohe

 February 5, 2026

THE CONVERSATION

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Navajo Generating Station, near Page, Arizona. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gas emissions, including from vehicles and fossil fuel power plants, endanger public health and welfare. The decision, known as the endangerment finding, was based on years of evidence, and it has underpinned EPA actions on climate change ever since.

The Trump administration now wants to tear up that finding as it tries to roll back climate regulations on everything from vehicles to industries.

But the move might not be as simple as the administration hopes.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent a proposed rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget in early January 2026 to rescind the endangerment finding. Now, a Washington Post report suggests, action on it may be delayed over concerns that the move wouldn’t withstand legal challenges.

Cracks in the administration’s plan are already evident. On Jan. 30, a federal judge ruled that the Department of Energy violated the law when it handpicked five researchers to write the climate science review that the EPA is using to defend its plan. The ruling doesn’t necessarily stop the EPA, but it raises questions.

There’s no question that if the EPA does rescind the endangerment finding that the move would be challenged in court. The world just lived through the three hottest years on record, evidence of worsening climate change is stronger now than ever before, and people across the U.S. are increasingly experiencing the harm firsthand.

Several legal issues have the potential to stop the EPA’s effort. They include emails submitted in a court case that suggest political appointees sought to direct the scientific review.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at history for some context.

The Supreme Court started it

The endangerment finding stemmed from a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The court found that various greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, were “pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act,” and it gave the EPA an explicit set of instructions.

The court wrote that the “EPA must determine whether or not emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

But the Supreme Court did not order the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Only if the EPA found that emissions were harmful would the agency be required, by law, “to establish national ambient air quality standards for certain common and widespread pollutants based on the latest science” – meaning greenhouse gases.

The EPA was required to follow formal procedures – including reviewing the scientific research, assessing the risks and taking public comment – and then determine whether the observed and projected harms were sufficient to justify publishing an “endangerment finding.”

That process took two years. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced on Dec. 7, 2009, that the then-current and projected concentrations of six key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Challenges to the finding erupted immediately.

Jackson denied 10 petitions received in 2009-2010 that called on the administration to reconsider the finding.

On June 26, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the endangerment finding and regulations that the EPA had issued under the Clean Air Act for passenger vehicles and permitting procedures for stationary sources, such as power plants.

This latest challenge is different.

It came directly from the Trump administration without going through normal channels. It was, though, entirely consistent with both the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration and President Donald Trump’s dismissive perspective on climate risk.

Trump’s burden of proof

To legally reverse the 2009 finding, the agency must go through the same evaluation process as before. According to conditions outlined in the Clean Air Act, the reversal of the 2009 finding must be justified by a thorough and complete review of the current science and not just be political posturing.

That’s a tough task.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has talked publicly about how he handpicked the five researchers who wrote the scientific research review. A judge has now found that the effort violated the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that agency-chosen panels providing policy advice to the government conduct their work in public.

All five members of the committee had been outspoken critics of mainstream climate science. Their report, released in summer 2025, was widely criticized for inaccuracies in what they referenced and its failure to represent the current science.

Scientific research available today clearly shows that greenhouse gas emissions harm public health and welfare. Importantly, evidence collected since 2009 is even stronger now than it was when the first endangerment finding was written, approved and implemented.

Many locations around the world had record or near-record warm years in 2025. Places with local record warmth in 2025 are home to approximately 770 million people, according to data from Berkeley Earth.
Berkeley Earth, CC BY-NC

For example, a 2025 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine determined that the evidence supporting the endangerment finding is even stronger today than it was in 2009. A 2019 peer-reviewed assessment of the evidence related to greenhouse gas emissions’ role in climate change came to the same conclusion.

The Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report produced by hundreds of scientists from around the world, found in 2023 that “adverse impacts of human-caused climate change will continue to intensify.”

Summer temperatures have climbed in much of the U.S. and the world as greenhouse gas emissions have risen.
Fifth National Climate Assessment

In other words, greenhouse gas emissions were causing harm in 2009, and the harm is worse now and will be even worse in the future without steps to reduce emissions.

In public comments on the Department of Energy’s problematic 2025 review, a group of climate experts from around the world reached the same conclusion, adding that the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group review “fails to adequately represent this reality.”

What happens if EPA does drop the endangerment finding

As an economist who has studied the effects of climate change for over 40 years, I am concerned that the EPA rescinding the endangerment finding on the basis of faulty scientific assessment would lead to faster efforts to roll back U.S. climate regulations meant to slow climate change.

It would also give the administration cover for further actions that would defund more science programs, stop the collection of valuable data, freeze hiring and discourage a generation of emerging science talent.

Cases typically take years to wind through the courts. Unless a judge issued an injunction, I would expect to see a continuing retreat from efforts to reduce climate change while the court process plays out.

I see no scenario in which a legal challenge doesn’t end up before the Supreme Court. I would hope that both the enormous amount of scientific evidence and the words in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution would have some significant sway in the court’s considerations. It starts, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” and includes in its list of principles, “promote the general Welfare.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gary W. Yohe is Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University.

Trump, Pirate of the Caribbean

By Craig Murray

February 5, 2026

Source: Craig Murray's Blog

Donald Trump delivers remarks to the Venezuelan American community at the Florida International University Ocean Bank Convocation Center on February 18, 2019, in Miami, Florida. (Executive Office of the President of the United States / Wikimedia Commons)

I have now been here a week and I think that I have absorbed enough to attempt a little analysis, as opposed to the simple impressions I gave shortly after arrival.

Those impressions remain valid however: this is not a repressive state. I was on the Randy Credico show live on WBAI New York on Friday, and by chance my friend, the renowned FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley was also on, from Minnesota (where I have stayed with Colleen and her husband in their home).

I was explaining that, in a week of going all round Caracas, I had yet to see a checkpoint, that nobody had at any stage asked me who I am, what I was doing or prevented me from going anywhere, and that the shops, bars and restaurants are all functioning normally.

Colleen reported from Minneapolis that there were checkpoints everywhere, that the streets are full of heavily armed men, that people are frequently stopped, questioned, asked to produce documents, and diverted, and that many shops bars and restaurants are closed because the staff are afraid to venture out into the streets. Colleen is heavily involved in detainee support and in getting supplies to people sheltering in their homes.

Remind me again, which of us is in a supposed dictatorship?

I want to tell you a couple of things to help explain Venezuela. I visited the mausoleum of Simon Bolivar, a genuinely heroic man. He has now been removed from the main Venezuelan Pantheon into a connected dedicated modern mausoleum. The Pantheon itself contains the remains of many of the heroes of the Venezuelan War of Independence, and monuments to all of them.

The Venezuelan War of Independence was, of course, in many respects similar to the United States war given the same name. It was a war between colonial elites and their metropolitan masters. Unlike the founders of the USA, Bolivar himself was genuinely opposed to slavery, but that was not true of many of his key allies.

So the Pantheon as originally conceived in the late 19th century was inhabited by the remains and memories almost entirely of those heroic people of Spanish descent who fought against the colonial control of Spain. This is the great founding ideal of Venezuela.

When Chavez and Maduro came to power, they made a very important change. They added a monument to the liberated slaves who had fought against the Spanish. Then Chavez and Maduro each added an extra monument: to leaders of the Native Americans who had fought against Spanish invasion in the first place.

This caused outrage among right wingers furious that the purity of the Pantheon, the great focus of Venezuelan nationalism, was being desecrated for what they viewed as political purposes. Which brings me to what I think is a fundamental observation. Politics in Venezuela are basically racial.

I am treading on eggshells here, but in 2019 I published this post noticing the contrast between opposition and government group photos. The leadership of the right wing are basically whiter. That is simply who they are.

Of course the divide is not absolute, and individual exceptions exist. But it is there. Politics in Venezuela are strongly class based, and in this post-colonial society it is difficult to disentangle race from class.

What the opposition want is simply to turn back the clock and restore economic apartheid in Venezuela. I had a very interesting talk with Ricardo Vaz of Venezuela Analysis. He explained how Chavez’s revolutionary policies had brought people into political discourse who had always been ignored in what was historically an extremely unequal society:

“The rulers, now the opposition, suddenly found that their cook, their cleaner, their driver and even their gardener were learning to read and write and starting to get political ideas. They did not like this at all”.

They still don’t like that. It is not possible for me here now to capture what happened exactly in the 2024 elections. Plainly the opposition performed relatively well, though I do not in the least believe they got 68% of the result. Maduro’s closing rally had 1 million people while the opposition’s had 50,000.

For the government to remain in power against the will of 68% of the population would require a degree of state repression which simply does not exist here. There is very little surveillance compared to Western states, let alone to acknowledged dictatorships. There are no politicised police or militias in the streets. There are no restrictions on people moving around and mingling.

Machado has discredited herself, as effectively as she has discredited the Nobel peace prize. Giving the prize to Trump made her look foolish and suppliant, and praising the bombing of her own country which killed fellow citizens has really not gone down well at all, even with opposition supporters.

But even that has not harmed her nearly as much as her remark to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that 60% of Venezuelans are involved in narcotics or prostitution. This is not quite what she said, but it is near enough and it really annoyed people here:

We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60% of our populations, and not only involving drug trafficking, but in human trafficking, in networks of prostitution. So this has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas…

Which takes me back to personal impressions. I have, as those who follow me would expect, assiduously been checking out the bars of Caracas. I have found some very beautiful ones – Juan Sebastian Bar is one of the most lovely bars that I have ever seen. A piece of stunning interior design. I took these photos before it opened one evening. It serves mojitos even better than you can get in Havana.

That is not a mirror, those are two grand pianos!

The point is that not in my hotel, not in any bar, not on any street, have I seen a single person who appeared to be operating as a sex worker. Not one – and I might perhaps be viewed as a pretty archetypal target. Similarly I have not seen any sign at all of narcotics abuse. In two days in Salisbury investigating the Skripal hoax I was shocked by how many obvious drug addicts we saw on the streets. There is nothing of the kind in Caracas.

While I appreciate that the allegation is that Venezuela exports narcotics rather than consumes them, you always get clusters of addiction around production points and transit nodes. I just see no evidence that the common tropes about Venezuela and Venezuelans are true: and I am a trained and seasoned observer.

Sanctions against Venezuela did not start after the disputed 2024 election; they have been applied by the Western powers more or less since the very start of Chavez’s socialist experiment. The repression of socialism in Latin America has been US policy for a century, and the more Chavez succeeded the more the West sought to suppress it. France refused to provide spares for the Mirage jets of the Venezuelan air force, and equally refused to supply spare parts for the trains of the Metro service.

The gold and foreign currency reserves abroad of the government of Venezuela have simply been stolen by foreign governments, and the blocking of Venezuela from the Swift bank transfer system for a while caused havoc. It has however spurred BRICS to develop an alternative, not fully adopted, not finished but working in Venezuela, which accounts for the full stocks in the shops and ultimately might represent a significant moment in international economics.

Slowly, unwillingly, the Socialist Party under Maduro has been forced precisely by the crippling effect of sanctions to allow more space for the private sector and move from a fully socialist to a more social democratic model – though to describe the reforms under Maduro as “neoliberal” is ridiculous. It may theoretically be possible to build socialism in one country, but if the major economic powers join forces to destroy you, it becomes very difficult indeed.

A dangerously simplistic narrative about what has happened in Venezuela has taken hold in the West, fuelled by Trump, CIA and Machado/Miami sources.

On this reading, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez is in collusion with Trump, betrayed Maduro and stood down defences on the night of his kidnap, and is now instituting neoliberal policies, including a new petroleum law which states only the USA may ship Venezuelan oil and that payments for it will go exclusively through the US in Qatar.

In fact this is not true at all. Venezuela’s new petroleum legislation contains no provisions banning oil exports to China or Russia and no provision for payments to be routed through the USA. The new petroleum law is in fact legislation which sets out a new commercial basis for the operation of the Venezuelan petroleum sector on the same kind of concession, licensing and royalty basis as pertains in almost every other oil producer.

The key point is that the legislation was drafted under Maduro, with extensive consultation and debate. It came for its first reading to the Assembly literally the day after Maduro was kidnapped. That was already scheduled, not a result of the kidnapping. The notion that Maduro opposed the legislation and Rodríguez had to get rid of him to get it through is patent nonsense.

The legislation is unrelated to the United States’ current hijack of the sale of Venezuelan oil. This is proceeding through simple piracy. Trump decreed that only two companies, Vitol and Trafigura, would be allowed to load Venezuelan oil, and those companies would pay for the oil to the United States, into a special account held in Qatar under Trump’s name.

This new scheme has been enforced by simple piracy. Any tankers carrying oil not owned by Vitol and Trafigura from Venezuela have been illegally seized at sea by the US Navy, sometimes assisted by the UK government. The United States has been claiming that Venezuela agrees to this arrangement. That is not true. Or it is true in the sense that a hostage held at gunpoint agrees to stay put, rather than get a bullet through the skull.

The Venezuelan government simply has no physical ability to prevent the United States Navy from seizing oil tankers.

Nor is it true that the Venezuelan government gave the United States information on non-Vitol and -Trafigura tankers and requested their interception. Obviously the United States could get the information on “rogue” tankers from Vitol and Trafigura.

Trafigura have featured in my writing for decades as the archetypal extremely corrupt Western corporation. Their record for deliberate pollution and corruption in Africa is appalling, including in Angola and Ivory Coast. They have frequently been involved in CIA schemes for regime change.

How Vitol and Trafigura came to be the beneficiaries of a duopoly, and what backhanders that may have involved, is another question. In fact this is the one area of domestic pressure that has forced a step back from Trump, and last Friday it was announced that the arrangement will be expanded to include more companies.

It is worth noting that the system has not just been invented for Venezuela. It is almost identical to the system imposed on Iraq after its destruction by the United States and its allies, with payments for Iraqi oil made to the USA and a percentage of them returned to the Iraqi government.

The difference is that the Iraqi revenues were paid to the US Treasury, whereas the Venezuelan funds are going to a Qatar account under Trump’s personal control, removed from the reach of Congress. At its most charitable reading, it gives him a massive slush fund to pursue policy outside the United States legal framework. It is like Iran-Contra on a massive scale.

To reiterate: none of this sales arrangement has been agreed by Rodríguez and none of it is contained in the new Venezuelan hydrocarbon legislation on concessions and royalties. There are two separate things being widely conflated.

The line that Delcy Rodríguez agrees both to the kidnap of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia, and to the hijacking of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, has been deliberately spread by the US and its acolytes, despite Delcy Rodríguez’s furious denials.

If Rodríguez really was Trump’s placed woman, then boasting about it would fatally undermine her within Venezuela and bring about her downfall – which obviously would be entirely counterproductive were there any truth in the claim.

So why is this rumour being spread? Well the obvious reason is precisely to undermine Rodríguez and destabilise the government of Venezuela.

But perhaps a more important factor is Trump’s obsessive need to claim victory. He gathered a massive military force off the coast of Venezuela, and stood in danger of mockery as the Grand Old Duke of York if he simply sailed it away again.

The seizure of Maduro has in fact changed nothing in policy terms within Venezuela, but it has provided a spectacular operation for Trump to claim as a victory. In truth, as a demonstration of the capabilities of the United States’ offensive military technology, it was indeed technically impressive.

For the removal of Maduro to be portrayed as a triumph, Trump has to claim that Rodríguez is solidly pro-USA, even though this is plainly not true. It is merely a part of the parade of triumph that is an essential component both of Trump’s ego and of the bombastic Trump method.

What now happens to Maduro and Cilia is, on this reading, not really relevant. The entirely false narrative of the non-existent Cartel de los Soles has already been abandoned as part of the prosecution. In the USA’s misnamed “justice” system, they have a variety of witness accusations from diverse figures prepared to sign nonsense against Maduro as part of a plea bargain agreement. These include rococo Trump-pleasing standouts such as testimony that Maduro was involved in fixing the 2020 US Presidential election on behalf of Biden.

My prediction is that Trump will “pardon” Maduro before the prosecution gets too silly, and present that as another part of his triumph. But who can predict a madman?

That is precisely the conundrum now facing Delcy Rodríguez. She is dealing with two imponderable equations.

The first was already difficult enough. Historians and ideologues will debate for centuries whether Chavismo could have succeeded economically with its full-on socialist programme, had the Western world not determined to destroy it with crippling sanctions.

What is I think beyond dispute is that the sanctions were so crippling that they caused considerable public hardship, and massive inflation. At the same time, the very fact that Venezuela is not highly dictatorial and both Chavez and Maduro broadly allowed debate, free opposition political parties and media, and the operation of Western-funded NGOs, meant that the Venezuelan population were continually bombarded with Western propaganda which blamed the problems caused by sanctions on the Bolivarian Revolution.

This eroded support for the socialist project, which though still intact, has crumbled at the edges. The Bolivarian government has been obliged to try to mitigate the effects of the sanctions which stole the government’s own capital, and to seek the removal of some sanctions, by the opening up of more space for capitalist investment and operation in the economy, notably but by no means only in the oil sector.

In other words the government has been forced to concede some ground to the West by inching along the spectrum from socialist to social democratic, while attempting to maintain the massive social gains of the Chavez revolution.

This is an exercise in which Nicolás Maduro himself was fully engaged. I believe that both Maduro and Rodríguez have the intention of inching back from social democracy towards socialism over time, once pressures have eased. Theirs is a game of strategy, not of tactics.

To this already extremely sensitive calculation is added the extraordinary factor of Trump. His willingness to simply kill innocent people, to shatter international law, and to impose his will by exploiting massive United States military advantage over a small country, changed all the rules of the game.

The pressure to make changes faster to appease somebody who is plainly mentally unstable, the difficulty of understanding his limits and true goals, is an excruciating experience when the lives and deaths of Venezuelans are in your hands. Trump’s incredible bombast, his wild claims that Venezuelan land and oil is stolen from the USA, are not contained within the realm of normal diplomatic negotiation.

Delcy Rodríguez is not so much walking a tightrope, as navigating an Indiana Jones tunnel full of traps.

One thing that Trump has in fact got right is his contention that Machado does not have the public support to rule. This seems to me indisputable, and an attempt to impose her would result in civil war. This of course in itself undermines the contention that Machado’s team massively won the 2024 election.

Meanwhile life in Venezuela goes on for ordinary people. I had the great pleasure to attend a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra on Sunday. It was very accomplished, and the auditorium was full. The programme was entirely of Venezuelan composers, and I had never heard any of the music before. The opening symphonic poem by Juan Bautista Plaza would stand alongside the European repertoire without blushing.

I make no apologies for bringing little slices of ordinary life to you, because the picture we have been given of Venezuela is so strangely and massively distorted, it requires multiple points of correction.

Chavez instituted a programme of musical education for working-class children that became the envy of the classical music world, known simply as La Sistema. Much more heart-rending examples of Western sanctions might be found, involving medical provision. But as an example of the cruel absurdity of the sanctions regime, the youth orchestra of Venezuela has difficulties getting hold of simple consumables – strings, reeds, plectra – because of sanctions.

In bringing violin strings to a child I should be committing a crime in the United States of America. Let that be a testament to the absurdity of using sanctions to crush human spirit.

I am very aware I have not left Caracas yet and of the limitations of my experience so far. But I am already struck by the great advantage of being here over commentators in the West who I see daily, even when well-intentioned, getting it all wrong. The mainstream media of course produce a fake narrative entirely as a matter of policy.

I am delighted to say that today our new videographer and editor are starting and we will be able to bring you video content. I also hope today to conclude rent of an office/studio space.

We now have a Venezuela reporting crowdfunder. I have simply edited the Lebanese GoFundMe crowdfunder, because that took many weeks to be approved and I don’t want to go through all that again. So its starting baseline is the £35,000 we raised and spent in Lebanon.

I do very much appreciate that I have been simultaneously crowdfunding to fight the UK government in the Scottish courts over the proscription of Palestine Action. We fight forces that have unlimited funds. We can only succeed if we spread the load. 98% of those who read my articles never contribute financially. This would be a good moment to change that. It is just the simple baseline subscriptions to my blog that have got me to Venezuela, and that remains the foundation for all my work.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Beyond the Artist Subsidy: Universal Basic Income as a Radical Shift in How People Receive Their Money

By Alex Howlett

February 5, 2026

Source: Feasta

The Irish government recently announced that its so-called* “Basic Income for the Arts” (BIA) program will become permanent starting in 2026. This is a victory for the arts as well as an acknowledgment that jobs might not always be the most effective way to distribute money to people.

But while subsidizing artists is a step in the right direction, it stops short of solving the underlying problem. By earmarking money specifically for “creatives,” we are still operating under the assumption that we must justify people’s income based on what they do.  We are trapped in a mindset that sees people first as workers and only second as human beings.

Forcing everyone to “earn” their money through jobs harms the environment, harms people, and squanders human potential.  Jobs take time and energy away from our families, our communities, and our leisure activities.

Why shouldn’t we want fewer jobs and less employment?  There must be something wrong with how we’ve structured our economy if reducing the need for—and use of—labor somehow makes people worse off.  Yet that’s the world we live in.

How do we escape this trap?  Well, if we continue to think of people fundamentally as workers selling labor, it limits our vision of what’s possible.  We generate jobs and wages just to keep money flowing in the economy.  The economic policy goal of full employment is axiomatic.

For environmental sustainability, the implications are stark. A full-employment economy wastes resources.  We are running the economic machine at high RPMs just to keep the engine from stalling. We are burning resources generating otherwise unnecessary “work” because we haven’t figured out another way to distribute money.

In my recent paper, “Keynesianism’s Labor Problem”, I urge us to transcend that labor-centric economic lens. We can think of people first as people, not as cogs.  And we can manage our economy from this perspective.

An efficient economy generates the maximum well-being with the minimum amount of coercion.  First and foremost, humanity is a beneficiary of the economic machine.  The less we have to use people as economic inputs, the better off we are.  People need money. They don’t need to be exploited.  And we certainly don’t need to pretend to exploit people as an excuse to hand them money.

Our economic policy goals can shift away from providing people jobs toward providing people access to the full benefit that the economy can deliver.  That’s where universal basic income (UBI) comes in.

Ireland’s artist subsidy merely plugs a gap—one of many gaps left by today’s dysfunctional labor-based money distribution system.  By decoupling income from employment, a true UBI can free us from “jobs for jobs’ sake” and allow the economy to reorganize itself around human flourishing.

We can conceive of UBI not as a way of plugging gaps in the economy, but as a radical restructuring of money distribution away from labor, workers, and wages.  A properly calibrated UBI can represent the solution to a deep problem in our economic infrastructure.  If we calibrate our UBI to a level that avoids us having to generate excess jobs, any remaining wages will pull people away from their leisure only as necessary.

Unfortunately, this is not where the UBI conversation stands today.

A great tragedy of the UBI movement is that most UBI supporters think about UBI in the context of the current labor-based economy with its full-employment paradigm and all the implications therein.  The discourse surrounding UBI has largely been dominated by ethical philosophy, political advocacy, and microeconomic analysis of poverty alleviation.   Even attempts at macroeconomic modeling fail to transcend the full-employment baggage.

People sometimes imagine UBI as a—perhaps imperfect—tool for addressing the problem of AI-induced job loss.  They see UBI as a form of safety net or social assistance for those left behind.  They rarely question why we’re living in a world where joblessness is something to fear.  They rarely notice that our society has a long history of using economic policy to generate jobs that counteract the effects of labor-saving technology.

At the Greshm Institute, we’re hoping to change all that.  In recent months, my colleague Derek Van Gorder and I  have been grateful for the opportunity to discuss these ideas on the monthly Feasta USA/North America calls. The transition to a green economy necessitates a shift to a UBI economy, and that requires moving away from the labor-entangled economics of the past.  Money distribution can be a public utility.

It’s not too early to start thinking about what kind of impact we might want to make at the 2026 BIEN Congress, August 20–22 in Toronto, Canada.  This event presents an opportunity for us to shift the UBI narrative away from safety nets and targeted pilot programs toward rethinking the economics of money distribution and the role of labor in society.

The Ireland program provides a glimpse of what’s possible, but we need to go further. If we want to maximize human flourishing while minimizing resource waste, we need to stop treating joblessness as a problem and embrace leisure as an ideal.  We need a truly Universal Basic Income.Email

Alex Howlett

Alex Howlett serves as President of The Greshm Institute, which conducts research on basic income. Alex is also an organizer for the Financial Stability working group at INET’s Young Scholars Initiative.

Depoliticizing Pedagogies of Comfort and Instrumentalism

By Henry A. Giroux

February 5, 2026

Source: L.A. Progressive

A university that confuses comfort with care, risks becoming an institution of managed ignorance or a laboratory for indoctrination.

Iam increasingly unsettled by the return of instrumentalism and operationalism, twin logics that reduce education to technique, measurement, and control, in higher education, even among academics who identify as progressive and should know better. Education is too often reduced to efficiency, training, metrics, and measurable outcomes, while pedagogy is judged less by its intellectual force than by whether it preserves student comfort. This emphasis focuses narrowly on whether students feel uneasy or anxious in response to challenging knowledge. This is a profound distortion of what teaching is for. Moreover, it is a form of depoliticization in that it refuses to connect critical inquiry with civic courage, reason in the service of justice, and knowledge as a force for social change and the expansion of the political imagination. When normalized, the pedagogy of comfort, wedded to instrumentalism, becomes a mechanism of containment, if not infantilism. It narrows how universities respond to students and faculty who challenge power, assert their voices against injustice, including the genocide in Gaza, and practice forms of critical pedagogy that refuse silence or compliance. Under this regime, dissent is managed, critique is pathologized, and education is reduced to the avoidance of discomfort rather than the pursuit of truth.

Against this reduction of pedagogy to emotional management, pedagogy must be grounded not in comfort but in respect, a value that is both ethical and intellectual. Comfort asks whether students feel uneasy. Respect asks whether they are treated as thinking subjects capable of engaging difficult knowledge, historical violence, and moral complexity as part of democratic life. Discomfort produced by rigorous inquiry, unsettling histories, or challenges to common sense is not a pedagogical failure but a condition of learning. A pedagogy that unsettles, however, must also be grounded in safety, understood not as emotional insulation but as protection from humiliation, violence, and harm so that students are not excluded from the world of ideas. Safe spaces, in this sense, must also be brave spaces, where discomfort does not displace commitments to economic justice, social transformation, and collective solidarity.

What violates respect is not intellectual struggle, but the exercise of power that humiliates, punishes, or diminishes students as human beings, especially within asymmetrical relations of authority. To confuse such abuses with “discomfort” is to empty the term of meaning and to shield domination from critique. Comfort is too thin, too privatized, and too politically vacuous a category to guide education. Respect, by contrast, demands that pedagogy cultivate critical agency, ethical responsibility, and the courage to confront injustice rather than retreat from it.

As schools retreat into either a zone of conformity or indoctrination, they embrace the false claim of neutrality while at the same time they surrender to the demands of a fascist Trump regime in order to keep the money flowing. Within this logic of surrender and complicity, the classroom is purged of its critical possibilities, treating discomfort as a failure rather than as a condition of thinking. Yet this misguided emphasis on comfort is not accidental; it is the pedagogical expression of an instrumentalized university that values bureaucratic efficiency and a sanitized curriculum over critical inquiry, compliance over consciousness, and affective management over intellectual risk. What emerges is a depoliticized pedagogy that mistakes ease for care and safety for education. It is also a pedagogical approach increasingly used by the Trump administration to weaponize education in the service of conformity and indoctrination. In this register, comfort means feeling good precisely because one can escape the hard work of critical inquiry and learning.

Pedagogy that matters is not about reassurance, spiritless teaching, and the comforting glow of never being challenged. It is about illumination. Critical pedagogy is critical precisely because it produces ruptures, unsettles common sense, challenges received truths, and pushes students beyond the boundaries of the familiar. It should teach students to think historically, ethically, and critically, rather than to consume ideas that leave the world and themselves unchallenged. Anything less is pedagogy as sedation.

If students experience discomfort in this process, it may signal that learning has begun, that they are developing a sense of informed agency, voice, and the willingness to think outside the box. To pathologize discomfort is to drain education of its democratic promise and replace intellectual struggle with appeasement, it revives the dead zone of the imagination, wrapped in feel good sensibilities.

This visionless pedagogy of comfort and instrumentalism mistakes comfort for learning and reassurance for responsibility. It soothes rather than unsettles, affirms rather than interrogates, and in doing so becomes a pedagogy of surrender. Such a pedagogy cannot name injustice, let alone resist it. Against it stands a pedagogy that unsettles, talks back, and is grounded in critical reason, one that refuses accommodation and preserves its emancipatory promise by turning critique against the very social structures that disfigure it. Critical pedagogy is not about making students feel good; it is about making injustice visible and power accountable. It seeks to cultivate forms of agency, identity, and judgment through which students can recognize how knowledge and power are entangled in the service of domination, and how reason itself must be measured not by technical success or managerial efficiency, but by its capacity to challenge oppressive arrangements and expand the horizons of freedom, social justice, solidarity, and democracy itself.

Auniversity that confuses comfort with care, risks becoming an institution of managed ignorance or a laboratory for indoctrination—both now institutionalized in states such as Florida and Texas—rather than a space of critical inquiry. At stake is not simply the emancipatory possibility of a pedagogy that empowers and informs, but the future of higher education as a democratic and emancipatory project. Without such a pedagogy, higher education becomes not a bulwark against authoritarianism, but one of its quiet enablers

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Henry A. Giroux

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.