‘You Dirty Orange Maniac!’: The President of Ultimate Destruction

Sadly, as crazed as Donald Trump may be — and he clearly is a deeply disturbed (and, of course, disturbing) human being — when it comes to war and the burning of fossil fuels, he’s been anything but alone as president of the United States.


Orange blow-up garbagemen Donald Trump speaks at Green Bay airport
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Tom Engelhardt
Apr 21, 2026

TomDispatch


When he’s on full blast, Donald Trump (not so long ago the “drill, baby, drill” candidate for president) is distinctly a furnace. And he seems intent on turning this planet, our only world, into a version of the same. But here’s the strange thing, when it comes to almost anything — from Iran to suddenly firing two key women, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, in his government (but certainly not the no-less-chaotic men) — there’s no minute, it seems, when he’s not flipping himself on his head and then spinning or stumbling or catapulting off in a new direction. There’s only one exception I’ve noticed and, all too sadly, that’s climate change, where everything he does — every single thing — is guaranteed to be a disaster for our children and grandchildren.

Recently, of course, he’s launched a nightmarish war, by definition a gigantic producer of greenhouse gases, that’s literally been all about oil and natural gas, thanks in part to the now chaotic, largely blocked Strait of Hormuz through which a quarter of humanity’s sea-borne oil and a fifth of its natural gas used to pass. And if you don’t believe me about it being a nightmare, just check out the most recent prices at your neighborhood gas station. Consider it an irony, then, that his disastrous Iranian war will undoubtedly lead in a direction — to the use of more green energy globally — that, if he ever thought about it, he would hate more than just about anything else. He has, of course, referred to environmentalists as “terrorists.” (“They are terrorists. I call them environmental terrorists.”) And in this country, over his two presidencies, he’s done his damnedest to attack and try to block wind and solar power projects in every imaginable way, even though, globally, green power is growing fast and getting ever cheaper.

And here’s the reality of our moment for which we do need to give Donald Trump credit: once upon a time, you couldn’t have made any of this up — or, of course, have made up Donald Trump as president of the United States (twice!). If you had, it would have seemed like the least believable science fiction novel ever written. Not that I drive a car in New York City (the subway and buses work fine for me), but as I was writing this piece, of course, the price of gas had also edged up in my city to almost four dollars a gallon and a (possibly global) recession is on the horizon. (Thank you, Donald Trump!)

Of course, in launching his recent war against Iran, however incoherently, “the PEACE PRESIDENT” (and yes, he’s into CAPS when it comes to himself) was, all too sadly, in good company, historically speaking. Since victory in World War II, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now to Iran (to mention only the big conflicts of that all-American era), our presidents have had quite a knack (if such a word can even be used) for starting wars, none (not a one!) of which has ended in anything faintly like victory. And it’s already obvious — you don’t need to have the slightest knack for seeing into the future to know this — that Donald Trump’s version of the same in Iran will prove to be a global disaster, made worse by the fact that, in the process, whether he faintly grasps it or not, he’s also launched another brutally losing war against Planet Earth.

And the worst thing is that I feel I’ve written all of this before. And before Trump — well, “leaves” is far too mild a word for it — abandons (??) the presidency, I could end up writing it again and again, and we would still be in the world — all too literally his world — from hell. Of course, for all we know, Donald J. Trump could decide to crown himself president and try to launch a third term in office that would, if successful, turn the constitution into an historical relic.

“The Only Orange Monarch I Want Is a Butterfly.”

The other week, feeling as I do about “our” president, I went to New York City’s “No Kings” rally. It was gigantic (though you wouldn’t have known that, had you read my hometown paper, the New York Times, in the days that followed). It started on 59th Street where Central Park ends, with masses of marchers on both Seventh and Eighth Avenue, heading for 34th Street. By getting there early, I made it to the front of the crowd on Seventh Avenue at the head of that vast mass of protesting humanity and, once it started, I wove my way in and out of the crowd, back and forth, downtown and uptown again, jotting in a little notebook some of the thousands of homemade signs people were carrying.

When I finally reached Broadway and 42nd Street, I stepped up on the sidewalk and looked back. To my amazement, I could see all the way to 57th Street where we had begun, and that significant-sized avenue was still totally — and I mean totally — packed right back to Central Park. And mind you, this old man was just one of an estimated more than eight million Americans who turned out at more than 3,000 rallies across the United States that day, in communities huge and microscopic, to protest the world Donald Trump has dumped on, spilled all over, and is continuing to roil and broil.

And, yes, it did seem like every third person (even the two demonstrators dressed as plastic tigers) was carrying a homemade sign. I doubt I had ever seen so many of them at any past demonstration. I was scrawling a number of them down in a little notebook, and they ranged from “Fight Truth Decay” and “Grandma says, ICE is not nice!” to “It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this” and “The only orange Monarch I want is a butterfly.”

And then there was the one carried by a bearded man that caught my attention: “You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!” And I thought to myself, boy, is that painfully accurate. In his own fashion, among all the things he hasn’t succeeded in accomplishing, he has indeed been blowing it all up in a striking fashion and, unfortunately, potentially damning my children and grandchildren (and yours) to a literal planet from hell.

And sadly, as crazed as Donald Trump may be — and he clearly is a deeply disturbed (and, of course, disturbing) human being — when it comes to war and the burning of fossil fuels, he’s been anything but alone as president of the United States. After all, in these decades, war has been this country’s middle name and we’ve been burning fossil fuels to fight them as if… well, as if there would indeed be no tomorrow(s). And in his two terms in office, Trump and crew have gone with a passion after any form of clean, renewable energy that wouldn’t blister us all. Only recently, for instance, the Guardian (which is superb when it comes to climate-change coverage) was the only publication I saw that reported on new research in Nature magazine showing that this country has caused “an eye-watering $10tn [yes, that’s trillion!] in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself.”

Consider it something of an unintended irony, then, that the crew President Trump and his administration have put so much of themselves into goes by the acronym ICE. In fact, wouldn’t you have thought that “ICE” would be a curse word for President Trump and that, when it comes to creating an immigration hell on earth, his crew of manic enforcers would have been known as “HEAT”? Which reminds me that, at the No Kings rally, I noted an older woman carrying a homemade sign all too appropriately saying: “Deport Trump! Make ICE useful.”

And thanks to his brutal assault on Iran, this planet is only going to get hotter yet, as war releases staggering amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere! Honestly, back in 2016, even if you had let your mind run in wild and unbelievably crazy directions, you simply couldn’t have made up Donald Trump’s planet as it is now, could you? Who could have imagined that the president of the United States, after launching a war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, would attack European countries for not joining him, saying, “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”

And remind me, who has Donald Trump been there for, other than the major fossil fuel companies that backed him so radiantly in the 2024 election and are now getting a remarkable return on their investment?

Giving Decline New Meaning

Of course, to put all of this in some kind of perspective, sooner or later great imperial powers do go down and the United States has been the number one imperial power on this planet since the end of World War II, with its only true competitor (until China rose well into this century), the Soviet Union, which collapsed in a heap in 1991. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that this country, which, singularly in human history, once reigned more or less supreme on Planet Earth, should finally have begun its own decline, while turning over investment in present and future green energy to China.

But of course, there’s decline and then, in ICE terms, there’s DECLINE!!! And Donald Trump is threatening to turn imperial decline, something known throughout history, into a distinctly new phenomenon. Even declining imperial powers haven’t usually had such a mad ruler or leader. And he does seem remarkably intent, in his own increasingly confused way, on taking this country down with him. The difference, historically, is that until now no imperial ruler had the chance to take down not just his (almost never her) country, but (after a fashion) our planet (at least as a livable place for us), too. And he does seem remarkably intent on continuing to fossil-fuelize our world in a disastrous fashion.

Of course, at this very moment, we’re all watching his approval ratings generally (and particularly on the economy) begin to tank. (Oh wait, my mistake! A tank is a war vehicle, and right now that reference only applies to Israel, which recently lost a remarkable number of tanks in southern Lebanon.) But “our” president has also focused a significant part of his administration on ending anything that could benefit the climate, while burning fossil fuels in a fashion that should be considered beyond incendiary. That includes recently agreeing to offer almost a billion dollars to a French energy company to abandon a project to construct wind farms off the East Coast of this country (as long as it was willing to reinvest that sum in future oil and gas projects here instead).

Yes, someday he could well be seen not just as the president of decline but potentially of ultimate devastation and that flaming red tie of his could end up having a symbolic significance that, once upon a time, no one might have imagined. No wonder that sign I saw on the No King’s Day march — and let me repeat it here one more time: “You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!” — sticks in my mind. It predicts the very future that, unbelievably enough, 49.8% of American voters tried to usher in again in 2024.

Once upon a time, who could ever have imagined either Donald Trump as president of these (increasingly dis-)United States or such a possible fate?


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).
Full Bio >

This Is a Fight for Humanity’: Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize

“The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress,” one foundation leader said.


2026 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Alannah Acaq Hurley poses for a photo.
(Photo by Goldman Environmental Prize)

‘
Olivia Rosane
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced the six winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the climate crisis.

The announcement comes as world leaders have failed to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President Donald Trump, leader of the world’s largest historical climate polluter, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, rolled back climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to supercharge the extraction and use of fossil fuels.

“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies—in the US and globally—it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress.”

The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners—Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria, Borim Kim of South Korea, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia—are women.

‘There’s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.“

“I am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,” Goldman said.

The winners also exemplify the prize’s 2026 theme “Change Starts Where You Stand,” as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate, biodiversity, and environmental justice.

As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, “At the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet.”

Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.

Iroro Tanshi

Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from wildfires.

Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria’s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.

Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.

“The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but climate change has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely,” she explained in a video.

Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of “forest guardians” to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.

“My hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like,” she said. “Let’s stay nimble. Let’s try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground.”

Borim Kim

Borim Kim helped win Asia’s first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.

Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother’s age, who died in her home.

“I realized that even home wasn’t safe from the climate crisis,” she said in a video. “I started looking for what I could do.”

Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her activism led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to sue the South Korean government for violating the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.

In August 2024, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.

“Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state’s duty to protect us,” Kim said.

Sara Finch

On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.

Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts oil and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the fracking boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.

In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council’s environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas’ contribution to the climate emergency.

“It became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill,” Finch said in a video.

She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally securing a groundbreaking victory from the UK Supreme Court in 2024, which has come to be known as “the Finch ruling.”

The UK government cited the “Finch ruling” when it revoked its backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions that year.

“It wasn’t just a win on Horse Hill,” Finch said. “It wasn’t even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there’s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.”

Theonila Roka Matbob

Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto’s Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.

“Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people,” Roka Matbob said in a video.

Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.

This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine’s impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment’s findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.

“It doesn’t mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought,” she said.

Alannah Acaq Hurley

As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.

Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup’ik Indigenous group in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.

“The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon,” Hurley said in a video. “It didn’t take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed—acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when.”

Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US Environmental Protection Agency and push back against the company’s multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold mining project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA canceled the project via its rarely used veto power.

“It’s just really a testament to the power of the people,” she said. “We just never stopped until we were heard.”

Yuvelis Morales Blanco

Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.

Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia’s Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.

“We had nothing but the river—she was like a mother who took care of me,” she said in a statement.

However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia’s leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.

“Man, I’m like, ‘They’re going to do that in Wilches?’ No sir!’” she recalled in a video.

Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign’s momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in France in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.

She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches’ right to free, prior, and informed consent.

Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders—over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness has a full tally. Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.

“I am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we’re going to win,” she said.

The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube here.

Why a Feminist and Just Energy Transition Is the Only Way Out of the Climate Crisis

As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it.


Thousands of people take part in the so-called “Great People’s March” in the sidelines of the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference in Belem, Para State, Brazil on November 15, 2025.
(Photo by Pablo Porciuncula/ AFP via Getty Images)

Theiva Lingam
Apr 21, 2026

Common Dreams


Wars, invasions, blockades, and genocide from Venezuela and Iran to Palestine have ripped the curtain off the inherent volatility and violence of the fossil energy system. We need a rapid and just scale-up of socially controlled renewables to end the era of fossil fuels. But ensuring a just transition requires deeper conversation. Who benefits from the energy transition? Who bears the cost? Who gets a say in how energy is produced? These are also feminist questions about power, labor, care, and whose lives are valued.

To answer them, grassroots leaders, Indigenous communities, trade unions, and environmental justice activists will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia for the Peoples’ Summit and First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this week. For many of us in environmental and social justice movements, this gathering represents both urgency and possibility. This will be a critical space because, without justice, the energy transition will reproduce the same systems of extraction, control, and violence.

So We Must Ask: an Energy Transition for Whom?

The transition narrative sold by corporations and rich countries today tells us we can scale up corporate, market-led renewable energy technologies without questioning who controls them, who benefits, and who bears the cost. This risks the transition becoming nothing more than the old model in greener packaging. In Malaysia, for example, the energy transition policy largely rebrands the old growth-and-extraction model. It uses green rhetoric, prioritizing corporate-led false solutions like carbon capture and storage and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Copying Western-style developments through corporate-driven trade and investment patterns sustains fossil fuel dependence and continues to entrench structural inequalities both nationally and internationally. Without systemic change, the transition becomes another chapter in a long history of resource plunder, particularly in the Global South.

Consider the surge in demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential components of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Governments and corporations in the Global North are racing to secure these materials, often greenwashing extraction as necessary for climate action, while diverting these minerals into military, aerospace, AI, and data centers. For communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this rush is already translating into land grabs, water depletion, labor exploitation, and violence. Lithium extraction threatens fragile ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods; cobalt mining has been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. As with oil before them, critical minerals are becoming objects of geopolitical competition—backed by military power and strategic control.

If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.

The military is among the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels, yet its emissions are routinely excluded from national reporting. At the same time, states and corporations work together to secure control over oil, gas, and critical minerals—profiting from war and devastation from Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba.

These are the very predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over energy as a right for people. A just transition must go far beyond emissions reductions. It must actively confront inequality, redistribute power, and wealth, and repair historical and ongoing harms. It must center those who have been marginalized and exploited—not as victims but as leaders.

A Just Transition Must Be Based on Peoples’ Sovereignty and Energy Sovereignty

At the heart of this vision are peoples’ sovereignty and energy sovereignty: the right of communities to control their lands, resources, and energy systems, and to shape the decisions that affect their lives. This means treating energy as a common good that is managed for collective well-being rather than private profit, while building energy democracy, where communities have real decision-making power over how energy is produced and used. It also requires energy sufficiency, prioritizing meeting people’s needs over excessive and wasteful energy use. Together, these principles challenge the concentration of power in corporations and wealthy countries, and point toward energy systems that are locally rooted, democratic, and aligned with social and ecological needs.

Achieving this also requires that we confront imperialism. The current global order allows wealthy countries to externalize the social and environmental costs of their consumption to the Global South, while maintaining control over finance, technology, and trade. This imbalance shapes the terms of the energy transition, devastating communities and often locking countries in the Global South into roles as raw material suppliers rather than equal partners.

Policies that ignore power dynamics may deliver short-term emissions reductions, but they will ultimately fail as communities resist exploitation and inequity deepens. A transition rooted in justice, however, can build the broad-based support needed for transformative change.

Around the world, communities are already practicing energy sovereignty, from managing decentralized renewable systems in Palestine to asserting their rights against extractive projects in Mozambique. Alternatives are not only possible, but underway.

A feminist and just energy transition must challenge the structures that perpetuate dependency and inequality, including unfair trade agreements, debt regimes, and corporate impunity. It must also recognize and address the intersecting forms of oppression based on gender, race, class, and colonial history that shape how the climate crisis is experienced and resisted.

As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it. If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.

The path forward will require confronting entrenched interests and reimagining our economies and societies. From Santa Marta and beyond, communities are showing us the way. The task now is to listen, to act, and to ensure that the transition ahead is truly just—for people, for the planet, and for future generations.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Theiva Lingam is chair of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental federation. She is also a public interest lawyer, environmental activist, and legal adviser to Sahabat Alam Malaysia-Friends of the Earth Malaysia, as well as a legal consultant at Third World Network.
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NIXON'S ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

Mike Johnson to Unleash ‘Catastrophic’ Attack on Endangered Species Act

“When wildlife is already under immense pressure from habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and industrial development, Congress should be strengthening the Endangered Species Act,” said one advocate.


A female northern spotted owl catches a mouse on a stick held by Mark Higley, wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, on the Hoopa Valley Reservation on August 28, 2024.
(Photo by The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Conservationists warned Monday that “Earth Day could become Extinction Day” if Republican leaders in the US House of Representatives get their way.

Elected Republicans have long set their sights on the historic Endangered Species Act of 1973—and wildfire defenders sounded the alarm in December, when the Republican-led House Natural Resources Committee advanced Chair Bruce Westerman’s (R-Ark.) ESA Amendments Act.



“If this bill passes, protections for species like the Florida manatee, monarch butterfly, and California spotted owl would immediately decrease,” Earthjustice legislative director for lands, wildlife, and oceans Addie Haughey warned at the time.

Since then, President Donald Trump has continued his war on endangered species with his budget request for the 2027 fiscal year, and his administration’s so-called “God Squad” unanimously approved an “unprecedented” exemption allowing fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico to ignore ESA protections.

Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plans to take up Westerman’s bill this week—potentially on Wednesday, Earth Day.

“At a time when wildlife is already under immense pressure from habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and industrial development, Congress should be strengthening the Endangered Species Act, not tearing it apart,” said Jewel Tomasula, policy director of the Endangered Species Coalition, which has hundreds of member organizations.

“If Rep. Bruce Westerman and Speaker Johnson have their way, Earth Day will become Extinction Day,” Tomasula warned. “The urgency is real. This bill is catastrophic for threatened and endangered species.”

Susan Holmes, the coalition’s executive director, emphasized that “the Endangered Species Act works because it is rooted in science and because it recognizes a simple truth: Once a species is gone, it is gone forever.”

“We should not allow politicians to dismantle protections that have saved bald eagles, gray whales, peregrine falcons, and so many other species from disappearing forever,” she declared.

Holmes also noted that “the American people overwhelmingly support the Endangered Species Act” and “understand that protecting wildlife is not a partisan issue. It is about responsibility, stewardship, and ensuring that future generations inherit a world still rich with wild species and wild places.”

Polling commissioned by IFAW and conducted online last year by Beekeeper Group found that over three-quarters of Americans say they are concerned about the environment, the welfare of animals, and conserving nature, and specifically support the goals of the ESA. That aligns with figures from surveys conducted over the past three decades, according to a 2025 analysis.

“Protecting the nation’s wildlife and habitats has never been an issue of right or left—it is a shared value and a commitment to future generations,” said Cassie Ferri, legislative analyst at Defenders of Wildlife, in a Monday statement. “Instead of honoring Earth Day, Congress is turning it into ‘Destroy Earth Day’ by attempting to dismantle one of our nation’s most foundational conservation laws. We all depend on healthy ecosystems to thrive, and the vast majority of Americans want to preserve wildlife through a strong Endangered Species Act—yet time and again Congress blatantly disregards their voices.”

The advocacy group director of legislative affairs, Mary Beth Beetham, said that “shameless attempts by some members of Congress to dismantle the Endangered Species Act demonstrate a profound disregard for how valuable this law is to wildlife conservation.”

“The Endangered Species Act isn’t just rhetoric—it’s proven effective and has safeguarded imperiled species for more than 50 years,” Beetham stressed. “This bill could be the driving force behind future extinctions and would set a dangerous precedent for wildlife legislation moving forward.”

Defenders of Wildlife is among nearly 300 groups that have signed on to a Monday letter—shared with Common Dreams by another signatory, Humane World for Animals—urging US House members to “vote NO on HR 1897, which is a damaging bill that would dramatically weaken the ESA and make it harder, if not impossible, to achieve the progress we must make to address the alarming rate of extinction our planet now faces.”

Westerman’s bill, the letter says, “would significantly rewrite key portions of the ESA to prioritize politics over science and inappropriately shift responsibility for key implementation decisions from the federal government to the states, many of which do not have sufficient resources or legal mechanisms in place to take the lead in conserving listed species.”

“It would place significant new administrative burdens on already overburdened agencies,” the letter continues. “It would turn the current process for listing and recovering threatened and endangered species into a far lengthier process that precludes judicial review of key decisions.”

While Republicans can pass legislation along party lines in the House, they usually need at least some Democratic support in the Senate—due to chamber rules, which can be changed—to send a bill to Trump’s desk.

 

Ocean eddies are amplifying climate extremes in coastal seas, study finds

New research reveals a powerful yet overlooked driver of climate change: Intensifying ocean eddies.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science

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image: 

Ocean currents on Feb 11, 2018 from OSCAR v2.0, distributed by NASA JPL, generated by Earth and Space Research, and visualized by earth.nullschool.net.

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Credit: generated by Earth and Space Research, and visualized by earth.nullschool.net.

New research reveals a powerful yet overlooked driver of climate change: Intensifying ocean eddies. These swirling currents—that break off from major currents—are redistributing heat and nutrients in the ocean and amplifying climate extremes in key coastal ecosystems.

MIAMI-- Lisa Beal, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, collaborated with South African researchers to study the Agulhas Current, a fast and narrow western boundary current flowing poleward along the southeast coast of Africa. Over a two-year period, they gathered high-resolution mooring data, recording hourly measurements of velocity, temperature, and salinity throughout the entire depth and width of the current.

The dataset launched more than a decade of research, with foundational work led at the Rosenstiel School and now advanced through sustained collaboration with Kathryn Gunn at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Gunn and Beal use this dataset to show that increasing eddy activity is reshaping the Agulhas Current and intensifying adjacent coastal temperature extremes. Their findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change, identify small frontal instabilities, about 10 kilometers across, along with larger, iconic meanders of the current, that transfer heat, salt, and nutrients between the open ocean and coastal environments.

“More eddy activity is accelerating surface warming in the Agulhas, while simultaneously enhancing hidden upwelling that cools deeper waters,” said Beal, the study’s senior author. “This combination—along with the onshore encroachment also driven by eddies—will create more extreme conditions in shelf seas in the future, potentially placing significant strain on coastal ecosystems.”

Both frontal eddies and meanders pump deep, cold, nutrient-rich water up onto the shelf, potentially enhancing productivity there, while farther offshore meanders trap heat and salt closer to the surface. The result is rapidly warming surface waters above cooler waters at depth.

Decades of satellite data have shown that surface waters in the Agulhas Current are warming at three or four times the global ocean average. At the same time, this new study shows that eddies have kept deeper waters comparatively cool. This layered structure helps explain how rapid surface warming—leading to increased rainfall in South Africa—has occurred alongside a reported decline in the current’s total heat transfer to higher latitudes.

These major changes are happening even as the overall strength (volume transport) of the Agulhas Current remains stable.

The implications extend far beyond southern Africa. The researchers suggest that intensifying eddies may provide a unifying explanation for observed changes in major ocean currents worldwide, including the Gulf Stream along the U.S. East Coast.

“Our findings suggest that eddies are fundamental in shaping how the ocean responds to climate change,” said Beal.

The study, titled “More eddying of subtropical western boundary currents boosts stratification and cools shelf seas,” was published April 15, 2026, in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #’s 1459543 and 2148676). 

The authors are Kathryn L. Gunn of the School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, UK; and Lisa M. Beal of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, Miami, Florida USA.

Lisa Beal, (left) and collegues, records instrument information.

Mooring buoy is hooked along the starboard side of the research vessel as it's prepared for retrieval from sea.

Credit

Lisa BEal, Ph.D.

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Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02599-9 

Method of Research

Observational study

Article Title

More eddying of subtropical western boundary currents boosts stratification and cools shelf seas

Article Publication Date

15-Apr-2026

 

‘Safe’ fertilizer linked to extreme water quality loss in Canadian Prairies

University of Regina

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Research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Water found that widespread application of the common farm fertilizer, urea, severely degrades water quality in the Canadian Prairies.  

Researchers at the University of Manitoba and the University of Regina added urea to farm ponds to simulate the effects of agricultural fertilization in the southern Prairies. Urea increased growth of microscopic plants (algae) to levels 10 times higher than seen in other damaged ecosystems, such as Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. The researchers found that the excess algae also drained essential oxygen out of the ponds.   

When compared with hundreds of similar water bodies across southern Saskatchewan, the study showed that nearly half of all Prairie lakes, wetlands, and reservoirs may be degraded by decades of urea use.  

Dr. Cale Gushulak, lead author of the research paper and an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba says that the team’s findings also revealed that agricultural regions in China and the United States are equally vulnerable to damage by urea use. “Our findings help explain why surface waters around the world are experiencing rapid oxygen loss that kills fish, increases toxin exposure, and intensifies harmful algal blooms, pushing freshwaters to an ecological tipping point,” says Gushulak.   

Dr. Peter Leavitt, limnologist and founding director of the Institute for Change and Society at the University of Regina, co-authored the report and says that urea accounts for over half of global fertilizer use and is considered safe because it’s non-toxic at concentrations ten times higher than those used in the research team’s experiment. “Rather, the damaging effects of fertilizers are being increased by draining natural wetlands that are important biological filters, capturing runoff from farms before it enters rivers and lakes.” 

The study shows that use of urea by farmers is not the problem. 

“Rather, it’s wetlands mismanagement that excessively drains farmland and increases fertilizer export to freshwaters,” says Leavitt. “And Saskatchewan is one of only regions in the world to actively promote wetlands drainage.”  

The researchers say this is a global problem 

“Two-thirds of the world’s population is supported by urea and other nitrogen fertilizers—so we cannot, and should not, stop its use,” says Gushulak. “However, if the fertilizer is lost from the soils, and ends up degrading surface water, then everyone loses”  

Gushulak says that Manitoba also heavily fertilizes with urea and lakes and wetlands in the province have also likely been impacted by this practice.  

The Prairie Provinces are known for their high agricultural productivity due to fertile soils and short but intense growing seasons. Sustainable healthy sources of water are needed for all agriculture, but these resources are threatened across the Prairies due to ongoing agricultural impacts, drainage of wetlands, and climate change. 

Read the full study at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-026-00636-7 

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About the University of Regina 

At the University of Regina, we believe the best way to learn is through access to world-class professors, research, and experiential learning. We are committed to the health and well-being of our more than 16,600 students and support a dynamic research community focused on evidence-based solutions to today’s most pressing challenges. Located on Treaties 4 and 6—the territories of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, and the homeland of the Michif/Métis nation —we honour our ongoing relationships with Indigenous communities and remain committed to the path of reconciliation. Our vibrant alumni community is more than 95,000 strong and enriching communities in Saskatchewan and around the globe.  

Let’s go far, together.  

 
About University of Manitoba 

The University of Manitoba (UM) is recognized as Western Canada's first university. It is part of the U15, ranking among Canada’s top research-intensive universities and provides exceptional undergraduate and graduate liberal arts, science and professional programs of study. UM campuses and research spaces are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anisininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Dene and Inuit, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. Our collaboration with Indigenous communities is grounded in respect and reciprocity and this guides how we move forward as an institution. For more information, please visit umanitoba.ca. 

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Journal

Nature Water

DOI

10.1038/s44221-026-00636-7 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

World's predominant nitrogen fertilizer induces extreme eutrophication of surface waters in central North America

Article Publication Date

15-Apr-2026