It’s Finally Happening!

Robert Hunziker

 May 8, 2026

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Image courtesy of the Fossil Fuel Treaty.

The Santa Marta Conference – Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels – An energetic multi-nation well-organized effort to get off fossil fuels with the underlying motto: “Make Science Great Again”

This article discusses this exciting new approach to hopefully mitigate climate change as well a discussion of the steep difficulty of overcoming the “monumental challenge” already extant.

For example, it’s ironic that a major campaign to hopefully fix climate change (it’s finally happening #1) is initiated at the same moment as carbon sinks worldwide are breaking down (it’s finally happening #2), more on this frightening scenario to follow.

“The first conference on ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, from 24-29 April saw 57 countries – representing one-third of the world’s economy – debate practical ways to move away from coal, oil and gas.” (Santa Marta: Key Outcomes from First Summit on ‘Transitioning Away’ From Fossil Fuels, Carbon Brief, April 30, 2026).

As it happens, the bloated planet can finally exhale after decades of stress and consternation and handwringing over its future following repeated failures of thirty (30) COP meetings (UN climate “Conference of the Parties”) to move the needle enough to effectively mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, after 30 years of 50,000 to 100,000 people assembling for two weeks every year to discuss the problems of climate change, principally the result of too much CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, CO2 emissions are at all-time atmospheric highs, blanketing solar radiation heat that would otherwise reflect to outer space. This abnormality relentlessly drives the world thermometer to new highs.

After all, the planet does not want to fall into the trap of one more extinction event like the horrific Permian-Triassic known as “the Great Dying” 252 million years ago when approximately 90% of all species were eliminated. It took millions of years to recover, merging into the rambunctious Jurassic Period, part of the Mesozoic Era aka: Age of Reptiles, from 252 to 66 million years but abruptly disrupted and destroyed by a 12-mile-wide asteroid that hit ground in modern-day Mexico, wiping out approximately 80% of all species, followed by the Cenozoic Era or Age of Mammals with humans emerging out of caves, eyes blinking in bright sunlight, discovering the detritus of millennia in the form of black gold, liquid and easy to light on fire, haunting humanity to this day as Jurassic vomit.

Still, the planet remains very much on edge, in fact, hesitant. The Santa Marta process is young, untested, only a vision on paper, but it holds great promise. At the opening meetings, serious discussions lifted expectations, to wit: “Ministers and envoys from across the world sat side-by-side in small meeting rooms to have open and frank conversations about the barriers they face in transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy. This new format – devised by co-hosts Colombia and the Netherlands – was described as ‘refreshing’, ‘highly successful’ and ‘groundbreaking’ by countries attending the talks.” Ibid.

Direct Action Advocated

“The event also featured a “science pre-conference” attended by 400 global academics, which included the launch of a new science panel that will aim to provide agile and bespoke analysis to nations wanting to accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels,” Ibid.

In a departure from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, the preliminary Santa Marta synthesis report offers “very direct guidance to action.” The report lists “12 action insights”, each with “three action recommendations”. The list was cut down from a shortlist of about 40-50 insights.

According to a preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief: The countries attending the fossil-fuel summit have been asked to consider “action recommendations” such as “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “rejecting gas as a bridging fuel.”

The genesis for Santa Marta originated at the UN climate conference COP30 in Belém, Brazil, several months ago, when a group of 80 nations pushed for a “roadmap away from fossil fuels” for inclusion in the final text. When this failed, Colombia and the Netherlands jointly announced a summit to be held in April in Santa Marta.

For the first time in 30 years, a renegade group of countries has been able to break loose from the clutches of a well-organized, procedurally rigged COP conference designed for the benefit of minority interests, i.e., fossil fuel promoters, that have effectively minimized efforts to reduce CO2 emissions for three decades running; still at record high levels after 30 years of hollow jabbering to reduce. This breakaway by the disenchanted is significant.

Renaissance of Science

Moreover, with a sharp slap to the face of orangish American Trumpers, science is once again taking center stage. The Trump administration has pinpointed science as a victim of one of the biggest hatchet jobs to ever visit Washington, D.C.

Whereas the Santa Marta coalition is building a pedestal reaching to the sky towards a sparkling star named: Science. “Colombian environment minister Irene Vélez Torres – herself a former academic – was particularly keen to emphasize the importance of science to the conference, telling journalists: ‘We need to go back to science and base our decisions on science,” Ibid.

A total of 57 countries participated in the conference. It’s an impressive list: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, the EU, the Federated States of Micronesia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malawi, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, México, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Nepal, Nigeria, Norway, New Zealand, Palau, Panama, Philippines, Portugal, Saint Lucia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovenia, the Solomon Islands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, Tuvalu, Uganda, the UK, Uruguay, Vanuatu, the Vatican and Vietnam.

On the first day, Colombian President Gustavo Petro gave a speech at the summit, telling countries: “What I see is resistance and inertia within the power structures and the economy of this archaic energy system. Today, fossil fuels bring death; undoubtedly, that form of capital could commit suicide, taking humanity and life itself. Humanity cannot allow that,” Ibid.

The Monumental Challenge – Carbon Sinks Breaking Down

Based upon numerous studies of the current rate of climate change, Santa Marta needs to hurry and execute, like yesterday. One example of many: According to a recent YaleEnvironment360 article d/d March 9, 2026: “The Earth is warming at the fastest rate on record as emissions hit new highs and critical carbon sinks break down.”

In fact, “carbon dioxide levels are at the highest point in at least 2 million years. While humans continue to pump ever greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the ability of the planet to soak up our emissions is weakening. Degraded by fire and drought, forests that were once carbon sinks are now becoming sources of emissions,” Ibid.

Carbon sinks “breaking down” is an alarmingly dangerous development, turning carbon sinks into carbon sources in concert with cars, planes, trains, and industry. e.g. “African Forests Have Become a Source of Carbon Emissions,” YaleEnvironment360 d/d December 1, 2025.

But it’s even worse than that: “The alarming shift, which has happened since 2010, means all of the planet’s three main rainforest regions — the South American Amazon, Southeast Asia, and Africa — have gone from being allies in the fight against climate breakdown to being part of the problem,” Ibid.

This loss of some of the world’s biggest carbon sinks is comparable in scale to a worldwide economic disaster such as the Great Depression, but it’s even worse. And it’s insane. While economic depressions eventually run their course, is it even possible to turn back time to reverse forests back to carbon sinks, once again?

The greatest risk to the world because of this nascent breakdown of nature’s carbon sinks is a surprising takeoff of acceleration of global warming, fast and faster, feeding on itself, blindsiding society in the context of collapsing life supporting ecosystems, e.g., by the end of 2025, approximately 30% of global land was already affected by drought, nearly tripling from the 1990s and drought severity has increased by 40% (Nature, June 2025), or the domino effect triggering tipping points. The house of cards collapses.

Stating the obvious, so bloody obvious that it’s impossible to miss what’s at stake. Santa Marta needs to hurry up and turbo-charge its policy prescriptions, and then, keeping fingers crossed, pray.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Picnic on a Receding Glacier

Peter Bach

 May 8, 2026

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Eliot Glacier in retreat, from Cooper’s Spur on the eastern flank of Mt. Hood. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Instrument records and long-term observations show that Alpine glaciers have been retreating and thinning significantly since the end of the Little Ice Age from approximately 1300 to 1850.

Hold that thought.

Now imagine someone bringing sandwiches.

Not metaphorical ones—actual ones, wrapped in that lovely wax paper, tucked into a backpack beside crampons and thermos flasks. Someone will have packed strawberries. Someone else, a small bottle of wine for those who drink, and mountain water for those who don’t, in a bottle to be refilled again and again.

By late morning, the light will be hard and precise. The surface—what remains of it—will not be the smooth, mythic white people expect, but a kind of broken grey: meltwater channels, soot, wind-scored ridges.

It will creak sometimes, like a door remembering with nostalgia that time when it used to open.

Little will be left of many of the glaciers now, retreating not just in metres per year but in staircases. A sign will mark where one stood in 1990. Another in 1950. The past will be arranged vertically, like something you can descend through.

The picnickers—if that is the word—arrive in clusters. A family from Lyon. Students from Berlin. A couple who came here once on their honeymoon and have returned to see it again.

“Before it changes forever,” the couple might say, and then stop, as if the sentence had already expired.

They all spread blankets on rock, not ice, because the ice is no longer reliable.

A scientist is there too, measuring what she calls ablation. This is the reduction in volume of the glacial ice through melting and evaporation. She drills into it, sets a marked pole. Each week, she returns to see how much more has been revealed.

She writes the number down. She does not linger. There is a discipline to looking without talking.

If she was ever asked why she comes in person instead of relying on satellite data, she would likely gesture outwards—to the fractured expanse, the improbable blue in the deeper crevasses.

“You cannot understand scale,” she might say, “unless you stand inside it.”

A man opens the wine.

It is not permitted. It is not unusual. The cork comes free with a soft, polite sound—another small release into the thin air. Paper cups follow. Someone laughs too loudly. The sound travels.

Below them, meltwater runs in narrow, urgent streams, cutting temporary paths through the ice. By tomorrow, they will have rearranged themselves yet again. Nothing here keeps its shape for long.

Children step closer first.

They crouch where rock gives way to ice, testing it with their weight. A parent calls out—“Careful! Not too close!”—but the warning feels abstract. The glacier looks solid enough. It has always looked solid enough.

In 1850, it reached far into the valley, threatening farms and homes. People prayed for it to stop advancing.

Now they come to watch it leave.

The direction of fear has somehow been reversed. The instinct—to gather, to witness—has not.

There is a blue that appears where ice is dense enough to absorb every wavelength of light except the shortest.

Not the blue of the sky or of water. It is deeper than that. It is internal. As if the glacier were lit from within by something slow and ancient.

A student tries to photograph it and fails.

“It never looks right,” they say, scrolling through images that have flattened it into something ordinary. “It’s more…”

They don’t finish.

Nearby, someone finally unwraps the strawberries. The red is uncomplicated. Immediate. They are eaten quickly, before they warm.

This one glacier presently loses several metres of thickness each year.

This is measured. Cross-checked. Published. The numbers grow with a clarity that resists metaphor.

And still, people come. They lay out their blankets.

Not in denial of the data, but in its presence.

As if beauty—especially when it becomes precarious—requires witness.

Peter Bach lives in London.

AI Workers Against the War Machine

By Anonymous

May 7, 2026

Source: The Tribune

Gciriani, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Google’s AI workers want to cure cancer, not kill for the US and Israeli military. That’s why they are now trying to unionise for the first time ever, writes an employee at DeepMind.

Today, members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) at the London office of Google DeepMind have informed management in a letter that, having gained a significant number of union members, they now intend to seek formal union recognition.

This is the first time a major artificial intelligence (AI) lab has applied for union recognition. The CWU’s United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) branch will seek to negotiate with employers over how our work is used, as well as discussing recent military contracts that Google has signed, and assurances over automation-led redundancies.

Our situation has been brewing for some time. Much of the interest in organising came from last year, when Google ‘amended’ its AI principles document by dropping its pledge against developing AI for military or government surveillance purposes — a move that was made without any input from DeepMind’s safety and responsibility team, whose role is to guide appropriate and ethical applications of AI.

When several hundred employees signed a petition against this change, Google chose to ignore it. For many of us working in DeepMind, this lack of transparency and employee engagement was part of a much broader trend of altering and changing policy to meet commercial demands, and applying an increasingly hands-on approach from Google in doing so.

Before concerns over the AI charter, employees also showed great unease over ‘Project Nimbus’, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract the Israeli government arranged with Google. DeepMind workers suspected that AI developed by both Google and DeepMind employees was being used directly in the Gaza genocide. This was confirmed last year, when a customer support whistleblower at Google Cloud revealed that the Israeli military was using Google Gemini to analyse drone footage.

Google is the most profitable publicly traded company on earth, and these contracts are far from an economic necessity. To prove the point, the rival lab Anthropic had its products removed from the US Department of War after the lab’s CEO, Dario Amodei, refused to allow its work to be used for domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons. Amodei stated that his employees ‘would rather not work with the Pentagon than agree to uses of its tech that may undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.’ There is no reason why Google cannot extend the same assurances to us.

Our members want the ability to step away from work which violates their personal morals. Many of us at DeepMind work here because we bought into the mission to ‘build AI responsibility to benefit humanity’. Even though these military contracts make a mockery of that slogan, some work continues to happen in our offices which reflect it. Union members work on the application of AI to predict extreme weather events, for example. They also optimize energy grids and contribute to research on Alzheimer’s and cancer. Union members worked on the advances in protein sequencing which won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These are applications of cutting-edge technology that contribute to the social good.

The push to use these advanced models to murder or spy on people is a betrayal of what many of us thought we were working towards. As balloting and negotiations between the union and Google take place over the coming months, the changes won here could have implications for the direction of other AI labs as both OpenAI and Anthropic seek to scale up their London offices and impact the British tech sector as a whole.

Certainly, technological advances can compromise and complicate morals. Modern AI models can quite easily generalise beyond the context for which they were trained, so AI can be developed for war without the engineers who built it having intended any military applications. The crucial point is that this kind of protection can only be reached through political means. This is why so many of us felt compelled to act and unionise: so that we can be heard, and so that agreements can be forged which help to shape a new legal framework under British employment law.

The idea of tech workers organising may seem strange to many. After all, we are paid well, and our sector is nearly entirely non-unionised. But we are not alone; we are merely some of the first. And in our new industry, we are expressing some of the oldest principles of trade unionism: firstly, that we demand a greater say over what we spend our lives creating, and secondly, that our effort need not facilitate brutality and cruelty — it can help create a better world.

This article was originally published by The Tribune; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Google AI Workers in UK Launch Union Campaign, Demand End to Military Contracts


“This is a really important moment for workers in the tech sector,” CWU tech workers officer John Chadfield said.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar , 

Truthout

May 7, 2026

A view of the Google DeepMind offices on October 9, 2024 in London, England.Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

On Tuesday, May 5, Google AI workers in the U.K. launched a unionization bid, as part of an attempt to end the use of their technology by Israel and the U.S. military.

Workers at Google DeepMind — Google’s AI research laboratory, based in London — sent a letter to management Tuesday requesting recognition of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite the Union as official representatives of their staff.

The decision to unionize followed a deal between Google and the Pentagon that sparked internal backlash. Last week, Google agreed to let the U.S. Department of Defense use its AI models in classified military networks for “any lawful government purpose.”

This comes as the U.S. government continues to work to secure contracts with major AI firms for use by the U.S. military, with controversies erupting over how the technologies will be used. In late February, the Trump administration ordered all government agencies to cease using Anthropic, an AI firm that focuses on AI safety, after the company refused to lift safety restrictions on the military’s use of its AI. The Pentagon had said that it would use Anthropic’s technology for “any lawful purpose,” and the company expressed concerns that its AI would be used for unmanned weapons or mass surveillance. Anthropic raised these concerns after the U.S. military used its technology in its raid in Venezuela to capture former President Nicolás Maduro. However, the company has since then met with the White House, aiming for a compromise to continue to work with the government, particularly with its new intelligence model, Mythos.

It is unclear if Google’s latest agreement with the Pentagon includes any restrictions on its use by the military.

In 2018, Google signed a similar contract to help the Pentagon use AI to analyze drone surveillance, which led to hundreds of employees signing an open letter in protest of the deal, and employee resignations that pushed Google not to renew the contract. This collective action deterred Google from making other deals with the Pentagon — until now.

This year, a similar petition with 600 employee signatures opposing the contract and expressing concerns on how the military would use the AI did not lead to its reversal. Instead, Google doubled down, declaring that it is “proud” to be “providing AI services and infrastructure in support of national security.” Workers found that the leverage that worked in 2018 no longer had the same effect, requiring a new level of organizing: unionizing.

The vote to unionize at Google DeepMind marks the first time employees at a major AI research lab have collectively organized in opposition to a military contract, suggesting a growing possibility of organized pushback against military use of AI.

“This is a really important moment for workers in the tech sector,” CWU national tech workers officer John Chadfield told Truthout.

“For the first time, employees at Google’s frontier AI lab are connecting with some of the most oppressed people across the world in a meaningful way, and based on the values of solidarity,” he went on, referring to workers who had called for an end to Israel’s use of the company’s technology in its genocide in Gaza. “By exercising their rights to collectivise, they are in a strong position to demand that their employer stops circling the ethical drain of military-industrial contracts.”

DeepMind staff globally are considering other tactics, like protests and “research strikes” — refusing to work on certain projects — to achieve their demand against making military contracts.

“The decision of Google DeepMind workers to seek union recognition is an historic one,” CWU’s general secretary, Dave Ward, told Truthout. “When artificial intelligence is developed without any accountability over its direction or purpose, it is bad for society as a whole — not for just the workers involved.”

“These conscientious workers demanding greater say over what they produce with their considerable skills are acting in the tradition of all those who have fought for workers’ rights before them,” he continued. “I hope that Google’s leadership will see the demand for voluntary recognition as a positive step for employees, and welcome the presence of the Communication Workers Union.”

‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’: Local Residents Furious After Shark Tank Billionaire’s Data Center Approved in Utah

The project, which residents were informed of just last week, is expected to more than double Utah’s electricity usage, hike its carbon footprint by 50%, and potentially drain more water from the depleted Great Salt Lake.


Protesters react as the Box Elder County commission announces approval of a large data center on May 4, 2026 in Tremonton, Utah.
(Photo by Natalie Behring/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
May 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

County commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, were deluged with chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” from a crowd of hundreds on Monday night as they voted unanimously to move forward with a sprawling “hyperscale” artificial intelligence data center project that many residents fear will cause energy prices to soar and imperil water access.

The project, known by state officials as “Stratos,” was proposed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary and has been rushed along by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, which recently approved a gigantic energy tax break for the program to help “lure” the billionaire “Shark Tank” investor.


Citing ‘Irreversible Harm,’ 100+ Groups Urge Congress to Reject Rushed Data Center Approvals


The development, dubbed “Wonder Valley” after O’Leary’s “Mr. Wonderful” TV persona, would span more than 40,000 acres of northern Utah—more than two and a half times the size of Manhattan—and would consume more than twice the electricity currently used by the entire state if approved, according to Axios.

CBS 2 KUTV called it “the biggest thing in the region since the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.” And yet Utahns say they’ve been given little information about the plan and few opportunities to voice their concerns.



Residents were given short notice before Box Elder commissioners gathered at the county fairgrounds on Monday for a “special” meeting to vote on the project, but an estimated 500 still showed up to voice their displeasure.

They raised fears that they’d have to endure the same dramatic energy price spikes as other states with high concentrations of data centers. Residential utility costs have jumped 13-20% year over year in Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey, a trend attributed to the rollout of data centers in these states.

The developers of the Utah project have emphasized that it will be powered by an on-site natural gas plant, which they claim would limit the impact on utility bills.

However, that still leaves the massive environmental concern, especially since natural gas is almost entirely made of methane, one of the worst planet-heating pollutants.

Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, has said that the estimated nine gigawatts of power the center would require, “would increase the carbon dioxide emissions for the state of Utah by more than 50%,” meaning “there’s a huge climate footprint associated with that proposal.”

Environmental advocates also warn that the facility will further drain water from the Great Salt Lake amid an already severe drought.

The Salt Lake Tribune has found that Utah’s dozens of other data centers consume wildly different amounts of water depending on the technology they use.

The developers of the Box Elder facility have claimed the project will use “zero water turbine” technology that allows it to recycle water, resulting in “net zero” consumption.

But Samantha Hawkins, the communications director for Grow the Flow Utah, a group dedicated to protecting the Great Salt Lake, said it’s impossible to know if the developers are telling the truth when they say their facility is designed to limit water usage.

“So far, there’s no publicly available hydrologic analysis or independent review to support those claims,” she said, “and there haven’t been any manufacturers, technologies, or contracts cited in relation to the ‘zero water turbine’ technology.”

Even if the centers limit water use, they still need to remain cool, which the Tribune said often requires more energy.

Many of the Utahns who showed up to protest Monday’s vote felt they were being kept in the dark about the facility’s potential harms and that the plans for the facility, which were not made public until last week, were being kept from them.

“I’m outraged,” said Colleen Flanagan, a resident of Sandy who spoke with Fox 13 Salt Lake. “I am absolutely angry that there was no studies done—it just came up out of the community. Nobody knew about it.”

Mitchell Tousley, who drove more than an hour from Draper to protest the decision, said, “A project of this scale just absolutely requires public input, and there really hasn’t been.”

Deals to build these facilities have often been made in secret, with contract details hidden from the public by nondisclosure agreements that stifle dissent until the project has already been approved. Despite this, these projects have often drawn fearsome backlash from the communities where they are planned. In some cases—like in Virginia late last month, where a 2,100-acre center was set to be built—it has led developers to pull out.

But the commissioners in Box Elder County, who said they’d reviewed more than 2,500 public comments on the proposal, appeared unmoved by the outpouring of public concern on Monday night. They said water and air quality issues were not factors in their vote and that the water rights were held by the private landowners.

As the crowd jeered, with chants of “cowards” and “people over profits,” Commissioner Boyd Bingham, a Republican, shouted them down.

“For hell’s sakes, grow up,” he yelled. “This is beyond a joke.” The commissioners then left the room and addressed the crowd via a virtual meeting.

In a video response to Monday night’s protest, O’Leary said: “I’m the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies. I’m pretty aware of what these concerns are. They are around air, water use, heat, noise pollution. So sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals.”

He claimed without evidence that 90% of the opponents of the data center project were “being bused in” from out of state. He also claimed that the facility would be powered in part by “solar, wind, and batteries,” when it is actually powered entirely by natural gas.

Opponents continue to characterize Stratos as a billionaire vanity project to loot Utah’s vast natural resources with little consideration for how it will affect residents.

Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies told Fox 13 that the Great Salt Lake “is occupied by amazing living systems” and that “projects like this go into environments like this and scrape the living systems right off the face of the Earth.”

He said, “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state… and leave us with a few crumbs.”