After his meeting in the White House with a truculent Trump and JD Vance, Zelenskyy headed to London for a summit of 19 leaders, including Justin Trudeau, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Nato chief Mark Rutte. This time there were no verbal fisticuffs, and with hugs all round, Zelenskyy basked in the company of friends.

Donald Trump criticised European leaders including Sir Keir Starmer on Monday, deriding their weekend talks over Ukraine and launching a furious new attack on Volodymyr Zelensky for saying a peace deal is still “very, very far away”.

In what could be a major setback in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, the US president fired off a tirade just as the prime minister was on his feet in the Commons insisting America was vital, sincere and indispensable in the path to peace.

Sir Keir rejected calls from MPs for Britain to shun Mr Trump and America after last week’s extraordinary ambush on Mr Zelensky in the White House Oval Office.

However, in a hint the US could be prepared to withdraw military aid to Ukraine, the president said in a social media post: “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelensky, and America will not put up with it for much longer! This guy doesn’t want there to be peace as long as he has America’s backing.”

And in a sideswipe at Sir Keir and other European leaders, he added: “In the meeting they had with Zelensky, [they] stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the US – probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”

    Trump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican importsTrump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican imports

Later on Monday night, Mr Trump warned Mr Zelensky “won’t be around very long” if he did not end the war soon.

At a press conference at the White House, Mr Trump told reporters: “The deal could be made very fast. It should not be that hard a deal to make. Now, maybe somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”

It was a deepening of the diplomatic crisis that began on Friday when Mr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after being bullied in front of the world’s media by Mr Trump and vice-president JD Vance.

But he appears to be at odds with the French president Emmanuel Macron about the “coalition of the willing” that Britain and France are meant to lead.

When he came to the House of Commons to outline his proposals, the prime minister received praise for his diplomacy but also a number of awkward questions about his support for Mr Trump.

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis (PA Wire)

The SNP and Tory shadow minister Alicia Kearns called for the invitation from the King for a second state visit – which Sir Keir brandished at the White House last week – to be rescinded.

The prime minister rejected those demands and warned MPs that any solution to Ukraine and European security would need to be achieved by working “more closely” with the US president.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said the UK needs to “reduce our dependency on the United States” as he fears “that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia”.

He told the Commons: “We’ve entered a new era, one where the United States prefers to align itself with tyrants like Putin rather than its democratic partners. We need to reduce our dependency on the United States because I say with deep regret that I fear that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia.”

Sir Keir said: “I welcome the understanding from our dialogue that our two nations will work together on security arrangements for a lasting peace in Ukraine. I also welcome the president’s continued commitment to that peace, which nobody in this House should doubt for a second is sincere.”

He added: “Our defence, our security, our intelligence are completely intertwined, no two countries are as close as our two countries and it’d be a huge mistake at a time like this to suggest that any weakening of that link is the way forward for security and defence in Europe.”

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget (PA Archive)

He also avoided answering a question about Britain’s ambassador to the US, Lord Mandelson, making statements in support of Mr Trump that defence minister Luke Pollard said did not reflect government policy. The diplomat claimed that Mr Trump’s mineral deal initiative to end the war was “the only show in town”.

Sir Keir said: “The plan is clear, we’re working, particularly with the French, I’ve had extensive conversations with President Macron over the last week, intensively over the weekend, talking to Ukraine as well, those are going on at the moment.”

In a further clash, he accused Nigel Farage of “fawning over Putin” when the Reform UK leader asked him how many British troops would be stationed in Ukraine.

The prime minister also faced a backlash from senior Labour MPs over his decision to cut the overseas aid budget to fund an increase in defence spending.

The post Keir Starmer Tries to Ride Two Horses Simultaneously appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Mountain biker carving a corner on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail north of Ogden on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest in Utah. Forest Service photo by Eric Greenwood.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…”

— Wallace Stegner

The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands.

But now, a handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a senator from Utah to gut the Wilderness Act.

This June, the Sustainable Trails Coalition, a mountain biking organization, cheered as Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill (S. 4561) to amend the Wilderness Act and allow mountain bikes, strollers, and game carts on every piece of land protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System. Stopping these intrusions would take each local wilderness manager undertaking a cumbersome process to say “no.”

The U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on September 3, 1964, to “preserve the wilderness character” of 54 wilderness areas totaling 9.1 million acres. Today, this effort has become a true conservation success story.

The National Wilderness Preservation System now protects over 800 wilderness areas totaling over 111 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico, making it America’s most critical law for preserving wild places and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species. Yet designated wilderness is only 2.7% of the Lower 48, and still just about 5% if Alaska is included.

The protections of the Wilderness Act include a ban on logging, mining, roads, buildings, structures and installations, mechanized and motorized equipment and more. Its authors sought to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness” to protect places not manipulated by modern society, where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature could continue to play out mostly unimpeded.

Grandfathered in, however, were some grazing allotments, while mining claims were also allowed to be patented until 1983. Many private mining claims still exist inside designated wildernesses.

Senator Lee’s bill is premised on the false claim that the Wilderness Act never banned bikes, and that supposedly, the U.S. Forest Service changed its regulations in 1984 to ban bikes. But bicycles, an obvious kind of mechanized equipment, have always been prohibited in wilderness by the plain language of the law.  (“There shall be…no other form of mechanical transport….”) The Forest Service merely clarified its regulations on this point in 1984 as mountain bikes gained popularity.

Unfortunately, bikers in the Sustainable Trails Coalition are not the only recreational interest group that wants to weaken the Wilderness Act. Some rock climbers, for example, are pushing Congress to allow climbers to damage wilderness rock faces by pounding in permanent bolts and pitons rather than using only removable climbing aids. In addition, trail runners want exemptions from the ban in wilderness on commercial trail racing. Drone pilots and paragliders want their aircraft exempted from Wilderness Act protections, and recreational pilots want to “bag” challenging landing sites in wilderness.

The list of those seeking to water down the Wilderness Act is growing.

Most of these recreational groups say they support wilderness, understanding how important it is when most landscapes and wildlife habitats have been radically altered by people. At the same time, they want to slice out their own piece of the wilderness pie.

Must we get everything we want in the outdoors? Rather than weakening the protections that the Wilderness Act provides, we could try to reinvigorate a spirit of humility toward wilderness. We could practice restraint, understanding that designated wildernesses have deep values beyond our human uses of them.

Meanwhile, in response to growing demand for mountain biking trails, the Bureau of Land Management invites over a million mountain bikers each year to ride its thousands of miles of trails. And the U.S. Forest Service already has a staggering 130,000 miles of motorized and nonmotorized trails available to mountain bikers.

Do mountain bikers and others pushing for access really need to domesticate wilderness, too?

Let’s cherish our wilderness heritage, whole and intact. We owe it to the farseeing founders of the Wilderness Act, and we owe it to future generations.

The post Mountain Bikers Push to Ride Through Wilderness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Proescholdt.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier

A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.

The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.

Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)

Imaginary Algae

Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendixthat came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5° Centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.

Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world’s climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth’s surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals.” So much for oil company pledges!

In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company’s vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was “a collective ambition for the world,” rather than a “Shell goal or target.” As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.” (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)

Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what it’s doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Timesacquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, “grand plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, told BU Today last February, “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be.”

In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company’s multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.

The environmentalist group Client Earth notes that ExxonMobil spends between $20 billion and $25 billion annually looking for — yes, of course! — new oil fields and is committed to doing so through at least 2025. The company had a net profit of $55.7 billion in 2022. In other words, it’s still devoting nearly half of its annual profits to looking for more petroleum when, of course, it could be using them to launch its transition to sustainable forms of energy. Such — to put it politely — inertia is clearly unwise. New electric vehicle sales in the U.S. soared to about a million this year alone, and EVs will have avoided using 1.8 million barrels of oil in 2023. Better yet, the cost of battery packs for the vehicles fell 14% and is expected to keep heading down, guaranteeing that EVs will be ever more affordable over time. Moreover, in significant parts of the rest of the world, as the New York Times reported recently, electric-powered two- and three-wheeled vehicles are beginning to give the giant oil companies a run for their money. In the decades to come, ExxonMobil’s inflexibility and refusal to innovate will undoubtedly doom the company, but the question remains: In the process, will it doom the rest of us, too?

A Deceptive Greenwashing Marketing Campaign

In another, better world, the courts could punish the oil majors for their greenwashing. That misleading paid ad in the New York Times forms but one cornerstone of a wide-ranging lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the state of Massachusetts, initiated in 2019, which has so far survived that company’s legal challenges. As the office of Attorney General, Andrea Campbell explains, it is “alleging that the company violates Massachusetts law through a deceptive ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaign that misleadingly presents Exxon as a leader in cutting-edge clean energy research and climate action… and… its products as ‘green’ while the company is massively ramping up fossil fuel production and spending only about one-half of 1% of revenues on developing clean energy.” Campbell, an African-American born in Boston, is keenly aware that climate change is an equity issue, since its deleterious effects will initially be felt most strongly among the less privileged. (Of course, given our present Supreme Court, don’t hold your breath on this one.)

In its complaint, the state points to marketing campaigns like those featured on ExxonMobil’s YouTube channel, which still shows an ad produced eight years ago, “Making the World’s Energy go Further,” that, in just 30 seconds, presents a medley of greenwashing’s greatest early hits — algae biofuel, “new technology for capturing CO2 emissions,” and cars twice as efficient in their gas mileage. Algae biofuels, however, have by now bitten the dust; there is no affordable and safe method of capturing and storing carbon dioxide; and electric cars are between “2.6 to 4.8 times more efficient at traveling a mile compared to a gasoline internal combustion engine,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The biggest fault in such commercials, however, is that the oil company’s ad makers were trying to convince the public that ExxonMobil was putting major resources into sustainable alternatives.  As the state of Massachusetts points out, in reality “ExxonMobil has ramped up production and reportedly is now the most active driller in the Permian Basin, the shale oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico that yields low-cost oil in months, rather than the years required for larger offshore projects to begin producing crude… ExxonMobil has invested billions of dollars into the development of massive Canadian oil sands projects, which are among the costliest and most polluting oil extraction projects in the world.”

Carbon Capture and Lake Nyos

An even more dangerous scam than algae biofuels (implausible but not life-threatening) is the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Remind me: Why would we try to store billions of tons of a poisonous gas? On August 21, 1986, subterranean carbon dioxide deposits bubbled up through Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly 2,000 people, thousands of cattle and other animals, and in the process turned four local villages into graveyards. Some scientists fear similar underground carbon dioxide storage elsewhere could set off earthquakes. And what if such quakes in turn release the gas? Honestly, since I still remember the 1989 Exxon Valdezdisaster where 11 million gallons of oil, spilled into the waters off Alaska, wrecked hundreds of miles of shoreline and killed unknown numbers of sea creatures and birds, I’d just as soon not have ExxonMobil store carbon dioxide in my neighborhood.

Worse yet, most of the CO2 harvested by oil companies so far has been injected into drill sites to help bring in — yes, you guessed it! — more petroleum. Worse yet, studies have shown that carbon-capture technology itself emits a lot of carbon dioxide, that it can only capture a fraction of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, and that just shutting down coal, fossil gas, and petroleum production and substituting wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is far safer, cheaper, and better for the environment.

Carbon capture is, however, a favorite greenwashing tool of Big Oil, since company executives can pretend that a technological breakthrough somewhere on the horizon justifies continuing to spew out record quantities of CO2 in the present moment. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wasted billions of taxpayer dollars by including provisions for CCS research and development in Joe Biden’s otherwise admirable Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he managed to insert a key greenwashing technique into even the most progressive climate legislation ever passed by an industrialized hydrocarbon state.

As for Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of COP28, he let his mask slip in November in a testy exchange with former Irish President Mary Robinson, who had invited him to an online discussion of how women’s lives could be improved if the climate crisis were effectively addressed. When she urged him to act as president of COP28, he exploded: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” He was pushing back against the goal advocated by scientists and many diplomats of quickly phasing hydrocarbons out. He claims to advocate phasing them down, not presumably eliminating them. He added, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Al-Jaber was posturing, since he surely knows that the International Energy Agency has issued just such a roadmap, which does indeed require rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Oh, and if he has his way, it’s quite conceivable that, somewhere down the road, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, could become too hot to be livable.

Given the plummeting cost of green energy, it’s clear that moving quickly and completely away from fossil fuels will improve the quality of life for people globally while making energy cheaper. In the end, COP28 could only issue an anodyne call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Despite al-Jaber’s globe-straddling greenwashing at the climate summit, however, there is no realistic alternative to phasing fossil fuels not just down but out, and on an accelerated timeline, if our planet’s climate isn’t to turn into a Frankenstein’s monster. After all, 2023 has already proved a unique year for heat — with month after month of record-setting warmthacross the globe. And sadly, as fossil-fuel production only continues to increase, that’s just the beginning, not the end, when it comes to potentially broiling this planet.

Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

The post How Big Oil is Taking Us for a Fossil-Fuelized Ride appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Juan Cole.

In Arizona, utilities have used a counterintuitive tool to help keep the lights on despite the state’s ongoing wave of historic heat — they’ve asked customers to turn their air conditioners down.

In July and August, Arizona’s three biggest utilities were able to call on more than 100,000 customers to reduce their electricity use by a total of 276 megawatts during afternoon and evening hours when demand for power was at its peak. For most of those same months, the southern Arizona territories served by those utilities were in the midst of a record-setting stretch of consecutive days over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

These statistics come from EnergyHub, the company that operates smart-thermostat-based demand-response programs for utilities Arizona Public Service, Salt River Project, and Tucson Electric Power. Like many utilities across the country, APS, SRP, and TEP offer incentives and free or discounted smart thermostats for customers who agree to let the utility remotely turn their temperature settings up by several degrees when the grid needs relief from air-conditioning power use — with the option for customers to ​“opt out” by manually resetting their thermostats.

But not every utility is able to get such consistent results out of customers facing as dreadful and persistent a heat wave as the one Arizona has endured this summer. During those two summer months, customers stayed engaged during eight to 10 separate events across the three utilities, delivering up to 300 megawatts of load reduction at the peak of participation, said Jessie Guest, EnergyHub’s strategic client success manager.

That’s not a huge amount, especially compared to the record high of more than 18,000 megawatts of peak electricity draw experienced by those three utilities over this summer.

But every little margin counts in times of peak demand, which makes these customer-enabled ​“demand-response” resources a vital tool in the grid-balancing toolbox. More and more U.S. utilities are facing the necessity of cutting power to entire neighborhoods to preserve grid stability as climate change drives increasingly hot summers. Demand-response programs offer one way to avoid that last-resort outcome.

Convincing customers to use less energy at critical times is also quite a bit less expensive and polluting than building and firing up new fossil-gas-powered ​“peaker” plants to cover short-term grid shortfalls. And because a large portion of utility costs are tied up in the investments and energy costs related to meeting peak demand, demand-response programs are especially cost-effective.

That’s in part the reason why Arizona Public Service (APS), the state’s largest utility with 1.3 million customers, plans to rely heavily on distributed energy and demand response to reach its goals of 65 percent carbon-free energy by 2030 and a 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050.

APS plans to add more than a gigawatt of new solar, wind and batteries over the next four years. But the utility is already closing in on its 2024 target of enlisting 200 megawatts of demand response, with 170 megawatts as of this summer. More than half of that comes from its Cool Rewards residential smart-thermostat program, which launched in 2018, hit 42 megawatts in 2020, 80 megawatts in 2021 and about 100 megawatts last year.

As of this summer, the program has 78,000 connected thermostats and the capability of shedding more than 110 megawatts of load, said Kerri Carnes, APS’ director of customer-to-grid solutions. ​“These customer partnership programs are going to be increasingly important for us on our journey to 100 percent clean energy,” she said.

Designing a smart-thermostat demand-response program that works for customers

There’s no single trick to getting so many people to so consistently endure discomfort to keep the grid up and running. But a combination of attractive financial incentives, closely managed customer expectations, and tight integration with utility power grid and energy market operations have certainly helped in Arizona.

Free or steeply discounted smart thermostats are a key starting point, Guest said. A growing number of utilities and demand-response providers nationwide have been offering customers free or low-cost smart thermostats from companies like Google Nest, ecobee, Honeywell Home, and other well-known brands so they can capture the greater flexibility and control these devices offer.

That trend is present in Arizona, too: APS has offered free thermostats to customers who sign up for Cool Rewards for years. Salt River Project and Tucson Electric Power have provided smart-thermostat rebates of up to $100 or more for years, and they both offered free thermostats this summer.

Incentives are available for customers who already have smart thermostats, too, with up to a one-time $50 credit for each device they enroll in demand response. Participants also earn annual credits of between $25 and $40, depending on the utility, Guest said.

Importantly, these programs don’t penalize customers who opt out of participating on certain days, she added. That’s not universally the case for demand-response programs — particularly those involving commercial and industrial customers that utilities rely on for larger-scale power reductions during grid emergencies.

But EnergyHub’s experience running residential programs for more than 60 utilities across the U.S. has shown that ​“a pay-for-performance model decreases overall participation,” she said. ​“You’re penalizing customers for choosing comfort over the program.”

Carnes agreed that if a demand-response program ​“feels overly complicated or overly punitive, customers will walk away.”

“Say the day you’re calling an event, I’m having a birthday party,” she said. ​“Should I be penalized” for opting out of turning off the air conditioning ​“because I wanted to make sure the people at my kid’s birthday party are comfortable and treated well?”

“If the industry truly wants to have customer-sited resources as part of the solution, then we have to treat customers like people,” she said.

Treating customers like people also means keeping the lines of communication open, Guest said. EnergyHub uses emails and text messages to inform customers before a request to reduce power use of ​“what to expect, how long it’s going to be, how much temperatures are going to increase above the setpoint,” she said. ​“Even sending a midseason message, saying, ​‘You’re having an impact on keeping the lights on in Arizona’ — that has been big.”

That communication goes both ways. After the first two years of the Cool Rewards program, ​“in some surveys, customers said, ​‘You should pay us more,’” Carnes said. ​“So we went back and did the math, and agreed — our customers should be paid more.” So in 2022, they boosted the annual participation credit from $25 to $35. Enrollment numbers have risen since the increase was put in place.

While plenty of other utilities around the country have demand-response programs that are as lucrative — or even more so — as the Arizona utilities’ offerings, many have been far less aggressive in implementing them. And those utilities without programs that pay customers to reduce power use during grid emergencies are forced to ask their customers to voluntarily cut power use for free — a last resort that runs the risk of turning people off of demand response entirely.

Finding a smart-thermostat demand-response program that works for utilities

But while the human touch is important, Carnes also emphasized the need to balance ​“the art and science” of treating customers ​“like a resource,” similar to the power plants APS controls or the energy-trading relationships it maintains with neighboring utilities. Paying too much for demand response may erase its relative cost-effectiveness compared to simply buying more power.

But traditionally, the key limitation for residential demand-response programs has been retaining enough customers to ensure that the reductions they can deliver are worth the costs of administering and running a program. Utilities have been criticized in the past for failing to adequately inform or reward customers for their participation in demand-response programs, limiting their growth over the decades they’ve been in place.

At the same time, utilities and their regulators have tended to express skepticism about customers being able to deliver meaningful load reductions when the grid really needs it. That uncertainty has limited utilities’ willingness to rely on demand response in order to forgo more expensive ways of dealing with demand peaks, like investments in new power plants or grid capacity.

As it stands, no utility is tapping the full theoretical demand-response potential that reports from a variety of federal agencies and energy analysis firms have identified across the country. A 2019 report from consultancy Brattle Group found that the U.S. could double its nearly 60 gigawatts of existing demand-response capacity by 2030, yielding $15 billion per year in benefits — and largely avoiding the use and construction of additional power plants — with smart thermostats making up one of the largest new sources of capacity.

But as utilities in Arizona and around the country struggle with increasingly extreme weather and the need to replace fossil-fired power with zero-carbon alternatives, so-called ​“demand-side” alternatives like Cool Rewards are becoming more and more central to their plans.

APS has made demand response an integral part of its strategy on this front, Carnes said. ​“My team is integrated with our operations team. We attend the weekly planning meetings — what does the energy market look like, what the weather is going to look like, any changes in the fleet that we need to prepare for.”

APS is using this tight integration between its smart-thermostat-equipped customers and its grid and energy market operations in a number of innovative ways, Carnes said. One example is ​“precooling” — turning up air conditioning earlier in the day, when grids across the Southwest are awash in low-cost solar power, to store up cold in homes that can then keep their air conditioners off for longer in the late afternoon and evening, when solar power fades away but outdoor temperatures and electricity demand remain high.

That’s not just a way to keep homes cooler through the late afternoons, Carnes said — it’s also a way for APS and its customers to take advantage of the hour-by-hour shifts in electricity costs. APS is among the growing number of utilities with ​“time-of-use” rates that charge customers less during midday hours and more during late afternoon and evening hours when demand for electricity often spikes. At the same time, widespread precooling allows APS to buy more cheap off-peak solar power from its neighbors, including solar-saturated California, and use less power during expensive peaks.

APS can also ​“stagger” the times when smart-thermostat-equipped homes are called on to reduce energy use to better balance fluctuations on its grid, Carnes said. That can help ensure that customers aren’t asked to keep their homes too hot for too long, but it’s also a way to react to real-time conditions that don’t correspond exactly to the preset hours of 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when customers are charged more for electricity. ​“Just because the residential peak ends at 7:01 doesn’t mean the system peak ends,” she noted.

Flexible dispatch also helps APS avoid ​“snapback,” she said — the effect of turning lots of air conditioners back on at the same time, which can lead to huge power draws that further unbalance the grid. That’s a common problem with demand response, and one that well-designed programs should try to avoid, she said.

Comparing and contrasting approaches to demand response 

The approach Arizona’s biggest utilities are taking stands somewhat in contrast to the way residential demand response is developing in two other states suffering from heat-related grid strains: California and Texas.

California has invested billions of dollars in emergency grid resources since it experienced rolling blackouts during an August 2020 heat wave, and hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are enrolled in smart-thermostat programs, including more than 100,000 customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, and more than 200,000 signed up with demand response provider OhmConnect.

But the state’s increasingly complex and cumbersome structures for rewarding participation in these programs have held back their impact, according to demand-response advocates. Recent changes in the state’s approach to demand response could further erode this potential, the industry warns.

And in Texas, where energy market deregulation and policy have limited investment in and incentives for residential energy efficiency and demand response, the state remains well behind many others in tapping the grid-relief potential of homes and apartments, grid experts say. That’s despite the state’s ongoing challenges meeting rising summer power demand — not to mention its catastrophic grid collapse during the winter storms of February 2021.

A May report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that investments in energy efficiency and demand response could reduce Texas’ summer and winter grid emergencies far more cheaply and quickly than the state’s current focus on building more fossil-gas-fired power plants — with the biggest summertime load reductions potential coming from free or low-cost smart thermostats combined with air-conditioner demand response.

Paul Hines, EnergyHub’s vice president of power systems, highlighted preliminary 2022 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that shows how different approaches are yielding different results in Arizona compared to Texas. That data shows that Arizona utilities were enabling nearly three times the number of kilowatts of peak load reduction per customer compared to utilities in Texas, while only spending twice as much per customer, he said.

“Both California and Texas have a complicated layer of incentive programs to work within,” Hines said. ​“What we’ve found is, the simpler we’ve made this, the more success you have.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Smart thermostats are helping Arizona’s grid ride out extreme heat on Sep 24, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jeff St. John, Canary Media.

“At that time, I didn’t know anything about endorphins and what it means to get your blood going and your muscles moving, and the impact that could have on depression. I just knew the totality of the experience, the socializing with people, the nature, the exercise, all of it together helped me feel a little bit better. And I knew this was not just a bike ride. This was the start of something.” 

– Olatunji Oboi Reed

Episode transcript

Olatunji Oboi Reed was working in the corporate world when his long struggle with depression forced him to take a leave of absence. During that time, he made a decision to get on a bike, and that ride, it eventually led him to his life’s work promoting racial equity. This is his story. 

My name is Olatunji Oboi Reed. I am 49 years old and I am the founding president and CEO of the Equiticity racial equity movement. 

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Growing up, we lived a modest life. Sometimes my mom had a car, sometimes she didn’t. My parents were divorced at a pretty young age. Same for my father – sometimes had a car, sometimes didn’t. So I would say it was mostly public transit, walking, and sometimes somebody may have a car.

As a kid, we loved riding bikes and it was super popular. It was a form of freedom. You know, as a child it was our way to explore our streets, our neighborhoods, get a little bit of distance from our parents, you know, have some freedom and just, you know, hang out and be with friends. Me and my brother, we had two of the coolest bikes on the block. He had a blue and gray Schwinn Stingray. I had a green and yellow Schwinn Stingray with the tall handlebars, the banana seat. It was awesome. We were the cool kids because we had some cool bikes. 

I think it was around sophomore year in high school. I started to lose interest. Started to lose interest in going to school and studying. Felt like my energy was low. I wanted to sleep more, wasn’t as interested in spending time with my friends. Had a challenging relationship with my father. 

I do recall in high school a mentor of mine said, “You know, I think you’re struggling with depression.” And at that point in my life, you know, I’m a young brother growing up on the South Side of Chicago, running with a crew of more young brothers and trying to be as hard as we can be and trying to, you know, get as many girls as we can get. The idea that I would even acknowledge maybe I have depression was just something I, you know, I couldn’t even consider.

I probably was a little ashamed of the potential that I could have a mental illness and didn’t want anybody to know. So some part of it was that I did not believe him. Some part of it is that I didn’t want to acknowledge it to myself.

I don’t know that I really had any coping strategies. I just tried to do what I could. That meant oftentimes not doing well, you know. Not doing well in my classes in high school, because I’m not showing up, I’m not studying, and I’m not focused. I can’t read. I mean, I knew how to read, but I couldn’t, like, sit down and focus because, you know, one of the challenges with depression is that you can’t focus. 

I have an older brother. There’s two of us – me and my older brother. He’s about 11 months older than me. And I figured he just – he got the right genes, you know, because he was studious, he was focused. He was clear on his goals and objectives. And I was just kind of floundering. So I just thought I was the lazy one of the two of us. He was the one that had figured it out. 

My older brother was going to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and at first I was at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, and wasn’t doing well. So he said, “Well, come up here and figure it out.” And he was leading an organization on campus called If Not Now, a black activist organization, and they did a mentorship program at an elementary school. The program was housed at Planned Parenthood. And, you know, because he was my older brother and I wanted to be around him, you know, he went, I went, and I loved it. You know, we were working with these middle school young brothers, and it was great. When the program director left, he asked me to apply for his position, and I wound up applying and got the job.

Probably around that time I thought nonprofit was for me, you know. And there was a gentleman who worked for the utility company in Champaign, and we were running leadership development programs for high school students and taking them on college tours, and I would always reach out to him when we needed some extra funding. Oftentimes, he would come through with the extra funding. He would bring this big check. He would bring a photographer. He would ask the media to come. And I just started thinking: Who is this guy? What does he do? What is his job title that he just gives money away and gets the media to cover it and make a big deal of all of this stuff. And I learned he does something called community relations. So in 1999, I moved from Champaign to Chicago, and I made up my mind that I’m going to go into community relations in the corporate sector. 

It wasn’t the corporate sector itself. It was the idea of community relations, community affairs, community development. Like me being someone who could take corporate resources and give them to our neighborhoods. Like, I could do that. I could be a philanthropist. So I came back to Chicago, and I just went trying to find a job in the corporate sector. And fortunate enough, I found one working for Bank One, which eventually was acquired by Chase Bank, and that was my first corporate job. 

I don’t know that this was a coping mechanism because, you know, I’m in the world of work now and what I’m doing is just pushing through my depression. And when I can’t, I step back and I come up with excuses for why I can’t be more present. You know, calling off sick, somebody in my family passed away. Any excuse that I could, you know, come up with. 

So I come back to Chicago in ‘99. By 2000, I’m working at Bank One, and it was a junior level community development position. And I had a lot of flexibility. I could kind of come and go. So while I’m still struggling with depression, I’m able to use those coping mechanisms and not put myself in too much risk of losing my job. I leave Bank One and I go to Citigroup, where I become a vice president and director of community relations. And in that position, those similar coping mechanisms didn’t work. Like, calling off more than once every few months is a problem. Or not delivering on an assignment. You know, something is due, it needs to be turned in on time. Like, any minor slip up was noticed. I couldn’t hide the impact of my depression. 

When I’m depressed and I’m working it’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard to socialize. It’s hard to articulate. It’s hard to read. It’s hard to keep a schedule. And when depression does get to the point where I just can’t even go to work, I can’t even wake up, the way it manifests for me is to sleep as much as possible and just try to ignore the world and maybe, you know, maybe I’ll wake up and it’ll all be a dream and everything will be alright. But it was a form of escape, you know, just to sleep and not acknowledge it. Not talk to people, because anyone I talk to: “How you doing? What’s up with work? How about therapy? How about medication?” And I didn’t want to face those questions. 

You know, I’m not sure how or why I started to think about the bike I had in the basement. I know that I had been socially isolated for probably two months or more on a medical leave of absence from work. Not answering the phone, not answering the door, you know, not communicating with family and friends and really questioning, is it worth it? Should I should I continue to struggle with? And some kind of way I just thought about it. Like, I do have a bike, you know, I do have a bike in the basement. Maybe – because I had been, you know, in this darkness, both literally and figuratively – maybe I could just go for a ride and just, you know, feel a little better. Just at least get out the house. I thought it could just give me a little bit of respite from the darkness and the pain. 

So I muster up the strength to take the bike to a bike shop, because it had been sitting in the basement so long, it was sitting on flat tires and in disrepair. Got the bike fixed, put the bike in the trunk and drove to 63rd Street Beach. Grabbed the bike out the trunk, took a deep breath. Because I’m still struggling. I mean, as much as I’ve done to get that bike to that lakefront trail that day was a big deal, however, I am deeply, deeply depressed, just sort of pushing through to bring this bike ride to life. Hop on the bike and started riding.

It was a beautiful summer day in Chicago, and it was early in the morning. And as I’m riding, I’m noticing a few things. It’s on the South Side of Chicago, and there’s Black folks on the trail, because it’s in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and they’re acknowledging me. They’re passing me with a head nod, with a “how are you doing, brother?” That acknowledgment after social isolation for several months was massive. 

The sun is peeking out of the clouds, and it feels like the sun is playing a game of hide and seek. So I’m sort of getting a little kick out of the sun coming in and out. The wind blowing the leaves of the trees sounded like a song. Like the leaves were singing to me. The sun’s rays following me on the water, bouncing off the water and just following me as I rode felt like it was this protective envelope around me. It was nature speaking to me in a way that I had never paid attention to. I had never looked to just take a moment and embrace all that is happening in nature. In that moment, I did. I saw it, I felt it, I heard it. It was like this cacophony of experiences and sounds and motion and things moving, and it was all happening. 

And then it was the physical movement of riding a bike. At that time, I didn’t know anything about endorphins and what it means to get your blood going and your muscles moving and the impact that that could have on depression. I just knew the totality of the experience, the socializing with people, the nature, the exercise, all of it together helped me feel a little bit better. And I knew this was not just a bike ride. This was the start of something. 

When I got back to the car, there was this sort of realization that all is not lost. You know, I’m not painting a picture that the bike rack cured me or that I was no longer depressed. However, it certainly helped me have a little more hope and gave me a little more faith that I’m able to come out of this deep, deep depression. 

I’m starting to ride more and more, and there was an old friend who I reconnected with, and we decided to go for a bike ride. And we’re on the Major Taylor Trail on the South Side of Chicago, kind of southwest, and I see a group of young people with an adult in the front. And these young people are in this practically straight line. It’s beautiful to see all of these young people riding, and the adult is clearly, you know, teaching them how to ride safely and manage the ride. And it was it was cool to see. And in that moment, I kind of thought about it, you know, maybe I could start a bike club to help get people to ride with me. So I decided to start a bike club. It was called the Pioneers Bicycle Club, and I would just invite family and friends to meet me at the Point here in Chicago, and let’s ride our bikes on the lakefront. 

I go back to school, you know, I left corporate America. By that time, I had went to Nike and left Nike. Decided to go back to school and did a study abroad program in Brazil. So I paused the Pioneers. When I came back, there was a new organization called Red Bike & Green, which was founded in Oakland. A woman named Ebony had brought a chapter to Chicago, and I loved everything that they were doing. They were focused on the black community and I connected with Ebony and asked her, “May we consider, you know, I could fold the Pioneers into Red Bike & Green and we could, you know, co-lead Red Bike & Green together.” And we did. 

And as I’m starting to ride more and more across the city, I notice some distinct differences of riding bikes on the South and West Side, which is predominantly Black and brown and low-to-moderate income, and riding bikes on the North Side or downtown, predominantly white and middle-to-upper income. And as I became more and more of an advocate, I would talk to bike advocates, mostly white. I would talk to government agencies and staff – again, mostly white. And I would ask, “Why is it harder to ride in our neighborhoods and easier to ride in white neighborhoods?” And what they all told me, to a T, “We focus bicycle resources where they will be used the most.” 

And that never sat right with me. Because I’m thinking about myself as someone who has turned to bikes to address my depression. And I’m also recognizing all of the health care disparities in Black and brown neighborhoods, from mental health to diabetes, heart disease, obesity. We could go on and on. And I’m thinking, well, should you focus bicycle resources where they will be used the most? You’re going to put those resources in predominantly white, middle, upper income neighborhoods, because those are the people who are going to take to cycling because they don’t have the inequities, they don’t have the structural challenges that we have in our neighborhood that stop us from taking to cycling. So you’re incentivizing people who are already well positioned to cycle. And you’re not going to put those resources in our neighborhoods where they’re needed the most.

So I became more and more of an advocate. Eventually, I co-founded Slow Roll Chicago. Slow Roll Chicago was an organization that came out of Slow Roll Detroit – Slow Roll Detroit was this massive bicycle movement. We were doing weekly rides in Black and brown neighborhoods, and narrated rides in partnership with community-based organizations. And at that point, I felt like one of the most important things needed was infrastructure. And when I’m in Black and brown neighborhoods and I’m telling people in our neighborhoods that we need bike infrastructure, I’m getting a lot of pushback. People are telling me that they don’t want the bike infrastructure, because it’s not for them, it’s going to cause gentrification and displacement. And it was tough for me to hear, because I’m a cyclist and I believe infrastructure will allow all of us to bike more – Black and brown people to bike more. We should we have safe bike infrastructure on our streets. However, I’m understanding their concerns. So I was, you know, I was twisted. I was deeply concerned that there was all of this pushback.

And a few things happened. On a whim, I learned about an organization called PolicyLink, based in California in the Bay Area, focused on equity. And I should just add, at this point, I’m talking about bicycle equity in Chicago. I’m advocating for bicycle equity. And nobody is listening. And in fact, many people are fighting me on bicycle equity and they don’t believe in it. They don’t want to support it. It’s not going to work. I shouldn’t do it. And then I go to PolicyLink’s conference in LA., and I’m surrounded by people who are talking about equity. It was like going to a family reunion and meeting family you never knew existed. 

So I come back and a couple of things happen. The video of Laquan McDonald’s murder is released, there’s a global racial justice reckoning as a result. Shortly thereafter, the city of Chicago announced its strategy to reduce traffic violence. It’s called Vision Zero, and their leading strategy was enforcement. And I could not see how the city’s answer to traffic violence, which is mostly impacting in our neighborhoods, is enforcement.

There was a white-led organization here in Chicago – and I think this was just what took me in a different direction. They decided to host a summit about Vision Zero. And as soon as I saw their announcement, I knew that they did not want Black and brown people there. It was on a weekday from 8 a.m.-12 p.m., located downtown, and it costs $50 to get in. And this white-led organization wants to do a summit to talk about traffic violence happening in our neighborhoods, and don’t engage with the community organizations operating in our neighborhoods, people who live in our neighborhoods. So I just decided, you know what, we’re not going to let this one go. Y’all not going to keep disrespecting our neighborhoods. 

And I told them, “Cancel it. Cancel the summit.” And they said, well, we made some mistakes, however, we’ll fix it. We’ll bring some Black and brown stakeholders to the table. We’ll work together to figure this out. I said, “No, no, we’re done. Cancel it. Start over from the beginning and a full partnership with Black and brown people in Black- and brown-led organizations. This summit is – it’s not happening.” After an intense three weeks, they canceled it. 

So in that moment, it really showed me there’s power in our neighborhoods. There’s power in our neighborhoods to do what needs to be done to change the course of history. To change our future, to improve our communities. That really sort of cemented for me that Slow Roll Chicago was not the right vehicle for me, and I needed something new. And that’s what gave birth to Equiticity. 

I wanted to move towards other forms of transportation. Transit, walking, emerging transportation technologies – you know, Bikeshare was becoming more and more popularized, scooters were on the horizon, dockless bikes were coming up. After learning about PolicyLink. I wanted to focus on equity more broadly, and in the context of equity I really wanted to focus on racial equity. 

And then there was this interconnection of transportation and police violence. When Laquan McDonald was murdered, he was walking. When Philando Castile was murdered, he was driving. You know, like, police violence and transportation are inextricably linked. We can’t separate those two. And I also wanted to center power, and that’s what drove the name of this organization. 

So Equiticity. Most people see “equity city” when they see the name. They see equity city. And I understand. It makes sense that you would see that. For us though, that’s not what it was about equities. It is a play on equity and electricity. The same way electricity requires a physical infrastructure to be transformative, so does equity require a social infrastructure to be transformative. Equiticity is about allowing power and equity to flow through our neighborhoods. Our central question from the founding of our organization has always been: what happens when we turn on the power and equity moves like electricity through our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods and our cities? That’s Equiticity. 

Equiticity is a racial equity movement operationalizing racial equity by harnessing our collective power, through research, advocacy, programs, community mobility rituals, and social enterprises to improve the lives of Black, brown, and Indigenous people in our society. 

We did research titled “Biking Where Black,” focused here in Chicago. Through that research, we uncovered that Black people are eight times more likely to be stopped and ticketed for riding bikes on the sidewalk than white people. And largely where we’re being stopped is on large arterial streets where there’s no bike infrastructure. That inequity is really two compounding inequities coming together, the infrastructure inequity and the enforcement inequity. When we ride bikes on the sidewalk, we get stopped by the police. When white people do it, they don’t. 

I’ll give you a quick example of some of our program work. One is BikeForce. It is a program focusing on high school students, teaching them about the technologies inside of e-bikes. There’s a wave coming to our society with these e-bikes. Bike share is eventually going all e-bike. Cities, states are offering incentive programs for people to go and purchase e-bikes. And we want our young people to sort of be at the forefront of that wave so when the time is right, they’re in a position to create employment opportunities for themselves. 

We do five types of rituals: community bicycle rides, neighborhood walking tours, public transit excursions, group scooter rolls, and open streets festivals. We also want to do the work to position us to be financially independent. So we are incubating some social enterprises that we see some potential of one day helping to financially support our organization and create jobs in our neighborhoods. 

From our perspective, when we think about climate, we think about it from the perspective of environmental justice. You know, the people in our cities – in Chicago and many cities across the country – the people who are the most impacted by climate change are Black, brown, and Indigenous people. So when we think about the sectors that we’re the most active on, of course transportation is number one, and we’re active on environmental justice and sort of growing our work in that space. 

So one of our programs is Mobility Opportunities Fund. It is a stipend program providing residents in North Lawndale with stipends to purchase climate-friendly transportation. That includes a conventional bike, e-bike, e-cargo bike, or an electric vehicle. So it’s our opportunity to begin to move people from, you know, regular cars to more sustainable, healthy forms of transportation. 

I don’t think it was until Equiticity that I felt like this was in my blood. Like it was in my body. It was something that was inherently the work that I should do. And that work, to be clear, is racial equity, you know, not limited to transportation. It is a part of my spirit. It’s a part of my soul. It’s everything that I want my life to be about. 

I’m a new father now. I have a newborn daughter. I want her to be excited about bikes. I want her to ride with her big cousins. Cycling has grown in the U.S., especially among Black and brown people, and knowing that I’ve contributed in even a small way doing something that maybe my daughter will appreciate, and my niece and nephews will appreciate, gives me a profound sense of purpose that I think I really, you know, in those younger years, I really struggled with.

I’m feeling pretty good. Of course, I have my ups and downs as one who continues to struggle with depression. However, I’ve maintained a nice regimen, some strategies to stay healthy. Of course, cycling is part of that mix. Doing what I love is a part of that mix. Being with family and friends. Having a new daughter gives me, you know, a whole new life. My daughter is six weeks today. She turned six weeks old today. So, yeah, things are going well. I don’t take any of it for granted. I know it’s a fragile existence for me. However, I’m proud of progress I’ve made. 

Everybody want to ride bikes now. Everybody. People visiting Chicago: “Oboi. Hey, can we hop on some bikes?” People want to come to North Lawndale, wanna ride. Everyone wants to ride. So I don’t have a dearth of people who want to ride. I probably got too many to keep up with all the requests to hop on some bikes. I don’t get to ride as much as I used to, however, our Friday night race series in North Lawndale is one that I love, and every time I’m able to hop on some bikes, cause it’s always a lot of young people on those rides, it reminds me that this is the reason I do this work.

More reading on this topic:

• In Chicago, cyclists in Black neighborhoods are over-policed and under-protected
• How to build a better bike-share program
• Bike-share programs are shifting gears and prioritizing equity

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Chicago’s South Side, one bike ride became a passion for cycling and racial equity on May 23, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Photograph Source: Felton Davis – CC BY 2.0

“Today,” US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Masquerading-as-I — VT) said in a December 13 statement, “I withdrew from consideration by the U.S. Senate my War Powers Resolution after the Biden administration agreed to continue working with my office on ending the war in Yemen. Let me be clear. If we do not reach agreement, I will, along with my colleagues, bring this resolution back for a vote in the near future and do everything possible to end this horrific conflict.”

Promises, promises.

Every time Congress rattles its war powers saber against continuing US support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, presidents simultaneously threaten to veto such resolutions, and pretend they’re just about ready to end that support, if only Congress will back off. And it does.

Meanwhile, the war rolls merrily along, with the United Nations estimating more than 377,000 dead as of the end of last year, including the starvation deaths of 85,000 children between 2015 and 2018 alone.

Why? Because despite Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to treat Saudi Arabia’s regime as a “pariah” over everything from its involvement with the 9/11 hijackers to the murder of  exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he remains as convinced as his predecessors that the US desperately needs the support and approval of Saudi terror kingpin … er, “Crown Prince” … Mohammed bin Salman.

Instead of the “pariah” treatment, MbS gets visits, fist bumps, and pleas to increase oil production so American consumers don’t have to pick up the tab for — and Biden doesn’t get the blame for — the price effects of US sanctions on Russian oil.

And US sanctions on Iranian oil.

And US sanctions on Venezuelan oil.

Do you detect a theme?  American politicians’ moonshine about “energy independence” is a perpetual riff on St. Augustine’s prayer: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

It’s not just about oil, though.

The Saudi regime is also one of the planet’s top military spenders, with much of its $50-75 billion “defense” budget buying US-made arms.

And since the US toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-heavy regime in 2003 and installed a more Shia-friendly (read: Iran-friendly) government, Saudi Arabia has been the US’s proxy/counterweight of choice in its 40-year war on Iran specifically and Shia power (in, for example, Syria and Lebanon) generally.

Decades of misguided US Mideast policy have given MbS a continuing grip on Washington’s dangly parts, with several ways to squeeze tightly should Joe Biden displease him in any way.

The problem with this particular intimate massage is that there’s really no prospect of a happy ending. Unwinding decades of would-be hegemony is GOING to hurt. But it has to happen sooner or later. Ending the slaughter in Yemen and telling MbS to go pound sand (he’s got a lot of that) would be a great start.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Image by Josh Nezon.

The crowd at the station near Burlington, Vermont was about average for a summer day. Forty-some folks gathered in the shade near the small depot only recently re-opened since COVID shut down so much of the world. Grandparents heading to the suburbs of New York to visit the kids, travelers coming in from a hike on the Long Trail and going to the next destination on their trek. College students going to Amherst and its plethora of schools. The Winooski River runs along the track for much of the first thirty or so miles of the trip south. Its banks were visible, but its depth was fair; no drought yet in Vermont. Verdant as an emerald, the pastures, cornfields and mountains overwhelm the senses in a manner that will be relished as the concrete and asphalt replace what nature intended.

The change in the landscape is subtle as one travels from Burlington to the New York suburbs. The woods and fields of Vermont are occasionally interrupted by small and smaller towns along the track, Indeed, it isn’t until one is south of Greenfield, Massachusetts that industrial structures and houses began to dominate the scenery. Even then, there are still enough woods on both sides of the train a passenger can ignore the impending aesthetic dissonance that describes the dystopian reality of the eastern seaboard. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the passengers boarding at each stop. The styles become more urban. Fades in the haircuts, a brutal razor’s edge taken to the skull in an attempt to reflect or blend in to an urban architecture defined by angles or just an attempt to blend in with a fad I’m unaware of, I’m not certain. Conversations become louder and one cannot help but hear personal issues they might rather not. It’s almost like riding a city bus where neighbors play out their disputes and their affairs, teenagers their loves and nonsense, and people complain about the weather no matter what it is. By the time the train is in the tunnel that leads into Manhattan’s Penn Station, the ride is more like a ride on the D Train heading north from West 4th than an interstate train collecting and dispersing its human cargo up and down the coast.

Certain towns along the way take one back to how it used to be. Bellows Falls, VT is one such place. The waters of the Connecticut River slowed by the walls that fence it in through the town, one can almost hear the water wheels turning crushing grain or powering looms. The industrial revolution that moved New Englanders off the farms and out of the shacks to fill the pockets of the bankers down river with more money then the workers would ever see in a dozen lifetimes of wage slavery. It turned the towns upside down, fed the tavern owners, freed the children from the structures of home and church and replaced them with the oppression of capitalism and its measly rewards the bosses call a payday—a ritual they begrudgingly go along with despite the greed capitalism encourages.

I don’t want to mislead the reader. The trip through Vermont and that parts of Massachusetts before Greenfield certainly have a good share of nature’s beauty. But, as is the case anywhere humans have set up community, there’s a fair amount of denatured ugliness, too. Gravel quarries and landfills hidden from the civilized outposts that demand these blights. Junked cars, junk food joints and junkyards, smokestacks beyond the corn. Corn that gets taller the further south one travels; corn that represents our societal addiction to sugar and beef. Corn syrup and silage is what the pilgrims wrought. Maybe the Pequot knew what they were doing when they let the Puritans take their corn. John Winthrop sent his repressed militia of to massacre the Pequot while the murdered have their revenge on the white folks that followed. I’m reminded of a routine titled “Temporarily Humboldt County” by the psychedelic comedy group Firesign Theater which goes like this.

By now the train is full. Every single seat has a body in it. The scheduled stops at the university towns in Massachusetts saw a few folks get on, but it’s in New Haven, where a monolith of a police station stands across from the train station, it’s brick walls a foreboding presence, that it reaches capacity. The police station’s windows are virtually non-existent, just a few rectangles of bulletproof glass. It is the occupiers’ defense against the proletariat and its completely reasonable antagonism towards the powerful elements the police protect—Yale University, defense industry affiliates and everything else that comes with the university-industrial complex.

Then the bourgeois environs of Stamford, Connecticut. John Cheever redux without the hidden pathos or the novelty. Their boats in the marinas and their BMWs zooming down the highway. Nothing affects them except for maybe a dip in the stock marker or an attorney’s bill for their adult child’s fuckups. The adolescents take the train into the city, some to shop and some to get high; some to take classes and some to hang with the gutter punks where ever they hang these days. The cool kids dress the part and the rest look like the twenty-first century version of the cast of The Breakfast Club. Their parents look like a graying version of the same. I can’t help but hope the kids reject the lifestyle their parents embraced and go rogue. They don’t need to commit class suicide and join some revolution, but even telling their parents they don’t want that 70,000 dollar car means something, I suppose. We all know the planet’s burning. The question is will we throw more fuel into the fire.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Before Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book there was The Little Red Song Book, which included lyrics to rabblerousing ballads written by labor troubadours such as Joe Hill in order to organize the Industrial Workers of the World. A 1979 documentary about the IWW is being re-released on April 29, making the stand-up-and-cheer The Wobblies – as IWW members were nicknamed – the absolutely perfect film to see for May Day.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.