During the COVID-19 pandemic, many nations reacted to supply disruptions for basic needs by imposing steep tariffs, other trade controls, or by banning exports of food and medicine. It was the single most sudden and pervasive surge in trade limitations since the end of the Cold War. Since then, the use of sanctions, both targeted measures and blanket actions against nations, has expanded.

There are important reasons for all of this. In an emergency supply shortage, keeping basic needs filled can save lives and maintain political stability and national security. Short-term thinking, however, can lead to actions that undermine cooperation and efficiency in value chains, making ongoing supply shortages more likely. Meanwhile, as governments accumulated more de facto political power to act without legislative instruction or popular scrutiny, human rights abuses and state violence proliferated, alongside hunger and instability.

Targeted measures aimed at creating a counter-incentive found new meaning and were in high demand. This was especially true after Vladimir Putin’s regime launched an illegal war of conquest against a neighboring sovereign country and fellow UN Member State, Ukraine.

Trade restrictions have become a popular tool among national governments, to project power without arms and to attempt to effect domestic economic policy changes—addressing shortages and high prices—by pushing hardship offshore, so to speak. There are a number of myths involved in this thinking—not least of which is that it is the people of the country imposing the tariffs who pay them.

In the United States, there is also heated, crisis-level confusion about who has authority to impose tariffs. The President keeps claiming that authority, but he was recently rebuked by the Supreme Court, which reminded him that only Congress has tariff authority.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States grants Congress sole authority over tariffs and trade. The President is merely an implementer and can engage in negotiations; Congress needs to enact the new taxes for them to be real and lawful.

Some countries allow their Executive branch to unilaterally impose tariffs, disrupt and control trade relations, and alter prices; the most functional countries do not allow that. Trade is itself a way of expanding the reach of the non-zero-sum benefits of free enterprise. If more people can contribute new additional value, then overall exchange value and incomes can rise further, and the amount of labor required to fill basic needs goes down.

In principle, both sides of any trade relationship need to keep innovating to hold onto the benefits of that infusion of new value. Money chases opportunity, so if old jobs move elsewhere, innovative businesses and new kinds of cooperative finance need to move in to ensure a new ecosystem of talent and opportunity develops.

The further we get from the worst days of 2020—where mass death, total economic shutdowns, food insecurity, and trade freezes were spreading—the less reasonable it will be for anyone to seek to increase tariffs. There is one exception to that, however: Where it is possible to use border adjustments to price in the cost of climate pollution, negotiated or unilalteral trade controls and fees can support improved risk reduction, financial stability, and sustainable development.

We have entered the age of climate disruption and destabilization. We have entered the age of cooperative resilience measures to address human security imperatives. We have entered the age of political legitimacy defined by serving the most vulnerable effectively. We must ask: Who is succeeding and how, and who is failing, and why?

When governments do not use trade relations to foster enhanced climate-resilient entrepreneurship, at the micro, small, and medium scales, they reject mutually beneficial value enhancements that protect people and property, lower costs, and bolster incomes. All people have a right to know whether their government is getting these things right, and whether companies are enabled to compete fairly and optimally by benefitting from trade that favors climate resilience.

In the coming years, multidimensional metrics that reveal these hidden costs will become increasingly important. Insurers, agribusiness, and other kinds of business and finance institutions, are already developing internal assessments aimed at understanding supply-chain vulnerabilities or disaster-related risks. Attribution science has advanced to the point we can trace intentional acts and legal liability to specific destructive business activities.

Article 6, paragraph 8 of the Paris Agreement invites all nations to cooperate bilaterally and in groups to drive progress on reducing climate risk, building resilience, eliminating poverty and hunger, and supporting sustainable development. Aligning financial regulations and incentives, measuring the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits, and prioritizing climate-smart trade, are ways to do this.

We should be in a cooperative race to the best possible future, where winners prosper by reducing embedded climate costs for everyone.

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It is not enough to “price in” risk estimates through insurance products; it is not enough to wait for major banks to decide that polluting practices are unlikely to sustain revenues long-term. Neither of these ways of “pricing in” risk is functioning organically or without political interference; policy choices are driving what is possible, both in terms of access to data and in terms of market size and related revenues.

One way to understand this is to look at food:

• Both prices and production practices are heavily dependent on public policy choices, including the use of subsidies.

• Even where subsidies are available to make it easier for farmers to afford insurance, private insurers are often unwilling to provide coverage in areas prone to extreme climate risk.

• Only government-backed insurance is available for many producers, and that is in wealthier countries with reliable government revenues.

• The volatility inherent in food prices—due to both farm products and fuels being traded commodities—obscures the fact that policy choices have been made that discount environmental risk and effectively ask consumers and producers to carry the cost.

• The most vulnerable people across the value chain have little means of predicting catastrophic cost or managing it when it hits.

• Financial incentives tend to allow large financial and corporate actors to capitalize on the vulnerability of smaller producers, again obscuring the numerous costly market failures.

We live in a world where harvest failure in one region can be offset by a surge in production from somewhere else, and yet we are already seeing this system fail. First, the practice means poor communities, including those that produce food for others, see hunger spreading. Second, climate-related risks and impacts, interacting with a background of worsening long-term environmental breakdown, are making it harder for most regions to surge production.

When harvests fail across multiple ‘breadbasket regions’, we are unlikely to be able to offset that loss as a global community. That means there will be hunger shocks on an unprecedented scale, and markets, which are already failing to produce real remedies for lost value, could unravel entirely, as trust is lost on all sides.

This is just one area where lack of adequate Earth system data is already creating grave inefficiencies. The Food System Economics Commission finds that unsustainable practices and their impacts, including environmental, disaster-related, and human health costs, add up to $15.428 trillion per year. Only the U.S. and China have economies that size or larger. This is value destruction we cannot afford—on the local, national, or global levels.

Cities and regions need working infrastructure to maximize the returns on investment for all investors, from those of freelancers to small and medium-sized enterprises, to municipalities and state or federal subsidies. As value is lost from unpriced market failures, all investments become less efficient. Infrastructure ages, without upgrading; services are sidelined for crisis management; rebuilding replaces innovation, costing more and delivering less in return.

Communities that cannot afford to maintain and upgrade infrastructure lose ground economically. Fewer people and businesses show up looking for a rewarding experience, and investment declines and collapses.

Though we live in an age of multilayered, interacting crises, doom and gloom do not need to dominate our perspective or experience. The outlook for local and regional sustainable development, including new investment, expanded job opportunity, even in the face of the AI boom, can be improved if Earth system data is used to help everyone get ahead of the risk and crisis-spending curve.

This starts with infrastructure, including data systems and data services. That does not, however, mean costly, energy-abusing data centers should be a local priority. Instead, data systems need to get more efficient and lightweight; even AI-based data platforms need to find ways to streamline their use of energy, materials, land, and water, and to operate away from population centers, conservation areas, watersheds, and farmlands.

The logistics of that land use challenge are a subject for another day, but Earth system data will be crucial to helping everyone decide how best to manage that challenge. This is where we need to focus in terms of local investment, resources, business model innovation, and mainstream practice.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can develop data flow management services, integrating and aggregating, or disaggregating and downscaling data, to provide useful decision insights to everyone in a local economy.

• Some of these SMEs might specialize in hard infrastructure or agricultural practices.

• Others might focus on Nature loss and related health and resilience questions, measuring biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, the viability of green infrastructure, and the human health benefits of urban tree cover.

• Still others might provide services that allow for uptake of new sustainable practices and leveraging of incentives and impact investment.

• Local banks could also step in with targeted services that play one or more of these roles and allow the larger institution or peer group to get a better view of the emerging landscape of economic opportunity.

When policy specialists talk about ‘infrastructure as an asset’, they are hinting at the need for this kind of intermediary service, which can document measurable benefits of better practices or manage financial assets that line up with those metrics. Municipalities can form and fund incubators that support development of this kind of sustainable innovation ecosystem, to allow spontaneous but structured discovery of valuable solutions.

The question for everyone, across value chains and industries, and in the policy realm and everyday business, is threefold: Where is the Earth system data we do not yet have ways to use? How can we access and apply it to our needs and priorities? What opportunity comes with applying Earth system data, not only in our own operations, but as part of an everyday economy that does so organically, in locally relevant ways?

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) knows this well, from experience of supporting the most vulnerable people forced to live far from home. This is what motivated the creation of UNHCR soccer balls, designed around artwork created by young people who know this experience, and the many acts of kindness and generosity it takes to overcome it.

Soccer is known as “the Beautiful Game”, because the ball floats around a vast green expanse, moving in careful arcs, sometimes in a flare of panic, always demanding a burst of athleticism from those seeking to take it to the goal or stop it from getting there, and because in almost every case, a goal materializes only when a whole team does a series of things just right, in a sequence that works only for that play.

To be excellent in soccer requires talent, hard work, and grace, and an understanding of how a team of 11 comes together to make each moment possible. All of this makes soccer a great way to bring young people together, even in the midst of profound hardship and vulnerability, to learn about what works and what does not work, and to build relationships that are based on something real.

This year’s World Cup is jointly hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico—all three nations of immigrants and refugees, all three modern democracies built around the principle that human rights are paramount. No nation is perfect; no nation is ideal or maintains its noblest demeanor at all times, but sport gives us the opportunity to pause, and to think about rules and principles and character and excellence.

The World Cup brings people together to celebrate the joy of being human, to honor the beauty of the Beautiful Game and the complexities that go into playing it well. Being human is more than existing, and it is more than being from one place or embodying a culture. There are challenges we all face, in our way, and there are examples of excellence we have to recognize as examples of what is best in our common humanity.

The UNHCR ‘Dream Ball’ soccer balls are meant to evoke all of this, and to remind us all that there are tens of millions of people involuntarily displaced, facing hardship, and wondering when they will find stability and security again.

• Thuria, who made the art on the blue soccer ball, wrote that “one could say that the hands are holding refugees gently, and the heart highlights the fact that refugees are people with feelings and hopes.”

• Maria, who made the art on the red soccer ball, explained: “I drew hands joined as in a team and a colorful heart. If they are united, it makes the arms connect with the lines next to the heart. Symbolizing how our love and support can help refugees and all the people in the world overcome difficulties.”

How we treat the most vulnerable people, at home and around the world, is the measure of our quality as a culture and as nations. We are safer in our humanity, our dreaming, and our freedom, when we honor our responsibilities to others who face those things being taken from them.

The proceeds from purchase of UNHCR Dream Balls will help to fund soccer and other sports programs for refugee children, and help to bring education, empowerment, personal growth, and opportunity to some of the world's most vulnerable.

Let’s translate the inspiration of the World Cup into actions and partnerships that lift up those who right now face the worst hardships. Let’s make the future better than the past.

National budgets in all regions include infrastructure, subsidies, agency support for rural economic development, food assistance, crop insurance, and other measures, aimed at reducing the destabilizing effects that flow from food systems falling out of alignment with climate dynamics.

The Food System Economics Commission found, after conducting the first global integrated assessment of the economics of food, in relation to planetary boundaries and the depletion of natural resources, that current practices are costing $15.428 trillion per year. These hidden costs are not sustainable, in a world where only two nations—the U.S. and China—have annual economic output exceeding that overall volume of cost and waste.

In 2020, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—a leading U.S. financial regulator—found that unchecked climate disruption would eventually collapse the financial system and stop it from supporting the macroeconomy. In 2021, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC)—another leading U.S. financial regulator—published similar findings.

In that future of systemic financial failure, even a nation as seemingly secure as the United States, a leading agricultural producer, a leading energy producer, with world-leading technology and financial wealth, could find itself unable to maintain basic services or the everyday economy people have come to expect.

Agricultural landscapes are dependent on groundwater, watersheds, precipitation, or a combination of these. Irrigation systems must draw fresh water from somewhere, and the unsustainable depletion of aquifers, together with the retreat of mountain glaciers and loss of forest and soil water retention across watersheds, have all led to our entering an “era of global water bankruptcy“.

Lack of coordinated attention to the preservation of fresh water supplies, including through climate change mitigation, means water-related destabilizing risks are spreading. Not only is food production in dependent communities and regions affected; so are food supplies and regional economies in both industrialized and vulnerable countries.

The Active Value Project has called for an integrated multidimensional metric based on assessment of the Balance of Hidden Costs and Co-Benefits (BHC). BHC calculations are crucial to undertsanding the real value of a given investment or industrial activity. To achieve this, an open, diverse, user-friendly networking of Earth systems science insights (NESSI) will be needed.

BHC and networked Earth system science insights will need to be available to marginal and vulnerable communities, as leverage for accessing results-based financing. Governments could support this expanded access to science insights, and the related expansion of economic opportunity, by supporting micro-scale, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) that translate data into funding and results into data.

The integration of value chains into traceable landscapes of producers, aggregators, distributors, and retailers, is crucial to providing consumers with the information they need to understand where their food is coming from, whether it is produced naturally or using chemicals, how workers are treated, and whether they face specific risks related to non-food ingredients. Much of this information is still not routinely available even in the most developed markets, as large companies lobby for the right to use misleading language, often obscuring key facts from customers.

Information integrity is easier to achieve if the information system is rooted, locally relevant, and rewarding to diversified local economic actors. This is why we propose small businesses as a key intermediary, which can be rewarded both with public sector incentives and enhanced targeted financing from the private sector and from multilateral agencies.

For example:

• Local soil ecology finance corporations (SEFCO) can manage data systems, aggregate and disaggregate financial flows, and prosper by providing verifiably independent, factual insights, to both investors and producers.

• Co-investment management agencies can operate as public or private-sector entities, to provide coordination services, including capacity-building and insight-sharing for development of climate-smart local and regional value chains.

• Field service practitioners can function as extension agents, supporting onboarding of new small-scale producers to sustainable cooperatives, through the adoption of new practices, with verifiable metrics.

• Regenerative practice-focused insurers can bring a new kind of financing to rural communities, by establishing their own function as best-practice propagators that successfully reduce costs for public agencies and corporates.

Behind all of this new, diversified economic opportunity is the question of food security climate risk, at the local, regional, and national levels, and internally to specific value chains. Food Security Climate Risk (FSCR) profiles can provide important leading edge insights into emerging risks, allowing recalibration and reorientation of public spending priorities.

• Major banks can support SEFCO services, which in turn deliver needed capital to local small-scale producers and regional cooperatives, to support adoption of regenerative practices and delivery of climate-related and sustainable development co-benefits.

• The critical need is not for risk profiles to be public information, subjecting the vulnerable to capital flight. Instead, they should be used as critical insights for realigning operations with future climate resilience.

• The delta between traceable risk and actionable innovation to build resilience can become an asset that attracts credit and investment.

• Governments can create incentive structures that invite this diversification of local and national banking activity.

• Insurers can capture and apply the data needed to prioritize resilience-building practices, and to reduce risk for their own clients, related local economies, and jurisdictions.

• Food Security Climate Risk profiles, driven by data and oriented toward cooperative innovation and economic diversification, can provide the common understanding of risk and opportunity.

By reducing risk proactively and on the basis of evidence, across multiple dimensions of economic, human, and planetary health, leading localities and value chains can reduce barriers and create attractive environments for new outcome-focused investment. FSCR profiles should include elements of sustainable value chain planning, with cooperative de-risking and innovation incubation as central goals for short, medium, and long-term planning.

Air quality index ratings above 150 are considered dangerous for all people, while lower levels can cause serious health threats to vulnerable people, including children, the elderly, and people living with degraded respiratory capacity.

• Guidance for everyone at levels above 150 include recommendations to limit outdoor activity, forego exercise and avoid walking even short distances.

• For vulnerable people, that recommendation to limit outdoor activity comes with levels as low as 50-100 AQI.

• When air quality alerts and emergency warnings are issued, everyone should consult the details behind the warning and seek to understand their own risk and recommended preventive measures.

The dense, choking wildfire smoke—which blocks sunlight and turns the skies orange, and sometimes brown or red—is the result of climate disrupting pollutants, which have made it far more likely for large wildfires to occur in dense Boreal Forest territory in Canada. Altered climate conditions also make it more likely these fires will grow to regional scales, larger than cities, and that they will become difficult to control.

The politics of climate policy should be straightforward:

• Heat-trapping gases are heating the planet.

• This is leading to disruption of major climate patterns and high-intensity impacts, like large-scale long-burning wildfires, horrific flood disasters, and dangerous storms.

• Providing for human security and livable conditions in cities and regions far from these impact locations requires a reduction in global heating pollution.

• Governments and the private sector should look for ways to innovate and develop sustainably, while not polluting.

• Communities, watersheds, food systems, and infrastructure, need new adaptation and resilience measures.

Unfortunately, those who profit from pollution or from other unsustainable activities, have opposed straightforward action to reduce climate risk and build resilience. In 2025 and 2026, this campaign of opposition to human security now includes efforts to dismantle science platforms and shut down major climate science reports that inform actions to protect human health.

The result is we are seeing climate disruption worsen, with impacts increasing threats to human health, security, and opportunity. When wildfire smoke spreads across continents and oceans, there is a need for specialized, multidimensional human security response measures. Such programs are now seeing reduced funding, due to degraded political support for climate action.

This is why Americans are being asked to stay indoors, to wear masks, and to treat the atmsophere around them as a threat to their health and the health of their loved ones. In the month the United States marks 250 years since its founding as a republic committed to universal human rights and natural freedom, the political sabotage of climate action is limiting human freedom in the most direct and intimate way.

We view it as crucial to understand that, at its founding, the United States was created to “establish Justice”, to “promote the general Welfare”, and to serve future generations (”posterity”) with honor and integrity. Beyond this:

• Article I of the Constitution requires a national commitment to the advancement of science.

• The First Amendment prohibits political manipulation or suppression of scientific findings.

• The Bill of Rights protects the right to bear witness and to have access to truthful information.

• The Fifth Amendment bars government from taking life or liberty, putting the value of human existence above the whims of political leaders.

• The Ninth Amendment clarifies that all human rights enjoy full legal protection, even if they are not written down.

Some in politics find this inconvenient—the idea that all human rights are protected by the Constitution. They worry that their space to act without accountability is reduced by this standard and that they cannot predict what rights might need specific newly stated protection or might arise in court.

The First Amendment prohibits government action to reduce ordinary people’s right to seek redress for harm caused. This is a reinforcement of the principle that the people are sovereign, not government leaders, and that all human rights are protected. The aim of American law is to reduce the room for unaccountable action by powerful people and institutions.

One of the reasons for the protection of universal human rights, including the right to science and information, is the recognition by the framers of the U.S. Constitution that access to facts, evidence, and learning, are necessary for the use of free will to make virtuous choices. We are not free to be good to each other, to protect human rights, or to serve future generations with honor and integrity, if we cannot access facts and solve problems.

Climate disruption and its impacts on everyday life are active degradations of the founding principles of American freedom, which we have learned to take for granted. Combatting climate disruption, reducing the spread of wildfire smoke and protecting the right to enjoy summer days, are projects involving all of society. Pursuing those solutions is a defense of human freedom.

Apocalyptic language does not motivate spontaneous, economy-wide cooperation. Institutions that do not act, or seem not to know how to act, to address this crisis, lose credibility, even when they are relaying facts, with evidence. Polluters prosper, to the extent that even brazen campaigns of corporate fraud seem to go unpunished and without correction.

All of this gives people the sense that climate shocks will play out like a state-run, big-money lottery: Someone, somewhere, will have a life-altering experience, but it is not likely to befall them. Their lifelong experience of never having faced catastrophe tells them this is the reasonable way to think, and political infighting and inaction fail to persuade them they are wrong.

There is no silver bullet, no single solution that can resolve all of the countless problems that flow from large-scale climate disruption. There is, however, a magic formula, which if all of the ingredients are added at the right time, in the right way, can stop global heating from getting worse, help communities build resilience, and secure the future of food systems, so economic development becomes sustainable and resilient prosperity becomes the norm.

The magic formula starts with recognizing that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 are a common-sense roadmap to functioning societies that intelligently meet the needs of human and planetary health. Any community, region, or nation, that makes real and deliberate progress on most or all of the SDGs will have better quality of life, more efficient investment flows, enhanced access to capital, and more sustainable wellbeing and security.

It is unreasonable to expect any society that ignores these everyday human priorities to be secure, stable, and prosperous. Increasingly, our turbulent new century reveals that moving backwards on these goals creates instability, unrest, and conflict, while moving forward on them reduces crime, corruption, and threats to human safety and to the security of nation states.

Powerlessness—including political marginalization and economic disempowerment—is a driver of injustice and of conflict. People who have no hope of progress are often subjected to degrading conditions, forced to flee their homes, to abandon the places where they have family, friends, roots, and memories, making them and their families vulnerable to exploitation and likely to suffer further hardships and injustices.

All functioning societies depend on favorable climate conditions. Our species has depended, for the entire history of organized societies, on major climate patterns that make our planet habitable and provide for ongoing, reliable agriculture and commerce. Climate disruption is creating wave after wave of shocks and displacements, with ripple effects that undermine everyday opportunity and wellbeing.

The second part of the magic formula is focused investment and action, at the human scale, to reward communities and businesses that advance the SDGs. Advancing one is good; advancing two, or three, or eight, is much better. Intead of using rhetoric and ideology to convince the public, leaders should take the actions that deliver results in people’s lives, so that whole economies begin to operate on a foundation of climate intelligence.

This may seem obvious, but political and economic experience in our time suggests even committed leaders struggle to maintain a politics of climate action and sustainable development. The reason, evidence suggests, is that major institutions are organized to externalize harm and cost—onto Nature and onto the most vulnerable. This takes us back to that cycle outlined above, in which failed progress breaks trust and reduces credibility.

Many of the societal and geopolitical crises of our time relate to the failure to prioritize the human benefits of the SDGs. Too often, governments are compelled to support dominant industries for fear of losing economic momentum; in most cases, those decisions postpone or discard vital opportunities for building new, sustainable and foundational value for future security and wellbeing.

Municipalities can organize their budgets around the Sustainable Development Goals, intentionally investing to reduce poverty and hunger, improve health and education, promote equality, opportunity, decent work, reduced pollution, clean water, and high-quality public services and infrastructure. By doing this, the program of climate resilient development ceases to be an argument and becomes a framework for everyday business and innovation.

It is harder to convince people to give up something good than it is to convince them that society must work to address a complex problem. Take the politics out of sustainability and climate action by investing intentionally to improve lives and create new opportunities for well-paid work that further improves lives.

The third part of the magic formula is to track progress in an integrated and open way. Let everyone develop a better understanding of how life is improving, and let those achieving that progress gain advantage by showing with evidence why their goods and services are preferable. Sustainability metrics are not a hindrance to business; they are a necessary tool for any serious commercial enterprise in our time of climate disruption.

Two more pieces make the magic formula work:

Fourth: fit the pieces together and work to fill gaps in sustainable and climate-resilient value chains. Modern industry has been organized around externalization of harm; this means climate-smart innovators often start with a structural disadvantage—most of all that there are not enough of them to form reliable, cost-effective value chains that minimize harm and maximize co-benefits.

Finally: treat the human experience of better practices as the fuel for further progress. Highlight benefits to human health and wellbeing—both because people need and welcome this and because human health impacts are among the most debilitating and fastest growing areas of cost to public budgets.

Better human experience is a driver of economic efficiency. We need new ways of measuring economic efficiency, because the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits has not been properly tracked before. Let people communicate to policy-makers what they need, what they are seeing in their environment, how specific new business models can be improved and made more stable and reliable.

So, the magic formula boils down to:

1. Plan around and pursue the Sustainable Development Goals.

2. Focus investment and action to achieve real improvements at the human scale.

3. Track progress, including through the use of new multidimensional metrics, and report openly.

4. Fill gaps in sustainable value chains.

5. Treat human experience as a key reservoir of insight; invite and facilitate dialogue.

To support progress in all of these areas, prioritize community-building landscapes and infrastructure that reinforces the good and disincentivizes the bad. Pope Leo XIV calls for a recommitment to the “magnificent humanity“ that artificial intelligence cannot replace, including grace, imagination, relationships, and experience.

We must start solving problems in an integrated and iterative way, with open dialogue across society, and between societies. Decision-makers must involve as many stakeholders as possible in decisions where it might be tempting to “let leaders lead”. It’s all hands on deck; we need sustainable innovation to be led from everywhere, to speed discovery, adoption, and economies of scale.

A republic is a democratic system, in which the people are sovereign and self-governing. This is the ethos of American political life. We organize our lives, our communities, our several states, and our country, in a collaborative way, for the benefit of all. A call for common sense in political life established the revolutionary idea that “no taxation without representation” can be legitimate, and so jurisdiction is about service, not control. We decide, together, how to make a livable future. So, we are all, in this sense, democrats.

Rights are universal and unalienable. Office-holders are servants of everyone else, even—and maybe especially—of the marginalized and vulnerable. What the Declaration of Independence did right, and did so effectively, was to recognize that all human beings are inherently valuable as human beings, and that all human rights are inherent and unalienable. No person can be separated from their humanity, or from the active protection of their rights by the rule of law.

The mission of the country is idealistic and ambitious—to “establish Justice”, provide for “the general Welfare”, and to secure the rights and liberties of future generations. The Declaration treats anti-immigrant policies as a violation of everyone’s human rights, and The Constitution would eventually require Congress to support and advance immigration and naturalization as integral to the national purpose.

The republic was not only for those already there; it was to be a beacon of freedom and a place of refuge and opportunity. It stood for the rights and dignity of all humankind, and yet:

• Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation that imposing enslavement on the colonies be listed as one of the tyrant’s abuses—“a cruel war against human nature itself”—was rejected by co-authors who felt doing so would divide the union and make it vulnerable to reconquest.

• The Constitution would be written in a way that made room for enslavement in states that allowed it, even as the Bill of Rights issued the clear, absolute, and legally binding mandate that “No person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law…“

• Women were not explicitly recognized as having equal rights and would not be allowed to vote at all until 1920.

• The description of Native American peoples in the last of the grievances listed in the Declaration reflected real, ongoing violence against Native peoples and helped to enable more than a century of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing.

A nation that allows such exclusions and injustices cannot succeed in achieving such a bold and transcendent mission. So, the republic has been defined by its complicated, inconsistent striving—to be a safe haven for persecuted peoples and the agent of rescue for humankind against the tyranny wrought by those who seek power to grant themselves wealth and impunity. That striving is real, and it is all the more important, because it is complicated by original sins and by ongoing injustice.

Our greatest moments have been defined by openness, and by the additional liberation of people formerly oppressed and abused. Americans of all perspectives and persuasions recognize the freedom of the human mind and spirit as a core value; in that, we are all liberals.

In all our diversity, we believe authority is conditioned on serving honorably. We believe human rights are unalienable. We believe all people are born free and all institutions must honor that fact. We have led the establishment of international bodies centered on these core values, with authority to rally nations to the defense of human rights and dignity.

To celebrate the boldness and humanity of the nation’s stated mission, we must recognize that indigenous peoples lived a history of at least 30,000 years, before Europeans arrived. In the Guna language of what is now Panamá, the Americas were called ‘Abya Yala‘, which means the mature land. Stewardship of landscapes and ecosystems, and of wildlife, was integral to many Native American cultures.

The land was cultivated and cared for, and wildlife populations and forest and river ecosystems were managed, so abundance would follow. The Constitution’s recognition of the duty to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” to future generations draws on this example of stewardship.

The Constitution requires advancement of science not to deplete and destroy vital ecosystems, but to ensure enduring health, security, and wellbeing. This is how Pres. Theodore Roosevelt came to see conservation as a core national purpose. It is why we must treat planetary health as integral to our project of cooperative empowerment and protection.

The Library of Congress also recognizes the significant role played by the Native American nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, in shaping the federal system of deliberative self-government that would be established after the Revolution.

The Pennsylvania Gazette reports that, in a meeting with envoys from Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and delegates of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, in 1744—32 years before the Declaration—the Iroquois leader Canassatego “advocated the federal union of the American colonies,” saying:

“Our wise forefathers established a union and amity between the [original] Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another.”

The United States Senate recognized by resolution on September 16, 1987, that:

“the original framers of the Constitution, including most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Whereas the confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies into one republic was explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.”

Freedom is a natural human condition, but it becomes real in our everyday lives when institutions are compelled to honor the right of all people to be whole, free, imaginative, and of service to our shared project.

It would take the American democratic republic 15 years of war and negotiation to fully establish the new Constitution and system of government. It would take another 74 years to establish the formal, legal, and practical end of human enslavement. The republic would be 144 years old before women—who comprise the majority of the population—would be able to vote to help decide who serves in public office.

A full century would pass after the end of the Civil War, before civil rights and voting rights, and the right to remain free from terrorist violence, would be confirmed to belong to all people, regardless of race. From the 1830s through the 1960s, terrorist militia opposed to universal rights—the purpose of the nation—would commit mass murder and would corrupt public institutions in local communities and in many states.

When we talk about the founders and the framers, the revolutionary people and movements that make American freedom real, we must recognize Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and countless others who risked everything to end the “cruel war against human nature itself” that was the evil of enslavement. Their courage and example improved conditions for all Americans, by removing from our system of laws the allowance for unbridled evil against innocents.

In our 250th year, we saw a remarkable resurgence in awareness about both the stated mission of our nation and the very real power of ordinary people, local communities, and civil society. When a campaign of extrajudicial violence and imprisonment targeted the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, first hundreds, then thousands, of people organized to help those in need and to defend the foundational legal principle that no one’s humanity can be discounted or disregarded by the state.

When two American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—were murdered for speaking up for that very principle—foundational to the nation, to our laws, and to the major religions most Americans espouse—that violence against innocents is unacceptable, tens of thousands of people rallied to the cause.

Groups of neighbors organized to deliver food and medicine to families hiding from roving paramilitary units. Doctors and nurses made house calls to ensure persecuted families did not go without care. Clergy, community centers, small businesses, and school teachers escorted children to and from school and stood unarmed against heavily armored militia members operating outside the rules set by the Bill of Rights.

It was America at its best. The movement was more redirection than resistance—a reminder that people have a right to be decent to each other. For our next 250 years, may we recognize this foundational spirit of shared liberation through common decency, that our 9th Amendment protects all human rights, whether they are written into law or not, and our 10th Amendment situates ultimate authority in the people.

This practice was recognized by the Rev. Carolyn Cavaness, on the occasion of the award of the Liberty Medal to Pope Leo XIV, when she called on all Americans to remember “ancestors who built institutions of care when the nation would not.” In his remarks, Pope Leo called for a national recommitment to founding ideals of universal rights and dignity, and celebrated a national character of “generosity and nobility of heart”.

When we talk about leadership and the defining of our shared values, we must also remember all of the people who have served—in the armed forces, as medics and reporters on the front lines, as teachers and postal workers, and local municipal staff. Those quiet contributors to the common defense and the general welfare are real leaders in our shared project of liberation. Those who sacrifice do so not for power-holders, but for everyone else who lives quietly, out of the gaze of history, making things work.

1776 was about many things, but principally, it was about the opportunity to make your own life in your own way. We have before us the same profound challenge that faced the founders—to resist the structural temptation to empower tyrants, in defense of a limited subset of ideas.

Democracy is hard work; it requires everyone to be part of the process of deliberative governance. When we tune out, stop reading, make reflexive decisions, and prejudge those who differ from us, we undermine our chances at successful self-government.

Liberty demands that no person be treated as less than fully worthy of the unwavering protection of a great republic. No person should be excluded from the opportunity to pursue lifelong education and to apply their talents. No person should be less able to vote and to shape our government.

We must distinguish, together, in a cooperative way, between those values that liberate humankind and those that make room for cruelty and neglect. As we mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let’s treat each other as the allies that we are bound to be: Freedom is secure when we are free together.

After the SB64 round of UN Climate Change negotiations, we held a small-group debrief to review four critical points of leverage for mainstreaming climate solutions:

• Diversifying local economies, including in remote and vulnerable communities;

• Climate-resilient agriculture, conservation, and sustainable development;

• Leveraging data systems to support enhanced investability and right-scaling;

• Climate-smart trade, including local and international banking, and climate resilience services.

As projected, the discussion highlighted food systems and infrastructure as essential structural imperatives for shifting to climate-resilient practices:

• Food systems solutions related to climate risk, resilience, and opportunity can serve as an anchor for everyday sustainable development and safeguard for future budget stability.

• We explored opportunities for mainstreaming through infrastructure, adaptation and resilience measures, and locally rooted cooperative de-risking and right-scaling.

The most salient insight emerging from the discussion was that jurisidctions and institutions large and small, with local or global reach, should aim to infuse climate progress into existing services. What that looks like in each case will vary, and there may be a “messy middle”—between high ambition goals and the eventual everyday living reality—where mistakes are made, lessons learned, and unexpected innovations are proven to be the most useful.

This question of unexpected innovations—those we cannot predict, which might arise from local needs, conditions, skills, and aspirations, and for which there is no pre-established market, and that do important work to solve climate-related problems—was reviewed as a matter of justice, access, sustainable development, and everyday opportunity.

• How, for instance, can marginal communities that need to innovate on the basis of city-level innovations access the technology and know-how to make modest but transformational local advances?

• Are there policy-based incentives, or financial mechanisms, that can be used to create more opportunity of this kind, to allow more places and more people to be not just beneficiaries or adopters of climate-smart practices, but innovators?

• Can existing small business support mechanisms—both those used in advanced economies and in emerging economies—be recalibrated to fit this need and to accelerate discovery and implementation?

• What role to mainstream commercial banks have in facilitating this kind of local economic diversification, and can public spending on infrastructure, food systems, public health, and disaster risk management, support them?

There was interest from stakeholders in both urban and rural landscapes in the Turquoise Nexus Initiative:

As a proposed programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) Partnership, the TNI will bring together governments, international organizations, research institutions, civil society, and the private sector around a common agenda for climate-resilient, water-centered agriculture and food systems. It will aim to enable developing countries to embed integrated food-water-climate approaches into their nationally determined contributions and Paris Agreement implementation efforts.

Earth Civics has advocated for integrating regenerative agriculture and agroecological land use practices, with watershed management and ecosystem restoration, to create investable opportunities for summit to seabed resilience-building. Downstream communities, as well as coastal and marine ecosystems, can benefit from clean farming practices upstream, which not only avoid pollution but support more resilient and healthier ecosystems and watersheds.

Infrastructure can be engineered to serve multiple overlapping needs, to support transit, water management, data gathering and distribution, access to markets, intermediary services, international ports, and financing. The right composition of local, regional, and national policy and incentive structures can, and should, serve climate, biodiversity, food, health, and development objectives.

On questions addressed in Bonn, in relation to financing of water systems, ocean health, ecosystems, and poverty eradication, participants in our debrief unanimously called for agricultural investments that support progress in all of these areas by rewarding small-scale producers for regenerative and agroecological practices and for related benefits to human and planetary health.

A suggestion was made that the emerging Good Food Finance Co-Investment Platform (CIP), intended to support sustainable food security and climate-resilient development, include coordinating and business model design functions that facilitate adoption of climate-smart practices, reducing risk for stakeholders downstream, including public authorities, builders, farms, and businesses.

It was also suggested that a strategy be developed for linking climate data and information about water resources to targeted financial mechanisms, to make it easier to show that specific investments are not only building climate resilience but also delivering measurable benefits to human health and to related areas of public spending and costs to consumers. Could the CIP provide such insights to small businesses, while adjusting financial arrangements and linking to international climate finance flows?

The next Resilient Prosperity Forum event will examine:

• Key points of progress on the way to the COP31 round of negotiations in Türkiye;

• Emerging financial innovations, including the CIP and similar mechanisms, to support climate-smart practices;

• Examples of mainstreaming, in which climate progress is infused into local economies;

• Priority investments for infrastructure, farming, and banking services that support climate progress.

Concepts & Applications

While examining the four levers of transformation—diversifying local economies, shifting to climate-resilient agriculture, leveraging data systems to support enhanced investability and right-scaling, and linking to climate-smart trade and banking—participants asked for a short list of potential applications, or institutional evolutions.

The following were put forward by Earth Civics, after reviewing work by affiliated organizations and networks, and the substance of the SB64 talks:

1. Macroeconomy Stabilization Funds

2. Multidimensional Metrics

3. Co-Investment Platforms

4. Cooperative De-Risking Strategies

5. Networking Earth System Science Insights

6. Incubators for Local Sustainable Finance Ventures

Macroeconomy Stabilization Funds

A reserve-holdings fund that invests to secure stocks of needed supplies and supply capacity, to bridge everyday needs and prevent price shocks, especially with regard to life-sustaining basic needs. The goal is to pool funding, financial instruments, and assets from public and private-sector, multilateral and philanthropic sources.

Multidimensional Metrics

To operate optimally in our present age of pervasive and compounding risk, rapid change, and systemic disruption, we need to be able to assess the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits (BHC). BHC metrics play an important role in the wider process of determining where there is greater or lesser non-financial value creation, contributing to overall economic value, opportunity, and sustainability. It is also a generic term that can apply to many different versions of this process.

Co-Investment Platforms

The Good Food Finance Co-Investment Platform will aim to marshal US $10 billion of core catalytic capital from public‑sector and philanthropic sources, multilateral development finance institutions (MDFIs), and select private-sector core capital providers. A structured finance architecture will leverage 8 to 15 times more private‑sector capital, with the aim of mobilizing US $150 billion of additional private investment over ten years.

Cooperative De-Risking Strategies

Cooperative de-risking (CDR) is a general term for a diverse range of financial and non-financial tools used to convert forecasted future savings (from avoiding harm to people and Nature) into present-day investment dollars, through integrated value-chain upgrading strategies and targeted co-investments aimed at shoring up the most vulnerable places and practitioners. An example is the Innovative Collaborative Funding Model put forward by Good Food Finance Network partners.

Networking Earth systems science insights

To achieve informational integrity, and so to establish a solid, shared foundation for informed climate-related decision-making, there is a need for well-established, innovative, and connective Earth science data systems, insight-sharing platforms, and data used by decision-makers in the public and private sectors, to connect and support mainstream science-based undertsanding of everyday problems. The Networked Earth Systems Science Initiative (NESSI) aims to achieve this.

Incubators for local sustainable finance ventures

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that specialize in creating opportunities for investors and for small and medium-scale value chain contributors aiming to support better outcomes for human and planetary health are needed. Their function is to right-scale large financial flows, including sustainability-focused bonds, fiscal stability measures, decarbonization and Nature restoration incentives, and other focused modes of financing, so they match the needs of small-scale local businesses.

This Knicks team has inspired love and devotion on a level beyond all expectations. There are many reasons for that: One is the way they win. The Nova Knicks’ style of play is studious, hard-working, no-nonsense, and crafty. Team Captain Jalen Brunson sets the tone. He was asked if he thought it was impossible to come back from 29 points down; he answered simply:

Asked about being consistently discounted, Brunson said people make the mistake of valuing everything that isn’t heart. The 6’2” point guard fearlessly went straight at the league’s defender of the year, 15 inches taller than him, and scored by constantly inventing moves and shooting angles that can’t be predicted.

When the Knicks say they work to “find a way”, they aren’t talking about luck or guesses, or a hit and miss approach; they are talking about solving problems.

The Knicks play like it matters.

It matters how you play… that you learn from mistakes… that you share and create opportunities for your teammates… that you put in an honest effort, always… that you respect the sport, the rules, the fans, and what it means to be inspired or to be an inspiration… that you remember your roots and your journey… that you treat the pressure of competition as something sacred, not a burden or annoyance.

It matters that you always keep trying, and have the humility to keep growing.

The last Knicks championship took place in the 3rd quarter of the 20th century. We are now living in the 2nd quarter of the 21st. The weight of all those decades adds gravity to each basket, to value of each player’s contribution, and to the hope generations of fans are learning to be comfortable with.

Tonight’s game started with a flood of Knicks fans making their presence known and cheering for their team. People are traveling for this team, investing to be part of this team’s historic run. It is because it matters how you play.

Defense dominated the first few minutes. Both teams wanted to make sure they didn’t give anything away.

The Knicks changed the dynamic in the second quarter, making San Antonio fight for every basket, and using their creative understanding of the flow of play to keep the ball moving their way. By the end of the first half, the Knicks had scored fewer than 40 points, but trailed by only 5.

Their defense was succeeding, and that was setting the stage for winning in the end. By the end of the game, the Spurs were fighting to stay in the game.

Jalen Brunson carried the Knicks, hitting his 43rd point to give the Knicks their 86th—half the points for the team. His 45 points were the most points ever scored by a Knicks player in an NBA Finals game. Only the great Michael Jordan has scored as many in an NBA Championship close-out game on the road.

And yet, as always, Brunson’s brilliance was intertwined with an excellent display of teamwork.

The Captain does not achieve record scoring figures on his own; he get there by motivating and organizing his teammates to each do as much as they can to make the team a success; his leadership and their trust puts him in position to do what he does.

He is loved not only for his heart, his grit, his inventiveness, and his fearlessness. He is loved for building this team. Brunson took a gave up $113 million so the organization could invest in the best possible group of teammates. Teamwork is the engine.

The Nova guys—Brunson, Hart, and Bridges—are now the first trio of teammates to win both the NCAA National Championship and the NBA Finals.

In each of their NBA Finals wins, the Knicks overcame significant deficits:

• In Game 1, at Madison Square Garden, they trailed by 14 with 6:31 left in the 3rd quarter.

• In Game 2, they trailed by 14 with 5:59 left in the 4th quarter.

• In the stunning, record-setting Game 4 comeback, they trailed by 20 with 9:33 left in the 4th, after trailing by 29.

• In Game 5, before clinching the title. the Knicks trailed by 10 with 7:43 left in the 4th.

The Knicks have shown that careful hard work, character, and ingenuity, all within the straightforward rules of the game, allow an exemplary group of teammates to become champions.

That better way, that display of solidarity, is what millions have needed for a long time. That is why it is frequently said this team is bigger than basketball.

The costs of climate disruption and Nature loss are human costs. Even when we look beyond the balance sheet, to consider non-financial ‘hidden costs‘, the very idea of cost tends to come back to what it means for the prospects of human security and thriving. Many costs are not built into the prices we see on products we purchase; instead, they filter through the economy, compounding each other’s effects and undermining security and wellbeing.

The costs of unsustainable practices are estimated to exceed $15.4 trillion per year, when focusing only on food and agriculture and their ripple effects. The intersecting and compounding risks some call the polycrisis are now generating costs across the everyday economy, in all regions around the planet.

While some nations are pulling back funding for international aid and development efforts, it remains the case that the biggest opportunities for thriving in a secure and sustainable way are linked to climate-resilient development and locally relevant implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The SDGs are not a global regime; they are a list of priorities that people everywhere not only share, but have a right to see advanced in good faith. How they are implemented must depend on local and regional context, and will be limited by national policy and agency structures.

As 195 nations gather in Bonn for the mid-year meetings on implementation of the UN Climate Change Convention and the Paris Agreement, delegates are weighing preferred options for advancing climate-resilient development and, ideally, doing so in cooperation with other nations.

What should successful climate cooperation look like? That is the ever-present question, and vast industries are arrayed against the best outcome, simply because they profit from practices that are destructive of irreplaceable natural goods and unsustainable.

This question is at the heart of negotiations around:

• Cooperative, phased reductions of global heating emissions;

• Transformation of agricultural practices and restoration of living landscapes;

• Strategies for locally relevant adaptation measures to reduce risk and harm;

• The co-design of investment approaches to build long-term resilience;

• Sharing of information—science data, new technologies, precision performance metrics;

• How to evolve financial institutions and arrangements;

• Protection of human rights and the rights of Nature—including health of watersheds and ocean ecosystems.

In each of these areas, the Paris Agreement invites nations to actively cooperate to improve the chances for successful climate-resilient development for local communities. The mechanisms are not set in stone; like the SDGs, climate cooperation is not a global regime, but a voluntary sharing of insights, opportunities, investments, and breakthroughs.

While negotiations focus on how insights, technologies, and evidence can best be shared, and how to finance best-case development, the following priorities can deliver real-world benefits that make future choices more attractive:

1. Focus on food – Climate-resilient development requires regenerative, agroecological food systems that restore and protect Nature and improve lives and livelihoods. Treat human and ecosystem health as a continuum.

2. Diversify decision-making – Too much needs to be done too quickly to leave decisions of multigenerational consequence to just a few high-ranking officials; invite stakeholders to co-design policies and investment arrangements.

3. Localize financial innovation – Evolving financial institutions and arrangements to support successful climate-resilient development naturally suggests a wider base of financial actors and activities. Support local MSMEs to expand opportunity.

4. Build better infrastructure – Climate-resilient infrastructure can include roads and bridges, trains and ports, but also coastal flood management systems, science observation capacity, and telecommunications. Invest for the best outcomes.

5. Incentivize zero pollution – Most industries can now operate without polluting; the obstacles tend to be access to capital, transition risk, and habit. Public incentives can help eliminate pollution and spur innovation.

One example of how to act on all of these priorities is the emerging Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation.

• The CIP will allow co-investors from the public and private sectors, with support from philanthropy and multilateral agencies, to access capital, restructure existing financial arrangements, and invest to motivate a transition to regenerative and agroecological practices and related job creation in services, infrastructure, and data.

• To optimize the flow of capital to local needs, local MSMEs will play a critical role, acting as translators and aggregators, matching data and performance to capital and credit. This is what makes the CIP a platform—the cooperative, mutlidimensional approach, including insight-sharing and non-financial contributions.

• Not only are local intermediaries crucial, but so are stakeholder insights. It makes little sense to make a big bet on one approach to a diverse range of conditions. Instead, the CIP will leverage local insights about needs, capacities, and aspirations, to build an ever more solid foundation for sustainable food systems.

• Infrastructure that supports everyday development can be optimized to support health-building, climate-resilient, sustainable food systems. This has the effect of de-risking related investments, so de-risking can be coordinated and cooperative.

• Regenerative and agroecological food systems, lower risk and cost for infrastructure and public budgets, and sustainable opportunity for communities large and small, all require elimination of pollution and protection of natural systems, including watersheds, ecosystems, and the broader climate system. Public incentives can address all of these goals together, while helping to reduce pollution, diversify local investment opportunities, and secure food supplies.

Finally, for the SB64 round of negotiations, we recommend:

• Integrating these kinds of cooperative innovations into insight-sharing platforms, indicators of progress on mitigation and adaptation goals, and financial arrangements.

• Openly calling for a transition to climate-smart trade, to facilitate the flow of resources to each of these layered and intersecting areas of interest.

• Supporting first movers and first followers in shifting to regenerative, resilience-building, sustainable practices, with existing and novel approaches.

RELATED

New Jersey lawmakers are poised to tap unused film tax credits to shore up the state’s local and public media.

The Senate Economic Growth Committee on Monday discussed legislation that would allow the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to auction off millions in tax credits each year to generate funding to back hyperlocal news outlets and the state’s faltering public media organization.

“Public media is going through a transformation of what it looks like in this new ecosystem, and New Jersey struggles to have a Jersey-specific focus from north to central to south to the shore and every single piece,” said Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex).

Though the present version of the bill calls for $20 million to be annually pulled from the $400 million in yearly film tax credits New Jersey authorized through 2049, Zwicker said that amount would be reduced to $15 million. Zwicker also said a $15 million appropriation from the state’s general fund will be removed from the bill to detach funding for local and public media from the state’s annual budget process, Zwicker said.

Bolstering New Jersey-focused media is important as residents increasingly turn to social media feeds for news, said Sen. Nilsa Cruz-Perez (D-Camden), the panel’s chair.

“It’s scary that people think social media, Facebook and all the other outlets, are the ones who are giving you information,” she said. “Sometimes that information is not true. It’s been put in there without any research whatsoever.”

Recent budget cycles have not been kind to public media.

In the 2024 fiscal year, state funding for the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit created to fund and encourage local journalism, totaled $4 million. It fell to $3 million the following year, then to $2.5 million in the current fiscal year. Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s first budget proposal would zero out that line item.

As written, Zwicker’s bill would direct at least $5 million annually to the consortium, but it’s unclear how those details may change before the bill sees a committee vote.

The consortium has provided some funding to the New Jersey Monitor.

The governor proposed cutting a separate $1 million line item supporting NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News, its news arm, to $250,000. That reduction added to deeper federal cuts that prompted WNET, the corporate parent of NJ PBS since 2011, to shed public broadcasting.

State officials last week announced Montclair State University had been awarded a contract to run New Jersey’s four public television stations for up to 15 years as part of an agreement that includes weeknight newscasts and other public affairs programming.

The bill’s supporters said reliable funding would enable local government news coverage that has largely disappeared in New Jersey compared to the decades of yore.

“We’ve witnessed firsthand the rapid decline of local journalism. Major publications have either ceased publication or have closed. The consequences are stark: New Jersey now ranks 49th out of 50 states in terms of journalists per capita, leaving our residents without reliable local news essential to a functioning democracy,” said Lisa Sahulka, the consortium’s executive director.

Dedicated funding would allow the consortium to expand, Sahulka said.

Since being signed into law in 2018, the consortium has issued more than $12 million in grants, which are funded by individual and corporate donations alongside state assistance.

“People like my parents need good, strong journalism, good civil information now more than ever,” said Jerome Montes, a member of the consortium’s board. “This is very much a worthwhile investment. It’s worth it both for the strength of our democracy and the individual decisions that millions of residents make with regards to their pocketbooks and with regards to what goes on in their townships every day.”

Some of the bill’s provisions are still under negotiation, Zwicker said, and the legislation was not ready for a committee vote Monday. He hoped to advance it before the Legislature breaks for its customary summer recess, which generally starts on July 1 after the state budget is signed.

“We’ve got a few more details to work out. I hope to get this bill in front of the committee for a full vote in the very near future, but the most important thing here is that we’re working together to create a vibrant, thorough, New Jersey-centric broadcast and media ecosystem,” Zwicker said.

Republished courtesy of the New Jersey Monitor, under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The Constitution of the United States requires the President to ask Congress for a declaration of war, in order to engage in hostilities against any nation that is not engaged in an actual or imminent military invasion of U.S. territory. It does not offer exceptions for perceived risk or intelligence assessments; it does not give the President discretion.

The War Powers Act was an effort to reinforce this principle after the Nixon administration engaged in a number of covert wars in Southeast Asia—the effect of which was widespread harm to civilians, ongoing destabilization, and harm to U.S. influence and security. It requires the President to seek explicit authorization for the use of military force within 60 days of initiating hostilities in response to a perceived imminent threat.

President Trump has not sought an explicit authorization, instead asking for $200 billion in supplemental funding. The first strikes against Iran took place 96 days ago, at the end of February. It is, as a matter of Constitutional law, unlawful for Donald Trump or his Secretary of Defense to order offensive strikes, whatever their reasoning.

Amid the early strikes, the administration appears to have committed a grave war crime, when it used artificial intelligence to circumvent civilian harm reduction safeguards, and launched repeated missile strikes at a primary school for girls in Minab. The follow-up strikes were apparently intended to honor the Secretary of Defense’s unlawful demand for “no quarter”.

U.S. federal law, military law, and international law, all require commanders to take all possible steps to ensure no civilians or civilian infrastructure is targeted or struck. The Minab strike appears to show that those safeguards were ignored, removed, or overridden, in a coordinated way. Congress has called for formal investigation of all relevant operational questions.

The vote in the House was, in part, an effort to persuade the administration to provide evidence, seek legal authorization, and establish a lawful purpose for continuing the use of force against the regime in Tehran. The effect, however, is that there are now in the formal Congressional record, clear votes in both chambers of Congress clarifying that Congress has not granted Constitutional authority for this war.

Members of both the Republican and Democratic parties have also been critical of the administration’s apparent misuse of the military in other ways, as well. For instance:

• A record loan from the Department of Defense, giving $600 million in taxpayer money to a company linked to the President’s son, has raised questions about self-dealing and organized corruption.

• The revelation that Mr. Trump and others close to him, including the Secretary of Defense, have purchased stock in companies linked to national security or to oil markets, around key moments in the ongoing conflict, suggest there may be a pattern of illegal trading in insider information, including classified national security information.

• Highly accomplished military officers have been removed from promotion lists, apparently because of their race or sex, while unqualified Trump loyalists—some with glaring conflicts of interest—have been put into sensitive positions.

The House vote to re-establish Constitutional authority over the armed forces and national security policy is the latest rebuke in a season of inflamed tensions. Sen. Ted Cruz described on his podcast a heated meeting in which Republican senators screamed at the Acting Attorney General—who is also Donald Trump’s former personal defense attorney—for attempting to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to give taxpayer funds to Trump allies.

The fund was part of a purported settlement reached between Trump and his own agencies in a $10 billion lawsuit he filed that legal scholars say had no legal merit. Dozens of judges published a brief expressing their view that the settlement was illegal and amounted to corruption. The court set aside the settlement, ordered the fund canceled, and demanded information from the Department of Justice about its decision-making process.

In Constitutional terms, the vote was a vote to end the war against Iran. President Trump cannot legitimately order offensive military strikes without explicit authorization from Congress. The President might seek to continue limited military operations around protection of military bases and civilian infrastructure of allies in the region.

The Speaker of the House warned the vote would limit the President’s ability to act as Commander in Chief. That is, in fact, precisely what the Constitution envisions. The Constitution treats combat command functions as coming into being only during an active and lawful armed conflict. Outside of that, the President’s role is one of faithful administrator of Congressional mandates.

By Sophie Nieto-Muñoz, for the New Jersey Monitor

A day after being caught in a cloud of pepper spray during a violent protest outside Newark immigration detention center Delaney Hall, Sen. Andy Kim said he is pressing federal officials to restore all family visitation privileges, speed up stalled immigration court cases, and conduct a full medical audit of detainees held inside the facility.

“What I witnessed was really heartbreaking — just seeing Americans fighting other Americans in the streets, the level of division,” Kim, a Democrat, said in an interview Tuesday. “And it’s not just that, it’s what I heard and saw inside the detention facility.

Kim said he is alarmed after speaking over the long weekend with dozens of the 700-plus detainees held at the facility, describing a pregnant woman who is not receiving medical attention and a detainee who has been hospitalized for two weeks with her family unable to find out any details.

“They said they can’t divulge that information because of security purposes,” he said.

Kim said he was told family members can file public information requests to get information about their loved ones.

“I mean, that’s absurd,” he said.

Kim’s comments come after a chaotic few days at Delaney Hall that began Friday with family members of detainees saying inmates launched a hunger and labor strike to protest conditions inside, escalated with more protests over the weekend, and devolved into chaos Monday when federal agents clashed with protestors who tried to block vehicles from exiting the jail’s property. Kim was among those injured when agents fired pepper balls into the crowd.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January and has clashed with the Trump administration over its immigration policies, visited Delaney Hall on Monday intending to inspect the interior, but she was denied entry. She told reporters Monday that the denial of access was “really concerning to me.”

Sherrill also condemned the federal government’s decision to send in additional agents to the facility amid the protests, contrasting it with Essex County’s move to set up a hospitality tent for demonstrators.

“The federal government is moving further and further away from our values here in New Jersey,” she said.

The Department of Homeland Security said on social media that no individuals were struck by pepper ball projectiles, and blamed protestors for escalating on Monday.

“The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly – not rioting. DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” the post reads. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous—obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the visits by New Jersey elected officials a “political stunt” and denied a hunger strike is taking place. Several House representatives and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka joined Kim and Sherrill in visiting the jail.

Kim brushed off the characterization and said the post was discouraging to see.

“It just kind of shows how this administration is often more interested in pouring gasoline on the fire,” he said.

Kim said the fixes he’s calling for don’t require new legislation, adding that the federal government has the power and funding to do it now. He also criticized Geo Group, the private contractor running Delaney Hall, for prioritizing profit over providing better food or hiring more doctors.

“We have a for-profit system that’s trying to capitalize off human misery and is not accountable to anyone,” he said.

Republished courtesy of the New Jersey Monitor, under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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May 22 is the International Day for Biological Diversity—a shared opportunity to recognize that we are not separate from Nature.

We are Nature.

How does that translate into local, everyday experience? If you are part of a conversation that is asking that question, you are further along than many people, communities, and institutions.

Too often, institutions demand we adopt the view that everyday life and the natural world are separate and distinct realities and that caring for Nature is a luxury, not an essential responsibility of all people and jurisdictions. Governments even incentivize business and finance to operate according to this skewed vision of our relationship to living systems.

So, how does being integral to Nature translate into local, everyday experience?

1. The air we breathe and the water we drink are not only highly sensitive to pollutants; they deliver that pollution into our bodies, ensuring pollution becomes an immediate, persistent, and urgent human health issue, wherever it occurs.

2. Agricultural landscapes depend on stable climate patterns, robust and reliable snowpack, glacial melt, rainfall, and watersheds, as well as the ecosystems that sustain (and are sustained by) pollinators.

3. Biodiverse, healthy rainforests and marine ecosystems, from oxygen-creating microbes and kelp to bioluminescent jellyfish and blue whales, anchor the global carbon cycle, stabilizing climate patterns, as well as climatic and ecological anchors, like glaciers, snowpack, and land-based watersheds.

4. Built infrastructure is highly sensitive to shock events generated by disrupted climate patterns and other natural systems.

5. Failure on any of these fronts—and we are failing on all of them at the same time—imposes real and pervasive costs to human beings; those costs come in the form of ill health, lost opportunity, and higher prices for everyday goods.

6. Beyond this: The very stability of nation states rests on the question of whether we can avoid shock price increases, destabilizing mass migration events, and the loss of national wealth and opportunity to nonstop disaster response.

Biodiversity is a signal of ecological health and resilience. Over billions of years, the Earth’s living ecosystems have evolved to afford optimal conditions for competitive, cooperative thriving. Nature’s ability to cope with and diffuse the effects of industrial activity are weakened when biodiversity and ecological resilience are weakened. Your health depends on the health of Nature.

As we consider ways to support biodiversity and ecological health and resilience, it makes sense to treat biodiversity as a measure of human health and security—both in our personal understanding and as a matter of public policy. It is also useful to leverage the protection of biodiversity to support an integrated approach to planetary health and sustainable development.

Richer soils more effectively filter water, protecting watersheds, clean water, and the health of people and of ecosystems. They also more effectively sink carbon and so provide better climate-stabilization services, which have measurable benefits across the economy and for human health and security.

Intact ecosystems that have a sufficient buffer against human intrusion are also far less likely to result in zoonotic disease transfer from wildlife to humans. This means the risk of pandemic-related shocks and their ripple effects is reduced. As Nature is cut back and ecosystems are depleted, zoonotic spillovers are more likely and pandemics and related catastrophic impacts are also more likely.

In our contribution to the historic High-Level Meeting on Harmony with Nature and Living Well at United Nations Headquarters in New York, on April 22, 2025, we called for food systems that utilize “deep regenerative practices—supporting the preservation of biodiverse ecosystems and watersheds, without turning Nature into a commodity.”

Today, we reiterate the call for nations to recognize and uphold the Rights of Nature, in order to “fully and consistently defend the rights of all human beings and establish conditions for a fair, equitable, and peaceful world.”

Earlier this week, two significant milestones were achieved in the effort to establish legal protections for the Rights of Nature.

• The European Commission recognized and registered a European Citizens’ Initiative seeking “to recognise Rights of Nature in European law via a legal act such as a directive or a regulation to strengthen the protection of ecosystems.”

• A private members’ bill was introduced in the UK House of Lords, “to recognise Nature as a legal subject; establish and protect the rights of Nature; establish a legal duty of care for public bodies, businesses, and individuals; provide procedural rights for the protection of Nature; establish an Integrated Rights Framework; establish mechanisms for dispute resolution and legal enforcement; establish a Nature Guardianship Council and Bioregional Councils; establish a Nature’s Rights Tribunal; create a governance structure for implementation and integration; provide for phased implementation and periodic review; ensure compliance with international environmental obligations; promote public awareness and education; and for connected purposes.“

As local communities and nations move to recognize that Nature needs legal protections, both for its own future health and integrity and for the benefits to human health and wellbeing, we will offer communities access to organizing and informational tools, to support stakeholder engagement and policy development, to align incentives, policies, and investments with human and planetary health.

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• Major climate patterns are being disrupted; rainfall patterns are being dislocated; snowpack is being depleted; wildfires are spreading. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—an essential climate-stabilizing network of ocean currents—is at risk of collapse.

• Vital ecosystems and farming are strained, and food scarcity is expected to become more prominent in all regions, undermining the stability of household budgets, local economies, and some nations.

This is the story of planetary health affecting human security and wellbeing. It is the result of a polycrisis, in which multiple overlapping structural drivers of change are all moving in the wrong direction, and compounding each other’s effects. It is the underreported background reality causing inequality to worsen, economic stresses to spread, and trust in established institutions to falter.

This last point deserves immediate attention: Today’s institutions were not created to manage the problems we face in this time of polycrisis; that does not mean they are not acting in good faith and taking many of the appropriate steps to address compounding risks and impacts. In many cases they are, but even well-funded climate action strategies are often focused on only part of the overall challenge.

We need to do much more than our institutions are structured to do, and most countries do not have a coherent strategy for evolving institutions rapidly, transparently, cohesively, and cost-effectively. Instead, we have seen dismantling of urgently needed aid funds and agencies, and a costly diversion of resources to military and technology priorities that do not reduce the worsening atmosphere of threat, harm, and cost.

The reluctance of some governments and leading financial institutions to prioritize climate-resilient practices will not shield them from risk or cost. We live in an age of risk; understanding the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits is essential to making informed decisions about the future.

In 2026, we see a surge in public understanding of the need for turning good ideas and bold visions into meaningful action that serves human needs, builds resilience, and spreads opportunity sustainably. 2026 should also be the year when public officials at all levels recognize the need to work with communities, stakeholders, and coalitions, to advance the best ideas, in the most relevant, rooted, and value-building ways.

As reported by the Guardian, just “20 companies have contributed to 35% of all carbon dioxide and methane since 1965”. It should be those whose business models rely on a high-cost self-destructive system who demand systemic change. Multidimensional performance metrics are going to create the incentive for rapid progress; those who will be outperformed should start innovating and raising their game, now.

Cooperative future-building is the urgent call of the moment. Governments should resist the temptation to focus innovation and development priorities on national political priorities and look for ways to leverage trade, co-investment, policy alignment, and cooperative innovation, to reduce risk and expand opportunity in partnership with other nations.

We recommend international negotiations around climate, energy, food, health, and other sustainability priorities, consider ways to mobilize in the following areas of action:

1. Open insight-sharing – Welcome stakeholders to the table; invite an open sharing of concerns, priorities, solutions, and visions for a cooperative crisis response, to reduce the time lag required to develop the needed innovations.

2. Data to expand opportunity – Artificial intelligence innovations should be used not to replace human talent, but to support high-quality, reliable translation of complex datasets into actionable inights for building resilience. Resilience activities should expand opportunity, including by diversifying local economies, and data should enhance this effect.

3. Mainstreaming – Treat the Sustainable Development Goals as what they were intended to be—a dynamic, adaptable blueprint for improved human security and wellbeing, in all countries and communities. Incentivize banks and businesses that perform well against several SDGs at once.

4. Infrastructure upgrades – All people everywhere need physical infrastructure to support communications, insight-sharing, and mobility, and infrastructure needs to evolve in the age of polycrisis. Nations can, and should, cooperate to support each other’s ability to upgrade infrastructure for resilience-building human development.

5. Food, Nature, and health – To be secure against future shocks, food systems need to improve and sustain human and planetary health. Prioritizing investments and commodities that deliver for food supply security, the health of Nature, and human wellbeing, will improve national economies and budgets and reduce risk for everyone.

National governments should act on previous commitments to include local and regional governments, consider and prioritize local needs and visions for a sustainable future, and urgently realign existing spending with these better, higher-value approaches. The following are tools that can help to make this cooperative surge a reality:

• Participatory process – Far more detailed, locally relevant practical insight is available when stakeholders are able to inform the design and implementation of infrastructure and economic development plans. Structured local meetings can ensure money is not wasted and incentives drive value-building private investment.

• Cooperative de-risking – De-risking only large investors or industrial actors can miss many of the weak points in the wider value chain. By including the most vulnerable, especially those without financial means, cooperative de-risking strategies can reduce risk for everyone and accelerate the delivery of both financial and non-financial returns.

• Earth system science data – The Earth is an integrated planetary system; the biosphere, which broadly overlaps with the climate system, depends on complex chemical and geophysical arrangements. Understanding Earth system science data is essential to understanding where risk and opportunity are in our time of compounding crises.

• Co-investment mechanisms – Cooperative investment strategies, that layer and sequence inflows of capital from multiple sources and sectors, expand available resources and allow for accelerated reallocation of existing expenditures. Macroeconomy stabilization funds can protect consumers, including public agencies, against price shocks and support needed innovation in a timely and efficient manner.

• Agroecology – Today’s food systems are not sustainable; they will not be able to reliably deliver sufficient food for human needs. Agroecological and regenerative farming practices restore depleted soils, protect and sustain ecosystems and watersheds and support urban-rural cooperative development strategies that optimize public spending and private investment to benefit all.

Turning good ideas into meaningful action that saves lives and helps to secure the biosphere is the task of our time. No-nonsense decisions to advance mainstream climate-resilient development must be central to multilateral negotiations, to meet the moment and secure the future.

The Trump administration has agreed to delay its plan to convert a Roxbury warehouse into an immigration detention center, a partial win for state and local officials who are seeking to block the proposal entirely.

Under a joint stipulation that came shortly before the matter was expected to go before a judge on Tuesday, the federal government agreed to conduct an environmental assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act, which can take months to complete. The initial plan was to open the 470,000-square-foot detention center as soon as next month.

In a joint statement, Gov. Mikie Sherrill, Attorney General Jen Davenport, and Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo said they have been demanding that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “back off its rushed construction” of the new jail since the state and Roxbury sued the federal government in March to halt the plan.

“We’ve been clear from the beginning that DHS’s proposed ICE detention facility in Roxbury will harm the community and won’t do anything to make us safer. If DHS conducts a proper analysis, it will discover that this industrial warehouse is no place for a detention center. If DHS continues to plow ahead after conducting its further analysis, we will return to Court to seek relief immediately,” they said.

The agreement says that within seven days of the final environmental assessment, both sides must confer before next steps.

New Jersey and Roxbury were due to argue in court Tuesday for a preliminary injunction halting construction on the warehouse until a judge decides on the underlying matter. Advocates gathered outside the Newark federal courthouse celebrated the order as a win for the Morris County town.

David Broderick, a retired attorney who works with activist group No Ice North Jersey Alliance, said the new agreement was the “best we could have hoped for.”

“Our real hope is that they just decide it doesn’t make sense to continue down this path and just walk away. Either use it as a garage or sell it,” he said.

The stipulation allows the government to do some work and maintenance on the facility, like installing a fence and CCTV cameras, monitoring the fire alarms and sprinkler systems, and limited custodial services and grounds maintenance.

“If they go one inch beyond what they’re allowed to do, there’s going to be hell to pay,” said Broderick.

The federal government purchased the warehouse off Route 46 in February for nearly $130 million. Federal officials said they planned to use it as an immigrant processing center where up to 1,500 people could be held. It would be the third detention facility for migrants in New Jersey, including privately owned jails in Elizabeth and Newark.

The New Jersey and Roxbury lawsuit alleges that the warehouse lacks adequate water, sewer, and bathroom access for detainees and staffers, and that an exponential increase in water demand could pose a risk to residents as well as sewage overflows into nearby land, streets, and waterways.

The GOP-led Roxbury Township Council has said the Morris County town, which has a population of 22,000, just 42 police officers, and a volunteer fire department, is not equipped to house a detention center the size of the one envisioned by the Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security has acquired warehouses across the country intending to retrofit them into immigration detention centers to house thousands of detainees as part of President Trump’s mass detention and deportation effort.

A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Maryland, a federal judge last month granted a preliminary injunction to halt the conversion of a warehouse in Williamsport, siding with state officials who claimed it would have led to environmental violations.

Republished courtesy of the New Jersey Monitor, under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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The United States Bureau of Land Management on Monday formally cancelled the so-called “Public Land Rule,” which required the agency to consider conservation and development equally in land-use decisions for millions of acres across the West.

The BLM published a notice Monday in the Federal Register finalizing its elimination of the 2024 rule, officially known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. The agency first announced it was considering eliminating the rule in September.

The Biden-era rule provided guidance for ensuring conservation received due consideration along with mining, timber, grazing, recreation or other uses on public lands. It also allowed the BLM to issue leases specifically for conservation, though the agency never issued any.

The BLM’s notice Monday said officials had received and responded to nearly 140,000 public comments in response to the proposal. Ultimately, officials said eliminating the 2024 rule was necessary because it “threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting.” The rule’s elimination comes alongside executive orders and other actions by the Trump administration to expand drilling, mineral production and other commercial uses of public lands.

Michael Carroll, a campaign director for environmentalist group The Wilderness Society, said Monday that the rule’s rescission, which officially goes into effect in 30 days, will leave millions of acres across the West newly vulnerable to oil and gas extraction and mining.

“They’re effectively saying, ‘We’re just going to prioritize extraction across BLM lands,’ Carroll said. “They’re going to be prioritizing industrial-scale development on those public lands. I think we’ll see that right away.”

He also noted that the BLM determined it did not need to consult with Indigenous tribes in its decision to rescind the rule, which he called “shocking in terms of its disrespect to tribal nations,” many of which sit adjacent to federal lands.

The Wilderness Society was among many environmental groups that denounced the end of the “Public Lands Rule” on Wednesday. Several public statements from the groups mentioned the pending U.S. Senate confirmation of Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico Republican congressman, as BLM director.

If the Senate confirms him, Pearce, who has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, will oversee an agency that is no longer required to consider conservation as an acceptable use of public land, Carroll said.

“Today is a bad day for those people who care about public lands and care about the Bureau of Land Management,” he said. “But we’ll keep fighting and keep pushing back.”

This article was first published by Source New Mexico, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

A state environmental panel on Wednesday approved the final license an energy developer needs to build a controversial $1 billion underwater natural gas pipeline project between New Jersey and New York, over the objections of dozens of environmentalists, public health experts, elected officials, residents, boaters, fishing enthusiasts, and others.

Critics have dubbed energy developer Williams’ proposed 37-mile Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline the “zombie pipeline” because previous permit denials in 2018, 2019, and 2020 killed the project. But the company reapplied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in May 2025, the commission approved the project in August, and state regulators in New Jersey and New York green-lighted it in November.

Wednesday, seven members of the Tidelands Resource Council unanimously approved a utility license Williams needs to construct the pipeline, which company officials say will expand capacity for the national grid. (The 12-member council has one vacancy and four members were absent.)

The approval came at the end of a nearly five-hour virtual public hearing, where only two people besides Williams officials spoke in support of the plan. More than 50 others blasted it, shouting “shame!” after the council approved it and calling council members “maggots,” “criminal,” and “disgusting” in the meeting’s chat thread.

The license was the last regulatory hurdle Williams had to clear for construction of the pipeline, which will deliver gas from Pennsylvania to Long Island via Old Bridge, Sayreville, South Amboy, and under the Raritan Bay in the New York-New Jersey Harbor. It would be part of a larger interstate network known as the Transcontinental pipeline, or Transco.

Despite the license approval, the project’s fate remains uncertain because its opponents have challenged it in state and federal courts in New Jersey and New York. Oral arguments are set for June 18 in federal court in New York, while briefs are still being filed in New Jersey’s federal fight, said attorney Dan Greenhouse of Eastern Environmental Law Center, which represents several environmental groups.

“It is a very real possibility that the meritorious challenges brought in these federal courts may result in significant changes to or reversal of the current permits that are required for the project,” Greenhouse said during the meeting. “So the council ought to hold its decision at least until the court cases have been finally decided.”

Council members, though, forged ahead after an hourlong closed door session where they discussed their “authority to act,” as well as the pending litigation, with Nicholas Seminoff, a deputy attorney general for New Jersey.

When they returned to the public meeting, they asked Williams’ representatives about issues that had particularly piqued critics, including the pipeline’s path across an underwater Superfund site and the company’s plans to discharge into the bay chemical-treated water that will be used to test the new pipeline.

They then approved the license but limited it to seven years instead of the 24-year approval Williams sought, ordered officials to submit updated drawings as the project gets built, and required the company to leave land in the pipeline’s path the way they found it, in case they ultimately abandon the project.

Earlier, critics had warned council members that the project risked environmental catastrophe, pointing to past violations and accidents involving Williams’ pipelines as well as the lead, arsenic, and other contaminants buried at the Superfund site the proposed pipeline would cross.

“I don’t know how this council could consider approving anything that goes through a Superfund site. It just defies common sense,” said Don Greenberg, a Bradley Beach resident and at-large chair of the Surfrider Foundation-Jersey Shore chapter. “We shouldn’t destroy this bay for a profit grab by a multinational company.”

Critics said New Jersey should be focusing on expanding solar and wind energy sources, with the U.S. lagging far behind China in renewable energy. They regarded the pipeline’s revival as proof of President Donald Trump’s meddling.

“During the 2024 election cycle, the oil and gas industry, including the Williams pipeline company, spent $450 million to impact the election results. As soon as President Trump took office, he embarked on a systematic payback plan for the industry, including successfully bullying New York’s Governor (Kathy) Hochul into approving the NESE pipeline,” said Anshul Gupta, policy and research director at New Yorkers for Clean Power.

The project’s foes also reminded the council that such projects required a showing of public necessity — and the pipeline would not serve New Jerseyans, delivering gas instead to people in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island.

“Approving unnecessary projects is the absolute worst decision that TRC can make,” said Ken Dolsky, vice president of New Jersey Forest Watch.

Williams’ representatives said the project is necessary.

“As determined by a number of federal and state agencies, the project has been determined to be in the public interest,” said attorney Richard Scott, who represented the company at the hearing.

Williams did have two people pipe up to support the pipeline project.

Dennis Hart, executive director of the Chemistry Council of New Jersey, said manufacturers here pay 55% more for electricity than the rest of the country, and the pipeline expansion could help alleviate that.

“We are not looking at an energy crisis in the future. We’re facing an energy crisis and energy shortage right now,” Hart said.

Ray Cantor of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association dismissed complaints that New Jersey residents would not benefit.

“We are not concerned that most of the gas will be going to near our state. We recognize that we are a nation of individual states. One state should not be in a position to deny energy resources to another state. That is why we have FERC overlooking the entire project,” Cantor said. “If we were to accept that proposition, then New Jersey would be at the whim of other states merely deciding to deny us our energy resources.”

Williams officials have said construction would start this fall, with the pipeline expected to be completed by the end of next year, barring further denials or delays.

Republished courtesy of the New Jersey Monitor, under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Those 57 nations represent about 1/3 of the global economy, and they are moving ahead with the transition to a future of distributed, renewable, non-polluting energy systems. Some are doing so, because they see opportunity to gain independence from costly fuel imports, some to advance the climate resilient development, because they are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise or extreme heat.

All of them are aware of the benefits to human health and wellbeing from eliminating pollution and preventing the countless health impacts and costs, related to pollution. They are also aware that future fiscal stability might depend on eliminating both climate impact risk and liability associated with materially promoting polluting practices.

Nations commit to cooperating for climate progress

Outcomes include: a sustained commitment to deliver, strengthening connections, complementing the UNFCCC process to enhance implementation, a commitment to science-based decision-making, and collaborative work on a) developing roadmaps, b) reducing economic and financial dependency, and c) producer-consumer alignment.

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Last year, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion finding that national governments have an obligation to work to prevent harm to their people from industrial climate disruption. The opinion was historic and provides a basis for courts in all nations, at all levels of jurisdiction, to interpret foundational international law and judicial precedent from other areas of law.

The Court found:

• Climate protection and a healthy, clean environment are implicit in all other human rights.

• Duty to act includes a duty to cooperate, and is grounded in treaties and in customary international law.

• Failing to act to reduce climate risk can constitute an “international legally wrongful act”.

There are many reasons the Advisory Opinion was issued—not least of which is the fact that basic science has long made clear the heat-trapping properties of carbon-based compounds, like those associated with the extraction, refining, transport, and burning of combustible fuels. National governments cannot lawfully ignore known serious harm, let alone treat the practices that cause it as a profit center.

It was clear from scientific observations in the 1980s that global heating had already begun, so the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established, and in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed. Industrialized nations agreed to restrict total national emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

In the 33 years since, global emissions have never declined—except during the worldwide economic shutdowns of 2020, during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That record of inaction is seen by people in countries around the world as a moral and strategic failure of their governments, of industry, and of international negotiations.

The 2024 Reinventing Prosperity Report on Priorities for a Livable Future brought together insights from stakeholders in 23 nations. Those guiding insights included:

• Climate change impacts—and related costs—are piling up.

• Human dignity is linked to sustainable investment.

• Unsustainable investment is waste.

• 1.5ºC is just a start; true climate resilience will require progress toward a standard of zero harm to people and Nature.

• New kinds of destabilization are on the horizon.

• Planetary boundaries are security measures.

• Valuing Nature, health, and safety, can expand wealth for everyone.

Cooperative problem-solving is essential. Respondents noted that we are already in a deficit situation, with regard to climate stabilization and climate-resilient development. A consistent insight was the need for nations to work together to innovate, to improve enabling environments, to support investment flowing to better practices that foster environmental sustainability, inclusive integral human development, social and economic justice, and shared prosperity that consistently respects human rights.

Clean industry is the only viable future

The future stability of everyday human existence must be founded on sustainable human development in line with climate risk reduction and resilience. The clean future is the only viable future. And, it is achievable.

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57 nations have recognized the duty to act and the duty to cooperate. The first scientific commission for the global energy transition was created and announced on April 25. The Co-Chairs of the Conference, from Colombia and the Netherlands, reported:

Over the past five days in Santa Marta, Colombia and The Netherlands convened 57 countries in support of the commitments made under the Paris Agreement. Together with - and informed by - representatives from subnational governments, academia, social movements, NGOs, trade unions, parliamentarians, the private sector, multilateral development banks, Indigenous Peoples, peoples of African descent, peasants, children and youth, and women and diversities, they created a safe space for dialogue on how countries transition away from fossil fuels.

The participating countries did not aim to establish new goals, but to develop plans for the optimal implementation of existing ones. Their deliberations focused primarily on challenges related to reducing economic dependence on fossil fuels, transforming supply and demand, and advancing international cooperation.

The model advanced by the 57 nations joining the Santa Marta Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was envisioned in the Paris Agreement, in paragraph 8 of Article 6, which calls for multidimensional climate cooperation among groups of 2 or more countries, to advance sustainable development and poverty eradication, while decarbonizing and building resilience, with support from the private sector and the mainstream economy.

Voluntary cooperation for a best-case climate future is underway. All nations should take a hard look at how they can join the race to climate-safe prosperity.

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As we reported this week:

Climate change, Nature loss, and pollution, are all affecting human health and wellbeing, everywhere. The costs of those impacts are rising, spreading, interacting, and compounding. Most consumer goods and services now carry embedded planetary crisis costs.

We ignore the Triple Planetary Crisis at our peril.

Around the world, people are now facing the very stark and imminent threat that narrow-minded short-term thinking, unaccountable self-interested decision-making, and outright greed, will degrade their future chances of everyday human security and wellbeing.

In a report on strategies for avoiding proportional climate risk, the Active Value Trust Ratings platform has reported:

• Human activity is causing disruption of Earth’s climate system, dangerous pervasive plastic pollution, and the collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems.

• These violations of planetary boundaries—the upper limit for what Earth can sustain in a number of critical areas—are putting supplies of fresh water, nutritious food, and affordable goods across the economy, at risk.

• The state of general multi-decadal human health most societies now expect may soon be unaffordable or unachievable for nearly all human beings, regardless of income levels.

This is why in November 2025, during the most recent round of global climate negotiations, we called for recognition of a Zero Harm standard as the transformational goal around which to organize climate policy, incentives, and investments.

Recognizing the universal human right to a clean, healthy environment, and the repeatedly restated global commitment to ensure “the integrity of all ecosystems, including in forests, the ocean, mountains and the cryosphere, and the protection of biodiversity”, with planetary crisis risk spreading to all regions, a commitment to zero preventable harm to people and ecosystems is the common sense high-ambition goal.

In that briefing note, we observed that:

To empower people across the diverse range of human experience, to adapt successfully, and to prevent danger and establish conditions for successful climate-resilient development, the zero harm standard must begin to play a constant role in the work of imagining the best possible future and working toward it, together.

Resilient prosperity is attainable. To achieve it, we will need to welcome the contributions of conscience, talent, and imagination of anyone wishing to build a better future. This means the most powerful institutions will need to be more open, more accountable, and more collaborative.

In 2026, we have seen tragedy in communities from Minnesota to Ukraine, to Iran and Nigeria. We have also seen how civic capital—the spontaneous cooperation of neighbors assisting each other in the midst of crisis—can change outcomes and save lives. And, we have seen how daring, principled, no-nonsense, cooperative acts of scientific exploration can unite people of widely differing views and interests.

We need a recommitment to the big cooperative endeavor of securing progress for people in all circumstances. This is what gives meaning to institutions and to innovations.

Innovations lose meaning and legitimacy when they accelerate the depletion of irreplaceable resources. Sustainable wellbeing and responsible stewardship are implicit expectations of any effort at human progress.

This Earth Day, we call on all governments—at local, regional, and national levels—to commit to robust, locally rooted and practically relevant civic engagement processes that will allow communities and stakeholders to shape major institutional priorities and value-building investment decisions.

These processes should follow the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity and, where applicable, the City Food Finance Principles to Build Climate Value. They should also weigh the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits, and operate as follows:

1. Hold open meetings where public views are welcomed and centered.

2. Use insights from those meetings to craft participatory development plan processes.

3. Prioritize health and wellbeing of residents, to ensure investments align with local needs and outcomes.

4. Assign local or national agencies the task of identifying entry points for new skills and services.

5. Treat engagement not as an extra but as the essential tool for getting the best results.

6. Continue active, open, and ongoing civic engagement processes.

No one alive stops being affected by our collective relationship to the Earth’s life-sustaining systems; civic engagement to ensure that relationship is sustainble should not end either. Honest evaluation of hidden costs and co-benefits, in line with local needs and human health and safety, can ensure new investments add enduring real-world value to local economies, with stabilizing effects for local and national budgets.

The Earth Civics Toolkit