B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Wine is one of the most delicious agricultural products worldwide, but it leaves behind a less delectable trail: millions of tons of wasted skins, seeds, and flesh. Now a team of researchers has landed on a circular economy solution for these mounds of mush. 

They say it can be used as a replacement antibiotic on chicken farms, working almost as well as the real thing.  

In the United States where the study was based, broiler farms—those that raise chickens for meat—have been trying to wean their livestock off antibiotics, over growing fears about drug resistance and environmental damage. But there’s a catch: these drugs, known as ‘antibiotic growth promoters’ serve a useful purpose because they help fight harmful gut bacteria that cause inflamed guts, make chickens sick, and reduce their growth levels. Farmers have been crying out for a solution—and this is where wine waste comes in.

Building on previous work revealing the possible bacteria-fighting potential of wine waste (known as ‘pomace’), the researchers decided to test it out in a series of experiments on 126 chickens, which they split into different treatment groups. Some were fed a diet containing 30% rice bran which is a known gut-inflamer. Others received that diet, but with the addition of a conventional antibiotic called zinc-bacitracin. Another group were fed the bran diet supplemented with a tiny percentage of grape pomace, which was either plain or fermented. 

Even at a tiny dose making up just 0.5% of the chickens’ diet, the researchers found that the addition of grape pomace brought about a remarkable change in the birds. Compared to those animals that received the diet without any added treatment, their body weight gains increased by 79%, and their average body weight increased by almost 20%, both helpful indicators of improved gut health. 

The fermented grape waste produced the most promising results. The researchers think this may be because fermentation changes the grapes’ chemical composition in a way that appeals to beneficial gut microbes that can boost the chickens’ digestive health. Strikingly also, the grape waste-treated birds showed beneficial physiological changes in their guts, 

Overall, the benefits of adding grape pomace were comparable to those recorded in the birds that received the conventional antibiotic treatment. It’s still not known why grape pomace has this antibiotic-like effect, but the researchers speculate that it could have something to do with a series of bioactive compounds contained in the waste including flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and to have antibacterial qualities. All of that potential sits untapped in wine waste, like buried treasure. 

But at least now there’s a possible alternative. Fermentation to make wine, and then to treat chickens might be exactly the circular solution that both these industries need. 

Tako et. al. “Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways.” npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene

We hear it all the time: “Americans just love their cars.” But the recent opening of a subway line in Los Angeles proves that Americans are even more crazy for transit — and when new stations open, they turn it into a party.

Check out this dispatch from Los Angeles by Hideaki Transit, where the opening of the new Metro D Line extension turned into nothing short of Woodstock for NUMTOTs. Complete with off-color puns, viral merch, spontaneous group chants, and even a pop-up furry convention, this raucous celebration of shared transportation should inspire leaders across the country to build party-worthy transit projects everywhere. (And yes, we promise: it’s safe for work.)

• The author of the book “Sidewalk Nation” reports that many cities do a terrible job of maintaining sidewalks, but some are improving. Siloed departments’ areas of oversight overlap, property owners are put in charge of repairs, and municipal budgets are tight. Michael Pollack advocates for cities to create departments of sidewalk and institute funding mechanisms like sidewalk improvement fees. (Governing)
• Rep. Rick Larsen, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said a bipartisan consensus is emerging around a multi-year funding bill involving safety improvements and freight connectivity. (Transport Topics)
• Amtrak unveiled the new Freedom250 next-gen Acela train (Railway Age) and, separately, a new train wrap celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (Axios).
• Short-hop flights of less than 250 miles are on the decline. (NPR)
• A federal bill encouraging transit-oriented development would bolster transit agencies’ bottom line by adding more riders. (Transportation for America)
• On the Seams goes inside Amazon’s vast distribution and delivery network.
• “Just one more lane, bro,” transportation engineering textbooks still say. “Just one more lane, and I promise, no more traffic.” (State Smart Transportation Initiative)
• San Antonio found a way around Texas’ ban on rainbow crosswalks by painting sidewalks instead. (New York Times)
• A Minnesota bill would consolidate Twin Cities transit agencies. (streets.mn)
• Empty Waymos are circling aimlessly around Atlanta cul-de-sacs. (WSB-TV)
• Saratoga is taking public input on a Complete Streets makeover for Main Street. (Saratoga Magazine)
• The fast-growing Arkansas village Cave Springs is also redesigning its Main Street to make it more pedestrian-friendly. (CNU Public Square)
• A think tank is urging the British government to lower speed limits to avoid an “energy shock” due to the Iran war. (The Guardian)
• Fox News reporters are probably so used to being able to park illegally with impunity that they were shocked when an automated camera ticketed them within two minutes in Beijing — ironically, while they were there to do a negative story about Chinese surveillance. (X)

This week on the Talking Headways, former Supreme Court law clerk and Cardozo School of Law Professor Michael Pollack discusses his new book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource.

Pollack discusses who manages, owns and feels ownership of sidewalks, and advocates for a department dedicated to them.

We also talk about the nexus between sidewalks and roads, the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Denver’s successful funding and maintenance referendum.

Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.

Jeff Wood: Are we free on the sidewalk?

Michael Pollack: Ha. That’s a loaded question.

Jeff Wood: I know. People should go read the book to get the whole answer.

Michael Pollack: Are we free on the sidewalk? We are freer than we might think, but also more subject to being made un-free than we might think. So again, it’s public space, or at least it is private space with a public easement, and so the Constitution applies.

We have rights to speak. We have rights to protest. We have our First Amendment rights. We have our Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by the police. I don’t get into this in the book, but sidewalks also raise Second Amendment concerns about the freedom to carry weapons openly or concealed.

So we have our constitutional rights on the sidewalk, and yet the law, the constitutional law, as well as what cities have in fact done, has limited all of those rights, sometimes in the name of public order, as we were discussing before, and sometimes in the name of protecting the adjacent property owners.

So for example, you do get to protest and picket on the streets, but the courts have said it’s okay sometimes if a municipality says you’re not allowed to do that in a residential neighborhood. Sometimes that’s gonna be upheld. Why? Because the owners of those homes or the residents of those homes deserve their peace and quiet, even if, you know, or perhaps especially if they are the target of that protest.

But we are in fact free to picket in front of commercial establishments. That’s well established. We’re free to, as I was saying before, engage in signature gathering for petitions, referendums, things like that on most sidewalks, except sidewalks at post offices, where there’s a whole line of cases where that’s deemed to be obstructive of important federal efforts, right?

When it comes to policing and our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, well that’s true, except that we can be stopped by the police and briefly frisked by the police. If you put your garbage out for collection on the sidewalk, which in New York City, that’s what we do, that garbage can be searched by the police because it’s considered abandoned property.

And then there’s all of the new technology surveillance architecture that is deployed on the sidewalk, so that’s cameras or license plate readers or facial recognition. None of that is really governed by our current Fourth Amendment law at all. So yes, are we free on the sidewalk? Absolutely. It is public space.

It is not private space, therefore we have constitutional rights. But those rights are not quite as capacious as I think we often think they are. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that we automatically don’t have the right to protest in a residential neighborhood or that we don’t have XYZ rights from unreasonable searches and whatnot.

Rather, what the Constitution tells us is that, or at least how the courts have interpreted the Constitution, what it tells us is that governments have the ability to prohibit us from protesting in a, in a residential neighborhood. They have the ability to instruct their police officers to stop and frisk folks in these ways.

It doesn’t mean that they have to make those choices. It doesn’t mean that we as voters have to make those choices either. And so part of my message in the book is when we think about what we want our public life to look like, that includes what we want our speech, protest, policing, surveillance public life to look like.

And we have more, we as voters have more of a role to play here than I think we often think we do. The Constitution does not answer all of these questions one way or the other. It leaves them to the local political process. And so if you don’t like what’s happening, you can and should vote for something else.

This op-ed ran in several Kentucky papers in May 2026.

Over the past several decades, rural Kentucky has faced significant changes. In Eastern Kentucky, a shrinking tax base, population loss, and the decline of long-standing industries has made resilience an ever-changing challenge. Through it all, our communities have adapted and searched for new ways to build a stronger, more diverse economy.

Increasingly, a new crisis has emerged: the soaring cost of keeping the lights on. For small businesses and farms that are essential to our local economy, electric rates for commercial facilities have more than doubled over the last 20 years. When you layer in historic inflation, the math becomes overwhelming. Overhead costs eat away at already thin margins, forcing owners to choose between a new hire, a new piece of equipment, or simply paying the utility bill.

At Mountain Association, we have been supporting small businesses since 1976 and saw this energy crisis coming early. In 2008, as costs began their steep climb, we launched an energy savings program. Through this work we continually see one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is upfront capital.

That’s where the Rural Energy for America Program—REAP, for short—comes in. REAP is a federal program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that provides guaranteed loan financing and grant funding to agricultural producers and rural small businesses for renewable energy systems or energy efficiency improvements. For a rural small business owner, that means a grant can cover up to 25 percent of the cost of solar more efficient HVAC system, LED lighting, or better insulation. These are the kinds of upgrades that pay for themselves in a short time, reducing overhead and improving the bottom line. But for many, the upfront cost is simply out of reach.

At Mountain Association, we have been packaging REAP grants for our clients since 2009. To date, our team has secured more than 60 REAP grants for small businesses and farms across Eastern Kentucky, totaling over $2.5 million for our clients. These energy savings projects keep rural businesses open and competitive. As a bonus, many of the projects are completed by local contractors, allowing those federal investments to go even further in supporting Eastern Kentucky’s economy. Without support from programs like REAP, some of the businesses and farms we work with simply won’t make it as costs continue to rise.

Mike Long is the general manager of Long’s Pic Pac in Pineville, a town of about 1,630 people in Southeastern Kentucky. His father started the business in 1964 with a $3,500 loan. Today, Mike is fighting to keep it the grocery store of choice for a community where the median household income is just $27,159. Grocery stores typically run on a razor-thin 2.2% profit margin. One bad year or one season of sky-high demand charges and a rural store can vanish.

For Long’s Pic Pac, a REAP grant funded 40% of a project to install solar panels on the store’s roof and a 60-kW battery. The battery can store excess solar energy and vastly reduce the punishing “demand charges” that make up more than half of the grocery’s monthly power bill. The result is an estimated cost savings of at least $15,000 per year—money that can go to staffing the deli, offsetting delivery costs, or simply keeping prices stable for families in Pineville. Long expects to pay back the entire cost of the project in just four years.

The need for this program has never been more urgent. With each devastating flood or winter storm, utility companies are forced to make expensive repairs to aging infrastructure. Businesses and ratepayers pay for those repairs through higher rates. As the frequency and intensity of these storms increase, utilities will continue passing those recovery costs back to us. For a business like Long’s Pic Pac living on a 2.2% margin, this compounding cycle of damage, recovery, and rate hikes is a threat to its existence.

REAP is a proven, efficient tool that uses modest federal investment to unlock private capital and lower operating costs. But it only works if it is funded and protected. It isn’t just an energy policy. It is the difference between closing the doors and keeping the lights on.

Josh Bills is the Senior Energy Analyst at the Mountain Association. He can be reached at josh@mtassociation.org.

The post Protect REAP, a federal program rural Kentucky can’t afford to lose appeared first on Mountain Association.

Nature is full of fascinating creatures that produce light. From fireflies putting on mesmerizing summer displays to fish that glow eerily in the depths of the ocean, this bioluminescence is a result of chemical reactions that produce flashes of light.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers have harnessed bioluminescent sea-dwelling algae to produce a light source that glows blue without the need for electricity or toxic chemicals. The advance could lead use in living sensors that monitor water quality, autonomous robots that work in dark environments, and eco-friendly consumer lighting such as glow sticks.

“I was curious if we could create a world in which we don’t use electricity but rather use biology to produce light,” said Wil Srubar, a civil, environmental and architectural engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a press release. “This discovery really paves the way for engineering other living light materials and devices.”

Marine algae species such as Pyrocystis lunula produce cold blue light that is visible from the water surface. The photosynthetic organisms, which survive on sunlight and carbon dioxide, flash when they are agitated by waves, passing boats, or swimmers. The spectacular light show draws visitors to beaches in the nighttime.

But the sparking light from the glowing algae lasts for only a few milliseconds at a time. The glow is also unpredictable and is hard to control.

Acidic (top) and basic (bottom) environments trigger different bioluminescent behaviors in algae. Credit: Giulia Brachi

Researchers at UC Boulder decided to use chemistry to get the marine organisms to sustain their luminescence. In the past, researchers have suggested that exposing P. lunula to various chemical compounds could activate the algae’s luminescence reaction.

So Srubar and colleagues exposed the algae to two solutions. One was acidic, with a pH of 4, similar to that of tomato juice, while the other was a basic solution with a pH of 10, comparable to mild soap. The acidic solution was a hit. Algae in the solution stayed brightly lit for 25 minutes.

For a more practical way to use the algae, the researchers embedded the organisms into various 3D-printed objects made with naturally-derived hydrogel. In these constructs, the algae survived for weeks while glowing when exposed to the acidic solution. After four weeks, the acid-treated examples still retained 75 percent of their brightness.

Srubar and colleagues are now exploring whether P. lunula may respond to various chemicals. The goal is to harness the algae to light up when exposed to toxins and serve as a tool for water quality monitoring.

Source: Giulia Brachi et al. Chemical stimulation sustains bioluminescence of living light materials. Science Advances, 2026.

Top image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Ashish Kothari

Originally publish by Meer on 13 May 2026.

Grassroots movements from across the Global South gather in Indonesia to confront war, inequality, and ecological collapse through collective alternatives.

Hope. Esperanza. Harapan. These words were frequently invoked by …

Congress could be days away from passing a bill that strips local communities of stable funding for multimodal transportation and deprives the entire country of predictable rail dollars that the overwhelming majority of Americans demand.

In a letter sent on Tuesday, Senate Democrats pressed the upper chamber’s appropriations committee to resist the Trump administration’s demands and renew multi-year funding for a raft of vital multimodal grant programs when they write the next federal transportation law.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, colloquially known as the BIL, will expire on Oct. 1, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is scheduled to begin marking up the replacement bill as soon as next week.

That committee’s chairman, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), said in November that he would lobby for a “traditional highway bill” to replace the BIL, and promised that lawmakers would refrain from “spending money on murals and train stations or bike paths or walking paths” — a suggestion Trump echoed in his budget proposal, which recommends draconian cuts to multimodal programs.

What the BIL Did Right

For all of its flaws, the BIL did at least one thing right: It provided local communities with historic levels of “predictable, multi-year funding” for multimodal transportation projects for five years, thereby insulating projects from the fickle whims of Congress’s annual appropriations process.

Since infrastructure projects generally take several years to plan and complete — especially ambitious ones like new rail lines, high quality bike paths and major road diets to keep pedestrians safe — this funding structure allowed communities to dream bigger about their transportation futures.

It also allowed locals to apply for far more grant money directly, rather than forcing them to rely on state-level Departments of Transportation, who far too often redirect gas tax receipts generated on city roads to pay for highway expansions in the suburban and rural periphery.

The BIL created a similar opportunity for the American rail industry, which secured its first predictable, multi-year funding streams in U.S. transportation history — finally allowing train operators to plan long-term expansions and start building out the expanded network that 92 percent of Americans want.

How Trump’s Proposal Could Halt Transportation Progress

If Congress accepts the Trump administration’s budget proposal, those rail programs would lose an astonishing 84 percent of their funding in fiscal year 2027, and they wouldn’t be guaranteed any money beyond that year. That would make it impossible for Amtrak and its peers to plan for the future.

Meanwhile, a host of programs that fund multimodal transportation would lose 96 percent of their 2027 funding — with no assurance of more money later. Safe Streets and Roads for All, for instance, would be zeroed out completely in FY2027, while the Capital Investment Grants program, a major source of transit funding, would receive a 48-percent cut.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who led the letter’s release and serves as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, recently oversaw the publication of a 26-page report that described these efforts as “Main Street improvement” programs. The same document noted that these programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts despite attracting so much interest that the Department of Transportation rejected more than 1,000 applications for funding.

“Congress must reject President Trump’s budget cuts and reauthorize surface transportation programs with advance appropriations that continue to provide dependable multiyear funding for our entire transportation system — not just part of it,” Cantwell’s office wrote.

Future-proofing the federal transportation program

Unfortunately, in an era of federal clawbacks, the mere existence of robust, multi-year funds for multimodal priorities doesn’t always mean that communities will actually receive their designated money — at least without a lot of lawsuits.

The Trump administration recently gained the dubious distinction of becoming “the first administration in at least three decades to fail to approve a new transit project in its first year,” according to Transportation for America’s Steve Davis. And that’s in addition to months of freezes, clawbacks, delays, and rescissions of programs that the administration deemed too “green” or “woke.”

That’s why advocates have launched parallel efforts to persuade Congress to stop negotiating the next transportation bill until Trump stops holding existing funds hostage — and, when negotiations resume, to build more guardrails to prevent future executive interference.

Recommended Trump Is Holding Affordable Transportation Projects Hostage, and Congress Could Call His Bluff Kea Wilson May 7, 2026

Until that happens, though, average Americans will continue to suffer from a lack of affordable, safe and multimodal transportation options — and that’s costing them real money.

Two years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that discontinuing infrastructural investment and canceling money for freight priorities — as Trump’s proposed cuts would do — would cost the average U.S. household more than $700 per year. And that’s to say nothing of the missed opportunity costs of everything our transportation network could be if we funded multimodal priorities.

“Our roads are more than just highways — they are also hubs for community activity, hosts to small businesses, routes to and from schools, and drivers of economic activity,” Cantwell’s office wrote in its report. “Our federal investment strategy must reflect that reality and empower communities to make the most of their infrastructure.”

An earlier version of this article misstated Senator Cantwell’s role on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. We regret the error.

• At 18 cents a gallon, suspending the federal gas tax would only save drivers a few pennies on pump prices that have topped $4.50, on average (Wall Street Journal; paywall). Gas stations often pocket the difference, and encouraging people to drive more during a shortage could push prices even higher (CNN). It would also drain the already insufficient highway trust fund (PBS). Even if state gas taxes were suspended, too, gas would still be 35 percent higher than before the war on Iran (NBC News).
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to get dunked on for filming a reality TV show funded by companies his department regulates. (NPR)
• Too many transit projects get bogged down because an agency tries to engineer its way around a problem rather than try to work things out with other agencies involved. (Infrastory)
• Electrifying bus fleets involves a lot more than just acquiring the buses. (Metro Magazine)
• Waymo and Waze recently started sharing pothole data with cities, and now a company that sells security cameras for trucks is offering the same service. (TechCrunch)
• After the H Street streetcar was unceremoniously shut down, the D.C. Metro is now considering a bus rapid transit line along H Street to get Commanders fans to the new RFK Stadium because a rail station won’t be open by 2030. (WUSA)
• The board of Vancouver, Washington transit agency C-Tran voted to support light rail along the controversial I-5 bridge connecting the city to Portland. (The Columbian)
• The Charlotte city council reversed course on supporting new toll lanes on I-77. (Observer)
• An Atlanta city council member pulled a bill to separate “heels” and “wheels” on the Atlanta Beltline, which transit advocates said would preclude future rail, but supporters said would protect pedestrians from the scourge of e-scooters. (AJC)
• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced a plan to improve cleanliness, reliability, access and safety for NJ Transit. (NJ Business Magazine)
• Is Florida private passenger rail company Brightline headed for bankruptcy? (Palm Beach Post; paywall)
• A Kansas City program is helping small businesses find empty storefronts along the streetcar line. (KSHB)
• Unfortunately, America’s fondness for oversized SUVs is spreading to Europe. (The Guardian)
• A new report established a baseline for English roads’ carbon footprint to help reduce emissions in the future. (Smart Cities World)

Scientists, including ecologists, are data hogs. More data can give analyses more statistical power, increasing confidence that a researcher is seeing something real in the numbers, whether it’s fluctuations in an animal’s numbers, location, or some other metric. There is generally no such thing as “too much data.”

Except when there is. As technological advances enable people to collect more information, such as images from satellites or audio from tiny weather-resistant recorders, some scientists are drowning in data.

Just one example: The proliferation of small, cheap wildlife cameras has enabled researchers to amass tens of thousands of images that can take months of tedious work to catalog. Recently, AI tools have been some help, enabling scientists to, for example, sift out images containing no wildlife at all. But people are often still spending months scrolling through grainy snapshots before doing any of the “real” analysis. In computer parlance, there’s still a “human in the loop.”

That might not be true soon, however. AI-powered programs have grown sophisticated enough that in some cases they can screen and analyze wildlife camera data with enough accuracy that the final result isn’t meaningfully different from the more common labor-intensive approach, according to a new paper in the Journal of Applied Technology. In other words, no more human in the loop.

“We’re not trying to replace people,” said Washington State University wildlife ecologist Daniel Thornton, the study’s lead author. “The goal is to help researchers get to answers faster so they can make better decisions about managing and conserving wildlife.”

The new research didn’t involve some fancy technical breakthrough in AI programming. Rather, ecologists like Thornton collaborated with people at tech giant Google to see how they could harness existing AI tools. To do that, they set up what amounted to a competition: computers versus humans.

They started with nearly 3.8 million digital photos taken by 1,200 wildlife cameras in three different locations – eastern and central Washington state, Glacier National Park in Montana, and a jungle reserve in Guatemala. The photos had been scrutinized by experts to identify the species of any mammal that turned up. Then the researchers handed them over to AI.

 

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First, they used MegaDetector, a program that detects whether animals, humans or vehicles are in an image. After that initial screening, the animal-positive images were turned over to SpeciesNet, a Google-developed program built to identify what animals are in a photo. It covers approximately 2,500 different groups of species from around the world. The results were then fed into a computer model built to convert these animal sightings into an estimation of where each species occurred on a landscape, what’s known as “occupancy.”

With the exception of a few outliers, the results from the automated AI approach weren’t very different from the analysis with a more human touch. The results aligned between 85% and 90% of the time.

It doesn’t mean the computers were perfect. Rare or hard-to-identify species sometimes tripped up the programs. SpeciesNet mistakenly classified mountain goats in Montana as domestic goats. Grizzly bears were reported in Washington, when they haven’t been there in decades.

But for many species in each of the three regions, the lightning-fast computers were as accurate as the plodding humans.

“The key question wasn’t whether the AI got every image right,” said Dan Morris, a scientist at Google who helped create SpeciesNet and is a co-author on the study. “It was whether the ecological conclusions you care about would end up being basically the same.”

If this approach finds its way out of academia, it could enable wildlife managers to get up-to-date information much more quickly about what’s happening to wild populations. Among other things, that could mean quicker alerts when an endangered species shows up somewhere, or if it’s starting to vanish.

“The big takeaway is that this doesn’t have to be a bottleneck anymore,” Thornton said of the image backlog. “If we can process data faster, we can respond faster, and that’s really what matters for conservation.”

Thornton, et. al. “Identification of camera trap images by artificial intelligence and human experts produces similar multi-species occupancy models.” Journal of Applied Ecology. May 6, 2026.

Image (based on) ©Smithsonian via Flickr

Migration and democratic decline in Central America cannot be understood separately from the intertwined impacts of US intervention, gang violence, economic instability and climate disruption. As droughts, displacement and insecurity deepen, the region faces growing pressure toward both migration and authoritarian rule.

A gathering in Paradise, California, will bring together fire-affected communities, local leaders and resilience practitioners to explore what rebuilding after catastrophe can look like beyond simply restoring the old normal.

War is a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions, yet most conflict-related emissions remain excluded from official climate accounting. Governments and international climate bodies must begin treating military emissions and the climate costs of war as central issues of accountability and justice.

The Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate federal transit funding would clearly devastate riders, but it would also be a bloodbath for transit workers and the families who rely on them, particularly in the type of communities that make up much of the GOP base, according to a recent analysis.

Researchers at the Urban Institute recently found that the White House’s recommendation that Congress eliminate the Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund would force agencies in small metros and rural areas to cut half or more of their staff. That move which would force them to halve transit service, too, impacting countless U.S. workers’ ability to reach their jobs, too.

That’s because unlike bigger cities, which have been mostly restricted to using their federal dollars for capital projects since the 1990s, small agencies can rely on grants sent from Washington to help pay for the basics, like salaries for bus drivers and people to clean train stations.

Even larger cities have come to depend more heavily on federal money for operations since the pandemic, when lawmakers relaxed the operations funding rule to help keep agencies afloat when riders fled buses and trains. The report authors say that makes it “difficult” for them “to estimate how much cuts in federal funding could affect workforce outcomes” even into the future, especially if local sources don’t fill the gap — which they often don’t.

As a result, by 2024 even urban areas over 200,000 residents were getting 17 percent of their operating costs paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Tribal areas, meanwhile, were getting an astounding 92 percent — which means the elimination of federal dollars could essentially wipe out transit for most indigenous communities in the country.

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The human costs of that move can be even higher, the researchers behind the study say. People in non-urban areas are often even more reliant on transit than their urban counterparts — and even more devastated when it vanishes, too.

An astonishing 4.3 million rural residents in the U.S. don’t have personal cars, even as they face longer commute distances that often put even the most basic needs well out of walking or biking distance, along roads with little protection for people outside vehicles.

“When you talk about the federal government cutting funds for transit, we’re talking about essentially firing half or more of the staff who work for transit agencies in those rural and tribal areas,” said Yonah Freemark, who co-authored the report. “And if folks are not there to actually drive the bus, transit agencies do not have the ability to hire a scab to make up the gap. … There has to be somebody that provides the service when the bus is ready to run, or the bus will literally not run.”

Recommended Four Factors Driving the Bus Operator Shortage (And What to Do About Them) Kea Wilson July 20, 2022

Of course, the need for more federal operations funding alone isn’t the only reason why so many transit agencies are facing a worker shortage — even if it certainly doesn’t make matters easier.

The researchers say that longstanding internal challenges like steep “job entry requirements, health and safety conditions, scheduling rules, and a lack of career advancement pathways” are all making it harder for communities to attract and retain workers, with direct impacts on the level of service they can provide. A companion study conducted by the Institute found that worker shortages in New York City caused as many as 17,843 delayed subway trips in a single month.

Low wages, on the other hand, might not actually be one of the main reasons why America is struggling to hire bus drivers and other staff — though that varies from community to community. Freemark says that while, by and large, “transit jobs are pretty competitive to other transportation industry jobs from a wage perspective,” places like Boston pay significantly less than the median wage for workers overall.

And while some GOP pundits paint transit as a lawless hellscape where workers and riders alike are under constant attack, but fear of violence is less of a concern today than it was during the pandemic — at least compared to stickier problems like inconvenient peak-hour schedules.

“Transit plays its most important role during peak hours, when other people are moving around the city or trying to get home to their families,” Freemark added. “And so from that perspective, I think transit agencies can play an important role by doing things like offering childcare benefits — which many of them do not do right now. But it could be beneficial in getting people to say, ‘It’s okay for me to take this job, even though it’s at this time that’s not ideal.”

Regardless of the reasons behind their hiring challenges, Freemark stresses that freeing up federal money for operations could help agencies solve them — and that, in turn, could help increase transit ridership across the country.

In addition to modeling Trump’s doomsday cuts (which have the support of some members of Congress), the Urban Institute also modeled what would happen if agencies got an infusion of federal operating money, by mapping how much staff agencies would need to double the number of revenue miles they operate by 2033.

That feat would require a lot of funding, but it would also result in a massive increase in jobs and access, which Freemark argues would pay for itself.

“If we were to make that investment of improved transit, it would also be a job generator, and that is not to be dismissed,” added Freemark. “Frankly, job creation is something that a lot of folks care about. We’re hopeful that this paper can help make the case for improved transit investment — not only as something that benefits riders, but also as something that benefits labor.”

Freemark acknowledges that with the GOP at the helm of the negotiations, there might not be much of an appetite in Washington for an influx of transit operating cash right now— even if advocates are still pushing hard for legislation like the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act to do just that.

Still, he says that we should never assume that getting shared modes more is a lost cause, especially if we can market that move as a job creator in addition to increasing access to basic mobility.

“At the beginning of Covid, transit agencies were on their knees, and Congress stepped up,” Freemark added. “I mean, they provided $69 billion — kind of out of nowhere — for transit agencies. That suggests that if the message is right and if the time is right, change can be made.”

• The highway lobby fossil fuel companies, asphalt manufacturers, automakers, engineers, road builders and truckers spends $100 million a year lobbying Congress, funding political campaigns, producing slanted policy research and trying to influence public opinion, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists report. That helps explain why 80 percent of transportation funding goes to highways, 90 percent of Americans lack access to frequent transit, and the average household spends $12,000 a year on vehicle ownership. (The Equation)
• The Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act will hurt not only Black voters, but anyone who lives in a blue city in a red state could be stripped of their representation. (The American Prospect)
• Some have been calling for TSA-style checkpoints on Amtrak after a would-be Trump assassin snuck guns onto a train, but stations just aren’t set up for it, according to the Rail Passengers Association.
• FIFA gets all the money from the World Cup, while the host cities have to foot the bill for things like transportation (The Atlantic; paywall). It’s been especially challenging for places like Kansas City that don’t have a robust transit system to begin with and are tying to impress visitors (New York Times).
• Light rail advocates say a proposal to build a separate paved trail for bikes and scooters on the Atlanta Beltline would kill longstanding plans for transit. (Rough Draft)
• Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott pledged to build 17 miles of bike lanes over the next three years. (WBAL)
• Nashville residents are pushing for more Vision Zero funding as pedestrian deaths surge. (Scene)
• A Charlotte city council member was involved in a serious car crash, and says it’s deepened his commitment to Vision Zero. (WCNC)
• None of the three options approved by Sound Transit to close a budget deficit includes extending Seattle light rail to Ballard, outraging electing officials and citizens who voted for it 10 years ago. (KOMO)
• It could take more than 100 years for Ann Arbor to fill its 138 miles of sidewalk gaps unless voters approve two tax referendums. (MLive)
• China is building a new type of transit-oriented development: housing on top of train maintenance depots. (Planetizen)
• Southeast Asian nations are using transit to improve on Le Corbusier’s flawed concept of the satellite city. (Arch Daily)
• Sydney is a sprawling city like most in the U.S., but still makes public transportation work in the suburbs. (The Guardian)
• Vienna is having problems procuring parts for its hydrogen buses, which is a good reason for transit agencies to buy much more common battery-electric models instead. (CleanTechnica)

The US Department of Transportation launched a “Freedom to Drive” initiative last month that aims to “tackle the nation’s growing congestion problem.” The belief that congestion is a problem is not new. People have been complaining about traffic congestion for more than a century, from when cars first clogged city streets. They are complaining about it still, as in a recent New York Times article describing traffic in Los Angeles as “soul-crushing.”

It is not surprising, given all the complaining, that congestion remains the primary focus of transportation policy in the United States. But why all this obsession with congestion?

Recommended For Earth Day, the Trump Administration Wants To Expand Highways Across America Kea Wilson April 22, 2026

Congestion is unquestionably bad for us. It causes stress and negatively affects mental well-being. By adding to travel time, congestion increases exposure to potential injuries and fatalities as well as air pollutants for drivers and passengers. The simple act of sitting in a car is not good for one’s health. Compounding these problems, time stuck in traffic is time that one could otherwise spend in activities healthy for mind and body. 

Psychology might also explain our hatred of traffic. Because a driver stuck in traffic cannot go as fast as they think they should be able to, a twenty-minute trip with traffic feels worse than a twenty-minute trip without traffic. The inability to move means that drivers have lost not just time but autonomy, their ability to act independently of external forces. Being trapped in a traffic jam might trigger feelings akin to claustrophobia. All these effects are possibly greater when one does not anticipate the congestion.

From a policy standpoint, we villainize congestion for its impacts on the economy. The annual Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute, estimates that “Americans lost an average of 63 hours sitting in traffic in 2024” and converts this into monetary impacts of $269 billion annually.

In promoting its new initiative, US DOT even calls congestion a “drain on American families and our economy.” Time is money, after all.

According to this line of thought, efficiency depends on speed, and economic growth depends on minimizing delays. This belief explains a century of highway expansions sold to the public as solutions to the congestion problem and essential for the economy.

But these projects have succeeded in reducing congestion only in the short-term despite consuming vast sums of public funding. The new federal initiative, which encourages states to expand their highways, are likely to be as ineffective as the old ones. 

It’s time for some new thinking.

Recommended How Congestion Pricing Proved the Haters Wrong and Is Changing New York for the Better David Meyer January 5, 2026

We can start by embracing the one proven strategy for reducing congestion: congestion pricing.

Congestion pricing is a way of prioritizing driving trips: if driving is important enough for a given trip, the driver will pay; if not, the driver will switch to another mode or reschedule or forgo the trip. This sorting results in more efficient use of the roadway system by ensuring that it serves the driving trips with the highest value to drivers at peak hours.

We can address the equity concerns this pay-to-drive strategy raises by using the toll revenues to improve transit and other driving alternatives and to subsidize tolls for low-income workers who need to drive. A year of congestion pricing in New York shows it can work.

We can think about congestion not as a phenomenon in need of reduction but rather as an experience that should be optional. Congestion becomes optional if we provide good alternatives to driving.

This would require a shift in funding away from highway expansion projects that have at best a short-term effect on congestion to alternatives such as transit, biking, and walking that give people a long-term way to avoid it. It would also require changes in land use patterns to improve the viability of these alternatives and that would, as a bonus, enable shorter driving trips. We would also need to make housing more affordable in these places, and one way to do that is to waste less land on roads and parking. 

Recommended Traffic Congestion Is a Housing and Transit Problem, Not a Highway Problem Damien Newton October 23, 2025

We could also reconsider our definition of congestion.

Congestion is measured relative to “free-flow” speed, the speed at which one can drive in light traffic conditions, usually around 70 mph on highways. An average speed less than that produces a “delay” — defined as the difference between the travel time at the free-flow speed and the travel time at the actual speed given roadway conditions.

But this is an entirely subjective standard, and it is also an unrealistic expectation, as experience has proven time and time again. By simply resetting our expectations to lower speeds, by reconciling ourselves to having to spend a bit more time getting places, we lessen the congestion problem by definition. 

After all, time isn’t the only way to think about the efficiency of the system. The congestion problem stems in part from the fact that cars are a spatially inefficient way to move people: each car requires considerable roadway and parking space but carries less than 1.5 people on average in the US. 

From a space efficiency standpoint, it would make sense to devote more road space to modes such as transit, biking, and walking that consume far less space per person moved. Contrary to the backlash against bike lanes in cities like Toronto and Washington, DC, studies show that taking space away from cars does not generally increase congestion. 

Recommended In Praise of Traffic Congestion Lloyd Alter July 10, 2024

Recalibrating our fear of the economic impacts of congestion would also help.

Although decision-makers justify highway expansions on the basis that congestion is an economic drain, research suggests that congestion has little impact on economic growth. This is in part because congestion is to some extent self-correcting: when congestion gets bad enough, people adjust their choices to cope with it.

It is also helpful to recognize that congestion, as history shows, is a fact of life in vibrant urban centers with thriving economies. The entire world experienced this truth in reverse during the COVID pandemic.

All of which is to say that maybe we shouldn’t be quite as obsessed with congestion as we are. Thinking differently about congestion would open the door to more effective strategies for addressing it while creating space for increased attention to other pressing problems —like safety.

The single-mindedness fostered by our congestion obsession has been counterproductive. Approaching the problem with a more expansive, more equanimous frame of mind might just get us to a solution.

Conceptualizing Security in a Time of Deep Civilizational Crisis Date and time * Date: June 4th, 2026 * Time: 1pm GMT * Registration Link: Here * Speakers: Manuel Rozental (Colombia), Deepa Sinha (India) and (TBC) * Moderation: Introduction alternativesalternativesalternatives

Events Upcoming events Conceptualizing security in a time of deep civilizational crisis - June 4th The first webinar will open the series with a conceptual discussion on security in a time of deep civilizational crisis. It will examine how security has traditionally been framed through the international order, the nation-state, sovereignty, militarization, and the management of threats, while asking how communities and movements are challenging this paradigm today.AlternativesalternativesTa…

Dollar for dollar, investing in renewable energy provides greater benefits to society than technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new analysis.

Most previous studies of direct air capture (DAC) have looked at whether it removes more carbon dioxide than it produces, or whether it costs society less to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere than it does to leave it there—in effect comparing carbon capture with doing nothing.

“Many analyses ask ‘is direct air capture net-negative?’ and leave it there, without acknowledging that there is an opportunity cost to investing in direct air capture,” says study team member Yannai Kashtan, a researcher at PSE Healthy Energy, an Oakland, CA-based independent research institute.

Instead, Kashtan and his colleagues set a higher bar for DAC, comparing its return on investment to that of other climate-friendly technologies, namely renewable energy development.

“I was surprised how much the answer [to] ‘is DAC worth it?’ changes when you change your metric,” Kashtan says.

The researchers modeled the health and climate benefits of investing $100 million in direct air capture versus investing the same amount in utility-scale solar or onshore wind in 22 regions across the United States through 2050.

The public health impact of DAC is often overlooked in studies of the technology. But if the electricity to power DAC comes even partially from a fossil-based grid, it results in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and small particulate matter pollution—while renewables do not.

The researchers modeled four scenarios for the development of DAC technology and performance, analyzing each of these in the context of eight different hypothetical future grid scenarios developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

 

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The results were stark. “Solar and wind beat direct air capture now and all the way through 2050, even if direct air capture gets substantially cheaper and more energy-efficient,” says Kashtan.

If today’s performance of DAC holds—the technology currently requires about 5,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and costs $1,000 to remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—it would have a net negative impact on society through 2050 due to greenhouse gas emissions and harmful air pollution, the researchers found.

Even if DAC energy use falls by more than two-thirds to 1,500 kilowatt hours and its cost by half to $500 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, the benefits of renewables are several-fold greater than those of DAC.

Only in the most optimistic scenario for DAC development—in which these figures fall to 800 kilowatt hours and $100 per ton of carbon dioxide removed—does the technology edge out renewables nationwide. Even then, solar and wind remain the better investment in some regions, such as across the Midwest.

“To be clear, direct air capture can do something solar and wind cannot: reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations, undoing past damage,” Kashtan says. But until carbon emissions are virtually zeroed out, DAC is highly unlikely to be cost-effective compared to investing in renewables. Kashtan compares the situation to a common-sense principle: “fix your broken faucet before you start mopping the floor.”

A future analysis could try to find the “tipping point” where the grid is sufficiently clean that DAC offers greater bang for the buck, says Kashtan.

Source: Kashtan Y. et al. “Direct air capture has substantial health and climate opportunity costs.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.