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Florida Parents and Teachers Aghast at Downplaying of Climate Change and Evolution in K-12 Science Standards

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
13

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t want the state’s children to learn modern science. The Orlamdo Sentinel reported that parents and teachers were “gobsmacked” by the state’s new science standards. In one of the states most threatened by environmental degradation, the state has deleted the study of evolution and diminished the study of climate change.

Stephen Walker reported:

Florida’s new plan for teaching science in public schools lacks depth, skirts around the important topics of climate change and evolution and would be a “disservice” to the state’s students, dozens of parents and teachers told the Florida Department of Education late Wednesday.

Nearly 300 people attended a virtual education department forum, with nearly all 29 speakers criticizing the state’s proposed new science standards, which are benchmarks for what should be taught in science lessons in kindergarten through 12th grade. Experts who’ve reviewed them have shared similar views, calling them a step backwards

The state released its proposed standards on Sept. 25 and is now taking public comment on them, both on its website and in several meetings.

Robin Williams, a retired biology and environmental science teacher, called them a “disservice” to Florida students because they don’t fully tackle evolution.

The state’s current standards, adopted in 2008, call evolution one of science’s “big ideas” and insist it must be taught.

That makes sense and should not change, Williams said.

“Evolution is a fundamental underlying process unifying all of biology. To leave it out is ideology posing as biology,” she said.

The proposed standards barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.

The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a months-long, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.

Education Commissioner Henry Mack seemed to some to re-ignite that fight with a statement released with the new standards that included a reference to “the book of creation.”

But Thursday morning he took to social media to insist he was not “smuggling a Sunday-school lesson into Biology,” adding in his post on X that, “I am not advocating religious influence in the standards. I am opposing the opposite error: treating nature as a prop for adult ideology, or treating wonder as something to be talked out of children by leftist zealots.”

His original statement said, “The classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered—that the book of creation can be read by reason. Florida’s new science standards will form students who observe carefully, reason rigorously, and treat the natural world as something given to be known, not invented.”

During Wednesday’s forum, one parent asked for clarification on what Mack meant by that. But state education department employees facilitating the meeting did not respond to that or other questions from speakers, instead thanking attendees and encouraging them to submit their concerns in writing.

Chris Vercelli, a parent in Sarasota County who regularly attends government meetings to preach Christianity, suggested at Wednesday’s meeting that he read the commissioner’s statement as an endorsement of his views and said he was in “full support” of the new standards.

It was “refreshing” to hear the state was “entertaining the idea of teaching creation and intelligent design in schools,” he said, referring to the argument that an “intelligent cause” better explains living things than evolution by natural selection.

“The way that evolution is taught really is like a bait and switch … that means that everything originated from primordial soup, and there is no God. That’s just ridiculous. That is like total non-science,” Vercelli said.

The proposed standards also give little attention to human-made climate change and do not use that term, instead referring to “anthropogenic activities” that affect “Earth’s systems.”

Brad Dupke, an Earth science teacher and geologist in Hillsborough County, asked how the state expects him to teach a required unit on fossils without teaching evolution and climate change.

“We need to call a spade a spade instead of trying to dance around what it is. I can’t teach geologic history of the Earth without being able to say how the climate changed,” he said.

In addition to complaints about the state’s proposed handling of evolution and climate change, several speakers said the standards were too numerous and lacked rigor and others criticized the way the state posted its proposal for public review. Instead of a single document, the department initially posted each standard on a separate page, requiring clicking through hundreds of pages to view all the standards.

I have s hunch that students in Florida don’t learn about the Scopes trials read the fictionalized version Inherit the Wind.

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Categories Accountability, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Environment, Ethics, Florida, Science

Jan Resseger: The Trump Administration’s War on Children

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
1

Jan Resseger keeps a steady focus o what matters most in a decent society: the well-being of children. Trump and his minions don’t care. Not about children. Not about the rule of law. Not about democracy. Trump cares about greed and self-enrichment. He seems to care about his children. He cuts them in on the grift. His youngest son Barron is said to be worth $150 million. But he doesn’t care about yours.

The fact that he just issued guidance on childhood vaccinations, which reduces mandated vaccines and puts America’s most vulnerable at risk of serious illness and death, tells you all you need to know about this scientifically ignorant man.

Jan writes:

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s important new book, Regime Change, explores how the second Trump administration functions—the cast of characters, their relationships, and their operational style. A reader is also exposed, however, to the President’s and the administration’s big policy concerns—imposing tariffs, ridding the country of immigrants, ending nuclear weapons in Iran, proclaiming that everything is more affordable, and ending the public’s fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. These issues have also been widely covered broadly in the news.

Here are topics that do not appear at all in Regime Change‘s index: children, public education, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, or Child Care.  There is not even a mention of Trump’s tuition tax credit private school vouchers launched in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The issue of birthright citizenship is mentioned in the index only as a subhead under immigration, and in the book itself birthright citizenship is covered only in one sentence describing its proposed elimination by an early Trump executive order. In the index, there is only one page citation to the U.S. Department of Education itself, but the reference is to brief coverage of the administration’s attempt to eradicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at Harvard University.

The lack of regular news coverage—particularly in the local newspapers—about Trump’s damaging public education policy and the administration’s failure to protect children’s well-being and children’s rights does not, however, mean that these issues have been untouched by Trump administration policy. For those of us who do not need CHIP or SNAP, who can afford quality child care and preschool, whose children attend well-funded public schools, whose families have been citizens for generations, however, there is minimal exposure to the Trump administration’s threats to the institutions on which vulnerable families and children depend.

Just this past week the Trump administration took two steps that, if they do come to pass, will seriously impact some of our society’s most vulnerable children—poor children benefiting today from Head Start, and the children of immigrants from whom the President is once again trying to steal the protection of birthright citizenship. First Focus on Children’s President Bruce Lesley has identified what he calls the Trump administration’s “organized abandonment” of the needs and rights of our society’s most vulnerable children.

The Trump administration attempted to destroy Head Start.     At the end of last week, the Trump administration formally proposed new federal administrative guidance to deregulate the quality of Head Start programs that currently serve 700,000 children across the United States.  The destruction of Head Start had been predicted early last week but on Thursday in a notice in the Federal Register, the administration formally proposed radically diminishing 133 pages of rules that have shaped Head Start since it was established in 1965 as a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.  The Center on Law and Social Policy explains that the proposed new rules are being disguised by the administration with language describing “an effort to ‘streamline,’ ‘enhance,’ and ‘modernize’” the program.  Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes reports: “The Heritage Foundation has long called for the elimination of Head Start, but the conservative group published a report last month saying the program should be deregulated in many of the ways the proposed rule suggests while ‘officials work to end the program.’ ”

The Associated Press‘s Moria Balingit outlines the changes the new rules would prescribe: “Head Start… is currently governed by more than 100 pages of regulations… (which) require centers to have low staff-to-student ratios and a research-backed curriculum, among other things, and they ensure centers are providing wraparound services that are critical to children in poverty, including medical and dental screenings and parent coaching. The proposal would toss out nearly all of that rule book. Education Week”s Elizabeth Heubeck adds: “The new proposal would require (that) all classroom instruction be conducted in English, except for immersion programs operated on Native American tribal lands. An estimated 30-35% of children enrolled in the Head Start program are dual language learners.”  The program would also exclude many non-citizen children and children in some immigrant families.

While Congress establishes federal departments and the specific offices within the departments, the legislative branch has no power over the executive branch’s right to establish formal administrative rules and guidance.  It is possible that the rules announced in last week’s Federal Register can be challenged in court, and it is also possible, of course, that public outrage might cause the Trump administration to modify the new rules during the 60 day period when the public is invited to submit public comments before the rule becomes final. A future President, of course, could replace the Trump administration’s new rules.

President Trump signed two new executive orders to undermine birthright citizenship.     Last Thursday, The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf, Justin Jouvenal, and David Nakamura reported: “President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt. In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The first order said children would be ineligible if born to ‘alien enemies,’ members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens… The new orders marked a fresh effort to… deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee.”

The reporters quote legal experts who doubt that the first executive order could survive a legal challenge: “An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department. No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic.”

The reporters attribute the second executive order to White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who has made stopping “birth tourism” a priority. They provide data to demonstrate that what is called “birth tourism” is relatively infrequent. “In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

None of the legal experts the reporters quote believes that either of these executive orders would be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court or would challenge in any way what Chief Justice John Roberts declared in his June 30, 2026 decision in Trump v. Barbara: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley believes that both of  last week’s executive orders are seriously misguided: “The legal question isn’t simply what the government thinks about immigration. It’s whether an innocent child can lose fundamental rights grounded in the Constitution because of something government officials allege about a parent’s conduct and intent… The latest effort to gut a fundamental constitutional operating principle since our nation’s founding has been written clearly in the Constitution since 1868, is being sold to the public with pathetic history and legal arguments the Supreme Court itself rejected 128 years ago and early this year. Every administration has the authority to enforce immigration laws. However, none has the authority to rewrite the Constitution… by redefining which babies they deem are precious and which are pushed into the shadows of our society.”

Although there has obviously been some news coverage of the week’s public policy initiatives impacting our society’s children, the well-being of our children is neither the top policy concern for officials in the Trump administration nor the top story for the reporters who track the administration’s agenda. Because the needs of children are definitely not the primary lens through which the Trump administration views and conceptualizes our society’s important needs, it is especially important to watch for news about children’s welfare, their rights, and the enormous institution of public schools that serves the mass of our children

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Trump Finds New Ways to Grift and Grab

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2026 //
6

Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.

On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

He writes:

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon. 

— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November. 

— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics. 

— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster. 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Trump Administration Admitted in Court That It Cancelled Major Grants for Political Reasons

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2026 //
9

The person who is elected President usually says on election night that he will govern on behalf of the American people. He makes a point of obligation to be respectful for all Governors, to send FEMA to any state that has suffered from natural disasters, regardless of whether they vote for him or his rival.

Trump has said frankly that he hates his enemies. He sometimes doesn’t pretend to care about states that did not vote for him.

Aaron Parnas of the Parnas Perspective points out that the Trump administrative made decisions about environmental grants based solely on whether the states supported him in the 2024 elections. This involved billions of dollars in grants.

Parnas wrote:

A major constitutional violation, confirmed in court. The Trump administration admitted in court filings this month that it canceled 284 Biden era clean energy grants worth billions of dollars based solely on whether the recipient state voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic senators. A lawyer for the Energy Department conceded that none of the terminations were based on any programmatic, statutory, cost reduction, or performance related factor, directly contradicting Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s June congressional testimony that no decisions were made on politics. The Energy Department disputes any contradiction, saying Wright was distinguishing between the review process and the timing of the cancellations, but hundreds of additional grants the department had itself recommended for cancellation were left untouched simply because they sat in states that backed Trump.

Real projects and real money were caught in the fallout. The politically targeted cancellations halted funding for hundreds of energy projects, including electrical grid upgrades in California and Oregon, methane leak reduction efforts in Colorado, and clean hydrogen fuel hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest. The cuts came in October alongside a broader White House push to pressure Democratic lawmakers during a government funding standoff, with Trump publicly threatening to slash what he called Democrat agencies. Some grant recipients have since sued to try to recover their funding, and this is not the first time the Energy Department has admitted politics played a role, since a federal judge already ruled in two earlier cases that more than a dozen grants were improperly canceled for political reasons, though this latest admission is far broader and more detailed.

Democrats say it exposes a dangerous pattern with more to come. Senator Patty Murray and Representative Marcy Kaptur called the cancellations an outright un-American weaponization of government and accused the administration of corruptly abusing its power to punish states over how they voted. The controversy lands as the administration finalizes new rules, expected by October, that would give Trump’s political appointees direct control to review, block, or revoke federal grants across the entire government, worth more than a trillion dollars annually. Budget office director Russell Vought has defended the changes as necessary to ensure democratic control of spending, but critics, including antipoverty groups, scientists, and city leaders, have flooded the government with comments warning the rules would let the administration extend this kind of political targeting far beyond energy grants. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities fellow Devin O’Connor said the willingness to be this blatant in court should be taken as a serious warning about what the new framework could enable nationwide.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Politics, Trump

Trump Administration Backs Down on Plan to Remove Ocean Monitors After Bipartisan Backlash

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2026 //
3

Only days ago, the Trump administration began dismantling a federal program to monitor the oceans, for no apparent reason. When Congress saw what was happening, some Republicans were aghast. The program to remove the monitors has been canceled, at least temporarily.

Just goes to show you what happens when Republican members of Congress grow a spine.

Maxine Joselow of The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

Categories Environment, Stupid, Trump

Trump Gives Contract for Coal-Fired Plant to MAGA Ally with Zero Experience

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2026 //
4

During the 2024 campaign, Trump met with leaders of the oil and gas industry and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He promised to be their champion.

I don’t know whether the industry delivered for Trump, but he has certainly delivered for them. He has opposed alternative sources of energy, treats climate change as a hoax, and canceled federal contracts for wind and solar projects that were well underway. He loves fossil fuels and plans to revive the coal industry. Trump is a champion of “clean coal,” whatever that is.

While Europe, China, and Japan forge ahead with the expansion of alternative sources of energy, the U.S. is investing in the energy sources of the past.

Redeeming his promise to the coal industry, Trump recently launched planning for a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The contract for the design and feasibility was awarded to a Trump crony with no experience in the field.

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

He made more of a name for himself within the MAGA movement through his American Priority Conference, known as AMPfest. It drew QAnon promoters and personalities like Roger Stone — President Donald Trump is a longtime friend and former client — former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and other MAGA influencers with a history of touting conspiracy theories, particularly the lie that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.

AMPfest and Phillips’ American Priority organization have since closed shop, with the last AMPfest held in October 2021 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Before then, however, he became integral enough to MAGA world to secure a speaking spot alongside far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones, Scott Pressler and Jack Posobiec at a rally on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” event.

While Phillips did not end up speaking at that event — according to Mother Jones, which did not report why — he embraced election denier theories from the scene. He also encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, saying he “needs to step up.”

“I think that there’s been overwhelming evidence provided in so many different formats, ways, that any congressman or senator that doesn’t think that there was some kind of irregularity that needs to be looked at in these seven states is just not paying attention or is corrupt,” he told Citizen Media News outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Phillips referred questions to a public relations firm, which made another TerraSpark partner, Bill Tolpegin, available for comment. Tolpegin said in a statement that Phillips had no contact with the White House or Energy Department about the grant. Tolpegin said that the company “had no special, unique or otherwise different levels of access, communication with or attention from administration officials.”

But Phillips’ latest career act is nonetheless illustrative of Washington politics during Trump’s White House sequel, where allies have often won contracts or jobs.

“This is not normal,” Mike McKenna, an energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump White House, said of DOE approving federal grants for a company with no track record in the industry.

McKenna said he is aware of two companies “with decades of experience in generating electricity” that have struggled to navigate DOE processes.

“These companies are no doubt going to ask if companies and people with no experience can do this, why can’t we?” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy, but this is obviously political. And the more political it is, the less likely it is to happen,” he said of building new coal plants.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump’s coal grants are part of his commitments to buoy the nation’s coal industry, such as directives to run coal plants beyond scheduled retirement dates that DOE has credited for preventing electricity blackouts.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” she wrote in response to questions about Phillips and TerraSpark.

Rogers referred POLITICO to DOE for questions about the grant process. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the department selected TerraSpark through a “competitive merit review process” that included evaluation of “technical merit, programmatic relevance, and the applicant’s ability to successfully execute the proposed work.” He did not address questions about Phillips.

“The economics of the project will speak for itself, and are highly competitive,” Tolpegin said.

Coal and carbon capture

What TerraSpark envisions is complex and expensive. A power plant the size it foresees would likely cost more than $1 billion — and that’s before accounting for technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions as proposed.

In addition to Phillips and Tolpegin, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” the company has a third partner, Cory Cipra, a Kansas City-based technology consultant whom Tolpegin said has “a deep background working with utilities.” The company applied for the DOE grant in December and said it will not receive the funding until it comes up with the remaining $21.5 million needed to fund its study.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tolpegin said he founded the company with Phillips to bring online more energy generation “in a way that’s as clean as possible” that could eventually be “carbon negative.”

He called the company’s lack of experience in coal a “good thing.” Prior carbon capture attempts have been limited by “conventional” carbon capture technologies, he said.

“We’re not building your grandparents’ coal plant,” Tolpegin said. “We’re going to be building something new that I hope can flip the script on coal.”

The project was not on DOE’s radar a year ago, said Steve Winberg, who ran DOE’s fossil energy office in Trump’s first term and was undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE until May 2025. He said he knew some of the people involved in TerraSpark — he would not say who — but not Phillips.

The pool of potential grant winners was much larger earlier this winter. DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which handles power generation and coal research, briefed the agency front office in early March on at least seven viable selections for the federal money, according to three people familiar with the process, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.

DOE ultimately picked two proposals for new coal plants, including a project in Alaska — which was awarded an $89 million grant — and the TerraSpark plan to build in West Virginia. Another two projects for existing plants also received awards. 

“Some of these companies are probably three connected guys who threw an application together,” said one DOE official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters. They said the TerraSpark proposal deserves scrutiny. “And the DOE review that occurred would likely not surface that and/or was specifically disinterested in figuring that out.”

TerraSpark does not have much of an online presence, registering its website in July 2025, according to a domain registry. Its website did not name any company officials until a press release for the DOE grant appeared late June 4.…

Kevin Hagerty, a commissioner of Grant County, where the project is slated to be located, said there had been rumors of a project but that he didn’t learn of specifics until DOE announced the grant. Nonetheless, he said people in the Trump-backing county were excited about the support for the state’s shrinking coal industry.

The project is in early stages. While TerraSpark said the project will be located in Mount Storm, it has not yet selected a location, and does not own land in the county.

The partners are also still exploring what specific end users, such as a data center, will be attached to the project.

On June 4, the day DOE announced its grant, TerraSpark’s website said the coal plant would be accompanied by a 1-gigawatt AI data center. By the next day, the website instead said the plan would be paired with a “multi-industry campus.”

Tolpegin said some details on the website were updated to correct “stale” information and that the “first phase” of the project would be building the coal plant in the next few years, with tenants to be determined later. The company has also said it eventually plans to connect the plant to the grid.

Uphill battle for new coal

Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.” Some coal backers are quietly optimistic that those trends will benefit them.

“You think about the speed to which you need to get a data center going, people assume it’s going to be natural gas, but then you’ve got that turbine problem — long lead time on those,” Winberg said. “A lot of people assume it’s going to be nuclear, but you’ve got a long, long lead time on the nuclear. So coal is starting to fit into the mix again.”

But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”

“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”

TerraSpark has partnered with Mantel, a carbon capture startup founded by MIT alumni in 2022, and Sargent & Lundy, an energy engineering firm. The Chicago-based firm has built more than 100 projects related to carbon capture in the last five years, according to its website, and completed work on the Petra Nova project in Texas, the only U.S. power plant currently operating carbon capture at commercial scale.

In a statement, a Mantel spokesperson said TerraSpark is one of many customers and that it is “committed to delivering efficient, scalable carbon capture solutions wherever they can have the greatest impact.”

The energy technology service provider Babcock & Wilcox is also part of the project, along with carbon capture consultants Advanced Resources International.

In a statement, Babcock’s communications director, Sharyn Brooks, said the company has decades of experience with boiler technologies, which positions the company “to support advanced coal generation projects with proven, high-efficiency technologies.”

“Our role is focused on providing engineering and technical support,” Brooks said.

Representatives of Sargent & Lundy and Advanced Resources International did not respond to requests for comment.

Terraspark’s ambitious plans also call for building a new campus for West Virginia University to focus on extracting rare earth minerals from coal waste, and could eventually acquire coal ash from other locations to process for rare earths.

That would be a massive undertaking for any developer, said Rudra Kapila, a director of carbon management and hydrogen at think tank Third Way, who evaluated carbon capture grant proposals for DOE during the Biden administration.

“I mean, who is this Johnny?” she said.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Jared and Ivanka Plan a Billion Dollar Resort on a Privatized Albanian Island

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2026 //
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Ivanka Trump Kushner was recently interviewed about her and her husband’s plans to develop Sazan Island, off the coast of Albania, into a major resort. Five miles of private beachfront. Thousands of hotel rooms. She says she wants it to be the kind of setting that people want. It’s clear that she has no contact with most “people.”

Sazan Island is owned by the state. The Kushners intend to privatize and develop it. The president of Albania welcomes foreign investment because Albania is poor, and he wants to bolster the economy and create jobs.

Albanians are not happy. In fact, thousands of them are rioting against the deal, due to the threat to the island’s natural beauty and biodiversity. It’s possible that their riot is intensified by their views of the Trump family.

The people in the streets may block it.

Categories Billionaires, Environment, Trump

Trump Administration Cancels System to Monitor Oceans for Climate Change

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2026 //
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The Trump administration has made clear its hostility to science, most especially to any scientific research into climate change. Trump and his allies are certain that climate change is a hoax, and they have defunded all efforts to study or prepare for the consequences of climate change. Trump hates wind power, solar power, and any other alternatives to fossil fuels, which he seems to think are inexhaustible. The United States has ceded the leadership in alternative energy sources to China and European nations and other countries who accept the clear evidence of climate change.

Eric Niiler of The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.

The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

Scientists have used data from the system to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how changes in ocean temperature such as marine heat waves might affect fisheries or signal bigger shifts in the climate, and coastal flooding along the East Coast.

The station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, a global conveyor belt of water that some scientists are concerned may be weakening as a result of climate warming. A collapse of the current could have severe weather effects.

The Irminger Sea moorings are fixed to seafloor 9,200 feet below the surface and are part of an international collaboration among scientists who are studying the overturning current.

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump term, said the move was part of a pattern in the Trump administration.

“This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit,” Dr. McLean said. “By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.” When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028.

Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water’s surface down thousands of feet.

The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the network was coordinated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in collaboration with Rutgers University, the University of Washington and Oregon State University. A Woods Hole spokeswoman referred questions to the N.S.F.

It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.

To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists.

Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.

Hilary Palevsky, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Boston College, has been using data from the Irminger instruments for the past decade to better understand how the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have benefited from downloading data from remote ocean instruments, rather than making difficult, dangerous and expensive trips to sea each year. Pulling up the instruments without a plan to store them or to continue collecting data “is very hasty,” she said.

“One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”

The $48 million annual budget for the observation network was small compared with the value of the data it collected for understanding the oceans and the climate, Dr. McLean said.

In the huge federal budget, $48 million is inconsequential, like grounding error.

Categories Environment, Extremism, Science, Stupid, Trump

Timothy Snyder on “Superpower Suicide”

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2026 //
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Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history. He taught for many years at Yale University and held a prestigious chair in European history. In 2025, he accepted a chair at the University of Toronto. His Substack blog is titled “Thinking About…” This important essay appeared in May 9. Nothing Snyder says here has changed.

He wrote:

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming bookdemonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them — the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics — government as customer service to the very wealthy — that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

*****

PS. If you would like to help Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s criminal war of aggression, please consider contributing to the Sky Defense campaign. For worse but also for better, as the Ukrainians have shown us, this is a time when civil society campaigns can contribute to general security.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, International, Lies, Science, Stupid, Technology, Trump, Tyranny

Harrison Ford’s Commencement Address at ASU: “Go Change the World.”

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
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Harrison Ford delivered a stunning commencement speech to the graduates of Arizona State University. Today is the first day of the rest of their lives. He urged them to make a difference.

In an inspiring speech to the class of 2026, actor Harrison Ford admitted to the mistakes of his generation, before calling on young people to change the world.

If you want to hear his speeech in full, here it is on YouTube (17 minutes).

Here is the report of his speech by KTLA:

He kicked off his commencement address Monday at Arizona State University by admitting he didn’t always make the best choices when he was young. “I was squandering my life in riotous living,” the 83-year-old said of his college years. He found himself in a drama class looking for an easy A grade, but fell in love with acting. 

“Hiding in character, costume and makeup, I had a freedom, a bravery I had never felt before – and I got an A!” he joked. “I was, I realized, present for possibly the very first time in my life. My passion had led me to community.” 

Ford pursued acting, he told the students, while working carpentry jobs to pay the bills and support his family. Even after the success “Star Wars,” when things got easier, something still wasn’t quite right.

“The load lightened. I had freedom, opportunity, but something was still missing.” He had found passion for acting, but not purpose in life. 

That changed in the 1980s, Ford said, when he discovered the nonprofit Conservation International. As he continued starring in episodes of “Star Wars,” the “Indiana Jones” series, “Blade Runner” and more, he found his true purpose in activism on behalf of the environment. 

“Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” he continued, making a plea for environmental justice, social justice and protecting indigenous communities. “These communities have long understood that the trees, the mountain, water, soil are not commodities, they are relatives to be cherished.

“We can all play a role by embracing that wisdom in our day-to-day lives, by loving the planet, by honoring nature’s authority, her generosity, the bounty she affords us, the justice of her example,” he said. “Because the world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you is a real mess.”

“Find a place for yourself,” he continued. “Whatever talent or ambition you have, find some way to put it to work. Build something that didn’t exist yesterday. Stand up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves. Bring people together that weren’t talking before. That’s leadership. That’s what moves the needle. 

“Your generation has far more power than you may realize. And if you harness that power, if you find your leadership, your issues, your voice, the world will not be able to ignore you.” 

He ended with a few more inspiring final words: “This is your time. Own it. Enjoy every second of it. Because what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing that you haven’t fully lived it. Congratulations. Go change the world.” 

The student body cheered as Ford exited the stage. Arizona State said more than 14,000 undergraduates graduated this year.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Environment, Ethics
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