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2026-05-03 19:00:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has made it harder for small and activist investors to raise concerns through the government filing system known as EDGAR. Now they’re pushing back with their own alternative platform, which they call the Proxy Open Exchange—or POE. 

Literary puns aside, the initiative is aimed at bringing greater transparency to an increasingly restricted space. In January, the SEC said it would no longer allow investors with less than $5 million in shares to use EDGAR to send communiqués called exempt solicitations to fellow shareholders. Such documents are often used to lay out an investor’s stance on a given issue, including climate action, board accountability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We believe a free market requires communication,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which spearheaded the new site. “If they’re going to take away EDGAR, we’re going to give them POE.”

The response has been swift. In less than a week, POE has 63 filings, with dozens more expected. EDGAR shows just 39 exempt solicitations so far in 2026. 

The SEC declined to comment about POE, but has previously told Grist that limiting access to the system is an attempt to rein in the scope of government, ease burdensome regulation, and curtail the “large volume” of requests that often require prompt attention. “Over the years, companies have expressed concerns that this misuse has caused confusion among their investor base,” an SEC spokesperson said at the time. “Shareholders can continue to conduct exempt solicitations through other commonly used means, such as press releases, emails, websites, and social media, and electronic shareholder forums.”

Critics of the move see it as an attempt to silence irksome investors.

The workaround is not the only attempt at an alternative to the official platform. The nonprofit Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, for instance, recently started putting exempt solicitations and proxy memos it receives about issues relevant to its members on its website. Still, POE is the most robust effort yet to fill the gap the government created.

It is designed to mimic EDGAR, Behar said. It even relies on the same set of codes—known as central index keys—to identify individuals and companies making posts. Although As You Sow reviews submissions for basic errors, it doesn’t filter content, making POE, like EDGAR, open to all viewpoints.

“POE is a new and adventurous approach to try to set up a large public website that people of all persuasions can post their solicitations on,” said Tim Smith, senior policy advisor for the Interfaith Center, who applauded the idea. “It could be an investor that’s filing a resolution on climate. It could be a conservative investor who decides to push a resolution that’s challenging diversity, equity, or inclusion.” 

Any filings are subject to the same anti-fraud legal provisions required by EDGAR, says Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania. “The postings have to be accurate, so that doesn’t change,” she said. What is new is that POE’s interface is much more user-friendly, she said, calling the government’s site “kind of old and glitchy.” 

Not everyone, however, is embracing the system. According to Behar, one of the world’s largest proxy advisors—which helps its clients research shareholder proposals—won’t consider any information that’s not on the official platform. The company, ISS, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. Still, Fisch said the pool of potential users of the new system is vast. 

“The great thing about these being public websites is that they’re available to mutual funds, to smaller institutions, to universities, and so forth,” she said. She’ll be curious to see data on who uses the site in the coming weeks and months. So far, though, “it’s way too early to tell.”

Fisch will also be watching how corporations respond. Some, like Exxon Mobil, which has often opposed shareholder advocacy, could see it as a threat (the company did not respond to an interview request) and start their own platforms. Or, perhaps, the existence of unregulated alternatives will encourage companies to ask the SEC to push people back to EDGAR, where everything will be in the same place. 

Whatever the rationale, it would be relatively easy for the government to reverse course. “Any new administration or new SEC could change this in a moment,” said Smith. That, in many ways, would be an ideal outcome for Behar, who hopes that POE will be temporary.

“We do not want this to be a necessary platform into perpetuity,” he said. “This is hopefully short-lived. When the administration changes and the SEC returns to its core mission, we expect EDGAR to be restored because transparent information sharing is essential for the free market.”

More often, though, Fisch finds that platforms like POE are one-way streets. Even if EDGAR is loosened back up, she expects people to continue finding the alternatives useful. “Once investors figure out how cheap and easy and convenient it is to use the internet and social media to communicate, I don’t think they’re going to stop,” she said. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

2026-05-03 02:41:14

As peace talks with Iran continue to stall, the Trump administration announced on Friday an additional $8.6 billion in fast-tracked weapons sales to Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the deal under an “emergency provision” allowing arms to be sold without the congressional approval nominally required for warmaking. This is the third time since the US started bombing Iran two months ago that Rubio has invoked emergency authorization to sell weapons to Israel and its allies. 

During those two months, the US and Israel have reportedly drained their munitions stockpiles bombing Iran and Lebanon. At least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran, according to the country’s health ministry; at least 2,509 people have been killed in Lebanon, per the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Last week, a White House official for the first time offered an estimate of the conflict’s costs to the United States, ballparking the campaign at around $25 billion. 

Generally, arms sales are supposed to go through a congressional review process under the Arms Export Control Act. But it’s not uncommon for the government to bypass that process entirely. (The Biden administration also approved arms sales under emergency powers.) 

This most recent set of weapons sales includes $4 billion for American-made Patriot missile interceptors, to be sent to Qatar; “Advanced Precision Kill Weapons Systems” for Israel, Qatar, and Kuwait; and an “Integrated Battle Command System” for Kuwait. The contractors receiving that money will include Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman. 

Those contractors might be the only people happy about the ongoing war on Iran: 61 percent of Americans in one recent poll said they believed the war was a mistake. Another recent survey said that the main priority among Americans, regarding the war, was to end it as soon as possible—whether out of concern for human lives or for gas prices, which have skyrocketed in recent weeks.  

2026-05-03 00:37:08

Donald Trump’s plans to remake parts of Washington, DC, are much bigger—and more expensive—than originally planned. A top Trump fundraiser is now asking for donations to a nonprofit that will support a proposed massive sculpture garden, as well as the remodeling of a central DC golf course. 

Last year, dump trucks carrying demolition waste and dirt started depositing their payloads in a giant pile near the 4th hole at DC’s municipal East Potomac Golf Course. It was the first sign that Trump planned to re-create the course to his own tastes. (Later, reporters learned that the debris was the remains of the White House’s old East Wing.) 

Today, the Washington Post reported that Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke is soliciting donations to remake the course into a championship-caliber facility for major events and to create Trump’s long-desired “Garden of American Heroes,” a sculpture park on nearby federal land. The federal government plans to formally take over the golf course Sunday, according to the Post. 

The concept images for the golf course seem to eliminate most non-golf activities that presently exist in East Potomac, disappearing the park’s bike paths and open spaces where people picnic in the summers.

The garden, meanwhile, is a Trump concept that’s been in the works since his first term. It would involve approximately 250 “realistic” statues of prominent Americans, including Elvis Presley, Kobe Bryant, Alfred Hitchcock, and Dr. Seuss, among many others, according to the New York Times. The statues alone could cost more than $50 million, though Congress has only approved $40 million for for the project. 

It’s the latest in a chain of attempts to remake DC in Trump’s image: the renaming of the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” the draping of banners bearing his portrait over various federal government buildings, and resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in “American flag blue.” He also hopes to add a giant triumphal arch to the Lincoln Memorial area, which would overshadow the memorial itself. 

The president, it’s clear, loves a monument: Yesterday, he posted a picture online of his own face photoshopped onto Mount Rushmore. 

2026-05-02 19:30:00

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Looking out to sea from the grey sandy beaches of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, it is never hard to spot evidence of the country’s thriving fossil fuel export trade. Oil tankers ride at anchor on the horizon, and sometimes, locals say, lumps of coal wash up on the shore, blown off the collier ships that carry cargoes from the nearby mines.

It was here, on Wednesday evening, that the Colombian government took a bold step to shift its economy—and that of the rest of the world—away from dependence on coal, gas and oil and into a new era of clean energy. With the first-ever conference on “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” the host joined nearly 60 countries determined to loosen the grip of petrostates on the world’s future.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy,” Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister and chair of the talks, said in closing remarks that celebrated a “new method” of bringing together high-ambition governments, parliamentarians and civil society groups to accelerate the decarbonisation of their economies.

At this moment in history, the conference may also mark a new global divide between “electro-democracies” and petro-dictatorships.

The initiative has come at a pivotal moment in the climate fight. Oil and gas prices have soared since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, the second such crisis within five years, after the price rises that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Households around the world are spiralling into debt, farmers cannot afford fertiliser, and governments are remembering that a dependency on volatile fossil fuels is holding them hostage to geopolitical forces they cannot control.

The global economy faces a triple whammy: rising energy costs, rising food costs that follow, and the spectre of rampant inflation that will raise interest rates and add to the cost of servicing debt. Both rich and poor nations are feeling the impact, but the poor, with their higher levels of debt and lower reserves, are suffering more.

Repeated oil shocks blighted the 1970s, and the current crisis is not only greater than those but more impactful than all previous crises combined, according to Fatih Birol, the world’s leading energy economist and chief of the International Energy Agency, the gold standard in energy research. “This is bigger than all the biggest crises combined, and therefore huge,” he said in an exclusive Guardian interview. “I still cannot understand that the world was so blindsided, that the global economy can be held hostage to a 50km strait.”

What is different today from previous oil shocks is the ready availability of a viable alternative: cheap, reliable and plentiful renewable energy from the wind and sun, with modern battery technology to smooth over any intermittency; while electric vehicles and heat pumps can shunt transport and heating off fossil fuels and onto far more efficient electricity.

For those reasons, Birol predicted the current shock would mark a permanent change for the global energy industry, leading consumer countries to lose trust in fossil fuels. “Their perception of risk and reliability will change,” he said. “Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future. And this will cut into the main markets for oil.”

These changes would be lasting, he added. “The vase is broken, the damage is done—it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy market for years to come.”

It is an irony not lost on Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, that it is the oil industry’s dominance of global economies that has finally woken governments to the dangers. “The fossil fuel cost crisis now has its foot on the throat of the global economy,” he said. “Those who have fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom.”

Renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation last year for the first time, according to the thinktank Ember, generating 33.8 percent of power compared with coal’s 33 percent. Interest from consumers in solar panels and batteries, from Pakistan to the UK, has leapt further since the Iran war.

“The economic logic of renewables [is] impossible to ignore,” Stiell said. Military advisers have weighed in, too, pointing out that renewables offer a better route than fossil fuels to national security. Stiell noted: “Governments are pushing renewables plans into overdrive: to restore national security, economic stability, competitiveness, policy autonomy and basic sovereignty.”

But no one should write off the petrostates just yet. The world’s biggest gas producer, the United States, is increasingly flexing its military muscle to assert the Trump administration’s goal of “energy dominance”. Russia, the second biggest gas supplier, is waging war against its democratic neighbor, Ukraine. Fossil fuel interests are pouring huge sums into the political campaigns of far-right candidates in the Americas and Europe.

The Santa Marta vision of a “new global climate democracy” sets people power against this. Polls constantly show an overwhelming majority of people want their governments to take stronger action against the climate crisis, but at many international meetings, their voices are drowned out by corporate lobbyists or shut down by petrostate vetoes.

At Santa Marta, by contrast, science led the way on the opening day, followed by a “people’s summit” and gatherings of parliamentarians. All of these groups sent representatives to the high-level sessions in the final two days, where there were no vetoes, no fractious negotiations over minutiae, only intensive and constructive dialogue on how to move forward. Many participants called the gathering historic, but few were under any illusions that it was anything more than a strong start.

Claudio Angelo, of the Observatorio do Clima, a think tank in Brazil, said: “I don’t think the Santa Marta process represents any immediate threat to the fossil fuel industry. This is more about countries organising to draw up a plan. Even within the ‘doers’, the fossil industry landscape is diverse: national oil companies in Latin America, private oil majors in Europe and parts of Africa. These folks will fight for lenient transition calendars until they’re either outcompeted by Chinese electricity or forced by governments to diversify.”

Though shifting to renewables will work out cheaper for all countries in the long-term, there is an upfront cost to the switch. Fossil fuel producer nations will also need finance to invest in new industries to replace lost oil, gas and coal export revenue.

The Santa Marta conference was not intended for new finance pledges – rich countries offered a settlement of $300 billion a year by 2035 at the Cop29 conference in 2029, and that will not be improved on now that the US has withdrawn its dollars.

But there could be other routes to finding cash. Diverting some of the $1.5tn currently spent each year on subsidising fossil fuels around the world would help, and raising money from the companies that have profited from the climate crisis, through windfall taxes and other mechanisms, is always an option. David Hillman, the director of the Make Polluters Pay coalition, said: “Fossil fuel giants are figuratively making a killing from this war. Their excessive unearned profits need to fund the transition to renewables to hasten the end of our fossil fuel dependence.”

Almost all of the 59 nations participating in Santa Marta are democracies, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Colombia will hold a presidential election at the end of May in which the ruling party’s candidate, Iván Cepeda, faces a fierce challenge from the far-right populist Abelardo de la Espriella, who wants to increase fracking and oil production. If the latter wins, the global energy transition movement would lose one of its most important nations.

Colombia is not the only country facing difficulties. The Netherlands, co-host of Santa Marta, announced new drilling in the North Sea just before the conference. The UK is considering new North Sea fields too, and other countries present, from Brazil to Tanzania, also have fossil fuel expansion plans. Those decisions will have to be reversed for this to become the hoped-for “conference of doers”.

Before the next conference, to take place early next year on the Pacific island of Tuvalu, which is co-hosting with Ireland, countries are supposed to start the process of drawing up national roadmaps for the phaseout of fossil fuels. The organisers want these plans to feed into the broader UN climate negotiating process and to spur others to join the transition movement.

Roadmaps offer a way for countries to attract investors, and also provide guidance for their industries to help ensure the transition to a low-carbon world is fair to workers and the most vulnerable people. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said: “We need three transitions: out of fossil fuels, into renewable energy for all, and into a world that cares for nature. All must be grounded in justice.”

Santa Marta, a historically coal-fuelled town at the heart of a coal- and oil-fuelled country, may eventually be regarded as ground zero for the demise of fossil fuels. Fernanda Carvalho, the head of policy for climate and energy at WWF International, said: “It is here that the seeds of a new, implementation-focused initiative have been planted. In times of an exhaustion of multilateral processes and a gap in delivering the system change we need, what is emerging offers a different approach. This could be a real bottom-up process that centres the voices of communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction and consumption.”

But despite the “contagious” hope felt by many involved in the Santa Marta talks, there remains a long road ahead.

2026-05-02 19:30:00

It’s become a familiar refrain: something awful happens in the world, and a member of the commentariat asks, “Where are the student protests? Or did those only happen when Biden was president?”

Deprived of student targets, they are forced to post ad infinitum about Hasan Piker. Who wouldn’t be bitter?

The consistent thread is that kids these days, because they’re protesting or because they’re not, are the problem. “One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution” over Trump’s bombing of Iran, a writer for the Atlantic recently mused. After all, critics from Jonathan Haidt (“Instagram intifada”) to Jesse Watters (“Hamas influencers”) framed the students as the least impressive of Iran’s proxies.

But the question itself is a fair one. Where are the protests? The real answer isn’t that students decided to shut up. It’s that universities, and a hostile federal government, have expended massive resources trying to ensure they do. 

Between spring and fall of 2024—before Donald Trump’s reelection, let alone his return to office—the total number of campus protests dropped a staggering 64 percent.

Then came Trump’s second term. Universities were terrorized and cuts dished out—but administrators who had been pulling their hair out in 2024 could now say their hands were tied. Soon after Trump’s election, dozens of schools fell over themselves to institute even more speech-suppressing policies, banning things like megaphones and musical instruments from outdoor areas of campus except with permits or during specified hours.

University presidents dragged before Congress to prove their compliance with Trump’s half-dozen executive orders on education testified endlessly about why they’d allowed such chaos in their fiefdoms. In response to allegations of antisemitism—and threats to revoke federal funding—some schools, like the University of California, Berkeley, even turned over students’ personal information to the federal government. 

Others simply turned the other cheek as the federal government bore down on their students. Some students who spoke in support of the Palestinian cause, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, were kidnapped by ICE. Others, like Momodou Taal, were pressured into leaving the country to avoid the same fate. Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of participating in the encampments.

Schools like the City University of New York and New York University still aren’t allowing student commencement speakers out of fear that those speakers might criticize Israel. At Swarthmore College, a student is busy preparing for a criminal trial over their participation in an encampment last year, when they should be preparing for finals. Immigrant students, now as in 2024, face the highest stakes: say too much about Israel or Palestine or genocide online, and your green card might be revoked. 

The high-risk climate has not silenced student activism entirely, in particular around Gaza. On April 24, several dozen students rushed the quad at Occidental College bearing Palestinian-flag banners, and set up the same cheap green Amazon tents that got Columbia protesters accused of being a Soros and/or Hamas-funded op back in 2024. One student in the encampment called me on Saturday, late from a session of his weekly Torah study group, and said the Occidental group was “definitely the first encampment that’s lasted more than 24 hours since 2024.”

The students at Occidental, who also mounted an encampment in 2024, wanted their school to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies profiting from occupation and genocide in Gaza. Occidental, like most colleges and universities, did not divest two years ago. 

But, like many schools, it did change its rules around demonstrations. “We’ve seen wave after wave of reactionary protest policies,” the Occidental student, who did not wish to be named due to fear of administrative retribution, told me—as at the dozens of other schools that expanded the circumstances in which student protest would be met with the threat of expulsion or arrest.  In Occidental’s case, student protests have been restricted to specific times and spaces, and more bafflingly, “semi-permanent structures” have been banned. (“What does that even mean?” the student I spoke to wondered.) 

Columbia’s 2024 encampment lasted two weeks. Occidental’s 2o24 protest lasted eight days and was voluntarily disbanded after the school’s board of trustees agreed to consider a divestment proposal, which it did not take up. The 2026 Occidental encampment, called the Rafah to Jenin Liberated Zone, was dismantled after only 3 days. No one was arrested and no one was hurt—but even the most liberal of liberal arts colleges can now plead Trump administration pressure if they threaten, or choose, to call in the riot cops. April’s Occidental board meeting, which the students aimed to protest, was moved to Zoom. 

“Students involved in the encampment cited a recently submitted divestment proposal as their key issue. That proposal is currently under review by the College’s Board of Trustees through the College’s established process, which is designed to gather input from across our community,” an Occidental representative told me.

And students, despite the higher-risk climate, are still politically engaged. The protests this week indicate that, as do slower modes of organizing, like the historic wave of graduate student unionism we are in. (Harvard’s graduate student union just went on strike, for one.) Some young people have simply moved their organizing off-campus and into broader coalitions. Palestinian flags can be found at anti-ICE and No Kings protests. We may not be in an era of encampments—but the kids haven’t given up and gone back to scrolling.

Correction, May 2: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Swarthmore students preparing for a criminal trial.

2026-05-02 15:01:00

Last fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention. 

At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy. 

“We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.  

They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert.

“You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.”

This week on Reveal, as a new flotilla recently set sail for Gaza, we’re bringing back our story about the Global Sumud Flotilla from last fall for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference. 

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2025.