For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is BP’s last unionized oil refinery in the United States. BP says it is pursuing “modernized job structures, training, and upskilling,” but workers and their union—United Steelworkers Local 7-1—say that the company has not bargained in good faith, that its contract proposals pose blatant existential threats to workers’ jobs, pay, and collective bargaining rights, and that the company is illegally trying to crush the union out of existence with the lockout. In this episode of Working People, we speak with three locked out workers at the BP oil refinery in Whiting: Eric Schultz, president of USW Local 7-1; Leno Miller, assistant griever for USW Local 7-1; Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7-1, and a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee. 

Additional links/info: 

• USW Local 7-1 Official Lockout Update/Support Page
• USW Local 7-1 Facebook page and Instagram
• Sarah Lazare, Workday Magazine / The American Prospect, “Locked out refinery workers say BP is trying to ‘starve us,’ crush union”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / TRNN, “I survived the rig explosion that caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is what I saw”

Featured Music: 

• Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song

Credits: 

• Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are going to Whiting, Indiana, where for the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum or BP has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. This is the last unionized BP refinery in the United States, and this is a really important struggle and a really important story. But with everything in the world and the news being so crazy these days, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves from national media.

But that is why we are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Lazare, a brilliant journalist and the editor of the excellent Workday Magazine going where others won’t and lifting up the stories that need to be told and heard. In her recent report titled Locked Out Refinery Workers Say BP is Trying to Starve Us and Crush the Union, which was jointly published by Workday Magazine and the American Prospect. Sarah writes, “British Petroleum, one of the 10 largest oil and gas companies on earth, kicked out its workforce at the Whiting Crude Oil Refinery, which at its peak produces 440,000 barrels a day on March 19th. The previous contract expired in January and United Steelworkers Local 7.1 declined management proposals that workers say would existentially threaten the local. The union has been locked out for over 140 days, and it says it is fighting for its survival against an employer that wants to cut pay in jobs, undermine workers’ ability to strike and tear the local away from national bargaining.

The lockout is illegal,” the union says. By late May, United Steel workers had filed 15 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company is refusing to bargain in good faith and using threats, coercive statements, and surveillance. The fight has become a test of endurance. On one side are workers who are not receiving the equivalent of strike pay, though members can ask for help from an assistance fund financed by the United Steel workers. On the other side is an oil company that brought in $189.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In an email to Workday Magazine and the prospect, BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez said that the company is pursuing, “Modernized job structures, training, and upskilling.” But workers say that this is just code for greater disposability and degraded conditions, and they declare a new pay progression would make it easier for BP to fire people and harder for workers to get to the highest rates of pay.

They’re also concerned about the proposed loss of dozens of jobs from the bargaining unit. On March 2nd, management presented the local with their last, best and final offer and the union membership voted it down. A revised settlement was offered the next day, but it too was rejected. On March 17th, the union gave a counter offer. Just four hours later, the company rejected our counterproposal, issued notice of the cancellation of rolling extensions and a notice of intent to lock us out of our jobs effective at midnight on March 18th, according to the United Steel workers. To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Eric Schultz is the president of United Steel Workers Local 7.1. Leno Miller is an assistant griever for USW Local 7.1. And Tim Powell is a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1 and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee.

Eric, Leno, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on the show, especially with everything that you guys got going on. I really, really appreciate it. And I do wish we were meeting under less horrifying and infuriating circumstances. And we’re going to talk about the lockout and everything that’s going on right now. But before we do, I’d love for listeners to get to know you first because most people have never met or spoken to folks in your line of work. So tell us more about yourselves, how you got into this work, and the kind of jobs that you do on a day-to-day basis before this lockout began.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for taking the time to have us. Again, my name’s Eric Schultz. I’m a machinist in the refinery. I hired in October of 2009. I started off in our machinist apprenticeship program. So that was a four-year apprenticeship where you learn the refinery inside and out from a mechanical standpoint. What machinists do out here? It’s kind of an amalgamated trade. It’s more like a millwright machinist. We’ll do anything from repairing pumps in the field, turbines, compressors. We have shop work where we repair relief valves, the pumps and the turbines inside the shop. So we do a lot of things from A to Z as far as a maintenance millwright mechanic would do. And then so that was 2009, about 2014, July of 2014, I came onto the union board as a divisional rep. I represented our machinists and our instrument in electrical groups.

And then about five years ago, I became president of local.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. You machinists need to rebrand as the MacGyver union because you’re out there fixing things that I didn’t even know existed or that are taped together and you got to have an intimate knowledge of this machinery and the kind of machinists I’ve talked to from the railroad industry to the gas and oil industry to Kellogg’s. There are just so many nuances that none of us understand. So I can only imagine the kind of stuff that you guys are doing out there in the field.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. Especially in an oil refinery, it’s a very niche market. You run into equipment that you wouldn’t run into in many other fields. We’ve got equipment from the 1940s and 1950s all the way up to incredibly modern equipment. So you kind of need to know the gamut. And we’ve got some amazing machinists out here that they’re absolutely experts on their units. They’re the ones that our operators will turn to to ask for help troubleshooting. Even our engineers walk into the main shop where our pump mechanics are, turbine mechanics, and ask them to help diagnose what went wrong and what they could do to fix it. So we’ve got some amazing mechanics out here, machinists. Hey,

Leno Miller:

My name’s Leno Miller. I’m a operations specialist for the refinery. I grew up in the area. I’ve carried a card my entire adult life, first of which out of high school, I carried a Teamsters card for a couple years. I worked at the local UPS plant. After that, I ended up in an automotive plant. I carried a UAW card before I got into the refinery. I hired in just shy of 20 years ago. So if BP refuses to come back to the table and bargain in good faith, I can get 20 years on the outside locked out, which not a good feeling, but that’s where we’re at. Inside the refinery, like I said, it’s been almost 20 years. So I started out as an operator, which do rounds, take samples, monitor the equipment on a day-to-day basis. We work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. From there, I became a board operator, a council operator, which is a specialist by trade what’s referred to in the refinery.

And then I ended up becoming a chief operator as well, a chief operator and a council operator, which is a cross-qualified position, which is one of the positions that the company is proposing to do away with. So I would essentially get bumped down from a chief operator and a board operator to a technician. I would lose my specialist qualification and my pay that comes with it.

Tim Powell:

I’m Tim Powell. I started almost 20 years ago. It was 19 years this January. Started at the Cats and it was spent just about 10 years.

Eric Schultz:

No one’s gonna know what the Cat is…

Tim Powell:

Yeah. So I started over at basically a gasoline processing unit. Spent 10 years there. Had an opportunity to transfer to another part of the refinery where we were basically make diesel using high pressure hydrogen and crude oil. And I was an outside operator for most of that time. About six years ago, I got onto the console board operator job as well. So specialists, we take training every year. We do training every quarter going through computer training. Now they’re trying to say that we need to interview for these jobs again and see if we’re still qualified to be there if they’re even going to keep the job. I’m third generation USW on both sides of my family. There’s been union people throughout my family from coal miners to steel workers, city bus drivers. I mean, my family has lived on a union paycheck for generations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that.Because I started this show eight years ago not knowing much about unions at all. I did not grow up in a union family. In fact, back in the day, we were more of an anti-union family. We didn’t know anything. And to be honest, the few union jobs that my brother had had at a Rite Aid just weren’t good. And so I think now that we’re at a point in this country where less than 10% of the workforce is actually in a union, it’s important to talk to folks out there about what being in a union means. And so I wanted to ask you guys, why is it important for workers in this industry especially, and workers in general, to have a union? Tell us more about why being in a union is important to you and your family. And then let’s sort of unpack some of the nuances of labor relations in this industry that listeners need to know about.

Because again, we’re talking about the last unionized BP refinery in the United States.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, sure. I mean, from my perspective, the first thing that most people come to, they think about is pay. Pay, retirement, when they think of a union. For me personally, I feel like in this industry, it’s more about the ability to collectively bargain, meaning we have 800 people that get to stand shoulder to shoulder, elect representatives, the representatives, then go sit down with the company. And you’re on as close to equal footing as you’re going to get. Without a union, it’s each man or woman for themselves. So the byproduct of that collective bargaining, yeah, it gets pay and it’s retirement, but to me, most importantly, it’s having a voice on the working conditions inside the plant, safety issues. We’ve got a contractual joint health and safety committee where members of the union sit down with members of management monthly to identify safety issues and then create programs to try to address those issues.

So at the end of the day, we do make good money because we work in an incredibly profitable industry and it’s a highly complex job that all of us do out here. But what good does that do if at the end of the day, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to be the same way that you left? You’re going to go home injured or even worse. And this is an industry that when things go wrong, they can go wrong real fast. Incidences can turn into fatalities very fast in this industry. An incident that spirals out of control inside of an oil refinery is highly likely to affect the community. And if you follow along in the news in the last year or two, it seems like once a month we’re reading about a refinery fire in which the community is ordered to shelter in place because of toxic releases that are getting into the community.

So to me, the most important piece of a union is to make sure that we go home safe and that when you retire, you actually can enjoy your retirement and not be struggling with debilitating injuries or diseases, which are very prevalent in this industry. You look at the cancer rates for an oil worker versus any other line. You look at mesothelioma, different issues. We have asbestos is all over the refinery. Everywhere you look, there’s stickers on piping that say warning asbestos. So we live with these things every day. And that’s to me the biggest thing that a union could do is help protect its workforce.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just to sort of underline everything that you said in red pen, listeners are going to have the hairs on the back of their neck standing up the same way I am because I’ve interviewed on this show a worker, Leo Linder, who was on the deep water horizon when it blew in the Gulf. So if folks are wondering how bad could it get, that’s how fucking bad it can get. Pardon my French. But it can get bad in so many other ways like we’ve been covering on this show. We talked to folks in Roseland, Louisiana near the Smitty Supply Plan where that massive explosion in fire happened and people said it was raining black sludge all over the place. I mean, we’ve talked to residents of East Palestine, Ohio where that Norfolk Southern train derailed over three years ago. And you’ve heard the hell that they’re going through.

You’ve heard the hell that railroad workers are going through and how they are being crushed into oblivion while all of our communities, our supply chain are being put at long-term risk for the sake of short-term, massive profits for Wall Street shareholders and company executives. This is part of the same horrible, vicious cycle that we’re hearing about from working people in different industries in different parts of the country all over the place. So please, I beg you, pay attention to what these guys have to say. Leno, sorry to hop in there. Please hop back in.

Leno Miller:

No, you’re spot on. And the refinery operates not only in Whiting, it’s basically in the center of three communities. It operates in Hammond, Indiana as well and also East Chicago. So it’s in the middle of a very populated area that has accepted the risks of operating a large crude oil refinery in the middle of it. But the promise that was made was the community was going to get some of the benefit of that. We were going to get the jobs. And it’s like you said, that’s where they’re breaking the promise. So if you’re bringing in workers from out of state to try to replace us and you’re trying to extract wealth out of the community, not even wealth, you’re just trying to extract a basic income and a basic way of life from the area in order to send it to shareholders and wealthy executives, especially it’s a foreign oil company.

So I mean, that’s the goal, right? And that’s what people need to understand. They’re trying to take from our community and from people that actually live and work here in order to send it elsewhere.

Tim Powell:

To build on something that Eric said too about the equal footing to have when we’re talking, when we’re negotiating with this company, a union honestly to me is the only way that everybody who has a particular job is going to get that same pay. Doesn’t matter how much the guy next to you is kissing ass to the company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad woman or what color you are. You’re getting that pay. It’s not that your friend across the aisle is going to get an extra 20 bucks an hour because he’s buddies with the boss. Everybody gets the pay for that work. And that’s the only guarantee honestly to me in this country that you have that.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the company’s large proposals that they have on the table is to eliminate seniority as a means for promotion. And they view it as, well, it’s a flawed system. It’s not always the best person that gets it with seniority. They want to go what they call merit-based. Well, you look at, well, let’s look at reality. Let’s look at outside of a union facility. Do women and men in this country make the exact same amount of money for doing the exact same job? Why not? Because the merit-based system is so effective. Do minorities make as much money as white men in this country for doing the exact same job? Absolutely not. I mean time and time again, no one would even argue that case. Well, is that a merit-based system? It is. So merit, they act like merit is some great system that only the best and the brightest rise to the top.

And they’re full of shit and everybody knows that. The guy who plays softball and goes to the bar with the supervisor afterwards is more likely to get the good jobs and get better pay. The executive’s nephew that gets brought right into the plant and gets to go to the front of the line, that guy is more likely to make more money than everybody else. That’s what merit-based systems are. So absolutely, that’s one of the main issues with them. And back to the safety piece, another one of their issues, and I don’t want to get too much into the nuances of the proposals because we would need a three-hour show probably. But what one of them is the reclassification of all of our jobs. So as Leno was saying, right now he’s risen to the level of an operations specialist. We have operation specialist field, operations specialist board, and then operations specialist cross qualified, which is you do them both.

That is the top of the top. So they want to eliminate those roles, but then still have us do the same work. But they want to call us tech threes and tech fours, and then the company would get to pick the tech fours. But then they also, for our operators, they want them to have to know five different jobs throughout the refinery. Places that are, it might take you 15 minutes to get from this unit to the next unit, and that’s hoping there’s not a train stopped in the middle of the refinery. So they want to spread everybody out and make them the term jack of all trades, the ace of none. Well, if you just go back a few years ago, our sister refinery in Toledo, Ohio, which BP has since sold, it’s no longer a British Petroleum facility, but there was a double fatality.

Two brothers were killed in a fire out there. And the Chemical Safety Board, when they came back, when they finally concluded their study, one of their findings that they punished the company for was rotating the operators too much so that they didn’t just get good in one area. So the company’s taking credit for, well, I’ve got this many operators that can handle this many jobs, but they can’t do it. They necessarily can’t do it well. You do it better when you specialize. So flash forward, so the Chemical Safety Board says that the company was wrong for the way that they were handling operations. So what does this management group decide to do? They decide to put a proposal on a table to do exactly here what they were doing in Toledo and spread our operators too thin. And people just saw the proposal, the average person in the community, they wouldn’t understand the implications of the company’s proposals.

And it would make it incredibly unsafe out here. Not to mention making these guys do a lot more work for less money, but again, more importantly, you’re going to have a bunch of people who just aren’t going to be as familiar with the equipment. When stuff goes wrong, you need the people that just know instantaneously, instinctively how to get out there and what to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I mentioned earlier that this is the sickness that we’re seeing spread to industries all across the board. And even though people may not understand the nuances of y’all’s contract, they understand that sickness of the corporate-minded Wall Street-minded obsession with cutting costs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, removing important layers of security to save a buck, and all at the expense of the workers who are being asked to do way too much for less than they were getting before. That leads to hazards all over the damn place. That’s the same stuff that we’ve heard from your fellow machinists at Boeing who described like, “Hey, how did job conditions and planes get so bad at Boeing over the years?” Well, this is part of it. That worker that I interviewed on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew in the Gulf, he said the same thing.

BP was pushing speed over safety and look at the results. I mean, the same thing was said to us by the railroad workers. They’ve been cutting jobs. They’ve been making the trains longer and heavier. They’ve been making workers be on call twenty four seven, running them into the ground. And it’s only a matter of time until those short-term profits run out and you end up with a massive, massive, dangerous problem that’s going to take years to fix. And that is, again, I really, really want to stress for folks, those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here, not just for frontline workers in these industries, but for fence line communities living near these industries or living near a railroad track, living near the Gulf of Mexico or any coast where your ability to go outside is basically in the hands of wealthy corporations that are making disastrous decisions that could impact you and your family.

But I don’t want to belabor the point because I know we have limited time here. And I wanted to, before we get really into the lockout itself, Eric, I wanted to ask if you could unpack for our listeners the baseline of understanding that we need to have for labor relations in this industry, how this is working with bargaining with BP. I mean, because we had to learn that four years ago when the railroad workers almost went on a national strike. I had to become a PhD in the Railway Labor Act and explain quickly that there are 13 craft unions. There are four major rail carriers. Everyone’s bargaining in sort of different fashion. So listeners of this show are a little familiar with hairy labor questions like that. But I guess just for your average lay listener, what are the things that folks need to understand about how bargaining works in this industry so that they understand everything that we’re going to talk about with the lockout?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, sure. So in the oil industry, we bargain at a national level. Not every facility, but every USW facility is in one way or another part of the national oil bargaining pattern agreement. And that’s been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s, there’s only been. We haven’t had a national strikes. We had one in 2015. Prior to that, 1980, I believe. So there’s really, yes, how is the labor relations in the industry? National oil bargaining, it’s been a stabilizing influence for both our members and the companies. Usually when we’ve got our final settlement offer on the table, the top table will bargain it and then it gets passed out to everybody else across the country and we put it across the table locally. Typically, you always feel like, “Man, I wish we got more. It wasn’t great, but 90-something percent of the membership votes yes for it.” And that’s probably how good bargaining works is neither party walks away feeling like they absolutely got the whole hog.

Both parties feel like, yeah, we got something, we gave up a little bit of something and we move on. So that’s how it’s typically been. Now this is a lockout, and there’s only been two lockouts in the oil industry in the last 25 years that we’re aware of. And there’s one common denominator between the two lockouts is there’s one guy that was at ExxonMobil on the HR team, on the negotiating team that was part of the lockout in Beaumont, Texas. Again, it was an Exxon refinery in Beaumont, Texas. They were locked out for 10 and a half months. While they were locked out, British Petroleum liked what they saw. They hired one of the guys from that team, his name’s Jordan Marks. They hired him and he came to Whiting and started working in the background. He wasn’t at the table with us in the first round of bargaining, but he had been there looking at the contract and trying to devise a way to do here what he did in Beaumont, Texas.

And so that’s where we’re living right now. Part of the reason that we believe that we filed so many labor board charges is that it was apparent that the company was at best surface bargaining. They had no intent to get an agreement this round of bargaining. Their intent was to push us into a strike. And then eventually if we didn’t strike, then they were just going to lock us up. So this was preordained. The company had this in mind the entire time, and that’s absolutely apparent. Now, national bargaining, everybody else, every other corporation that’s a part of it agreed to the patent. There was only one other site. There’s a site in California that’s having issues too. But the rest of the country, the membership all voted yes, and the companies all voted yes on national oil bargaining. We are in an absolute different spot than our peers.

When we get together with our sisters and our brothers from other locals, people that work for Marathon, people that work for Exxon, Chevron, they don’t have these problems. Most of their negotiations were not contentious. Obviously they didn’t get everything they wanted, but they all got a deal on time. So that’s kind of where we’re at is we’re just in this spot where British Petroleum chose years ago to go down this road in an effort to break the union here, to eliminate the union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s talk a little more about that. Let’s talk about how we got to this point. And what are the key contract issues and working conditions that you’re fighting with the company over right now? And how far back does this fight go?

Eric Schultz:

So it started, I mean, they kind of tested the waters in our last round of bargaining. So our last contract negotiation period was in 2022. It was another round where the rest of the country, the companies and the unions all agreed to national pattern and moved on down the road. We had to roll our contract for weeks after the expiration of the contract because British Petroleum had a 120-day strike and lockout notice on the table, which is something that they also did. Jordan and his cronies in Beaumont, Texas, there was a little bit less, but they put a strike and lockout notice on the table for them, the previous contract. So again, it’s lazy just bringing the exact same lazy playbook. So that was last round of bargaining. And eventually we had enough people in management that had a spine and could push back against corporate interests that were pushing for that 120-day strike and lockout notice.

And they pulled it off the table and we went down the road. So really it started last round of bargaining where you could see the items on the walls. Our smaller bargaining units, we also represent a plant right across the street called White and Clean Energy, which is a British petroleum plant. We represent our plant guards, our pipeline employees. And we’ve seen the company coming just absolutely trying to gut their contracts. And that’s what we saw this round. I mean, it’s hard to answer what are the issues because it’s everything. They basically took the contract book and went from cover to cover. And they’re proposing to change pretty much anything that benefits a union worker. Again, with the job reclassifications, we have decades of memorandums of agreements, letters of understandings, side agreements that govern how our job classifications work and how they’re policed. They want to eliminate all those and start all over again and then put management’s rights on everything.

Once we ink the deal, their proposal is going forward, the company can make any changes they want that they see fit. So who would sign a contract that the very next day it’s rendered useless because the company could go and change it however they want? And that’s where our job classifications, how we’re trained, what kind of work we have to do, how they can eliminate someone, how they can terminate someone for the company’s, their interpretation of lack of ability. So that elimination of seniority for the bidding into higher positions, elimination of plant seniority for the purpose of layoffs. So right now their proposal is they could basically, once we sign the deal, if they wanted to eliminate one of our groups, our lab, we represent our laboratory employees. As soon as we sign the deal, the company could then give us a piece of paper saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to lay off 50 people in the lab.

And then it would just go by that. Whereas right now we have plant seniority. If they wanted to lay off 50 people, it’s the 50 junior people, which makes it painful on the company. But what it does is it forces them to come sit down and be reasonable and have a conversation about how can, okay, you have to reduce headcount. We don’t want to talk about it, but we will. We’re not afraid to have hard conversations. And then we’ll work out a way to try to help them meet their goals, but at the same time protect our members. They want to eliminate that. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Management’s rights for the use of AI. Their original proposal was that the contract language would survive the life cycle of the contract. They said it would go into perpetuity, meaning you’re going to agree to something that forever you’ve given up your rights, your local, state and federal rights to bargain over the use of artificial intelligence forever.

And that’s just ridiculous, absolute ridiculous language. But again, it just goes on and on and on. Any one of these issues during a regular year would’ve been a very contentuous issue that could have led to a strike or a lockup. And instead, they decided to throw the entire kitchen sink at it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And the way that they’re trying to sweeten this deal is offer one time payments to you guys. Basically blood money to say like, “Hey, take this couple thousand dollars and sign away your collective bargaining rights.” I mean, that’s nuts. And that’s me speaking. That’s just me editorializing, but this is kind of making my head spin. And I know I could talk to you guys for hours, but we don’t have that long. And so with the time that we have, I wanted to go back around the table and just ask if you guys could sort of tell listeners how this whole lockout situation has unfolded as you’ve experienced it. Give us a worker’s eye view breakdown of events on the ground since the lockout began to now. How are you guys holding up after five months of this?

Tim Powell:

Well, with me being on the assistance committee, we’re meeting at least three days a week, sometimes more, usually six to seven hours a day. And everybody brings in their necessity bills. They bring in your mortgage, your rent, your car note, your car lease, your medical bills if they’re broken down in the monthly things, insurance, our medical insurance. The things we need to live that we can no longer provide for ourselves because BP took away our paychecks. We on the assistance committee hear the sad stories every day of like, “Well, we had to cut this back. We weren’t able to do this with the kids this summer. We weren’t able to do this. I had to sell this.” And you get jaded to it because you’re hearing it all the time, but every day there’s another heartbreaking story that you’re hearing because this person put in between.

I’ve got guys who have put in two years, I’ve had families that have come in, the guys have been here 25 years and they can’t provide how they’ve been providing for their family for the last 25 years. It’s crazy.

Leno Miller:

Yeah, it hurts. And that’s by design. I mean, that’s what BP is the company that we’ve, all three of us have been here on average close to 20 years. And by design, the company that we’ve. I mean, we’ve all missed holidays, birthdays. We’ve been dedicated workers for 20 years. And in order for short-term gains to be able to take from us, this company just posted in three months they made $5.7 billion and they’re paying a bigger dividend. We’ve been here sacrificing our personal lives for 20 years and they are intentionally hurting us and our families. So it’s shameful.

Tim Powell:

Now just are the holidays we’ve missed, but you mentioned 12 hour shifts, 16, 18 hour shifts, 12 to 19 shifts in a row. I mean, yeah, it’s great money when we’re working, but you don’t see your family for 19 days. You go home and you say hey to the wife and you fall asleep. For them not to think that this is a sacrifice every day that what we’re doing for them to then make a sacrifice even farther on this, it just drives you out of your mind.

Leno Miller:

That goes back to you asked the benefits of a union. We’re the union. The union is its workforce. The union is voted by us. It represents us. It is us. It’s the workforce. A Fortune 500 company, the workers are a line item. You’re a number on a spreadsheet. You mean absolutely nothing to them. Nothing at all. So Bernie’s Petroleum has no loyalty to us whatsoever. The only thing they care about is their shareholders. That’s it. It’s short-term value. Like I said, they made $5.7 billion in three months and increased their dividend while we were locked out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So where do things stand now? Like what can be done and what can folks listening to this do to stand in solidarity with y’all and the other 800 folks who have been locked out here?

Eric Schultz:

So unfortunately, we’re at a standstill right now. Again, as Leno just mentioned, that’s by design. They didn’t lock us out with the intent to hurry up and get a deal. They locked us out knowing that they have a number in their mind. They know how many months that they wanted this to go. They’re going to want to put as much economic stress and pain on families as possible with the intent that eventually will crack. Eventually enough of the membership will be. When they’re visiting the assistance committee asking for help, those conversations will turn from uncomfortable right now, painful, turn to hostile and panicked. That’s what the company wants. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to there yet, but that’s their design. We don’t foresee, unfortunately, this ending anytime soon. The things that we’re trying to do, we’re hoping to make some headway is public pressure, try to make sure that the community understands what’s going on and then try to ask the community to be vocal, to stand up and support us and tell British Petroleum to end the lockout and get back to the table.

And for the first time, actually come seriously with the desire to bargain. We’re asking the same of our local leaders, whether it’s political leaders or community leaders. We’re asking the same of state officials, federal officials. We feel like if we can get enough public pressure, enough political pressure, enough economic pressure on maybe somebody in London will finally say, “All right, enough’s enough. Let’s go. Go get a deal.” So that’s kind of where we’re at right now is just in this holding pattern and doing everything we can to keep our membership and their families propped up. Just yesterday, one of our representatives, Carolina Ramsey, she’s also the one that runs our. She oversees our entire assistance committee. She helped organize a school supply giveaway and backpack giveaway. That was really well attended. We had a lot of local political leaders pitched in and put the word out to get these supplies sent in, book bags and everything that would be needed to go inside of them.

So between things like that, the food pantry, we’ve had our local food bank, Northwest Indiana Food Bank, teamed up with the United Way and we had four mobile distributions where they came out to the union hall and dropped off food. Like Tim was talking with our assistance committee. We’ had our assistance committee up and running since about maybe a month into this. And we’ve given out quite a bit of money, and we’ll continue to do so. And everything we’re doing is with the intent to try to make sure that people stay calm, that people have at least their basic needs met and just kind of supplement them while at the same time asking them to go out and find work because that’s how we’re going to win this is by being able to withhold. And we’ve had numerous people go out of state to find jobs.

It’s an interesting spot to be in. Some people had no problem right away going to find a job. It depends what field you came from. If you were in the local pipe fitters union before you came and worked here and you still paid your dues in the background and still kept your car, you probably went right back to work. Same thing if you were in the electrician’s union, carpenter’s union. But some of our operators are in a much different spot because this is such a niche field. Where do you go to the next refinery to go find a job? And that’s where people are having to go out of state to go find work. And a lot of people can’t because we’re almost, it’s like we’re toxic to them because they know, “Oh, well, why would I waste money to hire this guy or gal if they’re going to leave and go right back to British Petroleum once the lockout’s over?” So we’ve had a lot of people say, “They told me they loved me.

They loved everything about the interview and my resume. They’d hire me, but they ask that I commit to I’m not going to go back to the refinery when the lockout ends.” And when people would honestly tell them, “I can’t promise that,” then they’d say, “Well, thanks. If you change your mind, let us know.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what you’re talking about goes the other way as well. I mean, for folks out there listening, the question of why should anyone stand in solidarity with 800 union workers who’ve been locked out by their employers? Because you stand with your fellow worker. I mean, you do it because it’s what’s right to do. That’s our policy on this show. It’s been our policies from the beginning. But on top of that, I think anyone living near this facility in Indiana or Illinois would want to know that that dangerous, complex facility is being operated by undertrained scab workers right now. And we don’t ever want to punch down and say your fellow worker is your enemy. I mean, those people who have taken those jobs have their own bargain with God that they’re going to have to kind of deal with. But the point of fact is, is that the trained specialists that you’re talking about are not operating the specialized machinery in that oil refinery right now.

Leno Miller:

Yeah. To expand on that too, one of their proposals that’s a sticking point for us, as Eric mentioned, that they brought to the table last time as well is the strike and lockout. Right now we can serve 24-hour strike notice. Currently, they want 150 days. Their BP stance publicly that they keep repeating over and over is that they need that. They need at least that 120 to 150 day strike notice to be able to continue to operate the refinery safely in the event of a work stoppage. How much notice did they give us when they locked us out? 24 hours. So both things can’t be true. Either you don’t need it or you’re lying, right? Or you are operating unsafely currently in the community. If it’s unsafe to operate without that much of a notice and preparation, then that’s how you’re currently operating unsafely.

Eric Schultz:

And to point out the 24-hour notice that we have, that’s not Wildcat 24-hour notice. That’s not mid-contract. That’s only after the contract expires. So I think a lot of people in the community don’t see that, don’t understand that. So they think just on any random Tuesday, I could just wake up in a bad mood and serve the company 24-hour strike notice. No, no. This is after you’ve spent months negotiating a contract. You knew that February 1st was the contract expiration. And our goal is to be as early as possible to hash out any issues so that by February 1st, you got a deal. You get that national agreement comes down from the top table. You take it to membership, you vote on it, and you move on. What they want to do is make that February 1st where we’re now that once February 1st comes, now we can serve notice.

And it’s something that we don’t take lightly. We could have done it this round of bargaining. And a lot of our members were upset that we weren’t serving strike notice when the contract expired because of all the ridiculous proposals that the company had on the table. So it’s something that we’re not going to just flippantly serve strike notice. We understand that people, it’s painful for us to be on strike. We’re willing to do it, just we don’t take it lightly. Well, so February 1st comes, now what they want to do with this 150-day strike and lockout notice is they won’t even start really bargaining, seriously bargaining until about 148 days into that 150-day strike and lockout notice, because that’s how they’re working it now. Our contract expires February 1st. They’re not serious about the proposals until the end of January. They just keep wanting to play mess around and they want to do this art of the deal stuff where they just put crazy things on the table knowing that, hey, we’re going to pull them off and we’ll meet in the middle type of thing.

So that’s all they’re going to do. They’re going to shift us 148 days down the road. Now maybe they’ll start to bargain. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the national pattern folks all went back to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Tim, I wanted to toss it to you to have the final word here. Being a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee, any final notes that you wanted to give for folks out there listening? Folks in the area or folks listening from around the country, anything that they can do to help?

Tim Powell:

You touched on a point about not punching down on your fellow workers, whether it’s in your union or out in the community. This is 800 families who don’t have the money right now to go out to eat. They’re cutting down on all of their summer projects, their summer vacations. Things aren’t getting the jobs that you normally do around the house during the summer, like doing your deck, your fence, and that kind of stuff. We’re not able to spend that. We’re not able to employ a contractor. We’re not able to tip the waitress at the restaurant because we’re not even going to the restaurants. Everybody is seeing a reduction in the wages because we are cut out. We have a couple of websites. I’m sure that we can share those, but I can’t remember all of them right off the top of my head right now, but Eric can get to that.

But we gladly appreciate any donation that we can get. Any help is helping. I was here yesterday handing out backpacks and notebooks and all the school supplies yesterday. It’s not just taking that money off the people’s hands. It was also like your wife isn’t having to freak out at the store trying to figure out how she’s going to buy the stuff.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, I will say to your point, the website, you ask how people can help. The easiest way is we propped up a website specifically for what we’re dealing with. It’s called supportoilworkers.com. On that website, it answers all those questions. If you wanted to send a check to help our assistance committee help pay bills or that money also goes to help just run the hall on a day-to-day basis, making sure that we have food for picketers, making sure that we’ve got the toiletries and things like that at the hall. So there’s an address and a way to send a check there. There was a link to an Amazon store for us, and that’s been fantastic. Every day we get shipments in here of diapers, formula, non-perishable food items, toiletries, things like that. They go, we stock them on the shelves and then members are free to come and take anything that they need.

So support oilworkers.com. And then today, hopefully today it’s going to start. We’ve been working with a company that we’ve used for years for all of our swag, our t-shirts and hats, ImagePoint. And today, hopefully we’ll have this store up and running. We’re going to have a pop-up store. There’s two shirts that people can pick from, and it’s going to be nationwide. We’ll be blasting this out every which way we can. It’s only going to be up for two weeks. And you can pick either of these shirt designs and a multitude of colors and styles, anything from a hooded sweatshirt to a tank top to a regular t-shirt. And then the proceeds for that will go help our strike and defense fund. So again, today I will send you that link once we get it up and running. We’re just getting the bugs ironed out of it.

There’ll be a couple of shirts. It’ll run for two weeks, then it’ll shut down. They’ll print, they’ll go into production, and they’ll start mailing out all the shirts to whoever purchased one. And then a couple weeks later, we’re going to pop up a second store with two different shirts. So all in, there’s going to be four different shirt designs for people to pick from. And we’re kind of hoping that some people that if you have the means and you really want to show some support, we hope that some people will choose to try to collect all four of those shirts.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Eric Schultz, President of United Steel Workers Local 7.1, Leno Miller, Assistant Griever for USW Local 7.1, and Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1, and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.

For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.

Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.

“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome. “She was found unresponsive in her car,” said Meno. “The medical examiner determined that her death was caused by hyperthermia,” a condition that is the opposite of the more well-known cold-related condition of hypothermia.

Hyperthermia-related deaths have sharply risen over the past decade, a predictable outcome of fossil fuel emissions. Oil companies such as Exxon have long been aware of the devastating impacts their product would have on the climate. “Major oil and gas companies decades ago knew, their own scientists told them internally, that if we kept burning fossil fuels, it would lead to, in the words of one internal Exxon document, potentially catastrophic events, just like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome,” said Meno.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome.

Big Oil’s failure to act on this information has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco. Companies like Philip Morris knew about the impacts of cigarette smoking on human health and kept it secret for years. Since that information was made public, individuals suffering from their addictive products have sued repeatedly and won.

A major lawsuit brought by state attorneys general culminated in 1998 in what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement, where dozens of tobacco companies settled to the tune of billions of dollars for public health. Notably, the federal government also sued tobacco companies for violations of racketeering laws over their deception.

Yet while individuals and states are taking action in the case of oil companies, the federal government clearly has no interest in holding Big Oil accountable for climate change. Instead, President Donald Trump says he wants the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies for raising oil prices in the wake of the Iran war. This appears to be a classic case of deflection, given that a majority of voters blame Trump for price increases at the pump. He isn’t interested in holding companies accountable for climate change; he’s upset they made it harder for people to consume oil. Moreover, his administration is suing states for trying to enforce environmental regulations aimed at oil companies.

In addition to keeping their own research secret, fossil fuel companies spent years sowing doubt over the cause-and-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and a warming climate. “What that decades-long deception campaign did is it stole a generation’s worth of time when action could’ve been taken, and we could’ve averted the worst of some of these climate disasters,” said Meno.

This year, more extreme weather records are expected to be broken as climate change intensifies. The first half of 2026 was the third-warmest half-year on record. An El Niño phenomenon developing this year is expected to be one of the strongest in modern history.

Whether or not the Trump administration admits that the climate is changing, Americans know it is. “Anyone of a certain age who can look back over enough time just knows, as a matter of common sense, that the climate we are all living in today is not what we had a few years ago,” said Meno.

The industry knows it too — and, according to Meno, oil companies “are in absolute panic mode, fighting tooth and nail to escape accountability.” Leon’s lawsuit is hardly the only one they fear. Numerous states, counties, cities, and tribal governments are suing Big Oil, and making headway.

Meno explained that companies have “been pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to take up one of these cases for years.” The Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case in Colorado where that state’s supreme court in May 2025 ruled the City of Boulder and Boulder County could move forward with discovery and trial in their suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor.

Not content with leaving it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress to grant the industry immunity over its role in climate change — and conservative lawmakers have complied. In April, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026.”

If Congress were to pass the bill, according to Meno, it “would be a truly unprecedented legal shield that would strip the public of their right to hold these corporations accountable for the harm they’ve caused.” Meno’s Center for Climate Integrity is urging members of the public to demand their elected representatives vote against Hageman and Cruz’s bill.

Big Oil says it deserves immunity because it shouldn’t be penalized for giving the public what it wants. In a joint statement, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said: “These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive.”

What they didn’t say is that they have worked for years to prevent fair competition from renewables. It’s why the state of Michigan launched an antitrust lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and others because they acted “as a cartel … to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy in order to maintain their dominance.”

Fossil fuel companies have long known their products are deadly, kept it secret, unfairly ensured their dominance, then argued that they ought not to be sued for delivering a product the public wants. Now, as climate-related deaths stack up, the industry claims it isn’t responsible. Misti Leon, whose mother might be alive today if governments and courts had reined in Big Oil, told The New York Times: “I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me. There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”

As wildfires ravaged large swaths of the Western US, a group of Democratic senators on Monday called on federal regulators to rein in prediction markets offering contracts tied to such disasters, warning that turning climate-fueled extreme weather into financial wagers creates “perverse incentives” that could motivate arson and other crimes.

In a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig, Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Adam Schiff (Calif.), Jacky Rosen (Nevada), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), Martin Heinrich (NM), Ron Wyden (Ore.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote that “prediction markets have been enabled to expand rapidly, increasingly inviting speculation on war, political violence, disasters, and public emergencies that raise ethical and public policy concerns.”

These markets risk creating perverse incentives, undermining public trust, and commodifying human suffering in ways that warrant careful scrutiny,” the lawmakers continued. “Recent public reports have highlighted how Polymarket—the largest prediction market platform in the world—accepted more than $1.2 million in bets surrounding the Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025. These fires devastated the Los Angeles area, claiming the lives of 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.”

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter argues. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”

Allowing prediction markets on wildfires is outrageously dangerous and will incentivize bad actors to spread or even start fires themselves. Frankly, this is betting on the suffering of our neighbors and families.

I’m demanding the CFTC crack down on this practice before… pic.twitter.com/EMZ0Al5vq0

— Senator Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto) August 4, 2026

“By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading,” the senators added.

The CFTC controversially considers Polymarket and Kalshi designated contract markets (DCMs)—over which the federal agency has control versus state gambling regimes—and is currently developing nationwide rules.

The letter’s signers asked Selig:

• Is the CFTC considering prohibiting DCMs from offering event contracts on wildfires as part of the rulemaking process currently underway, given they are against the public’s interest?
• Does the CFTC have any plans to curb bets on wildfires on prediction markets in the United States?
• Does the agency have plans to address these contracts being offered on offshore markets?
• Does the CFTC believe event contracts offered on the following wildfire-related events are in the public interest?
• Does the commission have guidance or planned enforcement related to these wildfire event contracts?

“As the United States faces yet another record-breaking fire season this year, the [CFTC] cannot allow these prediction markets to offer unrestricted betting on wildfires,” the senators stressed. “While these bets appear to be offered only on the offshore Polymarket site, it is only a matter of time before other US-based designated contract markets try to offer these. The CFTC must lead the charge to rein in these contracts in the US and offshore and put in place commonsense guardrails to prevent people from profiting as wildfires threaten communities.”

In addition to wildfires, Polymarket users can place wagers related to earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.

Polymarket responded to the senators’ letter in a statement to Claims Journal saying, “When tragedy unfolds, people turn to the news for commentary and to Polymarket for information.”

“While we recognize the risks associated with these markets, removing them does not prevent a tragedy,” the company added. “It only makes timely, market-based information less accessible to those seeking to understand what may happen next.”

The senators’ letter came days after Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit targeting Polymarket competitor Kalshi for operating as “an illegal gambling operation” in “flagrant disregard” for the Empire State’s “Constitution, penal laws, and other statutes.”

Last month, a coalition of consumer advocacy groups condemned the CFTC’s attempt to allow platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket “a green light to bypass state gambling regimes.”

“Calling a sports wager an ‘event contract’ does not transform it into a legitimate tool for managing economic risk,” said Eric Naing, communications director for Demand Progress Education Fund, one of the groups decrying the regulator’s approach to such companies.

The US is currently experiencing its largest ever recorded outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a disease caused by infection with the Cyclospora parasite. The disease is typically acquired via fecal-contaminated food or drink, and can cause explosive diarrhea and severe, lingering stomach cramps. Those who contract it generally have a terrible time. Experts have yet to conclusively identify the source of the outbreak, which continues unabated. Recent tests implicating Taylor Farms have been withdrawn as false positives, though Taylor Farms’ lettuce remains a primary suspect in the ongoing investigation. 

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US. As a result, this latest outbreak is unfolding in a system that is even more diminished and underresourced than it was in 2020.

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US.

First, it is worth noting that fecal contamination can happen when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks. Rather than protecting farm workers, however, the Trump administration has made it harder for them to challenge unsafe conditions. In June 2025, the Labor Department suspended enforcement of a rule that expressly protected H-2A agricultural guestworkers from retaliation for filing workplace safety complaints or consulting with worker advocates. The administration subsequently proposed rescinding those protections altogether. 

Another example of the second Trump administration’s handiwork is their changes to the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet. FoodNet is useful because it conducts active surveillance of foodborne diseases. Rather than waiting for private laboratories to send results, FoodNet staff regularly inquire about new disease cases and conduct audits to ensure cases are not missed. This proactive, standardized approach helps public health officials identify more cases earlier than systems that wait for reports to move passively up the chain. FoodNet is a joint program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the state health departments where the sites are located. There are FoodNet surveillance sites in ten states, covering 62.6 million people (Figure 1). 

Figure 1

FoodNet previously tracked cases of cyclosporiasis. In July of 2025, however, the Trump administration made FoodNet’s reporting of cyclosporiasis optional, mandating FoodNet tracking only for salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The administration justified the change as a way to conserve resources and avoid duplication, conflating FoodNet’s active surveillance with more passive surveillance systems such as the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS). The CDC’s own surveillance manual notes that active surveillance systems have been shown to increase reporting. Other empirical research has yielded similar results, with one study finding that the rate of disease reporting doubled when active surveillance practices were used, and that the disease reports themselves were more likely to be complete than those obtained through passive reporting structures.

Unfortunately, FoodNet’s reach was already limited, covering only about 16 percent of the US population. The CDC maintains that FoodNet is not intended to detect individual outbreaks, and is geared more toward measuring disease burden over time. Rather than expanding it to make it more useful for monitoring active outbreaks, however, the Trump administration significantly weakened the program by reducing the number of diseases it was required to track, undermining even its utility as a historical dataset. This will also make it difficult to determine whether foodborne illness increased under their watch.

The changes to FoodNet did not occur in a vacuum. In February 2025, the administration eliminated the USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was working on best-practice guidelines to combat foodborne illnesses shortly before its dissolution. In April 2025, federal workforce cuts forced the suspension of the Food Emergency Response Network proficiency testing program, which ensured that the network’s 170 food-testing laboratories could produce quality results during an emergency. The Trump Administration also downsized the CDC’s parasite surveillance team from eleven to just three. Zooming out, important institutions have been hollowed out: the USDA has shed 24,000 workers (an almost 27 percent reduction), the CDC has lost nearly 3,000 (roughly a quarter of its workforce), and the FDA is down more than 4,000 (almost a fifth of its workforce).

Many of these cuts were initiated at the direction of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE’s handiwork should certainly allow for more efficient spread of diseases like cyclosporiasis. Given the cost of such outbreaks, however, the more economically sensible path would have been to invest in public health rather than shortchanging it. In any case, there is no evidence that the Trump administration slashed programs based on some careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, the cuts appear to be part of the administration’s reckless and shortsighted pattern of hollowing out the federal government’s ability to serve the public. 

Cyclospora is exactly the kind of pathogen for which timely, comprehensive surveillance matters. The incubation period for cyclosporiasis is 2 to 14 days after exposure, making it difficult to track because people often struggle to remember exactly what they ate during that period. Active surveillance is better equipped to compensate for this, however, because it both picks up more cases and collects more complete records. This enables officials to identify clusters sooner despite shaky recollections from individual patients. Making active surveillance optional removed an important source of systematic, standardized data just before a major surge that has proved difficult to characterize and trace.

In public health, it is important to have robust systems in place before a crisis occurs. An outbreak that can be contained in its early stages may become difficult or impossible to control once it spreads. Yet these systems often become victims of their own success. Successful prevention means that the public never sees the disasters that were averted and may underestimate the scale of the danger those systems were designed to contain. The Trump administration appears to have doubled down on this terrible inclination, and people are paying for it with their bowels.

A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.

The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.

The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump’s Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.

The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that “extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America.”

“House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard,” the labor group said earlier this week. “That’s the wrong direction when workers’ lives are on the line.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation “would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities,” the coalition wrote. “More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard.”

“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the groups added. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it.”

The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.

“Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations,” the report noted. “As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them.”

As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.

While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.

“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.

We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”

There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.

As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.

People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0

— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026

Indigenous photographer Nadya Kwandibens shared images of flames rising over a lake with the words, “”My family hometown, Collins Ontario, is GONE.“

View this post on Instagram

Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.

“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”

Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.

“This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we’ve been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface,” she told BBC News.

Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.

“Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder,” Morin wrote.

On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.

Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.

“We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns,” the Sunrise Movement said.

We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.

The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: “Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal.”

Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) July 15, 2026

“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires,” Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. “Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”

In the flatlands of Italy’s Po Valley, the decommissioned Caorso nuclear power plant can be seen for miles, the reactor looming into the sky. When Alessandro Maffini, now an assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan, was growing up in the 1990s, the plant's distant silhouette captured his imagination. “The physical presence of that thing was so significant to me as a child. It was a very visible, tangible, concrete presence,” Maffini remembers. “It was like a white Duomo, there on the horizon, always in the background.” For many others, though, it was a specter of disaster, a ghost nuclear plant — shuttered, alongside all of Italy’s nuclear power stations, in the wake of the Chernobyl accident.

 “If that plant explodes, we’re all dead,” Maffini’s mother used to intone, looking out at the defunct Caorso station, once the largest in Italy. As Maffini rode his bike six miles across the countryside to get a closer look at the plant from a nearby overpass, his mother’s doom-laden words rang in his ears. Her warning scared him. It also made him want to learn more. When he left home to go to university, Maffini decided to work in nuclear physics. “Radioactivity is a strange thing,” he says. “You can’t see it, you can't hear it, you can't smell it. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, for speculation, for fear.”

Four decades on from Chernobyl, and Italy has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. The country is scrambling to disentangle itself from its dependence on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and build out its energy sovereignty. War in Iran, and a growing European consensus that turning away from nuclear power was, in the words of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a “strategic mistake,” has given more impetus to the Italian government’s argument that the country needs to move past its qualms.

Last year, the Italian cabinet approved a new draft law reintroducing the prospect of returning to nuclear power. “The government has approved another important measure to ensure clean, safe, low-cost energy that can guarantee energy security and strategic independence,” the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. 

Italy is already surrounded on all sides by nuclear power plants: Slovenia’s Krsko plant is 90 miles away from the border, and there are four French nuclear power plants within 110 miles. Italy is the world’s second-largest importer of electricity, with nuclear power, largely imported from France, making up 5% of its energy basket. Italy also plays host to more U.S. nuclear warheads than any other European country. An estimated 35 thermonuclear gravity bombs are stored at two NATO airbases in northern Italy, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. 

Now, as data centers spring up in Italy’s industrial north, the country’s energy needs are expected to increase exponentially and the government is turning, albeit cautiously, to a long-held Italian taboo. Since the spring of 1986, when the most serious accident in nuclear history unfolded in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the Italian population has lived in fear of nuclear energy. It voted to shutter its once-burgeoning nuclear industry in 1987, and in 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, when 94% of voters rejected government plans to revive the industry. 

It is a fear that has transformed Italy’s energy fortunes, making it reliant on imports and vulnerable to volatility and price shocks. 

“The international crises of recent years have clearly demonstrated the risk of excessive dependence on imported fossil fuels or vulnerable supply chains,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “The government approaches this issue with great respect for the country's history and the democratic choices expressed by citizens. The 1987 and 2011 referendums profoundly impacted the national energy strategy at very different historical moments. Precisely for this reason, the point is not to ignore those choices, but to acknowledge that today's technological, climatic, industrial, and geopolitical context has radically changed.”

For Meloni’s government, the argument is not so much whether Italy needs to revive its nuclear industry, it’s whether the country is ready to shake its demons, to shake the cultural memory of what happened at Chernobyl forty years ago, a thousand miles away from Rome. 

In the early hours of April 28, 1986, in the control room of the Latina nuclear power plant south of Rome, a young technician called Ruggero Dell’Aquila was working the night shift. “Everything was perfectly quiet,” he recalled. As morning broke, teletype messages from Northern Europe began to rattle in. A clerk came down from the control room with reports from the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Their monitoring stations were registering radiation spikes far above background levels, and no one knew why. 

That evening, nuclear physicist Sergio Malossi, a director at the Latina plant responsible for monitoring radioactive risk, drove home. His mind was turning over what the clerks had been reporting. “He came in extremely agitated,” remembers his daughter, Roberta Malossi, who was 16 at the time. “We knew he was worried about something going wrong at the facility, but we didn’t understand.” Malossi says that her father’s first paranoid thought was that there had been a malfunction in his own plant, that radiation was leaching into the air, and that it was somehow his fault. 

At 9 p.m. Moscow time — aperitivo hour in Latina — the Soviet Union announced there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In the ensuing days, Italian news was full of dire warnings. 

“Television was showing these clouds that would soon reach Italy. Everyone was terrified. The only information we got was from state TV, and the news was shocking,” said Monica Tommasi, President of Friends of the Earth Italy, who was a child at the time. Radiation, the news said, would rain down on the population. “The fear from the sky,” ran one La Repubblica headline. “The cloud above us, the doubt within us,” ran another.

On the night of April 30, 1986, Italy’s nuclear monitoring stations began recording increases in radioactivity. The cloud moved over the Valley of the Po, and while the government called for calm, the country began to descend into panic. In the minds of the Italian people, the worst had happened, explained Luca Romano, a writer and activist campaigning for the return of nuclear power in Italy. “Nuclear annihilation, death by radiation, the radioactive cloud and the nuclear holocaust, had arrived,” he said. Nuclear armageddon was a fear that had gripped the West for decades. This was not a nuclear war, but in the Italian collective consciousness, that didn’t make a difference. 

The reality was, says Barbara Curli, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, that “Italy was only marginally affected by the cloud.”

The cloud in northern Italy meant radioactivity levels peaked briefly, but ten days later they had fallen dramatically back down. Because this spike was short-lived, the total radiation exposure remained low. A United Nations committee report recorded that northern Italy received an additional radiation dose of about 380 microsieverts in the year following Chernobyl — less than a fifth of the normal background radiation humans absorb in a year; equivalent to taking about six transatlantic flights. It was much smaller than the doses received by neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, and in the south of Italy the dose was lower still. 

Down by the Latina power plant, though, the community was shaken by events in Chernobyl, and rumors and misinformation began to spread about the fallout. The friends and family of the technician, Ruggero Dell’Aquila, started asking him if a Chernobyl-style disaster could happen at Latina, too. “Everyone was afraid, asking — ‘can it explode, can it explode?’” he recalled. 

The reality was, a Chernobyl-style explosion was not possible at Latina, because its reactor lacked the unstable characteristics of the Soviet design. But this was not such an easy concept to explain. 

“The problem was that a slew of journalists took over, telling lies,” Malossi said, recalling paranoid rumours about radioactivity causing mutations in nature. People started telling stories, Malossi said, about “frogs with three heads, animals and fish with four tails. Strange things. When in fact absolutely nothing like that was happening.”

The government advised people to avoid fresh vegetables and dairy products, particularly for children. Farmers destroyed crops and poured away milk. Sergio Malossi ignored the warnings, having measured radiation levels in the air himself. “My father and others from the plant brought the vegetables home and we ate them,” his daughter recalled.

It was these warnings — delivered amid a lack of clear information — that shifted public attitudes toward nuclear energy, said Renzo Colombo, 65, who was just beginning a career in nuclear engineering when the explosion happened. Now a member of Nucleare e Ragione, a nonprofit that promotes a rational approach to nuclear energy in Italy, he recalls how quickly fear took hold. “A real phobia was born, a panic about radioactivity,” he said. “And this panic marked the next 25 years.”

The months after the accident were a shadowy, uncertain period for Italians working in the nuclear industry. “I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty,” said Colombo. “As a nuclear engineer, I thought ‘what have we done?’ My colleagues and I always thought we were designing something useful for humanity. And at that moment we felt betrayed by our own profession.”

Outside Italy’s nuclear plants, crowds began to gather. A coalition of environmental groups and political parties started pushing for people to vote against nuclear power in an upcoming referendum.

This movement was not new. “Many years before Chernobyl, an environmentalist culture was born — and it didn’t just concern nuclear power, but risky industry in general,” explained Curli, the Turin historian. The anti-nuclear environmental movement, which spread across Europe in the 1970s, was particularly potent in Italy — a country rocked by violent political turmoil, organized crime, and corruption scandals. Public fears, explained Curli, were sharpened by the Seveso disaster, an accident at an industrial plant in the north of Italy in 1976 that exposed tens of thousands of people to a toxic cloud of chemicals. Nuclear power, she said, “was not perceived by public opinion as a credible policy because there's this underlying distrust in institutions.” 

In 1977, almost a decade before Chernobyl, a 10,000-strong crowd of protesters showed up at Montalto di Castro, to protest against a large new nuclear plant that was planned. A Time magazine correspondent described the activists as “an improbable mix of elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians.”

In the wake of Chernobyl, Renzo Colombo was working at that very same plant, helping to build the thermohydraulic cycle. By then, the station was nearly complete. “It was a beautiful plant,” Colombo said. “I loved working there.”

In November 1987, 18 months after the Chernobyl accident, the Italian government held a referendum on nuclear energy. Nearly 80% of Italians voted in favor of measures that would end the country’s use of atomic energy.

One morning, following the referendum, the Montalto di Castro plant’s director called the workers to a meeting. Colombo remembers him saying: “‘Ragazzi, gather round, I need to talk to you. I’ve just been to the ministry, and Italy has decided that we are closing all nuclear activity and will focus on coal and gas instead.’” The room went silent. “I was young,” said Colombo. “But there were people there who were older and had devoted years of their life to the nuclear field. There was just this urge to cry.” 

The effect of the referendum was all-encompassing: construction was halted, and over the next three years Italy’s nuclear plants were shut down for good; its nuclear engineers scattered — many going to work abroad, or, like Colombo, re-training to work in other industries. 

It was hailed as a victory for Italian environmentalism, says Curli. But the result was that there was a push to “gasify” Italy. That is, she says, “to choose the gas route — less expensive, and less demanding than nuclear power. But this made Italy almost completely dependent on Russian gas, Libyan gas, Algerian gas.” The Montalto di Castro site was converted into a fossil-fuel powered plant, running on gas and fuel oil.

Decades on from that post-Chernobyl referendum — and a second referendum in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 — Italy remains in the process of dismantling its nuclear power stations, even as it now contemplates a return to nuclear power.

Watching them work is Enrico Bastianini, director of operations at the Latina plant. As I walk with Bastianini through the plant, we come to the old control room. When it first opened in 1963, the Latina plant was the largest nuclear power station in Europe — a feat of Italian and British engineering (the reactor was of UK design) and a symbol of Italy’s post-war industrial growth. 

“We were emerging from the destruction of the war, and this was progress. And it was what allowed us to escape the economic hardships of war, and have low-cost energy,” Bastianini says.

Now, over 60 years on from when the plant opened, more than half of its existence has been spent being taken apart. Critics of nuclear power often focus on precisely this point: the long and complex process of dismantling nuclear plants, and the problem of managing radioactive waste, some of which takes millennia to decay. 

There are two phases to the process of taking apart the plant. “The first phase allows us to dismantle everything that’s nuclear except the reactor. That’s because the reactor contains a huge amount of graphite,” Bastianini explains. “When we have a national repository, it can be removed. But for now, it’s safest if it stays in the first phase.”

Bastianini leads me into a deposit room where radioactive material is being stored in steel containers, inside an earthquake-resistant facility. These containers are only for temporary storage.

There were attempts in the early 2000s to establish a national nuclear waste repository at a salt mine in Basilicata in southern Italy, but huge protests forced the government to abandon its plans. Today, SOGIN, the state-owned Italian company in charge of decommissioning nuclear sites, is still actively searching for a suitable location for a permanent repository and faces considerable opposition. 

Rumours and anxiety swirl around the Latina plant itself — just as they did in the 1980s, when Malossi heard stories of radioactive fish with four tails. Last April, an article by the Italian magazine L’Espresso published claims that the Latina plant could leach radioactive material into the soil. The plant vigorously denies these claims — a spokesperson for SOGIN said the company periodically checks the quality of vegetables, milk and fodder as well as air, soil and groundwater for radiation and that “as always, the results of the analyses confirm radiologically negligible environmental impacts.”

In the gloaming of a summer evening in Umbria, Monica Tommasi drives me through the twilight-darkened hills surrounding the medieval city of Orvieto. This land is rich in archeological and ecological heritage — filled with ancient tunnels, Etruscan caves, untapped archeological sites, wild places where wolves and boar roam. Tommasi is the President of Amici Della Terra — "Friends of the Earth" in Italian — an organization that was once the Italian chapter of the international Friends of the Earth network before breaking away in 2014. "We left, because we argued a lot," she said of the split, describing how the network "wanted to put turbines and panels everywhere, and we couldn't be in favour of that approach." 

The International Friends of the Earth association was born from the anti-nuclear movement in America, where the group successfully lobbied to shut down two reactors, and has since 1969 made anti-nuclear campaigning a core part of its identity.

But Tommasi remembers precisely when she first began to reconsider nuclear power. “I started thinking about it in 2011, when I began to see that the government was investing heavily in solar and wind power, which would invade and industrialize the natural landscape,” she recalled. Many of these green transition projects have been fraught with problems in Italy — wind farm companies accused of corruption and profiteering, of erecting wind farms in areas where there’s little wind, and laying waste to nature. 

For the first time, Tommasi began to think about ways to decarbonize “that don’t destroy the environment where people live and the landscape around them.”. She became intrigued by the nuclear option. “We needed to start reasoning and changing our minds,” she said. 

Tommasi now advocates for a national conversation about nuclear power. “This choice must be accompanied by a public debate,” she told me, “but it isn’t happening because everyone is still afraid.” 

“The future of Italy's energy sector must lie in nuclear,” she said, adding that if Italy was to continue pursuing solar and wind energy alone, “it means destroying all the natural areas that are still left.”

I asked the government to respond to allegations about how criminality, speculation and land-grabs in the renewable energy sector might be affecting Italians’ opinions on nuclear power. 

“We do not believe it is appropriate to frame the energy debate by ideologically pitting nuclear power against renewables, nor should we use any administrative or criminal issues in certain sectors to discredit a technology as a whole,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “Nuclear power is not an alternative to renewables, but their best ally,” she said. 

On a warm autumn day in Rome, several thousand people gathered for an annual “climate pride” march. They brandished homemade cardboard wind turbines that spun in the breeze. Vincenzo Migliucci, 83, was among them. He worked for more than three decades for ENEL, Italy’s energy corporation, and he’s been anti-nuclear for much of his life. After the Chernobyl accident, he protested outside the nuclear plant under construction in Montalto di Castro almost every day, picketing the workers as they went through the gates.

“The wrath of God happened,” he said, referring to Chernobyl. “And when a true estimate is made, we’ll one day see how many disasters Chernobyl caused.” 

Migliucci is against nuclear power plants of all types — arguing for solar panels instead — and is particularly concerned about what happens to the plants after they become obsolete and must, like the Latina plant, be slowly dismantled over decades. “The decommissioning costs a fortune; the nuclear waste repositories cost a fortune,” he said.

He began telling me some of the stories that surround Italy’s shuttered nuclear plants. “Near the Garigliano power plant,” he told me, “a child was born with only one eye.” His own eyes widened as he pressed a finger into the middle of my forehead. “Sheep and cattle,” he said, “were born with six legs, or entirely red in colour. It’s not a myth, it’s real.” 

Younger generations of Italians don’t have the same collective impressions around nuclear power, nor around Chernobyl or its aftermath, explained Luca Romano, a young pro-nuclear influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. Romano makes videos with his partner, Luiza Munteanu, about the advantages of nuclear power. The main problem he runs up against, he says, is that “we have a very low scientific literacy, the level of debate is abysmal.” And culturally, he adds, “Italy has always been a country that looks backwards rather than forwards.”

In May, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Italy’s Lombardy region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor to cooperate on applying nuclear science for development across the region. The choice of Lombardy was significant. It is home to Milan, and is at the heart of Italy’s digital infrastructure. Speckled with no fewer than 60 data centers, with more cropping up, Lombardy has opened itself up to Silicon Valley. Microsoft is investing billions in the area to boost its AI and cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services has committed to spending over $1 billion to expand its data center operations around Milan.

How northern Italy’s growing AI infrastructure will be powered, though, is still a problem to be solved — one that cuts to the heart of Italy’s energy dependence. Since Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in October 2022 — which coincided with the launch of ChatGPT a month later — the Italian government has been broaching the topic of nuclear power as essential to Italy's energy future. “World population and economic growth will significantly increase energy demand,” Meloni said at a sustainability summit in Abu Dhabi. “Not least due to the growing requirements arising from the development of generative artificial intelligence.” 

Artificial intelligence is a “highly relevant topic,” said Corrado, the communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “As more things run on electricity, the economy goes digital, and data centers and AI expand, demand for steady, low-emissions power will rise. Nuclear energy can help as a reliable, controllable source that works alongside renewables.” 

In August, it emerged that the government had set aside €7.5 million purely for pro-nuclear communication and information campaigns directed at regions where new plants may be built. One focus of the Meloni administration is on the prospect of building small modular reactors, sometimes called “mini nukes.” They are compact fission plants, a fraction of the size of the traditional, cathedral-like nuclear power stations. They have a smaller core, and proponents argue their safety features mean there’s minimal chance of an epic, Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster, something the government is keen to get across to voters. 

Currently, only China and Russia have these small reactors up and running, but mini nuclear plants have attracted significant attention in Silicon Valley. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup focused on SMRs, while U.S. nuclear startup Kairos has signed an agreement with Google to develop these reactors to power its data centers. This month, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for rolling out small modular reactors and bringing them “online” by the 2030s.

Soon, Italy may take the first steps towards the reconstruction of a nuclear industry that has been abandoned for decades. “I believe it won't be easy to relaunch nuclear energy,” said Barbara Curli, the Turin historian. “Knowing a little about the history of nuclear power in Italy and its political dimension, I'd be quite skeptical about the possibility of relaunching nuclear power here in Italy — but let’s see.” 

A little under 1,500 miles away, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among wild boar, birds, and deer, radiation levels in some areas have dipped below around 0.3 microsieverts per hour, lower than background radiation levels in many European cities. Not least the eternal city of Rome.

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