WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a red-state constitutional challenge to California’s special authority to fight air pollution.
Over a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas, the justices turned away an appeal from Ohio and 16 other conservative states, which asked the court to rule “the Golden State is not a golden child.”
While Monday’s brief order closes the door on a constitutional challenge to California’s anti-pollution standards, the court on Friday cleared the way for a different, more targeted legal challenge.
The oil and gas industry is suing over the state’s “zero emissions” goals for new vehicles, arguing California’s special authority to fight air pollution does not extend to greenhouse gases and global warming.
A lower court had dismissed that suit on the grounds the oil producers had no standing to sue. Their complaint was they would sell less fuel in the future.
On Friday, the justices agreed to reconsider that ruling early next year. They could clear the way for the suit to proceed.
Monday’s related order narrows the legal grounds that the industry can use to challenge California’s rule, assuming it eventually wins standing.
The incoming Trump administration is likely to intervene on the side of the challengers.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar had urged the court to turn down both appeals. They said California’s strict emissions standards are designed to fight smog and other air pollution as well as greenhouse gases.
They argued that Congress had ample authority under the Constitution to set special rules for problems in different states.
Since early in American history, they said Congress approved special customs duties for some states or rules involving tribes relations.
In challenging California’s authority, Ohio’s Atty. Gen. David Yost pointed to the court’s 2013 decision that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds it violated the principle of equal state sovereignty.
When Congress adopted national air pollution standards in 1967, it said California could go further because it was already enforcing strict standards to combat the state’s worst-in-the-nation problem with smog.
Ohio and red states say this special authority violates “core constitutional principles because no state is more equal than the others. And Congress does not have the general power to elevate one state above the others….Yet in the Clean Air Act, Congress elevated California above all the other states by giving to the Golden State alone the power to pass certain environmental laws.”
Without commenting, the justices said they would not hear the constitutional claim.
The Environmental Defense Fund hailed the court’s announcement.
“California’s clean car standards have successfully helped reduce the dangerous soot, smog, and climate pollution that put all people at risk, while also turbocharging clean technologies and job creation,” said Alice Henderson, lead counsel for its clean-air policy group.
It’s hard to imagine a holiday season without “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The 1965 broadcast has become a staple – etched into traditions across generations like decorating the tree or sipping hot cocoa.
But this beloved TV special almost didn’t make it to air. CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different from the upbeat spectacles they imagined audiences wanted. A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice? No laugh track? Humble, lo-fi animation? And was that a Bible verse? It seemed destined to fail – if not scrapped outright.
And yet, against all the odds, it became a classic. The program turned “Peanuts” from a popular comic strip into a multimedia empire – not because it was flashy or followed the rules, but because it was sincere.
As a business professor who has studied the “Peanuts” franchise, I see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as a fascinating historical moment. It’s the true story of an unassuming comic strip character who crossed over into television and managed to voice hefty, thought-provoking ideas – without getting booted off the air.
Call from the blue
The “Peanuts” special came together out of a last-minute scramble. Somewhat out of the blue, producer Lee Mendelson got a call from advertising agency McCann-Erickson: Coca-Cola wanted to sponsor an animated Christmas special.
Mendelson had previously failed to convince the agency to sponsor a “Peanuts” documentary. This time, though, he assured McCann-Erickson that the characters would be a perfect fit.
Mendelson called up “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles “Sparky” Schulz and told him he had just sold “A Charlie Brown Christmas” – and they would have mere months to write, animate and bring the special to air.
Schulz, Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez worked fast to piece together a storyline. The cartoonist wanted to tell a story that cut through the glitz of holiday commercialism and brought the focus back to something deeper.
While Snoopy tries to win a Christmas lights contest, and Lucy names herself “Christmas queen” in the neighborhood play, a forlorn Charlie Brown searches for “the real meaning of Christmas.” He makes his way to the local lot of aluminum trees, a fad at the time. But he’s drawn to the one real tree – a humble, scraggly little thing – inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Fir Tree.”
Jazz — and the Bible
Those plot points would likely delight the network, but other choices Schulz made were proving controversial.
The show would use real children’s voices instead of adult actors’, giving the characters an authentic, simple charm. And Schulz refused to add a laugh track, a standard in animated TV at the time. He wanted the sincerity of the story to stand on its own, without artificial prompts for laughter.
Meanwhile, Mendelson brought in jazz musician Vince Guaraldi to compose a sophisticated soundtrack. The music was unlike anything typically heard in animated programming, blending provocative depth with the innocence of childhood.
Most alarming to the executives was Schulz’s insistence on including the heart of the Nativity story in arguably the special’s most pivotal scene.
When Charlie Brown joyfully returns to his friends with the spindly little tree, the rest of the “Peanuts” gang ridicule his choice. “I guess I really don’t know what Christmas is all about,” the utterly defeated Charlie Brown sighs.
Gently but confidently, Linus assures him, “I can tell you what Christmas is all about.” Calling for “Lights, please,” he quietly walks to the center of the stage.
In the stillness, Linus recites the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, with its story of an angel appearing to trembling shepherds:
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,” he concludes, picking up his security blanket and walking into the wings. The rest of the gang soon concludes Charlie Brown’s scrawny tree isn’t so bad, after all – it just “needs a little love.”
When Schulz discussed this idea with Mendelson and Melendez, they were hesitant. For much of U.S. history, Protestant Christianity was the default in American culture, but in the years since World War II, society had grown somewhat more mindful of making room for Catholic and Jewish Americans. Unsure how to handle the shifting norms, many mainstream entertainment companies in the 1960s tended to avoid religious topics.
“The Bible thing scares us,” CBS executives said when they saw the proofs of the special. But there was simply no time to redo the entire dramatic arc of the special, and pulling it was not an option, given that advertisements had already run.
Fun and philosophy
Fortunately for the “Peanuts” franchise, when the special aired on Dec. 9, 1965, it was an instant success. Nearly half of American households tuned in, and the program won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award. Schulz had tapped into something audiences were craving: an honest, heartfelt message that cut through the commercialism.
Millions of viewers have continued to tune in to the show’s annual rebroadcast for over 50 years on CBS and then ABC – and now Apple TV+.
When I was researching my spiritual biography of Schulz, “A Charlie Brown Religion,” one of my favorite finds was a 1965 letter from a Florida viewer, Betty Knorr. She praised the show for stressing “the true meaning of the Christmas season” at a time when “the mention of God in general (is) being hush hushed.”
The magic of Schulz’s work, though, is that it resonates across demographics and ideologies. Some fans find comfort in the show’s gentle message of faith, while others embrace it in a purely secular way.
Simple but poignant, Schulz’s art and gentle humor can do two things. They can act as safe entry points for some pretty hefty thoughts – be they psychiatric, cultural or theological. Or “Peanuts” cartoons can simply be heartwarming, festive entertainment, if that’s what you want.
Today, both the “Peanuts” empire and the Christmas industry are thriving. Back in the 1960s, commercial realities almost derailed Schulz’s special, yet those same forces ultimately ensured its broadcast. The result is a lasting touchstone of innocence, hope and belief.
Stephen Lind is an associate professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California.
This article is republished from The Conversation.
Early 20th-century winters in Minnesota were a hardship for the state’s residents―including those of Cottonwood County. Newcomers, hearing stories about the weather, soon learned that the accounts weren’t exaggerated. A few storms stand out, but the blizzard of 1936 topped them all.
The first settler-colonists of Westbrook Township had intimate experience with Minnesota’s harsh winter weather. A severe blizzard that hit the area on January 7, 1873, continued for three days. The “Winter of the Big Snow” (1880–1881) left snow on the ground from October to April. The blizzard of January 1909 left huge drifts that blocked doors, forcing some people to leave their homes through upstairs windows.
The winter of 1936 was a memorable occasion that surpassed even these earlier storms. Temperatures dropped to 30 degrees below zero in late January and did not rise above zero for thirty-six days. This 1936 North American cold wave ranks among the most intense in the recorded history of North America. The winter (December through February) of 1935/36 was the coldest on record for Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with February being the coldest month.
Although the wind, snow, and temperatures were similar to previous memorable winters, they impacted residents in different ways. Farmers were not lost in their ox carts or frozen on their property a few yards from their homes, but stranded by automobiles and trains and interruptions of electric power.
Several feet of snow accompanied the cold. Farmers strung ropes between their farmhouses and barns to prevent themselves from getting lost even on short walks outside. Even brief exposure was dangerous, since frost bite and hypothermia could occur in a few minutes. Many animals died. On some days, winds and snow were so intense that farmers could not see their fingers stretched out in front of them.
Blocked food and fuel deliveries created critical shortages by the end of the first week of February. By the middle of the month, all schools were closed by deep snowdrifts, and medical aid was delayed by a shortage of serum. In a February 14, 1936, account of the blizzard in the Windom Reporter, a reporter stated that the snow halted train and truck service from early Saturday to Monday night. The storm hit the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha railroad especially hard, and the line between Mountain Lake and Butterfield short-circuited most of the day. 209 passengers on this train waited for nearly twelve hours for the snow to be cleared.
With roads closed by large drifts, churches canceled their services on Sunday and schools were closed to students on Monday. Rural schools in Cottonwood County lost approximately a month of class time that winter. Frozen water pipes overwhelmed plumbing establishments, automobiles refused to start, and the wire service was impeded, though not totally paralyzed.
The blizzard caused medical emergencies and made it difficult for doctors to attend their patients. Doctors at the Windom Hospital treated two cases of frozen feet. People with severe injuries and illnesses managed with the ingenuity and help of others to get to hospitals and receive the help they needed. One doctor from Westbrook reportedly reached a pneumonia patient in Storden on skis. A farmer with a badly cut hand stopped the bleeding and the following day hitched a ride with a snow plow to the hospital.
The early February blizzard wasn’t the end of Cottonwood County’s winter woes in 1936. A storm on February 17 stopped trains and mail service for two days. After a promising thaw, another storm a week later dropped ten inches of snow, again bringing transportation in the county to a standstill.
For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship as soon as he gets into office to make good on campaign promises aiming to restrict immigration and redefining what it means to be American.
But any efforts to halt the policy would face steep legal hurdles.
Birthright citizenship means anyone born in the United States automatically becomes an American citizen. It’s been in place for decades and applies to children born to someone in the country illegally or in the U.S. on a tourist or student visa who plans to return to their home country.
It’s not the practice of every country, and Trump and his supporters have argued that the system is being abused and that there should be tougher standards for becoming an American citizen.
But others say this is a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, it would be extremely difficult to overturn and even if it’s possible, it’s a bad idea.
Here’s a look at birthright citizenship, what Trump has said about it and the prospects for ending it:
What Trump has said about birthright citizenship
During an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Trump said he “absolutely” planned to halt birthright citizenship once in office.
“We’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous,” he said.
Trump and other opponents of birthright citizenship have argued that it creates an incentive for people to come to the U.S. illegally or take part in “birth tourism,” in which pregnant women enter the U.S. specifically to give birth so their children can have citizenship before returning to their home countries.
“Simply crossing the border and having a child should not entitle anyone to citizenship,” said Eric Ruark, director of research for NumbersUSA, which argues for reducing immigration. The organization supports changes that would require at least one parent to be a permanent legal resident or a U.S. citizen for their children to automatically get citizenship.
Others have argued that ending birthright citizenship would profoundly damage the country.
“One of our big benefits is that people born here are citizens, are not an illegal underclass. There’s better assimilation and integration of immigrants and their children because of birthright citizenship,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the pro-immigration Cato Institute.
In 2019, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that 5.5 million children under age 18 lived with at least one parent in the country illegally in 2019, representing 7% of the U.S. child population. The vast majority of those children were U.S. citizens.
The nonpartisan think tank said during Trump’s campaign for president in 2015 that the number of people in the country illegally would “balloon” if birthright citizenship were repealed, creating “a self-perpetuating class that would be excluded from social membership for generations.”
What does the law say?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment in July 1868. That amendment assured citizenship for all, including Black people.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the 14th Amendment says. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
But the 14th Amendment didn’t always translate to everyone being afforded birthright citizenship. For example, it wasn’t until 1924 that Congress finally granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.
A key case in the history of birthright citizenship came in 1898, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants, was a U.S. citizen because he was born in the states. The federal government had tried to deny him reentry into the county after a trip abroad on grounds he wasn’t a citizen under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
But some have argued that the 1898 case clearly applied to children born of parents who are both legal immigrants to America but that it’s less clear whether it applies to children born to parents without legal status or, for example, who come for a short-term like a tourist visa.
“That is the leading case on this. In fact, it’s the only case on this,” said Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration restrictions. “It’s a lot more of an open legal question than most people think.”
Some proponents of immigration restrictions have argued the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment allows the U.S. to deny citizenship to babies born to those in the country illegally. Trump himself used that language in his 2023 announcement that he would aim to end birthright citizenship if reelected.
So what could Trump do and would it be successful?
Trump wasn’t clear in his Sunday interview how he aims to end birthright citizenship.
Asked how he could get around the 14th Amendment with an executive action, Trump said: “Well, we’re going to have to get it changed. We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.” Pressed further on whether he’d use an executive order, Trump said “if we can, through executive action.”
He gave a lot more details in a 2023 post on his campaign website. In it, he said he would issue an executive order the first day of his presidency, making it clear that federal agencies “require that at least one parent be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident for their future children to become automatic U.S. citizens.”
Trump wrote that the executive order would make clear that children of people in the U.S. illegally “should not be issued passports, Social Security numbers, or be eligible for certain taxpayer funded welfare benefits.”
This would almost certainly end up in litigation.
Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute said the law is clear that birthright citizenship can’t be ended by executive order but that Trump may be inclined to take a shot anyway through the courts.
“I don’t take his statements very seriously. He has been saying things like this for almost a decade,” Nowrasteh said. “He didn’t do anything to further this agenda when he was president before. The law and judges are near uniformly opposed to his legal theory that the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States are not citizens.”
Trump could steer Congress to pass a law to end birthright citizenship but would still face a legal challenge that it violates the Constitution.
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Associated Press reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
Adolescents with serious depression can feel stuck in their symptoms and ways of thinking, making it harder for them to recover from their mental illness. A series of two-week-long summer “Creativity Camps” developed by two University of Minnesota professors has provided a new treatment approach for adolescents with depression, helping them to get unstuck by encouraging participants’ creativity. The results are impressive, the camp’s creators said, with many participants showing significant, lasting reduction in their depression symptoms.
Kathryn Cullen, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an M Health Fairview child and adolescent psychiatrist, developed the camp along with Yuko Taniguchi, assistant professor of medicine and arts at the University of Minnesota Rochester’s Center for Learning and Innovation. The half-day intensive outpatient program (IOP) camps, which offered six sessions in the summers of 2022 and 2023 for adolescents who had been diagnosed with depression, were largely held at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain.
With her long history of working with adolescents, Cullen said she has treated many young patients who have hit roadblocks, trapped by their depression and unable to make progress.
“I’ve been working with young people for many years, helping them, prescribing medications for them, recommending therapy, researching new types of treatments,” she said. “It was hard to see those kids who just weren’t improving. I was looking for a new approach that could help these patients move forward.”
Kathryn Cullen
Many of the Creativity Camp participants have tried treatments that have not been fully effective. “We are always in need of great treatments for adolescents with treatment-resistant depression,“ Cullen said. “I have the experience of working with young people who have tried many treatments but get more hopeless and withdrawn and stuck in their own world.”
Taniguchi’s deep interest in art — her unique dual professorship was created in recognition of her groundbreaking work using art and creativity to aid the healing process — helped her to see the possibilities of harnessing creativity to aid young people struggling with their mental health.
“Kids with depression can be stuck in really rigid thinking,” she said. “They are determined to see the world as black and white. Their negativity is intense. Creative thinking, on the other hand, is flexible. It can be infused through inspiration by holding them accountable to become artists.”
Cullen and Taniguchi liked the idea of presenting an option that, for participants, felt significantly different from classic treatment modalities. The idea of a camp where young people were encouraged to tap into their creative sides, where they spent focused time working on art, felt like a good option.
“There’s more appeal to a camp than a therapy group,” Cullen said. After she and Taniguchi talked about possible approaches, she said, “We really got excited about the idea of doing a creativity camp.”
Yuko Taniguchi
The camp’s focus on art and creativity is more than camouflage, Taniguchi said. It’s also a new way of looking at the world. “What if we were saying to a young person, ‘What you are doing is practicing to be an artist?’ That approach is much more interesting than saying, ‘You are working on your mental health.’ What if being an artist is the priority and feeling better is a consequence? That’s a foundation of our practice.”
The team was eventually awarded comprehensive funding through a Minnesota Futures Grant from the University of Minnesota to support the project, Cullen said. “Our grant was to not just do a camp and study its impact on mental health but to also study the brains of participants and how thinking creatively impacted them.”
During the camps, researchers measured participants’ quantitative and qualitative responses to creative work, through functional MRI scans to measure brain activity and in-depth interviews (also conducted with parents and other caregivers) that analyzed participants’ depression levels before, during and after their time at the camp.
As the camps wrapped up, the research team analyzed the data. The first resulting paper, published in the journal Child Psychiatry and Human Development, Cullen said, “reports on the improvement in depression symptoms from both summers. We found that, for participants, there was a significant improvement in depression symptoms after participating in the camp. They also showed improvement in different measurements of well-being.” While there is still room for more research, she added, “The results were quite encouraging.”
Building from an idea
Cullen met Taniguchi in 2018, after her department chair suggested they collaborate..
“I was working on creating an after-school mental health program for teenagers that was at the level of an IOP program,” Cullen said. “Somehow my department chair had met Yuko and learned about this program that she was doing with adolescents at the Mayo Clinic. We met, got to talking and I learned about her approach.”
They eventually got involved in a program called Arts and Health sponsored by the University of Minnesota Medical School and the Weisman Art Museum that connects artists and researchers
The Arts and Health program encourages participants to take time to imagine the possible fruits of their collaboration, Taniguchi explained: “They say, ‘Have a conversation for a year and see what you come up with.’”.
One of the many ways the two professors connected was around the idea of art as a potential way to pull young people out of depression.
“When I first met Yuko,” Cullen said, “I told her that the one thing that seemed to get kids with depression out of their shell was when I would talk to them about their artwork or music. It gave them a little spark.” That realization felt promising, she continued: “We needed something that would tap into that a little more and help young people express themselves and be creative.”
The idea of turning this promising realization into a summer camp was spurred on by Abimbola Asojo, distinguished global professor at the University’s College of Design. “She had been doing these camps every year to encourage kids from underrepresented groups to go into design fields,” Cullen said. “She’d brought in mainly BIPOC kids to the U to do these design-focused camps. She said, ‘Why don’t you do a camp? We’ve been doing these camps. They’re really successful and a fun entry point.’”
During Creativity Camp sessions, staff made a point of telling the young participants that the creative work they were doing was important, that they were artists worthy of respect. “We take the camp participants very seriously,” Taniguchi said. “They are there to create art every day. We recruited professional artists to mentor them and work closely with them during the camps.”
The focus of the camps was on accepting the young participants for who they are, and encouraging their creativity in whatever form it took, Cullen said. “The activities are geared towards getting kids to tap into their imagination, to express themselves differently, be weird, be free of judgment about what they create. There are no right answers, no right way to express yourself. It is just what you make.”
At the end of the camps, participants’ creations were exhibited at the Weisman Art Museum. The public exhibition was important, Taniguchi said. “We treated them like the serious artists they are.”
‘Kids need things like this’
Going in, Cullen and Taniguchi felt confident their research would show that Creativity Camp would have a positive effect on participants’ mental health. As they analyzed their results, Cullen said the positive outcome “wasn’t surprising, because it sort of fit our expectations. We’d done this kind of work in our programs before, and Yuko had already been doing something similar with kids at Mayo for years.” The difference was the ability to collect hard data about the camp’s impact through MRI scans. “We wanted to collect data that would show others in a definitive way. We were happy that we were able to show it statistically and convincingly, but I wouldn’t say we were surprised.”
To further back up their research, Cullen and Taniguchi conducted a similar study with a group of undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota. “We found similar improvement in mental health and depression and an increased well-being,” Cullen said. They also conducted another study on young adults in Japan: “We were able to show that students’ well-being improved there, too.”
The research team conducted six-month follow-up interviews with Creativity Camp participants and their parents. While all respondents stated that participants continued to experience fewer depression symptoms than before the camps, the teens reported that their depression symptoms had increased in the six months after completing the camp but were still better than the baseline measurements. Parents tended to note that improvement in the teens’ depression symptoms was sustained.
Thanks to all of this checking and rechecking, Cullen and Taniguchi feel like they have developed a robust intervention that could be helpful in treating depression in teens.
“We’re pretty sure it works,” Cullen said. “I think it’s helping young people tap into something that they don’t really get the chance to do, and to think about themselves in a different way and really enjoy spending time with other people. It is a very meaningful, enjoyable experience that we’re thinking may be one of the key ingredients to their symptom improvement.”
In the end, the key seems to be finding something that breaks depressed teens out of the cycle of depression, Cullen said: “Kids need experiences that get them out of their stuck ways of thinking and give them an opportunity to reflect and connect with others and find a new way of seeing the world that’s different from the rut that they’ve settled into.”
Andy Steiner
Andy Steiner is a Twin Cities-based writer and editor. Before becoming a full-time freelancer, she worked as senior editor at Utne Reader and editor of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Email her at [email protected].
A top executive with Minnesota’s largest utility says data center growth will not prevent it from meeting the state’s 100% clean electricity law, but it may extend the life of natural gas power plants into the next decade.
“As we take all of that coal off the system — even if you didn’t add data centers into the mix — I think we may have been looking to extend some gas (contracts) on our system to get us through a portion of the 2030s,” said Ryan Long, president of Xcel Energy’s division serving Minnesota and the Dakotas. “Adding data centers could increase the likelihood of that, to be perfectly honest.”
Long made the comments at a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission conference this fall exploring the potential impact of data centers on the state’s 2040 clean electricity mandate.
The expansion of power-hungry data centers, driven by artificial intelligence, has caused anxiety across the country among utility planners and regulators. The trend is moving the goalposts for states’ clean electricity targets and raising questions about whether clean energy capacity can keep up with demand as society also tries to electrify transportation and building heat.
Minnesota PUC commissioner Joe Sullivan organized last month’s conference in response to multiple new data centers projects, including a $700 million facility by Facebook’s parent company Meta that’s under construction in suburban Rosemount. Microsoft and Amazon have each acquired property near a retiring Xcel coal plant in central Minnesota.
“We need to ensure that our system is able to serve these companies if they come,” Sullivan said, “and that it can serve them with clean resources consistent with state law.”
Alongside concerns about whether clean energy can keep up with new electricity demand, there’s also an emerging view that data centers — if properly regulated — could become grid assets that help accelerate the transition to carbon-free power. Several stakeholders at the Oct. 31 event shared that view, including Xcel’s regional president.
A 100-megawatt data center could generate as much as $64 million in annual revenue for Xcel, enough to help temper rate increases or cover the cost of other projects on the system, Long said. He said the company wants to attract 1.3 gigawatts worth of data centers to its territory by 2032, and it thinks it can absorb all of that demand without harming progress toward its 2040 clean energy requirement.
Long said data center expansion will not change the company’s plans to close all of its remaining coal-fired power plants by 2040, but it may cause them to try to keep gas plans operating longer. Ultimately, meeting the needs of data centers will require more renewable generation, battery storage, and grid-enhancing technology, but rising costs and supply chain issues have slowed deployment of those solutions.
Other utilities echoed that optimism. Julie Pierce, Minnesota Power’s vice president for strategy and planning said the company has experience serving large customers such as mines in northeastern Minnesota and would be ready to serve data centers. Great River Energy’s resource planning director Zachary Ruzycki said the generation and transmission cooperative “has a lot of arrows in its quiver” to accommodate data centers.
Ruzycki noted, too, that much of the interest it has received from data center developers is because of the state’s commitment to clean energy. Many large data center operators have made corporate commitments to power them on 100% carbon-free electricity, whether from renewables or nuclear power.
Pete Wyckoff, deputy commissioner for energy at the Minnesota Department of Commerce, expressed doubts about the ability to meet unchecked demand from data centers. Even with the state’s recent permitting reforms, utilities are unlikely to be able to deliver “power of any sort — much less clean power — in the size and timeframes that data centers are likely to request.”
He sees hydrogen, long-duration batteries, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear among the solutions that will eventually be needed, but in the short-term the grid could serve more data centers with investments in transmission upgrades, virtual power plants, and other demand response programs.
“These solutions can be deployed faster and cheaper than building all new transmission and large clean energy facilities, though we’ll need those, too,” Wyckoff said.
Aaron Tinjum, director of energy policy and regulatory affairs for the Data Center Coalition, said data centers provide the computing power for things like smart meters, demand response, and other grid technologies. The national trade group represents the country’s largest technology and data center companies.
“We can’t simply view data centers as a significant consumer of energy if they’re all helping us become more efficient, and helping us save on our utility bills,” Tinjum said.
He also pointed to data centers’ role in driving clean energy development. A recent report from S&P Global Commodity Insights found that data centers account for half of all U.S. corporate clean energy procurement.
The true impact of data centers on emissions and the grid is complicated, though. Meta, which participated in the recent Minnesota conference, says it matches all of its annual electricity use with renewable energy, but environmental groups say there is evidence that its data centers are increasing fossil fuel use and emissions in the local markets where they are built.
Amelia Vohs, climate program director with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, raised concerns at the conference about whether data center growth will make it harder to electrify transportation and heating. She pointed to neighboring Wisconsin, where utilities are proposing to build new gas plants to power data centers.
“This commission and the stakeholders here today have all done a ton of work and made great progress in decarbonizing the electric sector in our state,” Vohs said. “I worry about possibly rolling that back if we all of a sudden have a large load that needs to be served with fossil fuels, or [require] a fossil fuel backup.”
The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office argued that state regulators need to scrutinize data center deals to make sure developers are paying the total cost of their impact on the system, including additional regulatory, operational and maintenance work that might be required on the grid.
In an interview, Sullivan said he was impressed by tech companies’ interest in having data centers in Minnesota because of the 2040 net zero goal, not despite it. They want to buy electricity from Minnesota utilities rather than build their own power systems or locate in neighboring states, he added, and the October meeting left him confident that “we can deal with this.”
This article first appeared on Energy News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Alex Plechash ousted Minnesota Republican Party chair David Hann during a state central committee meeting on Saturday, reports KARE 11. Donna Bergstrom will remain deputy chair.
During a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation on CBS, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the presidential pardoning process “cries out for reform,” saying she didn’t agree with President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter and also said some of the other pardons “make no sense at all.”
Sentencing for Adam Fravel, convicted of killing Madeline Kingsbury, will take place Tuesday in Winona County, reports FOX 9.
St. Paul and Ramsey County are no longer pursuing the purchase of a building on St. Paul’s Marshall Avenue to house the chronically homeless, reports the Pioneer Press.
Crosslake, Minnesota, north of Brainerd has acquired the nickname “tin city” after giant storage buildings have exploded in the area to house wealthy lake house owners’ boats and other toys, reports the Star Tribune.
Enbridge Energy is continuing clean up after a faulty valve caused one of its oil pipelines to spill nearly 70,000 gallons of oil into the ground near Cambridge, Wisconsin, which is located between Madison and Milwaukee, reports Wisconsin Public Radio.
On the worst days, Tamara Kcehowski said, she has thrown up when the stench from Los Angeles’ nearby sewage plant overwhelms her El Segundo apartment. She said her dog, Maggie, has even retched alongside her.
On the not-so-bad days, she says she often deals with a dull headache or burning eyes. Some mornings, she wakes up gagging or coughing.
None of this was part of Kcehowski’s life before July 2021, when major failures at the nearby Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant dumped millions of gallons of untreated sewage into Santa Monica Bay and released high levels of hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like rotten eggs and can cause health issues.
At the time, Kcehowski was hopeful the facility’s response would be swift and that her community would suffer the stinky mess for only a few days — or at worst a few weeks.
But now, more than three years later, the noxious odors and elevated hydrogen sulfide emissions persist, despite repeated complaints and appeals to the city of Los Angeles, air quality regulators and local officials. Although she’s lived in El Segundo with her daughter since the early 2000s, she now wonders if her only recourse is to move.
“You’ve had three years to take care of this issue, and you still haven’t,” said Kcehowski, 58. “We’re still suffering, why?”
Tamara Kcehowski is frustrated by smells emanating from the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant. She said the smells have been sickening and continue now more than three years later.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hyperion — the largest wastewater treatment facility west of the Rockies — sprawls across 200 acres of oceanfront Los Angeles and sits just outside the city limits of El Segundo. Every day, 4 million inhabitants of L.A. and 29 other cities — including El Segundo — flush a quarter-billion gallons of wastewater into Hyperion’s treatment tanks.
While most people are blissfully ignorant of their wastewater’s journey after showering or using the toilet, it’s become an unpleasant fact of life for many El Segundo residents. Many complain the city of Los Angeles has ignored their plight and has failed to make needed changes to limit, and track, odors. They worry their concerns will always be outweighed by the sanitation needs of millions.
“There’s no question it’s worse than it ever has been, at least going back to the early ’90s when it was really bad,” said El Segundo Mayor Drew Boyles. “It’s incredibly frustrating. … It doesn’t feel like the city of L.A. is taking this matter as seriously as they should.”
For its part, the facility has slowly addressed a laundry list of needed improvements in the aftermath of the July 2021 spill, some of which have dramatically improved odors.
“It’s services cannot be stopped, diverted or stored,” said Tonya Shelton, a spokesperson for L.A. Sanitation and Environment, the city department that manages the sewage plant. “Hyperion will nonetheless continue to work closely with both the [South Coast Air Quality Management District] and the City of El Segundo to ensure that operations are not only compliant, but reflect a spirit of partnership for the surrounding community.”
Odor complaints still up
In the three years before the July 2021 spill, residents complained fewer than 150 times about odors around Hyperion.
But in the three months after the spill — which officials found was likely caused by equipment failures, operational missteps and staffing issues — more than 2,500 odor complaints flooded regulators, according to South Coast AQMD data. Although community concern peaked in those initial months, Hyperion continues to be barraged by odor complaints, which routinely reach into the hundreds each month.
The alarming uptick in complaints led to increased oversight by the local air district beginning in 2022, when regulators determined L.A. Sanitation was “unable to contain the sewage odors at Hyperion and cannot conduct operations at the wastewater treatment plant without being in violation” of district rules and regulations.
An abatement order required the plant to improve infrastructure, operations and monitoring. It was aimed at minimizing smells primarily from hydrogen sulfide, a known byproduct of wastewater treatment facilities released during the breakdown of organic matter. It can be deadly at high levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, but both lower and longer-term exposure can also cause health symptoms, particularly for the respiratory and nervous systems.
After more than two years under the order, L.A. Sanitation and AQMD officials reported last month that Hyperion had successfully met all the mandated conditions — but members of the air quality hearing board were not convinced the problem had been resolved.
“Everything that is being done is not getting rid of the odors,” Cynthia Verdugo-Peralta, a board member, said at the late November hearing. “The problem still remains — the odors are still affecting the public in such a negative way. … The city of El Segundo, especially, is still suffering.”
At that hearing, a South Coast AQMD air quality inspector testified that there were no remaining shortcomings related to the abatement order. However, he said that during his recent visits to El Segundo there “are pockets that I can consistently detect odors in the community.”
The board members voted unanimously to extend oversight of Hyperion through at least next August, instead of terminating the abatement order in January.
Boyles said he was in “disbelief” that the board even considered lifting the abatement order, but was glad it stood by his city’s concerns.
Still, he and the El Segundo City Council are considering filing a lawsuit against the city of L.A. It’s something Boyles considers a last resort, but the city has taken that route in the past when conditions around the sewage plant have deteriorated.
El Segundo Mayor Drew Boyles and City Manager Darrell George, from left, are photographed near the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Two groups of residents have already filed suit against L.A.’s sanitation department over air quality issues immediately after the spill, one specifically alleging the city’s failure to monitor noxious gases. Those cases remain in litigation.
After the spill, Hyperion officials admitted that there were several shortcomings and repairs were needed. L.A. has since spent an estimated $114 million on improvements, including placing new covers on a tank that AQMD officials found to be a principal source of odors, Shelton said. The plant has also enhanced employee training, implemented an air monitoring system along its perimeter, increased neighborhood checks for odors and, most recently, hired environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay to improve community relations.
An external review of the plant after the spill called for 33 immediate fixes, of which about 85% have been completed, the city has reported.
But Shelton emphasized that an odor-free plant handling millions of gallons of sewage a day is not realistic.
“Despite the completion of these projects, and though Hyperion continues to put concentrated effort into minimizing odors, odors are a part of work at any wastewater treatment plant, and the presence of odors does not always mean there is a problem to remedy or changes to implement,” Shelton said in a statement. “Hyperion continues to work with the community on this issue.”
Air quality compliance issues
For decades, a single air quality violation in a year was rare for Hyperion. But since the 2021 sewage spill, Hyperion has seen a surge in compliance issues. In just the last six months, the South Coast AQMD has issued the facility eight such nuisance violations, which indicate a discharge of air contaminants causing odors traced back to Hyperion, according to recent inspector testimony.
Officials have also issued some violations tied to hydrogen sulfide emissions.
While Hyperion historically tested for the colorless toxic gas in certain scenarios, it was only in May 2022 — after months of complaints and violations — that Hyperion began consistently monitoring for hydrogen sulfide along its eastern border with El Segundo neighborhoods.
Since then, there have been several occasions when levels of the compound have spiked above 30 parts per billion on average for an hour — California’s standard for acute risk from hydrogen sulfide. Such high levels were recorded three times in 2022, four times in 2023 and once in February of this year, Shelton said.
In one instance from June 2023, hydrogen sulfide reached a one-hour average of 64 ppb — more than double California’s standard — when Hyperion operators had turned off pollution control devices, or scrubbers, for maintenance. Shelton noted that during several of the other spikes, there were issues at the plant or heightened winds that likely influenced the hydrogen sulfide measurements, but some were unexplained. However, Shelton noted that “Hyperion is consistently well below” the 30 ppb level.
In recent months, the monitors have regularly recorded the gas at much lower levels, around 1 to 3 ppb, though spikes have occurred. The state of California considers a long-term average of 7 ppb, across several months, to be dangerous.
Officials have found that people can detect hydrogen sulfide at levels from 0.05 ppb to 30 ppb, though it’s not exactly clear the levels at which symptoms occur, and this likely varies by person. Research on the effects of chronic or low-level exposure remains limited.
The Los Angeles County Public Health Department in 2022 reported that “odors alone from hydrogen sulfide cause well-documented physiological responses, including nausea, vomiting, headache, dizziness and other symptoms.” Some studies have also found that experiences with odor can alter sensitivities, as well as increase stress.
For those residents who say they smell the gas regularly, chronic exposure is a worry.
“I’m concerned with a 1 [ppb] every single day for 365 days a year,” Kcehowski said. “What is this doing for us for this length of time?”
Tamara Kcehowski walks through her El Segundo neighborhood, which has been dealing with foul odors from the nearby Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Funding an unglamorous job
Hyperion has been in operation since 1925, and underwent its last major upgrade in the 1990s. Since that time, it has been instrumental in transforming Los Angeles County beaches from a potential health hazard to a worldwide tourist destination.
But even with such an important — albeit unglamorous — role in keeping Santa Monica Bay clean for humans and sealife, accessing the necessary funds for Hyperion’s upkeep has been a challenge, said Elsa Devienne, author of the book “Sand Rush,” which chronicles the history of L.A.’s coast.
“Nobody wants to think about sewage, nobody wants to spend a cent on it,” Devienne said. “So investment in those things only happened when things get really, really bad.”
Many times, state or federal oversight — often in the form of lawsuits — has been the only surefire way to enact necessary change at the plant, Devienne said.
That history again played out this year. A settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency required L.A. to invest $20 million into improvements at the plant. But notably, that deal focused only on water quality issues — not emissions or air quality.
There is, however, some funding on the horizon: for the first time in years, the Los Angeles City Council approved a sewer fee rate hike, which is expected to generate nearly $115 million in additional funds for L.A. Sanitation in its first fiscal year. By 2028, the increases are expected to more than double a typical single-family home’s bimonthly sewer fee, from $72.27 to $155.55, estimates show.
“The project lists are long, but they have been working really hard lifting up the odor control projects, to support the city [of El Segundo] to be better neighbors,” said Meredith McCarthy, senior director of community outreach for Heal the Bay.
The last few months of improvements have addressed the most urgent issues and what McCarthy called low-hanging fruit, but she said the facility’s maintenance backlog remains “pretty spectacular” and continued investment is needed, especially if Hyperion is going to play its important role in the city’s aggressive shift to recycled water over the next decade.
‘No change, wasted effort’
While McCarthy is hopeful the plant is now on the right path, she knows it doesn’t change the last few years of suffering felt by many El Segundo residents.
Although overall complaints have decreased, Boyles insists that its not because foul odors are no longer an issue.
“Our residents are so fatigued by this matter,” Boyles said. “People are getting worn down. … We cannot give up on them.”
Chuck Espinoza, who lives not far from the plant, is among those who have given up. He was submitting odor complaints most days of the month soon after the spill, when he and his family for the first time started suffering from headaches and burning eyes. But the multi-step complaint process eventually felt like a pointless time-suck.
“No change, wasted effort and it’s all for nothing,” Espinoza, 51, said. “Giving up for me has been the best thing for my sanity.”
Before the spill, he estimated that his neighborhood smelled funky once a week. But after July 2021 it’s been at least three to four times a week, he said, and he described the recent odors as more chemical.
“I don’t think we even know what we’re being exposed to,” Espinoza said. He said he worries about long-term effects, including for his children, but he said he feels “completely powerless to even address what those are.”
But for some residents, Hyperion hasn’t changed much about life in the industry-surrounded city.
Chuck Nicolai, who lives only a few houses from Espinoza, said he and his wife haven’t noticed any dramatic changes or issues since the spill. When he bought his house in the mid-1980s, Nicolai remembers a horrible smell from the plant. But since it modernized in the 1990s, he said he can’t complain.
He considers it a part of life in El Segundo, similar to dealing with fumes from the nearby Chevron plant or the constant noise from the airport.
“It’s SoCal coastal, the best climate in the world,” Nicolai, 79, said. “You live here, you get used to the jets and Hyperion.”
SALTON SEA, Calif. — In a state boasting epic mountain ranges and stunning coastlines, the Salton Sea is not typically considered an outdoor-lover’s paradise.
California’s largest inland lake, which straddles Riverside and Imperial counties, is in fact beautiful. The 35-mile-long sea shimmers, a cascade of colors in the desert, when the sun sets over the Santa Rosa Mountains. But after its heyday as a popular resort destination in the 1950s, the sea has become one of the state’s most critical environmental challenges.
The Salton Sea is shrinking as less water flows in from the Colorado River, surrounding farms use more efficient irrigation and the planet warms. As water levels recede, the exposed lake bed is dry and dusty, and frequently emits a hold-your-nose rotten-egg stench, the result of natural processes, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Researchers have linked the dust that blows off the playa to the region’s abnormally high rates of childhood asthma.
During its heyday in the 1950s, the Salton Sea was a destination desert paradise. Stars including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz vacationed there.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The rural communities that surround the Salton Sea, their populations majority Latino, bear a disproportionate brunt of this crisis. Sara Renteria, who lives along the sea’s northeast shore, was diagnosed with asthma three years ago, and doctors said she probably developed the condition from the dusty environment and exposure to pesticides at work. One of her three daughters has developed nosebleeds, which locals say is a common condition among kids in the region.
Yet when Renteria visits the Salton Sea State Recreation Area and gazes out at the sparkling water, she sees possibility.
“When I come here, I stop and look out at the lake and think, ‘If this place wasn’t like it is now, if it were like when it was recently created, this place would be full of people from the community, and it would bring more tourism,’” she said. “Our community would benefit from that tourism, and the businesses around this area would benefit, too.”
In this sweltering desert region where residents have limited access to parks and green space, community advocates are calling for the state to transform the park, which covers 14 miles of the northeastern shore, into a vibrant destination where families could gather in nature. Renteria envisions people hiking and biking on wheel-chair accessible trails and spending evenings at family campsites. There would be bathrooms and shade structures and ready access to public transit.
“The children will no longer be stuck inside, because they will be able to leave to walk and ride their bikes,” Renteria said. “They will put aside their telephones and tablets for a little while, and they will have more connection with nature.”
A visitor takes a selfie with public art in Bombay Beach, a tiny community on the Salton Sea.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Alianza Coachella Valley, the nonprofit group leading the call for recreational infrastructure at the Salton Sea, is pushing for a trail that would connect to a 40-mile bike and pedestrian corridor already under construction in the Coachella Valley, extending from the community of North Shore to the state park.
Audubon California, meanwhile, is advocating for improved infrastructure at various locations around the sea to be included in the state’s ongoing work, through the Salton Sea Management Program, to build natural habitats and suppress dust on areas of exposed lake bed.
The modern Salton Sea formed amid efforts in the early 20th century to irrigate Imperial Valley farmland using Colorado River water. Heavy floodwaters breached a canal system in 1905, and water rushed into the Salton Sink, according to the Salton Sea Authority.
By the 1950s, the sea southeast of Palm Springs had become a desert paradise in its own right. The Beach Boys performed there, and stars including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz vacationed there, according to Linda Beal, a volunteer docent at the closed Salton Sea History Museum.
“The Salton Sea is a thriving hot spot for birds and wildlife, so we do want communities that live there to be able to witness the nature in their backyard,” says Keilani Bonis-Ericksen with Audubon California.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“The shores were just covered with people sunbathing,” recalled Beal, who grew up in the Coachella Valley. “We’d go out fishing for a while, and then it would get hot, and Dad would say, ‘Kids, let’s go waterskiing.’”
Tropical storms in the 1970s flooded the shoreline resorts. In recent decades, as the lake shrank and grew saltier than the ocean, nearly all the fish have died and the migratory birds that relied on them for sustenance have become scarce. Many of the homes and buildings around the sea have fallen into disrepair.
But for the farmworkers who toil in the Coachella and Imperial valleys and still live in the shoreline communities, the area is ripe for reinvigoration.
The federal and state governments have directed millions of dollars toward restoration work at Salton Sea. The once-abandoned North Shore Beach & Yacht Club is now a community center. Towns such as Salton City, population 6,202, are growing, as low-wage workers seek out affordable housing.
The discovery of lithium — an element critical to producing batteries for the electric vehicle market — in geothermal brine below the southern end of the sea has raised the possibility of more jobs and investment coming into the depressed region.
A sunbather relaxes in solitude at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It’s with that context in mind that Silvia Paz, executive director of Alianza Coachella Valley, held an autumn news conference at the Salton Sea to launch a campaign “designed to seize this moment” and improve the quality of life and economic opportunities for residents.
Her organization released a survey of area residents, conducted with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, that found widespread support for a trail along the Salton Sea, as well as bike lanes, children’s play areas, shaded picnic areas and cooling stations at the state recreation area. Many respondents supported the idea of small businesses such as food vendors and farm stands hawking local products, and more than half wanted to see bike rental stations, fast-food options and a souvenir store.
Paz said she sees the effort as an opportunity to promote sustainability amid climate change. Groomed walking trails reduce dust; bike trails reduce car travel; shade canopies and water features provide respite from triple-digit heat.
California State Parks is in discussion with Riverside County about efforts to connect county facilities at the North Shore Beach & Yacht Club to the state park, and may consider adding trails through the park, according to department spokesperson Jorge Moreno.
A separate 2022 survey by Audubon California found community members wanted to see basic amenities at the sea, including bathrooms, drinking water, lighting, paved roads and shaded space.
A pair of herons nesting at Salton Sea.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“The Salton Sea is a thriving hot spot for birds and wildlife, so we do want communities that live there to be able to witness the nature in their backyard,” said Keilani Bonis-Ericksen, program manager for geospatial science at Audubon California.
Bonis-Ericksen found that improving public access along the western shore of the sea would bring economic and social benefits to local towns, and that existing public areas such as the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge are easy targets for improvements. Audubon, she said, is encouraging state officials to incorporate community access into restoration projects moving forward, “so that the community can have access and reap the benefits of the new habitats that will be created.”
A crucial hurdle to the vision involves getting sign-off for the changes from area landowners. Outside of the state recreation area, California is not a significant landowner in the area. The seashore and the land beneath the water are a checkerboard of ownership. That means constructing trail systems and providing amenities such as bathrooms and drinking fountains in areas outside the state park may require multiple land agreements and time-consuming negotiations, according to a community needs report prepared for the state Natural Resources Agency.
Another looming question is whether it is indeed safe to promote recreation alongside a dying sea that has well-documented health effects on people living nearby. One extreme athlete this year ran the circumference of the sea wearing a full-face gas mask to raise awareness of its plight.
Paz acknowledged those concerns but emphasized that creating recreation areas would include hardening surfaces, planting trees and greenery, and being “really intentional about keeping dust down.”
Jill Johnston, an associate professor of environmental health at USC who has studied the health impacts of Salton Sea dust on children living nearby, agreed the sea could become an asset for local communities, as long as dust-suppression measures were integrated into the design of any recreational infrastructure.
She said there should be ways for visitors to monitor the air quality and be notified of dust events that could stir up contaminants, adding: “Those would be days that you would not want to be outside, not want to be running around or breathing in more of those particles.”
“We’d like to nourish the lake, so it’s cleaner and healthier, so people can breathe,” says Israel Piza, a father of five who lives in the eastern Coachella Valley.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, supports the vision for more recreational opportunities. Trails “don’t require a tremendous amount of investment,” he said, and could be incorporated into the state’s ongoing efforts through the Salton Sea Management Program.
Israel Piza, a father of five who lives in the eastern Coachella Valley community of Thermal and works in the fields and in landscaping, would like to see trails at the Salton Sea state park dotted with gazebos, benches, water fountains and trees. His hope, he said, is to witness the Salton Sea returned to its splendor — or something like it.
“It might not be exactly the same as it was before,” he said. “But we’d like to nourish the lake, so it’s cleaner and healthier, so people can breathe.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative,funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to addressCalifornia’s economic divide.
Two years after 48,000 University of California academic workers won big pay gains in a historic six-week strike, labor experts and organizers predicted that their success, along with a labor-friendly Biden administration, would spur broad union activism within higher education institutions.
A flurry of recent university union activity coupled with fears of a more pro-business, anti-labor Trump White House is providing the answer. At campuses across the country — including top California universities, New York University and Harvard — unions representing graduate student workers, part-time and non-tenure track faculty and others are rapidly and aggressively moving to organize workers.
For many part-time and non-tenured faculty, who are a backbone of undergraduate education, the union activism reflects their longtime frustrations as lower paid and easily let-go instructors, experts said. Now, time is of the essence.
“It’s the pre-Trump rush,” said John Logan, a professor in the department of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, as unions anticipate new conservative appointees taking over positions in the federal agency that enforces U.S. labor laws. Unions, he said, “are thriving on campuses.”
At USC, a majority of the 2,500 adjunct, part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty last week said they had signed union authorization cards and filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election, with hopes that votes will be certified before Inauguration Day.
In Burbank, nearly 200 faculty members at the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus voted this month to form a union. At the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, a majority of the more than 600 full-time and part-time faculty and staff have signed union authorization cards, though there has not yet been an election.
“We don’t know what Trump is going to do,” said Nadia Suryawinata, a union leader at Caltech in Pasadena, where 2,000 graduate student workers and postdoctoral scholars formed a union in February and overwhelmingly voted this month to authorize their leadership to call a strike — a tactic to speed up negotiations to secure a contract.
“Time is running out. We want a contract by inauguration,” said Suryawinata, a doctoral student in biology who teaches classes and conducts research.
University unions grow
Many of the campuses are organizing with United Auto Workers, the union with origins in car manufacturing whose ranks have increasingly become filled with academics. Campus unions now represent a quarter of the roughly 400,000 UAW members, including graduate-student workers and postdoctoral researchers at the University of California, Caltech, USC and Cal State. UAW is also part of the non-tenured faculty union drive at USC and efforts at CalArts.
A September report from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College found that both student worker and faculty unions are growing — with students labor movements moving at a faster clip.
Between 2012 and 2023, the number of unionized graduate student and postdoctoral workers more than doubled, from roughly 64,000 to 150,000. Faculty unions also increased by 7%, from 374,000 to 402,000, in the same period, the report said.
Today, more than a third of graduate-student and postdoctoral workers are unionized while a quarter of faculty are.
“Among faculty, the drive for unionization has been strongest among non-tenure track faculty,” said William A. Herbert, the executive director of the center who was co-author of the report. “This reflects the massive restructuring of faculty, over the past decades, to largely precarious low-wage college teaching and researching positions.”
“Both groups are a cheap, disposable labor force for universities, and they are feeling the same pressures as everyone else who is working and trying to pay the bills,” said Logan, the SFSU labor studies professor. “Some universities will pay adjuncts about $5,000 a semester per class.”
In California, the biggest fight is expected at USC, where the potential new union called United Faculty-UAW would represent around a third of all faculty. Organizers filed with the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday. The union would cover eligible employees at all USC schools except for the School of Cinematic Arts, where a separate adjunct faculty union formed in February, and the Keck School of Medicine. No election date is set.
The UC union of academic workers that struck in 2022, UAW 4811, recently averted a clash when membership voted to extend its contract by six months in exchange for 4% raises next October and “transitional funding programs” at each of the University of California campuses.
The Tommy Trojan statue at USC.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
The funding program, piloted at UCLA this year, allows graduate-student researchers who have had breakdowns in relations with their advisors or have reservations about their funding sources — such as opposition to work tied to the U.S. military or weapons research, an issue that arose during pro-Palestinian protests — to transition away from their current positions.
At UCLA, union members must demonstrate “incompatibility in research goals, or irresolvable differences in the adviser-advisee relationship” to move to new advisors.
Girding for battle at USC
Pay is at the center of union organizing at USC, where non-tenure track professors complain of semester-to-semester contracts with little job security, minimal or nonexistent raises and moves by the university to cut benefits. Current openings for part-time roles at USC on its website list jobs with pay as low as $29.06 an hour in the case of an opening for an adjunct instructor of health policy and management in the Sol Price School of Public Policy.
Several faculty interviewed by The Times also cited cuts to tuition benefits for children and spouses of faculty as a reason they supported unionizing in hopes of having a bigger say in benefit decisions.
“The cost of living is enormous in Los Angeles and keeps on going up, but USC hasn’t been able to keep up,” said Sanjay Madhav, a unionization supporter in the USC Viterbi engineering school who has been a full-time non-tenure track associate professor at the school for 13 years.
Patrick Corbin, an full-time, non-tenure track associate professor in the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, pointed to a COVID-era university decision as among the issues that led him to want a union.
Amid widespread cost-cutting and a national economic slump, “USC unilaterally froze their contributions to our retirement benefits,” Corbin said. “I wasn’t asked about that. I did not take a vote on it. I’m 60. I cannot get that loss back.”
In a statement, USC said it opposes the union because the administration believes all faculty are managers as a result of being able to vote for Academic Senate officers and serve in other positions that make recommendations on how the campus runs.
“USC respects the role of unions and has worked collaboratively with them for many years. But we have serious concerns — legal, academic, and operational — about a union purporting to represent almost all of our research, teaching, practitioner, and clinical faculty. All of our faculty have an equal voice, and exercise it regularly, in our system of shared governance over how the university operates,” the statement said.
“We do not believe our faculty need a union to speak for them or that applicable law will permit it. We look forward to continuing to work, as we always have, in direct collaboration with our faculty on matters of importance to our university.”
Union organizers argue that playing nonbinding advisory roles on campus is far different from being in management. As an example, they point to a recommendation the Academic Senate made in 2022 that USC implement an annual cost-of-living salary increase. The university rejected the idea.
An attempt to organize some of the same non-tenure track faculty in 2015 and 2016 under the Service Employees Industrial Union fizzled out. Faculty at Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science voted against unionization, but union supporters argued USC interfered with the process. Those at the Roski School of Art and Design voted in favor of unionizing. USC sued in multiple court cases over the legality of the Roski election and, by 2019, the SEIU withdrew its petition to represent faculty.
“Back then, it felt like it was a very top-down approach by the SEIU. I wasn’t involved, but I knew it was happening,” said Scott Uriu, who has taught part time in the USC School of Architecture for 14 years and supports unionization. “Today it feels much more like a groundswell.”
