Good morning! Washington spent the week toasting a blue wave. Democrats took both chambers, Kerry promised COP31 that America would be back, and the cable panels declared the Trump era wobbling. Fair enough. Elections matter, and this one mattered a great deal.
Thomas Linzey would like a word before we pop the cork.
On Tuesday, Shanley and I sit down with Linzey to talk about his forthcoming book, American Democracy (and other fairy tales): A Call for a New Constitution, due out next spring. Linzey is the father of the community rights movement. He wrote the first local laws that let communities protect themselves from corporate harm, and he helped communities become the first in the world to recognize the rights of nature. For decades he has been the lawyer towns call when they want to say no: to factory hog farms in Pennsylvania, to chemicals dumped in Washington rivers, to oil and gas drilling in Ohio and Colorado, to bottled-water companies draining New Hampshire aquifers. His conclusion, earned the hard way, fits on a bumper sticker. Democracy exists. Until you try to use it.
His book lays out the corporate playbook in three moves. First, re-frame: sewage sludge becomes “recycled biosolids,” factory farming becomes “modern agriculture.” If that fails, permit: steer the community into a state regulatory maze that argues about fence heights and manure plans while assuming the project gets built. If the community somehow escapes the maze and passes a local ban anyway, see you in court, where the corporation’s constitutional “rights” outrank the town’s. In Linzey’s baseball metaphor, the community has to bat a thousand. The corporation only has to get on base.
Coos County readers know this game by heart. We spent the better part of two decades fighting the proposed Jordan Cove LNG export terminal and its pipeline, a project that was re-framed, re-permitted, and re-litigated more times than anyone could count.
I know Linzey’s corporate playbook firsthand because I helped launch a community-rights initiative to challenge that project. In 2017, our Coos County Right to a Sustainable Energy Future Ordinance, Measure 6-162, sought to give local residents the authority to reject industrial fossil-fuel projects and recognize the rights of nature.
Some of the hardest pushback came from people on our own side. Many longtime Jordan Cove opponents wouldn’t touch the measure because it didn’t follow the accepted path of filing comments and challenging permits. They knew how to fight over the conditions under which a project could be approved. We were challenging who had the authority to approve it in the first place.
That’s how deeply the system runs: even its critics can end up policing its rules.
That prospect made the developers nervous.
First came the push polling. Then came an advertising campaign warning voters that our measure would allow people to trespass on private property and destroy buildings and vehicles in the name of the environment. It said nothing of the sort. But why debate the actual language when you can frighten the voters?
By Election Day, the opposition had received more than $600,000 in contributions, nearly all of it from Jordan Cove interests. Our little campaign had raised about $13,000. All this in a rural county with roughly 41,000 registered voters.
And here’s a detail worth remembering. The company behind Jordan Cove wasn’t even American. It was Veresen, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, with shares trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Through its American subsidiary, this Canadian-owned corporation helped bankroll an extraordinary campaign to influence how the people of Coos County voted.
We had no say in the corporation’s decisions about our community. But the corporation had hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend trying to influence ours.
Which tells you something about whose voice carries the most weight in our democracy.
The measure lost. We kept fighting Jordan Cove, and eventually the developers walked away. Changing market conditions and the inability to secure essential state permits had made the project untenable.
After nearly two decades of opposition, hearings, lawsuits, and regulatory battles, the project was finally dead.
But here’s the distinction that matters. The community hadn’t won the legal authority to reject the project. The developers had decided they couldn’t make it happen.
The project was gone. The legal structure that had denied us the right to say no remained firmly in place.
Which is rather the point Linzey is making.
So before Tuesday, two of this week’s stories are worth holding up to Linzey’s light. Neither is about a hog farm. Both are about who gets to decide what happens to a place.
The climate win nobody voted for
Here is the best climate news of 2026, and it should make you a little queasy. The annual Global Carbon Budget, presented at COP31 in Antalya, projects global fossil CO2 emissions will fall 0.4 percent this year, to 38.2 billion tonnes. That would be the first drop since the pandemic, led by a 1.9 percent fall in oil emissions.
There’s a catch. Add emissions from deforestation, peat fires, and other changes in land use, and total CO₂ emissions are projected to rise to 43.3 billion tonnes. We’re burning slightly less fossil fuel and still adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Some victory.
Credit goes partly to the Iran war. Hormuz has been shut for most of the year, oil prices spiked, and demand bent. Solar, wind, and electric vehicles met about two-thirds of the increase in global energy demand. The Iran war sent oil prices soaring and pushed consumption down. Between the expansion of cleaner technologies and the energy shock, global fossil-fuel emissions are projected to fall for the first time since the pandemic. The drill-baby-drill president delivered the steepest cut in oil emissions in years, by accident, at gunpoint, and billed it to everyone who owns a gas tank. The report’s lead author, Pierre Friedlingstein, put it more politely: a reduction driven by geopolitical shocks “is not a sustainable climate solution.”
Notice what’s missing from that story. No town meeting chose it. No county commission, no ballot measure, no legislature. The biggest climate decision of the year was made by a war and a price chart. The Trump administration’s chair in Antalya sits empty. More than 120 American state and local leaders showed up anyway, but Washington didn’t bother.
This is where Linzey gets uncomfortable for the people celebrating this week, and that’s exactly why I want to ask him about it. Democrats now promise to grill EPA chief Lee Zeldin over the pollution rollbacks, and Kerry says America will lead again. Linzey’s book argues that electing the right people can’t fix a structure in which state permits preempt local law and corporations sue towns for passing bans. Ohio and Colorado communities that voted to keep drillers out learned that lesson in court. A new Congress can hold hearings. Can it give a township the power to say no and make it stick? That’s my first question for Tuesday.
Terms of service
Scale it up from a township to a country and the shape holds. Then add a billionaire.
On Thursday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy told European leaders that Ukraine’s Starshield terminals, the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, were again losing connectivity when moving faster than 100 miles per hour. Ukraine’s military calls the restrictions systematic, not a glitch. In practice, some Ukrainian interceptor drones cannot reach the speeds necessary to catch Russia’s jet-powered Shaheds before they strike.
Overnight, Russia attacked energy facilities in five Ukrainian regions. This morning, Zelenskyy again called for the restrictions to be lifted, saying they had allowed Russian attacks to get through.
SpaceX insists nothing has changed. Ukraine insists something most certainly has.
Who flipped the switch? Depends who you ask. Musk says Starshield is controlled by the U.S. military “and ultimately POTUS.” In October, Reuters reported that the original restriction was ordered from inside the White House. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk ordered it himself and discussed it with Trump, who denied directing the slowdown.
Rubio said decisions about access belonged to SpaceX. Hegseth invoked the company’s terms of service.
A nation’s air defense, reduced to a customer-service dispute. Defending your country against an invading army is subject to the fine print.
On Friday, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Coons demanded that SpaceX preserve its contracts, communications, and technical records concerning both rounds of restrictions. They want to establish who authorized them, who implemented them, and whether the government has sufficient control over a system it pays to provide.
Those seem like reasonable questions to ask before the next Russian drone arrives.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is defending itself using critical communications infrastructure supplied by a company controlled by one billionaire, under an American government contract whose actual lines of authority remain remarkably unclear.
We’ve become accustomed to celebrating entrepreneurs who build businesses so indispensable that entire industries, national economies, and military operations depend on them. We are considerably less enthusiastic about examining what happens when that dependence gives private companies extraordinary leverage over public decisions.
This isn’t a Pennsylvania township fighting a factory hog farm. The legal issues are entirely different. But Linzey’s underlying question travels remarkably well.
Who has the authority to make decisions affecting people’s lives, and what happens when those people have no effective way to challenge them?
That’s what I want to ask Linzey on Tuesday: What does consent of the governed mean when the switch belongs to someone you never elected and can’t fire?
Fish, meet water
Linzey closes his introduction hoping that fish are not the last to discover the water in which they swim. That line has stuck with me all week, because the water is everywhere once you look. It’s in the permit hearing where your testimony about the family farm gets struck as “outside the scope.” It’s in the commissioner who tells you her hands are tied. It’s in a military communications system that can leave Ukrainian interceptor drones disconnected while the people responsible argue about who controls it.
The good news, and Linzey insists there is some, is that a system this visible can be changed. He doesn’t mean better protest signs or a longer mailing list. His book ends with a plan to organize for constitutional change: a system in which communities can adopt laws more protective than those adopted by state and federal governments, and which recognizes the rights of people and nature to clean water and a healthy environment. Think of state and federal law as a floor that towns can build on, not a ceiling they’re forbidden to touch.
Regular readers know we’ve been wrestling with these questions for some time. Earlier this year, we introduced a sample new Bill of Rights, one that would protect fundamental liberties, guarantee basic human needs, limit corporate power, and recognize the rights of nature to exist, thrive, and naturally evolve. Not a finished constitution, but a starting point for deciding what we actually want our democracy to guarantee. We’ve also explored Montana’s corporate-charter approach to corporate election spending.
Linzey is approaching these same questions from another direction, grounded in decades of community organizing and legal battles. On Tuesday, I want to ask him whether these ideas fit together, how we go about changing a Constitution he argues was designed to prevent exactly this, and what a town like ours could actually do first.
Shanley and I will be talking with Thomas Linzey live on Tuesday, 11 AM PT, and you’re invited to join us and ask him questions directly.
If your community has fought a project and lost, or won, we’d especially like to hear about it. What were you trying to protect? What obstacles did you encounter? And did the people who lived there actually get a say in the outcome?
Bring your questions Tuesday, or leave them in the comments today so we can make sure they get into the conversation.
Those stories are the evidence, and you are the ones who hold it.