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Eight years ago, then-Costa Mesa City Council member Jim Righeimer had anunforgettable encounter with police after a visit to his local Irish pub.

Skosh Monahans was owned by a fellow local council member and it wasnt unusual for Righeimer to hang out at the bar, trading gossip and sampling the menu. That summer, political conversation in the Orange County, Californiacity was dominated by upcoming elections and a contentious debate over police union contract negotiations.

But what would make this August 2012 evening so memorable wasnt any juicy political tidbit exchanged at the pub. It was the private investigator who followed Righeimer home.

The private eye was a former police officer, ChrisLanzillo, whod been pushed out of a neighbouring citys police department. His agency was hired by a law firm that catered to law enforcement unions across the region, including the Costa Mesa local. Lanzillo had been staking out Skosh Monahans with a couple of colleagues stationed inside the bar, court documents and local news coverage attest.

The detective no doubt saw Righeimer's drive home as a potential coup. As he followed the councilman home, Lanzillo called the police.

Several minutes after Righeimer walked through his front door, he recalls, a police officer rang his doorbell and demanded he take a sobriety test. Righeimer passed he'd only been drinking Diet Cokes that night.

My mind's going 90 miles an hour, and I just said 'this is crazy, we're in the middle of negotiations on a contract and I get a guy on a DUI at my front door,' the former councilman recalls. Then his wife spotted the car that had followed the unsuspecting Righeimer home from the pub.

They ran out to confront Lanzillo, who sped away. But they managed to confirm his identity, kicking off a years-long legal confrontation that would end with the detective being sentenced to a year in jail on three counts of conspiracy and one of false imprisonment. (Further details emerged too, including the discovery of a GPS tracker in another councilmans car.)

The Costa Mesa police union denies any direct involvement in the operation, and broke its contract with the detectives law firm, which was subsequently shuttered, shortly after the incident at Righeimers home.

Despite his eventual legal victory, Righeimer says his experience is an extreme example of the power that police unions can wield over municipal politics in America, and the unique kinds of pressure the unionsare capable of bringing to their confrontations with the local officials they are meant to answer to.

It may sound like a pretty cheesy novel, but what happened to me was the very tip of the systematic structure of how it's done, says Righeimer, who is a conservative Republican with law enforcement officers in his family.

Even in my case, we kind of won. But the lesson wasn't lost on other elected officials, Righeimer says. They see all that and think, Damn, I don't want to go through this. I don't need this shit.

CityMetric spoke with 10 former and current elected municipal officials across the United States, who testified to the unusual challenge of negotiating with police unions and the particular pressure campaigns they can bring to bear. The local leaders CityMetric interviewed described facing aggressive and confrontational tactics, which are strengthened by law enforcement unions ability to play on the publics fearof crime. That combination poses a special challenge to the public officials who pursue policies that might meet resistance from law enforcement, including over issues of funding, oversight and contract negotiations.

Law enforcement unions wield impressive influence in the US, in part because they arent prohibited from being involved in political campaigns or supporting candidates. (David McNew/Getty Images)

Police unions in America emerged in their current form in the 1960s, in the wake of successful organising campaigns by other government workers. But they behave quite differently from the rest of the US public sector labour movement, often championing conservative politicians and aggressive law enforcement policy even as violent crime in America fell to 50-year lows.

While they are distinct from the departments they negotiate with over wages and working conditions, the unions often serve as the id of the institution. They routinely stake out combative stances on criminal justice issues and fight for levels of protection for their members that seem to encourage the use of force.

Theyve gone so far to the other extreme all across the country, talking about how elected leaders have blood on their hands and are making communities less safe, says Greg Casar, a city council member in Austin, Texas. I dont think they always realise how that can make people scared, given the fact that they have been entrusted with the ability to use force in our society. It's really irresponsible for people in their position to be acting the way that they do.

Law enforcement unions wield impressive influence in the US, in part because they arent prohibited from getting involved in political campaigns or supporting candidates, unlike their counterparts in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdomand New Zealand. Researchers from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeleyhave found that when police unions are politically engaged in elections, they reap even greater wage and benefit increases than those that only engage in collective bargaining.

Furthermore, in many local elections in less populous areas of the US, organised interest groups are thin on the ground especially as much of the rest of the US labour movement has withered giving police unions organisational heft that may otherwise be lacking. They have also benefitted greatly from having allies in both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Texas, police and firefighters are the only public workers who can collectively bargain, and when then-Wisconsin governor Scott Walker sought to crush his state's public unions, he exempted police and firefighters from his crackdown.

The kinds of pressure that police unions can wield is distinct from other interest groups, even other municipal unions. Their tactics trade on the police departments duty to protect citizens, but the unions have the latitude to go above and beyond what police department leadership, with its direct ties to the mayor, would be willing or capable of doing. Local leaders told CityMetric about facing a kind of militancy from police unions that they dont see in negotiations with other interest groups.

The police union has always been the most aggressive at the negotiating table, pushing back on any efforts to instill discipline, says Sam Adams, the former mayor of Portland, Oregon. You go into dealing with a police union knowing that it was almost always going to be conflict oriented.

Neither the Fraternal Order of Police nor the National Association of Police Organizations responded to interview requests for this story. But John Burpo, a retired consultant who worked as a negotiator for law enforcement unions, says that sometimes extreme tactics are required. Policing is relatively dangerous and emotionally strenuous work. Before they had unions, officers were poorly paid and had skimpy health care plans. Sometimes, Burpo says, they have tobutt heads with the powerful to get benefits commensurate with the stresses of the job.

I was known as a bomb thrower. I followed the principles of Saul Alinsky, and his thing was if you dont have as much power as the people you are confronting, you have to do things that make people uncomfortable, Burpo says.

But Burpo emphasises that, in his experience, clashes with local officials are actually rare. (In regards to Righeimers case, Burpo says, Thats extremely extreme, I wouldn't recommend that, I wouldn't do it, thats total bullshit.) He has used hard-nosed tactics, including digging up embarrassing details from a public records request on an officials out-of-town expenses, but he emphasises that such cases are tough on everyone involved and should be avoided if possible.

Normally most negotiations are settled, 95% of them, but there are just times when you have to go that extra mile, says Burpo, who co-wrote a widely shared book on successful negotiation tactics for police unions. I prefer not to use those tactics because it's hard on everybody: the city council, the membership, our leadership. But sometimes you have to do that little extra thing.

A favourite move is to warn that local politicians are courting danger by not giving police departments the funds they say are needed to keep residents safe. During New Yorks fiscal crisis in 1975, the police union printed pamphlets in reaction to proposed budget cuts, headlined with a hooded skeleton and the words Welcome to Fear City.

Under those circumstances, the best advice we can give you is this: Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can, the union warned tourists.

More recently, billboards have been employed for similar purposes. In 2010, the Stockton, California, police union rented huge signs reading "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California Stop laying off cops." (They also bought the house next door to the city managers home, the Los Angeles Times reported, and operated a backhoe in the yard during his childs birthday party.) In 2013, the Memphis police union rented billboards on the way into town that read, Danger: enter at your own risk, this city does not support public safety. This summer the Baton Rouge Union of Police posted billboards that read Enter At Your Own Risk and 5th Deadliest City in America.

This tactic was even recommended in a police union playbook posted on the website of the now-defunct law firm that hired the detectives who shadowed Righeimer and his allies. Nothing seems to get more attention than a billboard entering the city limits which reads that crime is up and the City could care less about your safety, reads a sentence from the document, which was posted on local blogs in 2012. It also advises police unions to heavily play up the danger of crime during contract negotiations.

More extreme, politicians say, are the instances when police officers and their unions have slowed down their work or selectively conducted their duties to turn up the pressure.

This is the challenging thing about having a group of employees who are authorised to use force, and who we rely on in very vulnerable situations, says Minneapolis city council member Steve Fletcher. There's that kind of implied reminder that officers can use independent judgement to use force on you or not, create consequences for you or not,protect you or not. That does create leverage, and that leverage can be exploited.

Fletcher believes he first won the ire of local law enforcement when he co-authored a budget amendment in 2018 that took $1.1 million from a proposed budget increase for the police department and redirected it toward non-police community safety strategies.

The police union began attacking Fletcher politically, but more troublingly he started to get complaints from business owners and constituents who said that officers were delaying response times in his district. The officers claimed the department couldnt possibly spare the resources after Fletcher's amendment.

They'd show up 45 minutes later and say, Well, we would have loved to come, but talk to your councilmember about why we cant, Fletcher says. Many of my constituents were given the very strong impression by MPD that we had somehow just created a situation where they couldn't respond to 911 calls.

John Elder, director of the MPDs Office of Public Information, saysthat a greater volume of emergency calls can create delays.

I am unaware of any officer saying that however I am not with them 24/7 either, Elder wrote in an emailed response to queries about Fletchers statement. I will tell you that we have seen an uptick in calls for service and this will certainly delay response times. Officers are well aware of their responsibility to respond to 911 calls and address them appropriately.

Municipal politicians in other cities attest to seeing similar tactics.

In Syracuse, in upstate New York, council member Tim Rudd reports similar statements from police officers during recent contract negotiations. At a community meeting in his district, as the Syracuse Common Council debated a pay increase for law enforcement, police representatives claimed that the current conditions made it hard for them to get their jobs done.

[They are at this meeting saying] our guys don't feel supported, it's really rough, they're so down, so it's hard to respond the way we should, Rudd says. They're basically telling people that we didn't get our pay raise, so we can't do that. They rely on you being intimidated and shutting down and letting them do whatever they want.

People carry signs during a "Defund the Police" march in Seattle, where the police union ran a campaign last year to vote city council members out of office. (Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images)

In Seattle last year, the police union ran a campaign encouraging voters to vote out the city council. (Still, the police budget had been increased by over $100 million over the previous four years, and a generous new contract was approved.)It didnt work the most targeted politicians won re-election but the tactics used to supplement the campaign should sound familiar to Steve Fletcher and Tim Rudd.

Most disturbing to me was a near constant refrain that I heard from constituents calling SPD for help that they were told by officers that the council has tied their hands, says Lisa Herbold, a member of the Seattle City Council and chair of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee.Of course individual council members don't decide what laws SPD enforces or doesn't enforce.We aren't in the chain of command.

Similar dynamics have played out in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected on a platform of police reform and ending stop-and-frisk. Several early confrontations with the citys many police unions resulted in a work slowdown colloquially known as the blue flu as officers protested what they saw as the mayors anti-law enforcement bias. (Police officers are generally not allowed to strike, so sick-outs and other kinds of informal actions are occasionally pursued instead.) Mayor de Blasio backed off his police reform priorities in the face of union protests, and in the aftermath of George Floyds death received considerable criticism for his deferential attitude toward the policeduring the protests and unrest that followed.

Local elected officialslike de Blasio have often been loath to go against police departments or their unions because they do not want to be tarred as anti-law enforcement or soft on crime.

The endorsements of police unions are often valued by mayors and city council folks in elections because theres a law-and-order constituency of people who care about crime, says Daniel Disalvo, professor of political science at the City University of New York. The image of being with police and other [law enforcement unions] can be important [in an election].

But University of Michigan Ann Arbor professor of history Heather Ann Thompson argues that this power is less about the police unions, per se, than the pervasive law-and-order ideology that lived on long after crime began dropping sharply in the mid-1990s.

The bullying works not because they are unionised, but because in the public's racial imagination if we don't have police, we're going to descend into chaos, Thompson says. They can play that card, which makes mayors shake in their boots and the media pay attention. That gives them enormous power, because we've already drunk the Kool Aid that we need a massive militarised police force in this country or we're going to fall apart at the seams.

For Thompson, the conversations about changing how police departments behave and what their duties are, which she sees occuring after George Floyds death, can shake this power.

If we re-examine why we need police in the first place, then that bullying would be a hell of a lot less effective, Thompson says.

She also argues that the work slowdown in New York City undermined the unions point, as crime did not skyrocket in response to the dramatic decline in arrests. In other cities with low crime rates and more progressive politics, police union tactics and the ideology that empowers them have been similarly undermined.

In San Francisco, the extreme rhetoric of the police union has rendered it all but ineffectual as a political actor. In the recent district attorneys race, law enforcement unions from across the state pooled resources to defeat progressive candidate Chesa Boudin, who won despite the unions spending over $650,000 to campaign against him.

No one at this point who runs for office in San Francisco and is a serious candidate seeks their support, says Matt Haney, a member of the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco's equivalent of a city council). They don't have a whole lot of leverage over elected officials here because they've worked themselves into irrelevance. Now they just throw bombs from the outside.

But San Francisco and New York are among Americas safest and wealthiest cities. There are counterexamples where police departments seem to have slowed down although they deny these are organised efforts andcrime rates didspike, such as in cities like Baltimore and now, it appears, Minneapolis.

The real test of the continued strength of aggressive police union strategies will be in cities that arent so unusually blessed. Like, for example, Santa Ana, California.

In 2018, Celia Iglesias decided to run for an open city council seat. The longtime school board member is a Republican, and she ran on an anti-tax platform. In particular, an increase to the citys sales tax already one of the highest in Orange County captured her attention and her ire.

The majority Latino Santa Ana is also one of the poorest municipalities in the region, and sales taxes fall especially hard on lower-income and working-class people.

Iglesias won a seat by running against the tax and with promises of spending on basic services like street maintenance and after-school programs.

But she didnt hold on to it for long. After voting against a wage increase for police officers, and to retain the services of a city manager who clashed with the union, the Officers Association waged a recall campaign against her, spending over $300,000 to oust her in 2019 alone.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, but just before the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the effort succeeded. Less than two years after she took office, Iglesias lost her job.

He [Union president Gerry Serrano] wants to use me as an example to say, This is what's going to happen if you cross me, Iglesias says.

Serrano denied that Iglesias's vote against additional police spending spurred the recall. In a letter sent to the Orange County Register, he said that her illicit behavior was the cause of the recall effort. In the missive he accused Iglesias of undermining other city services and opposing affordable housing.

But Righeimer, of neighbouring Costa Mesa, agrees with Iglesiass analysis of what happened. Although he doesnt know of any illegal bullying tactics used against her, he sees a connective thread between their cases. In both, the police union responded to criticism even from a conservative Republican with an overwhelming display of political force.

Her vote didnt affect the end result. The new police contract had a majority of votes, but the police union head just was having none of it and needed to explain to everybody in politics how it's done, Righeimer says. Part of that process is you have to have some scalps. They have to show everybody what they can do to you.

Iglesias says that her experience has only inspired her to keep fighting, especially in the wake of the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police. Despite her loss, she believes things have changed so much in just the past few months that the police unions endorsement would today be a kiss of death in Santa Ana.

Iglesias plans to test that hypothesis by running for mayor this fall.

A lot of voters in Santa Ana are waking up and saying, No more police union stronghold in city hall, Iglesias says. Right now, I feel like the recall and everything is working against them. Any candidate who gets supported by the police union now is going to be a no-go for a lot of voters. We all want public safety, but at what cost?

Jake Blumgart is a staff writer at CityMetric. Alexandra Kanik contributed to this report.

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'They rely on you being intimidated': Local elected officials in the US describe how police unions bully them - CityMetric

Rumors surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's ill heath have intensified after media reports suggest that he has died or is in a vegetative state following heart surgery.

CNN firstreported that Kim is in "grave danger" following a heart surgery according to a US official who also said that the country is closely monitoring the situation. A later report from a Japanese magazine statedthat the North Korean leader was in a "vegetative state". Further unconfirmedreports emerged that Kim had died this week.

Reports also emerged of North Korea's closest ally, China, sending medics to the country to "advise on" the North Korean dictator's health. The 36-year-old leader's condition remains a mystery as North Korea is one of the world's most secretive states.

However, experts have long been warning about Kim's diet and eating habits. Kim has been known to be a chain smoker and has been seen puffing away on cigarettes in public appearances, as well as on the sidelines of summits with US President Donald Trump.

Personal chef to Kim's father, Kim Jong-il for 13 years, Kenji Fujimoto had spoken to the Daily Mail in 2015 about the dictator's extravagant and luxurious eating habits. The chef used a fake name out of concern for his safety.

He told the publication, "I used to make sushi for the General (Jong-il) at least once a week and Jong-un always joined the dinner. So I could say Jong-un liked sushi."

Kim also reportedly had a fondness for champagne as Fujimoto revealed that the North Korean leader's favorite was Cristal and that he would finish "usually about two bottles [in a sitting]." The leader also reportedly drank "10 bottles of Bordeaux" during a meal.

In 2012, Fujimoto attended an extravagant banquet in North Korea on a personal invitation from Kim. The banquet served up delicacies such as Kobe beef steaks and shark fin soup. On the occasion, Fujimoto said, "I was so drunk when I visited North Korea in 2012 and when I woke up, I was in my bed, so I don't remember what was on the table well."

Reports also suggest that the leader's massive weight gain since he took the position as the Supreme Leader could be accounted to his love for Emmental cheese. The UK's Metro claimed in 2014 that Kim had vanished from the public eye due to his love for cheese and alcohol which reportedly caused gout.

According to the Metro's report, Kim likely picked up a taste for Emmental cheese during his education in Switzerland. Made from whole cow's milk and is not low in fat content. Reportedly, in 2014, Pyongyang officials visited a French dairy college in an attempt to secure more fine cheeses for their country.

Ermanno Furlanis, an Italian chef recruited to make pizza for the regime in 1997 as North Korea, also spoke to Daily Mail, saying that Kim Jong-Un's father, Kim Jong-Il was a "maniac" for food and that his interest in food was "not normal."

Furlanis added that Kim may have inherited his father's taste for meat, saying, "They loved so much the meat, the salami, the prosciutto, the ham." He further explained, "In North Korea, they are very fond of bulgogi (Korean-style marinated beef), and we know that meat is not healthy if you eat too much."

Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack in December 2011. According to the Daily Mail, the elder Kim was obsessed with luxury food and drink and would often send Fujimoto on missions to retrieve the finest ingredients from around the world, such as Uzbek caviar and Czech beer.

Though Kim Jong-Il lived to the age of 69, his son's penchant for smoking may have resulted in poorer health. According to reports, Kim prefers French designer cigarettes. The Yves Saint Laurent variety that he prefers sell for $44 per pack and the accompanying leather case to carry them in costs $165.

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Kim Jong-Un's poor health could be a result of his diet that included lots of cheese, meat and alcohol - MEAWW

The plastics backlash Garbage, including plastic waste, is seen at the beach in Costa del Este, Panama City. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

It was once the height of metropolitan chic: the dash into Starbucks for a skinny decaf caramel latte en route for work, the takeaway cup a mark of upward mobility. Those were the days of Sex and the City, when the culture of doing everything on the go eating, drinking, socialising was taking hold.

But in the past 10 years, in the developed world at least, the accoutrements of a disposable society the coffee cup, the plastic bag, the bottle of water have become items of shame as we see them pulled from dead marine mammals, clogging rivers in developing countries or lying on beaches littered with detritus.

Since 2010, more than 120 countries have banned or legislated against the use of plastic bags. European countries, including the UK, have considered levies on takeaway coffee cups and multimillion-pound brands such as Coca-Cola and Nestl have faced high-profile campaigns designed to get them to clean up their waste. Fast fashion has come under fire too.

These movements are in their infancy and the scale of the problem is still growing. Some companies are taking their own steps, but legislation in Europe will force their minds to focus on reducing their waste footprint. And while images continue to spread across the globe exposing how our lifestyles damage wildlife and the environment, the backlash against a disposable society is likely to continue. Sandra Laville

The 2010s were a decade of hard-won progress in gender equality and reproductive rights globally. The launch of a campaign to increase access to modern forms of contraceptive in 2012 has resulted in 53 million more women and girls now using family planning in some of the worlds poorest countries. Two-thirds of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education. And, although the figure is still low, more women are now sitting in parliament than in 2010: 11,340, compared with 8,190.

The #MeToo and Times Up movements have propelled sexual violence and harassment into the spotlight and young women have become the face of high-profile global campaigns, including the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai fighting for girls education, and Greta Thunberg for action to tackle the climate crisis. One notable campaign was the struggle against female genital mutilation (FGM), which gathered pace through the decade.

But any progress is tempered by statistics that show one in three women globally will experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetime. Efforts by conservative religious groups to roll back womens rights, particularly sexual and reproductive rights, have intensified and are having some impact. The Trump administration has emboldened these groups by introducing an extreme policy that bans funding to overseas groups doing any work related to abortion.

However, women are mobilising in their tens of thousands to fight the backlash, setting the stage for a turbulent start to a new decade. Liz Ford

Giving a DVD or CD as a gift in 2010 was commonplace. Not any more. In the past decade, not only has the music industry shifted from CD to MP3 (with a smattering of a cassette and vinyl resurgence thrown in) and TV platforms from live services to on-demand catch-up players, but paid-for streaming is now the unequivocal norm across most of the developed world.

Since Netflix switched its primary business model of DVD rental to streaming in 2010, its user base has soared. The recent release of the $159m Scorsese epic The Irishman amply demonstrates that Netflix has the financing to eclipse even the most established of Hollywood giants for its own content. Other producers are following suit, from Amazons Prime Video service, which accounts for over 26 million users, to the BBC and ITVs new BritBox platform. Streaming has become the default.

The situation is even more marked in the music industry. Since its launch in 2008, Spotify has grown to 248 million monthly active users and is valued at $23bn. Streaming now accounts for more than half of major record label income. As CD sales drop by almost 29% year on year, labels are increasingly relying on streaming as the main platform for their new and established artists, with services such as Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon Music all providing rival alternatives. Even MP3 downloads are dropping by almost 28% each year, a shift exemplified by Apple shutting down its flagship iTunes service to become a part of its streaming platform, Apple Music.

Potential unlimited access to thousands of hours of TV, film and music is clearly a tantalising prospect not to mention the environmental advantages of moving away from physical products. The access to this information has become more important than ownership. Few predict that the tide of streaming will turn back any time soon. Ammar Kalia

Ten years ago, being vegan came with a certain social stigma. It was the kind of diet that led to eye-rolls at dinner parties, a limited range of restaurant options and the continuous fielding of the question: So, what do you eat?

But over the course of a decade veganism has gone mainstream in the developed world. According to a poll commissioned by the Vegan Society, there are now 600,000 vegans in the UK, up from 150,000 in 2014, as well as millions adopting vegetarian or flexitarian diets. Its no surprise that companies have been scrambling to make the most of this flourishing new market.

One in six food products launched in the UK in 2018 had a vegan claim and all the major supermarket chains have increased their vegan offerings. Who could forget the nationwide buzz generated by the Greggs vegan sausage roll earlier this year, which flew off the shelves and boosted company profits? Now McDonalds has announced the launch of its first fully vegan Happy Meal.

Concern over animal welfare, along with a desire to be more environmentally friendly and eat healthily, has largely fuelled the demand, with record numbers signing up to Veganuary every year, from 3,300 in 2014 to 250,000 in 2019. And the trend is not just consigned to food: sales of cruelty-free cleaning products have soared, while Superdrug reported a rise of over 300% in sales of vegan-labelled beauty products from 2015 to 2018.

There are now countless vegan events and dozens of cookbooks, and restaurants from Wagamamas to Pizza Hut offer vegan options; in just a few years, consumer pressure has forced society to accommodate lifestyles free from animal products better than ever before. The shift shows no sign of letting up either, with some reports suggesting that a quarter of the population will be vegetarian by 2025. Jessica Murray

In early December, thousands of Britons were paid to charge their electric vehicles or run a laundry load to make use of the record-breaking renewable energy generated by the UKs wind farms. It is the latest example of how the renewable industry has turned the energy system on its head in the past 10 years.

At the turn of the decade, wind, solar and hydro power projects made up less than 8% of Britains electricity. Today, more than a third of the electricity mix comes from the fleet of renewable projects, which have grown fourfold in 10 years. Globally, investors have ploughed $2.5tn into renewables since 2010 to drive its share of the worlds power generation to 12%.

The burgeoning industrys greatest feat has been to cut the costs of renewable energy technology far faster than expected. A global survey by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that solar power costs had fallen by over 80% since 2009, while onshore wind had plunged by 46%. In the UK, the cost of offshore windfarms has dropped by half in the past two years alone; they are now cheaper to build and run than fossil-fuel plants.

The ultra-low cost of renewables means wind and solar farms will spread even faster in the years to come. By 2030, the UK government expects offshore windfarms alone to provide almost a third of the UKs electricity, with total renewables making up about half of the electricity system. Renewable energys greatest decade will light the way for even greater decades ahead. Jillian Ambrose

It was the decade when we finally turned to face our mental health problems, didnt much like what we saw and started to do something about it.

In 2010, depression was still the illness that dared not speak its name: wherever you lived, few people mentioned it in public apart from the occasional brave celebrity outlier. Certainly there were no MPs, chief executives or presidents on the record about their psychological disorders.

By the end of 2019, its still not easy to tell the world that there is something not quite right with your brain. But its perhaps easier than it has ever been. You may well still face discrimination particularly if you suffer from one of the rarer conditions that are still taboo, like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. But people will understand.

Many family doctors will have a better grasp now than they did 10 years ago (though they may not be able to do much for you). Your workplace will probably have mental health first-aiders, employee assistance programmes and, if they are really smart, psychiatric conditions added to employee insurance policies. Your friends will all know someone who has been through something similar.

What changed? The internet undoubtedly helped (though Googling your symptoms remains a very bad idea): a torrent of blogs, videos and advice columns helped to shed light on the darkness. Campaigns by British royal family members and mental health charities cut through. MPs including Charles Walker and Kevan Jones came out. Portrayals in TV shows, films and novels multiplied.

The next step is to crack the treatment conundrum. By the end of the 2020s, mental ill-health will be so common that it may even become the rule rather than the exception. But it will still feel like the most dreadful thing that can ever happen to a human, and the demand for services will have gone up, not down. Mark Rice-Oxley

At the start of the 2010s, transgender people did not exist in the mainstream. They were portrayed by cisgender actors in Hollywood, excluded from US and UK gay rights groups and denied basic legal recognition. But now, trans and non-binary people are stars on screen and breaking barriers in media, politics, sports, courtrooms, science and other industries.

In 2013, the US whistleblower Chelsea Manning came out as trans and became a global LGBTQ+ icon. In 2014, the actor Laverne Cox graced the cover of Time magazine, which declared a transgender tipping point. Caitlyn Jenner came out the following year.

While cis male actors repeatedly won awards for playing trans women in the first half of the decade and beyond, this kind of casting eventually became untenable; in 2018, Scarlett Johansson dropped a role as a trans man amid massive backlash, while Tangerine, A Fantastic Woman, Pose and other projects raised the bar by giving trans actors leading roles.

Celebrities such as Indya Moore, Asia Kate Dillon and Sam Smith also came out as non-binary, pushing mainstream awareness of gender-nonconforming people, who have long existed in cultures around the world.

With expanded societal and scientific recognition that gender is fluid, states across the US passed laws allowing people who are neither female nor male to mark a third gender on IDs. Germany, Nepal, Austria and other countries also expanded gender options. Teens increasingly rejected gender labels and intersex rights activism blossomed.

There has been a dark side to the progress: unprecedented assaults on LGBTQ+ rights and increasing reports of violence, harassment and discrimination, particularly against trans women of colour. The decade of visibility and backlash has set the stage for continued civil rights battles with growing movements of trans and non-binary people organising to fight back. Sam Levin in Los Angeles

A decade of steady quantitive growth for womens football in England has been studded with qualitative leaps in the sports development.

In 2011, the FA launched the Womens Super League and moved the game out of the shadow of the mens into the summer. It was a bold step and reaped instant rewards. The average attendance of 550 in that first season was an increase of 604% on the previous season average. At the decades close, that average had reached 4,112.

The English national team, the Lionesses, have provided the biggest public window into the game, with consistent showings through the decade. That has generated a surge in the number of women and girls playing football: there are now more than 11,000 registered teams and more than 2.6 million women over 16 playing at one level or another.

This is all a result of multimillion-pound investment from the FA and commercial partners. In 2018, the FA announced an additional investment of 50m in the womens game over six years. A league sponsorship deal with Barclays is believed to include investment of as much as 20m.

There is a real momentum behind womens football. Professionalism means the product on the pitch has improved dramatically and a home Euros to help start the decade off in 2021 is likely to be another moment that propels the sport forward. Suzanne Wrack

The jury is still out on whether vaping will take over from more traditional methods of consuming tobacco but, in terms of pure numbers, it was indisputably one of the trends of the decade.

The first e-cigarette is credited to a Chinese pharmacist called Hon Lik, who said he invented it after his father died of lung cancer. Those that arrived in the UK in 2006 were described as cigalikes, devices heating nicotine to produce inhalable vapour but still masquerading as cigarettes.

Measurement of e-cigarette use began in 2012, at a time when less than half the adult population of the UK had heard of them. In that year, there were 700,000 users (1.7% of the population). In 2019, that had grown to 3.6 million (7.1%). According to ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), just under 2 million of todays vapers are ex-smokers, 1.4 million are current smokers and 200,000 have never smoked. The reason most often given for vaping is to quit smoking. Most public health experts in the UK, with some notable exceptions, think e-cigarettes could save lives. Nicotine is strongly addictive but not proven to do harm, whereas the smoke and tar from tobacco kill up to half of those who use cigarettes.

But e-cigarettes have developed a bad name in the US, at first because of Juul, a stylish device looking like a USB stick that took off among high-school pupils. It contains three times the level of nicotine permitted in Europe. A panic among parents and teachers became a national scare when reports began to pile up of adult vapers with lung diseases. As of mid-November, the authorities have reported 2,172 cases of lung injury and 42 deaths.

If e-cigarettes can weather the storm and irrefutable data is collected to show they are a big help in quitting smoking, they could still have a bright future. But after such reputational damage, the adolescents of 2030 may be asking: Vaping what was that? Sarah Boseley

The technical specification says it all. In 2010, the top-of-the-line iPhone 3GS had a 480-pixel-high screen, 32GB of storage and a 3-megapixel camera. Going into 2020, the equivalent iPhone 11 Pro has a 12-megapixel camera, 512GB of storage, and about 17 times the pixels in the screen. Weve dropped the smart, too, and the mobile. Its just a phone now and it lies at the heart of everything.

It also costs 1,400. That, more than anything else, shows the real change that smartphones have wrought over the past decade: from an optional extra, sold to boost the value of phone contracts, to the core of modern life. Apple can charge such a price because phones are firmly established as central to productivity, to entertainment, to communication and to education.

The proliferation of phones across the globe is one of the stories of the decade. There are an estimated 3.2 billion smartphone users worldwide, a penetration rate of 42%. That spread overwhelmingly on Googles Android operating system has let countries leapfrog previously essential stages of development: from sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile internet is crucial to economic development even though fixed lines are still scarce, to China, where cashless stores are more common than in the US despite a 10th of the take-up of credit cards.

In the developed world, phones have killed the concept of being online. Once, the internet was a place you sat down to connect to. Now, were all online all the time, and the reality-distorting effects are bleeding over into meatspace. Misinformation on Twitter makes the front pages; CGI-Instagram influencers are licensed for fashion ads.

That change will last. Phones may alter unrecognisably over the next decade, with smart glasses, voice assistants and wearables taking more of the interactions, shrinking the phone down to an always-on and always-on-you hub. But the blending of realities is here to stay. Alex Hern

In 2010, the traditional media ecosystem was fraying but largely intact: television still attracted big ratings, print newspaper sales were struggling but had yet to fall off a cliff and many people still used traditional phones that could do little more than call and text. Although we were spending increasing amounts of time online, people still generally accessed Facebook through the site on a desktop computer. Instagram was in its infancy. Twitter was still quite niche.

But as smartphone usage took off in the early part of the decade, everything changed. Suddenly, checking a social network turned from something that took place a maximum of a few times a day, perhaps on your lunch break when the boss wasnt looking, into an addictive habit. With people constantly checking Facebook, new ways of communication and new formats of conveying news took hold. As hundreds of millions spent more time on these networks, the advertising cash followed them. By the end of the decade the social network that started as outsiders had grown into lightly regulated behemoths. Their algorithms exerted enormous influence over commerce, the media, and politics. They were credited with anything from allowing small businesses to flourish to undermining journalism and helping extremists to gain power.

Whether the same social networks continue to exert the same amount of influence in 2030 depends on two things. First, whether governments have the political will to regulate or break up these companies. And, second, and potentially more damaging, whether they can convince the public to keep using them and not spend their time elsewhere. One scary lesson for Mark Zuckerberg is that no one is talking about the risk MySpace poses to democracy. Jim Waterson

The shale revolution has made the unthinkable inevitable. In the blink of a decade, fracking has transformed the US from an energy-hungry importer to one of the worlds most important energy producers. The US is poised to enter the 2020s as a net exporter of oil and gas for the first time since records began.

At the centre of the boom in shale oil and gas was a technology breakthrough. Across the US shale heartlands in Texas, North Dakota and New Mexico, hydraulic fracturing unlocked vast reserves of oil and gas trapped in unyielding layers of shale. It was an engineering feat that has upended global energy markets and rewritten the rules of geopolitics.

The impact has been profound. By declaring its energy independence, the US has claimed its right to step back from the instability in the Middle East in favour of a US-first diplomatic policy. It has ignited a surge in manufacturing, which has helped fuel trade tensions with China. It has hardened the stance against the climate agenda, oiling the US exit from the Paris climate agreement. Since 2010, the amount of shale oil and gas produced has increased sixfold.

Within the first half of the decade, the rise of North Americas upstart frackers triggered the start of the most severe oil market downturn on record. By the second half of the decade the Opec oil group determined its production policy around the prospects of US frackers. Today, the worlds biggest oil companies have staked multibillion-dollar investments on their claim to the next phase of the US shale era.

There is yet to be a convincing successor to the US shale boom elsewhere in the world and with good reason. Environmental concerns, densely populated areas and fierce public opposition have kept frackers at bay across Europe. Efforts to ignite a US-style shale boom in Argentina have been slow to gain traction but may soon take off. Jillian Ambrose

Austerity has defined the decade. Trillions of dollars may have been pumped into the banks to reboot global growth across the developed world but cuts to public spending and welfare benefits, rather than Keynesian stimulus, was the remedy adopted by western governments battered by the worst economic shock since the great depression.

In Britain, cuts imposed by the Conservatives determined the 2010s, fuelling political dissatisfaction that led to the Brexit vote. But the austerity drive spread around the world. Greece was at the centre during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, as markets feared contagion for other euro-area nations, known together as the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Austerity was the condition attached to international bailouts to stop the rot. Cutting the way to prosperity was all the rage. The belief was that governments could mend their finances while central banks rebooted economic growth by cutting interest rates to zero and firing up the quantitative-easing money press.

The trick worked to a degree, stopping the last recession from turning into another great depression. The US has enjoyed the longest uninterrupted stretch of growth in modern history.

But austerity dismantled the mechanisms that reduce inequality. The 2010s mark the weakest economic expansion on record, wage growth has stalled, the public realm lies in tatters, improvements in living standards are stagnating, politics has shattered into extremes and the world economy remains on life support. A third of young people are still out of work in Greece, where the economy remains a quarter smaller than in 2007. More than 14 million in Britain are struggling in poverty.

Austerity dogma is fading and increasingly regarded a mistake. But after defining the past decade, it will still influence the next. Government spending is starting to rise to repair the damage, but trust in establishment politicians to deliver is shot. The 2010s incubated more radical ideas that will colour the 2020s, while the consequences of austerity will continue to be felt. Richard Partington

In 2010, migration was much less visible on the global agenda, other than in central America and parts of south-east Asia. Today it is a pressing issue on most continents.

There are currently more than 272 million people around the world living outside their country of birth 3.5% of the global population. This is an increase of 51 million since 2010. It shows that the rise in the global number of migrants has outpaced the increase in the worlds population but perhaps not by as much as political rhetoric suggests. Forced migration meaning refugees and asylum seekers has risen much faster than voluntary movement of people seeking better opportunities. One in seven migrants is younger than 20.

Despite the global compacts on migration and refugees adopted last year and despite the broad benefits that migration often brings the issue is arguably more politically sensitive than at any point since the end of the second world war. Governments across Europe and in the US and Australia have put up fences and forced back people seeking refuge.

Migration patterns are tough to predict since they reflect evolving crises and instability but also longer-term societal changes in demographics, economic development, transport access and connectivity. There is every indication, though, that rising population, climate pressure, food insecurity and conflict mean migration will remain as potent an issue through the 2020s. But evidence does not support a dramatic rise in either the number or proportion of migrants.

The latest UN projections suggest zero net migration between now and 2050, which would mean migrants would remain at about 3.17% of a global population of 9.8 billion. Lucy Lamble

When G20 world leaders gathered in London in April 2009, only one politician Silvio Berlusconi could justifiably have been called a rightwing populist. Fast-forward a decade, and three of the four largest democracies on the planet now have far-right populists at the helm: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US.

In Europe, radical-right populist parties are rarely winning elections but they are securing more votes, more seats in parliament and more power-sharing roles in coalition governments than at any time since the second world war. In the two western countries that arguably suffered most under the rule of 20th-century fascists Germany and Spain far-right parties using populist rhetoric are the third-largest parties in parliament. And they control the government in Poland and Hungary the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbn, has gone a long way toward his goal of transforming the EU country into what he hopes will be an illiberal democracy.

Political scientists do not agree how we got ourselves into this hole, and are even less sure about how we can scramble out. Many explanations for the causes of the rightwing populist wave point to the effects of financial crisis of 2008, the September 11 attacks (and the security clampdown that followed) and, in Europe, the so-called migrant crisis in 2015, which brought into focus long-simmering unease over mass migration.

Others point to the dominance of a neoliberal economic order implemented not just by conservatives but also those who identified as centre-left and paving the way to rampant globalisation and inequality. But no one should discount the impact of a technological era, which has rewired the entire information ecosystem, eroding trust in institutions and rewarding the kind of angry, tribal, divisive and sensational political debates in which rightwing populist thrive. Paul Lewis

What will be the great trends of the 2020s? Let us know your thoughts by emailing theupside@theguardian.com

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From renewables to Netflix: the 15 super-trends that defined the 2010s - The Guardian