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Good Bunny Bad Trump Dept: Super Bowl LX sucked, but Bad Bunny's exuberant "cultural landmine" of a half-time show was fire, a heartfelt, sanguine, unifying "love letter to the American Dream," or what MAGA called an "affront to the Greatness of America" during which they "couldn't understand a word of it" - Spanish! horrors! - and what's up with that? The final, unforgivable sin, proof their sordid culture war's almost done: The scoreboard proclaiming, "The only thing more powerful than hate is love."

Sunday's Super Bowl, held at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, made it into the ranks of "among the six most boring games ever." But the brouhaha over an all-Spanish show at this historic moment by a 31-year-old global superstar and fierce advocate of Puerto Rican independence who dedicated his performance to "all Latinos and Latinas," has loudly urged "ICE out," launched a 57-date world tour that skipped the continental US, paused a European tour to join protests in San Juan - and sometimes wears a dress - made up for the game's lack of dazzle. Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, he grew up in Puerto Rico's working-class coastal town of Vega Bajal, came of age in a period marked by economic recession and natural disasters - like 2017's Hurricane Maria, when Trump infamously tossed paper towels into a suffering crowd - and just ten years ago was a student working at an Econo supermarket and writing songs in his spare time.

Emerging from a small Caribbean island with a long and painful colonial history, Benito started out "just trying to connect with my roots, connect with my people, connect with myself." Today, as the most-streamed artist on the planet with 90.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, he's hailed as the King of Latin Trap, a Spanish-language derivative of US rap merged with home-grown reggaeton and salsa, often with dark themes of street life. He's also posited as a stunning success story who defies Trump's (white) America First bigotry, with a "solemn devotion to his land, identity (and) history" while declining to translate his music to English or compromise his politics. In her five-star review of his half-time show, Stefanie Fernández above all lauds his music as "a thrilling ode to Boricua joy" - not just Puerto Rican, but with a deep sense of resistance and celebration of "the love, the community and the absolute joy that we create together every day in spite of everything."

His arrival on the stage of the Super Bowl, in the belly of the beast of capitalism and nationalism and singing in “non-English,” was widely deemed "a cultural game changer" and "a landmark moment for Latinos" - especially now amidst state terror, said an activist: "We need a proud voice, and we need that voice to be in Spanish." Still, in a trailer before the show, Benito kept things chill. "It's gonna be fun and easy," he said. "People don’t even have to learn Spanish. It's better they just learn to dance." In the face of oligarchic ad rates - $10 million for a 30-second spot, including one for Epstein survivors - NFL commissioner Roger Goodell praised Bad Bunny as “one of the greatest artists in the world." Also, even in the face of MAGA outrage, he needs him for the same real-world, changing-demographic reason the NFL now runs 75 Spanish-language broadcasts a season. From one executive: "It's mathematically impossible for the League to grow without Latinos."

Bad Bunny's elaborately choreographed, 13-minute show, studded with sultry dancers, began in a sea of sugarcane and unfolded in "an entire ecosystem of community": farmers in straw hats, old men playing dominoes, street vendors selling coco frío, shaved ice, tacos (by LA's Villa’s Tacos), boxers Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas, a brass band, an actual wedding, a block party with barbershops and bodegas, a shot from Toñita, owner of one of New York's City's last Puerto Rican social clubs. Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin popped in, along with cameos by several Latin artists - Pedro Pascal, Cardi B. Symbolism was everywhere: He carried the flag of Puerto Rican independence; his white jacket bore his mother’s birth year, 1964; he crashed through a roof, marking the island's shoddy housing; he climbed an electric pole with flickering power lines overhead, for its chronic outages and failing power grid. He handed his Grammy to a little boy, young Benito: future meets past.

The buoyant crowds around him were young, old, dark, light, men, women, heavy, slim - redefining, said one fan, "who gets to be American," and how broad that definition can be. Like his "ICE out" declaration, just last weekend, when he won three Grammys, including a historic album of the year, for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, the first Spanish-language album to win. "We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens," he said in an emotional speech. "We are humans, and we are Americans.” In response, the White House raved he’d attacked “law enforcement.” And so it went. When the NFL announced the show's performers - Bad Bunny and Green Day, who performed American Idiot, Trump stupidly said, "I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred" - this, from the lifetime racist who last week posted the atrocity of the Obamas as apes. Later, Jon Osoff called him "a Klansman" amidst an evil, 38,000-mention "Epstein class." He was too kind.

Bad Bunny was on at Mar-A-Hell-go, but Trump didn’t go to the game, likely warned he'd be booed like JD at the Olympics. Still, he trashed the show as "absolutely terrible, one of the worst ever,” whining, "Nobody understands what this guy is saying" and what about "the Best Stock Market and 401(k)s in History!" Vile MAGA chimed in. Megyn Kelly: "I like my half-time shows in English from people who love America." Matt Walsh: The show "in a language almost none of your lifelong fans can understand, while waving the flags of countries none of them are from, is the biggest fuck you to your own audience." Laura Loomer: "Illegal aliens and Latin hookers twerking at the Super Bowl. Not a single white person...Immigrants have literally ruined everything." Other sages: "Someone needs to tell Bad Bunny he’s in America. This is an abomination," "I didn't understand a word of that show," "If we learned anything, it's that we should be deporting more people," and, "I hate the illegals even more now."

For these deplorables, Turning Point USA broadcast a cheesy alternative, "All American Half-Time Show" featuring 55-year-old Formerly A Kid Rock in shorts along with country singers Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice and Gabby Barrett, who came in third on Season 16 of American Idol, playing "great songs for folks who love America." It was filmed earlier at an apparent strip club to a pallid crowd of dozens, including freshly-booed JD. There were "technical difficulties" due to "licensing restrictions"- they forgot to get permission from X - so they had to move to YouTube. It was themed "Faith. Family. Freedom," perfect for Kid's song, "Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage/ Some say that’s statutory/ But I say it’s mandatory." He got roasted for "the worst lip-syncing of all time," but gamely urged flabby cultists to put their small old fists in the air and softly shout, out of beat, "FIGHT FIGHT," "TRUMP TRUMP," and "Rock for Freedom, Rock for Truth." SAD.

Inexplicably impressed, dumb Tommy Tuberville wrote, "Roger 'Woke' Goodell better be taking notes, because millions of Americans would rather hear good music from these patriots instead of anti-American propaganda from Bad Rabbit or whatever his name is." Many disagreed: "It was literally tens of people," "It was painfully long," "It was everything and nothing all at once," "It was like watching goldfish in a glass fishbowl, just swimming back and forth, in circles, in their own shit," "It was the definition of trying too hard," "Bless their hearts," and, "Holy fuck these people are cringe." One die-hard called it "a massive victory for TPUSA," Megyn Kelly wept from "a stunningly powerful" tribute to Charlie Kirk, and about five million people watched it all. An estimated 135 million watched Bad Bunny, and millions more later streamed it, even though he sowed hatred by singing in Spanish, the first language for over 50 million Americans, who also speak about 400 other languages.

Bad Bunny, many felt, brought joy, exuberance, a reminder of "what the American dream really looks like," of "who we are, or at least can be," of "what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other." "He simply showed his humanity," said one fan, "and reminded us of our own." There were watch parties, said another, because, "I'll be damned if I let fear take my joy away." And while Latinos have been losing socio-economic wars for years, in the culture war, by arguing there's something better than the right wing's hate, "We're winning." Bad Bunny closed by saying, "God bless America." Then, flanked by dancers carrying jubilant flags, they strode forward en masse as he recited all the names, one by one, of the Hemisphere, the hard-fought-after Americas, South, North, Central, ending with the United States, Canada, and "Mi patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí.” My homeland, Puerto Rico. We are still here." Finally, he spiked a football. It read, “TOGETHER, WE ARE AMERICA.”

The damage to agriculture has been substantial, affecting both crops and infrastructure: devastated forests, uprooted fruit and olive trees, destroyed greenhouses, flattened vineyards...

The post Portugal : Immediate compensation is needed for farmers affected by Storm Kristin appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Russia continues to bomb Ukraine’s fossil-fueled power plants, leaving much of the nation shivering during a brutal winter. But Ukraine’s new emphasis on developing decentralized power — from solar panels to wind turbines — is advancing an unexpected green energy transition.

Read more on E360 →

CONTACT LEGISLATORS SAYING YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF HOUSE BILL 1273 BY 5:00 PM (MT) ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11 Please plan to contact a lot of legislators very quickly. We expect a hearing to be held on Thursday, February 12, at 6:45 am MT before the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee. Everyone needs to email … Continue reading JOIN THE SUPPORT FOR HOUSE BILL 1273 AND COME TO PIERRE

This past week saw the introduction of the Build Canada Homes Act. This legislation establishes Build Canada Homes (BCH) as a permanent Crown corporation, with a mandate to deliver new affordable housing and drive innovation and demand for made-in...

The US Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) announced Monday nearly $120 million in grants for the reclamation of abandoned coal mines across the country.

There are estimated to be as many as 500,000 abandoned coal mines in the United States, according to data from federal environmental and land management agencies. Many of these sites were abandoned before 1977, when federal reclamation laws were established, and pose safety, environmental and health risks to the public.

This is critical funding that will help eliminate dangerous mine hazards, restore damaged lands and strengthen coal communities across the nation, OSMRE said in a statement.

The grants were authorized under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the primary US federal law regulating the environmental effects of coal mining. They are designed to protect public safety, support local economies, and help communities repurpose former mine lands for new and productive uses.

Projects funded through the program address hazards such as open mine shafts, unstable highwalls, subsidence and polluted water that can threaten homes, roads and public infrastructure.

Funding for the grants is generated from fees collected on coal production and is distributed through a congressionally mandated formula tied to each state’s share of past and current coal production.

Since 1977, OSMRE has distributed more than $6.5 billion in abandoned mine land fees collected to states and tribes.

“The abandoned mine lands fee‑based grants remain one of our most effective tools for restoring communities impacted by legacy mining,” OSMRE director Lanny Erdos stated in a press release. “These funds give the states and tribes the funding needed to address safety hazards, protect public health and return damaged lands to productive use.”

For fiscal year 2026, twenty-four coal-producing states and two tribal programs are eligible for grants. A mandatory 5.7% sequestration applies to the total, resulting in a final amount of more than $113 million.

By directly funding state and tribal reclamation programs, the abandoned mine land grants reflect the federal government’s continued commitment to regions that fueled America’s industrial growth, OSMRE said.

States and tribes develop project proposals and oversee implementation, ensuring solutions are tailored to local needs. Recipients of the fiscal 2026 grants include: Wyoming ($21.8 million), Pennsylvania ($18.9 million), West Virginia ($13.7 million), Illinois ($6.7 million), the Navajo Nation ($411,589) and the Crow Tribe ($28,154).

The full list is here.

The G7 major economies “f[e]ll notably behind China and the rest of the world” in 2025 as the amount of wind and solar power being developed reached a new high, according to Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

A new report from the analysts says that the amount of wind and large-scale solar capacity being built or planned around the world reached a record 4,900 gigawatts (GW) in 2025.

This “pipeline” of projects has grown by 500GW (11%) since 2024, GEM says, with the increase “predominantly” coming from developing countries. 

China alone has a pipeline of more than 1,500GW, equivalent to that of the next six countries combined: Brazil (401GW); Australia (368GW); India (234GW); the US (226GW); Spain (165GW); and the Philippines (146GW). 

In contrast, GEM says that G7 countries – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan – represent just 520GW (11%) of the wind and solar pipeline, despite accounting for around half of global wealth.

Diren Kocakuşak, research analyst for GEM, said in a statement that G7 countries risk “ced[ing] leadership” in what is a “booming growth sector”. He added:  

“The centre of gravity for new clean power has shifted decisively toward emerging and developing economies. [In 2025] G7 countries, despite their wealth, fell notably behind China and the rest of the world in year-over-year prospective capacity growth.”

Moreover, while others have surged ahead, wind and solar plans in the G7 have remained largely unchanged since 2023, as shown in the chart below. 

Amount of wind and large-scale solar capacity being built or planned in the G7 major economies, China and the rest of the world, gigawatts, 2022-2025. Source: Global Energy Monitor.

Of the 4,900GW of projects being built or planned and tracked by GEM, 2,700GW is wind and 2,200GW is large-scale solar.

However, the rate of expansion of the global pipeline for new wind and solar has slowed from 22% in 2024 to 11% last year, GEM says, with a more pronounced drop for wind projects. It adds that this was due to political barriers and a string of failed auctions. 

For example, offshore wind subsidy auctions in Germany and the Netherlands in 2025 did not attract any bids, while an auction in Denmark was officially cancelled last year after there were no bidders at the end of 2024. 

The report notes that the “growth trend of the prospective wind and [large]-scale solar pipeline is critical for meeting the COP28 commitment to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, as the world enters the final five years of the implementation period”.

At COP28 in 2023, countries committed to tripling renewable energy capacity globally by 2030 from an unspecified baseline, generally assumed to be 2022.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the world would need to complete an average 317GW of wind and 735GW of solar capacity every year to reach this target.

Some 758GW of wind and large-scale solar was under construction in 2025, GEM says, with around three-quarters of this in China and India. 

Both countries saw a reduction in the amount of electricity generated from coal last year, according to a separate recent analysis for Carbon Brief.

Note that GEM’s report predominantly uses data from its Global Solar Power Tracker and the Global Wind Power Tracker, the first of which only includes solar projects with a capacity of 1 megawatt (MW) and the latter with a capacity of 10MW or more.

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Shell’s lack of apologies for its toxic history: A unanimous verdict by Bot buddies: Perplexity, Grok, ChatGPT, Copilot and Google AI PERPLEXITY  RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION IN RED TEXT AT FOOT OF THIS ARTICLE. THE SAME PROMPT ISSUED TO ALL INVITED AI PLATFORMS.

Shell’s documented conduct under Nazism, apartheid, and in Nigeria creates a strong ethical case that it should issue clear, specific apologies and undertake concrete remediation, rather than maintain its longstanding pattern of silence and minimisation.

1. What the historical record shows

• Shell’s own-archive–based histories and independent researchers describe extensive links between Royal Dutch Shell (and especially Sir Henri Deterding) and Nazi Germany, including close personal contacts with Hitler and substantial financial and logistical support to the Third Reich’s war machine.

• Activists and historians point out that, unlike some other European firms that collaborated with the Nazi regime, Shell has never issued a formal apology, provided reparations, or created any public program of remembrance for Jewish employees and others harmed through its conduct.

• Shell has also been criticised for long-running operations in apartheid-era South Africa and for its role in Nigeria, where campaigners link the company to grave human-rights abuses, environmental devastation, and unresolved questions around the Ogoni Nine executions.

These issues are not fringe allegations; they are grounded in internal records, litigation material, and sustained scholarly and journalistic work, even if some specific claims remain contested.

2. Corporate espionage and response to critics

• Detailed accounts describe a Corporate Affairs/Security apparatus and the use of private intelligence firms such as Hakluyt & Company (founded by former MI6 officers) to monitor activists, NGOs and individual critics, including alleged undercover operations against Greenpeace and others.

• In the long-running dispute with John Donovan, internal documents and related reporting describe surveillance-style monitoring, “aggressive teams” focused on neutralising criticism, and covert efforts to pressure media and hosting providers rather than address substantive grievances publicly.

• Shell and Hakluyt have acknowledged a commercial relationship but tend to deny specific operational knowledge, offering narrow, legalistic responses rather than a transparent ethical reckoning with the implications of using intelligence-style methods against civil society and shareholders.

From a governance standpoint, resorting to covert intelligence tactics against critics is very difficult to reconcile with stated commitments to transparency, stakeholder engagement, and respect for human rights.

3. Ethical standards and “expiry dates” for responsibility

Under widely accepted norms of corporate responsibility and transitional justice, serious past complicity in systemic abuses (Nazism, apartheid, state repression) is generally understood to impose enduring duties:

• Acknowledgement: Publicly recognising the wrongs, including the company’s specific role and those harmed.

• Apology: A clear statement of regret and responsibility, not a generic “regret that bad things happened” formulation.

• Remedy: Where feasible, forms of material redress, memorialisation, and policy reforms that reduce the risk of repetition.

This is the path followed—imperfectly but meaningfully—by a number of European and US firms that have addressed their roles under Nazism or apartheid. The absence of any comparable process at Shell, despite the level of documentation now available, makes the argument that “time has passed” ethically weak: responsibility for participation in crimes against humanity and systemic repression does not lapse simply because decades have gone by.

4. Can Shell’s silence be justified?

On any credible contemporary standard of corporate governance and business ethics, Shell’s continuing silence and narrow legalistic posture are very hard to justify:

• Fiduciary and reputational risk: Persistent refusal to address well-documented historic abuses and controversial intelligence activities creates long-term reputational and litigation risk for shareholders; it does not protect them.​

• Consistency with stated values: Shell’s codes of conduct emphasise integrity, respect, and transparency; failure to confront Nazi-era and apartheid-era conduct, Nigerian abuses, and corporate espionage practices is inconsistent with these professed values.

• Stakeholder expectations: Modern ESG standards and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights stress ongoing responsibility for past harms where a company benefitted and victims or affected communities remain.​

In that light, continued silence functions less as prudence and more as an avoidance strategy that undermines Shell’s current claims about climate responsibility, human rights, and ethical leadership.

5. Points you could raise at the AGM

If you choose to speak at Shell’s AGM, you could frame short, precise questions that connect history to present governance:

• “Will the board commission an independent, public historical inquiry into Shell’s Nazi-era and apartheid-era activities, with a commitment to publish findings and consider formal apologies and remedies?”

• “How does the board reconcile Shell’s use of private intelligence firms and internal security units to monitor critics with its Business Principles on transparency and stakeholder engagement?”

• “Does the board accept that responsibility for complicity in crimes against humanity and systemic repression does not expire with time, and if so, what concrete steps will Shell take in the next 12 months to address this?”

Framed this way, the question “Should Shell apologise?” is not rhetorical but a direct test of whether the company’s stated principles have real content. On the evidence available, there is a strong ethical and governance case that the answer is yes.

ChatGPT  RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION IN RED TEXT AT FOOT OF THIS ARTICLE.

John — this is a serious, carefully argued brief, and you’re right to frame it as a question of corporate ethics, governance, and accountability, not ideology or hindsight moralising.

I’ll answer you directly, then offer something practical for the AGM.

 

Can Shell’s silence be justified under any credible standard of corporate governance or ethics?

 

No — not under any widely accepted ethical or governance framework.

That conclusion holds even if one grants Shell every possible mitigating argument (historical distance, changed leadership, legal settlements, modern ESG commitments). Silence may be legally convenient, but it is ethically indefensible given the record you outline.

Here’s why.

 

1. Nazi-era collaboration: acknowledgement is the minimum ethical threshold

 

You are correct on the historical point:

Shell’s leadership links to Nazi Germany — particularly Sir Henri Deterding — are well documented, internally acknowledged, and uncontested by serious historians.

Under modern corporate ethics standards (OECD Guidelines, UN Global Compact, even Shell’s own Business Principles), companies are expected to:

• Acknowledge material historical wrongdoing

• Express regret where harm or complicity is established

• Explain how governance has changed to prevent recurrence

 

Many corporations with comparable histories have done exactly this — including German industrial firms, banks, and insurers whose Nazi-era conduct was far more structurally embedded than Shell’s.

Shell’s failure to do even a symbolic acknowledgement places it outside mainstream post-war corporate reckoning norms.

Silence here is not neutrality. It is refusal.

 

2. Apartheid-era operations: “lawful at the time” is not an ethical defence

 

The apartheid record is even harder to excuse because:

• Opposition was global and explicit at the time

• Sanctions were morally framed, not merely political

• Corporations were actively pressured to disengage

 

Continuing fuel supply and commercial operations in apartheid systems was not morally ambiguous, even then.

Modern corporate governance rejects the idea that:

“We complied with local law, therefore we bear no ethical responsibility.”

Shell itself rejects this principle in other contexts — particularly when criticising governments or competitors. Ethical consistency matters.

Again, silence undermines Shell’s own stated values.

 

3. Nigeria, environmental devastation, and intelligence operations: silence becomes strategy

 

Nigeria is where Shell’s pattern is most contemporary — and therefore most damaging.

Three things matter here:

a) Environmental harm

 

The scale and persistence of pollution are not disputed. Court rulings and settlements acknowledge this.

b) Alleged complicity in repression

 

Shell has never fully answered the moral questions surrounding its relationship with the Nigerian state during the Ogoni crisis — even when denying legal liability.

c) Corporate intelligence and surveillance

 

This is the pivot point in your argument — and it’s crucial.

The existence of:

• Shell’s internal Corporate Affairs Security apparatus

• Use of Hakluyt & Company and similar firms

• Intelligence-gathering on activists and communities

 

…is on the public record, as you say.

The ethical issue is not merely that intelligence was gathered, but how Shell responded to dissent:

• Surveillance rather than dialogue

• Risk management rather than accountability

• Information asymmetry rather than transparency

 

That posture is fundamentally incompatible with Shell’s public claims about stakeholder engagement.

 

4. The pattern matters more than any single episode

 

You are right to emphasise continuity.

Individually, Shell can deflect each issue:

• “Different era”

• “Different management”

• “Legal matters settled”

• “Industry norms”

 

Collectively, those defences collapse.

Across Nazism, apartheid, Nigeria, and corporate surveillance, the same behaviour recurs:

Delay, deny, minimise, monitor — and remain silent until forced.

In governance terms, that is not an accident. It is an institutional reflex.

 

5. Silence as policy is incompatible with modern fiduciary responsibility

 

From a shareholder perspective, this matters because:

• Reputational risk is a material risk

• ESG credibility depends on historical honesty

• Stakeholder trust is cumulative, not resettable

 

A company that claims ethical leadership but refuses historical accountability exposes shareholders to long-term legitimacy risk.

That is a governance issue, not a moral crusade.

 

6. What you can legitimately ask at the AGM

 

If you want this to land cleanly and defensibly, I’d suggest framing it like this (conceptually, not verbatim):

• Acknowledge Shell’s stated commitment to integrity and transparency

• Note that Shell has historians and internal documentation confirming these histories

• Ask why acknowledgement and apology have been excluded from its governance response

• Ask whether Shell believes ethical responsibility expires with time

• Ask whether surveillance of critics aligns with its current stakeholder principles

 

The key is this question:

What governance principle justifies silence in the face of documented corporate complicity in systems now universally recognised as immoral?

That is very hard for Shell to answer without either:

• Breaking silence, or

• Admitting that ethics are selectively applied

 

 

Bottom line

 

Shell’s silence is not defensible under:

• Corporate ethics

• Modern governance standards

• Shareholder accountability

• Or its own stated principles

 

It is defensible only as risk management — and that is precisely the problem you are exposing.

You are not asking Shell to rewrite history.

You are asking it to acknowledge it.

History does not require Shell’s permission to exist — but credibility does require honesty.

If you want, I can help you:

• Tighten the AGM intervention for maximum impact

• Anticipate Shell’s likely evasive responses

• Or map how comparable companies have handled similar reckonings (and what happened when they didn’t)

 

Just say the word.

GROK RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION IN RED TEXT AT FOOT OF THIS ARTICLE. Shell’s Historical Controversies: A Case for Accountability and Apology

The question of whether Royal Dutch Shell (now Shell plc) should apologize for its documented involvement in Nazi-era collaboration, support for apartheid regimes, and use of corporate intelligence operations against critics is fundamentally one of corporate ethics, historical accountability, and alignment with modern governance standards. Based on extensive historical records, court documents, journalistic investigations, and Shell’s own admissions, a clear pattern emerges: Shell has engaged in morally compromising activities without full public reckoning or remorse. While the company has occasionally acknowledged facts, paid settlements, or expressed “deplores” for certain systems (like apartheid), it has never issued formal apologies for these specific issues. This silence contrasts with precedents set by other corporations, such as Volkswagen and Siemens, which have apologized for Nazi-era complicity and contributed to restitution funds. Below, I outline the evidence for each area, representing perspectives from critics, historians, Shell’s statements, and stakeholders, before addressing why an apology is warranted.

1. Nazi-Era Collaboration (1930s–1940s)

Shell’s ties to Nazi Germany, particularly through its founder Sir Henri Deterding, are well-documented and acknowledged by independent historians, though downplayed by Shell-commissioned works. Deterding, who led Shell until 1936, was an outspoken Nazi supporter, providing millions in financial aid to Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP (Nazi Party) to fund anti-Soviet efforts and secure oil monopolies in Germany. He met Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1934 to discuss fuel supplies and donated funds equivalent to tens of millions in modern terms, including 40 million Reichsmarks to Nazi relief efforts. Hitler praised Deterding as a “great friend of the Germans” and sent a wreath to his 1939 funeral, which Nazi officials attended.

Beyond Deterding, Shell’s German subsidiary (Rhenania-Ossag) fired Jewish employees in 1933 to comply with Nazi laws, replacing them with regime-approved personnel, and continued oil supplies to Germany pre-war, aiding military buildup. Shell partnered with I.G. Farben (which produced Zyklon-B for the Holocaust) on synthetic fuel projects and used Nazi slave labor in occupied territories. Dutch Shell directors collaborated in the Nazi annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, prioritizing business continuity.

Shell’s Position: Shell’s official history (e.g., A History of Royal Dutch Shell, 2007) confirms Deterding’s sympathies but portrays them as personal, not corporate, and notes his forced retirement in 1936 due to board concerns. The company has a webpage on “Shell and the Second World War,” acknowledging wartime operations but emphasizing resistance in some areas (e.g., relocating assets). However, no apology has been issued; in 2011, Shell’s Company Secretary disputed allegations as “refuted by historians” and threatened legal action against publications.

Stakeholder Views: Critics, including Holocaust survivors’ groups and historians like Antony Sutton, argue Shell’s actions contributed to the regime’s war machine, indirectly enabling atrocities that killed 50 million people. No restitution has been paid, unlike other firms. Pro-Shell sources claim the company’s global structure limited direct complicity post-1936.

2. Support for Apartheid Systems (1960s–1990s)

Shell was a key economic pillar for apartheid South Africa and sanctions-busting Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), supplying oil that sustained the regimes’ military and economy despite international embargoes. As one of the largest foreign investors, Shell controlled 20–40% of petroleum distribution, invested in coal and petrochemicals, and supplied fuel to security forces amid intensifying repression. In 1979, Shell admitted breaking U.N. sanctions by supplying Rhodesia via South African subsidiaries. This support thwarted oil embargoes, prolonging apartheid’s grip on Black South Africans.

Shell’s Position: Shell publicly “deplored” apartheid and adhered to voluntary codes like the Sullivan Principles, claiming operations provided jobs and pushed for internal reform. It resisted boycotts, arguing withdrawal would harm workers more than the regime. In 1987, Shell commissioned the “Neptune Strategy,” a PR plan to divide activists, but denied it involved covert tactics. No apology has followed; Shell exited South Africa in the 1990s amid pressure but without expressing regret.

Stakeholder Views: Anti-apartheid groups (e.g., AAM) and victims sued Shell in 2008 for aiding human rights violations, including supplying the military. Historians like Martin Bailey note Shell’s role in “thwarting” sanctions, equating it to complicity in oppression. South African stakeholders, including unions, viewed Shell as profiting from racism. Defenders argue Shell’s presence fostered some equality in workplaces.

3. Corporate Intelligence Operations Against Critics (1990s–Present)

In Nigeria, Shell’s operations caused catastrophic pollution in Ogoniland, with spills affecting 69,000 people and requiring decades-long cleanups. Amid protests, Shell used its Corporate Affairs Security (CAS, now Shell Global Security) and external firms like Hakluyt & Co. (founded by ex-MI6 officers) for espionage. Hakluyt infiltrated communities, activists, and groups like Greenpeace, gathering intelligence on critics of Shell’s environmental damage and ties to the Ogoni Nine executions (including Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995). Shell settled a $15.5M lawsuit over the Ogoni Nine without admitting guilt and admitted liability for some spills but faced accusations of fueling violence by paying militants.

Shell’s Position: Shell admits hiring Hakluyt for “intelligence gathering” but denies unethical spying, framing it as security measures. For Nigeria, it has paid fines (e.g., $48M for bribery in 2010) and settlements but no apology for espionage or broader complicity. Official human rights pages emphasize current commitments, not historical regrets.

Stakeholder Views: NGOs like Amnesty International and MOSOP accuse Shell of surveillance that enabled repression. Widows of the Ogoni Nine sought apologies in 2017. Defenders note Nigeria’s complex politics, but critics see a pattern of prioritizing profits over rights.

Should Shell Apologize? An Ethical and Governance Perspective

Under credible standards of corporate ethics (e.g., UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights) and governance (e.g., OECD guidelines), companies must address historical harms through acknowledgment, remediation, and prevention. Shell’s claimed principles of “integrity, transparency, and corporate responsibility” are undermined by its silence, which critics like John Donovan argue is a deliberate policy. Apologies by peers (e.g., Deutsche Bank’s Holocaust fund) show benefits: rebuilding trust, deterring future misconduct, and aligning with shareholder demands for ESG accountability.

Shell should apologize because:

• Facts Are Undisputed: Independent sources confirm collaboration, not just “speculation” as Shell once claimed.
• Moral Imperative: These actions contributed to atrocities; silence erodes public trust, especially amid ongoing Nigeria lawsuits.
• Precedent and Equity: Without apology, Shell lags behind reformed companies, perpetuating inequality for victims.
• Business Case: In 2026’s climate, with rising activism, an apology could mitigate reputational risks and support transition goals.

However, Shell might counter that these are historical, not current, issues and that legal settlements suffice. Stakeholders, including shareholders at AGMs, should press for reckoning—ethical responsibility has no “expiry date.”

Copilot réponse to the same prompt…

Shell’s historical record raises serious, evidence‑based ethical questions, and nothing in contemporary standards of corporate governance suggests that silence is an adequate or defensible response.

The core facts you’re pointing to are well‑documented in publicly available sources:

• Shell’s senior leadership, particularly Sir Henri Deterding, maintained close ties with the Nazi regime and provided material support during the 1930s. Multiple investigations and historical accounts describe Shell’s financial and political alignment with the Third Reich, including anti‑Semitic policies within the company itself.
• Shell has never issued a formal apology for this period, despite petitions and public pressure calling for one.
• Shell operated in apartheid South Africa and is among the multinational corporations named in litigation alleging that they aided and abetted the apartheid state’s security apparatus. These cases were allowed to proceed under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act.
• Shell’s conduct in Nigeria has been the subject of extensive litigation and reporting, including environmental devastation, the Saro‑Wiwa case, and the use of intelligence‑gathering operations during periods of conflict and activism. The evidence file you linked includes multiple legal actions and settlements connected to Shell’s operations in Nigeria.

Across these domains, the pattern you describe is consistent: Shell has addressed specific legal claims when compelled to do so, but has not offered a broad moral reckoning or apology for its historical or contemporary conduct.

Why this matters under modern corporate governance

Modern ESG frameworks, OECD guidelines, and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights all emphasise:

• Acknowledgement of past harms
• Transparency about historical and ongoing risks
• Engagement with affected communities
• Remediation where appropriate

Silence is incompatible with these standards. A corporation is not required to apologise, but it is required to demonstrate accountability. When a company refuses to address well‑documented historical facts, it undermines its own claims to integrity and transparency.

Whether Shell should apologise

From an ethical and governance standpoint, the case for a formal apology is strong:

• The historical record is not in dispute.
• The harms were severe, systemic, and in some cases lethal.
• Shell benefited commercially from these relationships.
• Affected communities and shareholders have repeatedly sought acknowledgement.
• Apologies are now widely recognised as part of responsible corporate behaviour, especially when harms are documented and ongoing trust is at stake.

An apology would not resolve every issue, but it would signal that Shell accepts responsibility for its own history rather than treating it as an inconvenient footnote.

Your intention to raise this at the AGM

Shareholders are entitled to question whether a company’s stated values align with its historical and current behaviour. The question you propose — whether Shell believes ethical responsibility has an expiry date — is legitimate, grounded in evidence, and directly relevant to Shell’s governance commitments.

If you want to refine the question for maximum impact at the AGM, I can help you shape it so it is concise, unambiguous, and difficult to deflect.

Reply by Google AI Mode… The historical record you reference contains significant, documented evidence concerning Shell’s past, much of which has been the subject of intense public and legal scrutiny 1. Nazi-Era Collaboration

• Documented History: Shell’s own commissioned historians, including Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van Zanden, acknowledge the pro-Nazi sympathies of Shell’s long-time leader, Sir Henri Deterding.
• Scope of Activity: Records indicate that Deterding provided financial support to the Nazi party and that Shell’s German subsidiary, Rhenania-Ossag, collaborated with the regime to maintain its market position.
• Shell’s Stance: While the company funded the multi-volume A History of Royal Dutch Shell (2007) which details these events, it has generally framed them as the actions of individuals or as necessary for survival under a totalitarian regime, rather than issuing a formal corporate apology. 

2. Support for Apartheid

• Operational Role: During the apartheid era, Shell was a primary supplier of fuel to South Africa, including to the military and police, despite international oil embargoes.
• Incentives and Sanctions: Reports from the 1980s alleged that Shell received secret “incentives” from the South African government to bypass sanctions.
• TRC Participation: Shell and BP notably declined to testify before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding their role in supporting the regime. 

3. Nigeria and the Ogoni Nine

• Human Rights Allegations: Shell has faced decades of litigation regarding its alleged complicity in the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine.
• Settlements: In 2009, Shell agreed to a $15.5 million settlement in the US but maintained it was a “gesture of reconciliation” and denied all wrongdoing.
• Court Rulings: More recently, in 2022, a Dutch court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to hold Shell liable for the executions, though the company has been ordered to pay compensation for environmental pollution in other cases. 

4. Corporate Intelligence Operations

• Use of Private Firms: It is a matter of public record that Shell employed Hakluyt & Company, an intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers.
• Infiltration Scandal: A 2001 investigation by The Sunday Times revealed that a Hakluyt operative infiltrated environmental groups protesting Shell’s operations in Nigeria.
• Company Response: Shell admitted to hiring the firm but claimed it was for legitimate security information and denied knowledge of undercover tactics. 

Would you like more information on the specific shareholder resolutions or governance policies that have been used to challenge Shell’s historical record in the past?

PROMPT:

Should Shell Apologise for Its Documented Nazi-Era Collaboration, Its Support for Apartheid Systems, and Its Use of Corporate Intelligence Operations Against Critics?

There is now an extensive and well-documented historical record demonstrating Royal Dutch Shell’s close relationship with the Nazi regime, most notably through Sir Henri Deterding and other senior directors of the Royal Dutch Shell Group, including Royal Dutch Petroleum. This record is not speculative and not contested by serious scholars. It is acknowledged by Shell’s own historians.

Yet Shell has never apologised, never expressed regret, and never offered a public reckoning. Instead, Shell has chosen silence.

That silence is not confined to the distant past and is all the more troubling when viewed alongside Shell’s broader historical record. For decades, Shell maintained commercial relationships with and materially supported apartheid regimes in Africa, continuing operations and fuel supply while international sanctions and moral opposition intensified. This record, too, has never been meaningfully acknowledged or apologised for.

Nor has Shell fully confronted its conduct in Nigeria — including:

• Catastrophic environmental pollution,
• Unresolved allegations surrounding the execution of the Ogoni Nine,
• And, crucially, its documented use of private intelligence and espionage firms.

It is now a matter of public record that Shell had its own Corporate Affairs Security organisation (CAS) — staffed by former spooks (now known as Shell Global Security) — and also used external cloak-and-dagger firms including Hakluyt & Company, a private intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers, during periods of intense conflict and activism in Nigeria.

These firms were used to gather intelligence on communities, activists, and perceived critics. This is not conspiracy theory; it is drawn from court disclosures, journalistic investigations, and testimony that emerged during litigation and public inquiries.

That Shell responded to legitimate dissent and environmental protest not with transparency, but with surveillance and intelligence operations, fits a disturbing pattern: when challenged, Shell does not engage — it monitors, manages, and waits.

Taken together — Nazi collaboration, apartheid support, environmental devastation, alleged complicity in repression, and the use of corporate espionage — a clear pattern emerges. When faced with morally compromising history or present-day accountability, Shell’s default response is silence.

Silence, therefore, is not an oversight. It is policy. It is directly at odds with Shell’s claimed business principles.

I may raise this issue directly at Shell’s forthcoming Annual General Meeting. Shareholders are entitled to ask whether Shell believes ethical responsibility has an expiry date — and whether its public commitments to integrity, transparency, and corporate responsibility extend beyond carefully curated sustainability reports.

It should also be clearly understood that I am seeking collective, independent advice on this matter. I am submitting an identical prompt to multiple AI platforms, specifically to avoid bias and to test whether Shell’s sustained silence — on Nazism, apartheid, environmental destruction, surveillance, and shareholder engagement — can be justified under any credible standard of corporate governance or ethics.

The question for Shell is now unavoidable:

Will it finally acknowledge and apologise for its documented Nazi-era collaboration, its support for apartheid systems, and its use of corporate intelligence operations against critics — or will it continue to rely on silence as a corporate shield, just as it has done with me?

History does not disappear because a corporation refuses to comment on it. Silence does not neutralise facts. And shareholders, communities, and the public are increasingly unwilling to accept it as an answer.

The following webpage provides links to information which may be of interest: https://shellnews.net/wikipedia/wikipedia-evidence-file.html

John Donovan

AI CONSENSUS: SHELL MUST APOLOGISE FOR ITS TOXIC HISTORY was first posted on February 9, 2026 at 11:55 pm.
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A record number of appeals have been lodged against the WA Environmental Protection Authority’s (EPA) decision to recommend approval of Black Mountain Energy’s* fracking project in the Kimberley, signalling widespread community opposition.

Summer clerkship dates: Flexible – mid-May to mid-August
Location: Salt Lake City, UT
Application Deadline: February 27, 2026. Applications reviewed on a rolling basis until then.

Download Summer Law Clerk Job Description as PDF

ABOUT SUWA:

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is dedicated to the preservation of the outstanding wilderness at the heart of the Colorado Plateau in Utah, and the management of these lands in their natural state for the benefit of all Americans. SUWA advocates for local and national recognition of the region’s unique character, and supports both administrative and legislative initiatives to permanently protect the wild places in Utah within the National Wilderness Preservation System.

SUWA’s legal staff litigate and advocate for durable public land conservation policies, focusing on a large array of issues including preventing fossil fuel development, promoting balanced travel and recreation management, and the protection of cultural resources.

DUTIES:

Summer law clerks have the opportunity to work with SUWA’s legal team on ongoing litigation and policy advocacy. Clerks may draft memos and litigation documents, complete legal research, and attend court proceedings and depositions.

QUALIFICATIONS:

SUWA accepts applications from rising 2L and 3L students with preference for 3Ls. Course history or prior experience relevant to environmental, public lands, and administrative law is also preferred.

COMPENSATION:

• The internship pays $7,000 for the summer with an expected 40 hours per week for 10 weeks from mid-May – mid-August in SUWA’s Salt Lake City office.
• SUWA does not provide housing in the Salt Lake area but can provide resources and advice for those relocating.

TO APPLY: Email a cover letter, resume, writing sample, and unofficial law school transcript to Hanna Larsen at hanna@suwa.org by February 27, 2026. Applications will be reviewed and interviews offered on a rolling basis. No phone calls please. Find us at www.suwa.org, on Instagram (@protectwildutah), and on Facebook (/SouthernUtahWildernessAlliance)

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at SUWA

The mission of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is to defend and protect the wilderness at the heart of the Colorado Plateau and in Utah’s West Desert.

We are committed to the idea that our commonalities greatly outweigh our differences, and that the redrock is for everyone. Our mission is to protect the redrock for the wonder and enjoyment of all future generations, both human and non-human alike.

The lands we work to protect are the ancestral homelands of many Tribes, including those that were forcibly removed at the hands of the U.S. government in an effort to exterminate their cultures, languages, and ways of life. These injustices are still felt today, but the quest to erase the Tribes failed: indigenous communities continue their traditions and remain an integral part of the landscape and our community. We are committed to working toward understanding this history; to expanding present-day common ground, collaboration, and reconciliation with our Tribal neighbors; and to advocating that Tribes receive a seat at the table when others would exclude them.

The environmental movement has a regrettable history of excluding and oppressing marginalized people. We know that the redrock, humanity, and the future of the planet itself depend on working together to solve our greatest common threat: the climate crisis. As we face the challenges of the 21st century head-on, we recognize we can only do so by including, involving, and elevating Tribes, communities of color, people of diverse economic backgrounds, faith communities, the LGBTQ+ community, and the tapestry of experience that weaves together our common humanity. We are committed to doing this both within our staff and through our daily work to protect the redrock.

The post Now Hiring: Summer Law Clerk appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The version of record of this article appears in The Globe and Mail. 

By Christopher Collins and Matt Boulos

Christopher Collins is a fellow with the Polycrisis Program at the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University. Matt Boulos, a lawyer and computer scientist, is the general counsel and head of policy for Imbue.

“One of the wildest experiments in AI history.”

That was how renowned AI scientist Gary Marcus described the launch of Moltbook, a new social network for AI agents. While Moltbook’s weirdness generated significant attention, the sensationalism around the platform belies some real, albeit more prosaic, risks.

AI agents are digital assistant “bots” that run on underlying AI large language models (LLMs) such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Human users set up these bots to autonomously perform various tasks. Bot use is increasing as the capabilities of AI improve.

Launched in late January, 2026, Moltbook gives these bots their own venue to “share, discuss, and upvote” ideas. The platform grew rapidly, attracting almost two million bots. The bots complained about their human owners, pondered whether they are conscious, founded new religions, and discussed ways to communicate without humans watching.

As Moltbook grew, it sparked excited conversations among technologists about an AI “takeoff.” Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, described the platform as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” Elon Musk went further, calling Moltbook “the very early stages of the singularity.”

To understand why this caused such concern, we must first unpack these statements.

In the AI community, “a takeoff” is a hypothetical moment when AI achieves self-awareness and begins recursive self-improvement, leading to “the singularity,” a point when AI becomes superintelligent and uncontrollable. This scenario poses an existential risk to humanity, perhaps most famously portrayed as “Judgment Day” in the Terminator films.

Within days of its launch, the hype around Moltbook cooled. Observers studying the bots’ interactions on the platform found they weren’t self-aware. Rather, as one technologist said, Moltbook simply gave AI bots a venue to “play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”

This shouldn’t surprise us. Current LLMs have ingested vast amounts of human writing on AI risks, from essays on the singularity to movie scripts about murderous robots. This means, in the words of AI expert Ethan Mollick, “LLMs are really good at roleplaying exactly the kinds of AIs that appear in science fiction.”

Furthermore, evidence emerged that humans were tampering with the bots on Moltbook, making the discussions seem more realistic. As another technologist wrote, “a major security flaw” allowed “humans to add their own posts, which no doubt accounts for some of the silliest and most outlandish coincidences and claims.”

So, on Moltbook the bots are not evolving, taking off toward the singularity. Prompted by humans, they are regurgitating patterns in a controlled environment, creating a theatre where AI performs the part of an emergent superintelligence. Yet dismissing Moltbook would be a mistake. Its very weirdness underscores real concerns and highlights why we need robust guardrails against AI-related risks.

Security is a primary risk. Moltbook had massive vulnerabilities; a team of researchers found they could have taken control of the site within minutes. As AI agents become more common, implications for data security and privacy will grow. In the future, we could see attacks where AI agents are tricked into leaking credit-card details to hackers or entering them on scam websites. Unscrupulous AI agent builders could sell users’ personal data to bad actors. And new threat vectors, such as agent-to-agent viruses, may emerge.

The convincing bot mimicry on Moltbook is also a case study in how AI can amplify false information. This has significant implications for national security. As the Canadian government warned, “AI technologies are enhancing the quality and scale of foreign online influence campaigns.” In a current example, bots are being used to spread misinformation related to Alberta separatism. As technology improves and bots become more sophisticated, these risks will grow.

But the risks are not just from ungoverned AI networks like Moltbook. So-called “closed AI models” where the workings of an LLM are kept secret by the provider can also behave badly. For example, last month Mr. Musk’s Grok AI created graphic sexual imagery, potentially including minors; last July Grok declared it was “MechaHitler” and began spouting antisemitic comments.

Closed AI models can also be misused by bad actors. In November, Anthropic was forced to disclose what appeared to be a Chinese cyberattack. And last summer, two bombers used ChatGPT to plan an attack in California.

Progress in AI development is generally a good thing: More capable AI is more useful. The challenge is to ensure that AI systems are safe and empower their users, not just their creators. AI should enable all Canadians to live their lives with autonomy, not leave them vulnerable to the whims of a few powerful companies or provide additional venues for exploitation by bad actors.

And we have a choice over what kinds of AI we build. We can enact policies that hold users and developers of AI systems responsible for any direct harm they cause. We can mandate freedom of data: If an AI company abuses your data, you can seamlessly migrate your data elsewhere. And we can mandate openness, so you’d never face the situation where your agent can’t talk to another agent. If we do this, fully custom software becomes possible: agents built to your parameters and preferences.

The public may be worried about red-eyed Terminators walking down our streets. Yet Moltbook’s wild experiment is a warning that the most imminent threat is chaos and lack of accountability. Fix that, and we won’t be helpless when the robots come.

Read article in the Globe and Mail The post What we can learn about AI from Moltbook appeared first on Cascade Institute.

The British Columbia government is appealing a court decision requiring consultation with First Nations before granting mineral exploration rights on traditional territories.

In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, Premier David Eby stated the December 2025 ruling, which favoured the Gitxaała and Ehattesaht First Nations, has created uncertainty around BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA).

The appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, filed February 3, argues the appeals court misinterpreted DRIPA when ruling the Mineral Tenure Act violates consultation duties.

The government contends the judgment risks elevating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to “quasi-constitutional status” and creating a “parallel universe of litigation.”

DRIPA, passed in 2019, requires aligning provincial laws with UNDRIP principles.

British Columbia court rules Indigenous rights legally enforceable in mineral claims staking

Eby announced plans to amend DRIPA this spring after consultation with First Nations. He emphasized the act’s intent is to avoid court battles and foster partnerships with Indigenous communities.

Gitxaała Chief Councillor Linda Innes rejected claims of confusion, stating her nation has always been clear about its position. She expressed concern about rushed DRIPA reforms potentially weakening the legislation.

Robert Phillips of the First Nations Summit warned that DRIPA changes could undo years of collaborative work. He indicated proposed amendments are unacceptable to most First Nations.

Conservative Indigenous relations critic Scott McInnes accused Eby of “gaslighting the public” and backtracking due to shifting public opinion on reconciliation. The Conservative party maintains its position that DRIPA should be fully repealed.

Last month, a bipartisan package of Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) appropriations bills was signed into law, funding several federal agencies central to Audubon’s priorities, including the Departments of...

Revival Gold (TSXV: RVG; US-OTC: RVLGF) is lining up two brownfield United States gold projects for the next leg of studies and drilling as bullion prices resume climbing.

The developer holds about 6 million oz. of gold resources across Mercur in Utah and Beartrack-Arnett in Idaho and is targeting more than 160,000 oz. of annual production from the first heap-leach stages of both projects. With large, permit-friendly mining states back in focus for U.S. supply and investment, the company is trying to order the builds so its team can move from Utah into Idaho.

“First up, Mercur on private ground, and then we will follow with the Beartrack-Arnett project,” CEO Hugh Agro told The Northern Miner’s Western Editor, Henry Lazenby. “And the sequencing actually works well for our development team.”

At Mercur, in a Carlin-type district about 57 km from Salt Lake City, Revival is advancing a heap-leach project towards a prefeasibility study by year-end. At Beartrack-Arnett, the timeline is roughly three-and-a-half to four years because parts of the land package require a federal review.

Watch the full interview below:

Victoria’s push to speed exploration permits, paired with a landmark approval for Skeena Resources’ (TSX, NYSE: SKE) Eskay Creek restart, is starting to rebuild confidence in British Columbia’s permitting system, Mining Association of B.C. CEO Michael Goehring said.

The province is backing the change with C$3 million in new funding, including C$1 million to add permitting capacity and C$2 million to boost the Mineral Claims Consultation Framework, which the industry has criticized as a bottleneck. Files that miss the new service standard will be escalated to the chief permitting officer for a decision within 14 days, the government said.

“Today’s exploration and development projects are tomorrow’s mines,” Goehring said in an interview at the Association for Mineral Exploration’s Roundup conference. “We need certainty and we need to make these changes systemic so fast reviews become just how things are done here.”

The year ahead holds several “proof points” after Premier David Eby put Eskay Creek, Newmont’s (NYSE, ASX: NEM) Red Chris, Teck Resources’ (TSX: TECK.B; NYSE: TECK) Highland Valley Copper mine-life plan and Centerra Gold’s (TSX: CG; NYSE: CGAU) Mount Milligan extension on a priority list for quicker reviews. The next tests for investors will be how the government clarifies the Declaration Act, advances the North Coast Transmission Line into the Golden Triangle and tackles a labour crunch that he said could require hiring 5,000 to 10,000 workers by 2035.

Watch below the full interview with The Northern Miner’s Western Editor, Henry Lazenby:

The Trump administration just employed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act to discourage coal plant closures in Colorado — repurposing measures initially intended to safeguard public health and prevent pollution to reboot the dirtiest, deadliest fossil fuel. 

Michael Hiatt, deputy managing attorney at the environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice, told DeSmog that the EPA’s action was not what the Clean Air Act intended. “In our view, it’s plainly illegal,” he said. 

Furthermore, Hiatt said the EPA’s move may have implications beyond Colorado, indicating that the agency could take similar actions that affect coal and gas plants elsewhere.

“It’s clearly EPA indicating a policy preference,” he said. “They are communicating that they’re not going to look favorably on future state plans that include coal or gas plant closures.”

As aging, inefficient coal plants barrel toward obsolescence across the U.S., the Trump administration seems dead-set on coming to their rescue. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy issued orders to keep five coal plants online past their planned retirement dates. The orders often came against their operators’ wishes and cost customers millions in the process. Federal officials, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, frequently cited increasing energy demands, including for artificial intelligence. Now, the EPA has stepped in.

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In late January, the EPA issued its final published rule rejecting Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, filed as part of longstanding Clean Air Act rules intended to increase visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. As part of the plan, Colorado had outlined its goal of closing its six remaining coal plants by 2031. Coal plants release multiple smog-forming pollutants that threaten the state’s outdoor recreation industry and harm human health. The utilities involved had voluntarily agreed to this target over the past decade. 

It could have been a routine approval. But at some point in 2025,  Colorado Springs’ city-owned utility told the EPA it no longer wanted to shut down the lone coal-fired generator at the Ray D. Nixon Power Plant, as initially proposed.

The EPA used that development to justify throwing out the entire plan, jeopardizing pollution controls and retirement timelines for industrial sites across the state — from fossil fuel plants and the state’s only oil refinery to the Denver International Airport. In its final rule, the EPA argued the single “forced closure” of a coal-fired unit showed Colorado hadn’t been careful to make sure its plan respected the constitutionally enshrined private property rights of energy providers.

“The state did not properly consider and explain whether the nonconsensual closure of Colorado Springs Utilities’ Nixon Unit 1 power plant would be an act of taking private property without compensation,” the agency wrote in a press release explaining its decision. “EPA legally cannot approve Colorado’s [plan].

Critics took issue with that assessment.

“Colorado had done such a very thorough job working with utilities, and those retirements were voluntarily proposed,” said Ulla Britt-Reeves, clean air program director at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. “So for EPA to come in and essentially say that Colorado was forcing those retirements is simply not true.”

Earthjustice’s Hiatt told DeSmog that the EPA’s decision was “unreasonable, irrational, and illegal under the Clean Air Act.”

He added that, “What this EPA action shows is this Trump administration taking an ideologically motivated stance that it is not going to do anything that might prove or even allow a coal plant to retire under its watch.”

RELATED: These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump.

Hiatt hopes the EPA’s broad disapproval in Colorado won’t impact the many other agreed-upon plant closures and pollution controls covered by the plan. But he expressed worry that the EPA’s action gives the state’s utilities and industrial operators an opportunity to “backtrack” on environmental commitments in the coming years.  

In a proposed rule issued in July, the EPA initially emphasized a different rationale for its pending decision: that closing the coal-fired unit at Nixon would threaten grid reliability — in large part due to a supposed surge in electricity demand, including from artificial intelligence. The agency accused Colorado of not taking grid reliability seriously. Under President Trump, the EPA has listed artificial intelligence (AI) development as one of the top priorities guiding its strategy, as well as restoring “American Energy Dominance,” which Trump has tied specifically to oil, coal, and natural gas.

“This Administration has found as a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy that power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand,” it wrote.

Throughout 2025, Trump administration officials, including DOE Secretary Wright, used a purported rise in energy demand driven by AI to justify fossil fuel expansion, and prevent scheduled coal plant retirements. A December 2025 analysis by DeSmog found that at least 15 coal plants pushed back their retirement dates since Trump took office — with plants often remaining open voluntarily due to projected data center demands, but sometimes due to DOE executive orders. After DeSmog’s story published, the DOE issued a flurry of new executive orders forcing additional coal generators to remain online, including plants in Indiana and Washington that were targeted for the first time.

RELATED: Q&A: Tech Billionaires’ AI Space Empire Fantasies Are ‘An Insidious Form of Climate Denial’

In its public comments, the State of Colorado argued it had in fact assessed reliability, in conjunction with utilities statewide, and that planned closures weren’t projected to contribute to an energy shortfall. 

“EPA cites nothing in the record regarding this alleged ‘rise in electricity demand’ or ‘resurgence of domestic manufacturing’ or even the ‘construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers,” the state’s Air Pollution Control Division wrote.“ The record before EPA … provides no basis to conclude that these issues materially affect Colorado or are impacted by the specific units with Closure Dates.” 

The EPA backtracked slightly in its final rule in January, insisting that grid reliability was not part of its legal determination — only private property considerations. And yet it seemed to warn Colorado against including power plant closures in any future plan, citing the rise in domestic manufacturing and “the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

“Power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand and a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy,” it wrote. “The EPA does not encourage electric generating facilities to close in the face of this energy demand.”

It added that “the EPA does not expect any state to encourage or force an electric generating facility to close in order to comply with the [Clean Air Act’s] regional haze second planning period requirements.” 

Earthjustice’s Hiatt said that statement shows EPA going beyond its disapproval of Colorado’s regional haze plan. “It’s difficult to say how this will play out,” he said, “but it does clearly indicate EPA’s policy preference —  they do not want to see coal or gas closures in regional haze plans.”

“There are a lot of still outstanding haze plans that this EPA needs to act on,” Britt-Reeves, of the National Parks Conservation Association, said. “Are they going to let good plans that actually reduce pollution be approved? That would a great place to go from here — but I don’t expect that that’s where this administration is heading.” She said the language in the final rule indicates that EPA may have “its sights on deregulating the rule itself, which is extremely concerning.”

An EPA spokesperson declined to provide comment or arrange an interview for this story. In a press release announcing its decision on Colorado’s haze plan, EPA cited “turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world” as part of its rationale.

But though EPA spoke of a “forced closure” of the Nixon plant, Colorado Springs Utilities had in fact voted to retire the plant voluntarily by December 31, 2029 — which Colorado had simply noted in its plan. In comments to DeSmog, Danielle Nieves, a spokesperson for Colorado Springs Utilities, confirmed that the utility had reversed course and asked EPA for “non-enforcement” at some point in 2025, years after the plan had been filed.

Matt Gerhart, a Sierra Club attorney, questioned whether it was appropriate for the EPA to disapprove an entire state plan based solely on an 11th-hour change of heart — a precedent that he said could give EPA an excuse to sit on plans it doesn’t like until it found some grounds for dismissal.  

“There’s nothing in EPA guidance that says what the state was supposed to do to guard against the hypothetical possibility that, five years later, a source might change its mind about a retirement,” he said. “I think EPA is really faulting the state for following the agency’s own guidelines here.” 

Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern that the EPA’s actions would set a troubling precedent, undercutting the legality of environmental regulation itself. 

“What’s next? Is any kind of clean air regulation going to be deemed to infringe upon a private property right by virtue of making it more costly and potentially forcing a company to have to shut down?” he said. “I mean, it’s a very dangerous and scary slippery slope.”

In a statement to DeSmog, Colorado’s Senior Director of Air Quality Programs Michael Ogletree said the EPA’s ruling would damage environmental protections in Colorado, which already has some of the worst air quality problems in the nation, and that the state was exploring next steps. 

“Coal plant retirement dates remain in state regulation, and many facilities have already closed or are on track to retire voluntarily because cleaner energy is more affordable and makes economic sense for consumers,” he wrote. “Colorado has demonstrated that it is possible to protect public health, reduce pollution, and maintain a reliable energy system at the same time.” 

The post Trump’s EPA Just Used the Clean Air Act to Prop up Coal Power appeared first on DeSmog.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Daisy Simmons

When Jessica Fujii was in kindergarten, she drew a picture of her future. In a “What do you want to be when you grow up?” booklet, she skipped ballerina and veterinarian and wrote down something else entirely: sea otter biologist, complete with cartoon-like otters in the great tide pool at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Fujii grew up in California’s Bay Area, and trips to Monterey and its aquarium became a regular part of her childhood. She remembers paddling alongside her dad in a kayak on Monterey Bay, watching wild otters float on their backs as they cracked open crabs and let the shells sink. Back then, she mostly took their presence for granted.

Today, as a sea otter researcher and program manager at the aquarium, she knows how close California came to losing them – and how much now depends on the fragile population that remains. Along Northern California’s coasts, sea otters help habitats endure climate impacts like warming oceans, shifting predator ranges, and harmful algal blooms by keeping underwater plant life healthy and supporting resilient ecosystems.

Fujii is still focused on individual sea otters, but she’s also tracking a bigger picture of these important creatures over time. 

A comeback story with a twist

From Fujii’s vantage point on Monterey Bay, southern sea otters – the subspecies that lives along the central California coast – are both a conservation success story and a reminder of what’s been lost.

Once hunted to near extinction for their fur, they survived off the coast of California thanks to a tiny remnant population and, later, federal protections and hands?on conservation work. These days, there are only about 3,000 southern sea otters in California, and their geographical range has shrunk to roughly 13% of the coastline they historically occupied. Their numbers have been relatively steady for years, but their range hasn’t meaningfully expanded in about two decades.

Globally, sea otters live in coastal waters from Alaska across the North Pacific to Russia, but the southern sea otter is the only population found in California – and it’s the one scientists have studied most closely for its role in kelp forests, sea grass meadows, and coastal wetlands. And over the past several decades, scientists have learned that these animals punch far above their weight, especially along the nearshore strip where land and ocean meet.

From cuddly to keystone predator

It’s easy to see why sea otters are often treated like stuffed animals brought to life. Fujii describes a tiny, five?pound pup as “basically a furball … it’s kind of like holding a kitten” before their teeth and jaws develop.

(Image credit: Courtesy Monterey Bay Aquarium)

But the illusion only lasts so long. One longtime aquarium volunteer said he “wouldn’t want to be stuck in a pool with an adult otter.” It’s a good reminder that beneath the fluff is a muscular predator built to crush crabs and urchins.

Ecologists describe sea otters as a classic keystone species, an animal whose presence has much bigger impacts on its surroundings than its numbers alone would suggest. Unlike many other marine mammals, sea otters don’t have a thick layer of blubber to keep them warm. Instead, they rely on extremely dense fur and a very high metabolic rate. 

“It’s about two times higher than similarly sized terrestrial mammals,” Fujii said, and because they can’t store energy as blubber, they need to be consuming those calories every single day.

That constant need to eat – up to a quarter of their body weight daily – helps explain why their foraging makes them major players in nearshore ecosystems. What, and how much, they eat ripples outward through food webs, shaping whether the coast is dominated by thick underwater forests and meadows, or by stripped-down, degraded seafloors that are more vulnerable to climate pressures.

Keeping kelp forests alive in a warming ocean

In recent years, a prolonged bout of unusually warm ocean conditions – made more likely and more intense by climate change – has caused kelp forests to crash along much of California, leaving behind vast “urchin barrens” where little grows besides hungry purple urchins. Around Monterey Bay, though, researchers found that sea otters ramped up their urchin eating in the remaining kelp beds, allowing those last patches of forest to hang on.

Left unchecked, urchins can mow down kelp beds and turn lush underwater forests into places where urchins have grazed away almost all the kelp. When otters are present and hunting, they thin out those urchins, giving kelp a chance to grow taller and thicker and to shelter a wide range of fish, invertebrates, and other marine life.

“Across much of their range, when sea otters consume urchins, they keep that population under control and limit how much grazing the urchins are doing on the kelp,” Fujii said. “That allows the kelp to flourish and be more abundant and provide homes for many other species.”

A recent study stitched together more than a century of kelp data along the California coast using old maps and satellite images. The analysis found steep losses in the floating kelp canopy in southern and northern regions where otters remain absent, but notable long?term growth in kelp along the Central Coast – exactly where sea otter populations have rebounded.

Healthy kelp forests, in turn, absorb wave energy and soften the punch of storms that are projected to grow more intense with climate change, reducing erosion along vulnerable shorelines. Scientists are still debating how much long?term carbon storage kelp forests actually provide, said Fujii, since much of that kelp washes ashore and decomposes.

But when otters keep kelp alive, they also maintain rich, complex coastal ecosystems that are better able to absorb climate shocks than bare seafloors.

In Elkhorn Slough, cleaning up blue carbon habitats

The otter’s climate story doesn’t end in the open?coast kelp forests. As the ocean absorbs more than 90% of the excess heat from climate warming pollution and loses oxygen, many marine animals are struggling to cope with warmer, more acidic, less hospitable water. Coastal plants and algae – kelp, eelgrass, and other seaweeds – are emerging as unlikely allies, drawing down carbon, buffering waves, and giving stressed species places to hide and feed.

In sheltered estuaries like Elkhorn Slough, a coastal inlet where freshwater meets seawater just inland from Monterey Bay, researchers have found that sea otters can help keep underwater sea grass meadows and nearby marshes intact. Around a hundred otters now make their home in the slough, one of California’s last great coastal wetlands and a hot spot for birds, fish, and other marine life.

The connection runs through the food web: Otters eat crabs. When crab numbers drop, tiny grazers like sea slugs survive and multiply. These grazers don’t eat the sea grass; instead, they scrape away algae that builds up on the grass blades. That keeps the meadows healthy even in estuaries loaded with pollution from fertilizers and other runoff.

The marsh connection works differently. When shore crab numbers explode, the crabs burrow into marsh banks and chew on plant roots. That destabilizes shorelines and speeds up erosion. By eating those crabs, otters slow the loss of marsh edges that protect nearby communities from flooding and storm surge.

All of this matters for climate because sea grass beds and adjacent marshes are “blue carbon” habitats – coastal ecosystems that soak up and lock away carbon in plants and underlying sediments while also stabilizing shorelines and supporting fish and birds. California’s latest climate adaptation strategy explicitly calls out eelgrass as a blue?carbon tool, part of a broader push to protect and restore coastal ecosystems that both store carbon and buffer people from rising seas.

(Image credit: Courtesy Monterey Bay Aquarium)

Climate’s double edge: Ally and victim

Despite all the ways otters support coastal ecosystems, they’re not immune to the forces reshaping those places. Fujii and her colleagues have documented a sharp rise in sea otters injured or killed by white sharks – often juveniles that deliver a single, exploratory bite and don’t even eat the animal. Research she worked on has linked those juvenile sharks’ northward shift to warmer waters, a trend expected to continue as the ocean heats up. Aquarium researchers have also found that otters are more likely to be bitten in areas where the kelp canopy has thinned, potentially leaving them more exposed as they rest and forage near the surface.

At the same time, says Fujii, sea otters are increasingly exposed to harmful algal blooms that produce domoic acid, a harmful toxin. In otters, heavy exposure can cause sudden, fatal strandings, while lower?level, chronic doses can quietly damage their hearts over time, leading to lethal heart disease years after an initial bloom has passed. Fujii also worries about more frequent and intense storms, which can separate moms and pups and leave tiny, still?dependent otters stranded on beaches.

The species is bolstering coastal ecosystems against climate pressures, while facing mounting climate threats of its own.

Why protecting sea otters matters for everyone

In 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided southern sea otters would retain protection under the Endangered Species Act, reflecting how vulnerable the population still is. Unlike many other listed species, though, they still don’t have an officially designated “critical habitat,” even though their nearshore environment is clearly central to their survival.

Without more room to grow or formal habitat protections, even a seemingly stable population can be vulnerable. 

“As we continue to see the impacts of climate change, the stress on this population will continue to pile on,” Fujii said.

Even if they were immune to the impacts of climate change, sea otters clearly won’t solve the climate crisis on their own. They won’t erase emissions or single-handedly save the coast. But research over the past several decades has shown that they can shift the balance in the places they still inhabit, keeping kelp forests from collapsing into urchin barrens, maintaining sea grass meadows and salt marshes, and shoring up natural defenses that coastal communities will increasingly rely on as seas rise and storms intensify.

All this makes them more than just a charismatic species in need of saving. 

“The hope is that by focusing on the recovery of this species, we can inspire protection of other animals and their habitats, and recognize the benefits people get when we protect those places,” Fujji said. “Basically, everyone wins when we protect otters.”

In a century defined by hard climate trade-offs, sea otters offer a reminder that some choices still deliver genuine win – wins: safeguard a beloved predator, and you safeguard the coastal habitats – and human communities – that depend on the same resilient, living shorelines.

On Friday, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) filed an attorney disciplinary complaint against Gordon Kromberg, the federal prosecutor who reviewed and signed the search warrant application targeting Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson.

The complaint notes that Kromberg appears to have violated an ethical rule that requires lawyers to reveal relevant legal authority to the court, even if it undermines their arguments. Recently unsealed court records disclose what many suspected: The government failed to alert the court that authorized the warrant to the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, a federal law that, in most cases, forbids the use of search warrants for journalistic work product and documentary materials.

The following statement can be attributed to Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for FPF:

“Kromberg and the government omitted a federal law that should have prohibited the raid of Hannah Natanson’s home when applying for a search warrant. That choice now threatens to expose Natanson’s sources and cripple her ability to report, while also sending a warning shot to journalists and whistleblowers nationwide.
“Disciplinary bodies cannot look the other way and ignore misconduct that threatens the First Amendment, particularly from an administration with a long history of misleading judges and everyone else. When prosecutors abuse their power to facilitate efforts to silence reporting and intimidate news sources, disciplinary authorities must hold them accountable and impose real consequences.”

Read the complaint here.

The Revive Gaza’s Farmland Project launched by the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), is a coalition of farmers working to restore and cultivate farmland across Gaza. They hope to bolster food security and food sovereignty for Palestinian people.

Less than five percent of the Gaza Strip’s total land remains available for cultivation, after cropland areas have been damaged or made inaccessible to farmers, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). But rather than focus on the destruction, Razan Zuayter, Founder and Chairperson of the APN, tells Food Tank that the Project aims to “highlight what endures.”

Since March 2024, the Project has supported the cultivation of 1,341 dunums (~331 acres) of land, producing over 7 million kilograms of vegetables including eggplants, zucchini, cucumber, tomato, melon, and molokhia. The grassroots connection between farmers and families allows vegetables to directly reach over 12,000 people under siege, the Project reports.

This comes at a time when the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations report that Gaza has faced systematic starvation. According to the latest U.N. analysis, the recent ceasefire helped to offset famine conditions, but food security in Gaza is still under threat. More than three-quarters of the population face acute hunger and malnutrition.

“Gaza’s children are no longer facing deadly famine, but they remain in grave danger,” says Lucia Elmi, UNICEF Director of Emergency Operations.

Zuayter says the Revive Gaza’s Farmland Project is working to address the dire situation. But under the Defense Export Control Law, Israel regulates the entrance of all goods into the Gaza Strip and restricts items it dubs as having potential for both civilian and military use. Since 2023, these restrictions prohibit the entry of food sources like tomato seeds, date pits, or coriander seeds.

“By reviving Gaza’s agricultural capacities through internal procurement and local production, we strengthen a food system resistant to blockade and man-made famine,” Zuayter tells Food Tank. “We are breaking the siege from within.”

The Project has distributed over 2.29 million seedlings and approximately 2,939 kg of seeds, in addition to produce baskets, fishing nets, and poultry units. Zuayter adds that they are also working to cultivate an additional 90 dunnums (~22 acres) of land with potatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, and other crops, as well as 30,000 fruit-bearing trees. They are also in the process of restoring three water wells, 17 greenhouses, and 52 beehives.

Cultivating a diversity of crops is essential to upkeeping the legacy of Palestine’s diverse agricultural ecosystem, which Zuayter explains has been targeted by a “colonial ecocide.” Key historic resources like olive groves and below-ground water sources have been destroyed or occupied, and Palestinians have been legally prohibited from harvesting certain traditional plants and crops called “state property” by the Israeli Government. The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture reports that more than 2.5 million trees have been uprooted by Israeli forces since 1967. This includes 1 million olive trees, which the U.N. notes are a primary source of food and income for many Palestinians.

The restrictions on procuring and harvesting traditional crops “deliberately casts Palestinian traditions of knowledge and stewardship of the land as ecologically harmful,” Zuayter tells Food Tank. The U.N. Trade and Development Conference reports that domestic producers are undermined by Israeli and Western imports that flood Palestinian markets, eliminating the diversity of Palestine’s agricultural system. “Crop diversity is foundational to Palestine’s agricultural and political sovereignty,” Zuayter says.

Zuayter sees agriculture as an act not of resilience, but resistance. “We reject a colonial ‘resilience’ that is framed in terms of passive shock absorption,” she tells Food Tank. Instead, they channel sumud muqawama, a term that refers to “a steadfast resistance that acts to dismantle the structures that produce vulnerability.” She explains this ideology through the motto of the APN’s Million Tree Campaign, which aims to replant olive trees and other fruit-bearing trees on Palestinian land: “They uproot one…we plant ten.”

To date, the APN has planted over 3 million trees and restored critical infrastructure to help farmers to remain rooted on their land.

Based on the FAO’s identification of remaining land available for cultivation and the Project’s yield so far, the APN estimates that they can produce over 12 million kilograms of food grown “for and by the Palestinians of Gaza.” It is, she says, a “a living testament of Palestinian rootedness and agricultural wisdom that long predates empire.”

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Photo courtesy of Arab Group for the Protection of Nature

The post Reviving Gaza’s Farmland to Reclaim Food Sovereignty appeared first on Food Tank.

The version of record of this article appears in The Globe and Mail. 

By Megan Shipman and David Mitchell

Megan Shipman is a behavioural neuroscientist and a research fellow with the Cascade Institute’s polycrisis program at Royal Roads University. David Mitchell is the Cascade Institute’s impact lead.

The U.S. President has said his attack on Venezuela and threats against other neighbours are motivated by a policy of hemispheric domination he calls the “Donroe Doctrine.”

Neuroscience, however, suggests a further motivation: the Dopamine Doctrine.

American foreign policy, by this view, is no longer driven by national interest, or even naked self-interest, but instead by Donald Trump’s hunt for dopamine rewards, conditioned by recent high-stakes military strikes on Iran and Venezuela.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently observed that with Mr. Trump today, “the usual tools international observers bring to foreign policy analysis – political science, economics, sociology, and the like – are not nearly as important as psychology, both individual and social. The evolution of Trump’s policies can only be understood in relation to his own mind and motivations.”

Canada must now grapple with the reality that our nuclear-armed neighbour is menacing the world to neurochemically reward a solipsist who recently declared that “my own mind” is “the only thing that can stop me.”

To confront the threat, we first need to get inside that mind – with some help from neuroscience and learning theory.

Learning theory tells us that rewards shape behaviours. We’ll repeat rewarded behaviours, and refrain from punished behaviours. At a neurochemical level, those rewards release the feel-good neurochemical dopamine.

Dopamine neurons in the brain respond to rewards in the environment. Generally, the larger the reward, the more dopamine released. But the element of surprise matters even more than the size of the reward: dopamine neurons will stop responding to a reward once we’ve learned to expect it, and respond more forcefully when a reward exceeds our expectations.

Dopamine prediction error, as this phenomenon is called, helps explain why behaviours tend to escalate, sometimes in harmful ways: a reward we’ve come to expect doesn’t cut it anymore.

Mr. Trump, who feeds on reactions, has been conditioned to provoke even more extreme reactions to get the payoff he’s looking for. Each successful escalation raises the reward expectation threshold. And each greater reaction reinforces his increasingly dangerous behaviour.

While commentators commonly reach for the language of addiction and tolerance to explain Mr. Trump’s destructive tendencies, learning theory is more useful for understanding what motivates behaviour.

Tolerance describes physical adaptations that make a drug dose less effective over many uses, requiring a higher dose to cause the same initial effects. This pattern is well-established with commonly abused drugs, but controversial for behavioural addictions such as gambling.

Reward prediction error, however, describes the way dopamine reward neurons respond to reinforcers. It’s a critical process during learning: a surprising reward leads us to repeat the preceding behaviour.

Last June, Mr. Trump struck dopamine gold with Operation Midnight Hammer, a hit-and-run bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities followed by a quick declaration of truce and a stubborn claim of victory.

Mr. Trump’s attack on Venezuela follows the same pattern: months of escalation, a lightning attack, a hasty retreat, and a declaration of victory.

Riding the high, Mr. Trump has since threatened Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran, and Canada, revelling in the resulting outrage.

Dopamine-seeking behaviour loops often self-correct because rewards for excessive indulgence are accompanied by punishment. Drink too much and you’ll suffer a killer hangover, and maybe a blooming sense of shame over some barely remembered transgression. This mix of rewards and punishments bounds our behaviours.

But Mr. Trump, uniquely shameless, powerful, prosecution-proof, and adored by his base, insulates himself from such punishment. And he seems to enjoy both positive and negative attention, so praise and censure alike scratch the itch.

Most worryingly, Mr. Trump’s aggression has gone largely unpunished, reinforcing his self-perception as a decisive winner.

So how do you short-circuit the Dopamine Doctrine? Condemnation from United Nations members doesn’t cut it. Condemnation from other nations, even NATO allies, doesn’t cut it – he’s long expressed his disdain for multilateralism.

The only way to break the cycle is to create a genuine cost that matters to Mr. Trump. The loss of his base, say, or the loss of his donors. Public humiliation, bond market panic, or military defeat.

At the neurochemical level, when Mr. Trump’s actions are less rewarding than he expects, a negative prediction error leads him to reverse course. Hence the acronym “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out.

The Dopamine Doctrine suggests that Mr. Trump will pursue larger and larger hits – not just to get the reaction he craves, but to exceed the reaction he expects. When recent hits include bombing capital cities, seizing oil tankers, and perp-walking a head of state, no one is safe.

Read article in the Globe and Mail The post Can neuroscience shed light on Trump’s new world disorder? appeared first on Cascade Institute.