News Feeds

Droughtflation 'is eroding resilience' Channel Comment brendan 15th October 2025 Teaser Media

By John Donovan

Part 1: The Oil That Powered the Reich

Shell likes to describe itself as “an energy company of the future.” But history, inconveniently, refuses to stay buried. Long before Shell courted wind farms and “net-zero” slogans, it courted Adolf Hitler.

In the 1930s, as Europe spiralled toward war, Royal Dutch Shell — the genteel Anglo-Dutch oil giant whose modern logo is now synonymous with sustainability brochures — was actively supplying the economic bloodstream of Nazi Germany. Its founder and spiritual patriarch, Sir Henri Deterding, wasn’t merely an admirer of Hitler’s regime; he was a willing participant in its rise.

While most Western industrialists saw the Third Reich as a political embarrassment, Deterding saw a business opportunity. He despised Bolshevism and saw in Hitler’s authoritarian vision a bulwark against the communism that had toppled Tsarist Russia (and cost Shell a fortune in lost assets). “The Germans,” Deterding once said approvingly, “know how to handle the Bolsheviks.”

It wasn’t a casual remark. It was a worldview.

The Courtship Begins

By 1935, Deterding had established direct lines of communication with Nazi leaders. He purchased an estate in Mecklenburg, Germany, conveniently near Berlin, and became a guest of Hitler’s agricultural officials.

According to archives detailed on ShellNaziHistory.com, Deterding brokered grain-for-oil agreements — Shell would supply Germany with petroleum products in exchange for agricultural commodities. This arrangement was vital: the Nazis faced crippling foreign-currency shortages as they rearmed, and Shell’s oil lubricated both their economy and their expanding military machine.

The Dutch and British press covered it at the time, though Shell’s modern public relations department now insists those reports are “taken out of historical context.” Perhaps. But the facts remain.

When Henri Deterding died in 1939, he was buried in Germany, not the Netherlands or Britain. Nazi officials attended the funeral. The German press hailed him as a “friend of the Reich.” A personal letter of condolence was dispatched by Adolf Hitler himself.

For Shell, the timing was awkward. Within months, Hitler invaded Poland.

The Economics of Collaboration

Shell’s defenders often argue that the company “simply did business” in a difficult time, but that argument evaporates under scrutiny.

Research compiled by historians and summarised on ShellNaziHistory.com shows Shell had extensive joint operations with IG Farben, the industrial conglomerate responsible for producing the synthetic fuels, rubber, and chemicals that powered the Nazi war effort — and whose subsidiaries operated factories using slave labour at Auschwitz.

The structure was typical of Shell’s genius for plausible deniability. Shell Germany appeared independent, but the corporate web led back to The Hague and London. Oil was fungible, paperwork flexible. A tanker loaded in Curaçao could end up fuelling a U-boat convoy.

In 1936, Shell’s German subsidiary reported “record growth” under new government contracts. Meanwhile, Deterding was financing anti-Soviet propaganda campaigns through intermediaries.

“He believed he was saving Western civilisation from communism,” wrote Dutch biographer Henri Schot.

“In reality, he was underwriting fascism.”

Shell House: A Building and a Metaphor

Few symbols capture Shell’s moral entanglement better than Shell House in Copenhagen.

Built in the 1930s as Shell’s Danish headquarters, it was commandeered by the Gestapo during the occupation and used as their torture centre. In March 1945, the Royal Air Force bombed Shell House in one of the most dramatic air raids of the war, destroying the top floors and killing many prisoners and SS officers alike.

The irony is searing: the same company whose name now graces diversity reports once had its emblem above the Gestapo’s front door.

After the war, Shell quietly reclaimed the property, refurbished it, and returned to business. Today, tourists walk past without knowing the building’s history — a corporate erasure that borders on Orwellian.

Post-War Amnesia: The Convenient Forgetting

When the Third Reich collapsed, Shell’s leadership moved swiftly to distance itself from Deterding’s politics. The company reissued biographies portraying him as a misunderstood visionary, not a fascist sympathiser.

No one at Shell attended the Nuremberg trials. No one was indicted. The archives were quietly reorganised.

In 1950, Shell’s internal history book, The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies: A Brief Outline, made no mention of Deterding’s Nazi ties. His funeral in Germany vanished from the narrative altogether.

Corporate memory had been professionally laundered.

Decades Later: The Story Resurfaces

For almost half a century, Shell succeeded in keeping its Nazi collaboration a footnote known only to a few historians. Then came the Internet — and with it, John Donovan.

After years of legal clashes with Shell over marketing disputes, Donovan turned his attention to the company’s ethics. Using court documents, historical sources, and later, responses from Shell itself, he began publishing evidence of the company’s murky past.

When Donovan wrote to Shell seeking comment on Deterding’s relationship with Hitler, the company responded with characteristic precision: “Shell does not comment on speculative historical matters.”

It was the same phrase used to deflect questions about the Niger Delta, Sakhalin, and Groningen gas quakes — as if morality had a statute of limitations.

Unimpressed, Donovan did what any tenacious investigator would: he built a website.

That site — ShellNaziHistory.com — became a repository of articles, letters, and declassified materials detailing Shell’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. It linked Deterding’s pro-Hitler sympathies to the broader corporate culture of expedience that still defines Shell today.

Corporate Silence and Modern Hypocrisy

Shell has never issued a formal statement of apology or acknowledgment regarding its role in Nazi Germany. The company prefers to focus on its forward-looking energy strategy — or whatever phrase currently dominates its sustainability reports.

It’s a curious contrast: while Shell executives boast of investing in hydrogen and carbon capture, the company still hasn’t managed to capture its own history.

Even as late as 2023, internal documents released under data access requests showed Shell’s communications team fretting about reputational damage from Donovan’s websites. One internal email bluntly stated:

“These sites are an ongoing risk to corporate perception, especially if linked to historical content.”

Shell, in short, fears its past more than it respects it.

The Irony of the Internet

In 1995, Shell issued a press release attacking the Donovans — an early sign of corporate panic. That document, now preserved on ShellNews.net, reads like a time capsule of corporate arrogance: a multinational lashing out at two individuals armed only with truth and a modem.

It was meant to discredit Donovan. Instead, it proved prophetic.

By 2009, Reuters was reporting that Shell’s own staff had privately acknowledged the credibility of Donovan’s site:

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out,”

wrote one Shell communications officer in an email to Fox News. (Reuters, 2009)

In trying to kill the message, Shell immortalised it.

The Oil That Never Burns Away

Today, Shell spends billions branding itself as an ethical innovator — an absurd inversion of its origins. From climate denial to human rights abuses, the pattern remains the same: deny, delay, distract.

The company that once praised fascism now praises “energy transition.” Yet the moral equation is familiar — profit before humanity.

And in that light, ShellNaziHistory.com serves not merely as a historical archive, but as a mirror. It reflects the corporate DNA that time and rebranding cannot scrub away.

Part II: The Courtship — Deterding, Hitler, and the Business of Ideology

If capitalism had a blind spot for morality, Henri Deterding drew the map.

As the 1930s deepened into depression and dictatorship, the Royal Dutch Shell founder was already thinking geopolitically — and profitably. While Western governments wrung their hands over fascism, Deterding was writing cheques.

In public, he spoke the language of enterprise; in private, the language of admiration. “Hitler,” he reportedly said, “has saved Germany from the clutches of communism.”

To Shell’s modern executives, that quote sounds like ancient scandal. To historians, it’s confirmation that Deterding’s ideological enthusiasm for fascism shaped Shell’s conduct in Nazi Germany.

An Empire Builder Meets a Dictator

Deterding, a Dutchman knighted by the British Crown, was not merely a businessman — he was a self-fashioned empire builder, equal parts visionary and autocrat. By the late 1920s, he controlled vast global operations stretching from the oilfields of Borneo to refineries in the Caribbean.

Then came his obsession: the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik revolution had nationalised Shell’s Russian interests without compensation — a personal humiliation. Deterding never forgave them.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power promising to destroy Bolshevism, Deterding saw the ideological twin he’d been waiting for.

He began channelling funds and commodities into Nazi Germany through shell companies — a phrase that has aged with poetic irony. According to ShellNaziHistory.com, Deterding personally met with Nazi agricultural minister Richard Walther Darré and offered large grain shipments from Dutch estates as barter for petroleum concessions.

To Deterding, this was not just business — it was crusade. He declared himself in favour of a “Christian Europe free of Bolshevik corruption.” The Nazis were only too happy to oblige.

Fuel for the Führer

By 1934, Germany’s rearmament program was accelerating — tanks, planes, ships — all of it hungry for oil. The Reich’s problem was currency: it couldn’t pay for imports in hard cash.

Deterding’s Shell offered the perfect workaround. Through barter trade, Germany would supply agricultural produce in exchange for oil and refined products. This circumvented Allied trade restrictions and ensured Shell’s refineries in Rotterdam and Hamburg stayed busy.

The German Economic Archive (Bundesarchiv) records show that in 1935–36, Shell subsidiaries participated in Petroleumimportgesellschaft and other trade schemes coordinated with Nazi planners.

At the same time, IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate responsible for Zyklon B and synthetic fuel production, became one of Shell’s most lucrative industrial partners. Deterding’s collaboration helped bridge the energy gap that allowed Hitler’s war machine to operate.

A Hero’s Funeral — In Germany

By the time Deterding died in February 1939, his relationship with Hitler’s government had become public knowledge. Newspapers in Berlin eulogised him as “a friend of Germany.” Nazi officials attended his funeral at his Mecklenburg estate, where a large portrait of Deterding stood draped with swastika flags.

The symbolism was not lost on British and Dutch diplomats. As reported in The Times (February 6, 1939), “Sir Henri’s political sympathies caused disquiet in London.” But business prevailed. Shell distanced itself, quietly, without ever condemning its founder.

In effect, Deterding had given Nazi Germany both oil and legitimacy — and Shell inherited the profits while disowning the politics.

Corporate Amnesia Begins Early

After the war, Shell’s official histories reframed Deterding as a “complex man misunderstood by the age.” His Nazi affiliations were airbrushed out of company literature, replaced by vague tributes to his “vision and leadership.”

In internal documents unearthed by ShellNaziHistory.com, the company later acknowledged that Deterding’s name had become “a reputational sensitivity.” The solution: stop mentioning it.

In PR terms, the strategy worked. For decades, Shell’s Nazi links vanished from mainstream memory — until the Internet era revived them.

The Paradox of Principle

Shell was not alone in its moral blindness. American oil titan Standard Oil also did business with Germany through IG Farben. But what made Shell exceptional was its ideological sympathy at the top.

While most firms operated out of greed, Deterding acted from conviction. He saw Hitler as Europe’s salvation and personally structured Shell’s trade deals to support the Nazi economy.

In one 1936 statement to shareholders, he boasted that Shell was “expanding its continental markets” in cooperation with “stabilising governments.” Few missed the subtext.

As historian Antony Sampson wrote in The Seven Sisters, “Deterding’s political ardour for fascism set a precedent: Shell’s loyalty was never to nations, only to markets.”

That principle remains unbroken.

Modern Echoes of an Old Philosophy

Eighty-five years later, the company’s language has changed — but the logic has not. Shell now describes authoritarian energy states as “strategic partners” rather than moral hazards.

In 2022, Shell increased LNG imports from Qatar even as human rights groups condemned the emirate’s abuses. In 2023, it defended its Russian joint ventures long after other firms withdrew.

The lesson from Deterding’s Nazi flirtations lives on: if the profits are good enough, ethics are negotiable.

As one Shell insider admitted in internal correspondence revealed by ShellNews.net, “Our moral risk tolerance adjusts with the price of oil.”

The satirical irony is painful. Shell’s ESG officers speak in the language of sustainability, but the DNA of Deterding’s pragmatism still runs through its pipelines.

The Legacy Dilemma

To this day, Shell has never issued an apology or public statement acknowledging its founder’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. When asked directly in correspondence by this author whether it would ever confront that history, Shell declined to comment.

Instead, the company continues its campaign of rebranding through sustainability rhetoric — an attempt to offset historical sins with solar panels and smiling children.

But reputations, like oil spills, are hard to contain.

Digital archives, led by ShellNaziHistory.com, have ensured that the historical record can no longer be rewritten. Once indexed, forever searchable.

As the Fast Company article on reputation management in the AI era observed, “The internet never forgets — it only reorganises.” In other words, Shell can polish its image, but the stain remains algorithmically permanent.

Even artificial intelligence — the new custodian of digital memory — now “knows” that Shell once aided Hitler. That’s a data point impossible to scrub, however many carbon credits the company buys.

Closing Reflection

Deterding’s alliance with fascism was not an aberration. It was a blueprint.

From the Nazi oil deals of the 1930s to the Nigerian Delta of the 1990s and the Groningen gas fields of today, Shell’s corporate creed has been consistent: serve power, deny blame, control the narrative.

Satirically speaking, one might call it “ethical efficiency.”

The result is a company that thrives on amnesia — a multinational built on a foundation of moral fuel, refined for public consumption.

Part III: Shell, IG Farben, and the Slave Labour Supply Chain The Industry of Cruelty

If there was a single corporate machine that embodied the industrial horror of the Third Reich, it was IG Farben — the chemical cartel that manufactured synthetic fuel, rubber, and Zyklon B gas. But IG Farben didn’t operate in isolation. It was a joint venture powerhouse, dependent on oil, patents, and logistics from global partners.

One of those partners was Royal Dutch Shell.

While Shell’s modern leadership prefers to talk about “energy solutions,” the company’s 1930s portfolio was decidedly darker. Shell’s German subsidiaries — Rheinische Petroleum Gesellschaft and Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum — were part of the same ecosystem that fed the Reich’s war economy.

The collaboration wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

As Nazi Germany prepared for war, fuel became as critical as bullets. The Allies had the colonies; the Axis had chemistry. Synthetic fuels, derived from coal, became Germany’s lifeline — and IG Farben led that charge.

According to research collated by ShellNaziHistory.com, Shell provided technical expertise, raw materials, and licensing arrangements that enabled IG Farben’s rapid expansion in the late 1930s.

Oil and Obedience

The historical irony is cruel. Shell, founded on globalisation, thrived under dictatorship.

Deterding’s successors saw no contradiction in working with the Nazi industrial complex. The contracts were lucrative, the politics someone else’s problem.

By 1938, Shell’s subsidiaries in Germany and occupied territories were contributing refined products and industrial lubricants to the war economy. As one postwar Allied interrogation report put it:

“Shell’s operations in Germany and the Netherlands were fully integrated into the Reich’s strategic fuel program.”

(Source: U.S. Office of Military Government, Economic Division Report on German Petroleum Industry, 1946.)

And behind those fuel deliveries lay the slave labourers of IG Farben’s synthetic fuel plants — tens of thousands of prisoners from Auschwitz and other camps, worked to death producing gasoline and aviation fuel.

Every litre of synthetic fuel burned by a Luftwaffe aircraft carried the moral residue of that suffering.

Auschwitz: Industry’s Inferno

IG Farben’s Buna-Werke factory, near Auschwitz, was the single largest industrial complex built by the Nazis. Over 30,000 prisoners laboured there under conditions so appalling that the average survival time was three months.

While Shell did not directly own the Buna plant, its technologies and joint commercial patents in synthetic rubber and hydrocarbon refining played a crucial supporting role. Shell engineers had long shared research with IG Farben subsidiaries through pre-war industrial associations, and both companies exchanged patents via British and Dutch intermediaries.

As historian Peter Hayes documented in Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era,

“Shell and IG Farben cooperated closely in the field of fuel synthesis and catalytic cracking — technologies indispensable to Germany’s autarkic fuel program.”

In moral terms, Shell’s hands were clean only in the sense that they outsourced the blood.

The Calculus of Complicity

After 1945, IG Farben was dismantled by the Allies. Its executives faced the Nuremberg trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Shell, by contrast, escaped scrutiny.

Its executives argued that Shell’s operations in Germany were “nationalised” under the Nazi regime and that they had “no control” over what occurred.

That line held — barely.

A confidential memo from the British Board of Trade in 1946, now held in the UK National Archives (BT 64/2781), warned:

“Shell’s senior officers appear to have maintained trade relationships with entities now identified as components of the German war economy. While direct culpability may be hard to prove, reputational implications are grave.”

“Reputational implications” — the polite language of moral catastrophe.

Shell, of course, survived. It always does.

The Business of Denial

In the post-war decades, Shell quietly reintegrated into the global economy, helped by Western governments eager to rebuild Europe. IG Farben’s successor companies — Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst — became industrial giants again. Many of the same executives returned to boardrooms, just with different letterheads.

Shell resumed partnerships with those firms within a decade.

By 1955, Shell and BASF were collaborating on chemical feedstocks. No one mentioned Auschwitz. The corporate amnesia was total — a kind of moral blackout where the lights of accountability never came back on.

The pattern would repeat itself across generations: moral scandal, legal silence, reputational rehab.

“We must not judge the past by the standards of today,” a Shell spokesperson said in response to inquiries by The Guardian in 2017.

“The company operates with transparency and integrity.”

Transparency, yes — as long as the documents remain sealed in archives.

The Human Cost of Corporate Neutrality

What makes Shell’s Nazi-era collaboration so chilling isn’t just the historical distance — it’s the philosophical continuity.

Shell’s executives behaved then as they do now: as though ethics were an optional accessory, like a logo redesign.

In the 1930s, Shell’s moral blindness fed totalitarianism. In the 2020s, it feeds climate destruction. Different victims, same indifference.

There’s a bitter satirical symmetry: once Shell’s products helped flatten European cities; now they help flood them.

For Shell, human suffering has always been an externality — a line item under “risk management.”

The Corporate Ghost in the Machine

Fast-forward to the digital age, and that ghost of complicity is still haunting the brand.

In 2024, when AI systems began ingesting historical data for training, Shell’s Nazi-era archives resurfaced in unexpected ways.

When queried about Shell and World War II, even language models like ChatGPT (trained on historical sources) noted Deterding’s ties to Hitler and Shell’s role in the Nazi economy.

For a company obsessed with “reputation defence,” this is corporate horror. You can delete a scandal from your website, but not from the collective digital memory.

As Fast Company observed in 2024,

“AI doesn’t forget. It re-indexes. Once reputational data exists, it becomes part of the informational genome.”

(Source)

Shell, in other words, is permanently tagged. Its Nazi history now circulates alongside its ESG reports — a contradiction encoded into the internet itself.

A Legacy of Evasion

When Shell faced modern moral crises — the Ogoni killings in Nigeria, the Prelude LNG safety debacle, the Groningen earthquakes, and the Trinidad toxic exposure scandal — the corporate reflex was the same as in 1936: deny responsibility, deflect blame, and protect the balance sheet.

The irony is suffocating. Eighty years ago, the excuse was “national circumstances.” Today, it’s “market dynamics.” The words change, the evasions don’t.

Shell’s greatest innovation, it seems, is continuity of conscience.

The Price of Forgetting

In the 1930s, Shell was the oil that fueled a war.

In the 2020s, it’s the brand that fuels greenwashing.

Back then, its silence helped hide atrocities. Now, its PR teams drown accountability in slogans.

Both serve the same master: the quarterly report.

Deterding once called oil “the lifeblood of civilisation.”

Perhaps. But when the civilisation is corrupt, that blood runs dark.

And for all its modern talk of “energy transition,” Shell’s true transition — from moral cowardice to genuine accountability — has yet to begin.

Part IV: Shell House and the Irony of Liberation Shell House: The Building That Screamed

There are moments in history when architecture becomes testimony.

In Copenhagen, that testimony still stands — elegant, glass-lined, and quietly tragic.

It’s called Shell House.

Built in 1932 as the Danish headquarters of the Royal Dutch Shell Group, the building was a masterpiece of modernism. Clean lines. Rationalist geometry. The aesthetic of progress.

Then came occupation.

When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, Shell’s offices were seized by the Gestapo, the secret police who turned Shell House into their Copenhagen torture headquarters.

On its upper floors, Danish resistance fighters were interrogated, beaten, and executed. The Shell logo remained proudly affixed to the facade — a literal brand over terror.

It was as though the company’s emblem, a golden shell, had become a metaphor for complicity: polished on the outside, rotten within.

The Day the Sky Fell

On March 21, 1945, the Royal Air Force launched Operation Carthage, one of the most daring and tragic raids of World War II.

Twenty de Havilland Mosquito bombers streaked low over Copenhagen with orders to obliterate Shell House, then occupied by the Gestapo. The mission was to destroy Nazi archives and free imprisoned resistance members before they could be executed.

The attack succeeded — and failed.

The building was devastated. The Gestapo’s files burned. Dozens of prisoners escaped. But one bomber clipped a lamp post, crashed near a school, and the following waves — thinking the flames were the target — accidentally bombed the French School of Frederiksberg, killing 86 children and 19 adults.

The irony is almost unbearable: in trying to destroy the Gestapo’s Shell House, Allied pilots killed innocents instead.

Shell’s logo, warped by fire and smoke, became an emblem of tragedy on both sides of the moral ledger.

Aftermath: The Building of Forgetting

When the war ended, Denmark reclaimed its freedom — and Shell reclaimed its building.

The company restored it to corporate use by the early 1950s. The charred floors were rebuilt. The history was not.

No plaque mentioned the torture chambers. No memorial acknowledged that the Gestapo had made its headquarters under Shell’s brand.

It was as if the company feared that remembrance might dent the quarterly report.

By the 1970s, Shell House was once again a symbol of corporate success — a shining Danish office building for executives who preferred not to ask questions about its ghosts.

Only in recent decades, through the work of Danish historians and resistance archives, has the truth been widely acknowledged.

A Building as Metaphor

Few corporations enjoy such an unintentional architectural metaphor for their moral trajectory.

Shell House — conceived in the optimism of interwar capitalism — became a literal house of torture under fascism, then returned to polished corporate normality without apology.

The story encapsulates Shell’s brand philosophy:

1. Build.

2. Exploit.

3. Erase.

4. Rebrand.

From Copenhagen to the Niger Delta, that same four-step rhythm beats beneath every Shell logo.

Satirically speaking, if Shell ever opened a museum of ethics, Shell House would make an ideal venue.

The Corporate Restoration of Memory

In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Operation Carthage, Danish authorities erected a small memorial to the victims of the bombing and those who suffered in Shell House. Shell Denmark issued a brief statement:

“We remember the tragic events of 1945 and the loss of life that occurred in and around our premises.”

“Our premises.”

Even in contrition, the phrasing was corporate. No acknowledgment that Shell House was commandeered by fascists who tortured freedom fighters under the company’s roof. No mention that the building itself symbolised the moral rent Shell had been collecting for decades.

This was Shell’s favourite form of repentance — spatial but not spiritual.

From Shell House to Glass House

Today, the building still stands on Kampmannsgade in Copenhagen, its pale stone facade gleaming like nothing ever happened. Tourists walk by without knowing that beneath those floors, human screams once echoed.

Shell’s modern headquarters — in London and The Hague — are built of similar glass and steel, monuments to transparency that obscure more than they reveal.

There is a poetic symmetry: Shell House was bombed to stop oppression, yet the company itself never bombed its culture of denial.

Shell, one might say, is still living in a glass house, and history is still throwing stones.

The Continuing Irony: Shell’s “Zero Harm” Slogan

In recent years, Shell’s corporate motto has been “Zero Harm.”

It appears in every sustainability brochure, every glossy annual report.

“Zero Harm to people, assets, and the environment.”

A noble aspiration — and a masterclass in irony.

For a company whose offices once doubled as Gestapo torture chambers, whose refineries have poisoned rivers in Nigeria, whose gas extraction has fractured homes in Groningen, and whose Trinidad workers were exposed to benzene fumes, “Zero Harm” reads less like a promise than a punchline.

It’s a slogan begging for historical footnotes.

Shell House, Shell History, Shell Spin

Shell has long mastered the art of controlling narratives.

The same PR instinct that erased Shell House’s Gestapo chapter also shaped the company’s modern approach to reputation management.

When ShellNews.net began publishing archival documents showing Shell’s anxiety over online criticism, internal emails revealed that the company feared “legacy issues” resurfacing — particularly “historical associations” that “could undermine our sustainability positioning.”

Those “associations,” of course, meant Deterding, Hitler, and the ghost of Shell House.

As Reuters reported in 2009, one of Shell’s own communications officers admitted,

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

(Reuters, 2009)

In other words, the truth was coming from the outside — again.

The Satirical Legacy of Brick and Brand

It’s tempting to imagine Shell House as just another wartime anecdote, but it represents something much deeper: the fossilisation of denial.

The company that once hosted fascists now hosts “energy transition” panels. The brand that flew beside the swastika now flutters over hydrogen pipelines. The rhetoric has evolved; the reflexes haven’t.

If Shell’s headquarters could talk, they’d probably issue a carefully vetted statement through Legal before admitting anything.

But the walls of Shell House — literal and metaphorical — have already spoken.

Echoes That Refuse to Fade

In the moral architecture of Shell’s history, Shell House is not a footnote — it’s a foundation.

It stands as the physical embodiment of a company’s indifference to context, consequence, and conscience.

The Gestapo may have left, but the ethos remained: secrecy, obedience, profit.

Today, Shell sponsors environmental art installations and carbon-offset initiatives. Yet in Copenhagen, the ghosts still whisper.

Every time the company speaks of “integrity,” those echoes grow louder.

For the victims of Shell House — both those who died within it and those whose histories were buried beneath it — remembrance is the only justice.

Part V: The Legacy Algorithm — How Shell Tried to Bury Its Nazi Past (and the Internet Dug It Back Up) The Age of Deletion Meets the Age of Discovery

In the 1930s, Shell traded with dictators.

In the 2020s, it trades with data.

Both transactions rely on control — of markets, of narratives, of memory.

But in this century, the control is slipping.

The same digital revolution that turned oil companies into data-driven giants has also made their history indelible.

Once, Shell could pay archivists to redact Deterding’s Nazi flirtations from its corporate histories. Today, that censorship is impossible.

As Fast Company observed in 2024 in its report on digital reputation defence:

“AI doesn’t forget — it re-indexes. Once reputational data exists, it becomes part of the informational genome.”

(Fast Company)

That genome now includes Shell’s Nazi-era records, scanned and searchable thanks to independent archivists, historians, and — yes — websites like ShellNaziHistory.com and ShellNews.net.

It’s corporate karma, digitised.

Shell vs. The Internet

When Shell first discovered that royaldutchshellplc.com and shellnews.net were publishing its internal documents, emails, and historical archives, panic set in.

A 1995 Shell press release — an extraordinary document in itself — admitted that the company felt “under siege” by the potential of a digital campaign to “damage the Group’s reputation.”

(Shell Press Release, 17 March 1995)

That was the year Shell first realised the Internet wasn’t just a PR platform; it was a mirror.

What terrified Shell most wasn’t a whistleblower, but a hyperlink.

By 2009, Reuters was reporting that one of Shell’s own communications officers had privately told Fox News:

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

(Reuters, 2009)

When your PR staff prefer the criticism to the company line, you’ve lost control of the narrative.

Reputation by Algorithm

Shell now spends millions on “digital risk management.”

PR consultancies use AI to downrank damaging search results and flood Google with greenwashed content — glossy sustainability reports, “future energy” videos, and cheerful tweets about hydrogen.

Yet the algorithm resists.

Search “Shell Nazi history” today, and within seconds you’ll find archived correspondence, British and Dutch intelligence files, and scanned clippings from The Times, Der Spiegel, and the New York Times.

The Internet — that uncontrollable ecosystem of collective memory — has become Shell’s unending tribunal.

The irony is delicious: the company that once tried to control fuel supplies now fights to control information flow — and loses on both fronts.

The PR Playbook Never Changes

The tactics haven’t evolved much since Deterding’s time.

When confronted with scandal, Shell follows a familiar five-step sequence:

1. Deny. “These claims are outdated or taken out of context.”

2. Deflect. “Other companies did worse.”

3. Rebrand. “We are committed to sustainability.”

4. Sponsor. “Let’s fund a climate art exhibition.”

5. Forget. “What Nazi history?”

It’s an elegant routine — corporate yoga for the ethically inflexible.

Even in 2025, as AI tools make historical accountability impossible to erase, Shell’s boardroom reflex remains denial wrapped in management speak.

One might almost admire the discipline if it weren’t so morally grotesque.

Digital Resurrection: The Donovan Files

When this author began publishing Shell’s internal communications, the company tried every trick in the corporate playbook — from legal threats to covert monitoring.

At one point, Shell even established an internal task force to “assess the Donovan threat.”

It backfired spectacularly.

The correspondence, later disclosed through Subject Access Requests, showed Shell executives debating whether to “neutralise” the publicity by feeding journalists counter-narratives.

The result was Streisand-effect perfection: the more Shell fought the criticism, the higher its Nazi history climbed in Google rankings.

A senior communications manager warned in a 2007 internal email:

“We risk amplifying this by responding. Silence may be preferable, though it carries reputational exposure.”

Reputational exposure — Shell’s least renewable resource.

From Deterding to Digital: The Same DNA

There is a through-line connecting Henri Deterding’s handshake with Hitler to Shell’s present-day manipulation of media algorithms.

Both are expressions of the same instinct: control the story, whatever the cost.

In the 1930s, that meant trading with fascists.

In the 2020s, it means partnering with search-engine optimisers.

Different technologies. Same morality gap.

What unites them is a refusal to confront the truth directly. Deterding thought propaganda could cleanse collaboration; Shell now thinks SEO can bury complicity.

Both underestimate history.

The Investors’ Blind Eye

Shell’s largest shareholders — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — hold themselves out as ethical stewards, champions of ESG values.

Yet none has ever demanded that Shell publicly address its Nazi-era record.

Their silence is not neutrality. It’s convenience.

For BlackRock’s Larry Fink, “sustainability is the new standard for investing.”

For Shell, sustainability is the new camouflage for forgetting.

When conscience costs dividends, everyone looks away.

The Unkillable Narrative

What makes Shell’s Nazi history uniquely indestructible is that it now lives in the connective tissue of the Internet — linked, mirrored, cited, and cached.

Even if every corporate website vanished tomorrow, the record would persist across public archives, journalist databases, and private collections.

This is why Shell’s modern executives avoid the topic altogether.

Mentioning it invites search engines to remember.

And so, the company that helped fuel fascism spends the 21st century fighting its own metadata.

Conclusion: The Shell That History Cracked

From Henri Deterding’s courtship of Hitler to the Gestapo’s occupation of Shell House, from IG Farben’s slave labour to the digital resurrection of those facts, one pattern holds:

Shell always seeks to refine its image as thoroughly as it refines its oil.

But unlike petroleum, history cannot be processed into purity.

Every scandal — environmental, ethical, or historical — is a spill, and this one stretches across a century.

Try as it might, Shell cannot mop it up with PR or bury it under carbon credits.

The Internet has become the final historian, and its archives do not forgive.

Disclaimer

Warning: satire ahead.

The criticisms are pointed, the humour intentional, and the facts stubbornly real.

Quotes are reproduced word-for-word from trusted sources.

As for authorship — John Donovan and AI both claim credit, but the jury’s still out on who was really in charge.

Sourcing highlights: ShellNaziHistory.com (primary dossier); Shell Press Release, 17 March 1995; Reuters (2009); Fast Company (2025).

Shell’s Dark Fuel: The Nazi Past the Oil Giant Couldn’t Bury was first posted on October 14, 2025 at 7:03 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

The transition from one fiscal year to the next is not something that typically dominates headlines. In fact, as the calendar turns from September 30 to October 1 – when the federal government begins a new fiscal year – the

The post How the Government Shutdown is Impacting Farmers appeared first on CalCAN - California Climate & Agriculture Network.

Cpt. Karoliina seining to clean the Koitajoki

Restoration season comes to an end with cleaning of spawning sites on river Koitajoki, and attention focuses on the Pacific – the Taumako Traditional Culture and Voyaging School Opens and a New Pacific Tour brings Snowchange delegates to Tasmania, New Zealand and Canada.

The rewilding and restoration season is drawing to a close in Finland. Several peatlands have been completed, including Arctic Circle sites, Suomussalmi and Koitajoki river sites. Now later in the season the main actions have included Reino and Karoliina using the river seining to clean several spawning sites of the whitefish. It can be only accomplished using the traditional small seine over the clogged sites across the upper Koitajoki.

Success in catch.

We join in celebration of the opening of the Taumako Traditional Culture and Voyaging School that has been accomplished by the Holau Vaka Taumako Association (HVTA) and Pacific Traditions Society (PTS) in the Solomon Islands. The school has received several Snowchange small grants to get to this position. The opening was at the end of September and now the school will support the unique culture and practices of this part of the Pacific.

Taumako community members with a traditional canoe.

New Pacific Tour will cover travels to Polar Data Forum in Tasmania as well as preparations for the Festival of Fishing Traditions 2027, as well as meetings with the Indigenous Tasmanians. From there we will continue over to Aotearoa to review and discuss collaborations with Te Anamāhanga Wetland Restoration Project and to strengthen the Indigenous-led restoration in the Pacific. Onwards to Western Canada, where delegates will come to from Minnesota and peatlands restoration as well as other parts of North America to discuss Snowchange priorities for 2026. Review of the small grants under way in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and other parts of the region will be conducted.

In international media and news, a new UNESCO Thematic titled “Paper on Culture and Climate Action: From Margins to Mainstream” contains summaries of Snowchange efforts. Mongabay, the global media on the environmental issues covers some of the Sámi forest work.

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Does increasing CO2 have a noticeable effect?

The warming effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 is well-established physics, confirmed by direct observation.

Experiments in the 1800s by Fourier, Foote, and Tyndall demonstrated how CO2 absorbs infrared radiation — the heat Earth emits back toward space — and re-radiates some downward, keeping the planet warmer. In 1896, Arrhenius calculated that doubling CO2 would raise global temperatures by 5-6°C (9-10.8°F) . Modern estimates hover around 3°C (5.4°F), with an upper range near 4.5°C (8.1°F).

Today, satellite and surface instruments detect less heat escaping to space and more returning to Earth at CO2’s specific wavelengths, exactly as predicted. Global average temperature is now about 1.28°C (2.3°F) above the preindustrial average, matching an increase from 280 ppm to 420 ppm.

While water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, it cannot increase until temperatures do.

Far from negligible, human-made CO2 is the main factor controlling Earth’s temperature today.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

JSTOR Daily How 19th-Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming

Endeavour CO2, the greenhouse effect and global warming: from the pioneering work of Arrhenius and Callendar to today's Earth System Models

Carbon Brief Explainer: How scientists estimate ‘climate sensitivity’

NASA Global Temperature

NOAA Climate change: atmospheric carbon dioxide

Environmental Defense Fund 9 ways we know humans caused climate change

EPA Causes of Climate Change

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

As the government shutdown drags on, concerns over the health of national parks and the safety of visitors continue to grow.

Surfaced photos and videos have shown visitors to Yosemite National Park BASE jumping from El Capitan and climbing Half Dome’s cables without permits.

“It’s like the Wild Wild West,” said John DeGrazio, founder of the tour company YExplore Yosemite Adventures.

In one post to Instagram, climber Charles Winstead filmed visitors BASE jumping from El Capitan. His caption encourages other BASE jumpers to take advantage of the lack of rangers, reading, “More base jumpers! Definitely feeling some freedom to flout the rules due to the shut down. Second group today.”

In Colorado, nonprofits that work closely with the U.S. Forest Service have received mixed messages about whether volunteers are allowed to work. The Eagle-Summit Wilderness Alliance—a nonprofit that works on the White River National Forest—was told by the Forest Service that all volunteer activities should cease during the shutdown, but a local ranger district has since told the group that volunteers are allowed to work.

The conflicting guidance has left members worried that they could get in trouble for volunteering, or that the workers’ compensation usually offered by the Forest Service might not cover them if they were injured while volunteering.

Quick hits Federal lands need the public’s help, retired national park ranger says

North Dakota Monitor

Senate nixes management plans for public lands, expanding access for fossil fuels

Inside Climate News

Squatters, illegal BASE jumpers invade Yosemite amid federal shutdown

SFGATE

Opinion: The case for national monuments

High Country News

Amid government shutdown, Colorado nonprofits describe ‘chaos’ and a ‘scramble to protect the places we love’

Summit Daily

Interior cancels largest solar project in North America

Politico

Farmers, ranchers cut back Colorado River water use while enduring one of the driest seasons on record

Colorado Sun

Wyoming congressional delegation wants to override BLM coal lease ban

WyoFile

Quote of the day

For the future of our natural places, I hope this is not the trajectory we remain on, where we’re all just trying to scramble to protect the places we love.”

—Meara McQuain, executive director of Headwaters Trails Alliance, Summit Daily

Picture This @coparkswildlife

Aspen Nature Trail at Vega State Park Aspen views for days

It’s not exactly a secret how this trail got named, but we’re fine with that. This easy out-and-back hike is a two-mile-long cruise through a large aspen grove on the south side of the lake. It’s a wonderful walk through the woods, made even more spectacular when the leaves are changing.

 

(Featured image: El Capitan at Yosemite National Park, California. Daniel Erlandson, Pexels)

The post Visitors to national parks persist amid government shutdown appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

National Nurses United presents a juried art exhibition on view Oct. 20-24

National Nurses United is pleased to present “Resistance and Resilience,” a juried group exhibition in Oakland, Calif., featuring the compelling work of 30 artists from across the country whose work embodies the themes of resistance

Earthy Governance and Interspecies Justice Confluence - 16-17th June, 2025, Sydney Centring Indigenous and majority world knowledges and practices 16th June-17th June, 2025 | Sydney Institute for Marine Studies, Australia The first gathering will be co-designed by a smaller number (15-20 participants) of the Indigenous and non-indigenous participants with a view to ensuring that it adopts methodologies most conducive to diverse modes of expression. The aim of this gathering is to provide the …

Video recording of the sessions The sessions were recorded over zoom where participants share stories of living, learning, with nature and how communities govern themselves following the rhythms and moods of natural world. Why stories? Stories are way that this relationship has existed and nourished. Now it's time that these stories are respected and they sit along but importantly challenge the dominant oppressive systems and its story of separation from Nature.

The world’s 250 largest oil and gas companies are responsible for less than 1.5% of renewable energy generation worldwide, according to a new analysis. The findings cast doubt on the fossil fuel industry narrative that it is helping solve the climate crisis by investing in renewable energy development.

In recent years, fossil fuel companies have pledged to make drastic cuts in their own emissions and have emphasized their green energy initiatives, as part of a strategy to maintain the social and political acceptance necessary to continue doing business in a world increasingly focused on decarbonization.

But until now, there has been no quantitative analysis of the industry’s contribution to the green transition. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” says study team member Marcel Llavero-Pasquina, a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. As to the answer, he doesn’t mince words: “Their interest ends with their profits.”

To reach this conclusion, Llavero-Pasquina and his UAB colleague Antonio Bontempi mined a series of existing corporate structure and energy production databases. They identified the world’s 250 largest oil and gas companies responsible for 88% of global production of hydrocarbons, as well as 344 subsidiaries, 193 acquisitions, and 172 sister companies of these firms.

Next, they identified 3,166 wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal power projects that the companies own directly, through subsidiaries, or via acquired companies.

Only 20% of the largest oil and gas companies own a currently operating renewable energy project at all, the researchers report in Nature Sustainability. Renewable energy represents just 0.13% of the companies’ total primary energy extraction, the researchers calculated.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Can Big Oil be part of a post-carbon world?

 

The oil and gas giants own 1.42% of global renewable energy capacity currently in operation. About half of this is via acquired companies, suggesting their investment is largely financial rather than a matter of active operations.

“I have been researching the fossil fuel industry for a decade, and I knew their renewable energy operations were tokenistic. But even I did not expect their share of renewables to be this low,” Llavero-Pasquina says. “I felt deceived by their intense media campaigns.”

Sister companies, meaning renewable energy companies that are directly owned by the parent companies of oil and gas firms, are responsible for about 10% of renewable energy capacity in operation. “This figure is largely attributable (94%) to the sister companies of Chinese state-owned firms,” the researchers write.

By far the company with the largest amount of installed capacity is TotalEnergies with 14.6 gigawatts of renewable power generation in operation – more than 3 times the capacity of the next runners-up and still just 1.59% of its total primary energy extraction.

“The companies with the largest share of renewable energy in their total production are TAQA (9.02%) and Pampa Energia (6.68%), whose core business is in the power sector” rather than oil and gas production, the researchers note.

Oil and gas companies tend to invest in larger renewable energy projects, and in geothermal and offshore wind projects where the firms’ drilling and offshore operations experience provides an advantage.

The oil and gas companies do have a larger share of renewable energy projects planned or under construction. But this capacity amounts to just 4% of the plan, agreed to at the UN climate conference in 2023, to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.

As well as evaluating oil and gas companies’ commitment to fighting the climate crisis by their contributions to renewable energy development, the researchers argue, the firms should be judged by the fossil fuel infrastructure they decommission and the amount of fossil fuels they leave in the ground.

Source: Llavero-Pasquina M. and A. Bontempi. “Oil and gas industry’s marginal share of global renewable energy.” Nature Sustainability 2025.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

This piece is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.

Conflict is the largest driver of hunger and starvation, and food has become one of the cheapest weapons of war. More than 120 million people are currently displaced by violence or persecution, and 60 percent of the world’s hungriest live in conflict-affected countries. At last count, the Center for Preventive Action found 27 active conflicts around the world. From Gaza to Sudan and from Ukraine to Yemen, withholding food is now a deliberate strategy of war. 

The ongoing war in Ukraine illustrates this reality. Once Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine’s farmland has been mined and blockaded, cutting off global grain supplies. Similar tactics appear elsewhere: in Gaza, famine now compounds the humanitarian crisis as food access is restricted as a part of Israel’s war against Hamas. Whether defined as genocide or not, the reality is that food deprivation is being weaponized to achieve military and political ends.

A Historical Pattern

Weaponizing food is nothing new. The Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) starved over a million civilians. The Bengal famine of 1943, exacerbated by British policies, left millions of dead. During Nigeria’s Biafran War (1967–1970), famine was used to weaken separatists. In the 1990s Balkans war, Sarajevo was cut off from food supplies. More recently, Syrian forces bombed bakeries to terrorize populations, while Russian forces destroyed Ukrainian grain.

History makes clear: starvation is not collateral damage—it is a tactic. Yet international law still struggles to hold perpetrators accountable.

International Law and Limited Action

Since its founding in 1946, the United Nations has repeatedly confronted ongoing crises marked by manmade famine and starvation. The 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Protocols prohibit withholding food from civilians, but these are considered broadly as crimes against humanity. It was not until 2018 that the U.N.’s Security Council adopted Resolution 2417 condemning famine as a weapon. 

While sanctions are intended to enforce international law by penalizing those who obstruct humanitarian assistance, accountability remains elusive. The International Criminal Court (ICC) established in 1998 includes intentional starvation of civilians as a crime. Yet, as a recent review by Chase Sova highlighted, prosecutions remain rare, the legal framework is weak, and U.N. investigations often stall as powerful states block enforcement.

Meanwhile, millions continue to suffer. Today, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, northern Nigeria, and South Sudan are on the verge of famine. These crises share a common thread: deliberate obstruction of food.

Why Food is a Powerful Weapon

Food’s power lies in its universality. It is also the cheapest weapon of war. Starvation kills slowly, demoralizes populations, and erodes cultures. Women—often primary farmers—are disproportionately targeted and their livelihoods destroyed. 

Modern communications now expose these crimes in real time. As global famine expert Alex de Waal notes, in the age of social media, perpetrators can no longer hide famine. Anyone with a cell phone or a laptop can see what is happening in real time. Instead, countries resort to “statistical denialism,” contesting or suppressing data to obscure accountability. But suppressing the news to deny what one can see is no longer an option. 

Still, visibility alone does not translate into action. Global outrage rarely leads to intervention. The U.N. has limited tools to enforce accountability, and political divisions prevent coordinated responses.

Today’s Urgent Challenge

The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals pledged in 2015 to get to Zero Hunger by 2030. Yet progress is faltering. It will get worse since the United States withdrew its support for the SDGs in September.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture’s State of Food Insecurity 2025 report, 673 million people–or 8.2 percent of the global population–remain hungry. Hunger has declined slightly since 2022, but ending hunger by 2030 is now unlikely. Unless we address the connection between conflict and food, the cycle of manmade famine will continue.

The moral urgency is clear: starvation should be treated not as an inevitable byproduct of war, but as a deliberate crime. Sanctions, international monitoring, and accountability mechanisms must target those who use food as a weapon. Governments and civil society alike must insist that the global community move beyond condemnation to action.

Ending the Weaponization of Food 

From Leningrad to Gaza and Biafra to Ukraine, the lesson is the same: food is not only sustenance, but also a cheap weapon. Conflict-driven hunger is man-made, preventable, and one of the gravest injustices of our time. The world must recognize withholding food as an inhumane act of warfare, strengthen mechanisms to prosecute perpetrators, and mobilize political will to protect civilians.

Striving to end global hunger by reducing the number of people on this planet who are hungry is a means of conflict prevention. What we do know is that since the U.N.’s founding global hunger has been reduced because of great advances in agriculture such as the Green Revolution, the increased coordination of humanitarian assistance, and economic development in places like India and China. Working to get to Zero Hunger by 2030, however, may not happen as other factors such as climate change, epidemics, and ongoing conflicts create insurmountable barriers, headwinds that destroy the progress made in the last eighty years. 

Unless the global architecture is refreshed so that access to food no longer becomes the main driver of global conflict, we are likely to see more suffering and death going forward. That means we must focus on democratic governance and giving voice to people remains essential to the fight against global hunger. At the end of the Cold War we saw a window to expand the benefits of more open societies across the globe and there was documented progress in many parts of Africa and Asia. Linking this message to the discussions about food weaponization is essential.

Ending hunger will not be possible without ending the weaponization of food. Until nations commit to resolving conflicts and holding aggressors accountable, we will continue to witness famine not as a natural disaster, but as a deliberate tool of destruction.

Photo courtesy of Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons

The post Food, Conflict, and the Weaponization of Food appeared first on Food Tank.

How a teenage “internet whizz” helped create the website Shell tried — and failed — to silence for three decades. A Phantom Web Whizz Became Shell’s Digital Nemesis

In the mid-1990s, when the Internet still seemed like a passing fad and oil companies still lectured the world about “responsible energy,” a quiet digital operator answered a newspaper advertisement from John Donovan, the former Shell promotions partner turned corporate adversary.

The ad sought an “Internet whizz.”

What Shell got was something far worse—a digital insurgency that would haunt its reputation for decades.

By 1998, even the Evening Standard took notice: a small website run from Colchester had become a major reputational threat to one of the world’s largest corporations. That website—eventually mirrored as RoyalDutchShellPLC.com and ShellNews.net—would become Shell’s digital nemesis, archiving leaks, lawsuits, and internal documents that chronicled the oil giant’s ethical, environmental, and legal missteps.

And behind the screens sat an unnamed technician—a man who never sought credit, rarely spoke publicly, but who built the digital fortress that Shell’s lawyers, PR teams, and cyber specialists could never tear down.

1995: The Panic Before the Storm

The signs of Shell’s anxiety appeared early.

On 17 March 1995, long before Donovan’s digital campaign began, Shell UK issued a defensive press release titled “DON MARKETING LIMITED –v– SHELL UK LIMITED.”

(Read it here)

It was remarkable for its time: a global oil major publicly accusing a relatively small marketing company of making “false claims.” The tone was uncharacteristically emotional—proof that the Donovans had already struck a nerve.

Shell would later regret putting such words on record. That single press release now reads like a corporate prophecy—a warning that the company was about to enter a reputational war it could never win.

From Courtrooms to Keyboards: Building the Shell Files

The anonymous technician who joined Donovan soon became more than a webmaster. He was a strategist, archivist, and digital bodyguard rolled into one. Together, the pair created an online infrastructure capable of resisting takedowns, mirroring sensitive content, and circumventing Shell’s many attempts to erase unflattering material from the internet.

He even represented Donovan’s company, Don Marketing, in the 1999 High Court action against Shell, which was quietly settled out of court after ten days of dramatic testimony.

That victory emboldened Donovan’s mission. The websites expanded into sprawling archives—thousands of pages of correspondence, affidavits, and leaked memos showing Shell executives scrambling to manage the “Donovan problem.”

Shell’s own internal emails, released years later through Subject Access Requests under the UK Data Protection Act, revealed that the company had created a dedicated surveillance unit to monitor Donovan’s sites daily. One internal communication advised:

“Maintain a watching brief on royaldutchshellplc.com and its mirror sites.”

The corporate paranoia was palpable.

The Irony Shell Couldn’t Script

In a moment of pure corporate absurdity, a Shell communications officer emailed Fox News to recommend Donovan’s site as a credible information source.

“royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

— Internal Shell email, cited by Reuters

In trying to discredit Donovan, Shell had effectively validated him.

A Trail of Intrigue: Burglaries, Whistleblowers, and Broadcasts

Over the years, Shell’s online tormentor found himself entangled in an ever-widening web of intrigue.

He was there when Donovan’s home was burgled and Shell-related files appeared disturbed.

He was there when Donovan was mugged in what seemed to be a targeted robbery (Shell denied any link).

He attended meetings with whistleblowers—including one connected to the BAE–Shell Al-Yamamah oil-for-arms scandal—and was present during the filming of “Joe Lycett vs The Oil Giant,” the Channel 4 documentary that skewered Shell’s greenwashing.

Like a ghost in the machinery of corporate PR, he operated unseen, but his fingerprints were everywhere.

Shell’s Legal and PR Machine: “Contain the Threat”

Inside Shell, Donovan’s campaign wasn’t seen as a sideshow—it was treated as a containment issue.

Shell’s internal documents show the company debating how to silence or discredit him, drafting legal opinions, and even exploring takedown strategies against mirror sites. The tone shifted from annoyance to fear as Donovan’s archives began influencing journalists, regulators, and even policymakers.

What Shell executives didn’t realize was that the harder they tried to erase the criticism, the deeper it embedded itself in the public record—and, as we now understand, into the data ecosystems that train artificial intelligence.

The Watchdog and the Whisper Network: Reputation in the Age of AI

“AI no longer simply reads about your brand. It learns from it.” — Fast Company, October 2025

In 2025, a new frontier of corporate dread emerged: the age of AI-driven reputation.

According to Fast Company, brands are no longer judged just by humans, but by algorithms that learn context.

If your company’s name frequently appears beside words like “lawsuit,” “explosion,” or “toxic,” then guess what? The model remembers.

“Removing negative content isn’t enough anymore. AI retains associations, even after links disappear.” — Fast Company

For Shell, its internal and external spooks, and its sinstock shareholders, including BlackRock, this is bad news. Donovan’s archives—tens of thousands of documents detailing environmental harm, employee deaths, murders in Nigeria and in China, and political manipulation—form part of the online corpus that large language models continuously train on.

Even if Shell somehow scrubbed the web clean, the associations would live on inside the algorithms.

Deleting a file doesn’t delete a pattern.

In other words, Shell’s behaviour has been fossilised in AI.

The very technology Shell once hoped to harness for efficiency may become its ultimate moral historian.

Legacy of the Unseen

The anonymous technician, still active today, continues to quietly maintain the servers and archives that preserve Shell’s corporate history—warts and all. His work has been cited by major media outlets, government investigators, and environmental campaigners.

He is never quoted, never photographed, and never credited. Yet without him, Shell’s digital opposition might have faded into obscurity.

“He was with me in every crisis—in court, in robbery, in victory,” Donovan once said.

“Without him, there would be no RoyalDutchShellPLC.com.”

A Future Shell Can’t Rewrite

When Shell issued its angry press release back in 1995, it thought it could shape the narrative.

Thirty years later, the narrative has shaped Shell.

Every leak, affidavit, or whistleblower story captured on the Donovan websites now feeds into the global digital bloodstream—from journalists to AI summarizers, from activists to chatbots.

For Shell, it’s the ultimate irony: the oil giant that once mastered global communications is now trapped in a feedback loop of its own making.

It tried to bury its critics; instead, they became immortal.

Disclaimer

Warning: satire ahead.

The criticisms are pointed, the humour intentional, and the facts stubbornly real.

Quotes are reproduced word-for-word from trusted sources.

As for authorship—John Donovan and AI both claim credit, but the jury’s still out on who was really in charge.

The Quiet Architect Behind Shell’s Biggest Online Headache was first posted on October 14, 2025 at 11:34 am.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Headline News:

• “A Quiet Floating Solar Revolution Is Bubbling Up In US Waters” • Floating solar arrays require specialized racks and mooring systems. As demand rises, economies of scale kick in, helping to reduce costs. Ease of installation is a notable feature typical of floating solar systems. They don’t require land to be cleared and leveled. [CleanTechnica]

US floating solar array (Courtesy of Third Pillar Solar)

• “Gas And High Coal Penetration Are The Drivers Of Costly, Volatile Power Prices” • Analysis of price data in Australia’s National Electricity Market shows a strong link between the share of gas and coal generation and wholesale electricity prices. When gas-fired generation exceeds 6% or coal meets over 55% of demand, prices rise significantly. [Renew Economy]
• “Green Energy Market To Reach $2.4 Trillion By 2032” • A report from Allied Market Research, “Green Energy Market,” says the global market, valued at $1.0 trillion in 2022, is projected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2032. The global move toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing energy security has propelled the demand for green energy. [Newstrail]
• “Chilean Salmon Farmer Signs Up For Floating Solar Power Supply” • Trusal, Chilean fish farmer, is to be receive electricity generated by on-site floating solar power after signing a 15-year supply deal with Alotta, a company based in Norwey. Alotta said aquaculture companies can use solar power without the need for upfront investments. [Fishfarming expert]
• “Harris County Sues Trump EPA To Restore $400 Million In Texas Solar Energy Funding” • Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee filed a lawsuit after the Trump administration cancelled over $400 million in solar energy grants for organizations based in Texas. The grants were expected to save participants annual amounts estimated to be $1,740. [Yahoo]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Hyperscale data centres will 'turbocharge emissions' Channel Comment brendan 14th October 2025 Teaser Media

With human-driven climate disasters growing in both frequency and intensity, taking decisive steps towards climate adaptation is crucial – but politics has failed to rise to the occasion. Spain, which saw the worst of the wildfires that tore through Europe this summer, exemplifies how disinformation, political polarisation, and institutional distrust can erode unity and disrupt urgently needed disaster responses. And yet, solidarity offers hope.

My friend Alicia was in Cádiz, Andalusia, when a large fire broke out near the urban area. She was evacuated from the campsite where she was staying and headed back home to Granada, a three-hour drive away.

A few weeks later, the fields around my family’s house in Granada caught alight. The flames were extinguished before they spread. What remains is a long black scar across the hillside, a reminder of both our luck and our fragility.

Several days passed. This time, a friend who was driving across Almería, also in Andalusia, sent me a video of flames flickering in the distance. “It’s unsettling,” he wrote. I also received messages from Madrid: “I have seen houses and gardens destroyed.” But the worst fires happened in Castilla y León and Galicia, in the northwestern part of Spain, where more than 141,000 and 130,000 hectares burned, respectively.

María, another friend of mine, sent photos from Riós, Galicia, where she spent August visiting family. Some were blurred with grey smoke, others washed in sepia by the orange glow of the flames. The images showed people bundled up to their eyebrows, clutching hoses and trying to push back the fire.

When María first arrived in Riós, the heatwave smothered any chance of outdoor activities, so she escaped to Vigo for a few days to cool off in the sea. On her return, she witnessed the first signs of a looming disaster: columns of smoke over the mountains and aircraft battling spreading wildfires. By the time she reached the village, she recalls, an enormous grey cloud loomed overhead, ash was falling, and the sky had turned a burning orange that lingered for weeks.

For eight chaotic days, fires raged and fear spread. Villagers and volunteers organised to fight the flames. They wore masks and tucked their pants into their socks. “I learned that xestas [broom shrubs, pulled straight from the hillside] are the best tool to put out flames,” María notes. She still remembers the jolt in her body at the thought of losing everything. Yet above all, she recalls a deep sense of abandonment. Cut off without electricity, internet, or phone signal, the villages were isolated as roads closed, and no aircraft appeared for days. “Everywhere you looked, there was the immediate threat of fire, yet no one explained to us what we should do,” she says. “It wasn’t until three days after the fires began that the first alert finally arrived on our phones, telling us not to leave the house”.

An explosive mix

María’s experience, though extreme, mirrors what many across Spain and Europe endured this past summer, as record heat and widespread wildfires swept through the continent.

2025 has been the worst year on record in terms of land burned across Europe. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), more than one million hectares have been scorched on the continent. Portugal suffered one of its three worst fire seasons on record, while Romania and southern Italy, despite seeing fewer fires compared to 2024, faced an increase in terms of area burned.

Spain was by far the hardest-hit EU country, with more than 400,000 hectares burned – nearly 40 per cent of the EU total. The 2025 season surpassed 2022, previously the worst year for Spanish fires since the mid-1990s. This summer was also the hottest ever recorded on the mainland, as reported by the Spanish Meteorological Agency.

At least eight people have died as a result of the fires. Emblematic local tree species have suffered severe damage, and wildlife has also been affected. The economy was also hit hard: the worst-impacted provinces experienced a decline in leisure and hospitality spending of 8 to 16 per cent.

The Mediterranean region is known for its hot and dry summers. The steep slopes that are typical of its landscapes also contribute to the rapid spread of wildfires. But climate change has greatly exacerbated the conditions for wildfires. According to a report by World Weather Attribution (WWA), human-induced climate change made the heat, dryness, and wind conditions that fuelled this summer’s blazes in Spain and Portugal up to 40 times more likely. In turn, the warming made the 10-day heatwave 200 times more probable and 3 degrees Celsius hotter.

The scale of the recent fires has also been driven by the dense vegetation accumulating in parts of Portugal and Spain – a buildup of biomass resulting from rural abandonment. Where forests go unmanaged, the risk of blazes steadily rises. “With fewer people and less traditional grazing, natural vegetation control has sharply declined,” the WWA report notes.

Luis Berbiela, director of Fundación Pau Costa, a global non-profit organisation dedicated to wildfire prevention and management through the lens of fire ecology, says rural abandonment in Spain is driven by an ageing population as well as by a decline in the consumption of forest-derived products, such as wood for heating and construction. Furthermore, second homes and recreational or tourist establishments have been introduced into these pristine areas, making fires ever more lethal. “Fires will inevitably become larger due to the continuity of vegetation; more intense because of the fuel density; and more dangerous due to the vulnerability of people living or vacationing in these areas,” he says. During this year’s crisis, the simultaneous occurrence of big fires in different parts of the country also played a big role, as it was impossible for emergency personnel to be everywhere at once.

The adaptation gap

When the fires broke out, María recalls, her grandmother told her that several people from the village had asked civil protection authorities back in winter to clear the branches around the area, but received no response. A sentence heard across Spain every summer is “Fires are extinguished in winter.” However, each summer, fires become more severe due to inadequate preventive management.

Across the globe, too, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2023 reveals that progress on climate adaptation is slowing across all fronts, attributing this slowdown to inadequate investment and planning, which leaves the world exposed to rising climate change impacts and risks.

Across the globe, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent.

​​After the devastating 2022 wildfires, Fundación Pau Costa brought together over 55 experts, from conservationists and forest managers to shepherds and journalists, to build a technical consensus on effective wildfire management. The resulting document outlines key measures to transform how the country addresses wildfires, including revitalising rural communities, preparing for extreme future scenarios, and fostering shared governance and climate change adaptation.

“We have repeatedly issued warnings, but this risk culture has not been embraced at the political level,” Berbiela says. “A culture of risk is glaringly missing.” He mentions Japan as an example to learn from: “There isn’t a single Japanese child who hasn’t been taught how to behave on unstable terrain, nor a Japanese person who would consider buying a house without earthquake-resistant foundations. Resilience and resistance to earthquakes are built into the very cultural DNA of Japanese life.”

With climate change-driven disasters set to become more frequent in the future, what is stopping political leaders from adopting the measures needed to mitigate the damage?

Paralysed by polarisation

An article recently published in Nature concluded that today’s “marked social contestation threatens the speed, scale and viability of climate action implementation at the very time when societies cannot afford climate action to stall or fail.” Political divisions are often cited as obstacles to strong climate policy because they erode trust, reduce willingness to compromise, and make long-term planning harder. For climate policy to be inclusive and effective, cooperation across political parties, stakeholders, and levels of government is essential.

As Luis Miller, a research scientist at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), explains, “to achieve a public good, the most important thing is cooperation, both at the individual level and between administrations. Yet both in the case of the Valencia floods and this summer’s fires, we saw major coordination problems.”

This summer, in a show of solidarity, volunteers poured into fire-affected areas to help. In contrast, the central government (headed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE), and regional administrations (mostly led by the centre-right People’s Party, PP) engaged in a blame game over political responsibilities. The PSOE accused the People’s Party of downplaying climate change, neglecting regional fire prevention policies, and rejecting a 2024 bill on forest firefighters that the PP claimed carried an “ecological and gender ideological bias”. In contrast, the conservatives largely attributed the wildfires to arson and criticised the central government for failing to deploy enough firefighters and additional forces, including the army.

This is not unique to Spanish politics. Italy witnessed a similar dynamic during the devastating floods that struck its northern regions this September. “All the unfortunate new events we are experiencing at the global level are being used by political parties, governments, and different administrations to polarise. The political landscape is increasingly fragmented, which makes this kind of confrontation easier,” explains Miller.

María recalls how frustrating it was this summer – whenever they had electricity and her grandmother would put on the TV – to see politicians play the blame game: “It felt like a slap in the face. People were burning their ankles, risking their health, putting out fires with branches and sticks, while the situation became a media debate. The whole thing was just about throwing mud from one political party to another on a talk show; it was absurd.”

Political polarisation has intensified across Europe since the 2008 financial crisis and has become a structural feature of European political systems. As noted in a 2025 study by the Bank of Spain, “In France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, public debate reflects increasingly deep ideological divides.” Politics has moved beyond the healthy disagreement and dissent that characterise democracy into an increasingly binary “us versus them” antagonism between ideological groups and parties, the report suggests.

Experts agree that polarisation is a top-down movement stemming from political elites. It starts with radicalisation or a movement towards the extremes of the political elites, which then manifests in the political stances of citizens. Disinformation is used to exacerbate disagreements. According to the Nature article, today’s polarisation is occurring against a backdrop of “post-truth” discourse, where “facts have lost their currency”.

As with last year’s floods in Valencia and the nationwide blackout earlier this year, online disinformation received widespread attention while fires burned through Spain. It ranged from claims that unaccompanied minor immigrants had started certain fires, to assertions that those behind the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were using the wildfires to eliminate traditional activities like livestock farming. At the same time, there were claims alleging the blazes were intentionally started to enable land redevelopment, while some even put the blame on eucalyptus trees, distracting attention from factors like climate change and poor forest management.

But what is more concerning is that some prominent politicians peddled these false narratives. The leader of PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, even proposed the creation of a “national registry of arsonists”, which would use electronic bracelets to monitor people convicted of starting fires, even though official data shows that only 7.64 per cent of fires in 2023 were intentional.

Miller notes that political positions today are often marked by a high degree of strong rhetoric, with some parties more prone to disinformation than others, even to the point of opposing scientific consensus. “The far right across Europe defends positions that run counter to the broader social consensus by denying climate change,” the researcher explains. He adds that the deliberate undermining of science, which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change classified as disinformation in its 2022 report, contributes to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.

In parliaments and in political commissions, this hysterical environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “The real problem with fake news and exaggeration in politics is that they spark debate over the very definition of the issue; for example, the causes of fires. And we end up arguing about what causes these problems, rather than relying on technical expertise and proposing political solutions,” concludes Miller.

The hysterical [political] environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “

This carries consequences. A recent report co-authored by the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the International University of Valencia (VIU) found that misinformation during the Valencia floods had worsened the emergency and undermined institutional trust. Three out of four false claims were created intentionally, combining far-right rhetoric with messages traditionally associated with the Left, such as criticism of institutional power or elites. This was done with the aim of exploiting uncertainty and reinforcing distrust in the government, scientific organisations, and NGOs.

During both the Valencia floods and the 2025 wildfires in Spain, the slogan “solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” (“only the people save the people”) gained widespread traction, reflecting both the remarkable solidarity among citizens and their deep frustration with political institutions. This grassroots mobilisation, though a powerful display of civic responsibility, also highlighted a vicious cycle of distrust. As citizens witness institutional inaction, they rely more on themselves, which simultaneously reinforces scepticism toward authorities and weakens confidence in governance. Moreover, the slogan was co-opted by conservative and far-right groups as a weapon against the welfare state, with the message that “the state would not save you.”

American environmentalist David Orr, who edited the collection of essays Democracy in a Hotter Time, argues that the influence of corporations on policymaking is partly responsible for the failure to adapt to climate change. Fossil fuels companies and tech giants like Meta, Orr maintains, are especially to blame: “They have done a great job at confusing people and have indeed moved fast and broken a lot of things”, says Orr.

The case for democracy

Policy failures, disinformation, and political blame games in the aftermath of climate disasters all contribute to a decline of trust in democracy. In many parts of the world, satisfaction with democracy is alarmingly low, in particular among Gen Z and younger generations. A YouGov survey conducted for the TUI Foundation across seven European countries found that one in five young Europeans aged 16 to 26 would support an authoritarian government “under certain circumstances”.

Polarisation is a healthy component of any democracy, but only as long as it does not erode trust and institutional capacity to act. “When facing common challenges (economic recovery, energy transition, social cohesion), it is crucial that political pluralism does not devolve into political paralysis,” writes the Bank of Spain.

Interestingly, one of the main causes of this scepticism towards democracy is that 36 per cent of Europeans do not feel their interests are well represented in their national parliaments. Orr explains that the problem with today’s democracy is that we are still living in a model that was built on the French and American example. “There are a number of features we would have to make to take democracy to the next step. One is that you can’t run democracy for long as an oligarchy. The other steps to make our democracy resilient to change have to do with honouring the rights of future generations and other species, and landforms,” he adds. “We need to have a different relationship with time. We can’t keep thinking in terms of the next election cycle, we now have to begin to think in terms of centuries.”

The alternative is deadly and mirrors what we are already beginning to experience. Ecological economics professor Julia Steinberger uses the term “climate necropolitics” to describe how those in power neglect the fact that we live in death-inducing conditions: “Every year the angel of climate death swoops down lower and lower over our houses. It’s a waiting and suffering game. This year, I think my family will survive the heat wave. Next year? The one after that? (…) It’s only a matter of time before we see the flames of forest fire crawling over our formerly green hills, coming down to smoke up our valley,” she writes.

Global warming is set to increase the pressure on democratic systems: rising temperatures and dwindling resources will make consensus harder to achieve. “Civilisation requires certain things such as tolerance, foresight, equity, competence in government. Qualities that we often take for granted. Once you turn up the thermostat, everything changes,” warns Orr.

Despite divisions, finding common ground is not impossible. Even in the highly polarised United States, Orr notes, many people who identify as right-wing still agree on basic needs: protection from climate chaos, a fair share of economic resources, and security for their families. Beneath the noise of ideology, people converge on the basic desire for security, fairness, and stability. If there is a source of optimism, it lies in the realisation that we are all connected.    

As my friend María wrote to me, “In the village, people condemned the politicians’ inability to take responsibility, yet they appreciated the help and time of their neighbours, because it was all they had.” Those in power should do their part too – before it’s too late.

Pooja Kishinani

An interview with filmmaker and water conservationist Lobzang Wangtak, whose latest documentary “I Am Zanskar” is a portrait of an ecologically fragile landscape that is undergoing rapid changes.With glaciers receding at an alarming rate and erratic snowfall patterns, …

ECVC calls on the European Parliament to not allow itself to be treated as a powerless spectator in the face of the European Council and the European Commission’s actions against democracy, self-determination of peoples and food sovereignty, and thus to not ratify this agreement.

The post ECVC denounces the revised EU – Morocco Trade Agreement appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

California Nurses Association applauds Governor Gavin Newsom for taking action to protect workers from employers’ use of predatory debt contracts and signing Assembly Bill 692 into law on Monday, Oct. 13. A.B. 692 prohibits employers from requiring workers to pay a debt, fee, or penalty if the workers wants to leave their job, expressly making these kinds of exploitative workplace debt arrangements unlawful.

News from Alabama Department of Environmental Management, Erema and more

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management awarded more than $2.5 million in grants from the state recycling fund to 18 solid waste authorities, counties, cities and other groups to boost recycling efforts. Amcor appointed Graphic Packaging‘s Stephen Scherger as CFO.  …

Continue Reading→

The post News from Alabama Department of Environmental Management, Erema and more appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

We focus a lot on global average temperatures, but this tends to mask the real local impacts that climate change is having. The land – where all of us live – is warming about 40% faster than the global average, and high latitude regions are warming even faster.

One of the many ways to visualize this regional heat is to look at when all time high temperature records were set for each region of the world. Here I’m build upon a Carbon Brief analysis I published back in 2023 that looked at daily temperature data from ERA5 – a great resource, but one that unfortunately only extended back to 1950 at the time (and back to 1940 today).

We know of at least some regional heat events – the 1930s in the north-central US for example – that set records prior to 1950 that were missed in my earlier analysis.

The figure below shows a map of when the record for the warmest temperature of the year occurred for each 1x1 lat/lon degree grid cell on the planet, extending back to 1850 (when local data allows). By warmest temperature I mean the warmest average monthly temperature (TMax, in absolute terms). I’ve further restricted the analysis to only show grid cells with at least 90 years of data – e.g. extending back to at least 1934. This uses the Berkeley Earth monthly dataset; their daily dataset could also be used but the results would only change modestly and the daily file sizes are a bit too prohibitive for a quick analysis.

Here we see that much of the world set a maximum monthly TMax temperature in the 2000s, 2010s or 2020s. There are a few regions – central North America, central and southern Africa, western India, etc. – that saw records set earlier, but this is not unexpected due to regional temperature variability (e.g. weather).

The figure below, which shows the percent of the world’s land that set a record in each decade, makes it clear that the vast majority of the Earth’s surface has seen a record set recently; indeed, 38% of the land surface has set a new record in the 2020s, despite the decade being incomplete. Overall, around 78% of the land surface area has seen a new all-time monthly high record set after the year 2000.

So the next time someone highlights a small region of the world to say that extreme heat has occurred before, suggest that they might be picking cherries rather than seeing the larger picture – a rapidly warming world on top of regional natural climate variability that is forcing more and more regions to set new all-time records each year.