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Lagos, Nigeria — A nationwide plastic brand audit conducted across eight Nigerian cities by Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) has identified multinational beverage companies and single-use plastic producers as the largest contributors to Nigeria’s worsening plastic pollution crisis.

The report examined 298,174  pieces of plastic waste collected during community clean-up exercises in Osogbo, Jos, Ughelli, Warri, Port Harcourt, Lagos, Uyo, and Benin City. The findings show that sachets, plastic bottles, bags, and wrappers dominate Nigeria’s waste stream. 

Nigeria produces an estimated 2.5 million metric tonnes of plastic waste every year, yet only a small fraction is recycled. In Lagos alone, plastic waste is a major cause of blocked drains, contributing to flooding that costs the state billions of dollars in annual damage.

Sachets and Bottles Top the Waste Chart

The audit found that sachet packaging, commonly used for water and beverages, was the most common plastic waste item identified, followed closely by plastic bottles. Plastic bags and wrappers ranked third and fourth. Despite their popularity due to affordability, sachets are single-use, non-recyclable, and remain in the environment for hundreds of years. An estimated 60 million water sachets are discarded daily in Nigeria, totalling over 20 billion annually.

Top Polluters

The audit identified Coca-Cola and PepsiCo as the leading multinational companies linked to plastic pollution across the audited cities. Other major contributors include Nestlé, Rite Foods, CWAY Group, and several local table-water producers.

“These findings confirm what communities have long known — plastic pollution in Nigeria is not caused by poor people, but by corporate practices that prioritise profit over the environment,” explains Weyinmi Okotie, GAIA/BFFP Africa Clean Air Program Manager.

While Nigeria has made policy commitments to tackle plastic pollution, including the National Policy on Plastic Waste Management, new regulations targeting single-use plastics, and a ban on single-use plastics in government offices, enforcement across the country remains uneven and slow. At the state level, Lagos, Oyo, Abia, and Anambra States have announced or begun enforcing bans on certain single-use plastics, with Lagos implementing the strictest measures to date. 

Recommendation

• Nigeria’s federal and state governments should shift from voluntary commitments to enforceable plastic regulations by supporting binding global and national plastic production-reduction targets compatible with climate boundaries under the new global plastics treaty.
• Enforce Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)  standards that are national, mandatory and strengthened to integrate waste pickers and other waste workers; mandates that producers and importers assume full financial responsibility for all costs associated with plastic waste management; are piloted and regulated by governments and above all, respect the waste hierarchy prioritising reduction and reuse. 
• Corporations in the country must stop greenwashing and reduce plastic production by investing in reuse and refill systems and safer alternatives.
• We call on Civil society and researchers to continue exposing polluters, supporting waste pickers, and providing evidence-based solutions.

“The plastic crisis in Nigeria is driven by a throwaway culture fueled by the fossil fuel industry. Delay is no longer an option. Corporate profit must never come before public health and environmental safety. Polluters must be held accountable, and strong regulations must be defended,” adds Weyinmi.

About the Report

The Nigerian Plastic Brand Audit Report were jointly developed by: Green Knowledge Foundation (GKF); Centre for Earth Works (CfEW); Sustainable Research and Action for Environmental Development (SRADeV); Community Development Advocacy Foundation (CODAF); Pan African Vision for the Environment (PAVE); Sustainable Environment Development Initiative (SEDi); Policy Alert; Community Action Against Plastic Waste (CAPws); Lekeh Development Foundation (LEDEF); Ecocykle Development Foundation; and the Association of Waste Pickers of Lagos (ASWOL).

The initiative was carried out under the BFFP & GAIA movement in Africa. 

ENDS

For more information, please contact:

BFFP Africa: Masego Mokgwetsi - masego@breakfreefromplastic.org 

GAIA Africa: Ibrahim Khalilulahi Usman - khalil@no-burn.org 

About GAIA & BFFP 

GAIA: GAIA is a global network of grassroots groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and individuals, in over 90 countries. The organisation envisions a just, zero-waste world built on respect for ecological limits and community rights, where people are free from the burden of toxic pollution, and resources are sustainably conserved, not burned or dumped. GAIA works to catalyse a global shift towards environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. www.no-burn.org 

BFFP: The #BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP) Movement is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 12,000 organisations and individual supporters from across the world have joined the #BreakFreeFromPlastic movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and to push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. www.breakfreefromplastic.org

Crossposted from the Daily Observer
Written by Amanullah Porag, 350 Bangladesh Coordinator and Youth for NDCs Founder/Executive Director 

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) victory in the country’s first democratic elections in 17 years was built on promises to restore democracy, stabilize the economy, and reform governance. But the new government has another urgent mandate: to protect people from a climate crisis that has driven at least 10 million Bangladeshis from their homes. For us, climate protection is a matter of national survival. With a staggering two-thirds of the country less than 15 feet above sea level, it is estimated that by 2050, one in seven people in Bangladesh will be displaced by climate change. For many years, I’ve worked with farmers who have lost their lands and homes because of encroaching sea waters. Most of them are forced to eke out a living in the sweltering streets of Dhaka, or else migrate abroad. We went to the polls hoping to correct past injustices-not just political corruption, but also systemic injustices that determine who suffers when floods destroy homes, when heatwaves turn factories into boiling rooms, when rising seas swallow farmland.

The BNP’s campaign manifesto included surprisingly clear environmental commitments: a “National Green Mission” that includes 25 million trees over five years, green jobs for youth, and a concrete target of 20% renewable electricity by 2030. Especially for a youth electorate starved of change, those green commitments matter. The question now is whether these promises will survive the BNP’s contact with power. A 20% renewable energy target by 2030 is not insignificant. If achieved, it can begin to transform an energy sector too long dominated by mega fossil fuel projects that have left people stranded with costly, unreliable electricity they can’t afford, and the country with debt it can’t pay. Unfortunately, the BNP also emphasized oil and gas exploration and refinery expansion as part of Bangladesh’s energy security measures. If the new government continues to lean into fossil fuels, it will fall prey to the same corrupt forces that doomed the nation. It should instead reform procurement, modernize grid infrastructure, and dismantle distortions that locked Bangladesh into expensive power deals.

Sure, planting trees is a good policy. But climate justice requires more. It means protecting coastal communities without displacing them for infrastructure projects. It means ensuring river erosion victims receive rehabilitation, not just temporary relief. It means designing urban heat action plans that protect workers and low-income communities. It means ending environmentally destructive projects that undermine long-term resilience. Bangladesh does not fall short on climate rhetoric, but on implementation failures. If the BNP wants to redefine governance, climate policy is where that promise will be tested most visibly. In its first 100 days, the new government must demonstrate its seriousness in addressing the energy and climate crisis that is eroding our capacity for progress.

First, it must audit all existing power purchase agreements and move to lower electricity prices. Second, it must revise the energy master plan, aligning it with climate science, economic rationality, and a just transition framework. Third, it must operationalize the national climate plan-moving beyond targets to delivery strategies, budget alignment, and accountability mechanisms. The greatest risk now is complacency. Governments often begin with reformist language but gradually slide into short-term stabilization politics, negotiated deals, and environmentally risky mega-projects justified in the name of development. We cannot allow that to happen again.

This is not yet a moment for antagonism. Youth activists, climate researchers, policy practitioners, and civil society are not adversaries of the newly elected government. Many of us have worked on climate governance and adaptation planning long before this election. If the BNP is serious about its green commitments, climate advocates stand ready to support with research, monitoring, implementation, and community engagement. But support does not mean silence. It means measurable progress, transparency, and accountability. It means speaking up when commitments drift.

The BNP’s victory reshaped the political landscape. Now it must decide whether it will reshape Bangladesh’s climate trajectory. This government has inherited more than power. It has inherited responsibility in one of the most climate-exposed countries on Earth. The elections are over-but Bangladesh’s climate test has just begun.

The post Climate change is a key challenge for Bangladesh’s new government appeared first on 350.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | 5 July 2025

1. We, the undersigned Members of Parliament, civil society organizations, and environmental justice advocates from across Southeast Asia, gathered in Kuala Lumpur on 4–5 July 2025 for the regional workshop “The Impact of Plastic Pollution on Human Rightsˮ, co-organized by the Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) Asia-Pacific Coordination Team and ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), alongside members of the BFFP movement across the region.
2. We met with a shared commitment: to defend the right of all peoples in Southeast Asia to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, and to collectively confront one of the regionʼs most urgent and neglected crises—the human rights impacts of plastic pollution and transboundary plastic waste trade.
3. We recognize that the entire life cycle of plastics—from extraction and production to consumption, disposal, and transboundary trade—has become a systemic threat to human rights, public health, and environmental integrity. The impacts of this crisis are disproportionately borne by waste pickers and other workers in the informal recycling value chain, Indigenous peoples, women, children, and marginalized coastal and rural [related to Session 1]
4. The continued transboundary trade in plastic waste—often disguised as recycling—has enabled countries of the Global North to shift their environmental burdens onto Southeast Asia. Despite national bans and international obligations under the Basel Convention, countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand remain hotspots for waste dumping and toxic exposure. [related to Session 3]
5. While we appreciate the existing regional progress through declarations and frameworks, including The ASEAN Framework of Action on Marine Debris (2019), The Bangkok Declaration on Marine Debris (2019), Framework for Circular Economy for the ASEAN Economic Community (2021), The ASEAN Regional Action Plan on Marine Debris (2021–2025), and The ASEAN Declaration on Plastic Circularity (2024); these instruments are non-binding and lacking in human rights They make no mention of the right to a healthy environment, the disproportionate impact of plastic pollution on vulnerable groups, the risks faced by environmental defenders, or the need for transparency and public participation. [related to Session 2]
6. Furthermore, the forthcoming ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment (2025)—a potentially transformative milestone in recognizing environmental rights as human rights — fails to explicitly link environmental rights to plastic pollution, marine litter, and transboundary waste trade. [opening session]
7. At the same time, at the global level, negotiations on a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty present a critical window for ASEAN member states to champion ambitious, justice-oriented measures. Yet, ASEAN lacks a unified, ambitious negotiating stance despite the dire consequences of plastic pollution in the region, or a formal process to engage parliamentarians and civil society in shaping its position. [related to Session 2]

We therefore declare the following shared commitments and recommendations:

8. Reaffirm plastic pollution as a human rights It endangers the rights to health, clean water, food, work, and a safe environment. ASEAN must treat plastic governance as a human rights imperative—not merely an environmental or waste management concern.

9. Call on ASEAN [Foreign Ministers] and its Member States to:

• Develop a Regional Action Plan on plastic pollution and plastic waste trade, grounded in environmental justice, gender equity, and human rights.
• Harmonize and enforce regulations on transboundary plastic waste imports, holding violators accountable.
• Enact a regional ban on plastic waste imports, accompanied by clear phase-down timelines, robust enforcement mechanisms, and alternatives to promote and enhance domestic waste collection for national and regional circular
• Urge ASEAN to ban plastic waste imports and develop a regional agreement on transboundary plastic waste management that is environmentally sound and socially just.
• Provide legal and physical protection for environmental defenders, waste workers, and local leaders who face intimidation, harassment, or criminalisation.
• Guarantee public access to environmental information, including corporate data on plastic production, waste flows, and pollution
• Institutionalize inclusive participation of civil society, national human rights institutions (NHRIs), Indigenous communities, and parliamentarians in environmental policy processes.

10. Call on the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) to:

• Include transboundary plastic pollution and waste trade into the Regional Plan of Action (RPoA) on Environmental Rights as a follow-up action from the adoption of the ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable
• Ensure the RPoA includes monitoring targets, measurable indicators, timelines, and budget allocations related to marine debris reduction, plastic waste import/export regulation, and river basin cooperation.
• Ensure inclusive consultations with civil society and affected communities throughout the RPoA process.
• Recognize and protect environmental defenders through regional principles and country-level guidance.
• Amplify and institutionalize local and Indigenous knowledge systems in environmental decision-making.
• Encourage ASEAN Member States to adopt mandatory environmental and human rights due diligence for businesses operating in high-risk sectors.
• Align regional policies with global instruments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the Escazú Agreement.

11.  Urge ASEAN Member States to lead the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations by:

• Advocating for a legally binding treaty addressing the full life cycle of plastics—from upstream production to end-of-life impacts.
• Phasing out avoidable, problematic, and single-use plastics and creating systems for reuse, refill, and extended producer
• Supporting a global ban on plastic waste exports from developed to developing countries, especially those lacking the infrastructure to manage such waste
• Demanding strong provisions on technology transfer, financial support, and capacity-building to support a just transition in the Global South.

12.    Commit to strengthening collaboration between civil society and parliamentarians to:

• Reform national laws and align them with regional and global treaty standards on plastic reduction, waste regulation, and circularity.
• Enhance corporate transparency and accountability across the plastics supply chain, including through due diligence
• Monitor state and private sector compliance with environmental and human rights
• Amplify frontline and community-led solutions, including those championed by Indigenous groups, grassroots organizations, and informal waste

We do hereby declare our shared commitment to take the following actions to ensure ASEAN plastic governance as a human rights imperative:

13.     For Parliamentarians:

• Introduce a resolution at the upcoming ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) General Assembly affirming the right of all peoples in Southeast Asia to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, and recognizing plastic pollution and transboundary plastic waste trade as urgent regional crises with profound human rights and environmental implications.
• Lead national legislative reforms to align with international standards and regional aspirations by enacting or strengthening laws that:
  • Regulate plastic production and consumption;
  • Ban or restrict plastic waste imports;
  • Mandate corporate environmental and human rights due diligence;
  • Advance circular economy principles;
  • Mandate extended producer's responsibility and polluters pay
• Establish parliamentary oversight mechanisms to monitor:
  • The implementation and enforcement of environmental regulations;
  • The conduct of corporations and importers;
  • Public sector    accountability,     including     budget            utilization                        for            waste management, environmental justice, and just transition initiatives.
• Ensure that public budgets reflect the needs of the most affected communities, including informal waste workers, women, Indigenous peoples, and local, rural and coastal populations, by prioritizing inclusive, equitable, and rights-based environmental programs.
• Champion the protection of environmental defenders, whistleblowers, and frontline communities through legal guarantees and public support, acknowledging their critical role in safeguarding environmental and democratic
• Convene inclusive national and subnational dialogues that engage civil society, youth, academia, Indigenous leaders, and marginalized groups in shaping national positions on ASEANʼs role in the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations and beyond.
• Represent the interests of the people, particularly those most affected by plastic pollution, in all parliamentary functions, ensuring policies are people-centred, gender-responsive, and climate-just.
• Come together to establish a Southeast Asian Parliamentary Network on Anti-Plastic Pollution, to:
  • Facilitate sustained cross-border collaboration and knowledge exchange;
  • Harmonize legislative efforts across the ASEAN Member States;
  • Engage in joint oversight missions and regional consultations;
  • Speak with a united voice in regional and global forums, including ASEAN platforms and Global Plastics Treaty negotiations;
  • Amplify the role of parliaments as protectors of rights and champions of environmental justice in the face of the plastic

14.   For Civil Society:

• Advocate at ASOEN and AICHR to embed human rights into ASEANʼs marine debris and plastic governance frameworks.
• Encourage the ASEAN in general and ASOEN and AICHR in particular, to formalize platforms where CSOs, academic institutions, and parliamentarians co-create policy recommendations.
• Strengthen grassroots monitoring of plastic waste imports and environmental
• Build cross-border coalitions to trace plastic flows and expose illegal dumping
• Coordinate national and regional participation in the Global Plastics Treaty

15.   Specifically, we call on the ASEAN Senior Officials on the Environment (ASOEN), at their 36th Meeting in Langkawi, Malaysia (28 July–1 August 2025), to: [related to opening session]

• Recognize plastic pollution as a regional human rights emergency and commit to an urgent, coordinated, and rights-based response. This framing must inform all environmental strategies and be mainstreamed across ASOENʼs working groups, cross-sectoral coordination, and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) Post-2025 Strategic Plan.
• Integrate concrete measures for social protection, capacity building, and financial support into just transition frameworks away from plastic dependency. These must include targeted budget allocations and policy mechanisms that prioritize informal waste workers, women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and coastal communities—those most acutely impacted by plastic pollution. A just transition must be central to ASEANʼs sustainability agenda.
• Ensure that the ASCC Post-2025 agenda fully incorporates environmental justice and human rights safeguards, that the forthcoming ASEAN Joint Statement on  Biodiversity  Conservation  (for  CBD  COP16)  reflects  the plastic–biodiversity nexus, and that institutional reforms strengthen ASOENʼs ability to address complex, transboundary environmental threats such as plastic pollution.

This joint statement represents a call for shared responsibility, regional solidarity, and transformative action—to reclaim our ecosystems, protect our people, and uphold the environmental and human rights of present and future generations.

For any additional questions or clarifications, please reach out to: devayani@breakfreefromplastic.org.

Organized by:

Originally published in the Winter 2026 issue of New Politics (Vol. XX No. 4, Whole Number 80)

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend
By Domenico Losurdo
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Henry Hakamäki, trans., Iskra Books, 2008/2023

The late Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend exalts and even deifies the long-ruling Soviet despot Joseph Stalin (1924–1953). Indeed, the text’s cover and inside cover art strikingly depict Stalin with a halo, and the book’s contents often read like a “Greatest Hits for Tankies.” In effect, Losurdo likens Stalin to a god threatened with desecration by wayward rivals like Lev Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Nikita Khrushchev. As critic Ross Wolfe observes, the author thus promotes “nothing less than the (re)entry of Stalinism into the realm of philosophy, a new school of falsification, all in service of justifying the course history has taken.”1

In his effort to contest his subject’s demonization by the West, Losurdo suggests that this infamous general secretary of the Soviet Politburo has been unfairly tarred with a “Black Legend” of sorts. Yet, as we will see below, there is plenty of evidence for such a “Black Legend” in Stalin’s case, just as there is a plethora of evidence for the parallel historical crimes of the Spanish Empire (1492–1976). Like neo-Stalinists, present-day apologists for this empire, including members of Spain’s Popular Party and Vox, largely dismiss critical and realistic discussions of Spain’s colonial past as a distorted Leyenda negra (“Black Legend”) opportunistically promoted by contemporary competitors like the British Empire.

Along these lines, Stalin is full of questionable praise for its object of study. Losurdo describes Stalin as the “eminent theorist of the national question,” based on the Bolshevik’s authoring “an essay of undeniable theoretical value [sic] (Marxism and the National Question)” (1913). Losurdo touts the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and modernization under Stalin’s “developmentalist dictatorship.” He does so, despite acknowledging that these policies involved the imposition of highly anti-egalitarian industrial policies, an abandonment of class struggle in favor of vastly expanded production, and the further empowerment of a bureaucratic-managerial elite. Moreover, the author misleadingly claims that Stalin “was committed to helping the [Second] Spanish Republic” when it came under attack from Francisco Franco’s Nationalist rebellion in 1936. Above all, Losurdo commends Stalin’s leadership during World War II, especially Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Nazi Germany’s devastating 1941 attack on the Soviet Union—the largest invasion force in history!2

In his dubious attempt at historical salvage in Stalin, Losurdo laments the general secretary’s reduction to a “scapegoat” for the “tragedy and horror of Soviet Russia.”3 By contrast, in our review here, we will provide a more critical account, based on the historical record, plus anarchist and socialist commentaries. We will then turn to reflecting on the paradoxical convergences linking Losurdo’s anti-imperialism with anarchism and Third-Camp socialism. In closing, we will consider some of the ominous present-day echoes of Stalinism in the toxic phenomenon of campism, especially as seen in the breakdown in left-wing solidarity with Ukrainians under genocidal attack by the Russian State.

Losurdo and Stalin

Ideologically, Stalin denies, distorts, and omits key parts of Stalin’s legacy. The idea, peddled by Losurdo, that Stalin sought to aid the beleaguered Second Spanish Republic is belied by the fact that he looted its treasury through fraudulent arms sales, often sending Republican forces useless weapons without ammunition. In reality, rather than defeating Franco per se, Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was aimed at controlling the course of events and keeping the revolutionary anarchists and Trotskyists in check.4 Even such a pro-Soviet historian as E. H. Carr acknowledges that the Republic had become “the puppet of Moscow” before its fall to Nationalist forces in 1939.5

Notably, as well, Losurdo applauds Stalin for supporting the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, given that the Soviet Union was the first State to formally recognize Israel. This is despite the fact that the creation of the Jewish State involved the mass-dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, in an event known as the Nakba, which undoubtedly persists, as seen in the Gaza genocide.6 Although Losurdo opens Stalin by discussing public mourning for the Soviet leader in Israel after his death in 1953, he fails to disclose that, besides legitimizing the Jewish State diplomatically, Stalin directly armed and trained Israel’s nascent military, which was engaged then (as now) in war crimes against Palestinians.7 In parallel to this lapse, Losurdo omits that Stalin had the Jewish Soviet anti-fascist Solomon Mikhoels killed in 1948, so as to prevent the latter from bringing to light the wartime genocide of Soviet Jews by the Nazis.8

Furthermore, Losurdo downplays Stalin’s responsibility for the Holodomor famine in Ukraine (1932–1933). He cites bogus charges from the last of the rigged Moscow Trials (1936–1938) to discredit Bukharin, Stalin’s Bolshevik rival, target, and eventual victim. He misrepresents Stalin’s misrule prior to, and at the start of, Operation Barbarossa. In particular, Losurdo dismisses as fake the widespread reporting that the so-called Man of Steel suffered a nervous breakdown and fled Moscow for his dacha upon learning of the Nazi incursion, and he broadly resists squaring with the fascist and Russian-chauvinist dimensions of Stalinism itself, as identified by Trotsky, the anarchist Voline, the theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, and socialist Rohini Hensman, among others.9

Losurdo likewise ignores how Stalin’s Terror (1936–1938) undermined military readiness ahead of the long-anticipated Nazi invasion, which Hitler had outlined as early as in Mein Kampf (1925). Historians Catherine Evtuhov and colleagues explain that the Stalinist Terror involved the execution of “60 percent of the marshals,” around 90 percent of “the highest army commanders, all the admirals, about 90 percent of corps commanders,” and several “divisional and brigadier generals.” Rather than acknowledge any of the Soviet Union’s early losses during the German blitzkrieg, either—from the fall of Minsk and Kyiv to the immediate destruction of one-fourth of the Soviet air force—Losurdo cheers on Stalin’s supposed military genius.10

The author only fleetingly acknowledges the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact that was signed just prior to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, claiming at once that Moscow had no other choice, but also, that Stalin somehow atoned for this error by going on to lead the Red Army in repelling and defeating Hitler.11 In reality, he omits that this deal involved Stalin leasing the Germans a secret U-boat base in Murmansk; supplying the Nazi war-machine with wheat, oil, and war matériel; and handing over German Communists to Hitler’s forces.12 More lucidly than Losurdo, then, Hensman outright calls Stalin a “Nazi collaborator.”13

In a similar vein, while Losurdo does briefly discuss the “so-called Holodomor” in Ukraine, only to dismiss it as a Ukrainian-nationalist myth, he guards silence about the similarly devastating famine that affected Kazakhs around the same time, owing—like Holodomor—to Stalinist policies of requisition and forcible collectivization, combined with poor climate conditions.14 He accurately observes that the “policy of ‘terrorist famine’ with which Stalin is accused runs deep through the history of the West,” yet this truth can hardly be used to excuse Stalin’s crimes, as the author apparently seeks to do. While he aptly decries the “deportation of the Cherokee people ordered by Andrew Jackson,” Losurdo only indirectly mentions the mass-deportations of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and other ethno-religious minorities ordered by Stalin during World War II.15

Stalin: A Critique

A more critical account of Stalin might emphasize that, rather than build socialism, the general secretary actually vastly accelerated the construction of state capitalism in the Soviet Union. He did so by imposing economic policies of “primitive socialist accumulation,” forcible collectivization of agriculture, super-exploitation of the working class, and “Five-Year Plans” mandating State-led industrial expansion and military modernization. In reality, Soviet society even under Stalin’s predecessor Vladimir Lenin was deeply marked by class divisions between workers and a bureaucratic elite, with the working class reduced to a new serfdom due to domination by a single, all-encompassing employer (otherwise known as a monopsony): namely, the Soviet State.16Stalin’s reign only entrenched such class divisions more deeply, while intensifying the war waged by the Kremlin against the peasantry. As such, in Nationalism and Culture (1937), the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker declares that “[m]onopoly of power must disappear, together with monopoly of property,” denouncing a “new absolutism” and “new economic feudalism” that have arisen in the Soviet Union.17

Undoubtedly, as Hensman and the late historian Martin Malia discuss, Stalin built up a “State Capitalist Empire” while rehabilitating Tsarism, Russian patriotism, heterosexism, and patriarchy. He did so, as the late Trotskyist Chris Harman notes, while exploiting millions of enslaved workers in the Gulag.18 According to Malia, Stalin’s invention and mobilization of new orthodoxies—particularly his framing of all of his rivals, from the anarchists, “the Populists[,] and the Mensheviks to the Trotskyites,” as irredeemable enemies of the people—went hand-in-hand with his persecution and mass killings of his opponents, including nearly all of the “Old Bolsheviks,” and even many of his own followers.19 George Orwell satirizes such Stalinist dynamics in his well-known dystopian science-fiction novel 1984 (1948), which Sandra Newman recently adapted as Julia (2023), hence providing a much-needed feminist take on the original cautionary tale.

The Third Camp

Potentially, against the author’s best intentions, some of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist points Losurdo raises in Stalin could jibe with anarchism and Third-Camp socialism, which both oppose the hegemony of Washington and Moscow. Despite all the aforementioned disgraces, Losurdo actually concedes that Lenin and Stalin’s regimes were “ruthless […] dictatorship[s],” that Stalin fashioned himself after the infamous Tsar Peter the Great, and that Stalin’s rule led to the “advent of autocracy.” To his credit, if only in passing, Losurdo expresses sympathy for political prisoners incarcerated in the Gulag, and he acknowledges the criminality of the 1940 Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers and prisoners of war, which was carried out on Stalin’s orders by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB).

In an attempt to avoid contemplating Stalin in a vacuum, however, Losurdo makes important criticisms of the wide-ranging contemporary “concentrationary universe” created by Western imperialism. He points to a plethora of murderous and genocidal violence on the part of Euro-Americans, as seen during British imperial rule over India, Ireland, and Iraq; the British military repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the antebellum and Jim Crow U.S. South; the settler-colonial genocides of Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America; the counter-insurgent war waged by the United States in the Philippines; the U.S. mass-internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war on Cambodia—among other crimes perpetrated by the nominally liberal United States and United Kingdom.21 Losurdo rightly stresses that the Soviet Gulag echoed many similar Western concentrationary spaces, yet, to reiterate, two wrongs do not make a right.

In this sense, to contemplate Losurdo’s emphasis on the racial slavery and imperialism practiced by Western liberal societies, while engaging in a critical reading of the same author’s apologia for Stalin, may lead one to a proper political and philosophical balance—that is, one in favor of the Third Camp.22 Along these lines, we should consider the horrors of Stalinism, along with Losurdo’s view—shared with Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and others—that liberalism effectively underwrote Nazi Germany, without overlooking the arguments made by Rocker and Critical Theorists (including Marcuse) that liberalism dialectically alsounderpins the libertarianism of anarchism and Marxism.23

Conclusion: Stalinism, Campism, and the Russo-Ukrainian War

The Stalinist concept of “socialism in one country”—or, rather, one empire—is intimately connected with the toxic phenomenon of pseudo-anti-imperialism in our time. Otherwise known as campists—in an allusion to one’s siding with either the “First” (Western) or “Second” (Soviet/Eastern) World, or Camp—pseudo-anti-imperialists usually promote the cause of the Second Camp against the First, as is reflected in their apologia for Russia, China, Iran, and Syria’s former Assad regime, among other bureaucratic-authoritarian rivals of the West.24 In subscribing to campism, pseudo-anti-imperialists clearly contradict the anarchist and socialist imperatives of internationalism, egalitarianism, and working-class self-emancipation.

Once disconnected from such fundamental principles, campists readily proceed with the promotion of deadly disinformation that serves their cause, such as denialism over Assad’s use of chemical weapons during the Syrian Civil War or China’s present-day genocide of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other ethno-religious minorities. They typically do so, while de-emphasizing and distracting from undeniable everyday atrocities—especially Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine. Such practices echo the past denial of Stalinist crimes, as evinced in Losurdo’s book, along with the “continuous and often hefty leftist support” the Soviet regime enjoyed, in the words of Eric Heinze—not to mention Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing blatant rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy.25

At a basic level, it is undeniable that the plight of Ukrainians at the hands of the Russian military has much in common with that of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. Still, while present-day leftist critics of the First Camp do well to center the horrors and injustices of the Gaza genocide, many overlook the parallel genocide in Ukraine—perhaps due to a mistaken sense that this atrocious war is either unremarkable or “constructive,” its victims “unworthy.” While this formulation is taken from Edward S. Herman, an unrepentant second-campist who used it to criticize Western media and politicians, it can help to illustrate the extent of the problem of leftist denialism, when the shoe is proverbially on the other foot. Other factors inhibiting an unequivocal left-wing embrace of the Ukrainian cause likely include a combination of indifference or hostility to national self-determination in Eastern Europe, and deference to the Kremlin, perpetrator of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which ranks highly within the Second Camp.26

By contrast, as remedy, we must resist the dehumanization, militarism, and imperialism of both camps, while supporting the cause of the anti-authoritarian, internationalist Third Camp as best we can.

Notes

1. Ross Wolfe, “Against Losurdo,” New International, Sept. 1, 2025.

2. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Henry Hakamäki (Seattle: Iskra Books, 2023), 6, 14–15, 28, 34, 54–55, 101, 124, 136, 157.

3.Ibid., 117.

4. Ronald Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xvii, xxiv, xxx.

5. Losurdo 2023, 6; E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (London: Pantheon, 1984), 31.

6. Losurdo 2023, 216–21.

7. Ross Wolfe, “Losurdo’s Lies,” New International, Sept. 4, 2025.

8. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 63.

9. Losurdo 2023, 15–16, 43, 68, 78–84, 117, 190–96, 282–84; Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975), 350–51; Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 147; Catherine Evtuhov et al., A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 703; Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), 110–11; Hensman, 15, 35–36, 47.

10. Evtuhov et al., 673, 702–4; David Reynolds, “Stalin’s weakness almost cost him the War,” Telegraph, June 13, 2011; Losurdo 2023, 218.

11. Losurdo 2023, 27–28, 142, 183.

12. Laurence Rees, WWII Behind Closed Doors: talin, The Nazis and The West (London: BBC Books, 2008); Evtuhov et al., 701–2; Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Verso, 2017), 524.

13. Hensman, 36.

14. Losurdo 2023, 191 (emphasis in original); Evtuhov et al., 669.

15. Losurdo 2023, 10, 13, 29, 44–47, 175, 195–96, 200, 267; Evtuhov et al., 710–11; Hensman 36.

16. Voline, 355–415.

17. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998), 535, 545–46.

18. Hensman, 32–36, 62; Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 235–36; Chris Harman, “From Trotsky to state capitalism,” Marxists Against Stalinism (London: Resistance Books, 2022), 37.

19. Malia, 228–68.

20. Losurdo 2023, 123, 135, 266–67, 271–72, 286, 318.

21.Ibid., 151–60, 170–76, 196–200, 256–69, 300–308.

22. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014), 1–34.

23. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1968); Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 21; Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 3–42, and Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia: Collected Papers Volume 6, eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London: Routledge, 2014), 340–41.

24. Hensman.

25. Eric Heinze, “Critical Theory and Memory Politics: Leftist Autocritique after the Ukraine War,” International Journal of Law in Context vol. 20, no. 2 (2024), 184–203.

26. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010),103 (emphasis in original); Heinze.

The Bay Area is facing its biggest threat to public transportation in decades. With a looming fiscal cliff, major transit agencies—including BART, Muni, Caltrain, and AC Transit—may soon have to make difficult decisions to close stations, reduce frequencies, and shorten hours of operation. The changes are stark and could mean that agencies like BART will have to close two of its lines and more than a dozen of its stations. Consequently, riders will wait dramatically longer for their trains and will have to switch trains more often to get to their final destination.

Failure to act now will mark the start of public transit’s slow demise in the Bay Area."

Greenbelt Alliance is endorsing a new transit funding measure in five Bay Area counties called Connect Bay Area, joining a powerful coalition of advocates to save the Bay Area’s public transit. 

The campaign is currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November 2026 ballot, and we need your support to sign the petition at an in-person event in your county! 

Learn how you can support below:

How We Got Here

Funding for transit agencies in the Bay Area relies heavily on fares and local revenue sources, so when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and ridership plunged, a substantial amount of that funding disappeared. For a while, agencies were able to stay afloat due to the federal relief stimulus, but that has quickly dried up, and California has not stepped in to address those deficits. Without yearly State funding and with ridership only slowly recovering to pre-pandemic levels, agencies are not seeing the revenue needed to continue operating at full capacity.

To put this into perspective, here is what will happen in 2027 if we do not pass the transit measure:

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)

• The Blue line (Balboa to Dublin-Pleasanton) and Grey line (OAK airport) will close
• 15 stations with the lowest ridership will close, including Millbrae and Warm Springs
• 70% reduction in train hours and 24% reduction in system miles
• The agency will face a $355-$385 million budget deficit (30% of the operating budget)
• Without a funding pathway by the end of 2027, BART may have to stop all operations

SFMTA Muni

• There will be a 50% cut of Muni services 
• There will be an elimination of fare discounts and pass programs for youth and seniors
• The agency will face a $322-$398 million budget deficit (25% of the operating budget)

AC Transit

• There will be a nearly 40% cut to services
• The agency will face a $51-$72 million budget deficit (10% of the operating budget)

Caltrain

• The agency will run 1 train per hour and cut all weekend service
• The agency will face a $65-$76 million budget deficit (42% of the operating budget)

These monumental disruptions to operations are direct consequences of the fiscal cliff. However, it does not account for the myriad ramifications down the road for managing traffic, tackling climate change, meeting our housing needs, and ensuring an affordable California for all.

“Fuming” with Greenhouse Gases

With 41% of California’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from the transportation sector, losing major parts of our public transit system will allow for even more cars on the road and weaken our ability to fight the climate crisis. Without BART, drivers can expect their commute to extend by 12 more hours per week and see traffic across the Bay Bridge surging by 73%. This means less time with family and friends doing the things we love. 

In the long term, this may lead to worsening climate hazards, including droughts, flooding, and wildfires. More cars will also be a direct threat to our health and well-being, causing more air pollution, compromising air quality, and leading to higher rates of respiratory-related illnesses. By maintaining our public transit system, we can reduce GHG emissions and avoid these catastrophic changes to our communities.

Communities Connected to Transit

Three words encapsulate our housing abundance strategy: transit-oriented development (TOD). In the last two decades, many urbanists have turned their attention to creating walkable, affordable, and resilient communities that are well-connected to the places where people work, study, and play. A cornerstone of this vision is built on the idea that we should promote more homes near our public transit corridors.

BART TOD projects like MacArthur Station provide residents access to the vibrant Temescal neighborhood, while allowing easy access to commute to downtown Oakland or San Francisco. Even new project proposals like the Caltrain-adjacent Hillsdale Reimagined in San Mateo demonstrate the durability of TOD in renovating underutilized buildings and turning them into lively community spaces. 

That is why Greenbelt Alliance co-sponsored Senate Bill 79 in the California legislature, which makes it easier and faster to build homes near public transit. While SB 79 is now law, the risks of public transit’s fiscal cliff diminish the law’s application by making fewer sites viable for TOD upzoning. Other proposed TOD projects funded by transit agencies will likely be reevaluated, too. This could all delay much-needed affordable housing in the Bay Area and worsen the housing crisis.

How to Save Our Public Transit

In light of the fiscal cliff and its many consequences, communities and advocates have organized to create a new regional transportation ballot measure. Dubbed Connect Bay Area, the measure will create a ½ cent sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties; San Francisco County will have a 1-cent sales tax. Taxes collected from this measure will be used to fund the transit operations for BART, Muni, Caltrain, and AC Transit while also funding transit transformation improvements to safety, cleanliness, convenience, and seamless integration of transit services. 

Last year, the measure passed its first hurdle as SB 63 and is now in its signature-gathering phase. By adding your name to the petition at one of our events, you will help us qualify for the 2026 November midterm election! Please continue staying connected to the campaign and we hope to see you at one of our events in the future.

The post Sign Petition To Save Bay Area’s Public Transit appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

Calling all climate-smart development enthusiasts: apply to join Greenbelt Alliance’s Climate SMART Development Endorsement Program (DEP) Committee.  The DEP Committee meets monthly to review, discuss, and select proposed development projects for endorsement that meet our  SMART—Sustainable, Mixed, Affordable, Resilient, Transit-Oriented—criteria and vision. These development projects advance the right kind of development in the right places across the Bay Area. (see the projects we have endorsed). 

 Applications are now open until March 17, 2026. Fill the form below to apply:

We are looking for additional members from across the Bay Area who share our climate SMART—Sustainable, Mixed, Affordable, Resilient, Transit-Oriented—vision, and professionals with expertise in housing equity, sustainability, finance, and environmental design. We would like this committee to accurately reflect a diversity of ages, professions, backgrounds, and genders, as well as employment status, including those who are in school, employed, or retired.

The meetings are currently held via Zoom every 3rd Wednesday of the month, for 1 hour, with occasional ad hoc meetings. The new committee members would attend their first meeting in April 2026.

The goals of the Climate SMART Development Endorsement Program are:

• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to climate impacts. 
• Promote equity, foster community resilience, and protect the most vulnerable. 
• Prioritize natural and green infrastructure solutions to enhance and protect natural resources and urban environments. 
• Preserve and restore ecological systems that enhance natural system functions, services, and quality and that reduce risk.

Why Join?

By promoting climate-smart development, we can create thriving, resilient neighborhoods with ready access to transit and housing for everyone. We can continue to protect the Bay Area’s greenbelts from sprawl development, preserving our open spaces for generations to come. As a trusted advocate of both open spaces and climate-smart communities, Greenbelt Alliance is in a unique position to help infill development projects move forward.

The Development Endorsement Program and Committee provides an essential environmental perspective on building housing within existing communities in the Bay Area. We pursue the SMART goals to achieve our mission of ensuring that the Bay Area’s lands and communities are resilient to a changing climate.

If you have any questions about this committee, please contact Andrew Ha at aha@greenbelt.org.

What We Are Looking For?

Title: Climate SMART Development Endorsement Committee Member
Deadline to apply: March 17, 2026
Responsibilities: All members of the Development Endorsement Committee are required to fulfill the following duties:

• Attend the 8-12 Development Endorsement Committee meetings each year.
• Review information about each development prior to the committee meeting.
• Come prepared with a high-level understanding of project(s) being reviewed and any initial questions
• Become familiar with Climate SMART Development Endorsement Guidelines and evaluate each project based on these criteria.

 

Header image: Karl Nielsen/Greenbelt Alliance

The post Join Our Climate SMART Development Endorsement Committee appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

RNs will hold a picket outside the Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 19, to demand hospital and county leaders move funding to save our health system, maintain services, and reverse the dangerous dismantling of the enhanced care management program.

.avia-section.av-jcvycj-9f2550a1b53c16788ff6a51b9204be42{ background-color:#f8f8f8; background-image:unset; } Social Media and Digital Manager
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Job Description

The Social Media and Digital Manager is a full-time role responsible for strengthening Native Organizers Alliance/Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund’s (NOA/NOAAF) digital presence. Working closely with the Communications Director, this position supports developing and implementing strategic social media campaigns, creating digital content, and managing updates to the NOA website. The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of the political landscapes shaping Indian Country and the current national conversation, along with the ability to respond quickly to emerging opportunities for narrative change.

Key social media duties include planning, creating, scheduling, and tracking content; sourcing images and artwork; monitoring campaign performance; and analyzing platform algorithms to evaluate audience reach and engagement.

Website responsibilities involve maintaining and updating content through WordPress, posting blogs, and assisting with ongoing webpage updates in coordination with the Communications Director.

This role is essential in shaping NOA/NOAAF’s digital narrative, expanding audience reach, and increasing engagement across platforms. The ideal candidate is creative, innovative, a self-starter, multimedia savvy, well-organized, adaptable, and possesses excellent writing and communication skills.

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Primary responsibilities:

• Develop and execute social media and digital content strategies, including messaging, audience targeting, and editorial planning
• Create, publish, schedule, and manage daily content across social media and website (text, graphics, video, and multimedia)
• Build and manage NOA/NOAAF’s social media presence by engaging community members, moderating content, and fostering meaningful online dialogue
• Monitor political, cultural, and media developments affecting Indian Country and the broader national landscape, and rapidly develop digital content and campaigns that advance narrative change
• Track, analyze, and report on social media and website performance to inform strategy, increase reach, and improve engagement
• Maintain and update website content, including publishing blogs and collaborative content with the Communications Director
• Collaborate with communications, narrative, design, and partner teams to ensure cohesive messaging, brand consistency, and coordinated campaigns
• Help develop social media campaigns in collaboration with partner Tribes, Native community groups, and ally organizations
• Manage content calendars for social media and website platforms, aligning with short and long-term organizational goals and priorities
• Ensure digital content complies with legal, ethical, and organizational standards, including copyright, data protection, and C3/C4 requirements
• Stay current on digital trends, platform updates, and best practices to generate new ideas and grow audiences
• Support the Communications Director with crisis communications, public relations, and other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• 2+ years’ experience in digital marketing and social media for an organization
• Strong familiarity with the business applications of social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Knowledge of WordPress website management and best practices
• Understanding of social media metrics; able to interpret the results and take action to increase the effectiveness of social media campaigns
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work independently and be well organized in a remote setting

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Qualifications – You could be great for this role if you:

• ​​Honor the idea of Native beliefs and practices as the guiding principles of NOA’s organizational culture, political strategy, and ways of working within the staff and with all our relations.
• Have a deep knowledge of the politics and issues impacting tribal and Native communities.
• Have a strong knowledge of intertribal Native history and culture.
• Have knowledge of and commitment to progressive social change movements and grassroots organizing as the key to building political power.
• Understand the decisive role tribal governments play in the movements for achieving sovereignty, protecting civil and human rights, and creating systemic change in nation-to-nation relations with the federal government.
• Have the ability to assess political moments as they unfold and respond with culturally grounded, values-aligned digital strategies that advance Native-led narrative change.
• Can communicate clearly and effectively.
• Are familiar with managing work plans and are able to participate in setting priorities and meeting deadlines.
• Are detail-oriented and able to manage your time efficiently in remote work.
• Possess solid problem-solving skills and know how to give and receive feedback well.
• Have a desire to grow and develop personally, and deepen our collective Indigenous frameworks.
• You want to learn from others in an exciting moment in Native history with an organization committed to movement-building for transformational change.

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Compensation

Salary: $75,000

Location: Remote (some travel for staff gatherings, campaigns, and events or conferences) 

Native Organizers Alliance is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for a Just Society (501c3) and is an equal opportunity employer, and women, people of color, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQI people are strongly encouraged to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression, nor any other basis protected under law. We embrace the full spectrum of humanity and the intersectional nature of our existence and imaginative energies. We embody diversity in our staff, board, the artists and partners we work with, and the audiences we attract.

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Application Procedure

Interested applicants are asked to please email:

• Cover letter or social media campaign examples
• Resume

Please email with the subject line “Your Name: Social Media and Digital Manager” to: jobs@nativeorganizing.org

Only those whose applications are being considered will be contacted. Position open until filled. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

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The post Social Media and Digital Manager appeared first on Native Organizers Alliance.

Soon after the turn of the century, James Miller wrote a couple of important articles on urban biodiversity. The first argued that conservation biology needs to focus more on areas “where people live and work” (i.e., cities) to address the (adverse) effects of human land use (Miller and Hobbs, 2002). The second argued that people […]

Dear Friends,

The Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) has officially released the hearing notice for the upcoming appeals hearing regarding the Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) Consistency Determination for the Delta Tunnel. This is a critical moment for community in our fight to protect the Delta.

Click here to read the full official notice, or see below for a snapshot of what it contains:

• Hearing Dates: Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27, 2026
• Start Time: 9:00 AM
• In-person Location: California Natural Resources Agency – 715 P Street, Room 221, Sacramento, CA 95814
• Virtual Option: Join as an attendee online via Zoom https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88406543651
  or call in at 1 (669) 900-6833 (webinar ID: 88406543651)

Register for the Training!

Public Comment Community Training: Mark Your Calendar

Restore the Delta and San Francisco Baykeeper will host a public comment training on February 19, 2026!

Join us to learn:

• What to expect at the Council hearing
• How to participate virtually or attend in person
• And how your voice can make a difference

This is your opportunity to learn what this means for the future of the Delta Tunnel and how to show the Council that the community stands united against the Delta Tunnel!

What is the Hearing For?

The Delta Stewardship Council will have a meeting on February 26 and 27th to hear from the Department of Water Resources (DWR), which has officially submitted a Certification of Consistency with the Delta Plan to the Delta Stewardship Council for the Delta Conveyance Project. 

• By submitting the Certification of Consistency, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) is stating that the Delta Tunnel aligns with the “coequal goals” and provides a reliable water supply for California while protecting and restoring the Delta ecosystem.

We know that to be untrue!

• Restore the Delta and our partners have filed a formal appeal to challenge this determination. DWR’s plan ignores the best available science, threatens our water quality, and disregards the people who live and work in the Delta. 

We thank you time and time again for showing up for the estuary we call home. We hope you can join us in making your voice heard!

In solidarity,
– The Restore the Delta team

RNs from St. Joseph Health in Brazos Valley, Texas, will hold a rally on Thursday, Feb. 19, as they prepare for upcoming negotiations for their first contract since forming a union last December. Nurses say safe staffing, workplace safety, and a strong voice for bedside nurses will be their top priorities as they start negotiations.

California has committed to reducing methane emissions from the dairy and livestock sector 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2030 under SB 1383 (Lara, 2016).  An important strategy in meeting that target has been the Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP),

The post New CalCAN Report Examines the Climate and Water Quality Potential of Alternative Manure Management in California appeared first on CalCAN - California Climate & Agriculture Network.

SAVE THE DATE: Northwest Transmission Summit

Join us May 7 & 8 in Boise, Idaho to discuss how we can reinforce and expand our transmission system to meet our region’s needs and build toward our prosperous future.

Learn More

Federal and Regional Updates 

With other public interest groups, we are challenging the Department of Energy’s illegal emergency order forcing Washington’s last coal plant to operate past its planned retirement date. 

Read our joint op-ed with Climate Solutions and Washington Conservation Action in The Seattle Times and more about the order in The New York Times. 

Join us in speaking up for salmon and a strong regionally supported Fish & Wildlife Program  

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NPCC) is updating its 5-year Fish and Wildlife Program – a regional plan for mitigating harm to endangered native fish affected by hydropower operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers. 

With the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement abandoned and continued efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the NPCC 2026 Fish and Wildlife Program is the best path to mitigate further harm to fish from hydropower operations in the Columbia and Snake rivers and make actionable progress towards recovery goals. We are working with our partners at Save Our Wild Salmon and the Columbia Snake River Campaign to encourage participation in this process. 

Submit your comments by March 2 to help ensure that the final plan: 

• Includes elevated “spill” over the dams through August 31 to help protect outmigrating juvenile salmon and steelhead. 

• Emphasizes holding Bonneville Power Administration accountable to its obligation to protect and enhance all fisheries impacted by the hydro system. 

• Acknowledges Lower Snake River dam breaching as a necessary measure.   

The Fish & Wildlife amendment is the first part of the NW Council’s five-year planning process. The second part will come this summer when the Council releases the 9th Power Plan for public comment. This is a great opportunity to urge NPCC to chart a course towards affordable, efficient, and reliable energy that also protects and restores abundant fish populations. 

Submit Your Comment

Washington 

2026 Legislative Session Updates  

The 2026 Legislative Session is in full swing! This “short” session runs through March 12. We are tracking and collaborating on bills related to data centers, wildfire, affordability, distributed energy resources, the Clean Energy Transformation Act, and more. Keep an eye out for our weekly emails that list opportunities to testify and follow along. If you have any questions, please reach out to charlee@nwenergy.org.  

Our work on the Governor’s Data Center Workgroup, and after has led to a couple of bills that are now making their way through the legislature. Driven by rapidly growing energy demand for data centers in our region, tech industry load could add the equivalent of an additional 2-4 Seattles to the grid by 2030. In the face of this unprecedented growth, we need to protect ratepayers, grid reliability and the environment. Two data center bills would do that:  

• The main bill, HB 2515 / SB 6171, will help protect affordability and reliability for consumers and will help ensure that data center companies are being transparent and are prioritizing new clean energy. HB 2515 made it through House committees and passed the House Floor on February 14. While still a strong bill, a few important pieces of the bill were lost through the process and we will be working to see if we can restore those on the Senate side. 

• The second bill, SB 5982 / HB 2245, will ensure that Washington’s clean electricity law, CETA, applies to all electricity used by data centers. That bill passed through Senate committees and passed the Senate Floor on February 11.   

The two bills were also selected as one of the Environmental Priorities Coalition’s (EPC) 2026 Priorities, which means that a larger group of environmental organizations in the state are aligned in support of the bills. Here is the EPC’s one-pager that has more details on the contents of the bills. You can also read more about them in The Seattle Times and Axios.  

Caitlin Krenn, Climate and Clean Energy Director at Washington Conservation Action, Zachariah Baker, NWEC Regional and State Policy Director, and Leah Missik, Washington Legislative Director at Climate Solutions, testifying in support of SB 6171 in Olympia. Linda Garcia and Jeff DeLuca from the Washington State Community Action Partnership pictured in the row behind the speakers also testified. The companion bill in the House – HB 2515 – became the vehicle for the bill and passed the House Floor on Feb. 14. 

Oregon 

Energy Justice Leaders End-of-Year Celebration 

At the end of January, we celebrated the completion of the third year of the Energy Justice Leadership Program virtually and in person in Portland and Talent. 

NWEC Policy Associate Alessandra de la Torre was able to join participants in Talent, and shared carne asada and tamales made by one of the EJ leaders. 

“It was beautiful to hear about what participants loved the most and learned from the program as well as how to continue to improve it,” de la Torre said. 

Oregon Legislative Session Underway 

The Oregon Legislature kicked-off the 2026 “short” session earlier this month. The session runs through March 8. NWEC is not leading bills this session, but supporting partners in their efforts.  

Montana 

NorthWestern Energy Releases Draft 2026 Integrated Resource Plan  

Every three years, NorthWestern Energy (Montana’s largest Investor-owned utility) must produce an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)—a long term planning study that outlines different options for how the utility will meet its customers’ power needs over the next 20 years. It includes the forecasting of future electricity demand as well as an evaluation of how it will use (or develop) energy resources to meet that demand. On January 13, NorthWestern Energy (NWE) released its draft 2026 IRP to the public, and the utility is now accepting comments on the draft as part of its own (pre-regulatory) process.  

This year’s IRP is particularly important due to three recent and potentially game-changing occurrences across Montana’s electric service landscape.  

First, NWE recently announced a proposed merger with Black Hills Energy—a South Dakota-based, regional utility company. This is only the second time in a quarter century that a major utility merger has been proposed in Montana. NWEC is examining this merger closely for potential impacts on clean energy resource development and energy affordability. 

Secondly, NorthWestern recently acquired almost 600 MW of Colstrip—the aging and polluting coal-fired power plant in eastern Montana—making it the majority owner of the plant. Almost immediately, NWE filed documents with FERC to transfer the 370 MW Puget Sound Energy portion into a new, unregulated merchant company. Their stated intent is to sell power from this share of the plant outside of the regulatory structure, likely to a new large load customer.  

And thirdly (speaking of large loads), NWE has announced intentions to provide 1,400 megawatts (MW) of power to several new data centers proposed in Montana. For perspective, that’s nearly twice as much power as its average load in the entire state. NWEC is deeply involved in the emerging issue of data center development in Montana, its implications on residential rates and water resources.  

So, while a lot is at stake this planning cycle, unfortunately NorthWestern’s draft IRP has numerous deficiencies:  

• It fails to consider climate-altering greenhouse gas pollution; 

• It overvalues fossil fuel generation resources, while undervaluing low-cost renewables like wind, solar and battery storage; 

• Its goals for achieving energy savings through conservation and energy efficiency programs are anemic, at best; 

• It proposes extremely expensive nuclear power as the eventual replacement for Colstrip, while not accounting for the full cost of plant construction and its impact on customers. 

NWEC is reviewing the IRP in greater detail, and we will be providing comments in the coming weeks. The public comment period remains open until March 12, after which NWE will submit its plan to the Montana Public Service Commission for official regulatory review and approval. We encourage all interested stakeholders to provide input during these public processes and to tell NorthWestern Energy that it must do a better job of investing in and providing clean, affordable energy to its customers.   

Idaho 

Idaho Power’s Plans to Address Load Growth  

Growing energy demands due to new large loads is the hot topic in energy planning today. Whether it’s data centers for artificial intelligence, booming populations, or electrification to protect our climate, demands for new energy are growing across the region. As we look at state-level actions to address this issue, Idaho Power provides an example of a regulatory structure to help ensure growth pays for growth.  

New large customers are subject to Idaho Power’s Large Load Tariff that defines the costs and requirements for taking electric service. The public tariff setting out the prices the customer will pay and the terms of taking service is a transparent process to ensure the entity takes service on par with other customers. New customers must also comply with “Rule H” which ensures the new entity pays its share of the wires, poles, and substations they require. When it comes to planning generation and transmission to meet new demands, Idaho Power only includes customers who have a meaningful commitment to actually interconnect. This approach avoids overbuilding the system for customers who never arrive and thereby shifts costs onto local customers.  

This Idaho approach is one way to address new large loads, and as mentioned above, we are leading the effort in Washington to pass state-wide legislation to address data center loads. We will continue to use all of our tools and opportunities to address the issue across the region.  

Idaho PUC Reviewing Wildfire Management Plans 

NWEC efforts to address increasing utility wildfire liability and costs continue. Each state has a different approach to the same two issues: how to ensure utilities are proactively planning to protect energy infrastructure and how to address a utility’s liability for wildfire damages. The Idaho Public Utilities Commission has initiated its first review of utility plans that, if approved and followed, should address these issues.  

NWEC Policy Associate Alessandra de la Torre has engaged in most Wildfire Management Plans in the region, assessing the protections for public interests and reviewing utility plans to ensure cost effective investments. NWEC is recommending best practices discovered in other plans and techniques to ensure customers are protected from the impacts of utility-caused wildfires. Two key areas we are exploring are how to determine whether a utility investment is a cost-effective approach to reduce wildfire risks and how utilities can provide customers with local solutions when service is interrupted.  

Join us in shaping a brighter energy future for people, salmon, and the climate—give to NWEC now and help advance affordable and equitable clean energy across the Northwest.

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The post February 2026 Newsletter first appeared on NW Energy Coalition.

Not Our President's Day, thank God, has passed. Along with mattress sales, it was marked by many middle fingers in the air, a typically grotesque message from a tainted White House, and news that a massive, ill-fated, gold-leaf statue of the worst president in history, hilariously dubbed "Don Colossus," remains stranded on its back in an Ohio warehouse as its creator and a bunch of crooked crypto bros - surprise! no surprise! - back-stab and bicker about money. May he rot there, please.

The general sentiment around our latest National Holiday was best summed up by one post: "Happy Presidents Day. Except the current one. Fuck that guy." He didn't win any points by marking the day spewing the usual hateful vulgarity "in the creepiest way possible," declaring in a vengeful post, "They came after the wrong man. I was the hunted. Now I'm the hunter." He is also, of course, "one sick dude," old, dazed and confused with unprecedented low approval ratings, maybe because all he does is lie, bully, bribe, be bribed and in his gluttonous delusion insist, “We have the greatest economy actually ever in history” as he rips us off for billions by selling his name for hopeful airports and don't forget their trashy "clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips." Democracy dies in tie clips.

Now, in one final, loutish indignity, he - or at least a gaudy doppelgänger - is being held hostage in Zanesville OH for a $92,000 payment, having been both delayed and downgraded from a planned prime spot at his inauguration to his Doral golf course - specifically, the tenth hole. The statue saga began when sculptor Alan Cottrill, who's made about 400 figures on commission, including bronzes of 16 past presidents and a Thomas Edison now in the Capitol, got a call from an unknown Las Vegas sculptor asking if he'd like to make a statue commemorating Trump's brave ear being allegedly grazed in Butler, Pennsylvania - an "iconic" 2024 moment a consortium of 16 cryptocurrency enthusiasts deemed "a turning point in world history," also a cool chance to "show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto." LOL.

The original plan was to unveil a bronze, 15-foot, 2,400-pound Don Colossus, installed on a 6,000-pound concrete base, at Trump’s inauguration, positing it to loom over the National Mall. The roughly month-long timeline was tight - Cottrill had to work "crazy fast" - and he was to be paid $300,000. There were tough moments. When he replicated Trump's "turkey neck," the crypto boys were "aghast" and requested "a more flattering, less realistic look." The hardest part was the hair: "Holy shmoly! You can't sculpt and cast something that is....wispy." Still, he toiled away at it, and met the deadline. The night before one of the crypto clutch called: Temps had plunged, the Secret Service had moved Inauguration Day inside where a two-story rapist might pose a danger, and the new plan was to install Don later at his Doral resort.

The statue malingered in a warehouse in DC, then in another in Pittsburgh. Cottrill got paid over time, but "every payment arrived weeks late." In November, he approached his patrons with a shiny new idea: The bronze was burnished to look gold, but what if they coated it in Trump's beloved gold leaf? The proposal was "like a glass of water to a person dying of thirst - Immediately everybody jumped on board." But finding someone to work on a giant Trump statue proved tough; several declined the job "because of the subject matter" before someone agreed to slather it in a layer of 23.75-carat gold leaf. A photo was sent to the felon, who loved it - "Wow, it's so bright and beautiful" - a plan was formed to install the pedestal at "a juicy spot" near three palm trees at the 10th hole, and the crypto investors began "actively looking” for a launch date.

But Cottrill suddenly charged the crypto guys - who include Dustin Stockton, a GOP strategist investigated by federal agents for the "We Build The Wall" fraud Steve Bannon did time for - with copyright infringement, arguing they'd gone behind his back for months to promote their $PATRIOT cryptocurrency while marketing the statue: "That was their play all along." Instantly, the deal got bogged down in the volatile world of crypto, a meme coin only worth what current speculation makes of it; things got really messy when the gluttonous Trump, smelling money, launched his own $TRUMP coin days before his inauguration, hammering the $PATRIOT value before itself predictably tanking to over 95% below its peak. Still, and despite charges of massive conflict of interest, Trump has reportedly raked in $1.4 billion from this crap.

Meanwhile, Don Colossus is being held hostage in "financial purgatory" by Cottrill, who claims the crypto guys are both ripping him off and refusing to fork up their final payment. "They keep saying, 'Oh don’t worry Alan, we’ll pay you, we’ll pay you,' but actually they've been illegally infringing on the copyright of my original art right up to the present day." They're also continuing a bizarre social media campaign, posting images of the pedestal - all they have - with promos for their meme coin. "The dream is alive and well," they proclaim. "What the president has in store for the $PATRIOT community and his inner circle for this unveiling will surely be spectacular!" They say they hope to offer Trump one of Cottrill's earlier miniature versions, coated in the same gold finish; they'd love to have it placed in the Oval Bordello, along with all its trashy drek.

The crypto cartel argue they'll pay their final installment before Don "leaves for Doral," and Cottrill is "trying to squeeze us for it." But Cottrill says he already went to Doral a few weeks ago to install the base; he brought along a 12-inch version to scope out the site - "It was the only thing I could fit in my hand luggage" - and a landscape architect dug up and re-positioned the palm trees just so. "The gold leaf in the Florida sun - it’s going to be brilliant," he pledges. "But what they owe me is $91,200, and it's not leaving until they pay me." For all the aggravation, Cottrill says he's enjoyed working on the project. But it's taken up a lot of space in his studio for a long time, and now, "I'd like to get it the hell out of here." Many, many Americans can relate.

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In a letter directed at senators, President Theodore Roosevelt’s relatives spoke up in opposition to a proposed copper mine upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, proclaiming that President Roosevelt would be “appalled” by the project. The family warns that overturning the 20-year mining ban via a Congressional Review Act resolution would set a dangerous precedent that threatens public land protections across the nation.

The letter points out that conservation was once a pillar of the Republican platform, and critiques the party’s retreat from the environmental legacy of Roosevelt, who protected around 230 million acres of public lands during his presidency. “T.R. was active in preserving our greatest wilderness terrain on both the East and West coasts — it became one of the greatest enduring legacies of his life,” the letter states. “It is now time for all of you to get in the arena with him.”

The letter was signed by Roosevelt’s great-grandsons Ted IV, Tweed, and Mark, and his great-great-grandson Kermit III.

Judge orders restoration of Philadelphia slavery exhibits

A federal judge has ordered Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to restore displays discussing slavery at a National Park Service site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as president. The exhibit, which details the lives of nine enslaved people, was removed last month as part of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a ruling yesterday, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe stated that an agency “cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership” and ruled that the exhibit’s removal violated a long-standing agreement requiring that the federal government consult with the city before making any changes to the site.

Quick hits A highway through tortoise habitat? What the Northern Corridor’s revival means for southern Utah

Salt Lake Tribune

Judge orders slavery exhibit to be restored after Trump administration removal

Washington Post | Politico | CBS News | The Guardian | Los Angeles Times | New York Times | CNN

Feds to move ahead with Colorado River plans after states don’t reach deal

New York Times | Colorado Politics | The Land Desk | Fox13 | KNAU | Aspen Times | AZPM | Colorado Sun

Trump nominates hospitality executive to lead National Park Service

KUNC | More Than Just Parks | Newsweek | Deseret News

Tribes grant the Colorado River legal personhood. Can this help save it?

BBC

Editorial: Public land management requires a thoughtful steward, not a bulldozer

Las Vegas Sun

Former National Park Service director reflects on layoffs, deep cuts

OPB

Arizonans in Congress make latest push to make Chiricahua National Monument a national park

Arizona Daily Star

Quote of the day

As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

—US District Judge Cynthia Rufe, ruling on the removal of a slavery exhibit at a National Park Service site, CNN

Picture This @yosemitenps

Happy Valentine’s Day from Yosemite National Park! We’ll never take you for granite.❤️

Can you spot the heart on the face of El Capitan? This shape was likely formed from either one very large rockfall or, more likely, several smaller ones that carved the heart over time. The point of the heart is formed by two intersecting rock fractures called joints. The curving arches that form the rounded parts of the heart are potentially a result of rocks falling away from beneath.

We think that’s pretty rock solid!

Featured photo: President Theodore Roosevelt at Yosemite National Park in 1903. National Park Service

The post Teddy Roosevelt’s descendants call on Congress to protect public lands appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Argentine lawmakers are set to vote this week on government proposals to weaken a landmark law that bans mining on and around glaciers, days after President Javier Milei’s libertarian administration signed a critical minerals supply deal with the US.

Milei will ask Congress to amend 2010 legislation known as the glaciers law – hailed as the first of its kind in the world – which prohibits activities such as mining or oil drilling on the nearly 17,000 glaciers and surrounding periglacial areas that supply water to millions of Argentines and the vital agricultural sector.

While glaciers account for less than 1% of Argentina’s vast territory, they overlap with large mineral deposits, especially copper, a critical mineral which is in hot demand for use in renewable energy systems, power grid infrastructure and batteries for electric vehicles (EVs).

Soaring demand for the red metal is driving a supply shortage that could reach 30% by 2035, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Argentina, already a leading global lithium exporter, does not produce copper at present, but several major projects – on hold for years – could go ahead if Milei’s glacier law overhaul is approved by Congress, environmental campaigners and mining advocates say.

The nation’s mining exports reached $6.04 billion in 2025, according to the government.

Mineral-rich provinces would define protected areas

Milei says his bid to amend the glacier law is a way to give greater autonomy to the provinces by allowing them to decide exactly which glacial areas should be protected and off-limits for mining due to their role in water systems, and which should lose that status. Provincial authorities would then be allowed to grant mining permits in periglacial areas.

The amendment comes as part of a wider push by Milei – a close ideological ally of US President Donald Trump – to draw investment to the country, and the legislative overhaul is backed by mining companies and governors in the nation’s biggest mining provinces such as San Juan, Salta, Jujuy and Mendoza.

“This bill we are sending to Congress will bring investments that could create one million jobs,” Milei said of his plan to overhaul the glaciers law in November, adding that “environmentalists would prefer people to die of hunger before touching anything”.

• Feb 5, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier ‘America needs you’: US seeks trade alliance to break China’s critical mineral dominance   The US has signed nearly a dozen mineral deals with countries as it called for the creation of a trading bloc to diversify supply chains away from China Read more
• Feb 3, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier West Africa’s first lithium mine awaits go-ahead as Ghana seeks better deal  Ghana wants to benefit from the scramble for lithium but its reliance on mining firms for revenue and expertise weakens its ability to negotiate preferential terms, experts say Read more
• Jan 16, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals Over 100 countries attended the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh, putting the Kingdom at the heart of discussions on minerals for the energy transition Read more

Earlier this month, Milei’s administration signed a critical minerals deal with the US to strengthen and secure supply chains, saying the accord was expected to drive significant economic growth and new investment.

But many environmental scientists in Argentina say the government’s proposal puts business interests before safeguards vital to protecting the nation’s water supplies at a time when climate change is taking a heavy toll on glacial areas.

“There is a clear intention among those pushing for these modifications to portray the current protection of the periglacial environment, or glacial waste rock, as a legal exaggeration, minimising the importance of these areas within the glaciers themselves and the ecosystem services they provide,” Guillermo Folguera, an environmental researcher from Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), told Climate Home News.

Some mining experts say regulators could protect water supplies by establishing technical criteria – such as the ice content of periglacial areas.

Copper projects on ice – for now

By opening a door to mining on areas that are currently protected, Milei’s plan could clear the way for at least four large copper projects that have been on hold since the glaciers law was passed 15 years ago, said FARN, an Argentine NGO focused on environmental issues and natural resources.

“Today, some projects violate the glaciers law and that, with this regulatory change, could potentially begin operating,” Leandro Gómez, environmental policy coordinator at FARN, told Climate Home News.

Giant copper mining projects that could be revived if the overhaul passes Congress include El Pachón and Agua Rica, both of which are owned by Swiss miner and commodities trader Glencore, according to FARN, which along with 26 other environmental organisations published a document rejecting the government’s proposal.

Last year, Glencore said it planned to spend $4 billion to develop Agua Rica and $9.5 billion to develop El Pachón.

The other two copper projects that FARN says could get the go-ahead if Milei’s amendments are passed are Los Azules and Josemaria in San Juan province.

A view of the glaciers above Mendoza in Argentina (Photo: REUTERS/Ramiro Gomez)

All four projects are located in areas classified as periglacial zones with rock glaciers, according to surveys by IANIGLIA, the national agency responsible for conducting inventories of such areas.

Asked to comment on its Agua Rica project, now called MARA, Glencore said in a statement the site was not located on a rock glacier.

“There is no rock glacier located in the footprint of the MARA project; neither in any current works nor within the foreseen area of future operations,” it said, adding that water management was a key element of the project’s design.

“We have been developing a system designed to minimise or mitigate impacts on the local communities or the environment,” it said.

Milei is confident of congressional approval

Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party gained ground in Congress following a midterm election in October, and he voiced confidence in January about having enough votes to pass his glacier law proposal.

Last week, José Peluc, a deputy for San Juan from La Libertad Avanza, was designated head of the lower house’s environment commission in a signal of support for the amendment, though some opposition lawmakers have condemned Milei’s plan.

Lawmaker Maximiliano Ferraro from the centrist Civic Coalition told Congress in a recent debate that the proposal “is in clear violation” of the country’s constitution and Latin America’s 2018 Escazu Agreement on environmental rights.

The amendment, like other government measures aimed at boosting big mining projects such as the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI), is supported by the CAEM chamber that groups Argentina’s major mining companies. It has also said the change would help revive deadlocked copper projects.

“Seventy-five percent of the surface area of ​​the copper projects that were announced need clarification of the law because they are in areas considered periglacial,” Roberto Cacciola, CAEM president, told La Nación newspaper.

“Most have already started the application to enter the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI),” he said.

“Irreparable consequences” feared near copper project

In the small town of Andalgalá in Catamarca province, which lies about 17 kilometres from the Agua Rica project, anti-mining activists have been holding weekly marches against the mine’s development since 2010 and they describe heavy-handed police tactics aimed at stifling their protests.

They are dismayed by the government’s attempt to water down the glaciers law, fearing that allowing the mine to operate would endanger the town’s water supplies from the Andalgalá River.

“Starting up Agua Rica would mean large-scale environmental destruction,” said Juan José Cólica, an agricultural engineer who worked for 35 years, until his retirement last year, at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology’s Andalgalá office. 

• Jun 17, 2024 Clean Energy Frontier Lithium tug of war: the US-China rivalry for Argentina’s white gold As global competition hots up to secure lithium supplies for batteries, China is boosting its investments in Argentina while the US courts President Javier Milei Read more
• Feb 17, 2026 Investigations As Louisiana bets big on ‘blue ammonia’, communities brace for air pollution Carbon capture hasn’t delivered major climate benefits — and the plants would still emit thousands of tons of pollution. Read more
• Feb 13, 2026 News Türkiye prioritises cleaning up garbage emissions in COP31 ‘action agenda’ ‘Zero Waste’ is the personal project of Turkish First Lady Emine Erdogan and aims to cut emissions from landfills and waste disposal Read more

Glencore said it was working to complete the exploitation phase environmental impact report (EIR) for the project, which would be subjected to a technical review by the regulatory authority and public consultation.

“We engage with our host communities to understand and address their concerns, including in respect of economic and social development opportunities for the region,” the company said.

Cólica said allowing the mine to operate at the foot of the snow-capped Aconquija mountain would cause “irreparable consequences that could last for generations”.

“There is no technical method or technology to remedy the damage that could be caused, nor to safeguard the population of Andalgalá from the geological, hydrological, environmental and health risks,” he said.

The post Argentina’s pioneering glacier law on the line as Milei bets on copper rush appeared first on Climate Home News.

This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last June, California climate and environmental justice groups celebrated a victory a long time in the making. After an opposition campaign that built alliances across movements, turned out supporters to hearings and generated 50,000 public comments, a company gave up plans that threatened to wreak havoc on the state’s forests.

The corporation behind the defeated project, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, proposed building two mills in Northern California’s Tuolumne and Lassen Counties to turn wood from nearby forests into pellets to be burned for fuel. 

Globally, the burning of wood pellets made from trees, known as forest biomass, has become one of the fastest-growing false solutions to climate change. It is turning some of the world’s last intact forests into fuel that’s used as a substitute for coal, mainly in Europe and Asia. 

GSNR’s mills would have sourced wood from California forests already under strain from a drying climate. Burning wood contributes to climate change, with some estimates placing the carbon footprint of this type of energy generation close to that of coal. Even so, the company’s backers tried selling their project as “green” energy.

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GSNR planned to export these pellets via the Port of Stockton, where local environmental justice organizations said increased industrial activity would further pollute communities already suffering from some of the worst asthma rates in the state. 

“This project would have transformed California in a very negative way,” said Gary Hughes, a California-based organizer for Biofuelwatch, one of the organizations involved in the campaign. “Grassroots organizing put a stop to it.” 

The coalition that stopped Golden State Natural Resources joined a global movement that has achieved real momentum, leading to major defeats for the industry last year in the Netherlands, Mississippi and Washington State.

“The movement against the forest biomass industry is winning,” said Michél Legendre, campaigns director for the Dogwood Alliance, which fights to protect forests in the U.S. South. “People exposing this industry for what it is have put it on shaky ground.” 

Uncovering false solutions 

The narrative propping up forest biomass as an energy source is that burning wood from trees is climate neutral, because the carbon that is released can theoretically be reabsorbed if the trees are replanted. However, this fails to account for how carbon from wood combustion remains in the atmosphere for decades or centuries before trees can fully regrow.

Other sustainability claims made by the industry, like that it uses mainly leftover slash from logging, have also been debunked. Industry whistleblowers and environmental groups engaged in ground-truthing — in which activists tail logging vehicles to see what they are cutting — say they have witnessed biomass companies harvesting whole, mature trees, including old-growth trees in British Columbia.

“This industry is a glaring example of corporations responding to the climate crisis with greenwashing as they try to make a profit,” said Merry Dickinson, a lead campaigner for the U.K.-based Stop Burning Trees Coalition. “In the process they’re destroying people’s health and livelihoods.”

Dickinson joined the movement against forest biomass while she was a university student in Yorkshire, home to the U.K.’s largest biomass power plant and single biggest source of carbon emissions. The Drax Power Station formerly ran on coal, but began transitioning to burn entirely wood pellets in 2012. The U.K. government supported the move by providing Drax with roughly a billion pounds in annual subsidies. 

“When Drax announced they would stop burning coal, we climate activists celebrated,” said Katy Brown, a campaigner with Biofuelwatch in the U.K. “But when they started burning wood instead, it began to feel like a hollow victory.”

Previous Coverage

West Coast climate activists battle the false ‘solution’ of forest biomass

Dickinson co-founded the direct action group Axe Drax in Yorkshire. This led to her becoming an organizer of Stop Burning Trees, a coalition working to educate the public about Drax’s climate impact. A major goal was to end Drax’s government subsidies, which were coming up for renewal.

“We did street outreach, knocked on doors in communities around the Drax plant, and built relationships with workers and unions,” Dickinson said.

In February 2025, the U.K.’s Minister for Energy made an announcement: Government support for Drax will continue through the period from 2027-2031, but at half the current level. This suggests Members of Parliament are at least beginning to see Drax’s subsidies as a liability. 

“Drax having its subsidies extended is far from what we wanted,” Dickinson said. “Still, the deal they got is far from being what Drax wanted, either.” 

U.K. activists have continued pressuring Drax. In May, Axe Drax nonviolently disrupted the company’s annual meeting, blocking entrances to the building where the gathering took place and delaying its start time by an hour. Meanwhile, biomass opponents won a victory in mainland Europe when plans for a massive biomass power plant in the Netherlands were canceled last year.

Drax, which has expanded into the global market, now operates pellet mills in the U.S. and Canada, sourcing much of the wood burned in its Yorkshire plant from the U.S. South. In 2024, Drax also entered a partnership with Golden State Natural Resources in California. 

But as support for Drax wanes in the U.K., it and other biomass companies are also running into trouble in North America. Thanks to opposition from local communities, several new or existing biomass pellet projects have been shelved or shut down in the past year — including in the industry’s heartland. 

Recent wins

When Mississippi state regulators denied a permit for a Drax pellet plant in the small community of Gloster last April, the decision showed how grassroots pressure is starting to push policymakers to take a harder line toward the forest biomass industry. 

Drax was requesting a change to its regulatory status that would have allowed it to emit more air pollution and increase the volume of pellets it could produce. When Mississippi’s Environmental Quality Permit Board met to discuss the plan, locals fed up with existing pollution from the plant turned out in force. 

“The community of Gloster packed the room,” said Legendre, the Dogwood Alliance campaign director. 

A rally in Mississippi to oppose the proposed Drax wood pellet plant permit. (Dogwood Alliance)

The board’s initial vote to deny the permit was later reversed after a flurry of public relations work by Drax convinced state regulators to backtrack and side with the company. However, the effort Drax had to expend to get its way in an industry-friendly state suggests the movement against biomass is having a real impact. 

Other biomass projects in Mississippi, a regional hub for the industry, were outright defeated last year. In February, biomass giant Enviva announced it would close a plant in the town of Amory, which once processed up to 115,000 metric tons of pellets annually. A massive new Enviva plant in Bond, Mississippi, is also unlikely to move forward. 

Industry attempts to expand to the U.S. West Coast have run into resistance, too. GSNR’s California development plans were opposed by a diverse coalition including forest defender groups, climate activists and environmental justice organizations like the Stockton-based Little Manila Rising. 

“It was a kind of unprecedented urban-rural alliance that came together to fight this project,” said Hughes, of Biofuelwatch. 

Another proposed Drax pellet mill in Longview, Washington, drew opposition from nearby residents and local climate groups. That project would have processed up to 450,000 metric tons of wood annually, exposing surrounding working-class neighborhoods to air and noise pollution. In December 2025, Drax put the project on indefinite hold.

“I am glad the Drax pellet project is gone from Longview,” said Diane Dick, a longtime climate organizer in the community. “I look forward to their forest destruction business being gone from North America.”

Drax also recently closed an existing pellet plant in British Columbia, citing a challenging business climate. Even so, the forest biomass industry in North America is far from defeated. Corporate giants like Drax and Enviva still operate pellet mills in Canada and the U.S. South. A smaller company called Pacific Northwest Renewable Energy has proposed building a large pellet plant in Hoquiam, Washington. Several existing power plants in New England also run on biomass pellets, with plans in the works for new projects that are opposed by activists. 

“As long as harm is being done to communities affected by biomass plants, this story isn’t over,” Hughes said. “We’re not going to declare victory when we’re far from getting to the end of this fight.”

Growing the movement 

Up to this point, organized resistance to forest biomass has come mainly from those who are directly affected by the industry, and a relatively small number of regional or international groups focused specifically on this issue.

“What we’ve done so far has been with a very small subset of impacted communities and those who care about Southern forests,” Legendre said. “I can only imagine what might happen when we bring the movement to a larger scale.”

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Part of this process entails getting the broader climate movement to more explicitly embrace stopping forest biomass as one of its goals. 

“People who are already involved in other climate campaigns might feel, understandably, that they can’t take on another fight,” said Brown, of Biofuelwatch. “But something as simple as organizations who work on fossil fuels incorporating opposition to forest biomass into their existing messaging can really help, without creating a lot of new work.” 

In 2024, Enviva filed for bankruptcy, restructuring itself as a private company. Its troubles are another sign opposition to the biomass industry is having an effect — but activists fear the new structure will make it easier for Enviva to avoid public scrutiny. Meanwhile, Drax has floated building a data center in Yorkshire to prop up demand for its power plant.

“We have a real chance to put the final nail in the coffin of Drax and the biomass industry,” Dickinson said. “But they’re never going to be the ones to put themselves in the ground. It’s our job to fight them to the very end.”

This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

VICTORIA, B.C. — JESSICA McILROY, the Pembina Institute’s director of government relations, made the following statement in response to the B.C. government’s 2026 budget:“Today’s budget is a clear reflection of the challenging economic conditions we...

This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.”

From her home in Donaldsonville in the southern US state of Louisiana, less than three miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge. 

The odour, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended a school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during breaks from class, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.

“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”

Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertiliser giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage. 

Ashley Gaignard points toward smoke stacks that are part of the CF Industries plant in Donaldsonville, La. That plant emits more air pollutants than all but one other facility nationwide, EPA data show. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution. 

An extensive review by Floodlight found no evidence that existing carbon capture projects anywhere in the world have achieved anything close to the emissions cuts companies like CF Industries are promising. Permit documents, meanwhile, show that the proposed plants combined could be allowed to discharge more than 2,800 tons each year of air pollutants (not greenhouse gases), including more than 400 tons of ammonia. 

Classified as a highly hazardous chemical, ammonia can damage the lungs and hurt the skin, eyes and throat. In the air, it can form fine particles that are linked to increased risks of heart disease and stroke, and can be deadly — particularly for children, older adults and people with heart or lung disease. 

The Louisiana plants would also be allowed to release carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde.

The companies proposing those plants — CF Industries, Air Products, Clean Hydrogen Works and St. Charles Clean Fuels — have said their operations will provide an abundant source of clean fertiliser and clean energy to global markets, including countries whose climate and trade policies favor low-carbon fuels. They’ve also said they’ll create nearly 840 permanent jobs and millions in new tax revenue for local communities while prioritising public health and safety.

The CF Industries complex in Donaldsonville is the world’s largest ammonia and nitrogen plant. (Ted Auch / FracTracker Alliance, 2024; with aerial support by SouthWings)

“We are designing the facility with advanced emissions controls, robust monitoring systems, and strong operational practices to minimise impacts,” said Chandra Stacie, the director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our goal is to operate responsibly and be a constructive, long-term partner.”

Environmental advocates, scientists and community members, however, say the new ammonia plants would delay the phase-out of fossil fuels — and bring substantial air pollution and safety risks to places that have long borne the health costs of America’s industrial economy. 

Why Louisiana became ground zero

While the historic streets of Donaldsonville recently served as the backdrop to the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, the town’s real-life drama is far less cinematic.

Donaldsonville lies at the center of Cancer Alley, a chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known for its elevated health risks and dense concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries.

Now this stretch of Louisiana is also ground zero for a new buildout: four proposed blue ammonia plants, with several more planned for Texas.

So, why the Gulf Coast?

South Louisiana has abundant natural gas for ammonia production and ports that connect to international shipping routes. 

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The state offers an existing pipeline network, a seasoned chemical-industry workforce and political leaders who have consistently favored industrial development. The companies proposing ammonia plants can also tap generous state and federal incentives, including more than $2 billion in federal tax credits for carbon capture projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, allows companies to collect up to $85 for each ton of carbon captured and permanently stored. 

And the state of Louisiana is offering developers millions more in grants and tax breaks designed to spur economic development. 

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who has studied carbon capture systems for years, said there’s little to be gained — and much to lose — from making ammonia this way.

“These plants increase air pollution, they increase global warming … they increase not only energy costs, but total social costs, and so there’s zero benefit — except to the people who are taking the subsidies to implement these projects,” he said.

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The scale of subsidies for the proposed Louisiana ammonia plants is “off-the-charts outrageous” — and amounts to a bad deal for taxpayers, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects. The plants are unlikely to deliver anything close to $2 billion a year in public benefits, he said. 

“It can only be accurately called a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to corporate shareholders,” he said.

Ambitious pitches, tougher reality

Ammonia has long been a workhorse of the global economy, quietly underpinning modern agriculture. It’s the key ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser, and demand is expected to grow as global food production strains to keep pace with population growth. 

Now, producers say it could play a far larger role — not just as fertiliser, but as a climate-friendly fuel for ships and power plants. 

Researchers at Sandia Labs explore using solar power-generated heat to produce ammonia. Using renewable energy to create ammonia instead of fossil fuels can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, researchers say. (Craig Fritz / Sandia Labs Flickr)

When it’s burned as a fuel, ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (though it can produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide).

It can also be burned with other fuels in power plants or potentially used to store hydrogen for shipping and later conversion for use in fuel cells. 

But the process commonly used to make ammonia carries a heavy climate cost.

Most production relies on hydrogen derived from natural gas, a process that releases carbon dioxide. Enormous amounts of energy — typically from fossil fuels — are then used to force hydrogen and nitrogen to combine under extreme heat and pressure.

Nitrogen fertilizer plants in the U.S. released more than 46 million tons of heat-trapping gases in 2021 — roughly the emissions of nine million cars running for a year — according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. Globally, almost 2% of carbon dioxide emissions come from making ammonia — or as much as the energy system emissions of South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency. 

That’s where carbon capture comes in. The companies planning blue ammonia plants say they will isolate most of the carbon dioxide released, piping it deep underground for permanent storage.

Texas-based Clean Hydrogen Works says its Ascension Clean Energy project, slated for Donaldsonville, will produce up to 7.2 million tons of ammonia annually and will capture “up to 98 percent” of the carbon dioxide produced.

Nearby, CF Industries and the Pennsylvania-based Air Products plan to build two plants they say will have capture rates of 95% or more.

About an hour to the east, the St. Charles Clean Fuels project would capture more than 99% of carbon dioxide generated, its developer says.

Those claims are unlikely to hold up, said Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, an expert on greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia pollution. 

“Is the industry correct in saying that they can produce a really, really low emissions fuel using natural gas as their original feedstock?” he asked. “The answer is no. It’s just never been done, and I don’t think it can be done.”

CF Industries has been in Louisiana for over 50 years. Its Donaldsonville Complex occupies 1,400 acres. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

The majority of existing carbon capture facilities trap less than 60% of carbon dioxide, according to a 2023 review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “No existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon,” the institute found.

Blue hydrogen — a prerequisite for blue ammonia — “is neither clean nor low-carbon,” and pursuing it would divert time and money from more effective climate solutions, the institute concluded. 

In an email to Floodlight, Air Products spokesperson Christina Stephens said the company is “very confident in our proprietary technology that allows us to capture 95 percent of the CO2 emissions.” She did not elaborate.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said its facility’s design will be “conducive to high capture rates.”

Experts also note that carbon capture itself is typically powered by natural gas, adding emissions and undercutting its climate benefits.

Compounding the problem are emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is frequently emitted during drilling, processing and transport of natural gas. More escapes in the process used to extract hydrogen for ammonia production.

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Total methane emissions from the fertilizer industry could be more than 140 times higher than official estimates, one 2019 study found.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company believes previous research related to methane leakage has flaws that led to inaccurate conclusions.

Stacie, meanwhile, said St. Charles Clean Fuels will monitor and verify methane emissions through “operations control and third-party verification consistent with emerging best practices.”

The local cost of a global fuel

Even if blue ammonia plants deliver the climate benefits their backers promise — benefits that experts dispute — their local impacts could still be substantial.

In 2024, the CF Industries Donaldsonville plant — near Gaignard’s house — released more toxic air pollutants than all but one other industrial site nationally, according to EPA data. The 7.1 million pounds of ammonia the plant released that year would more than fill the New Orleans Superdome, according to Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist for the Environmental Integrity Project.

Emissions from the planned blue ammonia plants could worsen respiratory health, Terrell said, with impacts extending far beyond the plant sites. 

“I would be concerned about increasing asthma rates long term,” she said.

Ascension Parish, where three of the proposed blue ammonia plants would be built, hosts more than two dozen industrial facilities and already has the second highest amount of air emissions in the country, according to EPA data.

So the prospect of new ammonia plants in Ascension Parish worries Twila Collins. 

She has lived her entire 55-year life in Modeste, a historic, predominantly Black community along the Mississippi River. If CF Industries gets its way, a massive ammonia plant would rise roughly a mile from her home. 

Twila Collins poses for a photo inside her home in Modeste, a small Louisiana community next to the Mississippi River. She’s concerned about the potential health and safety dangers of a proposed CF Industries blue ammonia plant. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

Her message for the company is blunt: “Leave us alone and find somewhere else to go where there’s nobody living, so you won’t disrupt a community.”

Industrial pollution already drifts into her neighborhood, bringing smells “like a landfill,” she said, and a new ammonia plant would add another layer of pollution — and another set of health risks.

In a 2024 report, CF Industries said its employees “regularly maintain, replace, and update equipment” to reduce emissions. 

But under its draft permit for the Blue Point plant, the company would be allowed to release more than 1,100 tons of air pollutants each year — equivalent to the weight of more than 27 fully loaded tractor trailers. That includes more than 140 tons of ammonia and more than 580 tons of carbon monoxide.

Collins said she can name more than 30 people in Modeste who suffer from cancer or respiratory problems. The issue is deeply personal. She herself has struggled with cancer. And in 2002, her 9-year-old son died of an asthma attack. He had struggled with asthma all his life, but Collins still wonders whether the industrial pollution surrounding Modeste helped trigger the attack that killed him.

She also worries about what could go wrong if something fails — an accident, a leak or worse — because ammonia production and carbon dioxide transport involve well-documented industrial risks.

CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant has a history of deadly accidents: a 2000 explosion and fire killed three workers and injured at least eight others, and a 2013 blast killed one worker and injured eight more. 

This past November, an explosion at another CF Industries plant in Yazoo City, Miss., led to an ammonia leak and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents.

Residents push back

While supporters emphasise the economic boost and high-paying jobs the projects could bring, many local residents have turned out at public hearings to oppose them.

So many people packed a hearing room on the St. Charles project in 2024 that it had to be canceled and rescheduled in a larger venue.

Some of the public fears have centered on the carbon dioxide pipelines that would be needed to make the projects work.

Air Products, for instance, has proposed piping millions of tons of carbon dioxide 38 miles to be stored a mile underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would be “the world’s largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration endeavor to date,” according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development. 

At a November 2025 public hearing, many Louisiana residents raised health and safety concerns about Air Products’ plan to build a large blue ammonia plant in Ascension Parish. (US Army Corps of Engineers via Wikimedia Commons)

At a November public hearing on the project, Air Products vice president Andrew Connolly said the company has an “unsurpassed safety record.” 

“All pipelines will be monitored 24-7 and we will meet or exceed all pipeline regulations,” he said. 

More than 300 people turned out for that public hearing, according to Dustin Renaud, a spokesperson for the environmental law group Earthjustice. Among the more than 50 people who spoke, all but three opposed the project.

Opponents have warned of what could happen if a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures, as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. That disaster sent 45 people to the hospital and left some residents unconscious in their homes and cars. Starved of oxygen, cars stalled or couldn’t start, making evacuation difficult.

A carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured on Feb. 22, 2020, in Satartia, Miss., leaving this crater and prompting an evacuation. (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency)

The Air Products pipeline would run within half a mile of Sorrento Primary School, an elementary school in Ascension Parish with more than 600 students. An expert hired by Earthjustice concluded that a pipeline rupture could endanger the schoolchildren, along with residents of a nearby subdivision.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company will run the pipeline deeper than is required by code in the school’s vicinity. The pipeline will also have more shutoff valves than required, she said.

“We have a long safe history of operating the largest hydrogen pipeline network in the world right here in Louisiana,” she wrote.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said the company will incorporate “detection systems, automated shutdowns, mechanical integrity programs and emergency response planning” — consistent with federal rules and “lessons learned from prior incidents.”

Still, some residents worry. 

“We don’t have a good evacuation route,” said St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, who co-founded the environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana. “If something would happen, we would just be stuck like Chuck.”

The companies behind the blue ammonia projects have said they will bring jobs and millions of dollars into the state economy — a message that has found a receptive audience in the state capital and some city halls.

CF Industries did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its proposed plant, while Clean Hydrogen Works declined to answer questions.

Amid public opposition, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in October announced a moratorium on new carbon capture projects. The order halted the state’s review of new permits for projects that would inject carbon dioxide underground, while allowing existing applications to continue — including the blue ammonia projects already underway.

A lower-carbon alternative

There are cleaner ways to make ammonia.

Instead of extracting hydrogen from natural gas and then trying to capture the CO₂, producers can use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That “green hydrogen” can then be combined with nitrogen to make what’s known as “green ammonia.”

At least one large-scale green ammonia plant is already operating. In Chifeng, China, a facility powered by wind turbines and solar panels began industrial-scale production in 2025. By 2028, the plant is expected to produce 1.5 million tons of green ammonia annually.

In the U.S., developers have proposed green ammonia plants in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington. 

“Instead of making this big labyrinth of pipes and equipment and sending CO2 everywhere and using more energy, you can simply produce that hydrogen with electricity from solar and wind,” said Jacobson, the Stanford professor. 

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In the debate over blue ammonia, the stakes are high.

For ammonia producers, the projects promise billions in federal tax credits and a foothold in emerging energy markets. They also offer oil and gas companies a way to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels, critics say.

“It’s a great way to lock in oil and gas infrastructure. … Something that we should be getting away from, as opposed to locking in for years and years to come,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, a research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project who tracks oil and gas projects. 

For residents along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the stakes are more immediate. They’re being asked to live with new plants, new pipelines and new risks in places that have already absorbed decades of pollution. 

But Gaignard plans to keep fighting for her community.

“I don’t look at this as red and blue and the left and the right,” she said. “We need to start looking at humanity.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

The post As Louisiana bets big on ‘blue ammonia’, communities brace for air pollution appeared first on Climate Home News.

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