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Lincoln County commissioners filed a petition last year to undo safeguards protecting Lake Koocanusa from the mining contaminant selenium. Plaintiffs accused local officials of “doing the bidding for a foreign mining company.” By Tristian Scott, Flathead Beacon An environmental organization is suing the board of commissioners in Lincoln County for refusing to disclose public information …

The post Lawsuit Accuses Lincoln County Officials of Rebuffing Public Records Requests Seeking Information on Petition to Loosen Cap on Canadian Mining Waste appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.



We have the chance to ban eminent domain for CO2 pipelines in our state, so that landowners who don’t want such projects on their property impacting their businesses have the right to tell a corporation, “No thanks.”

It is critical that Nebraskans contact Senators on the Natural Resources Committee *NOW*

Urge them to support LB 916, to ban eminent domain for CO2 pipelines
==> Click here to send a letter to all 8 Senators, and make calls now.

• Sen. Tom Brandt (402) 471-2711
• Sen. Barry DeKay (402) 471-2801
• Sen. Stan Clouse (402) 471-2726
• Sen. Danielle Conrad (402) 471-2720
• Sen. Jana Hughes (402) 471-2756
• Sen. Margo Juarez (402) 471-2710
• Sen. Mike Moser (402) 471-2715
• Sen. Jane Raybould (402) 471-2633

If you submitted written testimony or showed up last week at the public hearing to testify — thank you! You can still send a letter to all the Senators on the Natural Resources Committee, and your calls to their offices can help make sure our bill gets heard and voted on by the full Legislature.

SUWA and our partners invite you to join us on Monday, February 9th at 6:00 pm MT for an urgent webinar and call to action in defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Emergency Webinar in Defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Monday, February 9th on Zoom at 6:00 pm Mountain Time
Click here to RSVP

As you’ve hopefully seen from our recent emails, Utah’s congressional delegation is expected to introduce a “Joint Resolution” in Congress that, if passed, would undo the current Monument Management Plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante. This would be a devastating blow to the monument and could turn it into a wildly different place: one where out-of-control off-road vehicle use, landscape-level clearcutting of native pinyon-juniper forests, and other extractive activities are all possible. We cannot let this happen.

Making this all possible is a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Join us on Monday to learn about the background of this obscure law and how its unorthodox application could not only impact Grand Staircase-Escalante, but is also being used to upend public land protections across the country. We’ll spend the second half of the call highlighting ways we can all fight back and defend the monument, including by contacting members of Congress and requesting in-district meetings.

Please share this invite with your professional contacts, friends, and family. We encourage attendance regardless of where you live, but especially if you live in Montana, Idaho, the Western Slope of Colorado, Nebraska, the greater Philadelphia area (including both Pennsylvania and New Jersey), or Maine, this is an urgent event to join!

Don’t forget to RSVP here. See you on Monday night!

SUWA’s Organizing Team

The post Emergency Webinar in Defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

February 6, 2026 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUWA Files Litigation to Stop Illegal Actions by Garfield County in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument – 2.6.26  Garfield County strikes at heart of the Monument, ignores federal law 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org

Salt Lake City, UT – Yesterday, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) filed a lawsuit and moved for an emergency injunction in federal district court, alleging that Garfield County, Utah violated federal law when it began making unauthorized “improvements” to the Hole-in-the-Rock Road. The Road runs from the junction of Highway 12, east of the town of Escalante, to the top of the cliffs above the Colorado River within the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Surrounded by wilderness-quality lands, 57 of the road’s 62 miles are within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and 16 miles of the road are in Garfield County. It is an unpaved, primarily dirt road and core to the remote experience that defines the 1.9-million-acre National Monument.  

Garfield County is no stranger to ignoring federal laws. On Monday, Feb. 3, the Department of Justice provided SUWA and others a copy of a letter sent by Garfield County on Tuesday, January 27 to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument manager regarding the County’s planned activities on the Hole-in-the-Rock Road. As detailed in the letter and verified on-the-ground, Garfield County is currently conducting and plans to continue conducting unauthorized road improvements on the Hole-in-the-Rock Road including realigning and widening the road and chip sealing (effectively paving) a 10-mile stretch of the road (changing the surface from dirt to chip seal). 

While Garfield County has title to a right-of-way for the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, it does not own the road or the land beneath it (this remains federal public land) and the County is required to consult with the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) before making any improvements. The BLM is required by law to make sure that activities like these do not cause unnecessary damage to public lands and resources; BLM has entirely failed in those duties, idly standing by while the County does this unauthorized work and damages the surrounding area. As detailed in SUWA’s lawsuit and motion for an emergency injunction,  each of these described activities constitutes unauthorized improvements to the road and the County must cease its work immediately and “consult” with BLM before taking any further action. The point of consultation is to allow BLM to fulfill its statutory obligations to protect monument objects and values and to determine if the County’s proposed activities are both reasonable and necessary.  

Below is a statement from SUWA Staff Attorney Hanna Larsen and additional information. 

“The scenic, rugged, and remote Hole-in-the-Rock Road is how many visitors first experience the majesty of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The County’s illegal actions seek to destroy that experience, turning the Road into one you might find in any city in the nation instead of a one-of-a-kind National Monument,” said Hanna Larsen, Staff Attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “Paving will lead to more, faster, and louder traffic forever changing the remote, serene backcountry experience the Monument was created to protect and that draws visitors from around the world.”  

From the 2021 Proclamation re-establishing the National Monument:  

“To the southeast of the Upper Escalante Canyons, adjacent to Capitol Reef National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, is a region with a rich pioneer history that functions as a gateway to the many slot canyons and arches near the Escalante River. Traversing the area is the historically significant Hole-in-the-Rock Road, which generally follows the route that Latter-day Saint pioneers constructed between 1879 and 1880 when crossing southern Utah to establish a wagon route between Escalante and southeast Utah settlements.  

Today, the road provides access to many of the landscape’s resources, including Devil’s Garden, an area with hoodoos, colorful rock formations, and unique sandstone arches like the impressively delicate Metate Arch; the small but attractive Little Jumbo Arch; the widely photographed Sunrise and Sunset arches; and Chimney Rock, a remote, lonely sandstone pillar that seems to defy its otherwise flat surroundings. This area is also the location of Dance Hall Rock, an important landmark where Latter-day Saint pioneers camped and held meetings and dances when constructing the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail.  

These uncompromising desert lands are home to high concentrations of rare species of bees with fascinating adaptations to their local environment, such as Diadasia bees, which build nests in the hard desert soil that feature a clay chimney on top, an architectural design that has, thus far, stumped scientists trying to understand its utility. Consisting of rock primarily from the Jurassic Period, there are many paleontological sites in this region. Among those, the sprawling Twentymile Wash Dinosaur Megatrackway consists of more than several hundred individual dinosaur tracks and what some scientists believe is a rare, mid-line tail-drag impression left in the Escalante Member of the Entrada Formation by a sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur.” 

### 

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards a world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org. 

The post SUWA Files Litigation to Stop Illegal Actions by Garfield County in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument – 2.6.26  appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

  Cruz Salucio (right), CIW senior staff member and farmworker, discusses the transformative success and expansion of the Fair Food Program in a class with students from the University of Michigan 2019 University of Michigan Advisory Committee report: “The Fair Food Program is the most comprehensive social responsibility program in the U.S.,” and the best thing that the University of Michigan could do in order to improve labor standards would be to “become a signatory to the Fair Food Program.”
Nola De Graaf, a current student at the University of Michigan: “The best part of this program is that it is an organization that amplifies the voices of workers, not attempting to speak over them but rather making them the forefront of the organization, something that is unfortunately not often done. I also love that there is a very set goal; joining the Fair Food Program. With this alliance between workers and students, it’s attainable and real, something that can make lasting, permanent change.”

A new initiative calling on universities to join the Fair Food Program is rapidly gaining momentum across the country.

Just last week, we shared an update from Yale University, where students are leading a movement urging the storied Ivy League university to become the first to join the Fair Food Program as a Participating Buyer. Now, following a multi-day campus visit from the CIW, that momentum is carrying over to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where hundreds of students are joining the growing campus-based campaign, leveraging their demand for fresh fruits and vegetables to expand the FFP to new fields where workers remain in desperate need of the program’s life-saving human rights protections.

For decades, the CIW has confronted the egregious human rights abuses that have plagued the agricultural industry, demanding modern, humane business practices that ensure the farmworkers who put food on our tables are treated with dignity and respect. To achieve that goal, the CIW partnered with consumers, growers, and buyers to forge the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program — a groundbreaking model that has not only remedied abuses in participating fields, but actually prevented modern-day slavery, sexual violence, wage theft, retaliation, and more. Yet since the program’s launch in 2010, there has been a troubling rise in human rights violations on fields beyond the reach of the FFP’s industry-leading protections, including documented cases of modern-day slavery.

The need to dramatically expand the FFP’s reach is therefore more urgent than ever, and the new Fair Food University initiative aims to do just that. Over the course of the visit to Ann Arbor, more than 200 students took part in classroom presentations, luncheons, film screenings, panel discussions, and organizing meetings — trekking through growing mounds of snow and icy sidewalks to hear from the CIW and student allies.

Students with the University of Michigan met with staff members of the CIW to jumpstart an effort for the university to join the Fair Food Program

During the UM campus visit, Michigan students learned how farmworkers with the CIW developed a cutting-edge analysis of the food supply chain, identifying where the power to guarantee farmworkers’ dignity truly lies: at the top of the massive food industry, with major produce buyers like Taco Bell and smaller institutional buyers such as the University of Michigan. In packed, often standing-room-only presentations, students, faculty, and staff heard from CIW staff member and farmworker leader Cruz Salucio, who described overcoming immense odds to forge — and ultimately scale — the Fair Food Program by building lasting partnerships with consumers, growers, and buyers alike.

The CIW visited about a dozen classes across a wide range of disciplines, including public health, education, drama, and food studies. In Spanish classes, students practiced their language skills while learning directly from CIW staff about the realities of agricultural labor and the strategic vision behind the Fair Food Program. In an introductory acting class at the School of Drama, students performed a popular education exercise often performed at farmworker community meetings in Immokalee, depicting the life of a farmworker whose rights are routinely violated by an abusive crewleader, discovering how theater has long served as a powerful tool for farmworkers to raise consciousness among workers and allies alike within the Campaign for Fair Food.

At the Ford School of Public Policy, a packed luncheon drew such a large crowd that the catered food quickly ran out. There, Michigan Dining representatives joined students and faculty to learn about the Fair Food Program’s unique model of worker-driven enforcement — and the pivotal role their university can play in becoming a national leader on human rights within higher education.

Nola De Graaf, a  current UM student, shared a moving reflection on meeting the CIW and hearing about the FFP: 

“I was first introduced to CIW through my Spanish language class. The representatives gave a presentation that made me realize that I, as a student but also as a general consumer of the products of agricultural labor, had a responsibility to make sure that I wasn’t endorsing the abuse and exploitation of workers. I also knew that as someone who has the privilege to attend a university, I needed to use my position as a student to be an active participant in change. The best part of this program is that it is an organization that amplifies the voices of workers, not attempting to speak over them but rather making them the forefront of the organization, something that is unfortunately not often done. I also love that there is a very set goal; joining the Fair Food Program. With this alliance between workers and students, it’s attainable and real, something that can make lasting, permanent change.”

Braving blizzard-like conditions outside, students packed an informational session on the Fair Food University initiative. Michigan students also met virtually with current Yale students to exchange ideas and strategies. Yale students shared how their campaign to bring the Fair Food Program to their campus has included investigative research revealing that Yale Hospitality sources from a massive grower with a documented record of egregious human rights violations.

This kind of student-to-student exchange has long been central to the movement’s success. From 2001 to 2005, it helped students across the country successfully “Boot” Taco Bell from dozens of campuses until the corporation ultimately joined the Fair Food Program. One panel discussion between the CIW and leading human rights scholars also featured University of Michigan alumni who, in 2019, successfully pushed Wendy’s off campus. They shared hard-won lessons from their campaign with current students eager to carry forward the fight for farmworker justice.

History comes alive

That legacy of student-led organizing and university-backed calls for farmworker human rights still looms large at Michigan.

In 2019, the University of Michigan Student Government overwhelmingly passed a resolution removing Wendy’s from campus until the fast-food giant joined the Fair Food Program. The vote followed the release of a report — commissioned by UM’s own Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights — outlining a clear path forward: to identify labor and human rights concerns in the university’s supply chain, partner with external experts, collaborate with peer institutions, and present feasible pathways for improving labor standards and human rights protections.

The report’s conclusion was unequivocal: “The Fair Food Program is the most comprehensive social responsibility program in the U.S.,” and the most effective step the University of Michigan could take to improve labor standards would be to “become a signatory to the Fair Food Program.”

More recently, the university awarded CIW co-founder and national human rights leader Lucas Benitez the prestigious Wallenberg Medal for his role in freeing thousands of workers from modern-day slavery rings and for his leadership in creating the Fair Food Program.

Today, seven years after students first locked arms with farmworkers from Immokalee in the Wendy’s Boycott, the University of Michigan finally has a clear opportunity with the Fair Food University campaign to realize the goal outlined in its own 2019 Advisory Committee report. The CIW’s recent visit has already sparked an enthusiastic effort by current students to ensure their administration follows through and joins the FFP. We look forward to more news from the snowy north as the UM campaign continues to grow in the months ahead!

If you are a student, professor, or university staff member interested in learning how your campus can become part of the Fair Food Program, reach out to the Student/Farmworker Alliance at organize@sfalliance.org to get connected to the growing Fair Food University movement.

02-17 * 13:00 - Toolkit meeting (franco)

As the planet warms, seas will rise around the world — but not in Greenland, where they are projected to fall by several feet, according to a new study.

Read more on E360 →

Headline News:

• “Worsening Snow Drought In The West Will Have Cascading Impacts, Experts Say” • Prolonged drought across much of the West has been worsened by low snowfall and persistent warmth, fueling a widespread snow drought. With reduced mountain snowpack, the region’s water supplies are facing mounting challenges, experts said. [ABC News]

Low snow cover (Deer Valley Resort image)

• “Why Sodium-Ion Batteries Are Happening Now” • CATL, the world’s biggest battery maker, made a production commitment for sodium-ion batteries. It introduced its Naxtra line of batteries last year. Now it has announced plans for volume production of sodium-ion batteries this year, with integration into production EVs by July. [CleanTechnica]
• “Canada To Spend Up To $200 Billion On Wind, Solar, And Energy Storage” • Canadian investment in wind, solar, and energy storage is forecast to top $200 billion over the next decade, leading to a significant decline in the emissions intensity of electricity production, according to the Canadian Renewable Energy Association. [Yahoo! Finance Canada]
• “Michigan Sues Big Oil For Antitrust Violations” • The state of Michigan filed a suit against several major fossil fuel companies. This suit seems to be more than what has happened in the past. According to The Hill, it says the defendants acted together as a cartel to reduce production and distribution of renewable energy and restrain EVs. [CleanTechnica]
• “GE Vernova Wins 1.1-GW US Repowering Haul” • GE Vernova booked 1100 MW of US onshore wind repower orders in 2025 as developers look to boost output and extend the life of existing fleets. The projects will use nacelles and drive trains made at the company’s Pensacola, Florida facility, GE Vernova’s onshore wind business said. [reNews]

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

Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what was once the United Kingdom’s largest coal-burning power station. 

“When the dust came our way, we’d have to come out and clean our windows,” said Watts, who has lived in the North Yorkshire village of Barlow for more than 30 years. “And when we’d get snow in winter, there’d be a lot of black over it.”

Thankfully, she said, the wind usually blew northeast, pushing the station’s smoke and dust toward Scandinavia. Locals liked to joke that the air pollution was mostly Norway’s problem. There, it caused bouts of acid rain that damaged forests and poisoned lakes. 

The U.K. has quit coal — a lengthy process culminating in the closure of the country’s last deep-pit coal mine in 2015 and the shutdown of the U.K’s last coal plant in 2024. 

The giant station near Barlow, however, is busier than ever, fueled now by American forests rather than English coalfields. Trees felled, shredded, dried, and pressed into pellets in Louisiana and Mississippi are shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, loaded onto trains, and then fed into the station’s immense boilers. Operated by Drax Group, the station gradually stopped burning coal until it made a full switch to wood in 2023. It now burns enough pellets to generate about 6 percent of the country’s electricity. 

Purple flowers crowd a field near the Drax power station in Drax, England. The former coal plant now runs entirely on wood pellets, which the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Tristan Baurick / Verite News

The U.K. government, in a bid to meet its ambitious climate goals, is giving Drax the equivalent of $2.7 million a day in subsidies to keep burning pellets, which the company touts as “environmentally and socially sustainable woody biomass.” 

But a growing number of Brits aren’t buying it. After years of celebrating the shift away from coal, U.K. residents are realizing that wood pellets aren’t the cleaner, greener alternative they were supposed to be. 

“I still have difficulties in my little brain figuring out how you can grow wood at the other end of the Earth, chip it, ship it to here … and then burn it, and say, ‘Isn’t that nice and green?’” said Steve Shaw-Wright, a former coal miner who serves on the North Yorkshire Council. 

Burning wood for power instead of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels offers the illusion of sustainability and robust climate action, said William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University. But in reality, it’s doing more harm to the environment than burning fossil fuels, he said. “England is off coal — isn’t that wonderful?” Moomaw said. “But there’s no mention of the fact that it’s because they’re now burning wood from North America, which emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity than does coal.”

Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

The Drax station in North Yorkshire emitted more than 14 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, making it the largest single source of CO2 in the U.K., according to a report last year from the climate research group Ember. That amount is more than the combined emissions from the country’s six largest gas plants and more than four times the level of the U.K.’s last coal plant. 

A Drax spokesperson called Ember’s research “deeply flawed” and accused the group of choosing to “ignore the widely accepted and internationally recognized approach to carbon accounting,” which is used by the United Nations and other governments. 

But several scientists say burning wood can’t help but produce more emissions. Wood has a lower density than coal and other fossil fuels, so it must be burned in higher volumes to produce the same amount of energy. Between 2014 and 2019 — a period when coal was in steep decline — the country’s CO2 emissions from U.S.-sourced pellets nearly doubled, according to a report by the Chatham House research institute in London. “Almost all of this U.K. increase was associated with biomass burnt at Drax,” the report’s authors wrote. 

The station’s cross-continental supply chain is also heavy on emissions. For every ton of pellets Drax burns, about 500 pounds of CO2 are released just from making and transporting the product, according to Chatham House. About half of Drax’s supply chain emissions are tied to production, while transportation via trucks, trains, and ships accounts for 44 percent, according to the company’s estimates. 

The switch from coal to pellets created a new pollution problem in Louisiana and Mississippi, where most of the station’s fuel is produced. Drax’s pellet mills have repeatedly violated air quality rules at its two Louisiana mills, located near Bastrop and Urania, and its mill in Gloster, Mississippi. The mills emit large quantities of formaldehyde, methanol, and other toxic chemicals linked to cancers and other serious illnesses, according to regulatory findings and public health studies. Residents of these poor, mostly Black communities say the mills’ dust and pollution are making them sick. In October, several Gloster residents sued the company, alleging that Drax has “unlawfully released massive amounts of toxic pollutants” in their community for nearly a decade.

The Drax spokesperson said the company is improving its mills’ pollution controls in line with a longstanding dedication to “high standards of safety and environmental compliance.” On its website, Drax says the company is “committed to being a good neighbor in the communities where we operate,” offering funding for environmental education programs, ensuring its wood is sourced from “well-managed forests,” and supporting land conservation efforts, including the establishment of a 350-acre nature reserve near Watts’ home in Barlow. 

Much of the timber that Drax harvests comes from private lands in the Southern United States that function more as tree farms than natural forests. But in recent years, Drax has sourced an increasing share of its wood from western Canada, including from British Columbia’s treasured old-growth forests. 

In 2024, Drax agreed to pay a nearly $32 million penalty after U.K. energy regulators determined the company had been misreporting data on where it sources its wood and how much of it comes from environmentally important woodlands. The practice of pelletizing Canada’s mature trees appears ongoing, according to a recent report by the environmental group Stand.earth. Citing logging data from 2024 and 2025, the group claims Drax has been accepting truckloads of trees from British Columbia that were hundreds of years old. Drax downplayed the report, emphasizing that the logs were legally harvested and of insufficient quality to go to sawmills.

Drax sees itself as one of the most environmentally conscious companies on the planet. “Sustainability is the cornerstone of long-term success and the transformation of our business,” said Miguel Veiga-Pestana, Drax’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement. 

While most pellets Drax makes in the U.S. are derived from logged trees, the company also uses sawdust and other leftovers from lumber mills. The company supports forest thinning, a practice it says can ease crowding in densely planted timberlands, improve the health of the remaining trees, and diversify habitat for wildlife. 

“By ensuring that we source sustainable biomass, and that we embed sustainable practices into every facet of our operations, we can build lasting value,” Veiga-Pestana said. 

Water vapor escapes a cooling tower at the Drax power station in Drax, England. The station is the largest wood pellet-burning facility in the U.K. and was originally developed to burn coal. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The value of the entire utility-scale wood pellet industry depends on what many scientists call an “accounting loophole” entrenched in some of the earliest international policies aimed at combating climate change. 

During the 1990s, the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol established land use and energy use as two separate categories for counting a country’s greenhouse gases. To avoid double counting wood burning across both land-use and energy-use categories, the U.N. assigned wood pellet emissions only to the land-use sector, believing that normal forest regrowth would keep pace with the modest harvests for pellet production. The wood pellet industry at the time was tiny, selling the bulk of its products to homeowners with small pellet-burning stoves. Any carbon released by burning would be balanced by new trees that work as natural CO2 absorbers, the thinking went. 

The effect, though, was that regulators would count CO2 from burning oil and coal, but CO2 from burning timber could stay off the books. 

“Drax and other bioenergy companies took that and said, ‘Look, we have no impact — we’re instantly carbon neutral,’” said Mary Booth, director of the environmental organization Partnership for Policy Integrity. 

Read Next Europe gets ‘green energy.’ These Southern towns get dirty air. Tristan Baurick

This exemption was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty that set legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. Experts were soon warning of troubling consequences. In a study published in the journal Science in 2009, scientists said the exemption was an “accounting error” that could spur deforestation and hinder attempts by governments to curb emissions. 

“The error is serious, but fixable,” said Tim Searchinger, a Princeton University energy policy expert, in a statement at the time. “The solution is to count all the pollution that comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks whether from coal and oil or bioenergy, and to credit bioenergy only to the extent it really does reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Other scientists challenged the industry’s claim that planting trees would neutralize power station emissions. According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it can take 44 to 104 years for forest regrowth to pay back the carbon debt from pellet burning. While the planet waits decades for the trees to regrow, glaciers melt, seas rise, and weather from droughts to hurricanes grows more extreme. 

Trucks haul lumber in and out of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility operated by the Drax group in Gloster, Mississippi, on September 24, 2025. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

Despite these warnings, the European Union latched on to wood burning as a relatively quick and cheap way to meet tighter climate mandates. Rather than blanket the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels, countries could dust off old coal plants and put them on a diet of “carbon-neutral” pellets. 

The shift toward bioenergy accelerated in 2009, when the European Union set a target of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. Pellet demand in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and other European countries immediately began to increase, but in the U.K., the growth was explosive. Between 2012 and 2018, the U.K.’s pellet consumption surged by 471 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The U.K. left the European Union in 2020, and it remains the world’s biggest buyer of wood pellets. In 2024, the country imported nearly 10.3 million tons, a record high spurred partly by a dip in pellet prices. 

Wood burning has helped the U.K. come within striking distance of its goal to eliminate oil and gas from its electrical generation by 2030. Nearly 74 percent of the national grid is powered by what the government calls “low carbon” energy sources. Wood pellets and other forms of bioenergy supply about 14 percent of the low-carbon mix, with wind, solar, and hydropower accounting for the rest. 

Every workday, Ian Cunniff climbs into his orange overalls, pounds his helmet tightly on his head, and steps into a cage that drops 459 feet into a maze of dark tunnels littered with old machinery.  

The stout Yorkshireman is one of the last miners still working in the coal pits, but now his job is to lead tours along the rich seams he once risked his life to dig out. Cunniff is a guide for the National Coal Mining Museum at Caphouse Colliery, a former West Yorkshire mine dating back to the 1790s. His last “real” mining job was at Kellingley Colliery, the U.K.’s last deep coal pit and a major feeder of Drax’s power station before it switched to wood. 

In the depths of the Caphouse mine, Cunniff grew wistful over the coal still embedded in the walls. The seams once provided nearly everything a man and his family needed, he said. “It was your future; it was your retirement. So much of it has never been touched.”

Miners, union members, and the local community take part in a protest march in 2015 in Knottingley, England, marking the end of deep-pit coal mining in Britain.
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

Wood pellets didn’t kill the U.K.’s coal industry. It began to wither as the country shifted from cheaper, imported coal in the 1980s to natural gas in the 1990s. Coal’s decline left gaping holes in Yorkshire’s economy and social fabric. The wood pellet industry has contributed some jobs and tax dollars, but it can’t replace what the region once had, said Shaw-Wright, the county council member. 

“With coal, you didn’t really need to get an education much because you were going to get a job at the pit,” he said. “And if you had a job at the pit, you would have it for life.”

At its height between the two world wars, the industry employed 1.2 million people in the U.K. In some northern England counties, 1 in 3 residents was employed in coal mining. The Selby Complex, a group of deep-pit mines near the Drax power station, employed about 3,500 workers before it shut down in 2004. The industry also supported cooperative groups that funded social halls, community brass bands, libraries, sports clubs, and welfare programs for injured miners and their families.

In contrast, the Drax-dominated bioenergy industry employs about 7,400 people across the U.K., including about 1,000 people at the Drax station. The increasingly automated industry has seen its job numbers fall by more than a third since 2014, according to data from the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics. 

A similar trend is playing out in Louisiana and Mississippi, where the three Drax wood pellet mills employ far fewer people than the older pulp and paper mills that once played a dominant role in the Deep South. The paper mill in Bastrop, for instance, once employed 1,100 people. Drax’s pellet mill near the town has just 71 workers on its payroll. 

Read Next The biomass industry promised these Southern towns prosperity. So why are they still dying? Tristan Baurick

Shaw-Wright appreciates the economic activity the wood pellet industry brings to Yorkshire but said most of the region’s recent job growth actually comes from a surge in distribution centers for online retailers — a trend that has turned Yorkshire into the country’s “capital of warehousing.” Many of these massive facilities now sit on former coal fields, including the old Kellingley Colliery, yet the work of unloading and sorting parcels doesn’t provide the pay, stability, or sheer number of jobs that mining once did.

After giving another tour, Cunniff rested in the colliery’s old locker room. He knows coal isn’t coming back, but he doesn’t believe cutting and burning trees to power the grid is any better — for Yorkshire or the planet. 

“So you’re taking away what’s cleaning the atmosphere, and you’re burning it?” he said. “That’s the big picture, isn’t it?”

The Drax power station is the dominant feature across several miles of North Yorkshire countryside. Its 12 cooling towers are each big enough to hold the Statue of Liberty. Every day, about 17 trains full of pellets arrive to top off four storage domes with a combined 360 million-ton capacity. The pellets are pulverized as fine as flour and blown into several boilers. Stored in hangar-like structures in the station’s center, the boilers consume some 8 million tons of pellets each year with fires that reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Just outside the station’s 3 miles of razor-wire fencing is a village, also called Drax, with one tiny pub. Inside, there was little love for the big neighbor. 

“They’re taking wood from where they shouldn’t be taking it,” Tony Emmerson said as he sipped a beer at The Huntsman’s bar. “I think we should go back to coal, personally. We’ve got a hundred years of coal right here just waiting to be burned.”

Many of Drax’s post-coal era promises — lower energy bills, cleaner air, and a decarbonized grid — have proven hollow, Emmerson said.

“They get all this tax money but we don’t get cheaper power bills,” said Peter Rust, The Huntsman’s owner. “And they say they’re carbon neutral, but how’s that possible when you have to bring the pellets across an ocean?”

Trains unload wood pellets into giant storage domes each day at the Drax power station in Yorkshire, England. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The growing doubts about the wood pellet industry are seeping into public debate, leading the government to rethink its support for Drax. Last February, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government decided that the current subsidies for Drax would be cut in half in 2027. The subsidy renewal, which lasts until 2031, also requires Drax to increase the proportion of “sustainably sourced” biomass from 70 percent to 100 percent. Michael Shanks, the energy minister, told Parliament that the government made the move because Drax was making “unacceptably large profits” and “simply did not deliver a good enough deal for bill payers.” 

Shanks, however, emphasized that wood pellets will still play a key role in powering the U.K.’s grid, and he welcomed Drax’s new efforts to bolster its green credentials. That includes a massive investment in carbon capture and storage technology. For years, Drax has been planning a pipeline that would divert about 8.8 million tons of the station’s CO2 emissions into storage under the North Sea. Reduced subsidies, though, are likely to slow these projects, the company has warned.  

Many Yorkshire residents knew exactly — and proudly — where the Drax station’s coal came from. They’re much less sure about where the wood is sourced. Watts, the gardener in Barlow, assumed the trees were grown on English farms. Shaw-Wright was also far off the mark, thinking the pellets came from Australia. At The Huntsman, guesses were slightly closer, with people calling out South America and Eastern Europe — regions that together supply only 10 percent of the station’s fuel. The fact that the U.S. meets nearly 80 percent of the station’s demand was a surprise to many. 

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have been campaigning for a broader understanding of the industry’s impacts. U.K.-based Reclaim the Power and Biofuel Watch have been highlighting the concerns about emissions as well as the pollution affecting mill towns in Mississippi and Louisiana. 

Several groups had planned to stage a large protest outside the Drax station in August 2024. Drawing hundreds of activists from around the country, the “Drax Climate Camp” was to feature five days of “communal living and direct action.” But police preemptively arrested 25 protesters and halted a convoy of vehicles carrying tents, composting toilets, wheelchair-accessible matting, and other gear. Activists staged a much smaller protest outside the police station where their fellow campaigners were held, but the groups decided the camp couldn’t continue without the equipment. 

Climate protesters hold signs outside a police station in York, England, in August 2024. Several of their fellow activists were arrested during preparations for a protest near the Drax power station in rural Yorkshire. Gary Calton / The Guardian Police patrol outside the Drax power station in Yorkshire. Dozens of officers were called to the station in 2024 to prevent a planned protest encampment. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The aborted protest got Shaw-Wright thinking more about the connection between the pellet mills in the Deep South and the electricity that lights his home. 

“Louisiana, that’s where they make the ‘gumba’ and they love cooking crocodiles, right?” Shaw-Wright said, half joking. “I think people will be surprised where the wood comes from and … know nothing of how it’s produced or what it entails. We need to be educated more about the communities that, in essence, benefit the Drax power station. And we all benefit from it. But if it’s at the expense of others, it gives you a different perspective.”

Rust, the pub owner, wasn’t so reflective, but he was deeply disappointed the camp was quashed. “I thought we were going to get loads more customers,” he said. “I bought loads more bottles when I heard about it. I thought finally Drax was going to do some good for me.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips0','A technology that catches carbon dioxide at the point of release, preventing it from escaping into Earth’s atmosphere. CSS systems typically are installed on industrial or energy facilities, like coal-burning power plants, where the greenhouse gas is captured, compressed, and then buried deep underground.
'); toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The UK quit coal. But is burning Louisiana’s trees any better? on Feb 6, 2026.

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the U.S., as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world — but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the U.S. is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since. 

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favor of the wind companies in recent months.) Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favorable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power. 

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the “One Big Beautiful Act” over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs. These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the U.S. and reallocating their investments accordingly. 

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion — more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments. 

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US lost $35B in clean energy projects last year on Feb 6, 2026.

The year 2026 began amid escalating war, repression, criminalization of resistance, and severe climate disasters across Southern and Northern Africa, Europe, and North America.

The post 2026 | January Bulletin: News from La Via Campesina member organisations around the world appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market. 

Invert that for modern times and you’ve got the idea behind “agrihoods,” communities designed around a central farm. Like a garden in a big city, agrihoods promise to boost food security, reduce temperatures, capture rainwater, and increase biodiversity. As climate change intensifies heat, flooding, and pressure on food systems, agrihoods could be a way to make urban living more resilient — not just more picturesque.

“Developers have a hard time offering open space, because they would like to build more housing,” said Vincent Mudd, a partner at the architectural firm Steinberg Hart, which designs agrihoods. “One of the few ways to kind of bridge that gap is to be able to use active open space that actually generates commerce.” 

On paper, an agrihood is a simple concept: a working farm surrounded by single- or multifamily housing. Steinberg Hart recently finished two of them in California — one in Santa Clara and another, called Fox Point Farms, in Encinitas. The former, south of San Francisco, features townhouses, market-rate units, and affordable housing, plus a community center and retail shops. The latter, north of San Diego, adds a farm-to-table restaurant, an event venue, and a grocery store, but its housing is primarily for sale instead of rent. “Two different housing programs for two different communities, but built around the sustainability of urban farming,” Mudd said.

While these projects are in relatively affluent areas, Mudd said agrihoods can be built nearly anywhere — though it might require tweaks to zoning rules. “Almost every city has the ability to make that zoning change,” Mudd said, “because it retains commerce, preserves jobs, generates sales tax income from retail, and provides mixed-income, attainable housing.”

A view of the Fox Point Farms agrihood in Encinitas, California.
Kyle Jeffers

(Last year, residents of the agrihood development in Santa Clara alleged that management failures have left them living in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, with delayed repairs, poor air quality, and other issues. The building’s manager, the John Stewart Co., and owner, Core Affordable, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Where it gets more complicated is the logistics of the farm. Water is the big one: Ideally a farm captures enough rainwater to keep crops hydrated. Because Northern California enjoys a Mediterranean climate of rainy winters and warm, dry summers, the Santa Clara agrihood gathers precipitation and stores it in a tower. “It auto-refills with city water once it gets to a certain point, but we can get two-thirds, or sometimes all the way through the summer without having to do that,” said Lara Hermanson, co-founder of Farmscape, which helped design, install, and maintain the community’s farm.

A rainwater-capture system, though, comes with an upfront cost that a community garden in a lower-income neighborhood might not be able to afford. If one year the rains stop and drought takes hold, it will have to pay for more water. “Perhaps people with the biggest need for food or nutrition security are also sort of disproportionately facing greater water expenses,” said Lucy Diekmann, an urban agriculture and food systems advisor at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Even so, one of the many charms of any urban farm or garden is that greenery, and even bare dirt, breaks up the concrete landscape. Historically, cities have been designed to whisk water through gutters and sewers as quickly as possible before it can pool and cause flooding. This strategy struggles to keep up as climate change supercharges rainstorms, making them dump more water. Green spaces let all that liquid soak into the ground, mitigating flooding even without deliberate catchment systems.

Still, an agrihood’s farm isn’t going to run itself. From the very beginning of planning, Hermanson said, a community must decide what it’s going to grow. The general idea is to get as much yield as possible because space is constrained compared to an industrial farm. So pumpkins probably aren’t a great idea, because those plants take up so much room. Instead, in Santa Clara, Hermanson grows Persian cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and hot peppers because they’re small. 

While an agrihood can’t feasibly provide all the calories residents need, it’s an especially powerful system because the produce that it does produce is highly nutritious. Scale that food production up across a city, and the impact could be huge: One study found that Los Angeles could meet a third of its need for vegetables by converting vacant lots into gardens. “It’s incredible what we could do with what we have, and what we could do even more with intentional planning,” said Catherine Brinkley, a social scientist who studies urban agriculture at the University of California, Davis.

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In Encinitas, Greg Reese, the farm manager at Fox Point Farms, is sending food to the agrihood’s grocery store, so in addition to size he also considers the value of his crops. A lot of that comes down to speed: Arugula grows faster than cantaloupe, meaning Reese can harvest it, send it to market, and grow some more in quick succession. (Given the pleasant climate of Southern California, the farm can grow food for 11, maybe even 12 months of the year.) It can also produce foods that the chefs at the on-site restaurant want. “What is in high demand, and then what grows really fast as well?” Reese said. “I can plant a seed and they can harvest it in a month, or transplant it within two months, so it’s a higher turnover.”

These crops can even benefit from a quirk of city life: the urban heat island effect. As the sun beats down on all that concrete, asphalt, and brick, the landscape absorbs its thermal energy — raising the mercury well above surrounding rural areas — and slowly releases it at night. This is a growing problem for urbanites struggling with ever-higher temperatures. On the flip side, these green spaces help cool the neighborhood because their plants release water vapor, making summer more comfortable for the surrounding community.

An agrihood can also support local biodiversity. Planting native flowering species, for instance, simultaneously beautifies the landscape and attracts pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and bats (which eat mosquitoes, an added bonus). Even the flowers the crops produce provide food for these pollinators, which return the favor by helping the plants reproduce. 

With the crop varieties decided, an agrihood can figure out how much refrigeration and storage capacity to build out. Those who live there will also have to decide whether to sell produce from a stand or use it in an on-site restaurant. And they’ll need to project the costs of hiring outside help to keep the farm going. 

It’s not so simple, then, as just erecting a few buildings around a green space and calling it a day. “All those things need to be figured out before you start putting things on paper and making commitments,” Hermanson said. “Successful farms are well-funded, well-staffed. Everyone does better with clear expectations, clear budgets, and then also the community knows what it is they’re getting.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm on Feb 6, 2026.

As federal agencies manage millions of acres of land critical to climate adaptation, wildlife, and water supplies, a new government report finds that they are falling short of their legal responsibilities to tribal nations.

“In treaties, tribes ceded millions of acres of their territories to the federal government in exchange for certain commitments,” the report read. Published in late January by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, these commitments, through treaties, included services, protection, reservations, and for some tribes, hunting and fishing rights. These commitments have evolved into federal agencies engaging in government-to-government relationships with tribes on managing natural resources.

The report highlights the role tribes play in land and water stewardship, noting their effectiveness in managing natural and cultural resources and restoring habitat. Through treaties, tribes have also been able to apply traditional approaches to land and water management.

In 2021, the Biden administration issued a joint order through the departments of Agriculture and the Interior aimed at increasing tribal control over public lands to better protect natural and cultural resources. Since then, the Native American Rights Fund estimates tribes have entered into at least 400 cooperative land agreements with federal agencies.

Such arrangements typically take the form of agreements between tribes and federal agencies, including the Interior Department. These relationships range from consultation to co-stewardship agreements and co-management, in which tribes share decision-making authority over certain lands and waters. The GAO report recommends expanding authority for the Forest Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to enter into land and water agreements with tribes.

One successful example cited in the report involves the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and the Chippewa National Forest, where the use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge alongside Western science helped improve habitat for snowshoe hare, a species considered culturally significant to the tribe, and increase the population.

“Because the joint secretary order is still in effect, because agencies are still pursuing these agreements, and we know that tribes are very much interested in pursuing and expanding these types of agreements, it’s important for federal agencies to understand how many staff may have the appropriate expertise,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the report’s author and team lead for natural resources at GAO. That includes understanding trust and treaty responsibilities and government-to-government relationships between tribes and the United States, she said.

Tribes told the GAO that agency staff often lacked familiarity with federal Indian law, treaty obligations, and government-to-government relations. Ortiz said employees across agencies have expressed interest in gaining the skills needed to navigate tribal affairs related to federal land and water management.

The report also examines staffing overhauls and mass layoffs driven by the Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to reduce government spending across federal agencies, including the interior and agriculture departments, in early 2025.

“If agencies lack the staff or resources to pursue these agreements, to build the relationships that facilitate these agreements, that’s going to get in the way of developing long-term partnerships with an eye to shared decision-making,” said Ortiz. 

The current fiscal year budget is expected to cut funding to several federal agencies and reduce staffing levels. That includes cuts of about 75 percent to the Bureau of Land Management’s wildlife habitat management program, as well as national monument and conservation management teams.

Staff interviewed at several federal agencies cited the influence of Traditional Ecological Knowledge — Indigenous knowledge systems that examine relationships within ecosystems — in wildfire and water management.

“Sometimes agencies may not understand the benefits of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge, and how that can play into managing a resource like a forest, a marine sanctuary, or a fishery. And when we have these situations, it really slows down the development,” said Ortiz.

The use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in land restoration and management has been shown to improve ecosystems and biodiversity, helping mitigate the effects of climate change.

“In one way, recognition and the work of federal agencies to better respect, incorporate, and listen to that knowledge in their own decisions is how this is currently working,” said Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington School of Law. “The other is where tribes themselves are involved in or can influence those decision-making processes.”

However, Mills cites the GAO’s report on current challenges, such as the stream of executive orders and agency policy changes, that influence and limit how these agreements happen now. 

“Whether that’s energy development, orders from the president and his officials declaring an energy or other emergency, or cutting staff, you name it, they’re not talking to tribes about it, they’re just doing it,” he said. “To respect and engage in a meaningful trust relationship, the basis of that relationship is incorporating, understanding, and respecting tribal interests and tribal sovereignty in the decisions that are made.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US government says it is falling short on its legal duties to tribal nations on Feb 6, 2026.

Concerns about misleading AI and influencer ‘content’ on health, welfare and civil rights miss a wider issue, argues Sophia McHardy. They fill a human-made gap that risks becoming an austerity-shaped chasm

The post Algorithms vs the welfare state appeared first on Red Pepper.

The Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations-Via Campesina rejects the imperialist actions by the US government and stands in solidarity with the peasants of Cuba, the Cuban people, and their revolutionary government.

The post CLOC-Vía Campesina rejects the Trump administration’s tariff sanctions on oil supplies to Cuba by third countries appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Green to red? Channel Comment brendan 6th February 2026 Teaser Media

Political leaders in Merced are weighing a novel idea for high-speed rail: skip downtown, and link the train to Yosemite National Park. Read more!

Throckmorton, Texas (February 5, 2026) — Nantz Land & Cattle, owned and operated by Robert and Stacy Nantz in the Rolling Plains region of the Texas Panhandle, is the newest ranch to earn the...

As sea level rise increasingly affects daily life in Alameda, residents are clear about what they want to see along their shoreline: adaptation strategies that protect and work with the natural environment. Last fall, the Oakland Alameda Adaptation Committee (OAAC), along with Greenbelt Alliance, Hood Planning Group, and Community Action for a Sustainable Alameda (CASA) put out a survey asking residents how they want to tackle sea level rise along the Alameda Shoreline. Over four months, more than 170 people responded, online and in person at local businesses and spots along the shore. Questions were organized by project reach, including Bay Farm Island, the South Shore, the East End, the Northern Waterfront, and the West End and Alameda Point.

The takeaway was consistent across neighborhoods: Alamedans strongly support solutions that protect natural systems while addressing real, everyday flooding concerns.

People Really Want Nature-Based Solutions

"Wetlands are the only thing that will save Alameda in the long term.”

Residents overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of preserving and restoring wetlands, regreening shorelines, and safeguarding natural habitats as ways to adapt to sea level rise. For example, one respondent wrote: “Wetlands are the only thing that will save Alameda in the long term.” Another wrote: “Please do what is possible to incorporate natural methods for protecting the shoreline.”

Overall, when it came down to it, most people chose wetlands and natural solutions over sea walls.

A few other things stood out in people’s responses.

Fiscal Responsibility and Access Matter, Too

There was a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility and transparent budgeting; people want to make sure taxpayer money is spent wisely, and that the investments actually match the community’s needs. 

Access was another big concern. People are worried about maintaining reliable ways to get on and off the island, especially making sure the Webster and Posey Tubes don’t flood, and that traffic congestion doesn’t worsen. 

Respondents also highlighted that flooding isn’t just a future problem; it’s already happening. One person noted, “Over the past five years the paths [at the Elsie Roemer Bird Sanctuary] have been more and more frequently inundated with water.”

“Over the past five years the paths [at the Elsie Roemer Bird Sanctuary] have been more and more frequently inundated with water.”

Neighborhood Perspectives Add Nuance

“Please do what is possible to incorporate natural methods for protecting the shoreline.”

While support for both nature-based solutions and infrastructure protection was strong citywide, responses varied slightly by location. Residents in the Northside and East End tended to prioritize protecting infrastructure, including transportation routes, while respondents from the South Shore expressed comparatively stronger support for nature-based strategies. These nuances will help inform tailored adaptation approaches across Alameda.

What Happens Next

Based on what we’ve heard, the project team will continue to develop to the extent possible near- and long-term adaptation strategies that promote environmental protection, including preserving and restoring wetlands, regreening shorelines, and protecting natural habitat. Additionally, balancing concerns about congestion and transparent budgeting and decision-making will continue to be a top priority.

Looking ahead, the next iteration for sea level rise adaptation planning in Alameda will include community outreach for adaptation specific to Bay Farm Island as well as the Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan (RSAP) required by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). 

Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for OAAC updates here, and keep your eyes peeled for more opportunities to give your input on what you’d like to see at the shoreline! 

The post Alamedans Show Strong Support for Adaptation Strategies that Protect the Environment appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.