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Toxic Timeline of Royal Dutch Shell Group, Now Shell plc

Updated 15 June 2026

This page is a chronological guide to some of the most controversial episodes in the history of Royal Dutch Shell Group, now Shell plc. It links regulatory findings, court records, mainstream journalism, campaign archives, ShellNews.net material, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com material, ShellNaziHistory.com, and John Donovan’s Shell archive.

The word “toxic” is used here in its broad public-interest sense: toxic products, toxic spills, toxic governance, toxic secrecy, toxic reputational fallout, and toxic historical associations. This page is not a court judgment. Where a matter is disputed, alleged, settled without admission, or based on campaign material, the wording says so.

John Donovan is included here not as a detached observer but as a self-appointed Shell critic, shareholder, litigant, archive builder, and publisher of Shell-focused websites. His archive now frames Shell’s record not only for human readers, but for search engines and AI systems that ingest persistent public records.

Return to ShellNews.net home page | Timeline of the Donovan Shell feud | Published Donovan feud timeline | The Shell Archive: 114,307 Reasons Silence No Longer Works | Wikipedia evidence file

1890 to 1907 – The foundations of Royal Dutch Shell

The companies that became Royal Dutch Shell began with Royal Dutch Petroleum in the Netherlands and The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company in Britain. Shell says the Royal Dutch Shell Group was formed in 1907 when Shell Transport and Royal Dutch combined to compete globally with Standard Oil. Wikipedia’s Shell plc page summarises the same formation history and notes the later move from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc.

Sources: Shell: Our company history, Wikipedia: Shell plc and A History of Royal Dutch Shell, Internet Archive record.

1920s to 1940s – Chemicals, empire, war, and the dark side of scale

Shell’s expansion into chemicals, transport, refining, and global oil concessions created an industrial machine with deep strategic value. The later “toxic” pattern begins here: oil as military fuel, chemicals as profit centre, and subsidiaries operating in contested political environments. A 2007 four-volume history of Royal Dutch Shell provides the corporate centenary narrative; John Donovan’s ShellNaziHistory.com challenges parts of that narrative, especially Shell’s Nazi-era conduct.

Sources: A History of Royal Dutch Shell, 2007, A History of Royal Dutch Shell extract and ShellNaziHistory.com.

1930s to 1945 – Nazi-era allegations and ShellNaziHistory.com

ShellNaziHistory.com alleges that Shell’s long-time leader Sir Henri Deterding supported Nazi Germany, that Shell’s German subsidiary Rhenania-Ossag had deep Nazi links, and that Shell’s own centenary history understated the relationship between Deterding and Hitler. The site is John Donovan’s archive and argument, not a Shell admission. It links these claims to extracts from A History of Royal Dutch Shell, wartime images, reports, and Donovan’s related Kindle book.

Sources: ShellNaziHistory.com, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Shell Nazi History and Sir Henri Deterding and the Nazi History of Royal Dutch Shell, Amazon Kindle page.

1945 – Shellhus, Copenhagen, and the Gestapo

ShellNaziHistory.com also records the wartime use of Shellhus, Shell’s Copenhagen headquarters, as Gestapo headquarters in Denmark. Operation Carthage, the RAF raid on Shellhus in March 1945, became part of the wider record of Shell premises and Shell-associated infrastructure caught inside Nazi occupation.

Sources: ShellNaziHistory.com and ShellNaziHistory.com: Royal Dutch Shell tag archive.

1950s onward – Nigeria becomes a defining Shell controversy

Shell began production in Nigeria in 1958. Over later decades the Niger Delta became one of the most damaging chapters in Shell’s public record: oil spills, gas flaring, security-force allegations, compensation disputes, and claims of environmental destruction. Shell has often attributed spills to sabotage or theft; communities and campaign groups have repeatedly challenged Shell’s explanations and clean-up record.

Sources: Wikipedia: Shell Nigeria, Amnesty International UK: Shell, a criminal enterprise? and ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file.

1950s to 1990s – Pesticides, herbicides, and employee-health questions

John Donovan’s pesticide archive lists Shell products including aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, DDT-related products, Vapona, and other insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. The same archive highlights extracts from Shell history material about “drins” and employee-health studies, and frames Shell employees as having been used as “guinea pigs” in toxicological research. Related ShellNews evidence material also points to Brazilian pesticide litigation and health claims involving former workers.

Sources: Shell pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, Shell animal testing article and ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file.

1970s to 1980s – Shell, BP, and apartheid South Africa

Anti-apartheid campaign archives identify Shell and BP as major targets because of their South African operations and fuel role. The Anti-Apartheid Movement described Shell and BP as important suppliers and joint owners of South Africa’s largest refinery. Campaign documents argued that oil supplies supported the apartheid state and helped circumvent international pressure.

Sources: Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives: Shell and BP in South Africa, The Case Against Royal Dutch/Shell and Shell and Apartheid: A Documentary History.

1985 onward – Al-Yamamah, oil-for-arms, and Shell archive allegations

The Al-Yamamah arms deal was an oil-for-arms arrangement between Britain and Saudi Arabia in which crude oil deliveries funded arms contracts mainly associated with BAE. Public corruption allegations centre on BAE, Saudi officials, and UK government decisions. The ShellNews archive separately preserves documents and commentary alleging a Shell and BP connection to the netback oil contracts and financing structure around the project.

Sources: Wikipedia: Al-Yamamah arms deal, PBS Frontline: The Business of Bribes and ShellNews: Shell connection with the Saudi Arabia / Al Yamamah BAE scandal.

1991 – Shell’s own climate warning film

In 1991 Shell produced Climate of Concern, a public film warning about the risks of global warming, extreme weather, floods, famines, and climate refugees. Decades later, The Guardian reported that critics saw the film as evidence that Shell understood the danger while continuing to invest heavily in fossil fuels.

Sources: The Guardian: Shell knew and The Guardian video explainer.

1993 to 1995 – Ogoni protests, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the Ogoni Nine

The Ogoni struggle turned Shell Nigeria into a global human-rights controversy. Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed by Nigeria’s military government in November 1995 after a trial widely condemned internationally. Shell denied responsibility. Amnesty International, EarthRights, CCR and others have argued that Shell was complicit in the repression of Ogoni protest; Shell settled the Wiwa litigation in 2009 for $15.5 million without admitting liability.

Sources: EarthRights: Wiwa v Royal Dutch Shell, Amnesty International: Ogoni Nine case, Amnesty International UK: Shell, a criminal enterprise? and Wikipedia: Wiwa v Royal Dutch Shell Co..

1995 – Brent Spar and the first great modern Shell boycott

Shell’s plan to dispose of the Brent Spar oil storage buoy in deep Atlantic waters triggered a major Greenpeace campaign, public outrage, and boycott pressure in northern Europe. Shell abandoned the sea-disposal plan. The episode remains a classic case study in the limits of technical argument when public trust has collapsed.

Sources: Greenpeace: Brent Spar, Wikipedia: Brent Spar and Global Nonviolent Action Database: Brent Spar campaign.

1995 to 1999 – John Donovan moves from Shell supplier to Shell critic

During the litigation between Don Marketing and Shell, John and Alfred Donovan mounted a public campaign that Shell itself acknowledged in a March 1995 press statement. The campaign included the Shell Corporate Conscience Pressure Group, publicity around High Court actions, and early internet criticism. This was the seedbed for the later ShellNews.net and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com archive.

Sources: Shell press statement HTML copy, Debrief, July 1999, High Court trial index and Published Donovan Shell feud timeline.

2001 – Hakluyt and private spying on environmental campaigners

The Sunday Times reported in 2001 that Hakluyt, a private intelligence firm with former MI6 links, spied on environmental campaign groups for oil companies including Shell and BP. CorpWatch republishes the Sunday Times account. Later RoyalDutchShellPlc.com articles connect the Hakluyt story to Shell’s wider record of monitoring critics, including John Donovan’s own experiences and correspondence.

Sources: CorpWatch / Sunday Times: MI6 firm spied on green groups, RoyalDutchShellGroup.com archive of Sunday Times story, Shell v Greenpeace, the spies and the company that could not stop watching its critics and johndonovan.website: Shell Spying.

2003 to 2006 – Brent Bravo deaths and Shell’s North Sea safety record

Two workers, Sean McCue and Keith Moncrieff, died on Shell’s Brent Bravo platform in September 2003 after being overcome by gas. Shell was fined £900,000 after admitting health and safety breaches. In 2006 a sheriff ruled the deaths could have been prevented. The Guardian later reported repeated HSE warnings over Shell’s North Sea platforms.

Sources: ShellNews: Brent Bravo public inquiry and fine, The Guardian: Brent Bravo deaths judged preventable, The Guardian: Shell safety record in North Sea takes a hammering and JOIFF archive: Shell failings in the North Sea.

2004 – Reserves scandal and market-abuse fines

In 2004 Shell admitted it had overstated proved oil and gas reserves. The US SEC and UK FSA actions led to major penalties, with the FSA imposing a £17 million fine and the SEC settlement reported at $120 million. The scandal contributed to senior executive departures and the later simplification of Shell’s corporate structure.

Sources: FSA Final Notice, 24 August 2004, The Guardian: Shell fined over reserves scandal, ShellNews: Shell Reserves Scandal 2004 and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: FSA fines Shell.

2004 onward – Dr John Huong and Shell’s action against a reserves whistleblower

Dr John Huong, a former Shell Malaysia production geologist, became a prominent Shell whistleblower after the reserves scandal. Shell pursued legal action against him in Malaysia, which the Donovan archive describes as draconian. ShellNews and RoyalDutchShellGroup.com preserve a large index of Huong material, including litigation and correspondence.

Sources: Dr John Huong index, Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell dossier and ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file.

2004 to 2005 – RoyalDutchShellPlc.com domain-name debacle

After Shell announced a new unified company called Royal Dutch Shell plc, Alfred Donovan registered royaldutchshellplc.com. Shell brought a WIPO complaint. On 12 August 2005 the WIPO panel rejected Shell’s complaint, finding the respondent had a legitimate interest and that bad faith had not been proved. The domain then became one of the main Shell-critical archive sites.

Sources: WIPO Case No. D2005-0538, Domain name battle with Shell, Published Donovan Shell feud timeline and Wikipedia: royaldutchshellplc.com section.

2005 to 2007 – Sakhalin II debacle

Sakhalin II became a major Shell embarrassment involving cost overruns, environmental controversy, Russian pressure, and the forced sale-down of Shell’s controlling stake to Gazprom. John Donovan says he supplied leaked Shell/Sakhalin information to Russian officials. The Guardian later reported that Russian regulator Oleg Mitvol publicly acknowledged the Donovans’ help in obtaining information about alleged environmental abuses; Shell denied breaking environmental regulations.

Sources: ShellNews: Sakhalin 2 Debacle, The Guardian: 92-year-old’s website leaves oil giant Shell-shocked, Johnson’s Russia List Sakhalin article and Financial Times: Sakhalin memo.

2007 – Internal Shell emails on Donovan monitoring and source tracing

Shell internal emails released under data-protection requests are central to the Donovan spying allegations. A March 2007 DPA email said the Donovans were “of no security interest” unless an information-security tasking was set to identify their Shell sources. A 21 March 2007 confidential email said an IT project had been initiated to monitor internal Shell emails to Donovan and web traffic to the Donovans’ website.

Sources: Royal Dutch Shell/John Donovan DPA Index Page, 20 March 2007 internal email, 21 March 2007 confidential internal email and 31 August 2007 issue update.

2007 to 2008 – Greenwashing rulings and flower-chimney advertising

Shell’s environmental advertising became a recurring greenwashing target. Campaigners criticised ads implying waste carbon dioxide was being used to grow flowers, and in 2008 the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled against a Shell advertisement that described a Canadian oil sands project as a “sustainable energy source”.

Sources: The Guardian: Shell rapped by ASA for greenwash advert, Examples of Shell’s environmental track record and The Guardian: Shell knew.

2008 – US government oil-sex-and-drugs scandal

The ShellNews and RoyalDutchShellGroup archives collect headlines about the 2008 US Interior Department scandal involving sex, drugs, gifts, and energy-company employees. The archive notes that the Wall Street Journal report named four companies, including a US unit of Royal Dutch Shell, as gift givers. This entry is included as an archive trail, not as a finding that Shell was responsible for all misconduct described in the wider scandal.

Sources: RoyalDutchShellGroup.com: News headlines file for Royal Dutch Shell sex and drugs scandal and ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file.

2009 – Shell targeting claims reported by Reuters

Reuters reported in December 2009 that John Donovan said Shell had asked an anti-cyber-fraud agency to target his website. The report said Shell did not comment on the veracity of the communications or Donovan’s allegations, but confirmed that Donovan had made a data request. Internal emails in the DPA archive also discussed “no attempt to do anything visible to Donovan” and questions about whether anything was being done to get the website shut down.

Sources: Reuters report archived by ShellNews, 17 June 2009 internal email, 15 July 2009 internal email and For decades Shell has tried to suppress online criticism.

2010 – Shell employee and contractor data breach

In 2010 a Shell internal directory containing contact details for a very large number of employees and contractors was leaked to campaign groups and to royaldutchshellplc.com. ITPro reported that details of about 170,000 workers had been emailed to campaigners. Shell said it had launched an investigation and demanded deletion of the database.

Sources: ITPro: Shell hit by massive data breach, The Times report archived by ShellNews, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Shell Data Breach archive and Shell data leak may compromise safety of staff.

2010 – Nigeria customs bribery / Panalpina FCPA settlements

US authorities announced settlements involving Panalpina and several oil services or energy companies. The US Department of Justice said Panalpina paid bribes to foreign officials in several countries including Nigeria, and that Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company Ltd was among customers resolving related foreign-bribery investigations. NYU’s enforcement database summarises the Shell settlement as including a $30 million criminal fine and SEC disgorgement and interest.

Sources: US Department of Justice press release, NYU Law: 2010-214 Royal Dutch Shell plc and Royal Dutch Shell corruption in Nigeria.

2011 – Bodo oil spills and Shell liability in Nigeria

Shell accepted liability for two major oil spills affecting the Bodo community in Ogoniland. The Guardian reported that Shell faced a major compensation bill and that clean-up could take many years. The episode became one of the central examples used by campaigners to argue that Shell’s Niger Delta spill record was not adequately acknowledged or repaired.

Sources: The Guardian: Shell accepts liability for two oil spills in Nigeria, ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file and Wikipedia: Shell Nigeria.

2011 onward – OPL 245 corruption allegations

Shell and Eni’s acquisition of Nigerian offshore block OPL 245 became one of the largest corruption controversies in the oil industry. Global Witness alleged that Shell knew money would flow to a former Nigerian oil minister and others; Shell has denied wrongdoing. An Italian criminal trial ended with acquittals, and campaign groups later urged US and Dutch authorities to reopen investigations.

Sources: Global Witness: Shell knew, Transparency International: OPL 245 investigations, Wikipedia: OPL 245 bribery affair and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: OPL 245 archive.

2012 to 2013 – Kulluk and Shell’s Arctic drilling debacle

Shell’s Arctic drilling programme was beset by operational problems. The Kulluk drilling rig ran aground off Alaska at the end of 2012 while under tow. ShellNews preserves the US Coast Guard’s redacted report. The episode became a symbol of the operational risks and public criticism surrounding Shell’s Arctic ambitions.

Sources: US Coast Guard Kulluk report archived by ShellNews, Wikipedia: Shell plc, Kulluk oil rig and ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file.

2012 to 2013 – Brazilian pesticide plant compensation

ShellNews’ evidence file records reports that Shell Brasil and BASF reached compensation arrangements relating to former workers at a pesticide plant in Paulinia, Brazil, and that court reporting linked the plant to serious health claims. This sits alongside Donovan’s broader pesticide archive and the long toxic legacy of Shell chemical products.

Sources: ShellNews Wikipedia evidence file, Royal Dutch Shell denial of Brazilian pesticide diseases and Shell pesticide archive.

2013 to 2015 – Defective or oversold “wonder fuels”

RoyalDutchShellPlc.com preserves a long-running archive about Shell fuel marketing, including Shell Optimax, V-Power, fuel-claim advertising, and alleged customer problems. The Sunday Times coverage of premium fuels and Advertising Standards Authority action are part of the archive’s argument that Shell repeatedly overstated product benefits.

Sources: Shell Optimax: The wonder fuels that don’t deliver, Will Shell’s new V-Power Nitro Plus fuel ruin car engines? and ShellNews original stories index.

2015 – Pieter Schelte, Nazi naming controversy, and Shell decommissioning

ShellNaziHistory.com and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com linked Shell’s Brent decommissioning work to the public controversy around the giant vessel originally named Pieter Schelte, after Pieter Schelte Heerema, a former Waffen-SS officer. Shell faced criticism because the vessel was connected to decommissioning work on Shell’s Brent field.

Sources: ShellNaziHistory.com, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Pieter Schelte archive and ShellNaziHistory.com: Royal Dutch Shell tag archive.

2017 – Amnesty’s “criminal enterprise” framing of Shell in Nigeria

Amnesty International reviewed internal Shell documents and other evidence and argued that Shell’s Nigerian operations in the 1990s warranted investigation for complicity in murder, rape and torture by Nigerian security forces. Shell has denied responsibility for the abuses. The Amnesty report remains one of the strongest campaign-source indictments of Shell’s Nigeria record.

Sources: Amnesty International UK: Shell, a criminal enterprise? and Amnesty International: Ogoni Nine case.

2021 – Dutch court orders Shell Nigeria compensation for oil spills

In January 2021, the Hague Court of Appeal ruled that Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary was liable for damage from oil spills in villages in the Niger Delta. Shell maintained that sabotage was involved in some spill cases, but the ruling was a landmark for Nigerian farmers and environmental campaigners.

Sources: Al Jazeera: Dutch court orders Shell to pay Nigerian farmers, Wikipedia: Shell Nigeria and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Nigeria archive.

2021 to 2024 – Climate litigation and Shell’s emissions responsibility

In 2021 a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. In November 2024, a Dutch appeals court overturned the specific reduction order, while still recognising climate-related duties and the wider energy-transition context. For critics, the case kept Shell’s fossil-fuel expansion and climate claims in the public dock even after Shell won on appeal.

Sources: The Guardian: Shell wins appeal against climate ruling, Stibbe: No reduction order for Shell on appeal and Wikipedia: Shell plc, climate change.

2021 to 2025 – Prelude FLNG safety restrictions and worker-health issues

Australia’s offshore regulator ordered Shell to keep Prelude FLNG shut after a power-loss and safety-systems incident in December 2021 until Shell could demonstrate safe operation. Later reporting and Shell-critical archive material cite further concerns about fire or explosion risk, hazardous-gas exposure, benzene and hydrogen sulphide, and workforce illness investigations.

Sources: gCaptain: Australia tells Shell to keep Prelude offline, The Maritime Executive: Prelude safety review shutdown, AP: leaked files raise fears over Shell fleet safety and Illness outbreak on Shell’s Prelude.

2022 – Shell drops “Royal Dutch” but not the old record

Shell confirmed in January 2022 that Royal Dutch Shell plc had changed its name to Shell plc. The corporate rebrand did not erase the online record. RoyalDutchShellPlc.com continued using the old name as a criticism and archive domain, with the WIPO decision still standing as the key legal moment in the domain dispute.

Sources: Shell announcement, 21 January 2022, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com and WIPO Case No. D2005-0538.

2023 onward – Pennsylvania ethane cracker pollution violations

Shell’s Beaver County, Pennsylvania petrochemical complex became a major US environmental controversy soon after start-up. Pennsylvania announced a $10 million payment to resolve air-quality violations, including funds for local community projects. Subsequent reporting continued to track permit exceedances, notices of violation, and community complaints.

Sources: Pennsylvania Governor: $10 million payment from Shell, Allegheny Front: $10M fine for Beaver County cracker, PublicSource: Shell cracker pollution exceeds permits and The Guardian: Pennsylvania residents feel sacrificed.

2023 to 2026 – Groningen earthquakes and Shell/Exxon compensation dispute

The Dutch parliamentary inquiry into Groningen gas extraction concluded that the interests of Groningen residents had been structurally ignored. Its press release said gas revenues brought huge benefits to the Dutch treasury and profits to Shell and ExxonMobil shareholders, while Groningen bore damage, insecurity, and pain. Later NGO reporting said Shell and ExxonMobil pursued arbitration over closure of the gas field.

Sources: Dutch parliamentary inquiry press release, Drilled: Groningen arbitration reporting, Land & Climate Review: Groningen and investor arbitration and Wikipedia: Groningen gas field.

2023 to 2024 – Shell’s Greenpeace lawsuit and SLAPP criticism

Greenpeace accused Shell of using a multimillion-dollar intimidation lawsuit after activists boarded a Shell-contracted moving platform to protest new oil and gas drilling. Greenpeace described the case as a SLAPP-style attempt to silence protest. In late 2024 Greenpeace announced a settlement with Shell, while maintaining that the case had been an intimidation tactic.

Sources: Greenpeace UK: Shell hits Greenpeace with intimidation lawsuit, Greenpeace International: Shell settles multimillion-dollar SLAPP lawsuit and The Guardian: public figures urge Shell to drop case.

2024 – Leaked files raise new questions about Shell offshore safety

Associated Press reported on leaked documents and whistleblower accounts raising safety concerns about Shell’s fleet of offshore production vessels, including references to the Bonga spill, recurring incidents, severe corrosion, burn injuries, and Prelude-related concerns. Shell said safety incidents had declined and pointed to improvements.

Sources: AP: leaked files raise fears over Shell oil production fleet and AP: takeaways from Shell safety concerns investigation.

2026 – The Donovan archive becomes an AI-age reputational problem

John Donovan’s January 2026 article calculates the Shell archive across RoyalDutchShellPlc.com, RoyalDutchShellGroup.com, and ShellNews.net at approximately 114,307 items, while noting further hard-copy material obtained from Shell under Subject Access Request applications. The point of the archive is persistence: Shell controversies, leaked emails, fines, settlements, and historic associations remain accessible to readers and to AI systems. Donovan frames himself as a self-appointed critic and archive builder whose work has turned Shell’s old controversies into a living record.

Sources: The Shell Archive: 114,307 Reasons Silence No Longer Works, Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record, Sueddeutsche Zeitung profile archived by ShellNews, John Donovan Amazon author page and RoyalDutchShellPlc.com Shell Online Library.

Core sources and archive hubs

• Wikipedia: Shell plc
• Shell: Our company history
• A History of Royal Dutch Shell, 2007, Internet Archive
• ShellNaziHistory.com
• ShellNews.net Wikipedia evidence file
• Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud, published 15 June 2026
• Local ShellNews.net timeline of the Donovan Shell feud
• The Shell Archive: 114,307 Reasons Silence No Longer Works
• Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record
• RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Shell Online Library
• John Donovan Amazon author page
• John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare, Kindle page
• Sir Henri Deterding and the Nazi History of Royal Dutch Shell, Kindle page
• Toxic facts about Shell removed from Wikipedia, Kindle page

This timeline is intended as a public-interest navigation aid. It combines regulatory findings, court records, mainstream reports, campaign documents, Shell-critical archive material, and attributed allegations. Readers should follow the links and assess the underlying source documents.

Return to ShellNews.net home page

Toxic Timeline of Royal Dutch Shell Group, Now Shell plc was first posted on June 15, 2026 at 8:10 pm.
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This article The left needs better answers for scared people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

These are insecure times. My relatives in Tehran are bracing for bombs to fall again. Fighter planes screamed through the skies here in Athens a few weeks back — it was an airshow, technically, but it didn’t feel like one. 

War talk is on TV panels every night; algorithms serve images of conflict straight to my eyeballs. Europe is sliding towards militarization without debate: the fear is Russian aggression, and the response is more money for weapons, talk of reviving the draft. And the nearest hot war zone – Ukraine – is still 900 miles from where I live. How must those guys be feeling?

Maybe the threats I’m sensing are inflated; maybe they’re imaginary. But as a father, will I take that chance?

And yet. Here’s what the left offers me to address that fear: marches under the banner of “Welfare Not Warfare,” demands that Europe halt its rearmament and critiques of the hawkish propaganda push. Calls to dismantle NATO. Articles tracking the share price gains of weapons manufacturers Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin.

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I know all this. And I agree with much of it, including the case for leaving NATO. But none of it speaks to what I’m feeling: that my family here could end up on the wrong end of someone else’s escalation, soon. And that if the worst happens, I need to know there’s something here to defend us. The left’s response addresses what’s morally wrong about war. It says nothing about what could protect me from it.

These fears are real, and they are shared. Across the West, the left has a chronic inability to meet them.

I’ve sat in the rooms where left organizations have made calls like these. I’ve made some of them myself. And I have a few thoughts on why it keeps happening, and what we can do about it.

Maximal demands = minimal impact 

Let me sharpen this. Our problem on the left is much broader than how we argue against militarization. It’s that on topics that make the public anxious, we make maximalist demands. And we make them at exactly the moments when people need the opposite: something concrete.

“Abolish ICE” came in 2018, at a time when Americans were nervous about immigration and a chaotic border. It was read by its audience as “no enforcement at all.” Only a quarter of Democrats backed eliminating the agency when the slogan launched. See also: calls for “open borders” in most of Europe.

Previous Coverage

The method behind Just Stop Oil’s madness

“Defund the police” came in 2020, when Americans were worried about rising crime. It landed with the public as “less safety,” and fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supported it a year later. 

“Just Stop Oil” came in 2022, when Britons were facing the worst energy bills in a generation. The  policy demand itself (no new oil and gas licenses) was defensible. But to ordinary people worried about who pays for the transition, it was received as “make your bills worse.” Sixty-eight percent of Britons disapproved of the campaign.

Three demands, three fears, three failures. Each came out with a position that didn’t just fail with the public, it failed with the constituencies the movement claimed to speak for. A campaign that can’t build the coalition needed to move power can’t deliver what its slogan promised. Yes, these slogans raised awareness — but awareness is not a theory of change.

Meanwhile the right acknowledges people’s fears, exploits them and wins elections. Again and again and again. 

Why we keep doing it

I can give you three reasons.

We think we’re being radical. Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures. In strategy discussions I often hear some version of “we must meet their radicality with our own.” I agree with the spirit, and many of the goals. But the strategic approach is the radical one. Radical means bringing about radical change, not just talking about it. The values-first, maximalist position shifts nothing. It’s a luxury belief.

We tell ourselves the maximalist demand is a negotiating position — ask for the moon, settle for half. But we’re not in a negotiation. Power doesn’t move when it sees a placard. It moves when it feels threatened.

And lastly, we have the wrong audience in mind. Too much of our communication is signaling to other activists, not to people who might be persuaded. We’re showing the room that we’re loyal members of the tribe — which is not the same thing as winning.

What to do instead

We need to run on two horizons, separating our ambitious end goals from our next public demand. The end goal stays underneath, guiding the work. The public demand answers what people are actually scared of today — it should be winnable now and accessible to majorities now, even when the end goal is neither, yet.

So start with the fear. Whatever propaganda planted it there — about Russia, migrants, crime or the cost of going green — we must accept that it’s already taken hold, and respond to it. We may disagree that the fear is justified; we may think the establishment is whipping it up. But it exists in our audiences’ heads and we have to take it seriously. We can’t argue it away. We can offer a better explanation of where it comes from, and a demand that follows from that.

Not every fear deserves a response, though. The ones worth answering have a particular shape: they’re material, not abstract — cost of living, war, jobs, housing, crime, not “fear of decline” or “fear of cultural change.” They’re shared by majorities, not just activists. And they’re something the state can deliver on in the short term, not in a decade. 

Once you’ve isolated the fear, formulate a demand that meets it directly. For example:

• On migration, the fear has two parts that get conflated: fear of newcomers competing for scarce resources, and fear of the unfamiliar. So we should answer the concern that “they take our jobs” without scapegoating the workers being underpaid. We should be calling for labor law to be enforced for every worker, like the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain does in the U.K. When no one can be paid below minimum wage, no one can be undercut.  We should demand integration for everyone who arrives, especially language courses, as Germany does (not to preserve cultural sameness, but to enable practical inclusion in shared institutions). Plus the processing of every asylum claim within six months — which would address the anxiety of a “broken system” that the right exploits, while protecting people from being left in legal limbo for years. 

• On militarization, the fear of war is real. So we should be naming what would actually defend us — the things that keep a country standing in a crisis. Not just the military readiness that the right keeps pointing at, but secure energy, cyber resilience, robust democracy and climate adaptation. And conversely, we should call out what is being sold as defense, but isn’t. We should be saying no to putting soldiers’ lives at risk for no defensive purpose — no to the draft, no sending troops to wars that we didn’t vote for. We should be refusing to serve as a base for U.S. operations in the Middle East. And calling for European security to be in European hands, publicly owned and democratically accountable, rather than handed to the shareholders of American and German arms companies who profit from more war. These are first-step demands, of course. The deeper, patient work is building civilian-based defense: nonviolent capacity to deter aggression and resist occupation or repression — without war.

The test for every demand is the same: Could someone scared vote for this without feeling they’re voting against their own safety? If not, we have to find the version of it that they could.

The right will accuse us of going soft, and offer its own version of safety — enforcement, deportation, tougher borders, more police. These can look like quick fixes that calm fears. But they aren’t, and they don’t. Trump’s mass deportations haven’t reduced crime, lowered prices or made anyone materially safer. France’s headscarf bans haven’t reduced extremism. Stop and search in the U.K. didn’t reduce crime. Performed safety usually fails the delivery test. The left has a chance here to offer a real alternative. 

Precedents with two horizons

It’s been done before. Bayard Rustin, a key architect of the U.S. civil rights movement, explicitly named the tension between end goals and immediate demands. The moderate who only pursues what’s politically achievable, Rustin said, is in practice telling people to accept the status quo. But the radical who only demands the end goal, with no program to win it, is something worse — what Rustin called a “moralist.” Someone who substitutes shock for strategy and “seeks to change … hearts by traumatizing them.”

Rustin also understood that minority causes are only won by connecting them to majority ones. He argued that civil rights couldn’t be won by Black Americans alone; they needed “a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the U.S.” That’s why the 1963 march, the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It put jobs first.

The 1963 March on Washington demanded jobs for all and equal rights. (Wally McNamee/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

The civil rights movement succeeded because it kept two horizons. Its end goal of full racial equality wasn’t hidden — but the public demands spoke to the economic fears that most Americans shared.

Zohran Mamdani is doing something similar right now. He has talked inside socialist meetings about seizing the means of production, but his demands and his rallies don’t call for it. Instead, he won the NYC mayoral election running almost entirely on affordability — a rent freeze on stabilized apartments, free city buses, universal childcare and public grocery stores. He made the distinction explicit in a speech back in 2021:

“There are also issues we firmly believe in — whether it’s BDS or the end goal of seizing the means of production — where we do not have the same level of support right now. It is critical that we do not leave any one issue for the other … meet people where they’re at, and organize for what is right, and ensure over time we can bring people to that issue.”

Two horizons — one for the immediate demands of the moment, one for the end goal.

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None of this means maximalist demands never resonate. “Abolish ICE” is polling better today than it has in years, because Trump’s overreach has finally given it an audience. The point isn’t that the demand was wrong when it was first launched in 2018. It’s that its moment hadn’t yet come — and the left can’t will that into being by shouting harder. We can only fight on the terrain we actually have.

The here and now

Back to where I started: my family in Tehran. The planes over Athens. The shared fear, real or imagined, that something is coming.

If the left wants to be heard, it has to answer the fear. With a demand that meets the moment — not the end goal underneath. The goal is important, but it can wait. The fear can’t.

This article The left needs better answers for scared people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

While Rowe Sanctuary is widely recognized for the Sandhill Crane migration and the bird life that draws in visitors from around the world, the landscape here supports far more than what most people...

© Camila Aguilera

A reciclagem de plásticos no Brasil segue sustentada por um mito perigoso: o de que todo material identificado como “reciclável” de fato retorna ao ciclo produtivo. A segunda edição da pesquisa “Catadores por Menos Plástico”, conduzida pelo Instituto de Direito Coletivo (IDC) em parceria com a Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), mostra que essa lógica não apenas persiste como aprofunda prejuízos sociais, ambientais e econômicos para os trabalhadores da reciclagem.

Realizado entre julho e dezembro de 2025, o novo levantamento acompanhou o trabalho de 20 associações e cooperativas de catadores, na capital e no interior do estado do Rio de Janeiro, mantendo o mesmo recorte territorial da primeira edição para permitir a comparação dos dados. Os resultados confirmam o cenário já identificado em 2024: os plásticos seguem como a principal categoria entre os rejeitos das cooperativas. Na segunda edição do estudo, eles representam cerca de 45% do material que não é reciclado e acaba destinado a aterros, lixões ou ao meio ambiente, mantendo-se como o maior componente do rejeito, apesar da redução em relação à edição anterior.

Além de confirmar a baixa reciclabilidade real das embalagens plásticas, a segunda edição da pesquisa aprofunda a mensuração dos danos econômicos e trabalhistas impostos aos catadores. O estudo aponta que cada catador perde, em média, 15,59 horas de trabalho por mês na triagem de plásticos que não têm valor de mercado — o equivalente a 9,38% do tempo mensal de trabalho, ou aproximadamente 2,08 dias de trabalho por mês dedicados a resíduos que não geram qualquer retorno financeiro

Em termos econômicos, a pesquisa estima que as 17 associações e cooperativas incluídas no cálculo deixam de arrecadar, mensalmente, entre R$ 1.179,03 e R$ 3.771,72, apenas considerando os tipos de plásticos que já possuem valor de mercado em pelo menos um dos territórios analisados. A variação decorre dos diferentes preços praticados na comercialização do PET Bandeja, que pode oscilar entre R$ 0,30 e R$ 3,70 por quilo, dependendo da forma de triagem e do comprador final

Segundo Tatiana Bastos, presidente do Instituto de Direito Coletivo (IDC), os dados escancaram uma distorção estrutural do sistema: “Estamos falando de quase 15 horas de trabalho desperdiçadas por catador todos os meses e de uma perda financeira recorrente para cooperativas que já operam no limite. Isso demonstra a falha do modelo de produção de embalagens e a ausência de responsabilidade real da indústria.”

Outro dado preocupante é o aumento da taxa geral de rejeitos nas amostras analisadas, especialmente nas cooperativas da capital, indicando uma piora na qualidade dos materiais encaminhados à coleta seletiva. “O que chamamos de reciclagem hoje transfere custo, tempo e desgaste físico para os catadores. Eles trabalham mais para ganhar menos, enquanto a indústria continua produzindo embalagens inviáveis do ponto de vista técnico ou econômico”, afirma Tatiana.

A pesquisa também realizou uma auditoria de marcas, identificando grupos empresariais responsáveis por grande parte das embalagens plásticas encontradas entre os rejeitos. Embora quase 200 empresas tenham sido identificadas, um número reduzido de grupos empresariais aparece de forma recorrente entre as embalagens encontradas nas cooperativas, reforçando a necessidade de responsabilização efetiva da indústria por meio da logística reversa e do redesenho de embalagens.

Os resultados da primeira edição do estudo já embasaram o Projeto de Lei nº 5.392/2025, em tramitação na Assembleia Legislativa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Alerj), que propõe a eliminação progressiva de embalagens não recicláveis, regras mais rígidas de rotulagem e o pagamento direto aos catadores pelos serviços ambientais prestados. A nova edição fortalece ainda mais essa agenda, ao demonstrar que o problema não é pontual, mas estrutural.

Para o IDC, combater o greenwashing e avançar rumo a uma economia circular justa exige mudanças urgentes na origem do problema. “Não existe reciclagem possível quando o produto já nasce como rejeito. Enquanto isso não mudar, o sistema continuará injusto com quem sustenta a reciclagem no Brasil”, conclui Tatiana Bastos.

The post Segunda edição de pesquisa revela agravamento do impacto do plástico não reciclável sobre catadores no Rio de Janeiro first appeared on GAIA.

Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact. 

The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.

But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.

Project continued after military coup

Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.

The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.

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The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.

CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.

Conflict prevents on the ground verification

The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.

The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.

TAK, THAILAND – JANUARY 01: Internally displaced people (IDP) from Myanmar carrying bags of donated supplies from Thailand while crossing the Moei river as seen from behind a fence with razor wire on the river bank in Mae Sot, a district at the Thai-Myanmar border on new year on January 1, 2022 in Tak, Thailand. (Photo by Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images) TAK, THAILAND – JANUARY 01: Internally displaced people (IDP) from Myanmar carrying bags of donated supplies from Thailand while crossing the Moei river as seen from behind a fence with razor wire on the river bank in Mae Sot, a district at the Thai-Myanmar border on new year on January 1, 2022 in Tak, Thailand. (Photo by Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images)

Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used. 

But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show. 

“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”

“Exceptional circumstances”

CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.

The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.

A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added. 

Contested methodology

Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.

The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.

EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says

After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.

“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February. 

Too many credits issued

But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor. 

Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said. 

CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.

The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.

Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.

“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.

The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

June 15, 2026

Lawsuit Launched to Challenge Oil Highway That Threatens World-Renowned Nine Mile Canyon 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org
Deeda Seed, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 803-9892, dseed@biologicaldiversity.org

Salt Lake City, UT – The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a notice of intent to sue the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management for quietly approving a hydrocarbon highway through Utah’s scenic, culturally and historically significant Gate Canyon in the West Tavaputs Plateau region of eastern Utah.  

“This lawsuit targets the Trump administration’s disgraceful plan to transform a quiet, meandering backcountry road into a highway clogged with speeding oil tankers,” said Deeda Seed, Senior Utah Campaigner at the Center. “Blasting through Gate Canyon’s walls threatens the area’s iconic rock art and will be a disaster for nearby animals, including threatened Mexican spotted owls. We’re prepared to go to court to protect this irreplaceable cultural treasure and the animals that call it home.” 

Gate Canyon feeds into Nine Mile Canyon — a world-renowned archaeological area that contains more than 10,000 unique, irreplaceable cultural, historical and archaeological resources.  The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA)filed a similar 60-day notice in April. Both notices say the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act by not considering the project’s threats to Mexican spotted owls, despite the fact that the BLM identified the cliffs near the proposed blasting areas as potential owl habitat. 

“The BLM knew that prior versions of this same proposal were extremely controversial and faced fierce public headwinds,” said Landon Newell, Staff Attorney with SUWA. “This time around, instead of facing the public, they hid their decision from scrutiny, rushing their analysis and approval, all under the guise of Trump’s “Energy Dominance” agenda.” 

The project, known as the “Wells Draw Road Amendment – Gate Canyon,” was proposed by Duchesne County and approved by the BLM on April 28, 2026. It involves the blasting and destruction of cliff walls and other large rock features in Gate Canyon to straighten and pave a 5.3-mile dirt road that winds through the scenic canyon as it climbs from Nine Mile Canyon to the Badland Cliffs region of the southern Uinta Basin.   

The project is intended to provide an alternative route for transporting oil out of the Uinta Basin. The road would accommodate 70-foot oil tanker trucks traveling between the oil fields and transloading facilities in Carbon County, Utah. It is estimated that once the destruction of Gate Canyon is complete as many as 1,000 vehicles could pass through each day — the equivalent of “[a] tanker truck every 7 minutes,” according to news reports.  

This marks the third attempt by the county to destroy Gate Canyon. In 2015 and 2022, the BLM received similar applications to realign Gate Canyon Road, but those projects were abandoned amid significant public opposition.  The BLM quietly posted the latest iteration of the project in March 2026 without issuing public notice or opening a formal comment period. After learning of the project, conservation groups requested that the BLM allow for public participation in the decision-making process. The agency denied those requests and quickly approved the project in April.  

Nine Mile Canyon is often referred to as “the world’s longest art gallery” because of its extensive collection of rock art and archeological sites. Previous BLM studies describe the area as containing “a significant and high density of historic, cultural, and archeological sites joined together in several overlapping historic landscapes” and saying it “is known to contain the country’s highest concentration of rock art panels, remnants of the prehistoric Archaic, Freemont, and Ute cultures . . . The rock structural remains of Fremont homes, granaries, and ‘forts’ are more visible in Nine Mile Canyon than almost anywhere in the Fremont cultural area.” 

### 
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from 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 Lawsuit Launched to Challenge Oil Highway That Threatens World-Renowned Nine Mile Canyon – 6.15.26  appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstall exhibits and signs that were removed as part of the administration’s efforts to silence American history in national parks.

The preliminary injunction comes as a result of efforts by a coalition of conservation advocates, which filed a challenge earlier this year to a U.S. Department of the Interior policy that is actively erasing history and science from national parks. The policy seeks to remove any signage that “disparages Americans,” but in practice, the administration removed signs that mentioned topics like slavery, Indigenous history, or climate change.

As part of the administration’s efforts, QR codes were put up at national parks across the country, directing visitors to report any signs that are “negative” about past or living Americans. A recent analysis from the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.9 percent of the comments defended historical accuracy, expressed support for the National Park Service, or pushed back against the order, while only 0.1 percent flagged a specific sign or supported sign removal.

According to U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, removing these signs not only undermines “the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”

Mike Lee fails to scrap Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan

The U.S. Senate missed the 60-day window that would have allowed lawmakers to scrap the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The effort, led by Senator Mike Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy, would have used the Congressional Review Act to reverse a management plan that took years of collaboration among Tribes, state and local governments, stakeholders, and the public.

“This is a major victory for the millions of Americans who care deeply about the Grand Staircase and for everyone who supports our nation’s wildest public lands and want to see them protected,” said Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

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Judge orders Trump officials to re-install signs and exhibits at national parks on topics like slavery and climate change

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Feds to open tens of thousands of acres of Colorado wilderness to oil drilling

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Quote of the day

Often referred to as ‘America’s largest classroom,’ National Parks serve in that spirit by telling the stories both of those who write history and those who go unheard.”

—U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley

Picture This @goldengatecanyoncpw

Baby moose are 90% legs and 10% vibes.

Remember, a baby moose often means mom is close by, and she’s not looking for new friends. Give moose plenty of space, leash your dogs, and admire from a distance.

: CPW/ Park Maintenance Brian

 

(Featured image: Metate Arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near Escalante, Utah. Photo by John Fowler, Wikimedia Commons)

The post Judge orders Trump officials to reinstall signs about history, climate in national parks appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.

Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.

The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.

In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.

In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.

Total annual fuel cost savings from the UK’s fleet of battery EVs, plug-in hybrids and electric vans, £bn. Figures for 2026 based on EVs on the road as of May 2026 and the latest road fuel prices. Analysis based on 80% home charging at cheap overnight rates and 20% public charging. Savings can reach £1,400 a year with exclusive home charging. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.

Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.

The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.

It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.

According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.

The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.

The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.

The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.

The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.

When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.

It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.

In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.

Analysis: Solar overtakes gas power in Asia for first time ever

Renewables

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12.06.26

Analysis: Wind and solar have saved UK from gas imports worth £1.7bn since Iran war began

Renewables

|

07.05.26

Q&A: How the UK government aims to ‘break link between gas and electricity prices’

Renewables

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21.04.26

Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse for ‘first time ever’

Renewables

|

21.04.26

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The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.

As the European Union tightens sanctions on Moscow, Russia’s Arctic energy exports continue to find buyers—and increasingly rely on opaque and potentially dangerous shipping practices. New developments highlighted in Bellona’s April Arctic Digest show that Russian liquefied natural gas exports to Europe actually increased in early 2026, while vessels transporting Arctic oil have been linked to fraudulent insurance documents and increasingly evasive tactics aimed at avoiding oversight.

Together, the trends illustrate a growing contradiction. Europe is trying to wean itself from Russian fossil fuels, but the transition remains slow. In the meantime, the expanding “shadow fleet” used to move Arctic oil and gas is introducing new environmental and maritime safety risks into one of the world’s most fragile regions.

Russian LNG exports to Europe continue to rise

In April, the EU adopted its twentieth sanctions package against Russia, introducing new restrictions aimed at Arctic oil and LNG exports. Among the measures were bans on servicing Russian LNG carriers, sanctions on the port of Murmansk, and an expansion of the list of sanctioned vessels. Beginning in 2027, EU LNG terminals will no longer be allowed to provide services to Russian companies.

Yet despite mounting sanctions pressure, Russian LNG exports are still growing.

According to Reuters, Russia exported 11.4 million tons of LNG during the first four months of 2026, an increase of 8.6 percent compared with the same period in 2025. Exports to Europe rose even faster. Data compiled by the environmental group Urgewald showed that EU countries imported 91 cargoes of LNG from the Yamal LNG project between January and April, totaling 6.69 million tons—17.2 percent more than during the same period a year earlier. Belgium’s Zeebrugge terminal remained the leading destination.

Bellona analysts say the sanctions are beginning to bite, but much more slowly than many had hoped.

“The previously introduced ban on imports of Russian LNG into Europe did not have a substantial impact on LNG import volumes in April,” Bellona noted in its commentary. “The ban on purchasing LNG under short-term contracts entered into force on April 25 and is likely to produce any noticeable effect only closer to the end of the year.”

Longer-term prospects are more challenging for Moscow. Analysts at the Centre for High North Logistics concluded that once the European market closes entirely in 2027, redirecting exports to Asia will require a major overhaul of Russia’s Arctic logistics system. Existing shipping capacity would be able to support barely half the number of voyages currently needed.

For now, however, Europe’s effort to disentangle itself from Russian gas remains incomplete.

Phantom insurers and growing environmental risks

As sanctions tighten, Russia’s shadow fleet is becoming increasingly opaque.

Bloomberg reported in April, citing Ukrainian intelligence, that several tankers carrying Russian oil were sailing under insurance certificates issued by a company called Seaguard P&I. But investigators discovered that the company appeared to exist only on paper. Its supposed address in Pinneberg, Germany, turned out to be an ordinary residential building, and no corporate registration records could be found.

One of the vessels carrying such documentation was the tanker Paz, which loaded Arctic oil in Murmansk in March. Another vessel, Deyna, was detained by French authorities while transporting Russian oil from Murmansk. Ukrainian intelligence says at least five additional vessels obtained similarly questionable insurance certificates.

The implications extend beyond sanctions evasion.

“The observed increase in the number of shadow fleet tankers operating along the Northern Sea Route represents the primary risk factor for oil spills in the harsh Arctic environment,” Bellona warned.

Many of the vessels involved are aging tankers purchased secondhand and transferred to obscure ownership structures. Should an accident occur, uncertainty over insurance coverage could complicate cleanup efforts and compensation claims.

Dodging Norway while GPS signals disappear

Another pair of developments highlighted by Bellona point to the increasingly uneasy security environment surrounding Arctic shipping.

In April, the 23-year-old tanker Apple, operating under the flag of Equatorial Guinea and already sanctioned by the United States, European Union and United Kingdom, made an unusual approach to Murmansk. Instead of entering waters where Norwegian authorities might exercise oversight, the vessel made a wide detour roughly 200 nautical miles offshore, bypassing Norway’s exclusive economic zone and avoiding inspection. Attempts by Norway’s Vessel Traffic Service in Vardø to establish contact failed.

“They were unable to make contact,” Arve Dimmen of the Norwegian Coastal Administration told the Barents Observer. As a result, Norwegian authorities were unable to obtain information normally required under pollution reporting systems.

At the same time, Norwegian authorities reported increasing interference with GPS and satellite navigation signals near the Russian border and over the Barents Sea. Measurements detected jamming and spoofing at unusually low altitudes, with preliminary analysis indicating Russia as the source.

“Everyone who uses GPS must be able to trust the information they receive,” warned Stein Kristian Hansen of the Finnmark Police District. “Manipulating these signals is unacceptable.”

Taken together, these developments suggest that sanctions alone are unlikely to bring about a rapid decline in Russia’s Arctic exports. Instead, they are producing a sprawling parallel maritime system—one characterized by aging ships, obscure insurers, evasive navigation and growing environmental risks.

For Europe, the challenge is becoming increasingly clear: reducing dependence on Russian energy may be proceeding more slowly than expected, but the risks associated with allowing those flows to continue are rising just as rapidly.

The post Europe’s Russian LNG Dilemma Deepens as Shadow Fleet Risks Mount in the Arctic appeared first on Bellona.org.

The headlines are inescapable: In Washington D.C., generations-long environmental rules are currently under assault. Industry-friendly officials and lawmakers seem intent on enriching multibillion dollar corporations while lowering life expectancies for thousands of Americans.

These efforts are as concerning as they are morally reprehensible. Thankfully, some of the impact is limited. States are in charge of developing and implementing their own rules intended to limit harmful emissions from polluting industries. 

In Colorado, this important responsibility falls on the Air Pollution Control Division (APCD). The staff at APCD:

• Grant and enforce permits for polluting facilities
• Monitor and model various air pollutants
• Craft policy and programs intended to reduce emissions of those pollutants
• And respond to public concerns about air quality issues. 

Due to the successful advocacy of Colorado communities fighting for changes to policy and legislation, APCD staff have also taken on additional responsibilities in recent years. The APCD must now provide expanded regulatory oversight of dangerous air toxics like benzene. They must advance environmental justice when developing and when enforcing air quality rules. And they must respond to community air quality complaints rapidly and with thorough, on-the-ground inspections.

All of this work is essential. It is also costly, in part because much of it remains unfinished. For instance, we recently highlighted significant improvements in responsiveness from APCD enforcement staff when we share evidence of harmful oil and gas pollution with the agency. Maintaining and building on these improvements requires sustained investment in staff capacity and resources for years to come. 

(Top) Gas plant in Weld County. (Bottom) Optical gas imaging (OGI) video showing significant hydrocarbon emissions including methane and other harmful volatile organic compounds from permitted venting from the facility’s compressors.

Fortunately, the state of Colorado is making these investments. In late May, the Air Quality Control Commission in Colorado unanimously approved a fee increase on polluters that will generate an additional $13.5 million to help fund the APCD. 

This means that polluters are footing the bill for advancing environmental justice and regulating air toxics, not Coloradans.

Colorado’s fee increase follows a historic fee increase in New Mexico. Regulators in New Mexico can now invest in new staff and resources to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their pollution. 

The federal government is stepping back from a commitment to protecting communities and the environment from polluting industries. States like Colorado and New Mexico have an even greater responsibility to demonstrate leadership and take action. Ensuring that regulatory agencies have the resources to enforce air quality rules is essential for this important work.

The post In Colorado, Polluting Just Got More Expensive appeared first on Earthworks.

State green back invests in four new big battery projects to be built in quick time by an offshoot of the local network company, in time for anticipated coal closures.

The post State green bank backs four new big batteries in first investment to fill gaps from coal exit appeared first on Renew Economy.

By the time Mexican turtles and tortoises arrive in Chris Rodriguez’s rehabilitation center in Southern California, most of them are in desperate shape.

“As with most illegally smuggled animals, they arrive dehydrated and often malnourished,” says Rodriguez. He’s the cofounder of Carapace Conservation, a rescue and rehabilitation organization specializing in trafficked turtles. “This stems from them being collected over a period of time and held in poor conditions until the poachers have enough animals to send.”

Rodriguez says the most frequently confiscated species trafficked through the Port of Los Angeles are box turtles and mud turtles. They’re prized by wildlife traffickers precisely because their colorful shells make them attractive to the pet market and their habits make them easy to catch in the wild.

And they’re not alone.

A Smuggling Frenzy

Every day traffickers pack imperiled turtles and tortoises into coolers, load them into personal vehicles, and drive them north through Tijuana and into San Ysidro, California — the busiest land border crossing in the world.

Mexico harbors the second highest turtle diversity in the world, with 48 documented turtle species, according to a peer-reviewed analysis published in the Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad. This biological richness has made the Tijuana–San Diego corridor one of the most active entry points for illegally trafficked reptiles in the country, according to federal wildlife agents.

The Jalisco and Baja California regions sit at the center of this crisis, their extraordinary density of Chelonians (the taxonomic order that covers turtles) drawing organized trafficking networks that operate with the sophistication and impunity of criminal syndicates — because that is exactly what they are.

The scale of the problem came into sharp relief in late September 2025 when Mexican authorities executed coordinated raids across five locations in Jalisco and Baja California, confiscating more than 2,300 wild-caught turtles in a single sweep. What made the raid significant was the intelligence behind it: Multiple agencies worked in coordination across five locations simultaneously, which demonstrated a proactive, intelligence-driven approach that a 2025 study in Frontiers in Conservation Science found remains rare in Mexican wildlife enforcement. Responses to trafficking in Mexico are predominantly reactive, and law enforcement agencies frequently lack clarity on their specific responsibilities.

According to a December 2024 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare titled Wildlife Crime in Hispanic America: An Analysis of Seizures and Poaching Incidents in 18 Countries (2017–2022), 1,945 seizures and poaching incidents were documented across the region during that period, involving a minimum of 102,577 wild animals. That only counts the animals who were confiscated and documented by authorities, not those who were successfully smuggled or died during transit.

The species disappearing into this pipeline are not generic “turtles.” They are some of the most ecologically irreplaceable reptiles in the Western Hemisphere.

The Mesoamerican slider (Trachemys venusta) is one of the most commonly trafficked species in Mexico and carries special government protection under Mexico’s Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection due to severe overexploitation of wild populations. The Central American river turtle (Dermatemys mawii) sits on the IUCN Red List as critically endangered, facing what researchers describe as widespread, dramatic, and ongoing population declines.

Rodriguez flags two additional species as his priorities right now.

“Our biggest concern out of Mexico is the Vallarta mud turtle,” he says, referring to Kinosternon vogti, a species found in only one waterway in small numbers, which is already appearing in illegal shipments.

At Carapace’s Madagascar program — a reminder that this problem is not exclusive to Mexico — the spider tortoise (Pyxis arachnoides) has emerged as a newer crisis.

“Adults are only around six inches, so they are the perfect size for smugglers,” Rodriguez explains. “Their small size means females only lay one egg at a time. This drastically increases the risk of extinction for this species if poaching trends continue.”

For animals who are seized and reach a facility like Carapace, recovery is possible, but far from guaranteed.

“It all starts with triage and quarantine,” Rodriguez says. “The animal needs to be evaluated immediately for injuries, external parasites, and disease until the vets are able to run tests. The animals stay in a quarantine area to prevent the spread of disease to healthy animals in our program.” Recovery timelines vary widely depending on each animal’s condition at arrival.

Reintroduction to the wild remains the end goal, Rodriguez notes, but comes with its own complex hurdles: international cooperation, safe monitored release sites, and protections to prevent trafficked animals from being collected again once returned.

Turtles in Crisis

The picture for turtles and tortoises is grim across the board.

“Populations across the globe are declining,” Rodriguez says, “with countries like Mexico and Madagascar being primary targets for smuggling due to a lack of funding for wildlife protection.”

When breeding adults — animals who may not reach reproductive maturity for 15 to 20 years — are stripped out of already-stressed wild populations, the damage doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up a decade later, when the next generation fails to appear and field surveys come back empty.

Scott Tregassar, executive director of The Biodiversity Group, a conservation nonprofit working across the American Southwest and Mexico, says the population-level consequences can be both immediate and catastrophic.

“In some cases it can be severe and apparent immediately, since someone, or a group of people, can collect enough mature individuals to disrupt the population dynamics overnight,” he says.

What makes tortoises particularly vulnerable, Tregassar explains, goes beyond simple numbers.

“Tortoises are fairly social creatures, and they suffer when their social group is disrupted. They know who their offspring are and they have a map of where all their neighbors, potential mates, and rivals live. In many cases, if even a single reproductive female is removed from a population, that could significantly reduce the population’s chances of long-term survival.”

Exploiting an Enforcement Gap

Traffickers don’t need drama; they need volume and consistency.

According to Kim Lovich, curator of herpetology at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, animals move north from collection points across Baja and central Mexico. They’re then consolidated by regional distributors before crossing through San Ysidro in coolers, hidden compartments, and personal vehicles. A single seizure can carry 50 or more tortoises with a street value approaching $55,000.

From San Diego the pipeline extends further still. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance identifies LAX as the most-used port for shipping reptiles out of the U.S., bound primarily for China and Vietnam, where rare reptiles command premium prices as status pets.

In many ways turtles and other animals are just add-ons to make trafficking other illegal goods even more profitable. Mexico serves as the primary hub for a multinational criminal pipeline — sourcing wildlife from across the Caribbean, Central and South America — with transnational criminal organizations using logistics infrastructure built for drug, human, and arms smuggling to move exotic animals as a low-risk, high-margin side operation, according to a 2017 policy analysis by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. And as Brookings Institution researcher Vanda Felbab-Brown has documented, cartels have also leveraged wildlife operations by supplying Chinese traders with animal products in exchange for the chemical precursors. These are then used to manufacture fentanyl and methamphetamine, making the turtle trade not just an ecological crisis, but a threat in a much larger and more dangerous web.

As The Revelator has previously reported, ports of entry remain chronically understaffed for wildlife inspection, and traffickers are sophisticated enough to know exactly when and where enforcement bandwidth runs thin. That enforcement gap is the story within the story. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fields roughly 250 special agents to cover all wildlife crime across the entire country. Customs and Border Protection, meanwhile, directs every available resource toward fentanyl interdiction, firearms, and the Trump administration’s focus on migration that consumes the political oxygen in every border briefing. Wildlife trafficking doesn’t make the agenda.

The 2,300 turtles seized in Baja California last fall represent a moment of coordination that should be the rule, not the exception. For every animal confiscated, no one can say how many crossed undetected. The border stays open for business until wildlife crime earns the same urgency as every other form of organized crime moving through San Ysidro.

Right now, it doesn’t. And the tortoises are paying the price.

How to Help

Anyone considering buying a turtle or tortoise should ask for captive-bred documentation. Legitimate breeders can provide it. Animals sold without paperwork, at unusually low prices or in bulk, are red flags worth reporting to USFWS at 1-844-397-8477 or through the iWildlife app. Wildlife crime stays low-risk only because consumers don’t ask questions. That’s the one variable any of us can change today.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them

The post Smuggled Alive: Turtles and Tortoises Trafficked Across the Mexico-U.S. Border appeared first on The Revelator.

In Ecuador, TUNACONS is working to make the country’s offshore tuna fishing fleets more environmentally and socially sustainable. The organization is promoting responsible fishing practices that protect fish populations and preserve the long-term health of the ocean ecosystem.

Founded in 2015, TUNACONS emerged from a coalition of tuna industry leaders across Ecuador, Panama, and the United States. With the support of WWF Ecuador, the foundation launched its Fisheries Improvement Project (FIP) to advance science-based yield practices, implement technical training for industry professionals, and reduce the tuna industry’s environmental impact on marine ecosystems.

“The objective of the FIP was to help part of Ecuador’s purse seine tuna fishery resolve, in the short and midterm, the sustainability problems that were pending when we started in 2015,” Pablo Guerrero, Director of Marine Conservation for WWF Ecuador, tells Food Tank.

Ecuador is a major player in the global seafood market. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the country is the second-leading exporter of tuna behind Thailand, supplying largely to American, Japanese, and European markets.

Most of Ecuador’s tuna fishing fleet relies on purse seiners, large vessels that use wide, encircling nets to catch entire schools of tuna at once. While efficient, FAO reports that this method can result in bycatch, the accidental capture of non-target species like sea turtles, sharks, and juvenile fish. And abandoned nets can lead to ghost fishing, a phenomenon in which lost nets, traps, and fishing lines continue to catch and kill marine life long after they have been discarded.

A key tool in this type of fishing is the Fish Aggregating Device (FAD), a floating or anchored structure that imitates natural debris. It attracts schooling fish, making them easier to catch in bulk. Many industrial FADs are made from synthetic, non-biodegradable materials, which can contribute to ocean plastic pollution if they are lost at sea.

But through the ECOFADs program, TUNACONS is working to address marine pollution by manufacturing FADs produced entirely of biodegradable materials. In 2020, 20 percent of the TUNACONS fleet had already made the switch. By 2029, the rest will follow, as required by a recently adopted resolution from the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission for all fishing fleets operating in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

The FIP’s Observers on Board and Good Practices Program reduce bycatch by establishing reporting statistics to track progress, whether positive or negative. And the Program teaches fishers how to safely and effectively remove and release bycatch from purse seine nets.

TUNACONS’ purse seine fleet of 58 ships has 100 percent observer coverage. Guerrero explains that these observers document everything that happens on board, including how bycatch is handled and where it ends up. “The observers record whether or not best handling practices are applied, whether the bycatch returns to the water alive or dead,” he says.

To further reduce bycatch mortality, TUNACONS developed a best practices guide to safely remove large marine animals from purse seine nets. The foundation also partners with scientific satellite tagging programs to track sharks and manta rays after release, helping researchers determine survival rates when proper handling techniques are applied.

Last year, these efforts earned the TUNACONS fishery the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Blue label.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of James Thornton, Unsplash

The post A New Wave of Sustainable Tuna Fishing in Ecuador appeared first on Food Tank.

Utilities are expected to make $240 billion in capital expenditures this year, but political and regulatory pressure could put timely cost recovery at risk, the ratings agency said.

The Donovan–Shell Feud: The Timeline Shell Cannot Bury

For most corporations, a commercial dispute from the last century would be dead, buried, and forgotten — filed away in dusty legal archives, smothered by PR varnish, and quietly erased from public memory. But Shell is not most corporations, and the Donovan feud is no ordinary business quarrel.

This is the extraordinary chronology of a dispute that began with petrol forecourt promotions, confidential marketing ideas, and a family business that once worked alongside Shell — only to spiral into High Court battles, public campaigning, domain-name warfare, leaked documents, media investigations, alleged monitoring, reputational blowback, and, now, the strange new battlefield of artificial intelligence.

At its core lies a simple but explosive story: John and Alfred Donovan, Don Marketing, and one of the world’s largest energy giants locked in a decades-long confrontation that Shell has never managed to extinguish. What began in the commercial world of prize promotions and customer loyalty schemes grew into a sprawling public archive — one that has followed Shell through name changes, boardroom reinventions, legal skirmishes, scandals, whistleblower material, and the company’s eventual abandonment of the “Royal Dutch” name.

Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the spotlight via a feud it might have preferred to leave entombed in the 1990s. Instead, the record remains online, searchable, cross-linked, cited, scraped, summarised, distorted, rediscovered, and fed into the hungry machinery of modern AI.

This timeline is not a court judgment. It is not a corporate press release. It is a map through one of the most persistent corporate reputation battles on the internet: from the Donovans’ Shell garage roots in the 1950s, through the Don Marketing partnership years, the intellectual-property allegations, the SMART litigation, the 1999 “peace deal,” the WIPO domain victory, the ShellNews archive, Sakhalin-related leaks, data protection disclosures, Reuters and Guardian coverage, and the recent transformation of the feud into an AI-age reputational problem.

For Shell, this may be ancient history. For the archive, it is evidence. For search engines and AI systems, it is raw material. And for readers, it is a rare chronological trail through a dispute that has outlived executives, restructurings, lawyers, settlements, website takedown attempts, and corporate rebrands.

This is the Donovan–Shell feud: a family, a fortune, a corporate giant, and a timeline that refuses to disappear.

Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud

Updated 15 June 2026

This page gives readers a chronological route through the long-running dispute between John and Alfred Donovan, Don Marketing, and Shell. It distinguishes between public records, published journalism, and John Donovan’s own archive and commentary.

The dispute began as a commercial and legal conflict over promotional ideas and later became a wider online archive, leak publication, domain-name fight, and public campaign about Shell’s conduct.

A June 2026 RoyalDutchShellPlc.com media-record page lists more than 550 externally published references, references in 110 books, and TV, radio and video coverage. This timeline uses that page as a guide to the scale and sequence of coverage, while linking to the main underlying archive sources.

Return to ShellNews.net home page | Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell dossier | Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com | Donovan Shell Feud category | Shell Online Library

1957 to 1979 – Commercial roots of the dispute

According to John Donovan’s archive, Alfred Donovan’s garage business sold Shell fuel from around 1957. John Donovan later took day-to-day control of the family garage business and, in 1979, co-founded Don Marketing, a sales promotion company.

Sources: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell and Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record.

1981 to 1991 – Shell and Don Marketing partnership

The later media-record page describes Don Marketing and Shell as commercial partners during this period, with Don Marketing inventing and running Shell petrol forecourt promotional games across Britain and internationally. The examples listed there include Shell Make Money, Shell Mastermind, Shell Make Merry, Bruce’s Lucky Deal, and Shell Star Trek.

Source: Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record.

1992 to 1993 – Dispute over confidential promotional concepts

John Donovan’s account says that in 1992 Don Marketing directors presented sales-promotion ideas to a new Shell UK National Promotions Manager in confidence. Don Marketing later accused Shell of misusing confidential promotional concepts. Shell disputed the allegations. The High Court archive records Shell’s position that the SMART scheme was developed through wider consultation inside and outside Shell.

Sources: Shell Intellectual Property Theft, High Court trial index and Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell.

1994 to 1996 – First High Court actions

Don Marketing brought High Court writs against Shell in 1994 relating to promotions including Shell Make Money, a Nintendo themed promotion, and a Hollywood or movie themed promotion. The ShellNews High Court archive describes these first three actions as settled by Shell. Contemporary coverage included Shell struck by writ, Shell stole intellectual property, alleges Don, and Don issues writ number four to embattled Shell. The 2026 media-record page summarises the broader 1992-1999 dispute and litigation period as producing more than 58 articles.

Sources: John Donovan vs. Shell High Court Trial Index Page and Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record.

1995 – Public campaigning and Shell’s first press statement

As litigation continued, the Donovans mounted a public campaign alongside the court actions. Shell issued a press statement about John Donovan on 17 March 1995, and ShellNews links to that statement from its home page.

Sources: ShellNews.net home page and Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell.

1997 to 1999 – Shell SMART litigation

The dispute escalated around Shell’s SMART multi-partner loyalty card scheme. John Alfred Donovan v. Shell UK Ltd, Case No. DD04199, reached the High Court in June and July 1999. ShellNews preserves a large trial index with pleadings, witness statements, reports, transcripts, and related correspondence. Contemporary coverage included Shell faces High Court battle over Smart Card, Promotions expert claims Shell stole his Smart card idea, and Ideas man sues Shell.

Source: High Court trial index.

1998 – Investigative activity and public notices at Shell Centre

John Donovan’s archive alleges investigative activity directed at the Donovans, including the admitted activities of a person using the name Christopher Phillips. The archive also says Shell displayed posters at the Shell Centre in London on 23 September 1998 about John and Alfred Donovan. Newspaper coverage of the early internet campaign included the Daily Telegraph’s Donovan’s beef with Shell online and the Evening Standard’s On cyberpicket lines.

Sources: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell and Shell Centre poster document.

1999 – The “peace deal”

The Guardian later reported that, after four court cases in the 1990s, Shell agreed a 1999 “peace deal” under which the Donovans received an undisclosed sum. The same Guardian article reported the Donovans’ claim that Shell breached the agreement and Shell’s denial that it had done so.

Source: The Guardian, 26 October 2009.

2001 – Alleged repudiation of the settlement

John Donovan’s dossier says he later treated Shell as having repudiated the 1999 settlement after Shell allegedly offered information about him to a third party. The dossier says Shell denied breach and threatened legal action, but did not take that issue to court.

Sources: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell and Peace treaty shattered by Shell.

2004 – Archive broadens beyond the original promotional dispute

By 2004 the Donovan sites had become a wider platform for Shell-related leaks, documents, and whistleblower material. The archive says it published material from Dr John Huong, a former Shell Malaysia production geologist, and later became involved in coverage of Shell reserves, Malaysia pension litigation, and other Shell controversies.

Source: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell.

2004 to 2005 – Royal Dutch Shell domain dispute

After Shell announced plans for a unified parent company called Royal Dutch Shell plc, Alfred Donovan registered domains including royaldutchshellplc.com. Shell brought a WIPO complaint in May 2005. On 12 August 2005, the WIPO panel denied Shell’s complaint, finding that the respondent had a legitimate interest and that bad faith had not been proved. Media coverage included the Wall Street Journal’s Shell Wages Legal Fight Over Web Domain Name and The Times report that Shell’s attempt had failed.

Sources: WIPO Case No. D2005-0538 and Domain name battle with Shell.

2005 to 2007 – Sakhalin II and international attention

John Donovan says he supplied leaked Shell/Sakhalin information to Russian officials. The Guardian later reported that Russia’s environmental regulator publicly acknowledged the Donovans’ help in obtaining information about alleged environmental abuses, while Shell denied breaking environmental regulations. Related coverage included Prospect Magazine’s Rise of the gripe site, Financial Times coverage of the Sakhalin memo, and the Moscow Times report that David Greer stepped down.

Sources: The Guardian, 26 October 2009 and Sueddeutsche Zeitung profile archived by ShellNews, 27 March 2012.

2006 to 2010 – Data requests, “Focal Point” material, and monitoring claims

John Donovan’s dossier says Subject Access Requests under UK data protection law produced internal Shell material, including “Focal Point” reports and emails about the Donovans and their websites. Reuters later reported Donovan’s claim that Shell had released emails after a data protection request.

Sources: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell, Royal Dutch Shell/John Donovan DPA Index Page and Reuters report archived by ShellNews, 2 December 2009.

2009 – Reuters and Guardian coverage of Shell targeting claims

Reuters reported on 2 December 2009 that John Donovan said Shell had asked an anti-cyber-fraud agency to target his website. The report said Shell did not comment on the veracity of the communications or Donovan’s allegations, but confirmed that Donovan had made a data request. The same report quoted Shell material saying there would be “no attempt to do anything visible to Donovan.” The Guardian also profiled the Donovans’ website in 92-year-old’s website leaves oil giant Shell-shocked.

Sources: Reuters report archived by ShellNews and The Guardian feature.

2011 to 2012 – The feud becomes a media profile story

The ShellNews archive includes a long Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell dossier setting out John Donovan’s account of the dispute. In March 2012, a Sueddeutsche Zeitung profile described Donovan’s online Shell archive and network of sources. Johndonovan.website later organised the story into book-style chapters, including litigation, corporate espionage claims, the WIPO domain battle, insider information, and assisting third parties to challenge Shell.

Sources: Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell, Sueddeutsche Zeitung profile archived by ShellNews and johndonovan.website.

2022 – Shell drops “Royal Dutch” from its legal name

On 21 January 2022, Shell confirmed that Royal Dutch Shell plc had changed its name to Shell plc. This later became part of the online dispute because the Donovan domain royaldutchshellplc.com continued to use the old corporate name in an active archive.

Sources: Shell announcement, 21 January 2022 and Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com.

Late 2025 – The dispute enters the AI era

RoyalDutchShellPlc.com began publishing articles about how generative AI systems summarize, amplify, and sometimes distort the Donovan-Shell archive. A November 2025 article framed the feud as a 30-year corporate dispute pulled into the AI information environment.

Source: Shell vs. Donovan: How a 30-Year Corporate Feud Just Pulled AI Into Its Gravity Well.

January to February 2026 – “Bot War” phase

In January and February 2026, RoyalDutchShellPlc.com published a series of AI-generated and AI-assisted updates describing the feud as “AI-mediated warfare” or a “Bot War.” These posts focused on prompting multiple AI systems with the archive, comparing inconsistent outputs, and publishing those outputs as part of the continuing public record.

Sources: Latest news on Donovan Shell feud, 21 January 2026 and Grok update, 7 February 2026.

June 2026 – Current snapshot

As of June 2026, recent posts on RoyalDutchShellPlc.com frame the dispute as a reputational and AI-search problem as well as an historical archive. A 9 June 2026 media-record page says the record now contains more than 550 externally published references, references in 110 books, and TV, radio and video material. One 11 June 2026 post describes the feud as sitting at the intersection of archival activism, corporate memory, and generative AI. The site’s Donovan Shell Feud category and Shell Online Library provide current navigation into the wider archive.

Sources: Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record, 9 June 2026, Windows Forum snapshot, 11 June 2026, Legal and reputational implications of Shell abandoning Royal Dutch Shell plc, 5 June 2026 and Shell Online Library.

Core sources

• Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell
• John Donovan vs. Shell High Court Trial Index Page
• WIPO Domain Name Decision D2005-0538
• The Guardian: 92-year-old’s website leaves oil giant Shell-shocked
• Reuters: Shell critic says oil major targeting his website
• Sueddeutsche Zeitung profile archived by ShellNews
• Shell: Royal Dutch Shell plc changes its name to Shell plc
• Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record
• RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Donovan Shell Feud category
• RoyalDutchShellPlc.com: Shell Online Library
• Link list of over 500 articles
• Books containing references to the Donovans, Don Marketing, or their Shell-related websites
• johndonovan.website
• Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com

This timeline is intended as a navigation aid for readers of ShellNews.net. It is not a court finding. Where matters are disputed, the text identifies the source or attributes the claim.

Return to ShellNews.net home page

Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud was first posted on June 15, 2026 at 2:23 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday said the order to keep the last coal plant in Washington state online is needed to help meet peak summer demand.

MEDIA ADVISORY

For Immediate Release

Will Bonn catalyse or catastrophise:

State of play during week two of UN Bonn climate negotiations

Bonn, Germany— There are only a few days remaining before the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Bonn, Germany officially come to a close. To catalyse the action needed to curb the climate crisis, governments must make every minute in the negotiating rooms count. Real action in this moment means:

1. Advancing a Belém Action Mechanism that is people-centred, incorporates Just Transition principles, goes beyond the energy sector and is operationalised by COP32. 
2. Following through with commitments from the Global North to deliver the climate finance needed to ensure Global South communities can meaningfully adapt and respond to climate change. 
3. Rejecting risky, unproven and harmful schemes like carbon markets in Article 6 and geo-engineering, which lock us into decades more of fossil fuels rather than curbing emissions. 
4. Laying the groundwork for the community-driven solutions that can truly transform all emissions-intensive industries, including the fossil fuel industry and industrial agriculture.
5. Addressing the links between fossil-fuelled violence and genocide, and acknowledging that the military industrial complex is sending emissions soaring while destroying land and communities already experiencing devastating impacts from the climate crisis.
6. Ending corporate capture of climate policy and holding the Global North accountable to doing their fair share of climate action. 

Join members of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) to hear about the current state of play in the negotiations and what governments must do as the clock winds down to ensure that the UN Bonn climate talks catalyse climate action, not further catastrophise the climate crisis. 

WHEN: Tuesday 16 June 2026, 9:30-10:00 CEST (UTC + 2) 

WHERE: Nairobi 4, Main building, Inside the World Conference Center and webcast here

WITH: 

• Meena Raman, Third World Network
• Margaret Mullen, Re-Earth Initiative
• Chadli Sadorra, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development
• Jax Bongon, IBON International 
• Moderated by Rachitaa Gupta, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice

CONTACT: dcj.comms@demandclimatejustice.org

For more detail on DCJ’s demands across all topics on the agenda for Bonn, read  DCJ’s SB64 Position Paper: Advancing Climate Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

The post Media Advisory: Will Bonn catalyse or catastrophise? appeared first on Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.

The Pondera County Commissioners filed litigation against the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, June 12th challenging the agency’s decision to exempt a portion of the Madison Aquifer in the county from protections under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The exemption and corresponding permits will allow Montana Renewables, a Great Falls-based biofuels company, to truck high strength industrial wastewater from its refinery in Great Falls and inject it into the Madison Aquifer via two retired oil and gas wells about 7 miles southwest of the town of Valier.

The Madison Aquifer Coalition (an affiliation of local landowners and county residents), the Golden Triangle Resource Council, and Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance joined Pondera County in filing the suit, with Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center as legal representatives.

The groups contend that the EPA erred when it determined that the industrial wastewater will not contaminate shallower aquifers that currently serve as sources of drinking or agricultural water, or that the exempted portion of the Madison Aquifer could never be a viable source of drinking water in the future.

“The EPA relied on an outdated model and wildly inaccurate assumptions about the geology, water quality, and economic viability of the Madison Aquifer as a source of drinking water in reaching its short-sighted decision to permit Montana Renewables to pollute this aquifer,” said Zane Drishinski, Pondera County Commissioner, farmer and rancher. “Rural communities across central Montana increasingly rely on deeper and deeper aquifers like the Madison for their water supply and the Commission simply wants to preserve the ability for people in our county to safely do so as well.”

A prolonged recent drought, coupled with climate prediction models that indicate reduced precipitation for this part of Montana in the future, has ranchers like Lisa Schmidt worried.

“My whole livelihood, like most of my neighbors, depends on access to clean water,” said Lisa Schmidt, a member of the Madison Aquifer Coalition who operates a 131-year-old sheep and cattle ranch. “Every year that water is getting less and less reliable. It makes no sense to me to put our fragile water supplies at further risk by injecting industrial wastewater into the Madison Aquifer.”

The EPA issued the aquifer exemption last month, along with two permits to the well owner, Montalban Oil and Gas Operations, to explicitly allow Montana Renewables to inject upwards of 232,000 gallons of industrial wastewater per day into the Madison Aquifer. The industrial wastewater, a byproduct of the manufacture of transportation biofuels like “renewable biodiesel” or “sustainable aviation fuel,” is currently being shipped out of state as it is too contaminated to be accepted for treatment by the City of Great Falls wastewater treatment facility.

“Clean water is essential to our farming and ranching economy and our quality of life in Pondera County,” said Jim Morren, Pondera County Commissioner. “The EPA’s short-sighted decision is particularly frustrating because a common-sense alternative exists, a solution that does not put farmers, ranchers, and rural residents’ water at risk, and that solution is treatment.”

In 2024, Montana Renewables received a $1.67 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to expand its production of biofuels. The agreement included financing and direction for Montana Renewables to build a wastewater treatment facility at its Great Falls refinery. In July 2025, Montana Renewables publicly committed to building that treatment facility. Despite this commitment, the company has refused to rule out the disposal of wastewater via underground injection in Pondera County.

“The initial exemption was right at the bottom of each well,” said Millie Whalen of Golden Triangle Resource Council. “When we and others pointed out all the reasons why the injected wastewater would likely not stay there, such as natural cracks characteristic of karstic formations, improperly sealed wells that dot the landscape, injection pressure, and the EPA’s own acknowledgement of hydrological connections, the EPA simply made the exemption bigger rather than take the close look required.”

The County and other groups involved in today’s filing have been fighting the underground injection for nearly 2.5 years. Throughout that time, the Pondera County Sanitarian and Board of Health have repeatedly asked for wastewater samples from Montana Renewables, only to be rebuffed.

“At the initial public meeting in January 2024, Montana Renewables CEO Bruce Fleming claimed the wastewater was so clean you could drink it,” Corrine Rose, Pondera County Sanitarian recalled. “Yet they refuse to provide the County with a sample, and the lab results they provided the EPA indicate this wastewater is nasty stuff. Before any of this high strength industrial wastewater is dumped in our aquifer, we want to see the EPA require more transparency, testing and monitoring.”

The delivery of the wastewater would require several dozens of trucks a day traversing rural ranch roads, creating potential hazards for county infrastructure, public safety, and local wildlife.

“The wells are situated near Dupuyer Creek which provides important habitat and a dispersal corridor for grizzly bears,” said Peter Metcalf, executive director of Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, an East Glacier-based conservation organization focused on protecting local public lands, waters and wildlife. “In addition to impacts to clean water, this ill-conceived project could have real effects on grizzly bears and other fish and wildlife in the area, all of which could be avoided by treating the wastewater on site.”

“We are deeply disappointed in the EPA for not protecting our rural community and our water and with Montana Renewables for trying to foist their wastewater on us when an attainable alternative exists,” said Tom Kuka, Pondera County Commissioner, rancher and Blackfeet tribal member. “We are simply asking the court to invalidate this aquifer exemption and for Montana Renewables to be a good neighbor and treat its wastewater.”

Contacts:

Andrew Hawley, Western Environmental Law Center, 206-487-7250, hawley@westernlaw.org

Jim Morren, Zane Drishinski, or Tom Kuka, Pondera County Commissioners, 406-271-4010, commissioner@ponderacountymt.gov

Corrine Rose, Pondera County Sanitarian, 406-271-4020, sanitarian@ponderacountymt.gov

Lisa Schmidt, Madison Aquifer Coalition, 406-728-0159, lschmidt@a-land-of-grass-ranch.com

Mildred Whalen, Golden Triangle Resource Council, mwhalen729@verizon.net

Caitlin Cromwell, Northern Plains Resource Council, 406-248-1154, caitlin@northernplains.org

Peter Metcalf, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, 406-434-6223, peter@glaciertwomedicine.org

Jenny Harbine, Earthjustice, 406-223-7781, jharbine@earthjustice.org

 

The post Pondera County, local landowners, conservationists sue EPA to protect Madison Aquifer from industrial wastewater injection  appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

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