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Scientists and Professionals letter Report on Carcinogens
Scientists and Professionals letter Report on Carcinogens
Call for submissions on the use and application of the CFS framework for action in protracted crises (CFS-FFA)
In line with the 2024–2027 Multi-Year Programme of Work (MYPoW), the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) will host a Global Thematic Event (GTE) during its October 2025 Plenary Session. This event, part of the Collaborative Governance for Coordinated Policy workstream, will provide a platform for sharing insights, experiences, and best practices related to the use and application of the CFS Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (CFS-FFA).
For this reason, the CFS opens a call for submissions regarding experiences and successful practices in utilising the CFS-FFA to inform discussions at CFS 53.
About the CFS-FFAEndorsed by CFS 42 in October 2015, the CFS-FFA aims to improve food security and nutrition for populations affected by protracted crises by addressing critical issues and enhancing resilience. It strives to strengthen policy coherence in line with the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security, by fostering the coordination of policies and actions taken in the fields of humanitarian assistance, development, and human rights.
The implementation of the CFS-FFA is primarily the responsibility of governments with contribution from other actors. Regular monitoring and review of its implementation including sharing of lessons learned, will inform policies and actions aimed at preventing, mitigating, and responding to protracted crises and promoting early recovery from food insecurity and malnutrition in protracted crises. In 2021, the CSIPM published a monitoring report on challenges to its implementation, as well as on experiences and recommendations from civil society and Indigenous Peoples to improve its implementation. Read the 2021 Monitoring report.
The call for submissions is open until 15 April 2025.Participants are encouraged to share their inputs by completing the Template for submissions. The inputs received from this call will contribute to monitoring progress on the use and application of the CFS-FFA, both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. All inputs will be compiled in a document made available for delegates at the 53 CFS Plenary Session will be held from 20 to 24 October 2025 in Rome, Italy.
More information is available here.
The post Call for submissions on the use and application of the CFS framework for action in protracted crises (CFS-FFA) appeared first on CSIPM.
Press Release: Montana Court Upholds Constitutional Right to Know
Citizens, Advocate, and Press Win Challenge to Legislature’s New Policy to Conceal Documents CONTACTS Rylee Sommers-Flanagan, Upper Seven Law, 406-396-3373, rylee@uppersevenlaw.com Anne Hedges, Montana Environmental Information Center, 406-461-9546, ahedges@meic.org David Saslav, Great Falls citizen, 406-315-3733, dsaslav@gmail.com GREAT FALLS, MT – Today, the Montana District Court in Great Falls ordered the Legislative Services Division …
The post Press Release: Montana Court Upholds Constitutional Right to Know appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.
Media in the Age of War and Resistance w/ Nora Barrows-Friedman, Dennis Bernstein and Bob Buzzanco
Diálogos sobre democracia radical y autonomía - [Sesiones]
Diálogos sobre Democracia Radical y Autonomía - Sesión #1: Voces de Asia
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Dialogues on Radical Democracy and Autonomy - Session #3: Voices from Africa - [Recording]
Diálogos sobre Democracia Radical y Autonomía - Sesión #3: Voces de África - [Grabación]
Press Release: Nurses Respond to Trump Administration Day One Actions
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact
Milagros R. Elia
Program Manager, Climate and Clean Energy Advocacy
Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments
milagros@envirn.org
914.455.1165
Nurses Respond to Trump Administration Day One Actions
WASHINGTON, DC – Yesterday, January 20th, President Trump’s “Day One” Executive Actions included revoking President Biden’s Executive Orders on climate and environmental justice, as well as U.S withdrawal from both the Paris Climate Accord, and the World Health Organization.
In response to these White House announcements, the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environment’s (ANHE) Executive Director Katie Huffling, DNP, RN, CNM, FAAN issued the following statement:
“Earth’s climate has entered a perilous term. The new administration has decided to officially disengage from global climate diplomacy through its Day 1 Executive Orders, ignoring the public health threats communities are already experiencing. While the Administration promises to disrupt the progress of clean energy, nurses know that this transition can’t be stopped.
President Trump’s announcements attacking EPA safeguards to reduce tailpipe pollution from the transportation sector will negatively impact the people who are the poorest and most marginalized, as well as the youngest in our society. These populations have done the least to contribute to the problem, yet they’re already bearing the brunt of the impacts caused by air pollution due to vehicle emissions.
The Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments strongly objects to these Executive Orders as direct assaults to our environment, climate and public health. The stakes for our planet and communities in which we live have never been higher.”
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The Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments is the only national nursing organization focused solely on the intersection of health and the environment. The mission of the Alliance is to promote healthy people and healthy environments by educating and leading the nursing profession, advancing research, incorporating evidence-based practice, and influencing policy. http://enviRN.org
Dialogues on Radical Democracy and Autonomy - Session #2: Voices from Latin America
Diálogos sobre Democracia Radical y Autonomía - Sesión #2: Voces de América Latina - [Grabación]
Equipo de Facilitadores
Dialogues on Radical Democracy and Autonomy - Session #1: Voices from Asia
What is the cheapest route to climate-neutral aviation: carbon capture or new fuels?
Air travel is really hard to decarbonize: Efficiency improvements can cut carbon emissions per mile flown but are swamped by more people flying; biofuels require massive amounts of land; and hydrogen- and electric-powered aircraft won’t be ready for wide use for a while.
In a new study, researchers analyze what they argue are the only solutions that could feasibly meet the scale of the problem: pulling carbon out of the air and storing it in some permanent form, or pulling carbon out of the air and using it to make synthetic jet fuel.
“Until now, truly ‘green’ synthetic fuels have been considered too expensive and energy-intensive to serve as a practical solution for aviation,” says study team member Nicoletta Brazzola, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “As a result, airlines have increasingly turned to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to offset their emissions.”
But synthetic fuel has some big environmental advantages over carbon dioxide removal: it reduces climate-warming contrail clouds, and is in line with the broader societal goal of shifting the economy away from fossil fuels.
Brazzola and her collaborators compared the costs and benefits of the two strategies in various economic and public policy scenarios, searching for what conditions would make synthetic jet fuel cost-competitive.
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If the goal is to achieve carbon neutrality – that is, eliminate the carbon dioxide emissions associated with aviation – then carbon storage is cheaper, the researchers report in Nature Communications. Synthetic fuel is expensive mainly because it requires a lot of energy and equipment to produce.
But if the goal is the more ambitious – climate neutrality – then the carbon-dioxide-to-jet-fuel strategy wins on cost. That’s because about two-thirds of the climate impact of flying comes from sources other than carbon dioxide, especially contrails.
Other efforts are underway to reduce the climate impact of aviation, and there could be tradeoffs among these approaches. Adding strategies such as reducing air travel demand and changing flight paths to avoid producing contrails to the mix makes synthetic fuel less attractive from a cost point of view, the researchers found.
On the other hand, cheap electricity or expensive fossil fuels shift the cost-benefit analysis in favor of synthetic fuel.
When it comes to what an individual passenger would pay for a carbon- or climate-neutral flight, the cost premium of synthetic fuel is only a little bigger than that of carbon storage. Synthetic fuels would increase ticket prices by about 50% compared to conventional fossil kerosene – a surprisingly modest proportion, Brazzola says, that is “within the range of seasonal fluctuations in ticket prices.”
Still, the findings don’t change the overall picture of air travel and climate change. “Flying less is still one of the most effective ways to reduce aviation’s climate impacts in the short term,” Brazzola says. In the longer term, “Synthetic fuels and carbon removal will likely play an important role” in decarbonizing the industry, “but reducing air travel demand would significantly lower the scale of these technologies required, making the challenge more manageable.”
Source: Brazzola N. et al. “The role of direct air capture in achieving climate-neutral aviation.” Nature Communications 2025.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
Is Canada helping Lebanon or working for the US and Israel?
Canada is working to further subordinate Lebanon to US and Israeli dictates. And it’s been doing so for some time. Recently, the Globe and Mail...
The post Is Canada helping Lebanon or working for the US and Israel? first appeared on Spring.
The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action
To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.”
“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.
According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.
Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts — one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations — and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.
The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by Exxon Mobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.
For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories — the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water — she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments — four that represent outright climate denial, and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”
Denial discourse 1: It isn’t happening Denial discourse 2: It isn’t that bad Denial discourse 3: It isn’t us Denial discourse 4: It’s taken care ofThe four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of — arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.
According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial — like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said — “but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.
“It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative, … reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)
Delay discourse 1: Redirection Delay discourse 2: Nontransformation Delay discourse 3: Downside emphasis Delay discourse 4: SurrenderThe study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced other research showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”
Six of the other organizations — the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and FMC Corporation — did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.
Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics — delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories — have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads.
“You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.
Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove — though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.
Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data.
Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”
Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action on Jan 21, 2025.
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