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Kay’s Tribute to Pat

The community of Las Vegas celebrated the tenure of Pat Leahan at the Las Vegas Peace and Justice Center on Friday, August 28, and Robin Collier of KCEI and I went over to join in from this side of the mountain. Robin recorded the event and I listened to Pat and her comrades tell stories of the Center’s incredible history of 22 years of service to the community.

Pat Leahan

Pat first came to town 30 years ago on a serendipitous vacation trip from Minneapolis and ended up staying, easing into a job at the United World College (UWC) as Community Engagement Liaison. A perfect fit for Pat, who loves young people, she began to connect students with people and activities in the local community. A handful of these students were at the celebration and spoke about how they were encouraged  to share the community organizing skills they learned with Pat when they return home.

United World College students

The mission of the Peace and Justice Center is “Providing free services in partnership with our community in 4 overall categories: Access, Education, Advocacy and Solidarity.” In practice that means getting involved in all kinds of social and environmental justice issues: inadequate medical services; union organizing; prison reform; Integration Center; low income services; animal advocacy; voting rights; protecting the Gallinas River, ICE interventions, and oil and gas regulation.

That last item, oil and gas regulation, was a highly contentious issue that Pat, along with comrades in Mora County (Las Vegas is in San Miguel County), took on despite political pressures from the industry. La Jicarita covered much of this issue over the course of 2013 to 2015 (see La Jicarita, June 4, 2013). It all started when several oil and gas companies sought permits for exploration drilling and potential fracking in Mora and San Miguel Counties and came to a head when a legal organization from Pennsylvania, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CDLEF) came to town and proposed that both counties adopt what they called “A Bill of Rights” that would ban oil and gas development outright. Pat and her comrades had already been organizing to educate the public, form relationships with elected officials and county staff, and partner with other county organizations that were working on the same issues or had already passed tougher regulations (e.g. Santa Fe County). The Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance, promulgated by CDLEF as a test of local sovereignty, and opposed by those who advocated for local zoning restrictions, was found unconstitutional in district court. The two counties then went on to pass zoning ordinances to protect against oil and gas development in sensitive county locations.

Pat also ran a progressive talk show, Community Peace Radio, for youth and adults, every Saturday on KFUN (AM 1230) or KLVF (100.7 FM). Over two decades she invited everyone to speak—children, students from the World College, activists from all over, including Sophia Martinez and John Trudell, union organizers, environmentalists, government representatives—and there was music, too. Robin Collier, Paula Garcia (than a Mora County Commissioner), and I went on the radio to discuss the ramifications of the proposed “Bill of Rights.”

Robin Collier of KCEI

Pat also supervised the Masters of Social Work students from New Mexico Highlands University in their UWC-USA Social Work internships. As a woman tied to so many organizations and people in the Las Vegas community she vows to stay in touch—and keep affiliations—after she moves to Philadelphia to be closer to her family.

Pat was a true force in the community—and a devoted dog lover who’s own dogs and everyone else’s were treated with tender care. I will miss her friendship and solidarity. Vaya con Dios, Pat.

Dear friends,

As the 2026 legislative session comes to an end on August 31, we write to share some important updates. 

Last night AB/SB 113 language was released. The budget language included: 

• $75 million for projects in the Delta that improve existing levees for the purposes of flood protection and climate resiliency; 
• Of that total, $30 million is designated to the Special Projects Program and Flood Control Subventions Program.

Thanks to your calls and emails, the language did NOT include:

• Streamlining measures for any elements of CA Forever’s Shipbuilding project, OR
• Exemptions to fast-track the construction of the Delta Conveyance Project.

We applaud the legislature for pushing back on harmful trailer bills this year. 

But our fight is not over yet. 

We still need Governor Newsom to sign AB 2218 and SB 872 into law.

Support AB 2218

On February 19, 2026, Assemblymember Kalra introduced AB 2218, the Indigenous Water Rights Bill sponsored by the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians and the Karuk Tribe. 

AB 2218 would establish a clear statewide policy directive acknowledging and seeking to remedy the inequities inflicted upon Tribes in California through historical state-sanctioned acts of termination, removal, and forced assimilation.

The bill directs relevant state agencies, including the Department of Water Resources and the State Water Board, to incorporate this policy into water rights decisions, regulatory actions, permitting, and grantmaking to address identified inequities. Recognizing historic harms and directing state agencies to center Tribal equity in water policy is not simply a symbolic act; it is a pathway toward stronger relationships, more inclusive decision-making, and better outcomes for the ecosystems we all depend on.

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action:
1. Call the Governor at (916) 445-2841 urging his signature on support AB 2218.

Please call the Governor’s Office and tell them: 

• As a constituent, I urge you to sign AB 2218 into law..
• AB 2218 supports the State’s progress towards equitable water management.
• AB 2218 is an important step toward addressing inequities affecting California Native American Tribes in state water policy and ensuring Tribal interests are meaningfully considered in decisions affecting water.

2. Alternatively, you can also write to the Governor’s Office, asking for their support on AB 2218. 

• Click this link to send a comment urging the Governor’s Signature on AB 2218.

Support SB 872

On January 6, 2026 Senator McNerney introduced SB 872, the Delta Levees and Canal Subsidence Fund. 
 
SB 872, would create a dedicated fund to address two major threats to California’s water supply: aging levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and sinking State Water Project (SWP) canals. These funds would help protect our existing infrastructure from the threats from a changing climate, protecting drinking water supply, Delta ecosystems, and communities from flood risk. 

We need your help! SB 872 moves to the Governor’s desk for signature, and we need your help to move this bill into law.

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action:
1. Call the Governor at (916) 445-2841 urging his signature on support SB 872.

Please call the Governor’s Office and tell them: 

• As a constituent, I urge you to sign SB 872 into law
• You support advancing legislation that prioritizes safeguarding California’s water supplies, protecting critical infrastructure, and preparing the state’s water system for future challenges.

2. Alternatively, you can also write to the Governor’s Office, asking for their support on SB 872. 

Click this link to send a comment urging the Governor’s Signature on SB 872.

CLICK TO CONTACT GOVERNOR NEWSOM

A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 23, 2026 thru Sat, August 29, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (8 articles)

• Climate change is unearthing new archeological discoveries, while also threating them NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben speaks with Jørgen Hollesen, a Senior Researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, about how climate change is impacting the study of archaeology. NPR, Danielle Kurtzleben, Aug 23, 2026.
• The world inches toward catastrophic climate events: ‘Bigger shocks are on the way’ Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms, floods and droughts. But what once seemed like the realm of fiction is now discussed as a possibility, even an inevitability. AP News, Peter Pringaman, Aug 24, 2026.
• Five ways Europe's heat-wave summer is hot, hot, hot Phys.org, Edward Zinin (editor), Aug 24, 2026.
• World`s oceans hit hottest temperature on record in August The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Aug 24, 2026.
• How does a collapsing glacier turn into a lethal wall of mud and water? An expert explains what happened in Nepal A collapsing glacier in Tibet led to a devastating wall of water and debris roaring through a valley in Nepal, leaving hundreds dead and many hundreds still missing. The Conversation, Stuart Dunning, Aug 27, 2026.
• Nepal`s devastating floods reveal the danger of `cascading hazards` in Himalayas How many factors driven by climate change can add up to disaster. The Conversation, Daniel Parsons, Aug 27, 2026.
• El Niño climate patterns supercharged by burning of fossil fuels, study finds ‘Godzilla’ event currently brewing could push 50 million people into acute hunger before the end of next year The Guardian, Oliver Milman, Aug 27, 2026.
• Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn Unusual heat this year may have melted ice and thawed bonds that hold glaciers in place – leading to catastrophe The Guardian, Jonathan Watts, Aug 27, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (6 articles)

• Near-real-time storyline attribution for everyday global weather An experimental reanalysis-based approach for extreme event attribution Climate Lab Book, Ed Hawkins, Aug 24, 2026.
• Climate Model Benchmarking: Building Trust and Advancing Science A critical look at how well climate models work, how to successfully use them, and the anticipated challenges for their next-generation development. Eos, Birgit Hassler, Forrest Hoffman, Ranjini Swaminathan and Beth Dingley, Aug 24, 2026.
• The biggest carbon polluters are to blame for half of U.S. western water lost, `groundbreaking` paper says Some of the largest fossil fuel companies on Earth are disproportionately responsible for the water crisis in the American West, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Tuesday. Inside Climate News, Jake Bolster, Aug 25, 2026.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #35 2026 Skeptical Science's weekly survey of freshly published climate research. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Aug 27, 2026.
• Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest 1000-year archive from the Galápagos portends greater weather disruptions from the Pacific climate cycle. Science, Julia Vaz, Aug 27, 2026.
• Scientists collaborated with narwhals to study warming waters in the Arctic Scientists collaborated with narwhals for a new study to understand human-caused climate change in the Arctic and rising sea levels around the world. NPR, Rachel Carlson, Aug 28, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (5 articles)

• U.S. Cuts Colorado River Water for Arizona, California and Nevada Arizona’s share of the river will shrink by a third, likely increasing reliance on groundwater and raising pressure on agriculture. NYT, Scott Dance, Aug 21, 2026.
• Council set to axe climate emergency declaration UK political party Reform discovers that basic physics is ''woke."" BBC News, Victoria Scheer and Annaleece Longmore, Aug 22, 2026.
• Trump demands `lies` in West Point climate curriculum, professor claims in new lawsuit A tenured professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point claims he was fired after pushing back on a presidential directive to “defy science” and stop teaching cadets that climate change had “primarily human causes, something contrary to the ideology of the Commander in Chief and forbidden at West Point.” The Independent News, Justin Rohrlich, Aug 26, 2026.
• West Point Climate Professor Says He Was Fired for Refusing to `Defy Science` Dr. Adam Kalkstein is suing the U. S. Military Academy, where he was a professor of geography and the only climate scientist, after being fired. New York Times, Michael C. Bender and Greg Jaffe, Aug 26, 2026.
• ?W?hy are European leaders staying silent after our summer of climate shock? Lethal temperatures ?and wildfires have exposed a widening gulf between voters demanding ?action and politicians unwilling to confront the long-term choices global heating requires The Guardian, Jon Henley, Aug 26, 2026.

Miscellaneous (3 articles)

• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #34 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 16, 2026 thru Sat, August 22, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Aug 23, 2026.
• If all car tyres were filled with CO2, would this cut atmospheric carbon significantly? Skeptical Science would like to hear your answer to this in comments: ''If all the vehicles on the planet had their tyres pumped up with CO2, would this lock up enough carbon to lower the amount in the air significantly?'' The Guardian, Guardian Staff, Aug 23, 2026.
• Mission impossible? Quantifying military emissions Military and wartime emissions are difficult to track—but too important to ignore. Bulletin of the Atomic Scienctists, Neta C. Crawford, Aug 24, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (2 articles)

• Against the wind: despite Trump`s attacks, unions are fighting for good US clean energy jobs Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a growing labor movement has addressed the climate crisis and economic inequality The Guardian, Dharna Noor, Aug 23, 2026.
• Fact brief - Do wind turbines release more emissions than burning fossil fuels? No - Wind turbines generate emissions during construction and transportation, but their overall climate impact is far lower than that of fossil fuels. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, Aug 25, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (2 articles)

• Florida shows how to adapt as coastal cities face growing threats from sea level rise and storms With a state government locked in denial of climate change, Floridians ''DIY'' and show how to self-help as coastal cities face growing threats from sea level rise and storms. Associated Press, Dorany Pineda, Aug 22, 2026.
• Empty North Sea oil fields could store enough green hydrogen to power the country for seven years Depleted oil and gas fields that powered Britain for half a century could be refilled with hydrogen made from wind and solar power. The Conversation, Stuart Jones , Aug 24, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (2 articles)

• Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra `heat-stress days` every year Carbon Brief, Ayesha Tandon, Aug 26, 2026.
• Climate Change Exposes 580 Million Children to 20 Extra "Heat-Stress Days" Every Year More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change. CleanTechnica, Ayesha Tandon, Aug 28, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

• How the Black Summer fires failed to shift Australians` climate views The research, published today by the Royal Society, indicates that misinformation may have dampened the fires’ impact on the public’s perception of climate risk, as evidenced by the widespread endorsement of the false claim that arsonists caused the bushfires – a belief held by 88.89 per cent of sceptics, 56.96 per cent of fence-sitters, and 38.79 per cent of acceptors. Sydney Morning Herald, Nick O'Malley, Aug 25, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

The Food Security Leadership Council (FSLC) is calling on the United States to launch a once-in-a-generation effort to boost agricultural innovation. In a recent report, they outline a proposal for US$100 billion in new public research and development (R&D) investments over the next ten years to strengthen domestic food systems, improve farm profitability, and restore global leadership.

The call comes at a critical time for American agriculture. Farmers across the country face soil degradation, water limitations, and extreme weather driven by climate change, while the U.S. leans on concentrated foreign supply chains for critical inputs like fertilizer.

Meanwhile, domestic agricultural productivity growth has slowed. According to the report, the U.S. share of global public agricultural R&D spending fell from 20.2 percent in 1960 to 11.5 percent by 2011. It also notes that China now spends roughly double what the United States does on public agricultural research.

“I am not sure many U.S. policymakers appreciate the full nature of the importance, and cascading benefits, of agricultural innovation,” Anna Nelson, Executive Director of the Food Security Leadership Council, tells Food Tank. “Food and agricultural innovation is not only a farm issue. It matters for our entire economy through its effects on employment, producer profitability, and consumer prices… It affects our environment by shaping land use, emissions, and pollution.”

Public investments in agricultural research generate an estimated US$18 in societal benefits for every dollar spent, according to the report.

Recent data from the Economic Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) underscores the importance of technical progress. Between 1948 and 2021, U.S. farm output nearly tripled even as total input use slightly declined, demonstrating an efficient use of resources.

The report demonstrates that new innovations can support the transition toward long-term sustainability, but Nelson is careful to note that new tools require careful design with input from communities. “Agricultural production is local—so is consumption,” she tells Food Tank. “Any innovation needs to be informed by the people who will ultimately implement or benefit from it.” Small and midsize farms cannot be left out of the picture when it comes to distributing R&D investments.

Nelson also cautions against treating high-tech breakthroughs and nature-based practices as opposing forces. “I wish people did not see them as inherently at odds with each other,” she says. “Both tech-based and nature-based solutions can offer important means of accelerating sustainable productivity growth. Producers should use all the tools available to them.”

Recent investments suggest that government agencies are interested in supporting alternative approaches to industrialized agriculture. Earlier this year, the USDA, alongside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency, announced more than US$1 billion for farm modernization and food supply security. This includes US$700 million for regenerative agriculture pilot programs.

The FSLC argues that sustained public grants remain essential to move new agricultural technologies from the lab to the field.

“The United States has the resources to make this investment if we can summon the political will to do so,” Nelson tells Food Tank. “US$100 billion over ten years is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget and would provide structural support to help transform U.S. agriculture over time.”

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 Tom Fisk, Pexels

The post Growing Agricultural Research and Development Can Strengthen U.S. Food Systems appeared first on Food Tank.

The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the U.S. Army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.

According to Kalkstein, who taught Army cadets there for 17 years, he told the dean at a November 2025 meeting that an order to cut from the curriculum content about the human causes of climate change was immoral and potentially illegal.

It “would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” he said.

Reeves responded by “storming out” of the meeting after telling Kalkstein that Donald Trump was commander in chief and set the agenda for West Point, the lawsuit alleged.

Read Next The EPA’s data on cancer risk from air pollution has gone dark Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

The developments were reported on Wednesday by Stars and Stripes and The New York Times.

Kalkstein’s lawsuit is the second legal action over the stifling of academic freedoms filed by an educator at West Point.

Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, had a similarly fiery meeting with a uniformed colonel, John Gregory, last year after standing up to a new Trump administration policy ordering civilian colleagues to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, The Washington Post reported in July.

According to Bakken’s lawsuit, Gregory ordered him to “stop talking and sit down” during a meeting of dozens of faculty members. “We’re a military institution. We follow orders,” Gregory is alleged to have said.

The U.S. Military Academy, West Point’s formal name, dropped its challenge to a preliminary injunction against the policy obtained by Bakken’s lawyers this month, military.com reported, and the parties have agreed “in principle” to work toward a permanent solution.

Kalkstein’s attorney, Michael Sussman, told the Times that his client was a conservative Republican who believes military students need to know the truth about the causes of the climate crisis as a matter of national security.

“He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,” he said. “And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.”

In further comments to Stars and Stripes, Sussman said Kalkstein’s position was not ideological. “There are certainly people who, anything Donald Trump does, they want to complain about it and scream and yell about it. He’s not that guy,” Sussman said.

The lawsuit alleges that Kalkstein first became aware his position was under threat in May 2025, when West Point leaders announced plans to reduce civilian staffing levels, while at the same time opening a new humanities center requiring new geography teachers.

They offered to let him stay as a “term employee,” Stars and Stripes said, and Kalkstein, fearful that colleagues would have to pick up his classes if he quit, accepted a loss of tenure and entitlement to a large severance package to stay.

The order to ban teaching about human contributions to climate change came in September, the lawsuit said, followed by the angry meeting with Reeves a month later. Reeves retired in April after a 30-year military career and is now president of the University of Wyoming’s board of trustees.

Kalkstein’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses West Point of breaching his First Amendment rights to free speech.

In a statement to the Guardian, the academy said it was “aware of the allegations and take[s] such matters seriously,” but declined further comment citing pending litigation.

The Guardian has also approached the White House for comment.

Trump has flipped between calling the climate emergency “a hoax” or “a scam” to admitting it exists but insisting that climate scientists are politically motivated and that the climate “will change back.”

Since taking office for a second time last year he has also attempted to impose numerous cultural changes on U.S. military institutions.

In April last year, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to purge books found to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, resulting in almost 400 being removed after review. The books were returned a month later after the Pentagon reversed course.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline West Point’s only climate scientist fired after continuing to teach human causes of climate change on Aug 30, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Solar Has Crossed A Critical Economic Tipping Point” • For years, the economic case for solar came with a qualification. Its installation cost a lot. That disadvantage has largely disappeared. According to an Ember analysis, a solar plant can now require less upfront investment than a coal or gas plant for the same amount of electricity delivered. [OilPrice.com]

Solar power plant in Dunhuang (ダモ リ, Unsplash)

• “COP17 In Mongolia Wraps Up With $1.3 Billion Of Green Investment Pledge” • After twelve days of negotiation and debate in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolian, delegates of 197 parties (196 countries plus the EU) who signed the UN Convention for Combating Desertification wrapped up the Conference of Parties (COP17). The results were note-worthy. [Euronews]
• “Is Europe’s Heat Finally Giving Way? And Are Flash Floods Next?” • Europe’s blistering summer was a “grim illustration” of human-caused climate change, the European Commission said in June, There was no relief in July and much of August. Now the heat is not so great along the Mediterranean, but farther North, it is cooler, with warnings of flash floods. [Euronews]
• “Mexico’s Green Energy Push Is Finally Gaining Momentum” • After a slow start, Mexico is now well on its way to undergoing a green transition. President Claudia Sheinbaum has launched an energy reform that opens the country’s energy sector to greater private investment while focusing on expanding the Mexican renewable energy sector. [OilPrice.com]
• “Most ‘Park Outside’ Warnings Involve Vehicles With Internal Combustion Engines” • Battery fires affected only about a dozen first-generation Chevy Bolts but the fallout cost their makers over $1 billion. How is it that the public does not know about the 3 million vehicles, mostly gas-powered, that are required to be parked outside away from homes? [CleanTechnica]

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

Lock the Gate Alliance is calling on the NSW government to urgently pass legislation that would protect coal workers, following revelations that the Independent Planning Commission (IPC) is seeking further information from the owners of Hunter Valley Operations coal mine about the time the operation needs for an orderly transition. 

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Efek Jade Legends Membuat Informasi Lebih Mudah Terlihat

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Warna Jade Memberikan Identitas Visual Kuat

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Efek Pemain Muncul Saat Tempo Permainan Berubah

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Animasi Kemenangan Membuat Hasil Terasa Lebih Besar

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Efek Besar Tidak Selalu Berarti Nilai Besar

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Efek Jade Legends Bisa Membentuk Persepsi Momentum

Serangkaian animasi dalam waktu berdekatan dapat menciptakan kesan permainan sedang memasuki fase aktif. Inilah salah satu Efek Pemain paling menarik untuk diperhatikan. Misalnya, beberapa kejadian visual muncul berurutan. Pemain mungkin mulai merasa hasil besar semakin dekat karena intensitas permainan meningkat. Persepsi tersebut tidak sama dengan perubahan probabilitas. Sistem permainan tetap mengikuti aturan matematis dan mekanisme hasil masing-masing. Efek tidak dapat digunakan sebagai bukti bahwa kemenangan berikutnya sudah dekat. Memisahkan dua konsep ini penting karena desain visual memang dibuat untuk menyampaikan emosi, sementara probabilitas bekerja berdasarkan sistem permainan.

Slot Jade Legends Mengandalkan Pengalaman Bukan Sekadar Hasil

Daya tarik Slot Jade Legends akhirnya dapat dilihat melalui hubungan antara visual, tempo, simbol, audio, serta respons pemain. Efek game membuat informasi lebih mudah dikenali sekaligus memberi identitas pada setiap momen penting. Pemain Jade Legends dapat merasakan perubahan suasana saat animasi meningkat, simbol mendapat sorotan, atau layar memasuki fase berbeda. Semua unsur tersebut membentuk pengalaman lebih hidup. Namun, efek Jade Legends bukan formula untuk menang banyak. Animasi kemenangan, cahaya jade, perubahan tempo, maupun suara dramatis hanya memperkuat cara hasil ditampilkan. Justru di situlah kekuatan desainnya. Efek pemain tercipta karena permainan mampu membuat sebuah kejadian terasa penting, mudah diingat, serta berbeda dari putaran biasa tanpa harus mengubah prinsip matematis di balik hasil permainan.

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES: 29 AUGUST 2026 SLF-2007-041 The Sakhalin Papers XXXI: The Judicial Review That Never Reached Judgment — WWF, The Corner House and the Unanswered Legality Question In August 2007, WWF-UK and The Corner House asked the Administrative Court to examine a question created by a three-year-old ECGD letter: could Britain’s export-credit agency make a legally binding conditional commitment to support Sakhalin II contracts before completing its environmental assessment — and while the very British supplies it was supposed to “facilitate” were already being delivered? The pleadings survive. The arguments survive. The judgment does not. Sakhalin Energy withdrew its application before the case could be decided.

Archive reference: SLF-2007-041
Collection: The Sakhalin Papers
Principal legal record: R (WWF-UK and The Corner House Research) v Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform — Statement of Facts and Grounds, dated 11 August 2007
Supporting records: Royal Dutch Petroleum Company/The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company Form 6-K, May 2003; WWF and Corner House witness material; contemporaneous reporting by The Guardian; Sakhalin Energy statements reported by Interfax; Parliamentary material concerning ECGD and Sakhalin II
Evidence standard: The allegations in the judicial-review papers are identified as allegations advanced by the claimants. They are not court findings. ECGD’s responses are identified separately. Sakhalin Energy’s withdrawal of its financing application is not treated as an admission of illegality or environmental wrongdoing. No court adjudicated the merits of this judicial review.

Introduction

The previous Shell Leaks File examined a deceptively simple document.

On 4 March 2004, Britain’s Export Credits Guarantee Department sent Sakhalin Energy Investment Company Ltd a letter headed:

“Confirmation of conditional support.”

The letter did not constitute the final approximately $650 million ECGD guarantee being contemplated for the Sakhalin II project.

But neither was it merely a casual expression of interest.

By 2007, ECGD acknowledged that the commitment was binding if the stipulated conditions were satisfied.

That left an awkward question.

What happens when a government department makes a binding conditional commitment before completing the environmental assessment upon which one of those conditions depends?

WWF-UK and The Corner House decided to ask a judge.

On 15 August 2007, they filed judicial-review proceedings challenging the legality of the March 2004 decision. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

The case potentially placed several aspects of Britain’s handling of Sakhalin II under judicial scrutiny:

the timing of ECGD’s environmental assessment;

the legal meaning of its statutory duty to facilitate British exports;

the status of its conditional commitment;

the adequacy of consultation;

and whether a support decision could still lawfully be made once much of the relevant procurement and construction had already occurred.

The court papers survive.

But the hearing never produced a judgment.

That absence is the central fact of this file.

1. The Court Papers Identified the Decision Precisely

The claimants did not simply challenge “British support for Shell” in general terms.

Their Statement of Facts and Grounds identified a specific administrative decision:

the 4 March 2004 decision by the Secretary of State, acting through ECGD, to give conditional support in relation to specified preliminary contracts for Sakhalin II.

The pleading also challenged ECGD’s continuing position, reflected in correspondence during 2007, that the March 2004 commitment remained legally binding if its conditions were fulfilled.

The relief sought was correspondingly serious.

WWF and The Corner House asked the Administrative Court either to declare that the 2004 decision had no legal effect or to quash it, and to prevent ECGD from providing support for the preliminary contracts on the basis of that decision.

These were remedies being requested.

They were never granted.

2. This Was a Case About Government Power, Not a Trial of Shell

That distinction is essential.

Judicial review examines the lawfulness of decisions made by public authorities.

WWF and The Corner House were challenging the conduct and legal powers of the British Government’s export-credit agency.

The proceeding was not a civil damages action against Shell.

It was not a prosecution.

It was not a trial to determine whether Sakhalin Energy had caused particular environmental damage.

It was not a proceeding to determine whether Shell had violated Russian environmental law.

Shell’s involvement was nevertheless central to the historical context because Sakhalin Energy was controlled by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group when the Phase 2 investment decision was made and when ECGD issued its March 2004 letter.

An authenticated Shell filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission records that, in May 2003, Sakhalin Energy was a 55 per cent Royal Dutch/Shell Group company, with Mitsui holding 25 per cent and Mitsubishi 20 per cent. (SEC)

So although the defendant in the judicial review was the British Secretary of State, the financing under examination concerned a project then controlled by Shell.

3. Shell’s Own Filing Fixes the Environmental Chronology

The May 2003 Shell regulatory filing is important for another reason.

It announced the shareholders’ positive investment decision to proceed with Sakhalin II Phase 2, then estimated at approximately $10 billion.

Shell described it as the largest single foreign direct-investment project in Russia and one of extraordinary industrial scale.

But the same Shell document also recorded that final approval stages for the project’s design and construction documentation — including what Shell described as a substantial environmental impact assessment — were still progressing. (SEC)

That chronology later became important to the judicial-review challenge.

The investment decision had been taken.

Contracting was advancing.

Construction subsequently began.

The environmental assessment and lender due diligence were still developing.

Then ECGD issued its conditional commitment.

WWF and The Corner House argued that the sequence was legally defective.

Again, that was their case.

No judge ultimately decided whether they were right.

4. The Statutory Words at the Centre of the Dispute

The claim involved an apparently innocuous phrase in the Export and Investment Guarantees Act 1991.

At the relevant time, the legislation empowered the Secretary of State to make arrangements:

“with a view to facilitating”

supplies of goods or services by UK businesses to businesses overseas.

That wording mattered.

The claimants argued that ECGD’s power was not an unrestricted authority to subsidise or insure any overseas transaction involving British suppliers.

The statutory purpose was to facilitate those supplies. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

From that proposition arose one of the most technically interesting questions in the entire Sakhalin financing story.

What happens if the goods and services have already largely been supplied before ECGD finally completes its assessment?

Can government support still be said to have facilitated something that has already happened?

5. Two Clocks Were Running

The claimants’ case effectively identified two clocks.

The first was the environmental clock.

ECGD said environmental and social impacts had to be assessed before final support was given.

That process was lengthy.

The second was the commercial clock.

Sakhalin II was already proceeding.

Contracts were being performed.

Construction was advancing.

British suppliers were doing work.

WWF and The Corner House argued that these clocks created a legal dilemma.

If ECGD waited until the environmental assessment was properly completed, some of the supplies it was supposed to facilitate might already have been delivered.

But if ECGD committed itself early enough to affect those supplies, it risked doing so before completing the environmental assessment.

Their allegation was that ECGD attempted to solve this problem in March 2004 by separating the two stages:

make the eligibility commitment now;

complete the environmental assessment later;

and make satisfaction of the environmental requirements a condition of eventual support.

The claimants argued that this solution was unlawful. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

ECGD disagreed.

6. Ground One: Had ECGD Predetermined the “Facilitation” Question?

One ground attacked the March 2004 decision as an unlawful predetermination.

The claimants argued that whether ECGD support genuinely facilitated British exports had to be assessed when the support decision was actually made.

Instead, they said, ECGD had effectively fixed that question in 2004 by making the conditional commitment, even though the financing and environmental process continued for years.

By 2007, according to the claimants, performance of the preliminary contracts had advanced to the point that the original facilitation rationale was questionable.

Their contention was therefore not merely:

the project is too far advanced.

It was more technical:

ECGD cannot preserve a statutory power indefinitely by determining years earlier that future financial support will count as facilitating supplies, regardless of what happens to those supplies in the meantime.(thecornerhouse.org.uk)

That proposition was never tested by a judgment.

7. Ground Two: Could ECGD Commit Before Completing the Environmental Assessment?

The environmental ground went to the heart of ECGD’s own procedures.

The court papers referred to international standards and ECGD’s Case Impact Analysis Process.

Sakhalin II was treated as a high-impact project requiring substantial environmental assessment.

The claimants pointed in particular to ECGD material indicating that preliminary indications of cover were normally given without commitment, with more detailed assessment required before a commitment was made.

Yet the March 2004 Sakhalin letter was different.

ECGD later accepted that it was binding if its conditions were satisfied. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

The parties were not apparently arguing about whether ECGD possessed all the environmental information necessary for a final support decision in March 2004.

It did not.

That was why the environmental condition was included.

The legal disagreement concerned what ECGD was entitled to do while that assessment remained incomplete.

WWF and The Corner House argued that the Department could not make a binding commitment first and perform the required environmental assessment afterwards.

ECGD’s position, as reproduced in the claimants’ papers, was materially different.

The Department relied upon the flexibility within its procedures and the exercise of professional judgment in the circumstances of individual cases. It did not accept that its policies created the rigid legal prohibition alleged by the claimants. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

That competing interpretation was precisely the sort of issue a judicial-review judgment might have resolved.

There was never such a judgment.

8. A Subtle but Important Point About the EIA Argument

The claimants were not simply asserting that ECGD was itself a Russian planning authority obliged by statute to conduct the project’s environmental impact assessment.

Their case was more nuanced.

ECGD had adopted environmental and social assessment procedures governing the exercise of its export-credit functions.

WWF and The Corner House argued that, once those policies were adopted, ECGD had to apply them lawfully and could not evade their purpose by making a binding commitment before the relevant assessment was complete.

ECGD disputed that interpretation of its procedures.

This distinction matters because it prevents a later historical account from exaggerating the case into something it was not.

The judicial review was fundamentally about the lawful exercise of ECGD’s own public powers and policies.

It was not an environmental-liability trial against Shell.

9. Ground Three: Was Anything Left to “Facilitate”?

A separate ground returned to the statutory language.

The claimants argued that ECGD needed evidence that its support would make some concrete difference to the supply of British goods or services.

Sakhalin Energy itself was not the British exporter.

The rationale for ECGD involvement was that UK suppliers and contractors participating in Sakhalin II would benefit from government-backed financial arrangements.

WWF and The Corner House argued that, as the relevant contracts progressed, ECGD needed to consider whether its involvement was still genuinely facilitating those supplies.

They alleged that the Department had not lawfully addressed that question. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Again:

allegation, not finding.

10. Ground Four: Consultation

Then came consultation.

ECGD had opened a process through which environmental organisations and other interested parties could submit information and concerns concerning Sakhalin II.

The claimants argued that once a public authority undertakes consultation, it must conduct that consultation fairly.

Their case relied upon familiar public-law principles:

consultation should occur while proposals remain genuinely formative;

participants should receive sufficient information to respond intelligently;

they should have adequate time;

and their responses should be conscientiously considered before the decision is made.

WWF and The Corner House alleged that the March 2004 binding commitment undermined that process because a legally significant decision had already been taken before subsequent consultation and assessment were complete. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

ECGD did not accept that its final decision had been predetermined.

From the Department’s perspective, environmental issues remained open and no final guarantee had been issued.

11. That Produced the Central Paradox

This was the puzzle already encountered in yesterday’s Shell Leaks File.

ECGD could say:

No final decision to support the project has been made.

And simultaneously:

The March 2004 conditional commitment is binding if its conditions are met.

To campaigners, those propositions demonstrated the problem.

To ECGD, they described two different stages of the process.

The first concerned eligibility and conditional contractual support for identified contracts.

The second concerned the final substantive decision whether ECGD’s conditions had been met and whether cover should actually be issued.

The judicial-review proceedings offered the possibility that a court would determine the legal consequences of that distinction.

12. ECGD Said the Challenge Was Premature

The surviving claimants’ grounds reproduce another important part of ECGD’s response.

The Department maintained that no decision to support the project had been made and argued that environmental issues remained open.

On that basis, ECGD contended that aspects of the judicial review were premature.

It also challenged whether WWF had standing to contest what it regarded as a commercial eligibility decision distinct from the environmental questions in which WWF had an obvious interest. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

The claimants responded that this missed the central point.

Their challenge was not directed only at a hypothetical future guarantee.

They said there was already an existing legally binding commitment dating from March 2004.

In their view, that was a decision capable of judicial review then and there.

The case thus contained an unusual threshold dispute:

Had a sufficiently final decision already been made to be challenged, or had the genuinely important decision not yet occurred?

13. The Claimants Wanted the 2004 Commitment Neutralised

WWF and The Corner House were not merely seeking a declaration for historical interest.

Their pleaded remedies included an order declaring that the March 2004 decision had no legal effect or quashing that decision.

They also sought to prevent ECGD from relying upon it to provide support for the preliminary contracts. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Had the claim proceeded and succeeded, the consequences could therefore have been practical.

But “could have” is as far as the documentary record permits us to go.

No such order was made.

14. The Case Became Public on 15 August 2007

WWF and The Corner House publicly announced the proceedings on 15 August 2007.

Their public presentation was strongly critical of ECGD and of Sakhalin II.

They argued that the Government had entered a binding financial commitment while continuing to tell Parliament that no final support decision had been taken. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Their witness material set out years of engagement with ECGD and the environmental objections raised by NGOs, consultants and others concerning Sakhalin II. Nicholas Hildyard’s Corner House witness statement specifically focused on the alleged separation between environmental assessment and the Department’s binding commitment. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Those documents are useful primary material for understanding the claimants’ case.

They should not be mistaken for independent findings of fact.

15. The Guardian Recorded ECGD’s Defence

The following day, 16 August 2007, The Guardian reported the legal action.

Its report is valuable because it did not merely reproduce the campaigners’ case.

It also recorded ECGD’s contemporary response.

The Department rejected the challenge and maintained that no final insurance cover had been given.

According to the newspaper, ECGD emphasised that no cover was in place, no premium had been received and no British taxpayer money was then at risk. (The Guardian)

That is an important part of the evidential record.

It demonstrates that ECGD was not concealing its interpretation once the dispute became public.

The parties fundamentally disagreed about the legal significance of the March 2004 commitment.

WWF and The Corner House emphasised its binding character.

ECGD emphasised the conditions still outstanding and the absence of a final guarantee.

A court was potentially going to have to decide which consequences followed from those facts.

16. By Then Shell Had Lost Control of Sakhalin Energy

There is another chronological complication.

When ECGD issued the March 2004 letter, Shell controlled Sakhalin Energy with a 55 per cent interest.

By the time the judicial review was filed in August 2007, that had changed.

Gazprom had acquired control earlier that year, reducing Shell’s interest to 27.5 per cent.

The ownership change does not retroactively alter the origin of the ECGD commitment.

The financing application and much of the environmental scrutiny arose while Sakhalin II was Shell-led.

But by the time the British court proceedings were gathering momentum, Shell was no longer the project’s controlling shareholder.

That distinction is particularly important in a historical series bearing Shell’s name.

Responsibility for events must be tied to the relevant date, not transferred indiscriminately across the entire life of the project.

17. The Hearing Never Happened

The litigation continued into 2008.

Then the underlying financing application disappeared.

On 29 February 2008, Sakhalin Energy withdrew its applications for support from ECGD and the US Export-Import Bank.

Contemporaneous Interfax reporting several days later quoted Sakhalin Energy’s Moscow representative, Igor Ignatiev, explaining that there was serious uncertainty over how long the two export-credit agencies would take to complete their consideration and reach final decisions. He rejected any suggestion of a political connection with the Russian presidential election. (Interfax.ru)

The Corner House subsequently recorded that the judicial review had been due to be heard about a month later and said the legal proceedings were among the factors contributing to financing delays. Following Sakhalin Energy’s withdrawal, WWF and The Corner House decided not to continue with the case. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Those two sources should be read together.

Sakhalin Energy publicly emphasised uncertainty and delay in the financing timetable.

The campaigners attributed significance to the pending judicial review.

There is no judgment establishing that Sakhalin Energy withdrew because it feared losing the case.

18. Withdrawal Was Not a Legal Victory on the Merits

This is where historical retellings can easily go wrong.

WWF and The Corner House had succeeded in bringing the issue toward a hearing.

Sakhalin Energy’s withdrawal then removed the practical financing decision around which the litigation revolved.

But that does not mean the Administrative Court ruled that ECGD had acted unlawfully.

It did not.

Nor did the withdrawal constitute a judicial declaration that the campaigners’ interpretation of ECGD policy was correct.

No judge ruled upon:

whether the March 2004 commitment unlawfully predetermined the statutory facilitation question;

whether ECGD had been prohibited from giving conditional support before completing its environmental assessment;

whether the Department had failed to facilitate UK exports within the meaning of the 1991 Act;

or whether its consultation process rendered the decision unlawful.

The questions survived.

The case did not.

19. Nor Did ECGD Win

The reverse proposition is equally important.

Because the claim was discontinued after the application was withdrawn, ECGD did not obtain a judgment vindicating its interpretation either.

There was no judicial ruling that the March 2004 arrangement was lawful.

There was no judgment accepting ECGD’s contention that its procedures allowed this form of binding conditional commitment.

There was no ruling rejecting the claimants’ statutory argument.

There was no judgment deciding the standing or prematurity disputes.

Consequently, neither side can legitimately point to this judicial review as a merits judgment in its favour.

The lawfulness question remained unresolved.

20. Do Not Confuse This With the Other Sakhalin High Court Case

The distinction is particularly important because another British Sakhalin case did produce a High Court judgment.

That was the litigation concerning access to environmental information involving Friends of the Earth and ECGD.

In that separate proceeding, the Information Tribunal had ordered disclosure of interdepartmental environmental material, and Mr Justice Mitting subsequently dismissed ECGD’s appeal in March 2008.

That was an actual judicial decision.

The WWF/Corner House proceeding examined here was different.

It challenged the legality of the March 2004 conditional-support decision itself.

That case produced no merits judgment.

The existence of one Sakhalin High Court judgment must not be used to create another that never happened.

21. An Extraordinary Timing Detail

There is nevertheless a striking historical sequence.

For years, ECGD examined whether to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of support for Sakhalin II.

The environmental process generated enormous quantities of material.

Campaigners obtained the March 2004 conditional-support letter.

They challenged it.

The case moved toward hearing.

And then, before a court could determine whether the commitment had been lawful, the applicant decided it no longer required the British support.

The contemplated ECGD financing vanished.

The legal question vanished with it.

Not because a judge answered it.

Because the commercial circumstances removed the need for an answer.

22. Yet the Statutory Problem Did Not Vanish Forever

There is a final documentary twist.

The claimants’ argument concerning the meaning of “facilitating” exports may sound like an obscure technical dispute peculiar to one Russian energy project.

It was not destined to remain obscure.

In 2009, Parliament legislated to amend ECGD’s statutory powers.

The Industry and Exports (Financial Support) Bill replaced the old formulation with authority to make arrangements “in connection with” overseas supplies.

More strikingly, the legislation expressly provided that arrangements could relate to goods or services already supplied before the arrangements were made. (Parliament Publications)

That legislative change maps remarkably closely onto one of the practical problems raised in the Sakhalin pleadings.

But caution is required.

Similarity is not causation.

The existence of the Sakhalin challenge does not by itself prove that Parliament subsequently changed the law because of Sakhalin II.

That question requires its own documentary examination.

And that is where the next Shell Leaks File will go.

Documentary Findings Established

The Royal Dutch/Shell Group held 55 per cent of Sakhalin Energy when the shareholders approved Sakhalin II Phase 2 in May 2003. Shell’s SEC filing estimated the investment at approximately $10 billion and recorded that final approval work concerning project documentation, including substantial environmental-impact assessment, was still progressing. (SEC)

ECGD issued its conditional-support letter on 4 March 2004.

WWF-UK and The Corner House filed judicial-review proceedings on 15 August 2007 challenging the legality of that decision and ECGD’s continuing position that the conditional commitment was binding if its conditions were satisfied.

The judicial-review grounds raised questions concerning ECGD’s statutory export-facilitation power, the timing of environmental assessment, consultation and the legal effect of the conditional commitment. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

ECGD disputed the claimants’ interpretation and maintained that no final project-support decision had been made.

Contemporaneous reporting recorded ECGD’s position that no cover was in place, no premium had been received and no British taxpayer money was then at risk. (The Guardian)

Sakhalin Energy withdrew its ECGD and US Ex-Im applications on 29 February 2008.

Interfax reported Sakhalin Energy’s explanation that considerable uncertainty existed over the timing of final decisions by the agencies. (Interfax.ru)

Following the withdrawal, WWF and The Corner House did not pursue their judicial review to judgment. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

No merits judgment exists in this proceeding.

Alleged in the Judicial Review — Never Adjudicated

WWF and The Corner House alleged that ECGD unlawfully predetermined whether its support would facilitate British exports.

They alleged that ECGD could not lawfully enter a binding conditional commitment before completing the relevant environmental assessment.

They alleged that the Department had not properly established that the proposed support would continue to facilitate UK supplies as required by the legislation then in force.

They alleged deficiencies in consultation and disclosure surrounding the 2004 decision.

They sought to have the conditional commitment declared ineffective or quashed.

These propositions were legal arguments advanced by the claimants.

They did not become judicial findings.

ECGD’s Position

ECGD maintained that the ultimate support decision remained outstanding.

It treated environmental and social issues as matters still requiring assessment before a final guarantee could be issued.

Its position, as reflected in the claimants’ papers, relied upon flexibility and professional judgment within its environmental procedures.

It disputed the proposition that the March 2004 conditional commitment amounted to the final project-support decision.

It also raised arguments concerning the prematurity of the proceedings and the claimants’ standing in relation to aspects of the commercial eligibility decision. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Those propositions likewise never received definitive judicial endorsement in this proceeding.

Not Established

It is not established that the Administrative Court found ECGD’s March 2004 commitment unlawful.

It is not established that the court found the commitment lawful.

It is not established that WWF or The Corner House won the case on its merits.

It is not established that ECGD won the case on its merits.

It is not established that Shell or Sakhalin Energy was found environmentally liable in this proceeding.

It is not established that ministers deliberately misled Parliament.

It is not established that Sakhalin Energy withdrew its ECGD application because it expected to lose the judicial review.

And the withdrawal itself was not an admission of wrongdoing.

Commentary

The historical importance of this case lies partly in the judgment that does not exist.

Most litigation becomes easier to describe once a judge resolves the competing legal arguments.

This one became harder.

The March 2004 document undeniably existed.

Its conditions undeniably existed.

The continuing environmental assessment undeniably existed.

ECGD’s later recognition of the conditional commitment’s binding character existed.

The claimants’ challenge existed.

ECGD’s defence existed.

The financing application then disappeared.

And with it disappeared the opportunity for a court to determine what all those facts meant in law.

That makes restraint unusually important.

It would be easy, looking backwards, to turn the sequence into a morality play in which one side was proved right and the other wrong.

The surviving record does not permit that.

What it permits is something more interesting.

It shows a British government department attempting to reconcile export promotion, environmental due diligence and a huge project whose commercial timetable was moving faster than the public financing process.

It shows campaigners identifying a potential legal collision between those objectives.

And it shows the collision reaching the doors of the Administrative Court before the underlying financing transaction was removed.

A legal issue can remain unresolved and still be historically significant.

The Sakhalin judicial review is an unusually good example.

Source Record

The principal legal source is the Statement of Facts and Grounds in R (WWF-UK and The Corner House Research) v Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, dated 11 August 2007 and filed as part of the Administrative Court challenge announced on 15 August. It identifies the March 2004 decision under challenge, the statutory and procedural grounds advanced, ECGD’s pre-action position and the remedies sought. The document is treated throughout this instalment as a pleading, not as a judgment. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

The authenticated Shell corporate record is the May 2003 Royal Dutch Petroleum Company/The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company Form 6-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It confirms Shell’s 55 per cent interest, the Phase 2 investment decision, the then approximately $10 billion cost and the continuing approval work concerning environmental assessment. (SEC)

The campaigners’ contemporaneous record includes the 15 August 2007 WWF/Corner House announcement and supporting witness material, which document their reasons for bringing the proceedings and their interpretation of ECGD policy. These sources represent the claimants’ case and are labelled accordingly. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Independent contemporaneous reporting is supplied by The Guardian, 16 August 2007, which recorded both the campaigners’ allegations and ECGD’s response that no final cover had been issued. (The Guardian)

The termination of the financing application is independently documented by Interfax on 3 March 2008, quoting Sakhalin Energy concerning uncertainty over the timetable for final ECGD and US Ex-Im decisions. (Interfax.ru)

The subsequent history of the abandoned judicial review is recorded by The Corner House, which confirms that WWF and The Corner House decided not to proceed after Sakhalin Energy withdrew its ECGD application. (thecornerhouse.org.uk)

Archive disclaimer: Judicial-review pleadings record allegations and legal arguments, not findings. The WWF/Corner House Sakhalin proceeding ended without a merits judgment after Sakhalin Energy withdrew its ECGD application. Nothing in this instalment should be read as asserting that a court found ECGD, Shell, Sakhalin Energy or any minister to have acted unlawfully where no such finding exists.

Site wide disclaimer also applies.

Next Archive File SLF-2007-042 — The Sakhalin Papers XXXII: After “Facilitating” — When Parliament Rewrote Britain’s Export-Credit Law

One of the most technical arguments in the abandoned Sakhalin judicial review concerned just three words:

“with a view to facilitating.”

WWF and The Corner House argued that ECGD could not use its statutory powers to facilitate British exports if the relevant goods and services had already largely been supplied by the time financial support was approved.

No court decided whether that interpretation was correct.

Then, in 2009, Parliament changed the law.

The replacement wording authorised ECGD support “in connection with” overseas supplies — and expressly permitted support relating to goods or services supplied before the government arrangements were made. (Parliament Publications)

The resemblance to the problem identified in the Sakhalin litigation is difficult to miss.

But resemblance is not proof of causation.

SLF-2007-042 will examine the 2009 Bill, its Parliamentary explanation and the surviving ECGD record to determine exactly why the law was changed — and whether the legal problem exposed by Sakhalin II formed part of the story.

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES: 29 AUGUST 2026 was first posted on August 29, 2026 at 8:44 pm.
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Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

FEWS NET Halts Reporting on Food Insecure Countries

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) is no longer reporting on three of the countries most at risk of hunger: Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

For the last 40 years, the resource has provided timely, accurate information on acute food insecurity. Rajiv Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, says that he has seen firsthand how the tool has been used to mobilize resources and save lives before a crisis hits. It also saves money: According to the World Food Programme, every US$1 invested in anticipatory action yields up to US$7 in avoided losses and benefits. 

In early 2025, the Trump-Vance Administration abruptly took FEWS NET offline for several months, raising alarm among international aid organizations and governments. Now, the administration is targeting the platform again. In response to questions about the change, a spokesperson from the U.S. State Department says they are “focusing on countries that align with the Secretary’s broader policy priorities.” 

But Shah points out that this data is essential for addressing food insecurity in nations deemed “hunger hotspots” by WFP. “We cannot prevent the world’s hungriest people from starving if we are flying blind,” he says.

Global Land Restoration Gains Ground

Over 124.3 million hectares of land—an area roughly twice the size of France—are under restoration, according to a new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are leading efforts as countries work to revive forests; shift farming practices; and restore drylands, rangelands, and agricultural landscapes. 

“Restoring degraded ecosystems strengthens climate resilience and addresses biodiversity loss, while delivering significant economic and environmental returns on investment,” says IUCN Director General, Dr Grethel Aguilar.

Countries have pledged to restore 1.2 billion hectares as part of their national targets under four major international frameworks. Yasmin Fouad, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, encourages the move from commitments to implementation at scale to achieve their goals.

It May Be Getting Easier to Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable

A new study in Earth’s Future suggests that it’s possible to tie emissions from particular companies to specific harms. Researchers hope this can help advocates hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate impacts.  

The study ran over 150 simulations to show how carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere influence the odds of extreme heat and rain—and the role fossil fuel emitters played. Author Christopher Callahan says, “What this science tells us is that there is a direct relationship between how much an entity emits and…[the] extreme events that alter people’s lives.”

The fossil fuel industry accounts for 68 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, according to the United Nations. And food and farming systems are a part of this: Food production accounts for at least 15 percent of fossil fuels used annually. 

Many questions around climate liability linger, but some experts believe legal cases supported by this new research have the potential to “[rock] the courtroom.”

U.S. Farmers’ Struggle to Access Resources Continues

Farmers across the United States are facing as they try to access resources from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the New York Times reports.

In many parts of the country, skeleton staff remain at local offices and in some counties, there’s nobody at all. 

More than 20,000 workers out of more than 110,000 left the agency during the first half of 2025. And recent data show that the rate of departure is even higher in divisions that work directly with farmers and rural residents. Rural Development, a subagency at USDA, has lost more than a third of its staff since January of last year. 

The staffing and budget cuts leave farmers and charity organizations facing delays as they wait to receive federal funding. USDA is also approving fewer loans and grants. In the past three fiscal years, the agency made investments that total between US$24-40 billion. This fiscal year, with just a month left, the agency has approved US$15.8 in investments. 

Farmers are feeling the disappearance of expertise and institutional knowledge as well. Amanda Butterfield, a rancher in Pennsylvania, says, “We’ve completely lost a whole group of experts within our communities across the United States that can no longer help and support us.”

Water Rises in African Sahel

The African Sahel region is seeing more water than it has in decades. Wells are filling up and water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in some places. Areas that have been affected by drought for decades seem to be recovering. 

Farmers are seeing the benefits. One farmer in Chad said that in the past, there wasn’t enough water to irrigate crops, leading to small harvests, but now, he says, “Now our lives have changed.” And as producers grow crops like millet and sorghum, they’re leaving more moisture in the soil than grasses they replace. 

Shifting rainfall patterns and heavy monsoons are partially responsible for the changes, but scientists say that more is at play. They believe that practices such as traditional water harvesting methods and projects like the Great Green Wall have also helped.

Encouraged by the results, Nigeria is considering restoring an irrigation project on the shores of Lake Chad, which it was forced to abandon due to drought. It promises to improve food security and create jobs.

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 Mihajlo Sivc, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Ecosystems Recovery, Aquifers Replenishing, and USDA’s Staffing Shortages appeared first on Food Tank.

Roughly 160 people are dead and hundreds more — including dozens of international tourists — are missing after flash floods hit a region on the mountainous border of Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday. Devastating footage posted to social media shows people fleeing a wall of water that washed away buildings and vehicles.

Initial analysis of satellite imagery and reports from the Nepalese government indicate that the flooding was likely triggered by a landslide caused after a piece of a glacier fell hundreds of feet.

As the region warms, its ice is becoming increasingly unstable, raising the risk of catastrophic flooding.

“The glaciers over there are definitely in retreat,” said Joseph Shea, an associate professor of geography at the University of Northern British Columbia. “There’s a lot of glacier mass up there, but we’re seeing thinning, we’re seeing retreating.”

Since 2000, the world’s glaciers have lost 5 percent of their ice, with much more drastic impacts in certain regions. Nepal’s glaciers lost nearly a quarter of their area between 1970 and 2010. More than 160 smaller glaciers in the country, research has found, have vanished entirely.

Read Next Scientists race to decode data from Europe’s vanishing glaciers Matt Simon

A recent study finds that 40 percent of the world’s glacial ice could disappear if the world does not keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The impacts of warming on glaciers in Nepal can cause cascading effects. Shea pointed out that retreating glaciers can help trigger landslides as they get smaller and can no longer hold back sediment. As these glaciers retreat, many are leaving large, dammed lakes at higher elevations. “If you have a landslide suddenly into a lake, you get an overtopping of the dam, and then the whole thing can collapse catastrophically,” Shea said. Known as glacial lake outburst floods, two of these events hit Nepal last year, and research shows millions are living in harms way around the world.

Wednesday’s disaster was more likely due to a glacial collapse that fell into the valley below. Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told The New York Times that satellite imagery suggested that a 2,000-foot-wide piece of ice may have fallen almost 4,000 feet, “[pulverizing] the ice into water” with the force of its fall. And while Shugar emphasized that it was still too early to make conclusive statements about the cause of the floods, he noted to Reuters that snow that was present on the glacier earlier in the week may have melted due to warm temperatures.

The collapse and debris flow were so large and forceful, they registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, according the U.S. Geological Survey.

Glaciers elsewhere have broken apart with destructive results. That includes the collapse of a Swiss glacier last year that buried a town while on a smaller scale, a glacier collapse in Italy in 2022 killed 11 mountaineers. Both were linked with rising temperatures.

There’s a lot of factors in a warming world, Shea said, that can play on each other to destabilize glaciers.

“It’s summertime,” he said. “There’s lots of warming, lots of melt happening, lots of water around. There’s also things like alpine permafrost thaws: the ground temperatures warm up, and big blocks and chunks that would have been frozen in place are now suddenly becoming mobile.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How rising temperatures likely contributed to Nepal’s deadly flood on Aug 29, 2026.

Headline News:

• “State Grid Corporation Of China targets 200 GW Annually Of Renewables” • State Grid Corporation of China outlined twenty measures in seven areas to support the national 15th Five-Year Plan carbon peaking goals. The company said its operating area will add about 200 GW of energy capacity annually during the 15th Five-Year Plan period. [reNews]

Wind turbines in China (Siyuwj, CC BY-SA 4.0)

• “Is Global Warming Supercharging El Niños? Study Suggests They Are” • A study suggests that El Niños are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change. El Niños are more than 36% stronger than they were before the industrial age began in the mid 1800s, with a 16% jump in just the last forty years. This shows that the increase is accelerating. [Euronews]
• “Sierra Club Slams Trump Plan To Carve Up Yosemite For Private Developer” • The Trump administration has spent over a year quietly pressing the National Park Service to give up land inside Yosemite National Park so a private developer can build a road connecting its own property to park land, an investigation by NOTUS found. [CleanTechnica]
• “Irish Solar Capacity Passes 3 GW” • Installed solar capacity in Ireland has passed 3 GW for the first time, including installations from rooftop solar to grid-scale solar farms. The Irish Minister for Climate, Energy, and the Environment Darragh O’Brien said the milestone comes as the growth of the country’s solar capacity continues to accelerate. [reNews]
• “Trump Announces ‘Historic’ US-Venezuela Oil Deal That He Says Will Lower Gas Prices” • President Donald Trump has announced that the US and Venezuela have reached a “historic” oil deal that he said would give the US a majority control of billions of barrels of oil reserves in the Caribbean country and lower gas prices for Americans. [ABC News]

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

The next materially distinct angle is internal compliance culture inside SPDC. Earlier instalments quoted the 2012 remark in passing, but none has examined it as the central documentary issue. The contrast is unusually sharp: in 2012 Shell publicly said its Business Principles were the foundation of how it worked and reported disciplinary action for Code violations worldwide; yet a Shell headquarters manager visiting Nigeria reportedly told colleagues that SPDC was afflicted by “collusion, nepotism and corruption” and that the Code of Conduct was “completely ignored.” (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

THE SHELL NIGERIA FILES: 29 AUGUST 2026 Shell’s Code of Conduct “Completely Ignored”? The 2012 Warning From Inside SPDC In the same year Royal Dutch Shell told the public that all employees, contractors and operated joint ventures were expected to comply with its Business Principles, a manager from Shell headquarters reportedly returned from Nigeria with a profoundly different assessment: “collusion, nepotism and corruption” — and a Code of Conduct treated as an “inconvenience.” It was one manager’s assessment, not a judicial finding. But Shell’s own ethics system makes the unanswered question unavoidable: what happened after the warning?

There are internal Shell documents about pipelines.

There are documents about corrosion.

There are documents about crude theft, illegal connections, maintenance backlogs, security failures and whether production should continue despite predicted environmental damage.

Then there is a different kind of evidence.

Evidence about culture.

Section 4.7 of the July 2026 report Nigeria: Lifting the Lid reproduces material relied upon by the Bille and Ogale claimants concerning a Shell headquarters manager who visited Nigeria in 2012.

According to the report, after the visit the manager emailed colleagues saying his suspicions had been confirmed about “collusion, nepotism and corruption running through the veins” of SPDC.

He then delivered an even more extraordinary assessment:

“Shell’s Code of Conduct is an inconvenience here: it’s completely ignored.”

Those are not words attributed to a Niger Delta campaigner.

They are reported as the assessment of somebody working within Shell.

They do not prove that SPDC as an institution was corrupt.

They do not establish criminal conduct by any identified employee.

They have not been adopted as findings of fact by the English court.

But neither can they responsibly be dismissed as routine corporate grumbling.

Because Shell’s Code of Conduct was supposed to be one of the mechanisms preventing precisely the kind of behaviour the manager said he had encountered.

The evidential chain requires care

Unlike many documents in this series, the underlying email is not identified in Nigeria: Lifting the Lid as one of HEDA’s individually numbered downloadable Shell files.

The report attributes the material to paragraph 17.4 of the Claimants’ Supplemental Skeleton for the Case Management Conference of 18 May 2026.

That distinction matters.

We are therefore dealing with an internal Shell communication described and quoted in the claimants’ court material and reproduced by Amnesty International, HEDA and the other organisations publishing the 2026 report.

The underlying email has not, from the publicly searchable material reviewed for this instalment, been independently published in full.

Accordingly, this article does not present the manager’s assessment as an established judicial description of SPDC.

It presents it for what the published record says it is:

a highly critical internal assessment made by a Shell headquarters manager after visiting the Nigerian operation.

That is serious enough.

What Shell was telling the public in exactly the same year

The timing makes the document especially significant.

Royal Dutch Shell’s Sustainability Report 2012 described its Business Principles as fundamental to the company’s operations.

Shell said those principles governed behaviour, policies, processes and decision-making and applied to its treatment of the environment and communities.

It also said all Shell employees and contractors, together with personnel at operated joint ventures, were expected to comply with the Business Principles. (Shell)

The public message was therefore unequivocal.

This was not an optional ethical aspiration.

It was supposed to govern how Shell worked.

The report also described an anti-bribery and corruption compliance programme, mandatory procedures and training concerning such matters as conflicts of interest, political payments and gifts and hospitality. Failure to comply could result in dismissal or termination. (Shell)

Shell’s own General Business Principles similarly insist on honesty, integrity and fairness and reject bribery while requiring potential conflicts of interest to be declared. (Shell)

Against that public framework, the manager’s reported description of the Nigerian operation is extraordinary.

Shell was enforcing the Code elsewhere

There is another piece of contemporaneous evidence that makes the contrast sharper.

Shell’s 2012 Sustainability Report did not merely say a Code existed.

It reported enforcement.

Shell said 209 Code of Conduct violations had been reported during 2012 and that 93 employees and contractors were dismissed or had their contracts terminated as a consequence. (Shell)

That demonstrates that Shell possessed a functioning corporate apparatus for identifying, investigating and sanctioning misconduct.

There were reporting channels.

There were investigations.

There were disciplinary consequences.

The obvious question is therefore not whether Royal Dutch Shell had an ethics programme.

It clearly did.

The question is:

What happened when one of its own headquarters managers allegedly concluded that the system was not functioning properly inside SPDC?

Was the allegation formally investigated?

The public documents reviewed for this instalment do not tell us.

That absence matters.

Did the email trigger an investigation?

Was Shell Internal Audit informed?

Was the Ethics and Compliance organisation notified?

Was the allegation referred through the Global Helpline process?

Were particular individuals investigated?

Were contracts reviewed?

Were disciplinary proceedings commenced?

Did Shell determine that the manager had misunderstood what he encountered?

Did investigators substantiate any part of his concerns?

Was the allegation judged exaggerated?

Were remedial measures imposed?

Was the Board Audit Committee informed?

We do not know.

And because the allegation came from inside Shell rather than from an outside campaign organisation, the absence of a publicly visible follow-up trail becomes particularly important.

One angry email does not prove institutional corruption

This qualification cannot be overstated.

Employees sometimes form harsh opinions after difficult visits.

Internal emails can be written in frustration.

A manager may encounter several disturbing incidents and wrongly generalise them to an entire organisation.

A particular office, team or contractor relationship may not represent the culture of thousands of people.

Terms such as “collusion”, “nepotism” and “corruption” can also cover very different conduct, ranging from unethical favouritism to potentially criminal bribery.

The published material does not identify particular transactions, payments or individuals behind the 2012 manager’s assessment.

It does not establish what evidence the manager possessed.

It does not establish whether an investigation agreed with him.

And it does not establish that every SPDC employee disregarded Shell’s Code.

The allegation therefore must remain precisely what it is:

an internal allegation requiring explanation and corroboration.

But the proper response to an allegation from a Shell headquarters manager is investigation — not pretending the allegation never existed.

Other documents make the cultural warning harder to isolate

The significance of the 2012 email does not depend on treating other Shell Nigeria Files stories as proof that the manager was right.

They are separate evidential strands.

But they do provide context.

A 2011 security review, as reported from the claimants’ court filing, described SPDC security operations as “seriously flawed” and raised questions involving procurement due diligence and inappropriate payments. That issue has already been examined separately in this series. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

In March 2013, senior Shell and SPDC personnel discussed alleged involvement of staff and contractors in crude-oil theft and considered using internal “traps” to determine whether insiders were helping bunkerers. Again, that has already been treated as a separate documentary issue. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Those records do not prove the sweeping 2012 cultural allegation.

But they mean the allegation did not arise in a documentary vacuum.

There were contemporaneous internal concerns involving security controls, contracting, payments, possible insider assistance and compliance.

Taken together, they create a legitimate governance question about whether SPDC’s internal-control environment was functioning as Shell publicly said it should.

Shell’s ethics framework depended upon people speaking up

Shell continues today to describe its Global Helpline as a mechanism through which employees, contractors and business partners can report suspected non-compliance confidentially and, if desired, anonymously.

The company says concerns are assessed and investigated and that confirmed Code breaches can result in disciplinary action. (Shell)

That makes the 2012 warning particularly relevant.

A compliance system is not tested by how attractively its Code of Conduct is written.

It is tested by what happens when somebody inside the organisation says the Code is failing.

Does management investigate?

Does it protect the person speaking up?

Does it identify root causes?

Does it discipline wrongdoing?

Does it disclose material failures upward?

Does it change incentives?

Does it follow up?

Or does the allegation disappear into email archives until litigation exposes it years later?

The public record currently does not tell us which happened here.

“Nepotism” matters in an operating company

Nepotism may sound less dramatic than a leaking pipeline.

In a major industrial operation it can become a safety and governance problem.

If hiring, promotion, contracting or procurement decisions are influenced by personal relationships rather than competence, controls weaken.

If people believe relationships matter more than rules, reporting misconduct becomes harder.

If contractors are selected without proper due diligence, security and integrity risks increase.

If employees believe influential colleagues are protected, a Code of Conduct becomes ceremonial rather than operational.

This does not mean the 2012 manager proved that any of those consequences had occurred.

It explains why the allegation merited serious escalation if made in the terms reported.

“Collusion” is potentially more serious still

The word becomes particularly sensitive given what Shell executives were discussing several months later.

In March 2013, senior personnel recorded concern about “Colluding staff and contractors” in relation to crude theft and instructed that alleged employee and contractor involvement be investigated.

One contemporaneous email warned that Shell had to proceed on the assumption that bunkerers were obtaining access to SPDC planning information. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Those records do not establish that the 2012 manager was referring to crude-oil theft when he used the word “collusion”.

We should not connect those dots as if the documents prove a single conspiracy.

They do not.

But the chronology makes one question entirely legitimate:

Did Shell examine whether the cultural concerns reported in 2012 had any connection to the insider-risk concerns being discussed by senior management in 2013?

Again, the public record does not provide the answer.

Shell’s Code was supposed to apply in difficult places too

Shell may reasonably respond that Nigeria presented extraordinary governance and security conditions.

That is unquestionably relevant.

The Niger Delta oil industry operated amid organised theft, sabotage, illegal refining, violence, weak institutions, political pressures and complex relationships with government agencies and contractors.

Shell has repeatedly emphasised that environment, including in its July 2026 response to Nigeria: Lifting the Lid.

But a Code of Conduct has greatest value precisely where the operating environment is difficult.

A company does not need elaborate ethics machinery merely for situations in which everybody already behaves properly.

It needs it where money, relationships, security pressures, patronage and conflicting incentives create opportunities for misconduct.

The more difficult Nigeria was, the more—not less—important the integrity framework became.

Shell says the report creates a misleading impression

Shell has responded directly to the organisations behind the July 2026 report.

In a statement dated 15 July 2026, reproduced in full in Nigeria: Lifting the Lid, Shell said the characterisation was not one it recognised.

It accused the publishers of selectively quoting documents in a way that creates a misleading impression and said their account did not adequately reflect the scale of organised oil theft, sabotage and illegal refining in the Niger Delta.

Shell also said its former Nigerian subsidiary worked with Nigerian authorities, its government-owned joint-venture partner and local communities in responding to these problems, including cleaning spills from joint-venture facilities irrespective of cause as Nigerian law required.

That response must be given proper weight.

It is also broad.

It does not specifically explain the 2012 manager’s allegation that SPDC’s Code of Conduct was being ignored.

Shell’s present position on Bille and Ogale

Shell’s current litigation page, updated 16 July 2026, says that large-scale oil theft, sabotage and illegal refining by organised criminal gangs caused the majority of pollution relevant to the Bille and Ogale proceedings.

Shell says its former subsidiary worked extensively with authorities and communities and invested in infrastructure, surveillance, repairs, shut-ins, spill response and remediation.

It maintains that neither Shell nor Renaissance should be liable for criminal acts committed by third parties and says it will vigorously defend the claims at the factual trial scheduled for 2027. (Shell)

Those are important positions.

But a Code-of-Conduct allegation concerns a different question.

Even if Shell proves that criminals caused the majority of disputed pollution, the integrity of the organisation managing the response remains relevant.

If internal controls were weak, that could affect contracting, security, maintenance, incident reporting, investigations and dealings with communities and government.

The criminality of outsiders and the conduct of insiders are not mutually exclusive issues.

Shell should publish the compliance trail

This is another area where documentary disclosure could settle rather than inflame the issue.

Shell could publish the 2012 email in full, subject to legitimate personal-data redactions.

It could identify the sender’s corporate role.

It could explain what events prompted the assessment.

It could state whether the email was escalated to Ethics and Compliance, Internal Audit, Legal or senior management.

It could disclose whether an investigation took place.

It could publish any findings in suitably redacted form.

It could disclose whether disciplinary or remedial action followed.

And it could explain what systems existed within SPDC in 2012 for employees and contractors to report nepotism, conflicts of interest, corruption or other Code violations.

If Shell investigated and found the manager’s claims unsupported, that is material context the public should know.

If it substantiated part of them and corrected the problem, that too should be disclosed.

If no investigation took place, the question becomes more serious.

The shareholder dimension

There is another reason this matters.

Shell’s public sustainability reporting was not written only for employees.

Investors, governments, civil-society organisations and communities were being asked to rely upon it.

The 2012 Sustainability Report told readers that the Business Principles governed Shell’s conduct and that compliance mechanisms existed. It also quantified Code violations and disciplinary action, demonstrating that ethics performance formed part of the company’s public accountability narrative. (Shell)

Against that background, a manager’s internal assessment that a major operating subsidiary regarded the Code as an inconvenience would have been potentially significant information.

That does not mean securities law required publication of this particular email.

The evidence reviewed here is nowhere near sufficient to reach such a legal conclusion.

Indeed, the publishers of Nigeria: Lifting the Lid themselves call for UK and Dutch authorities to investigate whether Shell made misleading statements concerning its environmental, social and governance standards; that is an advocacy demand, not a regulatory finding.

The narrower point is undeniable.

The internal assessment and the public corporate message point in opposite directions.

That discrepancy deserves explanation.

What is documented, alleged, contested and inferred

The documentary position can be stated precisely.

Documented: Shell publicly stated in 2012 that its Business Principles were foundational to how it operated, that employees and contractors were expected to comply, and that breaches could result in disciplinary action. Shell publicly reported 209 Code violations and 93 resulting employee or contractor terminations that year. (Shell)

Reported internal allegation: according to the claimants’ May 2026 court filing as reproduced in Nigeria: Lifting the Lid, a Shell headquarters manager visiting SPDC in 2012 alleged collusion, nepotism and corruption and described the Shell Code of Conduct as effectively ignored.

Not established: the public material reviewed does not establish the factual basis for every part of that manager’s allegation, identify particular individuals responsible, demonstrate criminal conduct, or show that SPDC as a whole was institutionally corrupt.

Inference: if the reported assessment was credible, it suggests a potentially serious failure of compliance culture requiring investigation and remediation. Whether Shell reached that same conclusion internally is not established by the currently public record.

Contested: Shell rejects the report publishers’ wider portrayal, says documents have been selectively presented without adequate context and emphasises the extraordinary criminal and security environment in which SPDC operated. The underlying Bille and Ogale liability disputes remain before the courts.

A Code is only as real as the organisation beneath it

Every large corporation has policies.

The difficult question is whether people believe them.

A Code of Conduct can prohibit corruption.

A helpline can receive allegations.

Employees can complete mandatory training.

The Board can receive compliance statistics.

Annual reports can publish disciplinary numbers.

All of that matters.

But culture exists below the paperwork.

It is expressed in what managers tolerate.

Which rules are enforced.

Who gets promoted.

Which contractors survive scrutiny.

Whether people can challenge powerful colleagues.

Whether misconduct has consequences.

And whether an employee who says something is badly wrong gets heard.

That is why the phrase attributed to the Shell manager is so damaging.

Not because it proves that everybody at SPDC was corrupt.

It does not.

But because it alleges that the mechanism designed to stop misconduct had lost authority inside the organisation.

“An inconvenience.”

“Completely ignored.”

Those are descriptions of a compliance system that, in the writer’s assessment, existed on paper but not sufficiently in practice.

Shell has the records that can resolve this

The public should not have to choose between two caricatures.

One caricature says SPDC was a fundamentally corrupt organisation whose rules meant nothing.

The other says every disturbing internal statement can be dismissed because Nigeria was difficult and criminals stole oil.

Neither is adequate.

The evidence permits something more precise.

A Shell headquarters manager reportedly made an exceptionally serious allegation about SPDC’s compliance culture in 2012.

Shell publicly maintained a sophisticated global ethics and compliance framework at the time.

Other disclosed material shows that senior management subsequently confronted concerns about security failures and alleged employee or contractor involvement in crude theft.

Whether those facts connect — and what Shell did about them — is a matter for documentary evidence.

Shell should release it.

Because after publishing global statistics on Code enforcement and telling the world that its Business Principles governed everyone who worked for it, the company cannot reasonably treat an internal allegation that the Code was being “completely ignored” as an irrelevant historical footnote.

The question is straightforward:

When Shell’s own manager said the ethics system had broken down in SPDC, did Shell investigate — and what did it find?

Until those records are disclosed, that question remains unanswered.

Documentary record

The central allegation appears in section 4.7, “Broken Rules,” of Nigeria: Lifting the Lid — Internal Documents Expose Shell’s Negligent Oil Operations, published on 29 July 2026 by Amnesty International, HEDA Resource Centre and partner organisations. The report attributes the 2012 material to paragraph 17.4 of the Claimants’ Supplemental Skeleton for the Case Management Conference of 18 May 2026.

The contemporaneous corporate comparison comes from Royal Dutch Shell’s Sustainability Report 2012, which described the Shell General Business Principles, anti-bribery and corruption programme, reporting mechanisms and Code-of-Conduct enforcement statistics. (Shell)

Shell’s 15 July 2026 response to the coalition is reproduced in Annex 1 of the report. Shell says the documents have been selectively quoted, that the resulting portrayal is misleading and that the severe criminal and operating conditions in the Niger Delta have not been adequately reflected.

Shell’s current account of the Bille and Ogale proceedings was updated 16 July 2026 and sets out its position on sabotage, illegal refining, spill response, liability and the factual trial scheduled for 2027. (Shell)

For direct reference: Nigeria: Lifting the Lid — full report · Shell Sustainability Report 2012 · Shell’s current Bille and Ogale position · HEDA Resource Centre — Shell documents page

Editorial note

This article does not allege that SPDC as an organisation was proven to be corrupt, that every Shell employee in Nigeria ignored the Code of Conduct, or that any named individual committed bribery, fraud or another criminal offence.

The statements concerning “collusion, nepotism and corruption” and the Code being “completely ignored” are reported as the assessment of a Shell headquarters manager following a 2012 visit to Nigeria. The material is cited by the claimants in the Bille and Ogale litigation and reproduced in the 2026 coalition report. It has not been adopted as a judicial finding.

The underlying email has not been identified in the report as one of HEDA’s numbered downloadable documents, and the publicly accessible record reviewed for this article does not disclose what investigation or remedial action, if any, followed.

Shell rejects the coalition’s wider interpretation of the documents, says selected extracts create a misleading impression without adequate recognition of organised oil theft, sabotage, illegal refining and the difficult operating environment, and continues to dispute the Bille and Ogale claims.

The factual and legal issues remain unresolved pending further proceedings.

Site wide disclaimer also applies.

THE SHELL NIGERIA FILES: 29 AUGUST 2026 was first posted on August 29, 2026 at 9:23 am.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

For farming families, we ask that relief and compensation reach tenant, landless and unregistered cultivators who hold no land papers; that seeds reach them before the winter planting; that farm loans be suspended.

The post Nepal Flash Floods: La Via Campesina Stands in Solidarity with the People of Nepal appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

“Today, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 40, the Community First Coal Review Act by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, a bill to protect Californians from dusty, toxic coal pollution. The bill now heads to the Governor’s desk to await his signature. If signed into law, developers of enormous bulk coal facilities, like the one proposed in West Oakland, will have to fully disclose their projects’ impacts and develop effective mitigation measures before they are granted approval.”

That’s today’s great news, courtesy of Earthjustice’s press release. The bill was co-sponsored by Earthjustice and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators project. Again, from the press release:

“West Oakland will not become a sacrifice zone for the fossil fuel industry,” said Veronica Eady, Executive Director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. “Our neighbors have fought against industrial pollution and corporate greed for decades, so we’re not about to let a major polluter come into our neighborhood without studying their impact, putting mitigations in place, and bringing community members to the table around decisions that affect their lives. We look forward to getting Assembly Bill 40 to the finish line.”

To take effect, the bill must be signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom by September 30, 2026.

Read the full press release here.

You can reach out to urge Gov. Newsom to sign AB40 into law … here is his official contact page, and here is an Earthjustice-crafted letter urging the governor to sign the Community First Coal Review Act.

 

 

 

Image: California State Capitol, Sacramento. Image credit: Andre M via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

 

 

A meaningful Woodcreek update has surfaced.

Reporting published on 28 August 2026, drawing on the JLL marketing material for Shell’s Houston campus, gives a much more precise picture of the proposed leaseback. Shell is reported to intend a 15-year lease on Buildings E and F, plus one floor of Building A, while taking only three-year leases on Buildings B, C, D and the remainder of Building A. That means the more than 700,000 sq ft Shell plans to relinquish would be released progressively over roughly three years rather than all at once. (Hoodline)

The broader terms remain unchanged: the Woodcreek campus is being marketed at about $325 million, Shell would retain a little over half of the nearly 1.5-million-sq-ft complex under the long leaseback, and there is still no identified buyer or confirmed sale price. (Houston Chronicle)

On Aberdeen, I found no meaningful new numerical disclosure. Shell still has not publicly stated how many employees will be required to move to London in 2027, and there is still no confirmed redundancy number tied to that relocation. The affected roles remain described as being in development, subsurface and wells, mostly supporting Shell’s global operations rather than the UK business. (Press and Journal)

So the new point worth recording is: Woodcreek is not simply a 15-year half-campus leaseback; Shell appears to be staging its exit from the rest of the campus over a three-year period, building by building.

A meaningful Woodcreek update has surfaced. was first posted on August 28, 2026 at 10:53 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 Hub” is a weekly round-up of transportation related news in the Philadelphia area and beyond. Check back weekly to keep up-to-date on the issues Clean Air Council’s transportation staff finds important.

As exciting events continue in Philadelphia, learn how you can get around to major summer 2026 events without a car, or being stuck in traffic with GoPhillyGo: Car-Free Routes Map!

Transit 4 All PA is hiring fellows, with two paid positions in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties: to support transit advocates in building local demand for transit. If you live in Luzerne or Lackawanna County, and you ride transit, apply TODAY. Application closes on September 2, 2026. Learn more here. 

Image Source: Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Pennsylvania Capital-Star: Additional Amtrak passenger train service to and from Pittsburgh to begin in mid-November – A second daily passenger train will be running between Pittsburgh and New York, via Harrisburg and Philadelphia. The train will begin running in mid-November. Ridership on Pittsburgh to Philadelphia trains exceeded pre-pandemic levels for the first time in 2024, with nearly 234,000 passengers.

Image Source: The Inquirer

The Inquirer: The return of the Philadelphia Cycling Classic will close roads – This weekend the Philadelphia Cycling Classic is back, utilizing the original route of the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive. Road closures will start on Saturday and continue into Sunday. SEPTA routes that travel through Manayunk and Roxborough or on Kelly Drive will be detoured.

Image Source: Visit Philadelphia

Metro Philadelphia: Open Streets returns to Center City for 7 Sundays of car-free fun this fall – Center City is bringing back Open Streets: West Walnut, for 7 weekends this fall. Starting September 13 through October 25, along Walnut Street between Broad and 19th Street, and 18th Street between Chestnut and Locust, will close to vehicles from 7 AM until 6 PM. Open Streets will run from 10 AM until 5 PM on Sundays.  Businesses along the closure routes reported an average 59% increase in foot traffic, and 37% increase in sales.

Other Stories

WHYY: Market Street Bridge closed to cars for a year as part of a nearly $150 million upgrade

The Inquirer: Lower Merion has issued more than 600 violations from red-light cameras since mid-July

StreetsBlog USA: Philadelphia Figured Out to Stop Double Parking — Will Other Cities Follow Suit?

The Inquirer: New trail connector lets bikers ride 70 miles from Philly to Reading. It’s ‘a really, really big deal.’

CBS Pittsburgh: Signs for upcoming PennDOT projects causing concerns for drivers, but impacts won’t be long-lasting

Philadelphia Today: Philadelphia Named Finalist to Host 2028 Democratic National Convention

On August 25th, 2026, candidates for City Council Districts 3 and 4 got on the water alongside willamette river keeper and candidates for Portland City Council Districts 3 and 4 to learn about the overwhelming danger of toxic and flammable fuels stored in aging tanks along the Willamette River. On this tour candidates learned the need for a significant CEI hub drawdown and better governmental regulation. Check out photos below!

The post Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub Paddling Tour appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

This article Why solidarity is vital to freeing imprisoned human rights defenders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Every Aug. 30, the world marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Beneath the official statements and solemn commemorations lies a stark, unsettling reality: the practice of making people vanish — and holding them in silence away from the world — remains a favored tactic for powerful regimes seeking to crush dissent. The goal of authoritarian states is to cut dissenters off from the outside world until public attention fades. 

Yet as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani highlighted during a global leadership summit last month, solidarity is far more than a moral sentiment; when organized effectively, it acts as a concrete strategy to pull those trapped in state-enforced shadows back into the light. 

Six years ago, when CIVICUS, a global alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society, launched the Stand As My Witness campaign, we made that exact wager: that the surest way to protect an imprisoned or disappeared defender is public visibility. In practice, that means turning quiet solidarity into loud, coordinated action, sharing their stories, mobilizing petitions, amplifying their voices across borders, and forcing governments to act. The objective is simple: to make their continued detention impossible to ignore.

Since 2020, the campaign has put faces to some 50 detained defenders and helped win freedom for 32 of them. Among them are Loujain al-Hathloul, who stood up for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia; Floriane Irangabiye, who set up a radio station to profile the lives of exiled Burundians; and Muhammad Ismail, who spoke out against human rights abuses by security forces in Pakistan. Solidarity works. That is exactly why we cannot stop now. 

Refusing erasure

Authoritarian regimes rely on the quiet assumption that if a prisoner is hidden long enough, the outside world will simply move on. Countering this state-enforced oblivion requires bringing individual names, faces and struggles back into the light.

Khurram Parvez has spent decades ensuring that victims of state-enforced disappearances in Kashmir are not forgotten. For that work, the prominent human rights defender was jailed in November 2021 under India’s draconian anti-terror laws. In exposing how security forces made citizens vanish, Parvez became a target of the same machinery of erasure himself.

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In 2023, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his imprisonment unlawful. Though an Indian court recently granted him bail after four and a half years without trial, state authorities moved instantly to halt his release. His ongoing ordeal is a reminder that when those who document disappearances are silenced, an entire society loses its voice.

Narges Mohammadi’s story reveals both the power of witness and its fragility. The Iranian Nobel laureate who has spoken out against torture and the death penalty has been repeatedly arrested, re-sentenced and subjected to periods of incommunicado detention — a form of short-term enforced disappearance designed to cut her off entirely from family, legal counsel and the outside world. 

Her ongoing persecution maps almost exactly onto the world’s attention span: when global pressure was high, she was granted temporary relief; when it eased, authorities placed her in punitive isolation and handed her additional sentences. In May, after collapsing in prison following suspected heart attacks, she was released on medical bail, some 45 pounds lighter and barely recognizable. Her cumulative sentence still stands at 44 years. A conditional release is not freedom, and the threat of return — and total isolation — has never lifted.

Buzurgmehr Yorov’s decade behind bars illustrates how states turn the justice system itself into a tool of erasure. Arrested in 2015 after taking on targeted political clients and speaking out against their torture, the Tajik lawyer has faced continuous punishment for refusing to stay silent. Held incommunicado and repeatedly placed in solitary isolation, he has been subjected to secret trials behind closed doors that pushed his sentence out to 2043, when he will be in his 70s. Though the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for his immediate release years ago, Tajikistan continues to keep him in the shadows. Silencing the advocate to bury the abuse is the ultimate act of state-enforced invisibility.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya embodies a newer frontier of enforced disappearance: the deliberate targeting of those who keep others alive. Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, he was detained by Israeli forces after refusing to abandon his patients, and he has since been held without charge, cut off from his family and the outside world as his health deteriorates. 

He is not alone. He is one of 14 Gaza doctors whose release Physicians for Human Rights-Israel is now seeking before Israel’s Supreme Court. Amnesty International has warned that his life is in grave danger, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has ruled his detention unlawful, and Médecins Sans Frontières has called for the release of all arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers. Their vanishing carries its own chilling logic: when the very people who run toward catastrophe to save others can be made to disappear, no one is meant to feel safe.

Breaking the architecture of erasure

Demolishing this system of state-enforced silence cannot be left to traditional diplomacy or closed-door negotiation alone. Protecting the space for dissent requires transforming public solidarity into an active, organized strategy.

At that same forum, Mamdani challenged governments to consider who among today’s vilified activists will be glorified in retrospect once history passes judgment. Parvez, Mohammadi, Yorov and Dr. Abu Safiya are direct answers to that question, alongside dozens of other defenders sitting in cells or secret detention facilities.

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And the space to defend them is shrinking at an alarming rate. Through the CIVICUS Monitor, we have tracked a steady global closing of civic freedoms — to the point where a mere three percent of the global population now lives in countries with open civic space. Across 83 countries now classified as “closed” or “repressed,” states rely on a familiar playbook: new laws branding activists as foreign agents, cross-border surveillance, and a news cycle so crowded with crises that political prisoners risk slipping into total obscurity.

Human rights defenders are not a threat to national security. They are often the last line of defense between a society and its own collapse: the journalists, lawyers and organizers who strive to hold power to account when institutions fail. Defending them is not charity; it is self-defense for democracy.

When powerful regimes attempt to bury dissenters in prison, global solidarity becomes a lifeline. Just as worldwide public pressure was instrumental in freeing Nelson Mandela after 27 years of state isolation, public witness remains the most formidable tool we have today. Thirty-two former political prisoners are free because ordinary people chose to speak up when states demanded silence.

As Mamdani noted, it is often in the darkest moments that true light becomes visible. The current darkness around civic freedoms is undeniable. Our ask remains deceptively simple: Learn a name. Say it out loud. Stand as a witness. Let us make sure that Khurram Parvez, Narges Mohammadi, Buzurgmehr Yorov, and Dr. Abu Safiya are not still waiting in the dark when the next anniversary comes.

This article Why solidarity is vital to freeing imprisoned human rights defenders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Nevada officials have long presented themselves as a voice for compromise and conservation in debates over the Colorado River. The Las Vegas area, home to two-thirds of the state’s population and most of its economy, has become a model of urban water conservation. As the river has declined from overuse and a decades-long drought exacerbated by climate change, southern Nevada water planners built extensive water reuse facilities and implemented tight restrictions on new turf and fountains, dropping the region’s per capita water use by 58 percent in roughly 20 years. Meanwhile, in interstate negotiations over the management of the Colorado River, state representatives have positioned themselves as bridge-builders, sometimes referring to themselves as the “middle basin” between the river’s divided upper and lower basin states. 

When the federal government’s new management plan for the river was announced earlier this month, most observers thought Arizona, which stands to take the largest immediate cuts, would launch the first lawsuit over the plan’s implications for its water supplies. So it came as a surprise to many Colorado River experts when Nevada became the first to sue the federal government over the plan this week.

“I expected that there would be litigation, but it was surprising to me that Nevada fired the first shot,” said Anne Castle, former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission,

Nevada’s lawsuit comes after more than two years of negotiations among the seven Colorado River states and the federal government over how to reduce water use on the declining river. The states failed to reach a long-term agreement before the river’s current management procedures expire in October, leaving the Interior Department to impose its own plan. The federal government’s plan largely relies on cuts to water use among the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada, and California — to prop up water levels in the river’s largest reservoirs. Those reservoirs have been draining so quickly that the dwindling water depth could threaten hydropower and dam operations within months without intervention. 

Nevada argues that the federal government’s plan illegally forces it to take too much of those cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the plan could allow for a 71 percent cut to the Las Vegas area’s water supply, the state argued, calling it an unacceptable risk to the state’s largest population center and economic hub. Nevada believes this outcome results from a misreading of the law and also claims the government didn’t consider important alternatives to such drastic cuts.

This worst-case scenario, which experts say is an interpretation of the plan’s implications by Nevada, would become possible if reservoir levels continue to drop and if Nevada couldn’t reach an agreement with Arizona and California to help it absorb more of those cuts. Those three states already have such an agreement, which is incorporated into the federal plan and meant to last through 2028, at which point the plan allows the states to update the operations with a new agreement. Without an agreement, the federal government will implement cuts based on preexisting water rights and agreements, cutting the most from Arizona and leaning increasingly on Nevada and California as potential shortages increase. The plan was created through a decision-making process required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which mandates that federal agencies gather public input and consider environmental and socioeconomic impacts of major decisions.

Read Next The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird Jake Bittle

At first glance, the lawsuit seems like a departure from Nevada’s long-standing posture as the river’s conciliator, advocating consensus among the river basin’s seven states and 30 tribes, which hold vast water rights but are not formal members of interstate negotiations. John Entsminger, the state’s negotiator on the river, has repeatedly portrayed compromise as the state’s preferred path, telling a Las Vegas water conference just a week before the lawsuit that negotiation and cooperation were the state’s “first, second, and third choice.” 

But Nevada has consistently paired its call for consensus with a warning that it would defend its water if negotiations failed, and the state’s case seems less surprising in light of the drastic cuts it claims are possible under the federal plan. Unlike other states, Nevada sends its Colorado River water almost entirely to urban areas. That means cuts fall directly on the Las Vegas area, while other states can cushion the blow by fallowing agricultural fields.

“There is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71 percent. That’s existential. Of course Nevada sued,” wrote John Fleck, water expert and author in residence at the University of New Mexico’s Utton Center, in a recent blog post. 

The lawsuit can also be read as a continuation of Nevada’s advocacy for consensus among the basin states and tribes. With the states unable to reach a long-term agreement and the federal government moving ahead with its own plan, Nevada is now using a different tool to make the same basic argument: that a federal decision without full buy-in from all the states can’t accommodate all their needs and find the innovative solution needed to manage the river.

Nevada argues in its suit that the legally required decision-making process that led to the federal plan failed to account for economic consequences to the Las Vegas area or consider creative alternatives to such drastic water cuts, such as changes to the structure of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevadans argue the process was too narrow and failed to consider solutions that would have avoided such massive theoretical water shortages in a major metropolitan area.

“Nobody can deny that the federal government did a ton of modeling and scenario analyses, but in terms of where the rubber meets the road, what were all the inputs, and what were some of the other analyses that could have been done?” said Kyle Roerink, former director of the Great Basin Water Network, an advocacy group for rural Nevada water resources.

How a court will see that issue has become complicated in the wake of a series of Supreme Court cases that reshaped the federal government’s responsibilities when conducting reviews under NEPA, especially with decisions that involve large, multifaceted infrastructure systems.

The suit, experts say, isn’t the cannonball-splash Colorado River experts have feared for years. That case, in which Arizona challenges the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — on whether they have met their obligations under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, may still materialize. Such a case could force judges to determine fundamental questions about who bears responsibility for the river’s decline. The resulting court battle could last years and remove states’ control over the fate of the river. Castle describes this scenario as where the “really big risks are.” 

Still, Nevada’s lawsuit has cast uncertainty over the river’s near-term operations. Nevada hasn’t yet asked for an immediate restraining order against the federal government, which would request that a judge immediately vacate the plan. But if the state convinces a court to rule against the federal plan, it could throw a wrench in the initial two-year arrangement that was expected to keep Lower Basin states afloat in the near future. 

“We are disappointed to see Nevada filing suit here, and are concerned about what the ramifications will be for the operations plans in 2027 and potentially 2028,” said Jay Weiner in an interview, speaking in his capacity as counsel for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, a senior water rights holder along the Colorado River in Arizona and California.

But experts agree this move, and even a theoretical Arizona suit, don’t strike a death knell for collaboration and negotiation on the river. States in the lower part of the basin may still negotiate regular arrangements to share shortages while litigation proceeds, while the possibility of a full seven-state agreement remains possible if negotiations resume.

Speaking at the Paris Las Vegas casino during the Colorado River Water Users’ Association conference in 2024, Navajo Nation Chief Counsel Bidtah Becker reminded the audience that water litigation and negotiation are not mutually exclusive: “You can get along and argue at the same time, and you develop long-term relationships through that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nevada preached peace on the Colorado River. Now it’s suing to protect its water. on Aug 28, 2026.