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UK-based asset management group buys prominent Melbourne consultancy specialising in wind and solar developments as part of Australian buying spree.

The post UK group snaps up leading wind, solar and battery consultancy as part of Australian buying spree appeared first on Renew Economy.

Another wind and battery project proposed for south-east Queensland, despite pushback by state government and federal MPs.

The post New wind and battery energy park, backed by super funds, proposed for south-east Queensland appeared first on Renew Economy.

Former Liberal leader and ex AEMO system design boss appointed to Snowy Hydro board as market continues its 11-month wait for a budget reset of Snowy 2.0.

The post Former Liberal leader appointed to Snowy Hydro board as market awaits another Snowy 2.0 reset appeared first on Renew Economy.

Smart Energy Council CEO David McElrea on LNP ideology, how to close coal fired generators, and the next policy goals for solar, batteries and EVs. Plus: CEC gives voice to mayors on community benefits.

The post Should ageing coal generators be fed carrots or sticks? | Energy Insiders appeared first on Renew Economy.

If you’ve been a longtime Streetsblog reader, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve been logging about 5-7 bylines every week for this site since I first started in January of 2020. And you also may or may not have noticed that in June, my name pretty abruptly stopped showing up here. That’s because I took a leave of absence following the death of my father.  

My dad was on a very short list of my favorite humans in the world and the most important people in my life, so I won’t attempt to eulogize him here; what he meant to me goes far beyond what could fit within the mission frame of this website.

But because I count many people who read my work as friends who care about me, I want to share a little bit about where I’ve been, and how the experience of becoming his caregiver has impacted my work. 

Recommended Why the New Mobility Revolution Leaves Seniors Behind Kea Wilson March 1, 2021

Over the course of my career, I’ve written countless articles about disability and mobility, as well as the “silver tsunami” of Baby Boomers who are poised to lose their ability to drive in communities where driving is not optional. I have memorized statistics about the third of U.S. households who can’t or don’t use cars, and the rising share of older Americans with mobility challenges who rank among their number. 

None of that prepared me for what happened to my dad. 

In September of last year my father went, in a matter of days, from being a seemingly healthy, active 73-year-old who had recently driven himself more than 500 miles for a multi-day canoe trip, to a stage IV cancer patient with metastases in his bones. Suddenly, dad was relying on a steady diet of sedating painkillers just to make it through the day; chemo soon stole what was left of his energy, and left him falling asleep mid-sentence at the kitchen table.

Needless to say, getting behind the wheel was suddenly and totally out of the question, and the SUV in his garage became an expensive stone around his neck. 

None of my carefully researched articles about increased road testing for seniors or the need for more walkable multi-generational neighborhoods had equipped me with the tools I needed to navigate this. It completely upended my dad’s life, my life, and the lives of my entire family.

It also taught me that it is not enough for transportation reformers to focus solely on projects like bus lanes and infill development. That might help car-dependent families like mine have more mobility options in a few years, or even decades; it would do nothing to help them tomorrow.

Recommended Report: A Third of Americans Can’t Rely On Cars — And 16 Million Have No Access At All Kea Wilson October 2, 2025

That’s doubly true of seniors in ultra-car dependent areas, which unfortunately included my father. 

Recently widowed following the death of my stepmother just a year before, cancer had left my dad functionally unable to leave the condominium in a planned community in rural Ohio that had been his home for 25 years, at least without someone to drive him. That’s because that “planned community” had been deliberately built without sidewalks, any form of fixed-route transit or even basic streetlights on most roads. There was a grocery store next door; you still had to drive to reach it, or walk on a 45 mile per hour arterial. 

The condo complex also backed up to an interstate, which you could hear roaring every time you cracked the windows. Despite the many articles I sent him about PM 2.5 exposure and its links to adverse health conditions — including the type of cancer he eventually developed — Dad still considered that highway an amenity. It allowed him and my stepmother to live deep in the horse country they both loved, where she worked, and he volunteered, at an equestrian therapy center for people with disabilities nearby. 

I think for many transportation reform advocates, it’s easy to write off people who choose car-dependent neighborhoods as uninformed, in dire need of deprogramming from the cult of “car-brain”, or even as victims of the dwindling supply and surging demand for houses along transit corridors. My father’s experience with cancer reminded me that while that can be true, it is also not that simple. 

My dad knew the many ways that his car dependent neighborhood did not serve him, because he read everything I wrote. He was not stubborn or stupid; he was thinking of downsizing before he got his diagnosis. But he loved his home despite all the driving it forced him to do; he was not quite ready to leave the place he’d shared with a wife he was still grieving. By the time he thought he might be ready, he found out he was dying.

As advocates, we can talk all we want about how “housing policy” is intertwined with transportation policy, and why it would be better if more people had the option of living in places without cars. But that is something very different than talking about our attachment to home, which can be among the powerful, emotional and irrational bonds in our lives.

We cannot argue away that love with statistics and policy briefs, even when the person in the car-dependent rural house knows full well that their home does not meet their needs.  

Recommended Car Dependency Helped Build the Modern Nursing Home Landscape. During COVID-19, It’s Killing our Seniors. Kea Wilson April 30, 2020

So yes: we tried to keep my dad in his home, despite the fact that he could not safely leave it without someone to drive him.

My sister and I lived multiple states away, but for months, we traded off flying hundreds of miles to stay with him, tag-teaming in and out of our new role as volunteer chauffeurs. Needless to say, we also served as volunteer nurses, and housekeepers and cooks, and about a million other roles; if this were a different type of website, I could write a whole other essay about how the medical system over-relies on the unpaid labor of families, and particularly daughters. 

I tried to keep up with my work at Streetsblog during this period. I wrote articles in the middle of the night, or in short bursts between administering meds, checking vitals, running to the pharmacy, juggling calls to insurance and dozens of specialists, and the zillion other tiny acts of caregiving that often got me up at 4 am and often stretched my days past midnight. (If you’re a troll who harassed me on the internet during this period for being an “ableist” because I want more cities to have bike lanes: well, I hope you feel bad now!) 

Getting my dad to the doctor, though, proved to be a uniquely difficult burden — and often, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Recommended Why We Can’t Afford to Ignore the Needs of Non-Drivers With Disabilities Kea Wilson August 30, 2021

From my reporting, I knew about the challenges people with disabilities face finding a ride, at least in the abstract. I knew that home health aides and the deeply underfunded paratransit system in Dad’s neighborhood weren’t a panacea, not least because both required the kind of advance notice that mapped poorly onto the dynamic schedule of a cancer patient with constantly emerging medical needs.

I also knew that Uber and taxi drivers wouldn’t help him down the stairs from his front door — if those drivers didn’t cancel the ride once they saw how far out he lived, which many of them did. 

Later, when my dad finally decided to move into an assisted living in my city, I would learn that even paying out the nose for the “all inclusive” option wouldn’t solve our transportation puzzle, either. Retirement communities with hundreds of residents all seemed to have just a single driver on staff; outgoing rides required at least 72 hours’ notice to book, and the staff couldn’t just wait around to bring a resident home.

That might be fine for retirees with low vision who don’t mind reading in a lobby for an hour after seeing their general practitioner; it was brutal for a guy with chemo fatigue who needed hours of recovery every time he left his room. 

Recommended Interview: Tammy Duckworth Insists Every U.S. Transit Station Must Be Accessible Kea Wilson May 20, 2021

The worst part, though, was the sheer mental burden of filling the gaps in a very sick person’s transportation schedule, and how that burden compounded the challenges of caregiving.  

From his very first treatment, my dad simply did not have the energy to call a dozen friends and family to see who could take him to the doctor. Even when I made those calls for him, most people we tried couldn’t help; they were too busy with their own punishing commutes across a region that functionally required everyone to drive long distances for most trips.

When I asked the social worker about other transportation resources, they kicked me to a byzantine app-based “platform” that connected patients with volunteer drivers who often weren’t available, either. The idea of making my terminally ill, not-particularly tech-savvy, Baby Boomer father navigate that app while on opioids when his millennial daughter could barely manage it was enough to break my brain. 

So a lot of days, I cancelled all my interviews and drove Dad myself. Some days, we put nearly a hundred miles on his SUV, between multiple appointments on far-flung medical campuses, over whose scheduling and locations we were offered zero say. I learned that this is just how doctor’s appointments work when you are very sick in a car dependent place: you go where the MRI queue can fit you in tomorrow, even if it’s on the other side of town, and your family has to figure out how to get you there. 

Recommended What We Can Learn From the 30 Percent of Americans Who Can’t Drive Streetsblog May 21, 2024

Here’s the thing: I am deeply aware that a bike lane would not have made any of this better.  

My dad could barely walk in the last months of his life, never mind ride; moreover, even the best bus driver in the world wouldn’t have accompanied him to and from his stop on days when he was struggling. And before any jerks on the internet swarm my inbox to slam me for the “hypocrisy” of relying on a car to get my dying father to the oncologist: please, just stop, because I am exhausted.

Nothing about the movement to end mass, forced, car dependence in our cities has ever been incompatible with the movement to support truly car-dependent people, which many of us will become as our bodies age or become ill. There was a brief period, before his illness progressed, where my father might have been able to maintain his independence with better paratransit near his home; the fact that this period ended so quickly does not mean that he did not deserve that chance.

And I’d even argue that mass, forced car dependence did make my dad’s life worse, even though he relied heavily on cars in his last months.

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with him in gridlocked traffic on the way to urgent care, desperate to get him care for some symptom that was not quite bad enough for an ambulance, and wondering how many of the able-bodied drivers that choked the road around us could have taken the train. Every time I walked through a hospital parking garage, I wondered if getting him care would have been less of a punishing ordeal if all that space had been used to build offices for his umpteen far-flung specialists instead. 

But there’s also an uncomfortable truth that I had not considered deeply before my dad got sick: that sometimes, when we are very ill, no transportation option really serves us anymore. And that includes cars.

Sometimes, the bike ride to the corner store, the walk to the train station, or even the journey from the living room to the attached garage feels like too much. We become housebound, and then we become bed-bound; our bodies change in ways we never expected. The best we can hope for as this failure progresses is a shorter trip to the doctor, or a visit from a friend that will save us from leaving the house at all.

I wish that more transportation reformers and governments alike would incorporate policies that support people who can’t move much at all into their mobility advocacy, like better home health care access, sustainable delivery options, and massive reform to the caregiving industry, including transportation and strong wages for those desperately-needed workers. It would save so much pain if we did. 

Recommended ‘World Day of Remembrance’: Connecting Grief to Activism Dan Langenkamp November 17, 2023

In the very end, I am grateful my father was spared pain by the amazing staff of a hospice house, who took wonderful care of him in his last days. I am equally grateful that my sister and I could be by his side when he passed, and that we could push his hospital bed outdoors to spend his final moments in the garden at sunset.

As a reporter, I have heard countless stories from people who have lost their loved ones to car crashes, including extremely graphic details about what happened to their bodies in their final moments. I do not share all of those details in my writing, but they do haunt me. l do not take for granted for a moment that my father died in peace rather than agony, in my arms rather than on the side of the road. Every single person we lose to traffic violence deserved the same.

In the end, I think the greatest lesson from this time that I will carry into my work is this: there is enough pain in the world already, even before we build a transportation system that ends so many lives too early, and makes so many others harder than they need to be. I still believe that a world with less pain is possible. My dad would want me to keep working to make it real.  

• President Trump may inadvertently gotten Americans out of the cars by starting a war with Iran. Gas prices have risen by $100 billion, costing motorists an average of almost $800 each (Jalopnik).
• Meanwhile, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that the best way to drive down gas prices right now is to drive less (Business Insider). But without the transit and bike lanes the administration is defunding, how else are people supposed to get where they need to go?
• The places that will be hurt the most by the Trump administration’s transit cuts are the major cities that provide half the country’s economic output, Howard Chernick writes.
• Even a guy who doesn’t know how to ride a bike things deriding bike lanes as “DEI” is dumb. (The Guardian)
• Members have been arrested, but a Los Angeles group that paints crosswalks where the city won’t is still at it. (NBC Los Angeles)
• San Francisco residents are arguing over whether it’s OK that cyclists get stuck in streetcar tracks and run over by cars. (Standard)
• Baltimore has a plan to reconnect neighborhoods separated by a “highway to nowhere.” (WMAR)
• Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms says she’ll fund Georgia transit for the first time if elected governor. (11Alive)
• The Minnesota Star-Tribune published a guest column in favor of finding the $224 million to continue the Blue Line project.
• The City of Omaha settled with the owner of a building that partially collapsed during streetcar construction. (Nebraska Public Media)
• An SUV driver hit and killed a man in a wheelchair on a stretch of road in Fort Wayne, Indiana that has no sidewalks. (WPTA)
• Common Edge details the mistakes made during Urban Renewal in New Haven — a common tale in many American cities.
• Runners used to be able to beat Seattle’s “Late 8” bus, but not since it got its own bus lane. (The Urbanist)
• The “cab car” revolutionized rail travel by allowing trains to easily reverse directions at the end of a track. (The Autopian)

Plan by energy ministers to agree on the new design for the National Electricity Market described as "incredibly ambitious" as consultation paper released.

The post “Incredibly ambitious”: Electricity market reforms given express track by energy ministers appeared first on Renew Economy.

Bowen says there is "a lot of work to do" to legalise plug-in solar and batteries. But experts say it's not complicated, and want regulators handed a firm deadline.

The post Plug-in solar “not an overnight proposition,” says Bowen, as pressure mounts to legalise it within 10 months appeared first on Renew Economy.

Hydrogen hopeful announces $1.5 billion proposal to build 3D printable floating wind turbines to make low emissions fuels at hub described as "Steven Bradbury of hydrogen."

The post Hydrogen hopeful wants to build 3D printable floating wind turbines in Tasmania’s field of green dreams appeared first on Renew Economy.

 by David Spratt 

There can be no excuse for not knowing that 1.5°C of warming would create a disastrous outcome, but few have chosen to say so. Indeed, up to the 2025 COP in Belém, the large Australian advocacy and umbrella organizations were actively advocating for 1.5°C, for example that “the 1.5°C threshold represents an ethical and moral boundary”. 

What is the morality in saying 1.5°C is an appropriate threshold when the World Health Organization concludes that more than 200,000 lives have been lost to the "silent killer" of extreme heat in Europe since 2022?

Right now, there is very strong evidence for the coming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports tropical ocean heat to the north-east of North America and western Europe. AMOC is slowing down and now rapidly approaching a tipping point for its collapse over a hundred years.  This would be a going-out-of-business scenario for north-west European agriculture, monsoons that typically deliver rain to West Africa and South Asia would become unreliable, and huge swaths of Europe and Russia would be devastated by drought. As much as half of the world’s viable area for growing corn and wheat could dry out. 

And evidence has been accumulating over the last decade that tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice,  the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The Earth climate system is undergoing abrupt change.

System-level change is happening faster than forecast only two decades ago, and changes are cascading. “If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization,” leading scientists warned in 2017.

A 2025 assessment of non-linear change in climate systems —  the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, Tibetan Plateau, land permafrost, Amazon rainforest, Antarctic sea ice, monsoon systems, Arctic summer sea ice, Arctic winter sea ice, and Barents sea ice — found abrupt shifts in all of these across multiple models, except for monsoons. At global warming of 1.5°C, six out of 10 studied climate subsystems already showed large-scale abrupt shifts across multiple models.

Setting goals

There are too few words and too little focus from climate advocates, from governments and from policy-makers on these issues. Is 1.5°C a desirable end-goal, or a political trade-off? What are their goals and what are they aiming to protect? For more than a decade advocates talked a lot about 1.5°C, but now they seem to be dropping the topic from their agendas. So what’s the new goal? Two degrees?

For a quarter of a century, policymakers have speculated about the maximum climate damage that civilisation and the Earth system can tolerate and adapt to. How close to the edge of the climate cliff can we stand, without falling to our death? 

Clearly, the goal pursued in mainstream climate advocacy is not the provision of “maximum protection” to the most climate vulnerable, or “concern to protect the welfare of all people, all species, and all generations”, but rather some poorly-informed notion of maximum acceptable damage.

To protect small-island states, the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctica, the Amazon — indeed to provide protection for the many places and people we care about — requires returning to a climate similar to the relatively stable Holocene conditions of the last 9000 years and fixed human settlement, during which time CO2 levels did not exceed 280 ppm CO2. it also requires preventing a cascade of tipping points in the meanwhile.

If this were the goal, activists and policymakers would be advocating a “three levers” approach to reversing global warming: a strategy to rapidly “reduce, remove and repair”. That means reducing emissions to zero at emergency speed; removing carbon by drawdown to return atmospheric conditions to the Holocene zone; and the urgent research on active cooling to identify safe interventions that protect and repair vital systems and, in the shorter term, aim to prevent warming reaching a level that triggers a cascade of calamitous tipping points that are irreversible on human timescales. 

Note:  This is an extract from Searching for climate action’s missing goal, available at: https://safeclimate.org.au/paper/searching-for-climate-actions-missing-goal

 

More than 30 organisations urge federal government to do more in backing electric appliances, equipment and vehicles to cut costs and emissions.

The post Electrifying homes and cars can save $5,000 a year, but households confused by policy “mixed messages” appeared first on Renew Economy.

Australia needs to phase out coal, gas and oil faster than planned to meet its climate commitments, a report says, with changes in energy, transport and mining.

The post Hitting climate goals means no coal power, and no new petrol and diesel cars by 2035, report finds appeared first on Renew Economy.

In our latest, Scott talks with Grace with Siskiyou Rising Tide about the campaign to stop lithium mining in southeast Oregon and the recent action they did at the state…

Beyond the Shareholder Verdict: Four AI Systems Examine Who Gains, Who Loses — and Why the Independent Shell Archive Matters

By John Donovan

The original question was deliberately simple:

Are Shell plc shareholders better off with or without royaldutchshellplc.com?

Claude, Grok, Gemini and use.ai all ultimately reached the same broad conclusion: shareholders are better off with the independent archive than without it.

But the exercise did not end there.

The four AI systems were subsequently asked to look much deeper: at trust in Shell management and corporate PR, at evidential reliability, and finally at the interests of other stakeholders including employees, directors, regulators, trade unions, journalists and the general public.

The expanded assessments make the original result considerably more interesting.

What emerges is not a crude argument that “Shell is bad and critics are good.”

It is a much more sophisticated picture of information asymmetry, institutional incentives and corporate memory.

And one conclusion now stands out above all others:

The same archive can be inconvenient to those responsible for managing Shell’s reputation while simultaneously being valuable to those responsible for scrutinising Shell’s conduct.

That distinction runs through virtually every expanded assessment.

Four different analyses, one recurring theme

The four systems did not reason identically.

Claude was notably cautious about the reliability of critics as well as corporations.

Grok concentrated heavily on institutional incentives and the need to triangulate evidence.

use.ai went furthest in describing the archive as an early-warning and accountability mechanism.

Gemini subjected the archive to what amounts to an investor-materiality test: if it disappeared tomorrow, what measurable financial benefit would shareholders actually receive?

Despite those different approaches, the conclusions converge.

Claude: scepticism should run in both directions

Claude’s expanded assessment may be the most intellectually useful because it refuses to give anybody a free pass.

It scores Shell management at 4/10 for overall trustworthiness, corporate PR at 3/10, and properly sourced independent scrutiny at 6/10.

But Claude also makes an important qualification: an independent archive does not become authoritative merely because it is independent.

It identifies the risks of selection bias, incomplete context, outdated allegations and a critic’s own institutional or personal incentives. Its answer is not to distrust independent scrutiny, but to subject it to the same verification discipline applied to corporate claims.

Claude therefore places courts and regulators first in its reliability hierarchy, followed by audited filings, established journalism and corroborated whistleblower evidence. Properly sourced historical archives come later, with Shell PR last. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

That is important for royaldutchshellplc.com.

The case for the archive becomes stronger—not weaker—when its own limitations are openly acknowledged.

The archive should not ask readers to believe something because John Donovan says it.

It should ask them to inspect the document.

That distinction is fundamental.

Claude also introduced one of the most useful concepts in the entire exercise: historical evidence should have a “decay function.”

A controversy from twenty years ago should not automatically be treated as proof of how present management behaves today.

But nor should it simply vanish from consideration.

Patterns in corporate culture, disclosure behaviour and institutional incentives remain relevant evidence. They should raise the level of verification required, not create a permanent presumption of guilt. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

That is a highly defensible standard for a historical corporate archive.

Grok: the stakeholder conflict becomes explicit

Grok’s expanded response takes the argument into new territory.

It asks not merely whether the archive is useful, but to whom.

Its stakeholder assessment finds Shell directors clearly worse off from the archive’s continued existence because permanent external scrutiny increases the cost of reputation management and makes historical controversies harder to leave behind.

But regulators are better off.

Journalists are better off.

The general public is better off.

Trade unions are, on balance, somewhat better off.

Employees present a more mixed case because they may experience reputational spillover even while some employees—particularly those concerned with safety, governance or internal accountability—may benefit from the existence of an external record. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

This is a revealing distinction.

An archive can be bad for narrative control without being bad for corporate governance.

Indeed, those two effects may be causally connected.

The easier it is for an organisation to control its historical narrative, the harder it may become for outsiders—or even future directors—to reconstruct what actually happened.

Grok also ranks court and regulatory records first, formal filings second, and properly sourced independent historical archives very highly. Shell senior management appears near the bottom of its hierarchy, while Shell PR comes last. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Its wider conclusion is essentially that the shareholder should never confuse access to information with neutrality.

Management knows more than outsiders.

But management also has more at stake in how that information is presented.

use.ai: who gains from an independent archive?

use.ai provides perhaps the clearest stakeholder matrix.

Its assessment is:

Stakeholder Overall effect of the archive Shell employees Neutral / slightly positive Shell directors Negative personally, potentially positive for governance Regulators Strongly positive Trade unions Positive News media Strongly positive General public Positive

The reasoning deserves attention.

For employees, use.ai sees an external whistleblowing and safety-accountability function, while recognising possible damage to morale and the danger of publishing unverified workplace complaints.

For directors, it distinguishes personal comfort from governance quality. Persistent independent scrutiny may be unwelcome to individual board members, but it can also operate as a forcing mechanism against complacency and internal groupthink.

For regulators, use.ai sees an archive as a potential lead-generation and historical-pattern resource—subject, importantly, to regulators independently verifying anything they use.

For journalists, the value is particularly obvious: a searchable repository of old correspondence, court papers, internal material and historical reporting reduces the enormous time required to reconstruct a complicated corporate history. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

The use.ai assessment also makes perhaps the strongest argument about asymmetrical shareholder risk.

It says that over-trusting management and PR is economically more dangerous than over-trusting critics.

Its reasoning is straightforward.

A shareholder who gives excessive weight to an unreliable critic may become unduly pessimistic.

A shareholder who gives excessive weight to management can fail to recognise a material liability, accounting problem, reserve issue or operational risk until substantial value has already been lost.

That does not prove critics right.

It explains why independent challenge has option value.

use.ai therefore rates overall trustworthiness at 6.0/10 for Shell management, 2.7/10 for Shell PR and 7.5/10 for properly sourced independent scrutiny. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Gemini: apply the economic test

Gemini’s expanded forensic assessment approaches the question rather differently.

Instead of concentrating primarily on trust, it asks the investor’s most basic question:

What happens economically if the archive disappears?

Its answer is essentially: very little.

Shell’s valuation is overwhelmingly determined by matters such as oil and gas prices, LNG economics, production, refining margins, capital expenditure, debt, buybacks, dividends, regulation, project returns and geopolitics.

Removing a critical website does not increase Shell’s reserves.

It does not increase LNG volumes.

It does not increase cash flow.

It does not make an offshore project more profitable.

It does not increase dividend capacity.

Gemini therefore finds little evidence that eliminating royaldutchshellplc.com would produce a measurable financial gain for shareholders.

What would disappear, however, is an independent body of historical material available to investors, journalists and researchers. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

That creates a striking asymmetry.

The archive’s disadvantages are primarily reputational.

Its advantages are primarily informational.

Gemini scores potential financial harm to Shell shareholders at just 2/10, while giving shareholder transparency 8/10, corporate accountability 8/10, historical usefulness 9/10, and an overall net shareholder benefit of 8/10. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Its central phrase is particularly apt: the site functions as a “long-memory corporate watchdog.”

That may be the most concise description produced by any of the systems.

The most important new finding: sourcing discipline decides everything

The expanded assessments have also produced an important qualification which should not be hidden.

Independent does not automatically mean reliable.

All four analyses, in different ways, return to the same condition:

The archive’s usefulness depends on the quality of its evidence.

Authenticated internal documents carry weight.

Court judgments carry weight.

Regulatory records carry weight.

Contemporaneous correspondence carries weight.

Reliable journalism carries weight.

Clearly identified whistleblower evidence can carry weight.

Unsupported allegation carries far less.

Gemini states the point especially clearly: the stronger the provenance and the clearer the distinction between established fact, allegation and commentary, the stronger the case that the archive serves shareholders rather than merely criticising management. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

That principle should arguably be treated as the editorial constitution of royaldutchshellplc.com and The Shell Leaks Files.

The objective should not be to make the archive less critical.

It should be to make it more forensic.

Shell PR emerges badly from all four assessments

One result has remained remarkably stable throughout the entire exercise.

None of the AI systems treats Shell PR as an objective information source.

This does not mean they accuse Shell communications personnel of routinely lying.

The criticism is structural rather than personal.

PR exists to select, frame and communicate information in the company’s interests.

Claude puts this particularly well: the relevant question is not simply whether PR is honest, but what filter is being applied and what that filter predictably leaves out. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

Grok reaches much the same conclusion, describing PR as legitimate advocacy operating within legal constraints rather than as a neutral truth-finding institution. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

use.ai similarly places Shell corporate communications at the bottom of its evidential hierarchy. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

This matters because Shell possesses communications resources that no independent critic can remotely match.

The informational contest is therefore inherently asymmetrical.

An independent archive does not need to replace Shell’s account.

Its value lies in ensuring Shell’s account is not the only account readily available.

Directors: the most revealing stakeholder

Perhaps the most interesting stakeholder is Shell’s board.

The expanded responses repeatedly distinguish between two different interests.

As individuals responsible for corporate reputation, directors may have strong reasons to dislike a permanent archive of controversies, historical correspondence and internal material.

As fiduciaries responsible for oversight, however, those same directors may benefit from external scrutiny that makes it harder for problems to be buried below board level.

Claude captures the tension especially well: an archive may be negative for a director’s personal or reputational interests while simultaneously being positive for the director’s governance function. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

That is not merely a rhetorical point.

It goes to the heart of corporate governance.

A board should not logically measure the usefulness of scrutiny by how comfortable that scrutiny makes the board feel.

Regulators and journalists: near-unambiguous beneficiaries

The strongest stakeholder consensus concerns regulators and the media.

For regulators, a properly sourced historical archive can provide leads, documents, context and evidence of patterns extending across different management generations.

For journalists, it can provide the documentary background that a normal news cycle does not preserve.

Both groups have the professional capacity to verify what they find.

That is crucial.

An archive does not have to be the final authority to be useful.

Its function may instead be to tell a regulator or journalist:

“There is something here worth examining.”

Claude describes regulators as close to pure beneficiaries of a well-sourced archive because they possess the institutional tools to distinguish useful evidence from noise. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

use.ai similarly rates the effect on regulators and journalists as strongly positive. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

The public-interest case is broader than the shareholder case

The expanded assessments also expose a wider point.

Shareholders at least have annual reports, market announcements, AGMs, voting rights, analyst research and formal investor-relations channels.

The ordinary member of the public has none of those privileged relationships.

Yet companies such as Shell have enormous effects on environmental policy, employment, public revenues, energy security and communities around the world.

For the general public, therefore, historical corporate transparency arguably has value independent of the share price.

Both Claude and Grok regard the public as, on balance, better off with continued access to an independent historical record—again subject to accurate sourcing and clear distinction between evidence and allegation. (Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com)

What the expanded exercise does not prove

There are limits to what can legitimately be claimed.

Four AI systems agreeing does not establish an economic fact.

The scores are analytical judgments, not empirical measurements of Shell’s share price.

The exercise does not prove that every article on royaldutchshellplc.com is correct.

It does not prove that every criticism of Shell is justified.

It does not prove that management statements are unreliable.

And it certainly does not mean that independent critics should escape scrutiny.

Indeed, the expanded answers argue precisely the opposite.

Everyone should be checked.

Shell should be checked.

Critics should be checked.

Whistleblowers should be corroborated.

Historical claims should be sourced.

Old allegations should be labelled appropriately.

Corrections should be made when evidence requires them.

That is not a weakness in the case for an independent archive.

It is the strongest possible version of that case.

The emerging model: corporate memory outside corporate control

Taken together, the four assessments suggest that royaldutchshellplc.com is best understood not simply as a “gripesite” or even merely as a campaigning website.

Its potentially distinctive value lies in something different:

persistent corporate memory outside corporate control.

Corporations continuously change.

Chief executives retire.

Boards turn over.

Websites are redesigned.

Press releases vanish into archives.

Legal disputes settle.

Corporate names change.

PR strategies move on.

But liabilities, environmental consequences, governance lessons and historical facts can survive for decades.

An independent archive can preserve continuity across those discontinuities.

That is precisely what conventional corporate communications are not designed to do.

The updated verdict

The expanded assessments make the original consensus stronger, but also more qualified.

The question is no longer simply:

“Does royaldutchshellplc.com embarrass Shell?”

It plainly can.

Nor is the proper question:

“Is everything on an independent archive automatically trustworthy?”

It plainly is not.

The more useful question is:

Does society—and do Shell’s own shareholders—benefit from the continued existence of an independent, searchable and increasingly source-disciplined historical record of one of the world’s largest corporations?

Across Claude, Grok, Gemini and use.ai, the answer remains substantially the same.

Yes.

Shareholders benefit from reduced information asymmetry.

Regulators benefit from additional leads and historical context.

Journalists benefit from documentary continuity.

Trade unions and whistleblowers can benefit from information outside corporate channels.

The public benefits from preservation of corporate history.

Directors and PR professionals bear more of the cost because independent scrutiny limits narrative control.

And that, perhaps, is the most revealing conclusion of the entire exercise.

The stakeholder groups most burdened by the archive are those responsible for managing Shell’s reputation.

The stakeholder groups most helped by it are those responsible for examining what Shell has actually done.

Those are not the same thing.

And for an archive whose purpose is independent corporate scrutiny, that distinction may be the strongest argument for its continued existence.

Why the Independent Shell Archive Matters was first posted on September 13, 2026 at 10:43 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

Registered nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital in Olympia Fields, Illinois, will hold a strike for one day on September 15 to protest the administration’s retaliation against nurses who speak up and fight for their patients.

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 6, 2026 thru Sat, September 12, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (10 articles)

• Satellite images of penguin droppings reveal impact of antarctic warming Penguin colonies are so large that their masses of excrement can be seen from space, offering scientists a useful means of studying the Antarctic birds. An analysis of 30 years of satellite images of penguin guano shows how the birds’ diets are shifting in response to warming. Yale Environment 360, Staff, Sep 06, 2026.
• Learning from the summers of 1976 and 2026 We have changed the climate in which our weather happens Climat Lab Book, Ed Hawkins, Sep 7, 2026.
• How climate change may amplify the impact of earthquakes in the Arctic Phys.org, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Sep 07, 2026.
• America is losing its war against wildfire The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. Grist, Mark Betancourt, Sep 08, 2026.
• Many People Aren`t Connecting the Dots Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather Scientific evidence has never been stronger. Why aren’t more people making the link? Inside Climate News, Kiley Price, Sep 08, 2026.
• Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis? In the first project of its kind, scientists are trying to answer if the future of Alaska’s streams and tundra may depend not on survival of the fittest but on how species adapt together The Guardian, Gloria Dickie, Sep 09, 2026.
• We just had the hottest August, hottest summer, and hottest year to date in U.S. history NOAA data show unprecedented heat, as deepening drought, shrinking reservoirs, and a severe wildfire season underscore the growing impacts of a warming climate. Could El Niño bring some relief? Yale Climate Connections, Bob Henson, Sep 09, 2026.
• Major study to assess impacts of climate change on Scotland`s canals Scottish Canals is working with two globally renowned climate and heritage experts to assess the growing challenges posed by climate change to Scotland’s network of canals. The Herald News, Craig Williams, Sep 10, 2026.
• Climate `feedback loops` could worsen global warming by 30%, study finds Emissions of planet-heating methane and CO2 from natural sources are worsening the climate crisis, paper says The Guardian, Oliver Milman, Sep 10, 2026.
• Earth just had its hottest August on record The intensifying super El Niño, combined with global warming, is favored to make 2026 the hottest year on record, with 2027 expected to be even hotter. Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, Sep 10, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (4 articles)

• The Worst Case Is Still on the Table Why removing RCP8.5 from the National Climate Assessment would be a serious mistake The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler, Sep 04, 2026.
• Climate experts respond to the government’s plan to amend the Fifth National Climate Assessment Climate.Us, Rebecca Lindsey, Sep 8, 2026.
• As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond A rift over how IPCC messages are produced and turned into policy is creating tensions in the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs Climate Home News, Matteo Civillini, Sep 09, 2026.
• With multilateralism in crisis, what`s next for climate philanthropy? Climate philanthropy must do more than fill the gaps left by retreating governments and find new ways to support climate action in a fragmented global landscape. Climate Home News, Megan Rowling, Sep 11, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (3 articles)

• This is the work of our lifetime: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson urges action after new UN climate report A United Nations report has found that the world will warm to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Climate solutions advocate Ayana Elizabeth Johnson urges a quicker implementation of known strategies - and determination rather than despair. NPR, Joel Rose, Sep 05, 2026.
• Rewetting peatlands may curb warming-driven CO? emissions Press release from the University of Münster about a new paper published in Nature Communications. Phys.org, Kathrin Kottke, Sep 10, 2026.
• How California is kicking its natural gas habit Solar and batteries matter, but they’re not the only reasons for the steep decline in gas-fired electricity. Inside Climate News, Dan Gearino, Sep 11, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (3 articles)

• Reform continues to cast doubt on climate science. Do its supporters agree? Climate scepticism is common at the Reform party conference, but many also criticise Labour for failing to protect Britons from hot weather The Guardian, Fiona Harvey, Sep 05, 2026.
• Fixing one of climate`s worst plots This is the third and last in our series discussing the use of unadjusted data and how it overstates the warmth of the 1930s over the U.S. Skeptical Science, Andrew Dessler, Sep 07, 2026.
• Factcheck: Reform UK`s 45 false or misleading claims about climate and energy Carbon Brief gathers together by topic and factchecks 45 false or misleading claims made by the ReformUK's leadership relating to climate change, renewables and net-zero. Carbon Brief, Carbon Brief Staff, Sep 11, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (2 article)

• Can Studying Heat Waves in Real Time Save Lives? Heat drove medical emergencies across the country last summer. Tracking those changes more quickly could help doctors prepare. Inside Climate News, Keerti Gopal, Sep 04, 2026.
• The Guardian view on extreme heat: its scale should be a wake-up call to us all | Editorial With thousands dead across Europe this summer, it’s time to recognise heatwaves as the major natural disasters they are The Guardian, Editorial, Sep 06, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (2 articles)

• Climate Trunk - Political Economy Summary post of John Lang's Climate Trunk visuals in the "Political Economy" ring Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, Sep 09, 2026.
• Beyond the heatwave: what it really takes for climate warnings to cut through in the UK As trust in institutions wavers, experts say local, collective action is more effective in driving change The Guardian, Natalie Wint, Sep 12, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 article)

• Does hosting wind turbines provide farmers with additional income? Yes - Wind projects provide farmers with substantial economic benefits while allowing most land to remain in agricultural use. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, Sep 8, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

• Global warming is ruining their way of life. These Colorado ranchers demand accountability A group of Colorado ranchers who are struggling with severe drought and heat have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a climate case that soon will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ranchers say that big oil companies should be held accountable for their role in causing climate change. LA Times, Ian James, Sep 05, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (1 article)

• The Arctic Report Card Matters More Than Ever; AGU Joins Partners to Publish in 2026 The critical and highly anticipated yearly assessment will be carried forward through a partnership with CIRES/CU Boulder and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Eos, Chris Avery and Kristen Averyt Hinton, Sep 09, 2026.

Miscellaneous (1 article)

• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #36 2026 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 30, 2026 thru Sat, September 5, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Sep 6, 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!

Registered nurses at Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston, Maine will hold an informational picket on Tuesday, September 15 in solidarity with nurse colleagues within the Prime Healthcare hospital system who are on strike on the same day at Olympia Fields Hospital in Olympia Fields, Illinois to protest the suspension of six nurses at Olympia Fields.

Registered nurses at three Prime Healthcare hospitals in Nevada and California, as well as nurses and health care workers at an additional hospital in California, will hold a sympathy strike for one day on September 15 in solidarity with nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital in Illinois who are striking on the same day to protest the suspension of six nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital.

Across much of the U.S., people have little way to know when the air they breathe turns dangerous.

Over recent decades, federal funding for public air monitoring has declined, the number of monitors has fallen, and much of the remaining equipment is aging or located far from major polluters.

Now, the stakes are rising: Wildfire smoke is reaching more communities, data centers are adding pollution, and climate-driven heat waves are worsening ozone levels. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has delayed and rolled back requirements meant to hold companies accountable for their emissions.

As the public monitoring system has weakened, communities have increasingly turned to an alternative: low-cost sensors they can use themselves. 

But a Floodlight investigation finds industry is moving to restrict that option, too.

A scientist discusses an air-monitoring car with Louisiana Environmental Action Network staff. The Trump administration canceled the group’s air monitoring grant last year. Zachary Kanzler for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network

Since 2024, lawmakers in Louisiana, Ohio, and Kentucky have passed strikingly similar bills — backed by chemical or manufacturing trade groups — that curb the use of community-collected data in enforcement actions.

The bills share a common thread: They block regulators from using air-quality data for enforcement purposes unless it meets EPA-approved standards. Similar bills in West Virginia have yet to pass. 

In case after case, proponents have made the same argument: Community monitoring isn’t reliable enough for regulatory enforcement. 

Yet when lawmakers in West Virginia offered a version of a bill designed to ensure accuracy, industry resisted. 

The bill “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent,” an official at the chemical giant Chemours wrote in an internal email.

An early-warning system in decline

Thousands of small, often-unremarkable instruments serve as the nation’s early-warning system for dangerous air — detecting pollution that people can’t always see or smell.

Some sit inside shelters the size of garden sheds. Others are mounted on rooftops or tucked into fenced compounds. Together, these monitors measure pollutants ranging from ozone and carbon monoxide to carcinogens such as benzene and vinyl chloride.

The network grew out of the 1963 Clean Air Act and transformed the way the nation tracked air pollution, giving regulators data they could use to identify dangerous conditions and hold polluters accountable. Since then, air pollution has fallen dramatically across much of the U.S.

But today, the network is “showing its age,” said Chet Wayland, who led EPA’s Air Quality Assessment Division for nearly two decades. “And it’s getting smaller over time.”

For example:

• Leaks, termites, and ants plague monitoring stations in one state while officials in another have resorted to shopping on eBay for discontinued parts, according to a 2020 congressional watchdog report. 
• Adjusted for inflation, federal grants to support the network have fallen more than 35 percent over the past two decades, while the Trump administration tried unsuccessfully last year to eliminate them entirely — and is trying again this year.
• The number of government air monitors nationwide fell by nearly half over the same 20-year period, according to EPA data.

The decline was especially pronounced among air monitors that track toxic chemicals, including those linked to cancer and other serious health effects. 

For example, the network monitoring vinyl chloride — the carcinogen at the center of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — shrank by more than half from 2004 to 2025. So did the network for chloroprene and benzene.

Floodlight analyzed the largest industrial sources of air pollution in Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, and West Virginia — where the monitoring legislation was introduced — and compared what each one reported releasing against what public monitors in those states are capable of detecting.

For 71 of the 100 facilities examined, the chemical they release most isn’t measured by any government monitor in the state. 

Hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, methanol — no air monitor currently reporting to the EPA measures those toxic chemicals. 

Nelson Roque, an assistant professor at Penn State, co-authored a 2025 study that found nearly six in 10 U.S. counties have no public air monitor at all.

Such gaps matter most in communities already facing higher risks. Black and low-income people bear a disproportionate share of elevated cancer risks from air toxics, according to the EPA. 

“We’ve realized the value of other infrastructure, and yet not this one,” Roque said. “Last I checked, we all breathe air.”

The shrinking public network has set the stage for another fight: who gets to measure the air, and whose data counts.

Louisiana: A monitoring gap, and the fight to keep it

Public air monitors in Louisiana — a national hub for oil, gas, and petrochemicals — are often located miles from major industrial polluters and fail to test for some of the most dangerous chemicals, a recent Floodlight investigation found. 

Community groups have tried to fill that gap. A $500,000 grant awarded under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act would have allowed the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to establish air monitoring in 27 communities it identified as pollution hot spots.

But the group was able to install monitors in only four communities before the Trump administration canceled the grant last year. 

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“It’s like having your legs knocked out from under you,” said LEAN executive director Marylee Orr.

In 2024, meanwhile, Louisiana became the first state to restrict the use of community air monitoring data. 

The Louisiana Chemistry Association helped draft the Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act (CAMRA), which cites the need for “science-based standards” and bars the use of air pollution data in enforcement or regulatory actions unless it’s captured by EPA-approved monitors. That equipment typically costs tens of thousands of dollars.

In a previous statement to Floodlight, LCA president David Cresson defended the law, saying it ensures “data used to enforce our state’s environmental protection laws complies with minimum U.S. EPA standards” and doesn’t stop residents from monitoring air quality for their own information — only from using unregulated methods for enforcement purposes.

The same period brought other rollbacks, some sought by the chemical industry’s most powerful national lobbying group. The American Chemistry Council — the LCA’s national counterpart — spent more than $22 million lobbying in 2024, ranking 10th among 9,200 organizations tracked by an independent watchdog group. 

The ACC and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers last year requested a blanket two-year exemption from Biden-era regulations meant to cut certain toxic emissions by nearly 80 percent at roughly 200 chemical manufacturing plants. They didn’t get the blanket exemption — but individual plants that applied did.

So far, President Donald Trump’s EPA has granted more than 60 petrochemical facilities exemptions from the rule, and the agency is now weighing whether to rescind it entirely. 

The ACC also successfully lobbied against federal rules that would have required about two dozen chemical plants to conduct fenceline monitoring for ethylene oxide, a carcinogen that contributes substantially to the elevated cancer risk in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.

The national trade group did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its lobbying or its involvement in Louisiana’s CAMRA law. Nor did it explain its role in promoting similar legislation in other states. 

But in an emailed statement, the ACC said it has invested in community air-monitoring projects and “publicly advocated for expanded access to credible air quality information.” It said it supports monitoring that produces reliable, transparent data and gives communities and regulators information they can use to make informed decisions.

Kentucky takes a page from Louisiana 

Odors from Rubbertown, an industrial complex that housed tire and synthetic rubber plants during World War II, have long bothered residents in west Louisville, Kentucky. So, in the early 2000s, the city’s Air Pollution Control District, the EPA and others launched a study that confirmed what residents had long known: The air had unacceptably high levels of toxic pollutants. 

A plan was enacted, regulations were revised, and the air was continuously tested. More than 15 years later, regulators announced toxic air contaminants in the Louisville metro area were down by almost 80 percent — with the most dangerous chemicals cut by 96 percent.

Despite the success of expanded air monitoring in Louisville, Kentucky lawmakers have moved in the opposite direction. In March 2025, 10 months after Louisiana’s CAMRA law, they passed House Bill 137, which also restricted how air-monitoring data can be used in enforcement actions. 

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Lloyd “Rusty” Cress, executive director of the Kentucky Chemical Council, told the Kentucky Lantern that the bill was similar to Louisiana’s community air monitoring legislation.  The law says air needs to be tested with “scientifically defensible” methods — echoing a phrase used in an ACC blog post in 2023.

The ACC, the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical and Chemours all lobbied for it.

Jess Loizeaux, a Chemours spokesperson, said the company doesn’t object to community air monitoring. “We object to community air monitoring results being used for enforcement decisions without first verifying the validity and accuracy of the data through official tests performed by trained technicians at the appropriate regulatory authority,” she told Floodlight.

Kentucky’s political push unfolded against a backdrop of major gaps in public air monitoring. Only one of the state’s 25 largest air polluters is close to an air monitoring station that measures the top toxic chemical it emits.

Fewer than a quarter of the state’s counties have an air monitoring station. 

Ohio’s restrictions meet with legal challenge 

Ohio’s new air monitoring rule was tucked into last year’s budget bill with no named sponsor.  It, too, stops regulators from acting on air-monitoring data collected by community groups. 

“When we take away the ability for those folks to have a reasonably priced monitor … for their own protection, we’ve just taken any tool they had right out of their hands,” said Miranda Leppla, an attorney who sued the state over the new rules last year on behalf of environmental groups.

The lawsuit also challenges another provision in the budget bill that instructs state regulators to remove Ohio’s “air nuisance rule,” which allowed citizens to take legal action against companies whose emissions endanger public health.

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One of the plaintiffs, Donna Ballinger, lives in Middletown, Ohio, hundreds of feet from a steel manufacturing plant that frequently rains down black, white, and gray particles onto her house and yard, she said. Fumes sometimes burn her eyes and throat, she said, and she often holds her nose when walking between her house and car. 

“My fear is cancer,” Ballinger told Floodlight.

She has an air monitor mounted in her front yard. But Ohio’s new requirement has made it impossible to use the data such monitors collect “as evidence of the nuisance conditions,” the lawsuit says.

The Ohio Chemistry Technology Council backed the measure. The group did not respond to Floodlight’s requests for an interview.

Tony Long, general counsel for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, said businesses are concerned that uncalibrated air monitors will spread misinformation.

“Given our litigious nature in this state, we think that the guardrails make sense,” he told Floodlight. “You don’t want to be stopped for speeding on an uncalibrated speed gun.”

With more than 90 public air monitoring stations, Ohio has a more robust air monitoring network than some states. Yet none of Ohio’s 25 largest air polluters are within 20 miles of a public air monitoring station that measures its top toxic emission. In fact, no air monitor in the U.S. measures the chemical that 10 of them release most.

Ohio’s Syensqo Specialty Polymers plant, which makes a resin used in plastics, released more than 130 tons of volatile organic compounds into the air last year, according to Ohio regulators.

The nearest air monitoring station is about 4 miles away — in West Virginia — and doesn’t measure VOCs. 

Industry resistance stalls West Virginia efforts 

West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection runs just 14 monitoring sites in 12 counties. The other 43 counties have no state monitoring stations at all.

None of West Virginia’s 25 largest air polluters has a public air monitor within 25 miles that measures the pollutant it releases most. For 17 of the facilities, no air monitor anywhere in the U.S. measures their top toxic emission.

In 2024, a state bill backed by the West Virginia Manufacturers Association would have barred community air monitoring data from use in regulation, enforcement and lawsuits; it passed the House but died in the Senate — partly because industry couldn’t agree on what to include.

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A compromise version of the 2024 bill, drafted to address the concerns of some lawmakers, would have let regulators use community data if the monitors met manufacturer standards. Industry refused to support it. 

In emailed comments about the compromise bill, West Virginia Manufacturers Association Bill Bissett said it “neuters” the measure and was “now toothless.” Chemours’ Jeff Fritz wrote, “I do not like this draft,” and said the bill “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent,” according to emails obtained by Mountain State Spotlight. Neither Bissett nor Fritz responded to requests for comment.

Subsequent bills, introduced in 2025 and 2026, also failed.

Why monitoring matters 

Evidence shows that better monitoring can reduce pollution — and potentially save lives. 

In 2018, the EPA made refineries begin monitoring benzene along their fencelines, and within five years, the number of refineries above EPA’s benzene action level dropped by half, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

While some states have made it difficult to know what’s in the air, others have been proactive: 

• California is funding equipment and training for residents in fenceline communities to monitor for things like pesticides, hexavalent chromium, and other toxic chemicals. From 2017 to 2025, the state budgeted $1.4 billion to help communities that have historically been overburdened with air pollution.
• Colorado required four industrial plants to install fenceline monitors that measure hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and hydrogen cyanide in real time. The state also bought two mobile vans that regularly sample the same pollutants in surrounding neighborhoods. 
• The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and its contractors operate 33 automated gas chromatographs — sophisticated equipment that collects air samples every hour and provides near real-time readings of volatile organic compounds. 

But in much of the U.S, those who live near industrial plants still have little way to know what they’re breathing.

An unanswered question

Reonda Victor lives in Louisiana’s heavily industrialized corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where flares from industrial plants often illuminate the night sky. 

Her mother, grandmother, and sister all had breast cancer. Concerned about her own risk, she underwent genetic testing, which showed no predisposition to the disease, she said.

The closest public air monitoring station to her home — which lies in an area where air pollution poses one of the highest cancer risks in the country — tests only for lead. 

Did industrial pollution cause the illnesses that struck her family members? She can’t say. But proper air monitoring could help answer that question, she said.

“Without information, we don’t know.”

Kentucky Public Radio contributed to this investigation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s air monitors are disappearing. So is your power to expose polluters. on Sep 13, 2026.

A recent report from Healthy Eating Research (HER) recommends a new definition for ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to create effective food policy. They also highlight policy opportunities to limit their consumption. The panel hoped the report can aid federal agencies as they work toward an official UPF definition.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently submitted the first federal definition of UPFs for final review after considering input from “thousands of stakeholders, including industry, consumer organizations, researchers, and members of the public,” according to a press release from HHS. It did not provide the proposed definition.

The HER report considers UPFs as products with at least one cosmetic additive to increase palatability or ingredient of non-culinary use not found in a home kitchen, like high fructose corn syrup. 

The panel’s definition is based on the Nova food classification system, developed by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. While the Nova system provides a comprehensive framework for studying UPFs in a research setting, it is difficult to employ operationally for policymaking, explains Jim Krieger, the panel co-chair and Executive Director of Healthy Food America.

By creating a policy-oriented definition, government agencies can easily and consistently identify UPFs by referencing a comprehensive list of UPF ingredient markers. The report suggests that a federal agency should monitor the constantly changing food supply and update the list with additional ingredients regularly. Used alongside existing food evaluation measures, these approaches account for a product’s level of processing, nutrient content, and ingredients.

UPFs are typically processed foods with several ingredients, such as sodas, candy, flavored chips, and breakfast cereals, designed to be shelf-stable, sensorily appealing, marketable, and convenient. More than half of the calories that Americans consume come from UPFs– one of the highest levels of consumption in the world, according to the report.

“Americans face an unprecedented burden of diet-related disease, and the dominance of ultra-processed foods is a major contributor,” Dariush Mozaffarian, HER panel member and Director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, tells Food Tank.

Studies including those published in The BMJ and the British Journal of Nutrition, link UPF consumption with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and mental health disorders. These findings have raised concerns among policymakers and government agencies, including the current administration, according to the report.

Using their definition, the panel recommends five policies that it believes are likely to be implemented by the federal government and effective in reducing UPF consumption in America. “The goal is not to eliminate all processed foods, but to shift the food system toward healthier formulations and defaults that make it easier, not harder, for people to eat well,” says Mozaffarian.

Their first recommendation is to tax select UPFs to increase their retail price and reduce their sales and consumption. Products would be chosen based on studies linking them to negative health outcomes, including sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats. 

The panelists do not recommend taxing all UPFs, as it would disproportionately affect low-income consumers. They suggest that UPF tax revenues be invested into programming that benefits those disproportionately affected by them, such as healthy eating programs.

“If we raise prices on these products without simultaneously improving access to affordable, minimally processed foods, we risk worsening food insecurity,” Emily Broad Leib, panel member and Director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, tells Food Tank.

The report also calls on the government to restrict the procurement of UPFs in institutional settings, including schools, early childhood education centers, hospitals, and jails. 

Another policy recommendation aims to decrease demand for UPFs through funding counter marketing campaigns. Companies that produce UPFs heavily market their products, especially towards children. The panelists argue counter marketing campaigns can educate the public about the health risks of UPFs and point to the Truth Initiative anti-tobacco campaign as a model.

The report also proposes the inclusion of a limit on UPF intake within the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). While the 2025-2030 DGA suggests limiting highly processed foods, future guidelines should outline a specific upper limit.

UPF labels on the front of food packages can also be useful, the panel says. By indicating a product is ultra-processed, it may deter eaters from buying it. They acknowledge, however, that these might amplify health disparities among non-English speakers who have more trouble understanding the label. Dr. Krieger suggests that bilingual labeling may mitigate this issue.

The panel believes that the government’s attempt to regulate UPF consumption will positively impact public health. But they expect pushback from manufacturers. “Industry has a lot of influence on this administration… and they are totally geared up and lobbying hard against anything to regulate UPFs,” Dr. Krieger tells Food Tank.

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