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Bankruptcy Court Had No Authority To Issue Widely Reported Liability Finding

Ominous headlines appeared in The New York Times and other media last November. A Kentucky bankruptcy judge had issued a startling order holding the City of Oakland liable for up to $654 million in damages, before interest, for obstructing construction of a massive rail-to-ship coal export facility in West Oakland. 

That all changed last Wednesday, September 30, as a federal judge in Kentucky dismissed the “billion dollar” lawsuit brought by Insight Terminal Solutions (ITS) against the City of Oakland.

“A Stand Against Coal Exports Could Push Oakland, California Toward Bankruptcy,” led The New York Times in a November 2025 story reposted widely, including on page one of the East Bay’s aspirational paper of record, the East Bay Times (“Coal project costs mounting”).

“The New York Times parlayed a recent rogue judgment issued by a handpicked bankruptcy judge in Kentucky into a tale of the wolf knocking at Oakland’s door,” No Coal in Oakland wrote at the time. The City’s attorneys protested, as they had from the outset of the Kentucky litigation, that the bankruptcy judge had no authority to hear the case, much less issue a judgment against the City.

But the tale of Oakland’s impending doom took hold, leaving City officials unwilling to voice opposition to coal. However shaky the legal grounds for the gargantuan lawsuit in Kentucky, the threat of a catastrophic defeat in a strange court left many in Oakland uneasy. Muckrakers slung muck on substack (see East Bay Insiders Oakland Newsletter and Oakland Report). Developer Phil Tagami’s PR flack, Zennie Abraham, posted a video confidently entitled “City Of Oakland Owes Insight Terminal Solutions $678 Million In OBOT Breach-Of-Contract Case.” 

“We lost, lost, lost, and we continue to lose,” lamented Oakland city councilmember and developer ally Ken Houston, apparently convinced that the bankruptcy judge’s ruling would stand. 

A dark cloud hung over City Hall.

The substance of the ITS lawsuit was the shell company’s sole asset, its sublease to develop a 19-acre corner of the shuttered Oakland Army Base as a marine export terminal. ITS claimed that the City of Oakland committed tortious interference with its effort to develop a coal export facility on the site, near the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. According to its complaint, the City owed ITS “not less than $1 billion,” plus interest, punitive damages, fees, and expenses.

But last Wednesday, United States District Judge Benjamin Beaton ruled that the City’s attorneys, led by Danielle Leonard of Altshuler Berzon LLP, got it right when they argued that the Kentucky bankruptcy court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to hear the case filed in early 2024. They insisted from the outset that the case involved California parties in a dispute governed entirely by California law and should be heard, if at all, in a California courtroom.

In his order of dismissal, Judge Beaton agreed, pointedly adding that “ITS’s decision to file an adversary proceeding in Kentucky, rather than to sue in the California courts, carries at least a whiff of forum shopping.” No Coal in Oakland made the same call nearly two years ago.

ITS chose the Kentucky forum to launch its “billion dollar” lawsuit after a California trial judge denied a $159.6 million claim brought by developer Phil Tagami in Alameda County. In 2018, the City terminated Tagami’s lease for failure to get terminal construction underway by deadlines set in the lease. This effectively rendered ITS’s sublease, executed weeks before the City’s termination of Tagami’s lease, worthless as well. 

Although Alameda County Superior Court Judge Noël Wise ruled the City’s termination of the lease unlawful and reinstated the lease in early 2024, she rejected the mega damages sought by the developer as too speculative to be awarded under California law.

ITS, which had funded Tagami’s case in California, decided to take another shot at an unearned payday in front of the Kentucky bankruptcy court judge who had presided over ITS’s reorganization in 2021. ITS emerged from bankruptcy under new ownership by Autumn Wind Lending, a shell company owned by Los Angeles hedge fund operator Jon Brooks.

The bankruptcy case was fully resolved when Autumn Wind acquired ITS. The shell company’s attorneys nonetheless argued that ITS’s claim against the City was sufficiently “related to” the 2021 case to provide the Kentucky bankruptcy court with jurisdiction. Brooks’ lawyers tried but failed to bluster past the glaring fault in their argument that the issues they were trying to litigate could have been, but weren’t, raised by ITS or Autumn Wind Lending during the earlier proceeding.

After quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia (“as many a curbstone philosopher has observed, everything is related to everything else”), Judge Beaton found no significant connection between the bankruptcy case and ITS’s 2024 lawsuit. He ruled that

the absence of any identifiable pre-confirmation claim or post-confirmation distribution dooms the jurisdictional basis for ITS to return to bankruptcy court. This litigation doesn’t involve application of the Bankruptcy Code, the interpretation of the reorganization plan, or any potential effects on creditors….The only relevant nexus between this case and ITS’s bankruptcy is the one linking its current owners to a potential future recovery. And that does not suffice…. Even the expansive reach of related-to bankruptcy jurisdiction doesn’t stretch this far.

The practical result of Beaton’s decision is that this litigation, after years in Kentucky federal courts, is almost certainly over in any forum that matters. ITS can refile its claims in California or appeal Judge Beaton’s decision to the Sixth Circuit, but neither approach is likely to lead to a different result.

California may provide a six-month window to refile in state court, but that window opens onto a limitations question ITS is unlikely to survive. The City cancelled Tagami’s lease and, effectively, rendered ITS’s sublease worthless in 2018. The business torts raised by ITS have a two-year statute of limitations so they became untimely long before ITS filed in Kentucky. Even if ITS could survive the limitations issue, the City has raised a number of other credible alternative grounds for summary judgment in its favor.  The City need only win on one argument; ITS would have to prevail on all of them to survive a summary judgment motion in state court.

In the event of a successful appeal of last week’s ruling to the Sixth Circuit, the case would land back before Judge Beaton. He made it clear in his opinion that, if the appeals court were to overrule him on “related to” jurisdiction, he would nonetheless abstain from hearing the case, either dismissing it again or leaving it in limbo. 

Abstention is a nonreviewable determination that a case is in the wrong court even though, technically speaking, the court has jurisdiction. Abstention is rarely invoked, but Judge Beaton included in his decision a detailed analysis, tallying up ten reasons no federal court in Kentucky should be handling the case.  

“This case cried out for the exercise of discretionary abstention by the federal courts in favor of California litigation,” he concluded, sending a message to both ITS and the forum-shopped bankruptcy judge who hung on to the case for nearly two years.

ITS now faces an unappetizing choice between investing further resources in a California refiling that is likely to fail at the threshold or an appeal that leads nowhere. ITS may choose to plow ahead along one of these paths just for the nuisance value of holding formally unresolved claims over the City’s head, but the bell has rung and ITS has lost this round, if not the entire bout.

With victories in Alameda County and Kentucky, the City is now 2-0 against the developers’ suits for damages.

The decision is Insight Terminal Solutions, LLC v. City of Oakland, No. 3:25-cv-00023-BJB (W.D. Ky. Sept. 30, 2026) Opinion & Order of Dismissal.

Photo at top: Musicians Action Group bringing musical energy to kick off June 2016 No Coal rally outside Oakland City Hall.  Credit: Brooke Anderson

Related coverage

Nina Singh-Hudson, Oakland Dodges $1 Billion Coal Terminal Lawsuit as Federal Judge Tosses Case, Hoodline (Oct 2, 2026) 

Eli Wolfe, Coal company’s $1 billion lawsuit against Oakland dismissed, Oaklandside (Oct 2, 2026)

Israr Ahmad, Insight Terminal Solutions’ $1 Billion Lawsuit Against the City of Oakland Dismissed, What the Federal Court Actually Decided, All About Lawyer (Oct 3, 2026)

Juan Carlos Lara, Newsom Signs Coal Terminal Law as Oakland Wins Key Court Fight, KQED (Oct 4, 2026)

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
October 6, 2026

Lawsuit Targets Utah Oil Highway Threatening World-Renowned Nine Mile Canyon – 10.6.26 Construction to Demolish 100-Foot-Tall Canyon Walls, Damage Native Rock Imagery, Utah History

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org
Mike Hansen, Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, (801) 916-2491, jmichaelhansen@gmail.com
Deeda Seed, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 803-9892, dseed@biologicaldiversity.org

SALT LAKE CITY, UT —The Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and Center for Biological Diversity today sued the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management for approving construction of a hydrocarbon highway through Utah’s scenic, culturally and historically significant Gate Canyon in eastern Utah.

The project would straighten 6 miles of what is currently a scenic, winding, gravel road through Gate Canyon and involves the blasting and destruction of 100-foot tall canyon walls, damaging Native rock imagery, Utah history, and habitat for threatened wildlife.

“This lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s disgraceful plan to transform a quiet backcountry road into a highway clogged with speeding oil tanker trucks,” said Deeda Seed, senior Utah campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Blasting through Gate Canyon’s walls will be a disaster for nearby animals, including threatened Mexican spotted owls. We’re going to court to protect this irreplaceable cultural treasure and the animals calling it home.”

Gate Canyon is located in Utah’s West Tavaputs Plateau region, between the towns of Myton and Wellington. It feeds into Nine Mile Canyon — a world-renowned archaeological area that contains more than 10,000 unique, irreplaceable cultural, historical and archaeological resources. The proposed route of the highway, designed to accommodate 70-foot oil tankers, cuts directly through the rugged landscape and will fundamentally alter the character of Gate Canyon.

“In the words of Joni Mitchell, the BLM has approved the ‘paving of paradise.’  But instead of putting in a parking lot, the BLM has given its OK to the building of a highway to carry crude oil from the Uinta Basin to Carbon County,” said J. Michael Hansen, president of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition. “It’s like constructing a highway through the Louvre Museum.”

Today’s lawsuit challenges the BLM’s rushed and behind-closed-doors environmental review for failing to disclose or analyze the threats of increased traffic and canyon blasting on wildlife, the area’s rock imagery, historic axle grease inscriptions and scenery, and for failing to consider alternative, less damaging routes.

The BLM also ignored its own resource management plans that require protecting the area’s cultural and scenic values and violated the federal National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act. The bureau failed to consider the project’s threats to Mexican spotted owls, despite the fact that the cliffs near the proposed blasting areas are identified as potential owl habitat.

“The BLM knew that prior versions of this same proposal were extremely controversial and faced fierce public headwinds,” said Landon Newell, staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “This time around, instead of facing the public, they hid their decision and rushed their analysis and approval, all under the guise of Trump’s “Energy Dominance” agenda.”

The project, known as the “Wells Draw Road Amendment – Gate Canyon,” was proposed by Duchesne County and approved by the BLM on April 28, 2026. It is intended to provide an alternative route for transporting oil out of the Uinta Basin. The current backcountry road would be transformed to accommodate 70-foot oil tanker trucks traveling to the oil fields and transloading facilities in Carbon County, Utah. If the destruction of Gate Canyon moves forward, as many as 1,000 vehicles could pass through each day — the equivalent of “[a] tanker truck every 7 minutes,” according to news reports.

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

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

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

The post Lawsuit Targets Utah Oil Highway Threatening World-Renowned Nine Mile Canyon – 10.6.26 appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.

A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.

They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.

“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.

“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”

Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Junior on Monday (Photo: Australia-Pacific Partnership)

Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.

It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.

Witnessing sea level rise

The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.

Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.

World leaders and bank officials pose for a photo at Tuvalu’s narrowest point (Photo: Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31)

On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.

“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.

From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.

Michael Joseph speaks to reporters at Tuvalu’s narrowest point (Photo: Australia-Pacific partnership)

A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.

Climate finance red-tape

Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.

“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”

• Aug 28, 2026 News Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31 Pacific leaders will appeal for pledges to a new regional fund designed to swiftly channel climate finance to local communities Read more
• Jun 11, 2026 Comment The Pacific made history in the courts – now we must do it in the negotiations Legal clarity alone will not lead to reduced emissions, more finance or stronger national climate plans – political will is key to meeting states’ obligations Read more
• Oct 3, 2024 Energy Civil servants warn fossil fuel exploration could harm New Zealand’s climate reputation Advice to politicians says revoking a ban on oil and gas drilling could damage relations with Pacific neighbours and risk lawsuits Read more

He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”

Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.

Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.

Action plan to improve access

On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.

The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.

In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.

The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.

Part of the GCF-backed Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project (Photo: Australia-Pacific Partnership) Australia calls for optimism

While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.

He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.

While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.

Climate campaigners criticise Australia’s fossil fuel subsidies on the grounds of the Sheraton hotel on October 06, 2026 in Nadi, Fiji. (Photo by Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images)

France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.

“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.

Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.

This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.

Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.

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Recent months have reinforced the case for accelerating action on the energy transition and climate, particularly from a European perspective.

Let’s list the reasons why:

• this summer has been like no other in Europe, with five major heatwaves across the continent and provisional data from the UK Met Office showing temperatures in London approximately 4°C above the long-term baseline average (1991-2020);
• internationally, 2026 has been marked by a series of extreme weather events, from the tragic landslide in Nepal caused by a melting glacier to a deadly winter storm bringing widespread fatalities across North America;
• all this against the backdrop of a super El Niño likely to generate even more extreme weather across the globe in the coming months;
• growing recognition, reflected in UK Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary of State Miatta Fahnbulleh’s warning that the war in Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz have shown how exposure to global fossil fuel markets raises energy costs;
• the war has also led to an explosion in electric vehicle sales, particularly in Asia. Across the first half of 2026, electric car sales in Europe grew around 35-40% compared with the same period in 2025; in the UK it’s up about 25% over the same period;
• according to WindEurope, Europe installed 8.8GW in the first half of 2026, a 30% increase on H1 2025. Renewables provided 53.1% of electricity generated by the UK’s Major Power Producers between March and May, with renewable generation up 22% year on year.;
• a breakthrough on the costs of energy storage, with global benchmark costs for four-hour battery storage projects falling by 27% year-on-year in 2025.

On the face of it, the case for accelerating the transition has never been stronger. But despite this, the state of multilateral action on climate change can probably be summed up by the collective shrug in response to the Climate Summit convened by the outgoing UN Secretary-General in New York on 23 September. In his final UNGA week, Antonio Guterres again argued that fossil fuel expansion “defies science, economics and common sense”. In language reflecting an increasing sense of alarm and urgency, he talked about this being the last generation “who can avert climate catastrophe”.

The weakened state of climate multilateralism is often attributed to a geopolitical environment in which political consensus has fractured and climate science is more openly challenged. This is evident not only in North America but in several European countries. But are there still opportunities this autumn for the pendulum to swing back towards concerted policy action that reflects the favourable platform that science, technology and economics are providing?

All roads on climate tend to lead to the COP, which this year will meet in Antalya, Turkey, from 9-20 November. COP31 will feature an unusual co-hosting arrangement between Turkey and Australia, alongside a pre-COP meeting hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu from 5-8 October. Crucially, the Pacific gathering will give small island states a platform to highlight the existential threat posed by climate change.

As for COP31 itself, the co-hosts face the challenge of providing a central focus for a COP where no single major negotiated decision is expected and which is being described as an “implementation COP”. But two key themes are emerging:

• a “35 by 35” global electrification target, designed to accelerate the transition by increasing the share of global final energy demand met by electricity to 35% by 2035, up from the present 20%;
• ecosystem resilience, and the impact of severe climate shocks on food and water systems.

Serious discussion of both issues will be welcome. Yet many increasingly view the COP process, and the wider UN system, as unable to move beyond being a talking shop. Which is why, perhaps even more than is usual at a COP, some of the more consequential action in Antalya may take place in the margins outside the formal negotiations.

This would be consistent with the most significant outcomes from COP30 in Belém, with the emergence of two separate “coalitions of the willing” to work on international roadmaps: to transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF); and to halt and reverse global deforestation.

This TAFF initiative in particular will be put to the test of COP politics, even if it’s not on the formal agenda. Twelve months on from its birth in Belém, and seven months since the coalition of nearly 60 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to kickstart work on a global TAFF process, there will be pressure to start turning high-level ambitions into concrete plans. This will mean attention on the Netherlands, which co-hosted Santa Marta with a Colombian government that has since been replaced by a new administration not committed to the initiative, and Ireland and Tuvalu, which will host a “Santa Marta 2.0” in the Pacific next July. These governments will want to show whether their initiative can work alongside the COP process and even restore some faith in the value of international cooperation to tackle global challenges. Other members of the coalition may also face questions about whether their domestic policies match their claims to international leadership: from the UK Government, which will also take on the G20 presidency in 2027, to Canadian and Australia governments, where fossil fuel production policy is moving in a different direction.

Looking beyond COP31, there are still grounds for optimism, whether through existing institutions or coalitions such as TAFF. The possibility, if recent reports are to be believed, that China could host COP33 in 2029 could be a game-changer, another Paris moment for the UNFCCC and multilateralism to demonstrate that it can deliver more than rhetoric. But back in the present, the science is making clear that delaying meaningful action, even now, will only do further harm. As the Belém Declaration on a TAFF spelled out nearly 12 months ago, action needs to be accelerated.

As progressives gather in Antalya, they may therefore do well to keep two overarching priorities at top of mind.

First, revisit the Belém Declaration as a constant reminder that limiting global temperature rises requires a “shared determination to work collectively towards a just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels”. This work will require, as the Declaration detailed, a focus on economic diversification, reducing structural dependence on fossil fuel revenues and phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Progressive policymakers will also need to consider how to support a step-change in finance for the Global South, given the vulnerability of many emerging and developing economies to both the transition and the physical impacts of climate change. The work that has begun since the Santa Marta conference – both in the Santa Marta workplan and the separate but closely linked Brazilian COP Presidency TAFF exercise – will give policymakers the tools to start implementing TAFF in practice. That collective effort can begin in the discussions in and around COP31, even if not yet in the formal negotiations.

Second, one of the most positive developments this year has been the reframing of climate around energy security, risk and resilience. The statement by the UK Prime Minister at the same UNGA week where the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit yielded little tangible progress, that “the climate crisis is now a national security threat for countries around the world”, is a sign of an evolving narrative. As is this line from the recent Green Central Banking newsletter: “maybe resilience, for lack of a better word, is a new, pragmatic way to ensure climate action and collaboration still take place in an ever more geopolitically fragmented world.”

COP delegates will also be mindful that they are convening just after the US mid-terms on 3 November.

Many of the underlying conditions (economic, technological and scientific) are in place for governments to make this autumn one of significant progress on climate ambition. The case for framing the transition around economic opportunity and 21st-century energy security is clear. Policymakers may remain cautious in the current geopolitical environment; but this is time to seize the moment.

The post Can a Sweltering Summer Create an Autumn of Opportunity for the Transition? appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is pleased to release its 2025–2026 Annual Report, documenting a year of collective action to advance agroecology, defend farmers’ rights and strengthen community-led food systems. Covering 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, the report marks the first year of implementation of AFSA’s 2025–2029 Strategic Framework. It brings together achievements, experiences and lessons from an alliance of 48 member organisations, showing how local knowledge and community leadership inform action from farmers’ fields to national, regional and global policy spaces.

The report highlights efforts to protect farmers’ rights to save and exchange seeds, advance agroecology in climate policy, celebrate African food cultures and strengthen local economies. Key developments include the Seed Is Life and My Food Is African campaigns, Healthy Soil Healthy Food work across six countries, and support for 222 agroecological enterprises and 21 territorial markets. Member stories bring these achievements to life: young farmers and women restoring land and water systems in Zambia, communities expanding farmer-led agroecology across West Africa, and farmers in Malawi rebuilding soil fertility and improving maize harvests through locally produced organic manure. Together, these experiences demonstrate the practical value of African-led solutions for livelihoods, resilience and food sovereignty.

Reflecting on the communities behind this work, AFSA Board Chairperson Rev. Dr. Tolbert Thomas Jallah Jr. writes: “Their experiences remind us that food sovereignty is not simply a policy aspiration; it is lived every day through the stewardship of land, seeds, biodiversity, livelihoods and human dignity.” General Coordinator Dr. Million Belay sets out the ambition guiding the alliance: “Our task is not only to respond to crisis, but to build power, alternatives and hope.”

Alongside these achievements, the report shares the challenges, institutional developments and lessons shaping AFSA’s next steps, including the need to translate policy commitments into implementation and sustain investment in community-led change. AFSA thanks its members, communities, partners, donors and allies for their commitment and invites policymakers, researchers, civil society and the wider public to explore and share the report.

Read the AFSA Annual Report 2025–2026

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More than 200 conservation organizations sent a letter today urging Congress to oppose the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026,” introduced by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), and Mike Lee (R-Utah). The bill includes sweeping attacks on the Endangered Species Act that would gut protections for nearly every endangered species across the country.

The legislation would weaken the Act’s gold-standard “best available science” mandate, making it substantially harder to protect imperiled species and the places they live. It would also surrender authority to states to conduct Section 7 consultations — one of the most important safeguards against harm from federal agency actions.

“We don’t have to choose between protecting our most endangered animals and plants and building a clean energy future,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hollowing out the Endangered Species Act only benefits energy-hungry data centers and the fossil fuel industry while leaving monarchs, manatees, and countless other species to pay the ultimate price.”

The bill also includes judicial review provisions that would make meaningful review of certain Endangered Species Act challenges much more difficult.

“Friends of the Earth US is proud to stand beside our NGO partners in the fight to uphold our country’s bedrock environmental laws,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director for Friends of the Earth. “It’s paramount that Congress keeps things in perspective as it continues to navigate our desperate need for a clean energy future. There is no reason to throw endangered species under the bus to secure what falls short of even a half-measure approach to achieving justly sourced, renewable energy access and affordability.”

Today’s letter notes that “real environmental champions do not trade away the world’s strongest conservation law in pursuit of a legislative mirage that does nothing more than grease the wheels for pipelines, data centers, petrochemical buildouts, and the next generation of energy-guzzling tech infrastructure.”

Editor’s note: On 7 October 2026, Brazil’s oil regulator ANP will auction hundreds of oil and gas blocks, many of them under the Cerrado of Maranhão. The Cerrado is a vast tropical savanna covering about a fifth of Brazil, home to rich biodiversity and the headwaters of many of the country’s major rivers, and one of its most threatened biomes. A lawsuit filed on 29 September seeks to pull 15 blocks that overlap quilombola and Indigenous lands, which were never consulted. Earlier this year, gas company Eneva gave up three blocks on Krenyê Indigenous and quilombola territory after media exposure. Below, Mayron Régis Brito Borges, journalist and president of the Maranhão-based environmental and human rights organization Fórum Carajás, reflects on what is at stake. Roots before sky

Where does one begin, writing about the Cerrado? For the people of Maranhão, a state in Brazil’s northeast, it is not a landscape but the ground of life itself. No biome is more careful with what it has. You can read this in its plants: their roots first go deep in search of water, and only then do they reach for the sky. The Cerrado is where we begin, and where we return.

350.org team with local community members in Maranhão. Photo: 350 Brasil

Going home

Every July and December, during the school holidays, families who had left for the big cities to work and study would make their way home. Most of those homes were in the Cerrado. They came back for what the cities could not give them: healthy food, clean air, silence, family and old friends, rivers, streams and forests, the games of childhood, a youth and innocence they had left behind.

For generations, the rivers carried them. They rise in the chapadas, the Cerrado’s high plateaus, and run down to the bays of São Marcos and São José de Ribamar, on the coast of the state capital, São Luís. The Mearim, the Itapecuru, the Parnaíba, the Munim, the Preguiças: these rivers bound the countryside to the city. Along the way, by water or by road, people gathered native fruits, bacuri, murici, buriti, pequi. There was enough for everyone. That sense of abundance never quite leaves you, even decades on.

The gas arrives

But that abundance now belongs to the past. One of the reasons is gas extraction in the Cerrado of Maranhão by the energy company Eneva, which bears down on the traditional and quilombola communities of the Mearim Valley. Eneva may argue that when it took over its gas-fired power project in Santo Antônio dos Lopes, the environmental licensing was already complete. Yet no one told the traditional and quilombola communities what a project like this would mean for them. What would it do to their groundwater and their rivers? To the air, the soil, their crops? To their bodies and their minds? To the forests, the wildlife, their right to the land itself?

Eneva cannot claim ignorance. The company recently gave back gas exploration blocks that overlapped the Krenyê Indigenous land and the Peixes quilombola territory. It knows. And still it holds on to the blocks it bought in Capinzal do Norte, where several quilombola communities live. And still it behaves as though nothing is wrong in the quilombola communities of Lima Campos.

Another auction, the same mindset

The auction planned for October reveals, once more, a way of doing business that looks past people and nature so long as the profits add up. One of the blocks on offer overlaps quilombola territories in the municipality of Vargem Grande. It also reaches into the Munim River basin, which gives water to towns and villages across eastern Maranhão. And once again, the communities were not asked first, as international law requires.

Activists stand in front of the Presidential palace, telling Brazilian President to end oil exploration in Cerrado. Photo: 350 Brasil

Those who would sell it off have learned the opposite lesson. They reach for the profit first, and leave the people who live on this land to deal with what is left behind.

The post The Cerrado Is Not for Sale appeared first on 350.

On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, the Indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up in Chiapas demanding land, autonomy, dignity and democracy for Indigenous peoples.

A new proposal from the federal government would narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act so much that it would be legal to drain nearly any wetland or pollute the vast majority of streams, experts...

On Monday, contractors knocked down an iconic “grandmother” cottonwood tree on federal land in the San Rafael Valley near Lochiel, Arizona to clear the way for border wall construction. Armed Border Patrol agents cleared an encampment of about 50 people who had gathered to try to protect the cottonwood after three others had already been felled. All four trees were estimated to be as many as 250 years old. The protesters’ efforts included taking turns camping in the tree itself to ensure it was occupied at all times for more than 70 days. Ten protesters were cited and at least another 12 were arrested, including the person who was camped in the tree itself at the time and was forcibly removed from the tree using a cherry picker.

“We are resolute,” said Kate Scott, one of the protesters. “This movement is not going anywhere. They have cut down our grandmother, but her roots are within us.” A similar continual-occupation protest is also happening in a tree on the Mexican side of the border, and a demonstration at the local Bureau of Land Management office is planned for later this week to protest the agency’s recent land closure orders related to border wall construction in the area.

The Border Patrol’s actions fit with a pattern of using the southern border to militarize national public lands, as Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein wrote in a Westwise blog post earlier this year. “If the administration continues on its current course, these iconic landscapes will continue to be collateral damage,” Bock-Brownstein wrote. “Border security should not require the permanent sacrifice of America’s public lands, and it should not come at the cost of the heritage and economies of the communities that surround them.”

Quick hits Analysis: 99% of commenters oppose motorized use changes in forests

Wyoming Public Radio

Native nations sue over Endangered Species Act changes

High Country News

Supreme Court grapples with case on holding Big Oil liable for climate change

Washington Post

NPS denies request to maintain water stations along Arizona-Mexico border for migrants

KJZZ

Winter is coming, and Crater Lake National Park is in trouble

SFGATE

Residents express worries about copper mine’s return

Las Cruces New Mexican

Judge jails man in moose abuse case and warns: Wyoming values wildlife

WyoFile

Heinrich: Repealing the roadless rule ignores public approval

The Hill

Quote of the day

The Roadless Rule is overwhelmingly popular, including with sportsmen, anglers, campers and recreators. It is so popular that the administration knows it will lose if it consults the public on dismantling it. Thus, the administration is simply refusing to hold public meetings at all. That is not only insulting—it is undemocratic. And it is a failure to listen to the people these lands belong to.”

—U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, The Hill

Picture This @rockynps

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
— L. M. Montgomery

October is a special time of the year in Rocky Mountain National Park. Enjoy shades of green, gold, orange, red, and purple throughout the park.

Image Credits: NPS

 

Featured image: San Rafael Valley border wall construction in southern Arizona. Russ McSpadden, Center for Biological Diversity

The post Arrests made as Border Patrol cuts down iconic tree to clear way for border wall appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

At least 130 organisations urge UN carbon market Supervisory Body to suspend credits and independently investigate controversial Myanmar cookstove project

UTRECHT, 6 October, 2026 — At least 130 civil society organisations, networks and other stakeholders are calling on the Supervisory Body of the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) to immediately suspend the first carbon credits issued under the UN’s new “high-integrity” Article 6.4 carbon market and commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project behind them.

The call comes as the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body meets in Bonn from 5–9 October for its 23rd meeting (SBM 023). At the centre of the controversy is PoA 10471, a Myanmar biomass cookstove programme backed by one of South Korea’s largest companies, which, in February 2026, became the first activity to receive credit issuance under Article 6.4. 

In an open letter signed by 130 civil society organisations, the groups call on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend the project’s credits and undertake an independent assessment, citing serious concerns about environmental integrity, verification, human rights and other safeguards and stakeholder participation, particularly given the radically changed conditions in Myanmar following the February 2021 attempted military coup.

“The first project to receive credits under the UN’s new ‘high-integrity’ carbon market was implemented in communities experiencing war, displacement and grave human rights abuses, while independent analysis indicates that, even if the project had been implemented under ideal conditions, its claimed emissions reductions may still have been substantially overstated,” said Zaw Tuseng, foundation director of the Myanmar Policy Institute. “This is not simply a question of how many credits should be issued. It raises fundamental questions about whether carbon credits can represent genuine climate action when they are separated from the political and social realities in which projects operate.”

The concerns are wide-ranging. The June 2026 report Carbon Credits Under Fire: Myanmar, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Crisis of Credibility Facing the UN’s “High-Integrity” Carbon Markets documents serious concerns about the project’s operation amid conflict and human rights abuses, as well as safeguards, stakeholder participation and the wider conditions in which its claimed emissions reductions were generated. 

PoA 10471 was designed and registered before the February 2021 attempted military coup, but continued operating during all but one month of the monitoring period underlying the first Article 6.4 issuance, from January 2021 to May 2022. Its first six component activities covered 27 townships in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, where communities experienced documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacks on civilians, forced displacement, the burning of homes and public buildings, and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence.

Project documentation identifies the Dry Zone Greening Department and other Myanmar government authorities in connection with implementation and data collection. The Dry Zone Greening Department operates under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, which came under military control following the takeover, and is a major income earner for the junta through gemstone mining and other resource exploitation. 

The project’s monitoring documentation does not acknowledge these fundamental changes in the political, administrative and security environment or consider how they may have affected implementation and the claimed mitigation outcomes. However, verification reports indicate that security conditions prevented the verification team from conducting the required on-site inspections of monitored households in any of the project’s implementation areas. Instead, the verification team was granted an exceptional exemption and permitted remote inspection. Instead of site visits, the verification team conducted video interviews through Zoom with just 22 end-users from an office in Yangon. Only two of the interviewees were women.

Meanwhile, two independent analyses of the project’s emissions reductions calculations have raised substantial concerns about the quantity of credits issued: an earlier analysis estimated that the project was over-credited by a factor of 14 under the CDM, while more recent analysis estimates that it is still likely to be over-credited by approximately a factor of seven under Article 6.4’s supposedly tougher rules. These findings further undermine the claim that the first credits issued under the new mechanism represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions.

“Environmental integrity cannot be reduced to accounting methodology alone. Simply refining the methodology used to calculate emissions reductions and slapping on a “high integrity” label does not guarantee that the resulting credits represent genuine mitigation, especially when they are so completely separated from the political, social and environmental circumstances in which they are supposedly generated,” said Oli Munnion, Global Forest Coalition (GFC)’s Climate Justice and Forests Campaign Coordinator. “The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism has fallen at the first hurdle. The Supervisory Body must immediately suspend this credit issuance and investigate how on earth it was approved in the first place.”

The organisations also raise concerns about safeguards and participation. Women and girls are presented as important beneficiaries of the cookstove programme, yet women in the project areas have experienced displacement, severe restrictions on movement and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Of the 231 households surveyed for monitoring purposes, 80% of recorded heads of household were men, raising questions about whether women—whose unpaid labour the project depends on—were adequately represented as decision-makers rather than primarily as beneficiaries.

The organisations are calling on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend any further issuance, transfer or use of credits associated with PoA 10471 and to commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project and the process through which the credits were approved. The assessment should examine the project’s environmental integrity, monitoring and verification, safeguards and stakeholder participation, as well as the impact of Myanmar’s radically changed political, administrative and security circumstances. 

The organisations are also calling for the assessment to consider the best available evidence and real-world conditions, rather than treating formal methodological compliance or previous validation and verification as conclusive, and for its findings to be made public. Where the evidence shows that applicable requirements were not met or that the credits do not represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions, the Supervisory Body should take appropriate corrective action, including revoking credits already issued and preventing the project from participating further in the mechanism.

In support of these calls, a Formal Stakeholder Communication was also submitted to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in response to its call for stakeholder input on matters before SBM 023. The submission sets out the concerns in detail and calls for PoA 10471 to be considered under the relevant agenda items, including Agenda item 4.3 on issuance.

PoA 10471 is the first activity to receive issuance under the Article 6.4 mechanism and therefore represents an early test of what the mechanism’s stated commitment to “high integrity” means in practice.

“Climate mitigation cannot be based on human rights abuses and questionable carbon accounting. If the Article 6.4 mechanism is to have credibility, its first project must be assessed against the realities in which the claimed emissions reductions were generated, not simply against calculations on paper,” said Sooyoun Han, Plan 1.5’s Policy Activist.

The food and agriculture sector employs 1.4 billion people—more than any other in the world. It’s also the most exploitative,  according to a new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). But stronger labor protections and worker-led movements can help build food systems that work for those who sustain them.

Roughly two out of every five people in the global workforce depend on food and farming systems for their livelihoods. But whether they are in a field, on a boat, in a processing facility, or a supermarket, many lack the protections they need to keep them safe.

Informal employment agreements, legal loopholes, and systemic discrimination make food systems workers some of the most vulnerable on the planet. The climate crisis, expanding gig economy, and corporate consolidation are adding new layers of uncertainty and risk.

“This report confirms what we’ve seen for many years: That there’s widespread exploitation throughout these systems,” says Susan Longley, a labor rights expert and External Advisor for IPES-Food.

The authors highlight a stark gender imbalance. One in three food systems workers makes below a living wage with women earning, on average, 50 percent of what men do. Women are also more likely to engage in unpaid care work, from cooking to cleaning, which makes up an estimated 12.5 billion combined hours of labor per day. This often prevents them from holding full-time jobs, resulting in lower wages and weaker protections.

“One of the things that is fairly central is our insistence that care be centered in the way that we think about food and food work,” says Raj Patel, a member of IPES-Food’s Expert Panel. “That means that we need to recognize care [and] we need to reduce the amount of it that is disproportionately on women’s shoulders.”

Migrant workers also face a uniquely precarious position. Despite the essential role they play in food and agriculture systems, they face “some of the highest rates of workplace abuse,” the report states.

The authors reveal that migrant workers are three times more likely to experience forced labor and they are 70 percent more likely to die on the job compared to the general population. They are also “routinely victims of wage theft,” says Olivier De Schutter, Co-Chair of IPES-Food’s Expert Panel. The International Labor Organization estimates that, collectively, migrant workers lose US$31 billion in underpaid wages every year.

The report makes clear that the exploitation experienced by food workers is no accident. It is built into the systems and structures that shape how food is produced, processed, prepared, distributed, and sold.

Patel sees efforts to upend these harmful power dynamics, but notes that “we are at the very early stages of the transformations that we need.”

Outlining 12 levers for change, the authors call for legislation that guarantees protections for workers, regardless of status, and demand accountability for employers guilty of labor abuses. And at the heart of solutions are the workers, who are empowered through stronger trade unions, collective bargaining, and broad cross-movement coalitions.

“The key to resolving a lot of these problems is through building worker power,” Longley says.

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Photo courtesy of Bernd Dittrich, Unsplash

The post Ending Exploitation Across the Food System appeared first on Food Tank.

Solar farms in desert areas could reduce dust pollution in cities downwind, according to a new Chinese study. The findings reveal unexpected synergies between renewable energy development and cleaner air, suggesting that solar’s air quality benefits go beyond reduced pollution from fossil fuel burning.

During springtime in the Gobi Desert, strong winds pick up desert dust and transport it hundreds of kilometers to the east and southeast to some of China’s largest urban centers. As China cleans up its air quality by reducing fossil fuel use, dust is becoming a larger proportion of remaining air pollution, and one that is harder to address.

Solar development in the Gobi Desert—where 42 solar farms cover a total of more than 13,000 square kilometers—is already improving downwind air quality, with the potential for even greater future benefits, the new analysis suggests.

Scientists already suspected that solar farms could help dampen dust pollution, but no one had yet conducted a quantitative analysis using true-to-life assumptions incorporating all of the possible mechanisms that regulate desert dust emissions.

In the new study, a combination of satellite observations and computer modeling reveals that existing solar farms reduce springtime dust emissions from the Gobi Desert by 352,400 metric tons per month.

 

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Several mechanisms contribute to this effect. Arrays of solar panels increase the roughness of the terrain, slowing wind speed near the ground so that the wind picks up less dust. The solar panels also stabilize the soil itself, in part by increasing vegetation cover.

Solar farms also act as windbreaks, shifting local wind patterns and resulting in less dust blown downwind—an estimated 131,400 metric tons less dust each month.

China aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by the 2060, a target that would require increasing the area covered by solar farms in the Gobi Desert by eleven-fold. With 140,000 square kilometers of the desert covered by solar panels, dust emissions from the Gobi Desert would fall by 12% and transport downwind by 21% compared to a scenario without solar farms, the researchers calculated. That’s an order of magnitude greater benefit than today’s solar farms yield.

What’s more, climate change is likely to make dust pollution worse by increasing wind speeds.Without the additional solar farms, springtime dust emissions form the Gobi Desert are likely to increase by 13%, and downwind transport by 27%. So the dampening effect of solar farms is likely to be even more sorely needed in the future.

Less dust in the air would be especially noticeable in big cities downwind. With future solar development, average springtime concentrations of larger dust particles could fall across northern China by about 14%.

In turn, those improvements would bump most of China’s northern cities up a tier in the World Health Organization’s air quality rating system. What’s more, both today and under future solar development, solar panels would have their greatest effect on days when dust pollution is at its worst, underlining the unexpected contribution of solar energy to respiratory health, the researchers say.

Source: Hao Y. et al. “Dust Pollution Mitigation by Solar Farm Deployment in Northern China.” Geophysical Research Letters 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine (AI-generated)