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The European Union’s package of major corporate environment and sustainability laws was years in the making — and has just been quietly gutted.

A debate that reshaped corporate Europe unfolded almost entirely within Brussels policy circles. Millions of Europeans who believe climate action should be prioritised and favour greater corporate accountability never realized the regulations were under threat. 

This should prompt serious reflection among those of us who believe that the climate and human rights focus of the regulations was deadly serious, but that support among politicians was not.

The so-called “Omnibus” rollback — a regulatory rationalisation ascribed to competitiveness concerns amid pressure from the United States – has exempted 90 percent of Europe’s companies from climate reporting. In parallel, supply chain reporting has been seriously watered down and postponed until the end of the decade.

The overturned rules included mandatory reporting by most EU companies of their impact on climate change, and how environmental dangers could affect their business. They also forced companies selling products on the continent to report on child and forced labour issues, as well as potentially dangerous working conditions in their international supply chains.

In today’s economy, corporate lobbyists seize moments of regulatory weakness to ram home anti-growth or relative competitiveness arguments that instantly gather financial and political support.

Indeed, the printer ink had barely dried on the official publication of the EU Omnibus — finalised this month — before companies started attacking the EU’s 20-year-old Emissions Trading System (ETS) carbon pricing regime on similar international competition grounds.

If we don’t quickly digest the lessons of the Omnibus debacle, sterner tests will come as populists challenge for power across the bloc. 

Why Was the Rollback Invisible?

Why was the European public largely unaware of such a huge regulatory rollback?

The reason is that it took place in a legacy media vacuum. No major polling organisation measured citizen awareness. The BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel barely — if at all — covered the vote. 

Further, how can we support and defend policies when we hide them behind letter jumbles like CSRD, SFDR, CSDDD — acronyms that mean nothing to the public? (The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Sustainability Finance Disclosure Regulation, and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, respectively.)

Fluency in Brussels acronyms becomes a political liability when success requires public mobilisation. 

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Campaigns succeed with vivid phrases that citizens quickly understand. Surveys consistently show that large numbers of Europeans support corporate accountability when it’s described in plain language. Germany’s “Supply Chain Law” campaign gathered over 200,000 supporters by using a clear, native-language label.

No comparable EU-wide branding effort for the sustainable finance regulations emerged. Defenders of the EU sustainability rules never attempted an equivalent translation.

By contrast, industry lobbyists framed their arguments with accessible language such as “simplification” and “cutting red tape,” while pushing the convenient elements of the Draghi report on EU competitiveness.  Advocates countered with “transposition deadlines,” “ESRS requirements,” and “regulatory coherence.” The contrast was decisive.

Post-defeat reflection on this communications failure has been nearly non-existent.

Green Groups: Bureaucratised and Compromised? 

Typically, the rallying call to voters on environmental and rights regulations comes from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In the case of the EU climate and sustainability Omnibus, more than 360 NGOs and other civil society organisations signed a coalition statement against the “disastrous” and “dangerous” deregulation.

Over the decades, many European climate and human rights groups have evolved into Brussels-based policy shops that are staffed by lawyers and technical experts fluent in EU procedure, but which seem to be relatively poorly equipped for mass public and political campaigning.

Their efforts produced no mass protests, no breakthrough petitions, and no broad public mobilisation. 

Some NGO funding structures appear to reinforce this limitation. Major foundations often restrict grants against “political or partisan activities,” while EU funding frameworks have introduced reputational-risk benchmarks that discourage confrontational advocacy. Funders also often seek short-term results to long-term problems that require deep, structural change, not “hope-for-the-best” strategy thinking. 

A coalition spanning 27 countries that relies on consensus decision-making could not move quickly. The NGOs deployed the only tools their structures supported: letters, technical briefings, and procedural complaints. The limitation was not a strategic choice; it was institutional. 

Big-spending corporate lobbyists, meanwhile, began organising months before public announcements on the Omnibus were made. In addition, the accelerated legislative timeline of the Omnibus compressed the opposition response time from multiple years to less than one, leaving opponents flat-footed. 

ExxonMobil alone is reported to have had more than 25 meetings with the European Commission to lobby against the CSDDD, and allegedly threatened to withhold $20bn in renewables spending in Europe if it was not rolled back.

We hear there have been reflections by major NGOs on what went wrong. To stop mistakes from recurring, the publication of these learnings is essential.

Why Doesn’t Capital Defend Itself?

Institutional investors representing €6.6 trillion in assets had strong financial incentives to oppose the Omnibus. Their risk analysis was clear: Stranding of major fossil-fuel assets would likely accelerate without transition planning; weakened disclosure rules would leave investors short of necessary climate information; regulatory uncertainty would stall long-term investment; and Europe would forfeit advantages in green technology. 

Citizens’ pensions and long-term savings could face potential portfolio-wide losses if systemic climate risks go unmanaged. 

Investors wrote detailed letters explaining these dangers. 

Then they watched the regulations collapse. 

They did not mobilize beneficiaries, fund public campaigns, or coordinate with the 362 NGOs in the field. The UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, the huge investor environment, sustainability and governance (ESG) coalition, could only muster a hundred or so of its 5,000-plus investors to sign a letter warning against a serious unravelling of the regulations. Many of the heavyweight investors in its ranks weren’t there.

The failure reveals a deeper structural problem: Even when capital’s interests align with regulation, financial institutions often lack the political capacity and institutional mechanisms to defend those interests against coordinated opposition.

Why Didn’t Progressive Business and Labour Fight?

Allies with different tools and constituencies struggled to convert shared positions into effective action.

Eighty-eight companies — including Unilever, Mars, Nestlé, Ferrero, DP World, and Primark — signed letters opposing the rollback and acknowledged that customers demanded consistent sustainability standards.

Why didn’t they also launch consumer campaigns, threaten relocation, withdraw from trade associations backing deregulation, or apply coordinated market pressure?

Competitive dynamics discouraged unilateral action by business, and company executives feared appearing overtly political during an ESG backlash. Meanwhile, trade associations often lobbied in the opposite direction.

Trades unions showed similar restraint. Despite representing tens of millions of workers, major confederations limited their involvement largely to signing coalition letters.

Unions excel at domestic workplace negotiations but often struggle with international supply chain issues and EU-level regulatory processes. When industry framed the debate as “regulation kills jobs,” unions faced an apparent dilemma between global labour protections and local employment security. 

Did the Regulation Work?

Businesses and investors respond to clear regulatory signals. They rarely get out ahead of politics or the market without a strong policy or pricing foundation to lean on.

One of the overarching responses we’ve heard from business and finance professionals to the Omnibus policy rollback is that the EU regulatory approach in its Action Plan on green and sustainable finance suffered from a “first principles” problem, skewing heavily towards bureaucratic solutions for policy or incentives problems. 

Many told us, for example, that the EU was not prepared to put the budget stimulus alongside hard regulations to seize the future green technology opportunity. Instead, they opted for a lower cost, weaker, reporting-led investment approach (more data encourages more finance) where actual green output (business R&D, investment flows) may be slow or unclear.

This risks creating a sort of Potemkin Village of climate and sustainability progress, because reporting and compliance solutions cannot replace market drivers such as incentives, infrastructure, or price signals.  

Some of these issues are being addressed, but they have been long in the amendment, despite concerns being raised.

To work, reporting frameworks require a clear, gradual shift in rules or pricing that can surmount competition barriers by underpinning market shifts.

Without it, data collection and research are costly and lack an underlying economic “materiality” (policy push, pricing, time-horizon). They quickly become a comparative drag.

The addition of important but complicated regulations, like supply chain reporting, then gets scapegoated as a further cost to EU companies in globally competitive markets. Bureaucratic overreach is easily lobbied against on competitiveness grounds. Policy row-back then becomes itself highly disruptive, creating a cycle of negativity.

Rationalising data points for corporate reporting and focusing, for example, on the biggest corporate CO2 emitters, as the Omnibus proposes, are not in themselves problematic reforms.  

But it is vital to ensure that policy is smart, joined-up, backed by developments in the real economy, competitive, and road-tested for outcome. 

This will be key to embedding regulations that align with the capital spending decisions that companies are already taking (according to EU data) as a result of the EU’s green taxonomy for sustainable activities.

How Should We Understand the Authoritarian-Fossil Fuel Alliance? 

The Omnibus was not a result of routine corporate lobbying. It reflected a broader geopolitical alignment.

Corporate actors, political movements, and transnational advocacy networks converged around shared economic and ideological interests. Months before public announcement, extensive lobbying campaigns began, leveraging substantial financial resources to coordinate messaging across institutions.

This alignment shifted the terrain from a conventional policy dispute to a power asymmetry.

Civil society coalitions and institutional investors faced opponents with larger budgets and stronger political backing. Investor inaction and NGO limitations become more understandable in this context: The imbalance was structural, not incidental.

We need to reflect deeply on this and what it means for EU sustainability regulations. 

Europe’s Own Leverage: What Can Still Work?

The Omnibus outcome is not final. The EU rules can be improved and made to work with the right public and business support, political will, and technical know-how.

Member states can move ahead independently, setting stronger national standards like Germany’s Supply Chain Law, which companies must meet to access their markets. The EU can lean in to sustainability initiatives via issues of global security, energy transition, and justice.

The economic momentum favours transition: Renewable energy capacity continues to expand and market trends are rewarding low-carbon shifts.

Practical paths forward include coordinated member-state regulation, economic-sovereignty instruments tied to market access, judicial challenges, cross-sector coalitions among cities and businesses, and clearer public narratives that link sustainability to competitiveness and security.

Europe’s regulatory influence remains significant when it acts decisively. Large markets can still set de facto global standards. But to get there we need to start answering these hard questions.

The post How Europe’s Climate and Sustainability Rules Were Shredded While Citizens Remained in the Dark appeared first on DeSmog.

The two-part series published by Spring under the titles “Who will ‘run’ Venezuela? A socialist hope” and “What next for Venezuela? Three possibilities” by Lucy...

The post A socialism-from-below response on Venezuela first appeared on Spring.

Gabrielle Dreyfus is chief scientist at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Thomas Röckmann is a professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University, and Lena Höglund-Isaksson is a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

This March scientists and policy makers will gather near the site in Italy where methane was first identified 250 years ago to share the latest science on methane and the policy and technology steps needed to rapidly cut methane emissions. The timing is apt.

As new tools transform our understanding of methane emissions and their sources, the evidence they reveal points to a single conclusion: Human-caused methane emissions are still rising, and global action remains far too slow.

This is the central finding of the latest Global Methane Status Report. Four years into the Global Methane Pledge, which aims for a 30% cut in global emissions by 2030, the good news is that the pledge has increased mitigation ambition under national plans, which, if fully implemented, could result in the largest and most sustained decline in methane emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

The bad news is this is still short of the 30% target. The decisive question is whether governments will move quickly enough to turn that bend into the steep decline required to pump the brake on global warming.

What the data really show

Assessing progress requires comparing three benchmarks: the level of emissions today relative to 2020, the trajectory projected in 2021 before methane received significant policy focus, and the level required by 2030 to meet the pledge.

The latest data show that global methane emissions in 2025 are higher than in 2020 but not as high as previously expected. In 2021, emissions were projected to rise by about 9% between 2020 and 2030. Updated analysis places that increase closer to 5%. This change is driven by factors such as slower than expected growth in unconventional gas production between 2020 and 2024 and lower than expected waste emissions in several regions.

Gas flaring soars in Niger Delta post-Shell, afflicting communities  

This updated trajectory still does not deliver the reductions required, but it does indicate that the curve is beginning to bend. More importantly, the commitments already outlined in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions and Methane Action Plans would, if fully implemented, produce an 8% reduction in global methane emissions between 2020 and 2030. This would turn the current increase into a sustained decline. While still insufficient to reach the Global Methane Pledge target of a 30% cut, it would represent historical progress.

Solutions are known and ready

Scientific assessments consistently show that the technical potential to meet the pledge exists. The gap lies not in technology, but in implementation.

The energy sector accounts for approximately 70% of total technical methane reduction potential between 2020 and 2030. Proven measures include extended recovery of associated petroleum gas in oil production, regular leak detection and repair across oil and gas supply chains, and installing ventilation air oxidation technologies in underground coal mines. Many of these options are low cost or profitable. Yet current commitments would achieve only one third of the maximum technically feasible reductions in this sector.

Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes

Agriculture and waste also provide opportunities. Rice emissions can be reduced through improved water management, low-emission hybrids and soil amendments. While innovations in technology and practices hold promise in the longer term, near-term potential in livestock is more constrained and trends in global diets may counteract gains.

Waste sector emissions had been expected to increase more rapidly, but improvements in waste management in several regions over the past two decades have moderated this rise. Long-term mitigation in this sector requires immediate investment in improved landfills and circular waste systems, as emissions from waste already deposited will persist in the short term.

New measurement tools

Methane monitoring capacity has expanded significantly. Satellite-based systems can now identify methane super-emitters. Ground-based sensors are becoming more accessible and can provide real-time data. These developments improve national inventories and can strengthen accountability.

However, policy action does not need to wait for perfect measurement. Current scientific understanding of source magnitudes and mitigation effectiveness is sufficient to achieve a 30% reduction between 2020 and 2030. Many of the largest reductions in oil, gas and coal can be delivered through binding technology standards that do not require high precision quantification of emissions.

The decisive years ahead

The next 2 years will be critical for determining whether existing commitments translate into emissions reductions consistent with the Global Methane Pledge.

Governments should prioritise adoption of an effective international methane performance standard for oil and gas, including through the EU Methane Regulation, and expand the reach of such standards through voluntary buyers’ clubs. National and regional authorities should introduce binding technology standards for oil, gas and coal to ensure that voluntary agreements are backed by legal requirements.

One approach to promoting better progress on methane is to develop a binding methane agreement, starting with the oil and gas sector, as suggested by Barbados’ PM Mia Mottley and other leaders. Countries must also address the deeper challenge of political and economic dependence on fossil fuels, which continues to slow progress. Without a dual strategy of reducing methane and deep decarbonisation, it will not be possible to meet the Paris Agreement objectives.

Mottley’s “legally binding” methane pact faces barriers, but smaller steps possible

The next four years will determine whether available technologies, scientific evidence and political leadership align to deliver a rapid transition toward near-zero methane energy systems, holistic and equity-based lower emission agricultural systems and circular waste management strategies that eliminate methane release. These years will also determine whether the world captures the near-term climate benefits of methane abatement or locks in higher long-term costs and risks.

The Global Methane Status Report shows that the world is beginning to change course. Delivering the sharper downward trajectory now required is a test of political will. As scientists, we have laid out the evidence. Leaders must now act on it.

The post Curbing methane is the fastest way to slow warming – but we’re off the pace appeared first on Climate Home News.

The leaders and climate ministers of governments around the world will be invited to meetings on the Pacific islands of Fiji, Palau and Tuvalu in the months leading up to the COP31 climate summit in November.

Under a deal struck between Pacific nations, Fiji will host the official annual pre-COP meeting, at which climate ministers and negotiators discuss contentious issues with the COP Presidency to help make the climate summit smoother.

This pre-COP, expected to be held in early October, will include a “special leaders’ component” hosted in neighbouring Tuvalu – a 2.5-hour flight north – according to a statement issued by the Australian COP31 President of Negotiations Chris Bowen on LinkedIn on Thursday.

Bowen said this “will bring a global focus to the most pressing challenges facing our region and support investment in solutions which are fit for purpose for our region.” Australia will provide operational and logistical support for the event, he said.

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Like many Pacific island nations, Tuvalu, which is home to around 10,000 people, is threatened by rising sea levels, as salt water and waves damage homes, water supplies, farms and infrastructure.

Dozens of heads of state and government usually attend COP summits, but only a handful take part in pre-COP meetings. COP31 will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya in November, after an unusual compromise deal struck between Australia and Türkiye.

In addition, Pacific country Palau will host a climate event as part of the annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which convenes 18 Pacific nations – in August.

Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that this meeting would be a “launching board” to build momentum for COP31 and would draw new commitments from other countries to help Pacific nations cut emissions and adapt to climate change.

“At the PIF our priorities are going to be 100 per cent renewables, the ocean-climate nexus and … accelerating investments that build resilience from climate change,” he told ABC.

The post World leaders invited to see Pacific climate destruction before COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Alejandro Álvarez Iragorry is a Venezuelan ecologist and coordinator of Clima 21, an environmental NGO. Cat Rainsford is a transition minerals investigator for Global Witness and former Venezuela analyst for a Latin American think tank.

In 1975, former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo gave a now infamous warning. 

“Oil will bring us ruin,” he declared. “It is the devil’s excrement. We are drowning in the devil’s excrement.”  

At the time, his words seemed excessively gloomy to many Venezuelans. The country was in a period of rapid modernisation, fuelled by its booming oil economy. Caracas was a thriving cultural hotspot. Everything seemed good. But history proved Pérez right.  

Over the following decades, Venezuela’s oil dependence came to seem like a curse. After the 1980s oil price crash, political turmoil paved the way for the election of populist Hugo Chávez, who built a socialist state on oil money, only for falling prices and corruption to drive it into ruin. 

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By 2025, poverty and growing repression under Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro had forced nearly 8 million Venezuelans to leave the country. 

Venezuela is now at a crossroads. Since the US abducted Maduro on January 3 and seized control of the country’s oil revenues in a nakedly imperial act, all attention has been on getting the country’s dilapidated oil infrastructure pumping again.  

But Venezuelans deserve more than plunder and fighting over a planet-wrecking resource that has fostered chronic instability and dispossession. Right now, 80% of Venezuelans live below the poverty line. Venezuelans are desperate for jobs, income and change. 

Real change, though, won’t come through more oil dependency or profiteering by foreign elites. Instead, it is renewable energy that offers a pathway forward, towards sovereignty, stability and peace. 

Guri Dam and Venezuela’s hydropower decline

Venezuela boasts some of the strongest potential for renewable energy generation in the region. Two-thirds of the country’s own electricity comes from hydropower, mostly from the massive Guri Dam in the southern state of Bolívar. This is one of the largest dams in Latin America with a capacity of over 10 gigawatts, even providing power to parts of Colombia and Brazil. 

Guri has become another symbol of Venezuela’s mismanagement. Lack of diversification caused over-reliance on Guri for domestic power, making the system vulnerable to droughts. Poor maintenance reduced Guri’s capacity and planned supporting projects such as the Tocoma Dam were bled dry by corruption. The country was left plagued by blackouts and increasingly turned to dirty thermoelectric plants and petrol generators for power. 

Today, industry analysis suggests that Venezuela is producing at about 30% of its hydropower capacity. Rehabilitating this neglected infrastructure could re-establish clean power as the backbone of domestic industry, while the country’s abundant river system offers numerous opportunities for smaller, sustainable hydro projects that promote rural electrification. 

A fisherman walks down the coast from the Paraguana Refining Center (CRP) following a crude spill in September from a pipeline that connects production areas with the state-run PDVSA’s largest refinery, in Punta Cardon, Venezuela October 2, 2021. Picture taken October 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria A fisherman walks down the coast from the Paraguana Refining Center (CRP) following a crude spill in September from a pipeline that connects production areas with the state-run PDVSA’s largest refinery, in Punta Cardon, Venezuela October 2, 2021. Picture taken October 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria

Venezuela also has huge, untapped promise in wind power that could provide vital diversification from hydropower. The coastal states of Zulia and Falcón boast wind speeds in the ideal range for electricity generation, with potential to add up to 12 gigawatts to the grid. Yet planned projects in both states have stalled, leaving abandoned turbines rusting in fields and millions of dollars unaccounted for. 

Solar power is more neglected. One announced solar plant on the island of Los Roques remains non-functional a decade later, and a Chávez-era programme to supply solar panels to rural households ground to a halt when oil prices fell. Yet nearly a fifth of the country receives levels of solar radiation that rival leading regions such as northern Chile.

Developing Venezuela’s renewables potential would be a massive undertaking. Investment would be needed, local concerns around a just and equitable transition would have to be navigated and infrastructure development carefully managed.

Rebuilding Venezuela with a climate-driven energy transition 

A shift in political vision would be needed to ensure that Venezuela’s renewable energy was not used to simply free up more oil for export, as in the past, but to power a diversified domestic economy free from oil-driven cycles of boom and bust.

Ultimately, these decisions must be taken by democratically elected leaders. But to date, no timeline for elections has been set, and Venezuela’s future hangs in the balance. Supporting the country to make this shift is in all of our interests.

What’s clear is that Venezuela’s energy future should not lie in oil. Fossil fuel majors have not leapt to commit the estimated $100 billion needed to revitalise the sector, with ExxonMobil declaring Venezuela “uninvestable”. The issues are not only political. Venezuela’s heavy, sour crude is expensive to refine, making it dubious whether many projects would reach break-even margins.

Behind it all looms the spectre of climate change. The world must urgently move away from fossil fuels. Beyond environmental concerns, it’s simply good economics.  

People line up as others charge their phones with a solar panel at a public square in Caracas, Venezuela March 10, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins People line up as others charge their phones with a solar panel at a public square in Caracas, Venezuela March 10, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

Recent analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency finds that 91% of new renewable energy projects are now cheaper than their fossil fuel alternatives. China, the world’s leading oil buyer, is among the most rapid adopters.  

Tethering Venezuela’s future to an outdated commodity leaves the country in a lose-lose situation. Either oil demand drops and Venezuela is left with nothing. Or climate change runs rampant, devastating vulnerable communities with coastal loss, flooding, fires and heatwaves. Meanwhile, Venezuela remains locked in the same destructive economic swings that once led to dictatorship and mass emigration. There is another way.  

Venezuelans rightfully demand a political transition, with their own chosen leaders. But to ensure this transition is lasting and stable, Venezuela needs more – it needs an energy transition. 

The post There is hope for Venezuela’s future – and it isn’t based on oil appeared first on Climate Home News.

This winter’s snow cover is the lowest on record in the Western United States. While that could cause a torrent of trouble come spring — more wildfires, less water for farms and fish — at the moment, there’s one thing on many Westerners’ minds: skiing.

In Colorado, less than a third of Arapahoe Basin’s runs are open. In Washington, Mt. Baker Ski Area canceled an annual snowboard race “due to an unworkable snowpack.” In Oregon, Hoodoo Ski Area and Mt. Ashland Ski Area temporarily closed for weeks due to lack of snowfall, while college ski championships were moved from Montana to Utah. 

What’s a ski resort to do? Make snow, presumably, though details about resorts’ snowmaking are scant. Alterra and POWDR, two major ski resort conglomerates, didn’t respond to questions. Vail Resorts, which owns and operates 42 ski areas across the globe, said that while the company doesn’t share specific snowmaking data, “weather conditions, particularly temperature, influence how much and how long we make snow.”

Despite the dismal conditions, Steven Fassnacht, a professor of snow hydrology at Colorado State University, said that it would be difficult for Western resorts to ramp up snowmaking in a major way. Doing so would require resorts to purchase additional water rights, an expensive and complex legal process.

Historically, ski resorts in the West have relied on snowmaking much less than those in other parts of the country. Fewer than 10 percent of the region’s skiable acres, on average, are covered by man-made snow, compared to more than 50 percent in the Northeast and around 80 percent in the Southeast and Midwest.  

But as climate change makes winters increasingly warm and unpredictable, snowmaking is likely to become more important in the region, bringing with it environmental consequences and other challenges.

Snowmaking’s origins can be traced back to 1949, when the owner of a Connecticut ski resort spread 700 pounds of ice on a single run. It only lasted about two weeks, but it gave a group of engineers — and failed ski entrepreneurs — an idea. “Outside their defunct ski factory, they connected a 10-horsepower compressor by garden hose to a spray-gun nozzle that they’d been using to paint skis,” wrote John Fry, a ski historian.

Today, snowmaking’s core technology remains the same: spraying highly pressurized water into the air, where it freezes. Energy and water use are the main environmental concerns, although the potential impacts range from soil degradation to chemical exposure. There’s also Indigenous opposition that generally focuses on the desecration of sacred places by wastewater.

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Lots of energy is necessary to push water uphill and pressurize air. One study of 10 ski areas across the country estimated that snowmaking accounts for 18 percent of a resort’s energy use on average.

Then there’s the water that’s used to make the snow. Palisades Tahoe, for example, uses “50 to 70 million gallons of water for snowmaking annually, enough to cover about 60 acres of terrain in 1.5 feet of snow,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Although 70 million gallons is nothing to sneeze at — it’s what 50 American families might use in a year — Fassnacht emphasized that an estimated 80 percent of the water used for snowmaking returns to streams and rivers. The remainder is lost to evaporation.

While that water comes from the same supply used by cities and farms, the demand is at a different time of year, Fassnacht said. Ski resorts typically make snow in the late fall and early winter, and agricultural and municipal needs don’t ratchet up until the late spring and summer. And if there ever weren’t enough water available, ski resorts are junior rights holders, meaning they would have to get in line behind those with senior water rights. In Colorado, snowmaking accounts for an estimated .05 percent of the state’s annual water consumption, whereas agriculture accounts for about 85 percent.

Still, machine-made snow differs from natural snow in an important way: It does not contribute to the regions’ water supply at scale. According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 75 percent of the water Westerners depend on comes from mountain snowpack, so even if snowmaking helps snow-hungry skiers, it doesn’t make up for dry winters where the water’s really needed. 

People ski and snowboard at Bear Mountain Ski Resort in December in Big Bear, California. Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“Snowmaking should be considered a temporary storage on the mountain, instead of in a reservoir,” Fassnacht said. “The water is not really taken out of the system, just stored somewhere else. It does not replace snow that falls from the sky.”

Fassnacht’s biggest concern about snowmaking is its timing — when the resorts decide to take water from streams. If the water is taken at times of low flow, he said, it could have a detrimental impact on aquatic life.

To reduce their consumption of fresh water, some resorts, including Big Sky in Montana, have begun making snow from treated wastewater. While one conservation group called the practice “a win-win for the health of our rivers and the resort economy,” it can be controversial.

Flagstaff’s ski area, for example, began using wastewater to create machine-made snow in 2013, spraying sewage on a mountain that is sacred to local Indigenous people and members of 13 Native American tribes. The practice — and the protests — continue to this day.

Overall, snowmaking can be seen as an adaptation to climate change, but researchers wonder if it is actually a maladaptation — one that contributes to worsening climate change.

The authors of a 2022 paper in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism concluded that snowmaking’s environmental impacts depend greatly upon a resort’s location. In areas with relatively clean electric grids and high water security, such as Washington, snowmaking has much less of an impact than in states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming, where electric grids are more carbon-intensive and water stresses are higher. Although most of those states have plans to decarbonize their grids in the next few decades, water scarcity is projected to increase over that period, too.

The researchers also said that snowmaking’s impact on travel can’t be ignored. On average, they found that skiers have to drive just 36 miles before they emit more carbon dioxide in transit than they do at a ski area. So if snowmaking encourages skiers to stick to nearby mountains rather than fly across the country, they said that could actually be a net-positive for the planet.

In any case, the prognosis for skiing, especially in coastal states and at low elevations, is grim.

“There’s a level to which, to put it bluntly, the ski industry is screwed,” said Jesse Ritner, an assistant professor of history at Georgia College & State University, who is writing a book on snowmaking. “That said, snowmaking is only going to become more and more important.”

The industry sees the writing on the wall. In 2019, Vail Ski Resort bought 421 new snow guns for its mountain in Colorado, a move the resort called the “largest snowmaking expansion in North American history.” Other resorts, like Bogus Basin in Idaho, are turning to snowfarming, the practice of collecting and storing snow for the following winter.

But even efforts like these can’t completely shield companies from bad winters: Earlier this year, Vail Resorts told investors that dismal snowfall in Western states had led to a 20 percent decrease in visitation across its North American properties.

Snowfarming operations at Bogus Basin, Idaho. Last year, the ski resort covered snow in insulation over the summer. Courtesy of Bogus Basin Mountain Recreation Area

“Bad years were a real rarity, now they’re becoming more common,” said Michael Pidwirny, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies climate change and skiing. “They’re going to even increase more in the future, and if it’s too warm, how do you make snow?”

Snowmaking only works when it’s cold enough: The “wet bulb temperature,” a combination of humidity and air temperature, must be below 28 degrees.

Pidwirny predicts that Whistler Blackcomb, the famous Vail-owned resort in his home province, will probably “reach a situation where one out of two years are really too poor to support good skiing in about 2050 (or) 2060.”

The resorts will just have to adapt, Pidwirny said. “And the way that they’ll adapt is they’ll recognize that it’s not guaranteed that they’re going to have a ski season every year.”

Perhaps not even snowmaking can change that.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ski resorts are increasingly reliant on snowmaking. But at what cost? on Feb 26, 2026.

A cleaner cooking initiative in Myanmar is set to generate the first-ever batch of carbon credits under the new UN carbon market, more than a decade after the mechanism was first envisioned in the Paris Agreement.

The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body has approved the issuance of 60,000 credits, which correspond to tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced by distributing more efficient cookstoves that need less firewood and, therefore, ease pressure on carbon-storing forests, the project developers say. The approval of the credit issuance will become effective after a 14‑day appeal and grievance period.

The programme started in 2019 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – and is being implemented by a South Korean NGO with investment from private South Korean firms.

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

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

Making ‘a big difference’

The approval of the credits issuance represents a major milestone for the UN carbon market established under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. By generating carbon credits that both governments and private firms can use, the mechanism aims to accelerate global climate action and channel additional finance to developing nations.

• Dec 18, 2025 News “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal The registry used nearly one million bogus carbon credits to compensate for failed Shell-linked China rice offsets, raising concerns over its rules Read more
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• Mar 7, 2025 Carbon markets Most cookstove carbon credits ruled out of quality scheme in integrity push The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market has rejected widely used rulebooks for cleaner cooking, which will require projects to switch to more rigorous methods Read more

UNFCCC chief Simon Stiell said the approval of the first credits from a clean cooking project shows “how this mechanism can support solutions that make a big difference in people’s daily lives, as well as channeling finance to where it delivers real-life benefits on the ground”.

“Over two billion people globally are without access to clean cooking, which kills millions every year. Clean cooking protects health, saves forests, cuts emissions and helps empower women and girls, who are typically hardest hit by household air pollution,” he added in a statement.

Concerns over clean cookstove credits

Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods. Proceeds from the sale of carbon credits made up 35% of the revenue generated by for-profit clean cooking companies in 2023, according to a report by the Clean Cooking Initiative.

But many cookstove offsetting projects have faced significant criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions. Their main criticism is that the rules allow project developers to overestimate the impact of fuel collection on deforestation, while relying on surveys to track stove usage that are prone to bias and can further inflate reported impacts.

As Louisiana bets big on ‘blue ammonia’, communities brace for air pollution

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

An analysis conducted last year by Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch claimed that the project would generate 26 times more credits than it should, when comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.

‘Conservative’ values cut credit volume

But, after transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project applied updated values and “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, according to the UNFCCC, which added that this resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued than would have been the case in the CDM.

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

Over 1,500 projects originally developed under the CDM requested the transition to the new mechanism, including controversial schemes subsidising fossil gas-powered plants in China and India. But, so far, the transfer of only 165 of all those projects has been approved by their respective host nations, which have until the end of June to make a final decision.

The UN climate body said this means that “a wide variety of real-world climate projects are already in line to follow” in sectors such as renewable energy, waste management and agriculture. But the transfer of old programmes from the CDM has long been contested with critics arguing that weak and discredited rules allow projects to overestimate emission reductions.

Genuinely new projects unrelated to the CDM are expected to start operating under the Paris Agreement mechanism once the Supervisory Body approves the first custom-made methodologies.

The post UN’s new carbon market delivers first credits through Myanmar cookstove project appeared first on Climate Home News.

In Czechia, little remains of the idealist foreign policy conceived under President Václav Havel in the 1990s. According to long-standing democracy and human rights advocate and newly elected MP Gabriela Svárovská, state capture and populism are weakening the country in the face of an aggressive Russia, a crumbling world order, and a worsening climate crisis. Could an approach based on values give new strength to Czech and European foreign policy?

Petr Kutílek & Pavlína Janebová: Have you observed a new idealism in Czechia’s approach to foreign policy? If so, is it really new?

Gabriela Svárovská: In the Czech case, there was much idealism in the foreign policy of Václav Havel, our first president after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. This idealism arose all over Central and Eastern Europe as we liberated ourselves from totalitarianism and stepped onto the path to democracy. When I started working for the Office of the President, under Havel, the universality of human rights, the right to democracy and self-determination, and the protection of civilians were genuine objectives that were set out and pursued in foreign policy strategies. Ditto during the years I worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I remember that, at the time, there was a debate within the European Union on lifting the sanctions imposed on China because of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Czechia, an EU member by then, wanted the sanctions to be maintained. Even though we were often criticised by more experienced member states for being “unrealistic”, we stood up for the idealist approach.

At EU meetings, when Czechs or Poles took the floor, some of those present would just stop listening, for lack of trust or interest. But then came the first Czech EU presidency, in 2009, which gave us some agenda-setting power in the Council of Ministers. We raised the issue of human rights in Russia and elsewhere. We regularly invited human rights defenders to provide first-hand testimonies during Council meetings. We started implementing the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders – practical measures to support and protect them. We also pushed through the Civil Society Forum as part of the EU’s Eastern Partnership agenda. Finally, our voice was being heard and listened to.

Today, Czech politicians still like to speak of Havel’s legacy, but they no longer adhere to its principles. At most, they pay lip service to them in their media statements. Other, stronger influences have come into play, not least private business interests and populist voices claiming to challenge the establishment, often equated with “Brussels” and its climate policies. Little remains of the idealism that once characterised Czech foreign policy.

Has Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed anything?

After the invasion, the Czech government came out strongly in support of Ukraine, but this was largely motivated by society’s response. The first government press conferences were rather lukewarm. This changed after Czechs spontaneously took to the streets in solidarity with Ukraine and started helping Ukrainian refugees. The system started moving largely thanks to bottom-up pressure. It was a narrow political calculation.

The Czech government’s 2024 initiative to procure ammunition for Ukraine was important, because every artillery shell counts at the front. However, in my opinion, the initiative was poorly organised. The government’s first step was to announce it – for PR purposes, one might say. Only then did it begin to raise money – from other governments in order to avoid putting its own money into it. Predictably, as soon as the buying spree was announced, ammo prices went up. The government’s grandstanding turned out to be not such a smart move after all.

We must also ask ourselves whether, prior to 2022, we were sufficiently vigilant in relation to the Russian threat. Were we really doing our homework, in Czechia and Europe, in terms of building societal resilience against disinformation and cyberattacks or reducing fossil fuel dependency? I don’t think we were. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, who spoke out against Europe’s dependence on Russian energy? It was the European Greens, one of a few lone voices. Who, in 2019, imposed sanctions on firms that helped Russia build another gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2? It was Donald Trump – a very uncomfortable fact. Of course, he was pursuing US strategic interests. It is a shame that Europe was unable to see, define, and pursue its own.

The reason I welcome the concept of “neo-idealism” is precisely because I see so little of it in current Czech politics. It confronts us with the gap between our words and our deeds. This applies not only to foreign policy, of course, but to politics in general. It is one of the reasons for the crisis of democracy spreading across the West. Elites – and politicians in particular – like to talk about “ordinary people”, yet these are no longer their primary concern. Corporate sponsors, marketing advisors, and other influential players come first. Their meddling in decision-making amounts to the privatisation of political power. Let us call those who skilfully convert economic power into political power what they are: oligarchs. Czechia scored highly on the crony-capitalism index drawn up by The Economist in 2023. It came in second place after Russia.

What can Europeans learn from each other?

We need each other to be able to better understand the various security threats Europe is facing. Countries such as the Baltic states, Poland, and Czechia, being former satellite states of the Soviet Union, see the threat from Russia and consider it a priority. But have they ever really cared about the Mediterranean aspect of European security? Did they listen to Spain, Italy, and others when they talked about the problems in their region? By this, I don’t mean that we should support efforts to stop boats carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about developing the Southern dimension of the EU’s neighbourhood policy.

The divergence in security threat perceptions is not an issue of double standards per se, rather just a lack of information. We have Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Armenians living in Prague, while other countries have people from North Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. That’s why it’s so crucial to listen to each other, share expertise and intelligence, and foster connections between our civil societies.

That said, I do think that Russia is the biggest threat at the moment. While its military capabilities may be declining due to massive losses on the front line in terms of both personnel and equipment, it remains a dangerous enemy for a Europe that is witnessing the erosion of the Pax Americana. For decades, we happily relied on NATO, financed in large part by the United States. We lived peacefully under the US nuclear umbrella and with the presence of US troops in Europe. We now have to face up to a new reality. We must become more self-reliant in the area of defence, while keeping in mind that security and resilience are much broader than just defence.

Could you elaborate on this last point?

Weapons cannot guarantee security in Europe if political cohesion continues to be lacking. Without it, how can our armed forces act together? How do we decide on their deployment? Today, we are struggling to even agree on the milder instrument of sanctions. We fail to implement them properly. Friends of Putin are benefitting from the war on our continent, and we are letting them off the hook. We still allow companies that are part of the Russian military complex to operate in the EU.

In Czechia, we host a branch of Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear energy company. There may be other companies that are owned by Russian oligarchs, and they might even be sponsoring political parties, but we simply do not know. What we do know though is that they are sponsoring disinformation campaigns, malign influence operations, and cyber attacks. Russia’s footprint could be spotted in anti-vax campaigns, climate change denial, conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, and anti-gender movements. We are unable to get rid of the presence of Putin’s regime on our territory, whereas that should have been the most straightforward part of our commitment to support Ukraine and protect Europe’s security.

It is too easy to place the blame solely on holdouts such as Hungary and Slovakia for Europe’s lack of political decisiveness. Other countries are hiding behind them to protect partisan interests of their own or cater to the most efficient lobbies.

How should Europe position itself towards the Global South?

In Czechia, there is little reflection on Europe’s colonial past. When the director of the National Gallery started to talk about the decolonisation concept in arts, she was ridiculed by politicians. Didn’t she know that our country never had any colonies? But we cannot ignore the fact that we have joined a club, the EU, that does include former colonial powers. In these countries, colonialism and the way it carries over into present-day relations with the Global South is discussed in public debate, by civil society, even by politicians.

It is also in our interest for Europe to make things right with the Global South. In today’s fragmenting world, we need more allies – also in the South. Today, big corporations from Europe and elsewhere are benefiting from slave labour, deforestation, land grabbing, and mining in these countries. Instead of continued exploitation, we should be offering them partnerships that, when it comes to trade and investment, observe the rights of their populations, including Indigenous peoples, and give them a say, for example in who is allowed to mine minerals on their territory and under what terms.

Should Europe still strive to promote democracy worldwide?

In 2009, in close cooperation with the Swedish EU presidency, we pushed through Council conclusions on democracy support, making this a key objective of the EU’s external policies. The preparatory work was a landmark effort, bringing together experts on human rights and on development. These goals are closely linked (if sometimes conflictual), yet these people had never actually sat down together.

Part of this effort was a discussion on whether to speak of “democracy promotion”. To avoid giving the impression of imposing our Western ways on other parts of the world, we agreed to use the term “democracy support” instead. I still think supporting democracy, with the involvement of civil society, is very different to colonialism. Of course, we have to recognise that different cultures and regions have their own models of public participation in government. But we must also keep our distance from those who say that democracy is only suitable for Western societies, and that other societies are not capable of it. That boils down to cultural racism.

Democracy may have different operating modes, different institutions. But you know a democratic country when you see one.

Soft power is an important foreign policy instrument for Europe. To many human rights defenders around the world, Europe remains a model. It has played a leading role in bringing about important international treaties and UN resolutions. Again, when we work in support of human rights protection, it should not be about copying our model, but about participation and cooperation. Context matters.

And what about the international rule of law?

Standing up for international law is not easy. It forces us to be critical of long-standing allies, such as Israel and the US. But if ever there was a time to think deeply about why international law exists, why it is vital to our security, it is now. Czechia is among the countries that should understand that any time in history, when the international order started to crumble, it was a bad time for the country.

In this context, which values should Green parties aim to project in society and politics?

As Greens, we are quite clear and confident in stating what needs to be done. We must combine care for the environment and the climate with proper social policies, while observing human rights. These are the three core values we stand for.

The difficulty is how to make ourselves heard amid a backlash that pushes everything green and social out of the public debate. Should we shy away from anything that may be perceived and portrayed as radicalism in order to avoid being marginalised? Should we be less vocal on certain issues to ensure we remain in the mainstream and keep attracting media coverage? Or should we just decide to say things as they are? This is a major strategic question for all European Greens.

The pendulum will swing back in the end, if only because Europe, including Czechia, will ultimately reap the benefits of climate policies, the more so if they are combined with a fairer distribution of wealth and a transformation of the current extractive economic model into a sustainable one, kinder to both the environment and people’s wellbeing. Meanwhile, it is essential that Green, progressive, and left-liberal parties and groups, as well as social movements, work together.

This interview was conducted prior to Gabriela Svárovská’s election to the Czech parliament in October 2025.

Europe’s new Right to Repair Directive will make it easier — and cheaper — for consumers to get their household goods fixed, rather than buy something new. Part of the E.U.’s Green Deal, the plan is expected to slash waste, promote recycling, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

Read more on E360 →

The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) recently hosted a webinar to examine how expanding use of GLP-1 weight-loss medications is reshaping food consumption, nutrition priorities, and product innovation. The changes extend beyond appetite suppression, influencing consumer preferences and sensitivity to flavors and textures.

Whitney Evans, Director of Nutrition and Scientific Affairs at Danone U.S., says that about 10 percent of adults in the United States have used or are currently taking a GLP-1 drug, and over half of American adults meet the criteria for the medication. With growing adoption, the food industry is rethinking product design to align with evolving nutrition needs and consumer preferences.

In the webinar, “Smaller Plates, Bigger Opportunities: Designing Food for Post-GLP-1 Appetites,” speakers discussed what that redesign could look like. Reduced appetites and new eating patterns are prompting companies to develop products with portion size, nutrient composition, and sensory experience in mind. As this happens, Evans emphasizes the importance of meals delivering sufficient protein, fiber, and micronutrients within reduced serving sizes.

“We know that GLP-1 medications not only reduce gastrointestinal transit, but they also impact the brain,” Evans says.

David Lundahl, founder and CEO of InsightsNow, adds that eaters often experience diminished appetite, sensory changes, and reduced thoughts around food while on the medications. He explains that GLP-1 users can have heightened sensitivity to flavors and textures, including aversions to greasy and overly sweet foods. As users eat slowly and develop sensitivity to strong flavors, Lundahl says, “texture can be a dealbreaker.”

In response, food companies may focus more on texture as flavors become less enticing. “Instead of trying to develop things that people would crave, it shifts to food product guidance that is about tolerance, avoiding displeasures, or slowing down eating rates through textural design,” Lundahl says.

As portion sizes decrease, food companies are reformulating products to deliver sufficient protein and key nutrients. “There is a lot of demand for novel protein formats,” Lundahl offers. He also notes an opportunity to fortify foods. “As people eat to live rather than living to eat, vitamins and minerals are going to be lacking,” he says.

Limited data on users’ diets before starting GLP-1s and while taking them has made it challenging to offer evidence-based recommendations. “We’re not exactly sure what this population needs, but we do know what’s relevant for individuals seeking weight loss in other areas,” Evans says.

Danone is prioritizing research and product development to better understand the role of protein and the nutritional needs of GLP-1 users. In consumer research, the company finds GLP-1 users seek small, readily available products.

“One of the things we heard over and over again is that it’s really difficult to eat on the go,” Evans says. “Our current ecosystem is not built for smaller portion sizes, and particularly for this population.” Danone’s yogurt brand OIKOS Fusion was the first cultured dairy drink designed specifically for the nutritional needs and preferences of GLP-1 users.

Access to education is another area of focus for Danone. “Ninety percent of GLP-1 users had no contact with a registered dietitian prior to initiating the medication,” Evans says. “A lot of people starting these medications are unfortunately flying blind with respect to what type of nutrition they should be prioritizing.”

Danone has built several tools to address this gap. This includes a website providing users with nutrition recommendations from registered dietitians. They’re also equipping pharmacists with nutrition guidelines to help support GLP-1 users as they pick up their medications.

Evans also notes the importance of building healthy routines, so eaters aren’t relying entirely on GLP-1s to maintain a healthy weight.

Evans says that similar nutritional needs apply to both GLP-1 users and non-users. “If we all focus on eating a more nutrient dense diet and prioritize essential nutrients, we’re going to be better off to the point where maybe we won’t need medication…to be doing some of this work for us.”

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The post How GLP-1 Medications Are Driving Food and Beverage Innovation appeared first on Food Tank.

Ontario’s electricity consumers face heightened risks as the province plans to increase gas-fired power to compensate for nuclear plants shut down for multi-year refurbishments. By 2030, gas generation in Ontario is slated to grow to five times its...

For Immediate Release:

February 25, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

Sacramento, Calif. —  Today, a coalition of Tribes and environmental advocates hosted a virtual press conference urging the Delta Stewardship Council to reject the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) Certification of Consistency for the proposed Delta Conveyance Project, warning that approval would signal a retreat from the Council’s promise to ensure that environmental justice and Tribal consultation are not merely procedural formalities, but central to its decision making. The press conference comes ahead of the Council’s February 26-27 hearings to consider whether the controversial Delta Tunnel project complies with the state’s Delta Plan.

The coalition includes the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, San Francisco Baykeeper, Center for Biological Diversity, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Little Manila Rising, Friends of the River, California Indian Environmental Alliance, Sierra Club California and Restore the Delta.

The coalition filed a formal appeal challenging the DWR’s Certification of Consistency, asserting that the project violates state law and poses an imminent threat to Delta communities, its ecosystem and cultural heritage. In the appeal, the coalition highlights several key concerns, noting that the Tunnel project would: 

• Irreparably harm Tribal Cultural Resources including cultural sites, burial grounds and traditional use areas, while lacking meaningful Tribal consultation;
• Intensify environmental harm by increasing diversions from the Delta, reducing protective water flows for threatened fish species and increasing harmful algal blooms;
• Worsen environmental injustices, placing disproportionate burdens on Delta residents including low-income, Tribal and Latino communities;
• Increase water reliance on the Delta, directly contradicting Delta Plan requirements, and weakening water flow protections

Advocates emphasized that DWR’s self-certification of consistency disregards critical environmental review findings and contradicts the project’s true impacts. The coalition contended that instead of spending tens of billions of dollars on a massive tunnel that would damage ecosystems, California should invest in restorative water solutions including prioritizing local water supplies, strengthening Delta levees, and modernizing existing State Water Project infrastructure.

STATEMENTS FROM COALITION MEMBERS:

Malissa Tayaba, Vice Chair, Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians:

“The Delta Plan recognizes the need to protect and support our treasured estuary, and the people whose lives, cultures, and traditions depend on it. My tribe’s ancestral territory includes the greater Delta and as the First Peoples of the region, we feel an inherent responsibility to protect the Delta’s eco-cultural well-being, not just for our people but for all people. Our guardianship responsibility, as well as the Delta Stewardship Council’s, extends beyond us and includes the plant, fish, and animal relatives that rely on these already imperiled waterways to survive. The DCP would take more water out of the Delta in times when the Delta and all the living things connected to it need water the most. The Delta Conveyance Project is fundamentally inconsistent with the Delta Plan and we hope the DSC will uphold its duty to protect it.”

Michelle Rivera, Program Coordinator, California Indian Environmental Alliance:

“The California Indian Environmental Alliance has worked towards implementing Tribal Beneficial Uses for subsistence fishing, cultural uses and water quality – this would translate to the health of plants, aquatic animals, and Tribal members. The Delta Tunnels block any ability to make progress in water quality to support tribal beneficial uses and this project will degrade the water, it will impair habitats and kill off the plant life that lies in the project area. We strongly oppose the construction of the Delta Tunnel and instead support investing in existing systems to upgrade them.”

Gloria Alonso, Environmental Justice Advocacy Coordinator, Little Manila Rising:

“In our urban Delta communities, generations of youth are growing up watching the degradation of our closest waterways—waters their elders once swam in on hot summer days. We ask ourselves, how is this possible? We are witnessing the public processes that, instead of protecting us, can enable this chronic environmental degradation, all while our communities are on the frontlines of climate change. The Delta Conveyance Project is inconsistent with the Delta Plan objectives and policies that seek to protect us. The Delta Stewardship Council has the power to reject this project and safeguard the future of the Delta ecosystem for generations to come.”

Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs, Restore the Delta:

“The proposed Delta Conveyance Project is far from consistent with the Delta Plan, which calls for protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Bay-Delta. Instead of reducing reliance on the Delta, the Tunnel would increase reliance on Delta exports, diverting much needed funds from investments in local water supply solutions. The Tunnel would also devastate the Delta as a place – removing prime farmland from operation, disrupting the fishing, recreation and tourism economies central to the Delta, and expediting the decline of an already imperiled ecosystem. Delta ecosystems, and the tribes and communities that depend upon them, deserve an opportunity to heal and thrive, but that future is incompatible with the Delta Conveyance Project.”

###

Greenland Resources (TSX:MOLY) announced Wednesday the government of Greenland has granted it exclusive rights of a special exploration license consisting of 1,147.76 km2 in the Semersooq region surrounding the company’s existing exploitation license for molybdenum and magnesium.  

The Canadian company said it now has a dominant mineral licence position on the east coast of Greenland. 

Molybdenum demand is experiencing strong growth, driven by its critical role in high-performance steel alloys, infrastructure, and the energy transition. Global demand is expected to rise from roughly 398,000 tonnes in 2024 to 500,000 tonnes/year by 2034, according to Research and Markets.  

Last year, Greenland Resources inked a long-term offtake agreement with Finland’s Outokumpu, the largest producer of stainless steel in Europe and the second largest in the Americas, for the supply molybdenum oxide produced at its flagship Malmbjerg project. 

Based on previous reports published by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, the geochemistry data from rock samples available in the new license area show multiple locations with highly anomalous molybdenum values that could potentially add to its Malmbjerg project, the company said, adding that an exploration program including hyperspectral surveys for the new concession will be established. 

By market close in Toronto, Greenland Resources stock was up 2.94%. The company has a C$235 million ($171 million) market capitalization.  

Lundin Gold (TSX: LUG) has enlisted Australian space company Fleet Space Technologies to sharpen drill targeting and cut exploration risk at its Fruta del Norte mine in southeastern Ecuador as it pushes to extend the asset’s life amid strong gold prices.

The Canadian miner plans to spend $100 million this year on exploration at Fruta del Norte, Ecuador’s first large-scale underground mine, which began production in late 2019 with an initial 12-year mine life.

Lundin Gold expects annual output of 475,000 to 525,000 ounces from 2026 to 2028. In 2025, the operation produced nearly 500,000 ounces, while exports of gold concentrate and doré are projected to reach about $1.8 billion.

The orebody lies beneath more than 200 metres of post-mineralization volcano-sedimentary cover, making conventional surface exploration ineffective. The blind epithermal gold-silver system is structurally controlled by steep, second-order faults within a broader regional fault zone, complicating efforts to define new targets near the mine.

Lundin Gold to invest $100 million in 2026 Ecuador exploration

To better map these concealed structures, Lundin Gold deployed Fleet Space’s ExoSphere platform, which integrates high-resolution active seismic data with existing geological and assay datasets. The company said the approach improved its structural framework, refined its geological model and identified new high-priority drill targets.

Fleet Space and Lundin Gold designed a high-resolution active seismic survey across the project area to complement existing data. ExoSphere processed and standardized the information, integrating it into a layered subsurface model that brought previously obscured geological features into focus. The resulting interpretations enabled more precise drill targeting and improved prioritization of prospective zones.

“Fruta del Norte is a powerful example of how Agile Geoscience is redefining what’s possible in mineral exploration,” Fleet Space chief executive Flavia Tata Nardini said in a statement. She said integrating active seismic data into the platform allows explorers to illuminate complex mineral systems beneath significant cover and translate deeper structural understanding into actionable insights.

Seismic reach boost

Fleet Space strengthened its seismic capability in May 2025 with the acquisition of HiSeis, a provider of seismic solutions to the mining industry. Active seismic technology delivers metre-scale subsurface imaging, helping companies visualize complex mineral systems and optimize drilling strategies.

Fruta del Norte sits in the remote Condor Mountain range, where dense jungle terrain creates logistical and access challenges. Fleet Space said its data-driven approach allows companies to operate with greater precision and speed in constrained environments while reducing risk and environmental impact.

Ecuador holds significant mineral reserves but has lagged Andean neighbours Peru and Chile in large-scale mining development, as projects often face community opposition, legal challenges and shifting regulations.

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The UK’s second biggest onshore oil operator saw production volumes drop nearly 6% below predictions in 2025.

Singleton oil site in the South Downs National Park. Photo: DrillOrDrop

In a trading update, Star Energy said net production averaged 1,886 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d), compared with the 2,000 boe/d expected for the year.

The company’s chief executive, Ross Glover, said:

“Production volumes in 2025 were below our expectations, driven by a number of discrete issues.

“At Gainsborough and Welton, unplanned National Grid power outages during summer infrastructure upgrades, together with a process pipeline failure, impacted output; the grid works are now complete, no shutdowns are scheduled for 2026 and the pipeline issue has been resolved.

“At Stockbridge, water disposal constraints reduced production and we are addressing this through conversion of a production well to a water injector, with production expected to be reinstated in Q3 2026.

“Across the portfolio we are working to minimise downtime and have a programme of work that will holistically assess, on a field by field basis, the opportunities to improve oil recovery.”

Singleton delays

The company also confirmed that plans to generate electricity for the grid from gas at the Singleton well site in West Sussex had been delayed.

Mr Glover said:

“Our Singleton gas‑to‑wire project has been delayed due to protracted regulatory approvals required and delays to the final connection to the grid.

“All major plant items are installed onsite and we are working constructively with the operator to complete the grid connection. We continue to target commissioning in Q2 2026.”

Star Energy reported it spent £2.7m on the Singleton project in 2025 and expected to spend another £2.6m in 2026 to complete it.

The South Downs National Park Authority approved the Singleton scheme unanimously in July 2025, despite objections from the local parish council, environmental groups and some residents.

Key figures for 2025

Net production for 2025: averaged 1,886boe/d. About 2,000boe/d predicted for 2026.

Cash at 31 December 2025: £7.6m

Money drawn under loan facility: £11.9m

Sale of non-core land: £6.3m in proceeds during first half of 2025

Investment in oil and gas assets in 2025: £5.3m (£2.7m on Singleton gas-to-wire project; remainder on production optimisation and plant upgrade

Forecast spending on abandonment activities: £1.4m

Forecast of 2026 capital expenditure: £6.3m (including £2.6m to complete Singleton gas-to-wire project

Realised hedging gain in 2025: £1.2m

Energy Profits Levy payments (windfall tax) for year ending 31 December 2024: £1.7m

General and administrative savings in 2025: £2.0m+

Geothermal expenditure in 2025: £1.2m less in 2025 compared with 2024.

I recently spent some time on the Bird Migration Explorer website, and it got me thinking about some of the interesting connections between bird breeding habitat in the Arctic and the far-off...

IT IS NO SECRET that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) raised critical questions about the relationship between Indigenous and Canadian cultural sovereignty. While those TRC Calls to Action focused on media and culture (notably numbers 83 to 89) do not explicitly frame sovereignty in constitutional terms, they do establish a general framework which correlates reconciliation with Indigenous authority. For example, Call to Action 83 led the Canada Council for the Arts to establish commitments explicitly acknowledging “the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous peoples” and respecting Indigenous “self-determination.” 

Jesse Wente’s appointment as Canada Council Chair in 2020 represented a direct implementation of this principle in the organization’s leadership. More fundamentally, faithful implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (UNIDRIP) would, as political scientist Liam Midzain-Gobin argues, “give Indigenous Peoples greater authority and decision-making power.” However, as Anishinaabe scholar Sheryl Lightfoot observes, Canada practices what she calls “selective endorsement” — accepting UNDRIP in principle while resisting the structural changes it requires. 

While the TRC does not explicitly redefine the constitutional relationship between Indigenous and Canadian sovereignty, the logic of these calls (notably the repudiation of doctrines that justified European claims to sovereignty over lands already inhabited by indigenous peoples) reveals a fundamental truism:

Canada’s claim to sovereignty is inextricably bound up
in a complex relationship with unceded Indigenous lands.
If this fact is slowly being metabolized domestically,
its implications must increasingly be
considered internationally. What is the Indigenous Screen Office?

At present, the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) has shown significant progress in supporting Indigenous creators internationally. However, while Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s formal announcement of the ISO in 2017 may give the impression of state innovation, the ISO’s creation was, “the result of decades of advocacy from Indigenous industry professionals and creators.” While the organization’s history can arguably be traced as far back as controversies surrounding the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change program, the ISO’s immediate history emerged from more recent reports like Jeff Bear’s At The Crossroads (2004), Danis Goulet and Kerry Swanson’s Indigenous Feature Film Production in Canada: A National and International Perspective (2013), and Marcia Nickerson’s Supporting & Developing the Indigenous Screen-based Media Industry in Canada (2016), each of which made the case for a dedicated screen institution which centers Indigenous Sovereignty both domestically and internationally. 

To this end, the ISO’s official mandate is a product of these longer histories, with “narrative sovereignty and cultural revitalization,” a framework outlined by founding director Jesse Wente, ensuring that,

“it is Indigenous peoples who should be telling our stories, and it should be Indigenous peoples describing how that is done and by whom. Anything less ensures that media creation remains a colonial practice.” 

By 2025, ISO controls about 42 percent of all funding in the Indigenous screen sector and receives mandated contributions from streaming platforms under CRTC regulations. The Office has partnered “with the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm Canada and CMPA to deliver activities under the ISO’s international market development strategy,” including hosting the first-ever international Indigenous Co-production forum at Cannes in May 2023, bringing together 18 providers from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Greenland, and Northern Europe, organizing the Indigenous Screen Summit at Banff connecting producers with international buyers. 

The impact is undeniable, but the implications of the Office — particularly when centred within the longer history of Indigenous advocacy for international representation — has wider ranging consequences. Telefilm Canada, the federal film finance agency responsible for promoting Canadian audiovisual content internationally, currently administers 60 co-production treaties and international promotion programs, none of which were designed with Indigenous sovereignty as a core organizing principle. And ISO’s authority over international pathways is still emerging. The question we might consider is: to what degree do the wider implications of the TRC affect Canada’s international cultural products, and how might emerging institutions like the ISO further facilitate Indigenous cultural agency? 

To address this question, a phased approach could build on the initial successes of the ISO within one possible trajectory of the TRC. As a settler researcher working in Canadian media history, I approach this question recognizing that Indigenous nations will ultimately determine their own international cultural strategies. My focus here is on how existing Canadian institutions might remove barriers and redistribute decision-making authority. 

In this way, this proposal aligns with both longstanding Indigenous advocacy for screen sovereignty and more recent and redoubled calls for international cultural governance.

Expanding the ISO’s Authority: A Step-by-Step Guide

At a TIFF 2024 panel, “Indigenous Creators Look Beyond Borders,” ISO CEO Kerry Swanson directly critiqued existing co-production treaty structures, suggesting that “these treaties were established between the nations without any consideration of Indigenous content because at that time Indigenous people were excluded from the industry and so there was not an Indigenous perspective at the table when negotiating these nationalistic treaties.” Panellist Anne Laja Utsi, CEO of the International Sámi Film Institute, illustrated this with reference to the Canada-Norway Treaty, which requires audio tracks in Norwegian, English, or French, excluding Sámi and Indigenous Canadian languages, offering a concrete example of how colonial frameworks structurally limit Indigenous cultural circulation. 

While the ISO has not explicitly demanded co-decision authority over Telefilm’s international programs, this critique — combined with ISO’s active international engagement and the broader narrative sovereignty framework established in the 2019 ImagineNATIVE report On-Screen Protocols & Pathways (“Gone is the era of consultants and consultations … sovereign nations must have control over their own stories”), and the logical implications of the longer history of direct action which generated the ISO — suggests the groundwork exists for expanded international authority. 

ISO representatives could, for example, be formally integrated into decisions about which Indigenous-led productions receive international promotion funding, ensuring Canada’s cultural footprint abroad reflects Indigenous priorities. Over time, the ISO could take on more direct responsibilities: leading co-production treaties and guiding distribution strategies so Indigenous creators claim partial authority over global circulation. This approach leverages existing programming while expanding Indigenous leadership, recognizing that

Canadian cultural exports depend not only on which stories are told, but also on which institutions ultimately hold decision-making authority.

For settlers in Canadian cultural industries (including myself), this matters because our own agency is governed by how these questions are (or are not) institutionally addressed. 

The transition could begin through incremental adjustment to existing programs. Currently, Telefilm’s International Promotion Program assesses applications through its standard evaluation criteria, with ISO involvement limited to partnership activities under the International Market Development Strategy rather than decision-making authority over funding allocations. The Black Screen Office’s “Being Seen” report (supported by Telefilm Canada) on inclusive content in Canadian screen industries demonstrates growing institutional recognition of the need for equity-seeking communities to have authority over their own representation, a groundswell which could be leveraged to impact international governance. As a first phase, Telefilm and ISO could, for example, formalize a consultation protocol whereby ISO reviews applications to Telefilm’s International Promotion Program before funding decisions are finalized for any Indigenous-led projects. This would ensure that international promotion strategies align with Indigenous priorities without disrupting Telefilm’s assessment process. 

In a subsequent phase, ISO could be granted co-decision authority over a dedicated subset of international promotion funding for Indigenous productions. Over time, this authority could expand to encompass broader aspects of international strategy, including a more substantial role in shaping Heritage’s international priorities in alignment with its evolving reconciliation commitments. Similarly, co-production treaty negotiations could include ISO representatives with advisory roles that transition to co-signatory status on treaty provisions.

Indigenous Cultural Diplomacy

Of course, this approach focuses on further reforming Canada’s cultural apparatus, recognizing that Indigenous nations will simultaneously pursue independent international cultural relationships outside this structure. The goal is simply removing barriers within existing institutions, not circumscribing Indigenous nations’ broader diplomacy initiatives. 

South Korea’s cultural-diplomatic success offers useful lessons. The Korean Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) operates 25 overseas business centres that don’t simply react to content producers’ existing work, but proactively build distribution networks. Canada could adopt this logic, but with a key distinction. Rather than projecting a unified “Canadian” brand, Canadian cultural centres could facilitate Indigenous-led diplomacy, positioning Canada as a convenor of global Indigenous knowledge. Overseas cultural offices could serve as nodes in Indigenous-controlled distribution networks, enabling relationships between Indigenous creators across settler states. It could, for instance, connect Inuk artists with Greenlandic festivals, Anishinaabe storytellers with Māori communities — a logical extension of the Indigenous Co-production forum at Cannes ISO already led in 2023. This would not simply be symbolic: it would provide infrastructure for Indigenous nations to further conduct their own diplomacy, using Canadian resources to build transnational networks that operate outside settler control. What’s required is a reorientation of existing systems around Indigenous authority.

If Canada’s sovereignty rests on its relationship with Indigenous nations, then state resources derived from unceded territories carry obligations, not opportunities. This doesn’t reconcile Canada with nations that reject its authority (nothing short of land back and genuine self-determination can do that). But it does remove some of the mechanisms through which Canada limits Indigenous cultural sovereignty, whether nations choose to use reformed infrastructure or build independent pathways. Telefilm’s administrative capacity, ISO’s demonstrated impact, and international precedents via institutions like Canadian Heritage provide a practical platform for addressing many of these questions.

What remains to be seen is whether this matrix of Canadian institutions will redouble its efforts to empower the ISO to lead this transition — legitimating decades of advocacy for new forms of Canadian international-cultural exports. 

–

This Brief was reviewed by an Indigenous expert on the ISO and Canada’s
Cultural Strategy.

Citation: Clark, Anton. “Sovereignty and The Indigenous Screen Office: A Proposal to Reshape Canada’s International Cultural Strategy,” Yellowhead Institute. February 26, 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/sovereignty-and-the-indigenous-screen-office-a-proposal-to-reshape-canadas-international-cultural-strategy

Cover Photo: Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) dir Zacharias Kunuk, Kingulliit Productions 

The post Sovereignty and The Indigenous Screen Office: A Proposal to Reshape Canada’s International Cultural Strategy appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

DENVER—The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today held a confirmation hearing for Steve Pearce, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management.

During the hearing, Pearce alternately stood by his past words endorsing the wholesale sell-off of public lands while also acknowledging the law currently doesn’t allow it. He also dodged questions about the Trump administration’s energy policy, including whether Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has the power to unilaterally block or slow all renewable energy projects on public land.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Deputy Director Aaron Weiss:

“Most people would prepare for a job interview beforehand. Steve Pearce claimed he wasn’t up to speed on everything from wind power to methane waste. His ‘I know nothing’ routine should be a red flag to every senator. Pearce even waffled on whether he still believes the many, many things he’s written about land sell-off, and he still has to answer huge questions about his ethical conflicts and businesses.

“Based solely on his feigned ignorance of energy policy, Steve Pearce is unqualified to lead the Bureau of Land Management. His ethics forms are woefully inadequate and leave room for massive conflicts of interest if he is confirmed.”

The full exchange with Sen. Ron Wyden regarding Pearce’s previous statements on land selloff:

Sen. Ron Wyden:

Not long ago, you said with respect to public land located in Western states, and I’m a Westerner, you said, and I quote, ‘most of it we do not even need.’ Now my question to you then is: is there too much public land in the West now, in your view?

Steve Pearce:

The statement made there was when I was represented as a legislative person, a district that was, I think, at odds with federal agencies many times because the management of those lands is sometimes not as well done as it should be. And local people pay the price.

It cost them jobs, it cost them their careers, cost them their land. And so I spoke of those frustrations, but I don’t, as I expressed to Senator Heinrich, I don’t visualize selling large swaths of land.

Wyden:

Well, let’s be clear on this. You no longer agree with the statement you made years ago that I quoted you on? Because people can change their mind, I get that, but do you continue to hold that view, or have you changed your mind about something that — we’re Westerners and we care about these kinds of things. So what’s your—

Pearce:

Senator, I’m not so sure that I’ve changed. I’m not sure that I was not speaking out of sheer frustration with an agency on behalf of the people who are being overwhelmed.

So I do not believe that we’re gonna go out and wholesale land from the federal government. That again, has been stated by the secretary and federal law says that we can’t do that from the BLM itself.

LEARN MORE

• Seven times ‘Sell-Off Steve’ tried to dispose of America’s public lands
• Trump’s new pick to run the BLM has a history of working to sell off public land
• What financial entanglements is Steve Pearce hiding?
• More than 80 groups oppose Pearce Nomination for BLM director

The post Statement on Steve Pearce’s BLM confirmation hearing appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.