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This November, San Mateo County voters have a chance to do something few counties in California have done: write climate resilience directly into their charter. Greenbelt Alliance proudly endorses a YES vote on Measure L, the County’s Charter Amendment on Extreme Weather events, on the ballot. 

Measure L would amend the preamble of the San Mateo County Charter to designate long-term resilience to extreme weather events, including fire, flood, wind, rain, heat, drought, and sea level rise, as a County priority. 

Why It Matters

Most climate resilience commitments live in strategic plans, resolutions, or budget line items. Those tools matter, but they can be rewritten or quietly dropped by a future board with different priorities. A charter is different. It’s the County’s foundational governing document, the one that outlives every single Board of Supervisors, budget cycle, or election. 

That’s what makes Measure L significant. It sets a precedent for both San Mateo County and for the rest of the state. Very few California counties have named climate resilience as an enumerated priority in their charter. If Measure L passes, San Mateo County will become a model other Bay Area counties can point to when making the case for similar charter language at home. 

The measure’s emphasis on collaboration with cities, districts, and other public entities also matters in practice. San Mateo County’s extreme weather risks, coastal flooding in places like San Mateo and Half Moon Bay, wildfire in the western hillsides, and extreme heat inland do not stop at jurisdictional lines. A charter mandate for the county to work across those lines gives future resilience hubs, shoreline adaptation projects, and emergency preparedness efforts a clearer foundation to build on, rather than relying on goodwill between agencies. 

Measure L does not create a new tax, program, or agency. It changes how the county defines its own priorities, at the level of its governance charter, in a way that is significantly harder for a future board to unwind than a policy or ordinance would be. 

If you want to vote for climate resilience this November, vote YES on Measure L in San Mateo County.

The post Vote Yes on Measure L To Put Climate Resilience on San Mateo County’s Charter appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

Natalie Campbell & Adriel Luis My friend Adriel: It is three in the morning, and I woke up to dash down some things I’ve been mulling over. First, obviously, the question “what does beauty mean?” demands a polyvocal response (thus, the roundtable format). What you wrote, though, speaks to why I wanted to dialogue on […]

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler

The Trump administration is continuing it’s war on climate science. This time, instead of attacking climate science in general, as they tried (and failed) to do with the DOE Climate Working Group, they are going after the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA).

The NCA is required at least every four years under the 1990 Global Change Research Act and it serves as the evidentiary basis for a lot of government climate planning in the U.S. Because of this, it’s frequently attacked by the Merchants of Doubt and weakening it is a clear goal of this administration.

There was some chatter that the administration would try to write an entire new version of the NCA that would deny well-established climate science, but my guess is that they have abandoned this. The NCA is a “Highly Influential Scientific Assessment” and therefore must follow specific rules. These include rules about how to select authors, peer review, etc. Following those rules would make it impossible to produce the biased, climate-denying report that they require. And if they don’t follow the rules, they’d lose the inevitable court challenges.

So they instead, they are proposing to amend the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) by (basically) removing references to the highest emissions scenarios, RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, which produces the most warming:

This is justified on two grounds: 1) RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 is not an expected emissions scenario and 2) it is not policy relevant. Point 1 is irrelevant since the NCA5 does not refer to it as business as usual, baseline, etc. And Point 2 is just wrong. My comment below expands on these points.

The USGCRP is presently soliciting comments. You can tell USGCRP understands their arguments are weak since they go out of their way to make it as hard as they can for people to comment on it: They’re limiting the comment window to 15 days and comment length to 3,500 words.

Below is my comment on this. If you see any errors, please leave a comment below or email me.

Public Comment on the Proposed Amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment Summary

I write to oppose the proposed amendment. It should be rejected in its entirety.

The amendment rests on two false premises: 1) that NCA5 presents RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 results as expected, baseline, or business-as-usual futures, and 2) that RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 scenario runs are not useful for policy deliberations. As described here, neither of these premises is true.

First, NCA5 accurately describes RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 as very high emissions scenarios throughout the report. Second, because of uncertainty in many climate parameters (e.g., climate sensitivity), the temperatures produced under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 are a reasonable upper bound on what the future climate might be. These scenarios are therefore worth examining not as expected outcomes but as plausible worst cases. Eliminating RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 therefore commits one of the cardinal sins of risk assessment: assuming the worst-case will not occur.

In addition, NCA5 frequently uses these scenarios in global-warming-level analysis, which evaluates impacts at different levels of warming but makes no claim about how likely any level of warming is.

Overall, removing RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 analyses would strip sound science from the assessment and make it harder for U.S. policymakers to evaluate the risks of climate change.

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1. NCA5 does not present results with RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as business-as-usual

The term “RCP8.5” and “SSP5-8.5” appear 113 times in NCA5 — 74 mentions of “RCP8.5” and 39 of “SSP5-8.5”. I have inventoried all of them. They appear in 98 passages. Eighty-four of those describe the pathway as a very high scenario and six as a high scenario; the remaining eight carry no descriptor in the sentence itself. NCA5 never refers to RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as business-as-usual or anything similar. Thus, NCA5 already labels the scenario correctly.

2. RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 emissions may be implausible, but temperatures are not

Much of the RCP8.5 discourse misses a key point: in trying to understand future climate changes, our focus is not primarily on emissions. Rather, it is on temperature, which is what drives most climate impacts. So the key question is: are the temperatures predicted by today’s climate models driven by RCP8.5 implausible?

To quantify this, I ran the FaIR climate emulator (v2.2.4, Leach et al., 2021) between 1750 and 2100 under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 emissions from RCMIP v5.1.0. Climate-response uncertainty was represented by the 841-member calibrated and constrained parameter ensemble of fair-calibrate v1.4.1. This analysis shows that the warmest of the SSP2-4.5 runs reach the median SSP5-8.5 run (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Global surface air temperature (GSAT) for two different scenarios, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5. The spread within each scenario represents parameter uncertainty in the model. It shows that 0.5% of SSP2-4.5 runs predict warming above the median SSP5-8.5 run.

Let me be precise about what this result means. The spread within each scenario in Figure 1 is not noise. Each of the 841 parameter defines a plausible set of uncertain parameters that determine how the climate system responds to emissions: how sensitive it is to carbon dioxide, how quickly the ocean takes up heat, how strongly aerosols cool, how the carbon cycle responds, etc. Because the ensemble was constrained against observations, every one of these descriptions is consistent with the warming observed to date.

The real climate system, of course, has one true set of these properties. This analysis shows that we cannot rule out that the real climate system driven by a SSP2-4.5 emissions delivers warming at the end of the century equal to what a typical model produces under SSP5-8.5 (around 4°C).

The median temperatures in the RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 ensemble are therefore plausible, even if the emissions that produced them are not. As discussed in the next section, this is important for risk assessment.

One might reasonably wonder why we need SSP5-8.5 to estimate the upper limit of SSP2-4.5 runs. Why can’t we just use SSP2-4.5 runs to evaluate the upper limit? You certainly could specifically analyze high-sensitivity models driven by SSP2-4.5 to determine the worst-case scenario, but the available literature doing that is sparse compared to the literature describing RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 results and doing that would require a wholesale revision of the NCA5 that is not being considered here.

Keeping the RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 runs as a plausible upper limit is particularly important given that recent research has emphasized the possibility that models are underestimating future warming. Gyuleva et al. (2026), for example, use the Earth’s energy imbalance to suggest that models with higher transient climate response more accurately fit the planetary energy balance observations of the last few decades. Armour et al. (2024) show further that the strongest evidence against high-sensitivity models, their poor reproduction of the warming since the 1970s, does not actually rule those models out.

In addition, the SSP2-4.5 scenario contains enormous amounts of carbon removal (Anderson & Peters, 2016). In 2100, for example, total carbon capture & sequestration (CCS) in that scenario is 32 GtCO2[1]. Our willingness and ability to implement CCS at this level (about 75% of today’s total CO2 emissions) is entirely hypothetical (Daigle & Ravikumar, 2026). It is therefore possible that we will not do so, meaning that SSP2-4.5 will be understating emissions. This would push SSP2-4.5 temperatures even further into the range of temperatures simulated by RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.

Thus, the median global temperature predicted by today’s models driven by RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 is a plausible upper limit of warming this century. To the best of my knowledge, there is no analysis that opposes this conclusion and I do not believe the case can be made on current evidence. The proposed amendment does not attempt it.

3. Risk assessment should not confine itself to the most likely outcome

Reaching RCP8.5-level temperatures with SSP2-4.5 emissions, while plausible, is not likely. But that does not mean we should ignore it. In fact, conventional risk management tells us that, when consequences are severe, low-probability extreme outcomes can determine the response.

Levees are built to withstand the hundred-year flood, not the average year. Nuclear power plants’ safety systems are designed against worst-case scenarios, not average operations. Insurance companies maintain solvency by accounting for the worst-case claims scenario, not typical scenarios. In the national defense arena, Vice President Cheney famously said that, if there is a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build a nuclear weapon, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”[2]

It is in this role that RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 is valuable: as a plausible upper bound of the temperature distribution given SSP2-4.5 emissions. This contradicts the claim in the amendment that RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 is not policy relevant. In fact, adopting this amendment would mean that our risk assessment would ignore tail risk. This would go against best practices of risk assessment. I also note that the amendment presents this as a correction of a scientific error, when in reality it’s a value judgement about what role upper limit risks should play in deciding how to respond to climate change.

4. Global warming levels

The amendment also ignores other ways the NCA5 uses RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5. In many places, NCA5 does not use RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 as a possible emissions trajectory but to predict impacts at various global warming levels (GWLs). In other words, the analysis estimates the climate impacts when the planet is 2°C, 3°C, or 4°C warmer than preindustrial.

For example, Figures 2.9, 2.10, and 2.13 map U.S. temperature, precipitation, and sea surface temperature at 1.5°, 2°, 3°, and 4°C of global warming; Figures 2.11 and 2.12 map extreme heat and extreme precipitation at 2°C; Figures 1.14 and 1.15 in the Overview and Figure 30.3 for the Pacific Islands do the same. The report’s findings are read off these figures: e.g., at 2°C of global warming, U.S. average temperature very likely rises 4.4°–5.6°F (p. 2-21), tropical cyclone winds are 5% faster (p. 2-26), and Midwest extreme precipitation intensifies by 10%–15% (p. 24-19).

None of these are predictions that these temperatures will occur. Rather, they answer a different question: what happens when the climate reaches that temperature.

The amendment’s plausibility argument does not address this alternate use and it performs none of the analysis needed to separate warming-level results from genuinely emissions-dependent ones. It simply declares RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 off-limits, which could be used to strike the GWL analysis from the NCA5. It offers no justification for discarding RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 scenarios in GWL analyses, which is of value even if reaching the top of the temperatures range is unlikely.

Recommendation

Reject the proposed amendment in its entirety.

The amendment fails to correct any errors in the NCA5 and is inconsistent with the underlying science. First, NCA5 accurately describes results with RCP8.5. Second, the amendment declares RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 off-limits to federal decision-making but doesn’t address the fact that the median temperatures predicted from these scenarios is plausible. Third, it presents an institutional judgment about risk tolerance (that we should ignore worst-case scenarios) as though it were a scientific correction. Fourth, it proposes to jettison research about impacts at global warming levels. Thus, adopting the amendment would leave the country less prepared for future climate impacts, including lower probability but high severity outcomes.

Anderson, K., & Peters, G. (2016). The trouble with negative emissions. Science, 354(6309), 182-183, doi:10.1126/science.aah4567

Armour, K. C., Proistosescu, C., Dong, Y., Hahn, L. C., Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, E., Pauling, A. G., Jnglin Wills, R. C., Andrews, T., Stuecker, M. F., Po-Chedley, S., Mitevski, I., Forster, P. M., & Gregory, J. M. (2024). Sea-surface temperature pattern effects have slowed global warming and biased warming-based constraints on climate sensitivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(12), e2312093121, doi:10.1073/pnas.2312093121

Daigle, H., & Ravikumar, A. (2026). Can we sequester carbon fast enough? Growing disconnect between models and reality. Environmental Research: Energy, 3(3), 031001, doi:10.1088/2753-3751/ae987b

Gyuleva, G., Fischer, E., Knutti, R., & Sippel, S. (2026). Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming. Earth’s Future, 14(8), e2026EF008356, doi:10.1029/2026EF008356

Leach, N. J., Jenkins, S., Nicholls, Z., Smith, C. J., Lynch, J., Cain, M., Walsh, T., Wu, B., Tsutsui, J., & Allen, M. R. (2021). FaIRv2.0.0: a generalized impulse response model for climate uncertainty and future scenario exploration. Geosci. Model Dev., 14(5), 3007-3036, doi:10.5194/gmd-14-3007-2021

A story highlighted by Campaign is worth revisiting because it captures something larger than a mere advertising stunt. It shows how Shell deliberately used pop music, celebrity culture and youth-oriented digital marketing to present itself as a company associated with the future of clean energy rather than simply as one of the world’s biggest oil and gas businesses. That makes it less a quirky campaign anecdote than a revealing case study in corporate image management.

In late 2017, Shell unveiled a glossy new chapter in its global #makethefuture campaign: a music video for “On Top of the World” featuring an international line-up of artists including Jennifer Hudson, Pixie Lott, Luan Santana, Yemi Alade and Monali Thakur.

Shell said the video was designed to spotlight clean-energy initiatives and projects backed by Shell and its partners, including solar access in Brazil, cleaner lighting in Kenya, cleaner cooking using gas in India, clean cookstoves in China and hydrogen transport initiatives in the US, Germany and the UK.

Shell’s own messaging was dressed in the language of collaboration, innovation and cleaner energy. Malena Cutuli, Shell’s global head of integrated brand communications at the time, said music was being used to “spark a global conversation” about access to cleaner energy.

In other words, Shell was not merely selling fuel. It was trying to sell a feeling: optimism, modernity and cultural relevance, all wrapped up in a catchy song and an attractive visual package.

The campaign becomes even more interesting when one looks at how it was described by the marketing industry itself.

A World Media Group case study on Shell’s earlier “Best Day of My Life” campaign stated the aim in strikingly direct terms: Shell wanted to reach “Energy Engaged Millennials” and transform its reputation from that of a traditional oil company into one seen as actively addressing future energy needs.

The case study said the challenge was to make energy feel exciting and relevant to younger audiences who would otherwise find it distant, technical or dull.

That is a remarkably candid description of reputational engineering.

The same case study boasted extraordinary results.

It said the campaign generated nearly 400 million views, more than 4.1 million shares, and significantly improved how the target audience viewed Shell.

According to the submission, people exposed to the campaign were far more likely to see Shell as a company addressing future energy needs.

A separate campaign success summary also stated that Shell specifically targeted a millennial audience and achieved measurable lifts in ad awareness, message association and the belief that Shell was “setting trends in energy.”

These claims come from campaign materials and case studies, not from independent regulators, but they make clear what Shell believed it was buying with this kind of promotion: not simply attention, but a softer and more progressive public identity.

That is why this is worth an article now.

The important point is not that Shell once sponsored a music video. Big companies sponsor cultural content all the time.

The important point is that Shell used music and celebrity endorsement as part of a broader effort to reposition itself in the minds of younger people as a participant in a cleaner-energy future.

It was, in effect, branding by emotional association: if the audience liked the artists, the visuals and the message, perhaps they would think differently about Shell too.

There is, however, an obvious tension at the heart of this.

While Shell was marketing itself through songs, influencers and “bright energy ideas”, it remained — and remains — a giant fossil-fuel company whose profits and global significance rest overwhelmingly on oil and gas.

That does not mean every clean-energy initiative mentioned in the campaign was fictitious.

It does mean the presentation was selective.

The cleaner, brighter and more youthful image was real as marketing, but it sat alongside a much larger hydrocarbon reality.

Seen in that light, Shell’s musical clean-energy campaign looks less like a harmless piece of brand creativity and more like an early, polished example of the kind of image management that later came under much harsher scrutiny in the greenwashing debate.

The style was upbeat, global and aspirational.

The objective was serious: win over the next generation before that generation decided that oil majors belonged to the past.

That is why the old Campaign story is still worth attention.

It is not really about music.

It is about how a major oil company tried to soundtrack its own reinvention.

Sources

Campaign — Shell turns to music to communicate with younger generations about clean energy

Shell press release — Shell Unveils New Music Video Featuring Oscar-Winner Jennifer Hudson and Chart-Topper Pixie Lott

World Media Group — Shell Case Study 2017

Shell #makethefuture campaign success story

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When Shell Tried to Sing Its Way Into a Greener Image was first posted on September 29, 2026 at 8:46 pm.
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Each spring and fall, the night skies above North America fill with billions of migrating birds. Hundreds of millions of them pass over the Southwestern United States.Many of these birds use stars...

Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Press Contact: Sumeet Bal, Director of Communications, 917-647-1952, sbal@publicadvocates.org

San Francisco—Governor Newsom just made it legal for California’s most vulnerable students—those with special needs—to spend nearly 40% of the school year with a barely-trained substitute standing in for a real teacher. This is not a compromise. Less than a year ago, his own veto message promised to protect these students. Today, he abandoned them.

In vetoing AB 1224 last October, the governor warned that the bill would “allow individuals to serve our highest-need students for as much as a third of a school year without minimally required training or mentorship.”  He urged the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC ) or the bill’s author to address the problem. The CTC did exactly that, engaging stakeholders for months to build a new substitute pathway with 15 hours of preservice training and 45 hours in the first year plus 2 hours per week of support and mentoring. AB 2490 guts that work before it even takes effect, replacing it with just FIVE hours of training, no weekly support or oversight and a permit good for 70 days—roughly 40% of the school year.

“Last year, the governor told us that substitutes couldn’t be trusted with our highest-need students without real training. This year, he signed a bill that provides no meaningful protections for those students,” said John Affeldt, Managing Attorney at Public Advocates. “Worse, he has signed a law that puts districts on a collision course with federal law, and puts students’ legally guaranteed services on the line. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires a certified special education teacher in that classroom—full stop. This bill runs headlong into minimum federal standards.”

The harm will fall hardest on students with disabilities. Unlike the CTC’s proposed regulations, AB 2490 reaches directly into special education classrooms, where federal law leaves no room for shortcuts.

“The CTC spent the last year doing exactly what the governor asked, building a real training pathway through a full regulatory process, with input from the people who’d be affected,” said Rachel Murphy, Senior Legislative Counsel at Public Advocates. “The legislature and the governor just undercut that process before it could even take effect. It’s a shortcut that leaves special education students paying the price.” 

An equitable education system does not respond to educator shortages by lowering expectations for the students who have historically been least well served. It invests more deeply in them. Students with disabilities deserve educators who are prepared, supported, and equipped to recognize their strengths and meet their needs. What they got was a system that normalizes unequal access to qualified teachers. 

“Placing insufficiently trained substitutes in classrooms for extended periods doesn’t create stability—it creates wider learning gaps that harm our most vulnerable students,” wrote Christine Case-Lo, a parent of a child with special needs, in a written testimony to the governor. “Districts should feel urgency to hire qualified teachers—not be given a legislative off-ramp that lets them settle for less.”

Public Advocates has spent over three decades fighting for qualified educators in every California classroom, from suing the state over a discriminatory teacher test in  AMAE v. California, to challenging the lack of a system to ensure qualified educators in Williams v. California, to recently overturning the unlawful use of substitutes to fill teacher vacancies in Cleare v. West Contra Costa Unified School District. We will not stand by while the state walks back hard-won protections for the students who need them most.

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About Public Advocates Inc.
Public Advocates Inc. is a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity, and climate justice.

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The post Press Statement: Public Advocates Condemns Governor Newsom’s Reversal on Substitute Teacher Training, Signing AB 2490 appeared first on Public Advocates.

This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

What if one of the most consequential political effects of Sudan’s war is not simply that the state collapsed, but that millions of people were forced to discover what society could organize without it?

In Sudan, that discovery did not begin with a political declaration. In many places, it began with food.

Khalid, a young man who had been involved in Sudan’s resistance committees during the revolution, was among those who remained in his city after many residents fled. Some of those who left already knew him and the other young people who stayed. They had organized things together before the war. Years of working together had created a kind of trust that would become critical once the institutions around them disappeared.

The displaced suggested that they start a community kitchen, or takiyya (a Sudanese community kitchen where volunteers prepare and distribute free meals), to feed those who remained.

The first donations came through WhatsApp groups. Sudanese living outside the city transferred money through Bankak (a mobile banking service that allows users to transfer money and make payments electronically). Khalid bought sacks of broad beans, oil and charcoal. He went to mosques to recruit volunteers, while others used Facebook and WhatsApp to invite young people to join.

They cooked and distributed food every day. Then the work expanded.

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Some families could not safely leave their homes. Women and girls faced particular risks moving through the streets, while elderly people often could not walk to the kitchen. Khalid and other volunteers began collecting their requests, buying what they needed and delivering it to their homes.

Relatives abroad would transfer money into the volunteers’ accounts. The volunteers would withdraw it as cash and deliver it to the families.

No institution had appointed Khalid to do any of this. There was no formal organizational chart, no contracts defining responsibilities, no salaries and no legal agreement governing the network.

But that did not mean there was no organization. People knew who could do what.

Responsibilities were distributed according to professional skills, geographic proximity, availability and urgency. Older volunteers carried particular authority because they had accumulated experience; younger volunteers learned from them.

The arrangement was informal. But it was not unorganized.

Emergency Response Rooms (locally organized civilian networks that coordinate emergency food, health care, evacuation and other essential services) and other civilian networks in Sudan are often described in humanitarian language: communities feeding communities, transporting medicine, evacuating the wounded and filling gaps left by the collapse of public services and the difficulty of international organizations reaching people.

That description is accurate, but it does not tell the whole story.

The more consequential question is: What did people learn while doing all of this?

They learned how to mobilize resources without an institution behind them. How to decide which needs were most urgent. How to match people to tasks. How to negotiate movement through territories controlled by different armed actors. How to manage disagreements without allowing them to destroy the network. How to move money and information across front lines. And how to transfer knowledge to someone else before the person who possessed it was killed, arrested or forced to flee.

Survival became a school of organization. But this school did not begin from nothing.

Before the war

Sudan already had traditions of collective action, including nafeer (a Sudanese tradition of collective voluntary labor in which people mobilize together around a shared need). The resistance committees (decentralized, neighborhood-based civilian groups that became a major force in Sudan’s 2018–19 revolution) that emerged during the revolution also developed forms of neighborhood-level organization based on trust, horizontal coordination and collective action.

Previous Coverage

How Sudan’s protesters upped the ante and forced al-Bashir from power

After the revolution, parts of this infrastructure evolved into Change and Services Committees (local community bodies that organized basic services and neighborhood affairs), which in different areas organized aspects of everyday life, from bakeries and cooking gas to other local services. These were organized bodies. In some places, they had defined responsibilities, documents and official stamps. Their members accumulated practical knowledge about managing the affairs of their communities.

So when war came, civilians did not begin from zero.

There was already an infrastructure that had learned how to turn political trust into everyday administration.

The experience of Gezira State reveals something even more striking.

When the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a powerful paramilitary force that the U.N. and U.S. found has committed acts of genocide, took control of Gezira on Dec. 18, 2023, local government effectively disappeared from areas under their control. Less than a month later, on Jan. 16, 2024, the governor of Gezira issued Decision No. 1 of 2024, dissolving all Change and Services Committees in villages, neighborhoods, rural settlements, markets and industrial areas.

The decision did more than dissolve them. It instructed local executive officials to inventory and take possession of the committees’ fixed and movable assets, documents, property and official stamps, and to freeze their bank accounts until new caretaker committees could be formed.

There was something revealing about that detail: Even the stamps were part of the authority the state wanted to reclaim.

But the committees that the governor had ordered dissolved were still on the ground, while the authority issuing the order was absent.

The committees’ response, in essence, was a simple question: If you have dissolved us, come into the state you left and take the stamps from us.

Six days later, on Jan. 22, the Fifth Infantry Division command of the Rapid Support Forces issued its own decision, stating that it was “renewing confidence” in the Change and Services Committees and instructing them to continue performing their duties toward citizens across the state’s localities, neighborhoods and villages.

The contradiction could hardly have been clearer.

The state, absent from the territory, ordered the civilian bodies operating there to disappear. The armed force that controlled the territory found itself facing an existing civilian infrastructure performing functions that military control alone could not perform.

An armed force can enter a city and declare control within hours. It does not automatically know who needs medicine, who has the key to the bakery, who can operate a water station, which families need assistance, or who can safely move between neighborhoods.

Here it becomes apparent that controlling territory militarily is not the same as possessing the knowledge required to govern life within it.

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The Change and Services Committees were not just a humanitarian response that emerged when the war began. Before the war, they had already accumulated experience organizing everyday services. What looked during the war like the sudden emergence of civilian networks was, in many places, a shift from one function to another: from organizing bread, gas and local services during the revolutionary period to organizing food, water, medicine and evacuation during war.

The infrastructure did not disappear when the state did. The mission changed.

The experience of a group of water engineers led by a man named Bakri illustrates the difference.

At the beginning of the war, the group tried to keep existing water stations operating. But as the fighting continued, fuel and spare parts became harder to obtain, while insecurity made maintaining centralized infrastructure increasingly difficult. So they improvised.

They organized ways to bring water directly from the Nile, sometimes using donkey carts carrying large barrels. They located wells that had been abandoned for years and organized their reopening. When some families could not collect water themselves, volunteers delivered it to them.

Teachers did something similar. A group led by Saif began operating schools at limited capacity after the war dragged on and children’s behavior became increasingly aggressive and distressed.

They were not trying to restore a normal academic year or guarantee promotion from one grade to another.

They were creating child-friendly spaces where children could learn, play and recover some sense of routine, while reducing the educational and psychological damage of prolonged war.

The same pattern appeared in medicine, evacuation and information.

Volunteers who had never received formal emergency-response training learned how to respond to airstrikes and artillery fire, how to protect women and children, how to organize safe departures, and how to move patients whose required treatment was unavailable in conflict areas.

Some became known to armed groups because their work required repeated negotiation with them. Sometimes that familiarity helped them pass checkpoints or move patients with fewer risks.

When neutrality becomes suspicion

But that knowledge created another danger. The more successfully civilian networks kept life going, the harder it became for armed actors to regard them as non-political.

In one town in Gezira, a group of young women working in medicine faced precisely this dilemma after the RSF took control and the hospital closed. They managed to enter the hospital and remove laboratory equipment, medicines and other essential supplies. They then began treating patients in secret.

They feared being forced to treat RSF fighters. But they also feared what would happen if the army returned and interpreted that treatment as evidence of collaboration with the RSF.

They continued working secretly for months. Eventually they were discovered and arrested, before being released after it became clear that they did not represent a political or military threat.

Their experience reveals a central contradiction of civilian life during war: You can decide to serve everyone. You cannot decide how an armed actor will interpret that service.

A surgeon I interviewed in Gezira lived through the same contradiction in a more brutal form. She was trying to keep medical care available to civilians. She treated everyone, including wounded RSF fighters.

According to her account to me, RSF members assaulted her inside the hospital after one of the fighters she had operated on died. Her 13-year-old daughter was then sexually assaulted.

She did not tell me what happened simply as a personal story. She was warning me to leave.

I was in Gezira myself during this period. I was among those working to keep hospitals functioning and civilian services going. I saw how quickly humanitarian work could be viewed as politically motivated.

Volunteers gather for the opening of a mental health hospital in the RSF-controlled capital city of Gezira State. (Eglal Hamid Abdulgadir)

This is where the language of humanitarian neutrality reaches its limits. In a war in which each side seeks not only to control territory but also to define the meaning of every action within it, even neutrality can acquire political meaning.

The problem is deeper than civilians being trapped between two armed forces. The war itself can appropriate the meaning of civilian action.

A doctor treats a wounded person because the person is sick. A fighter sees assistance to the enemy.

A network moves a family because the family is in danger. An armed actor sees suspicious movement.

The space between humanitarian action and political action becomes so narrow that separating the two can become almost impossible.

Knowledge that survives

And yet the networks continued to grow.

New volunteers joined. Donations from Sudanese abroad continued. International organizations provided limited support in some areas. In parts of Gezira, volunteers running medical facilities sometimes coordinated with Médecins Sans Frontières.

But the most important development was less visible. The networks began reproducing knowledge. The older generation knew they might not survive. Volunteers were being killed, arrested and displaced. So those with experience began teaching younger people what they knew.

This was more than training. It was a relationship of respect, mentorship and apprenticeship. And the reason was practical and brutal: If one person died, their knowledge should not die with them.

This changed the nature of the networks. A volunteer who distributes food to a neighborhood is practicing mutual aid.

But a network that can replace that volunteer, transfer the knowledge required to continue the work and survive the disappearance of its original organizers is demonstrating something closer to institutional capacity.

It is not an institution. But it is a capacity.

That distinction matters because we usually recognize institutions through their visible forms: offices, regulations, budgets, job titles, salaries and chains of command.

But perhaps institutions begin before all of those things. They begin when knowledge becomes transferable. When responsibilities can be redistributed. When a collective practice can survive the disappearance of the person who started it. When people know what to do without waiting for someone to tell them.

This is also why it is difficult to describe these networks simply as temporary substitutes filling a vacuum until the state returns.

The vacuum itself changed the society inside it.

People who entered the war knowing how to organize a neighborhood learned how to manage networks stretched across displacement, fear and military control.

The volunteer who began by distributing food learned, over time, how to manage money, information, risk and relationships with armed actors.

The doctor who opened a hospital door had to think about security, neutrality and evacuation, not only medicine.

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Even disagreements within networks became part of the learning: how to disagree without breaking the network, and how to place people’s immediate safety above personal conflict.

The war was not building institutions in the conventional sense. It was building people who knew how to create organization under pressure.

The limits of resilience

But the answer cannot be romantic. These networks cannot replace the state.

They can distribute food and medicine, restore access to water, organize emergency medical care and create educational spaces. They cannot indefinitely operate a national electricity grid, maintain complex pharmaceutical supply chains or guarantee public safety.

Nor are they equal.

Some neighborhoods have doctors, engineers and strong diaspora networks. Others have far fewer resources. Funding can run out. Volunteers can burn out. International support can bring bureaucratic requirements that alter the character of informal work.

These networks are therefore not proof that the state is unnecessary. They are proof that state capacity and social capacity are not the same thing. And that distinction becomes even more important when military control changes.

In areas retaken by the army, some volunteers fled. Others were arrested or killed after being accused of collaborating with the RSF. Sometimes the basis for suspicion was simply that they had continued providing services while the RSF controlled the area.

The same act that had once been an act of survival could acquire an entirely different political meaning when the person at the checkpoint changed.

Yet the practices themselves did not necessarily disappear.

The takiyyas continued, often under different people. The faces changed because the people who had built the networks had been killed, imprisoned or displaced. But the practice survived.

This may be the most politically revealing fact about Sudan’s civilian networks during the war.

The war did not simply create a vacuum where the state had been. It forced people to learn what could be organized inside that vacuum.

They learned from those they trusted. They learned how to distribute scarce resources. They learned how to negotiate with armed actors without becoming armed themselves. They learned how to make collective decisions without formal authority. They learned how to teach someone else before they disappeared.

And perhaps they learned something more important than any service they provided: The capacity to organize collective life does not always come from the center.

For decades, the state was treated as the basic infrastructure that made public life possible.

The war shattered that assumption in places where the state could no longer provide food, water, health care, education or security.

People did not respond because they had decided to build an alternative political system. They responded because someone had to cook. Someone had to find water. Someone had to treat the wounded. Someone had to get children off the streets. Someone had to negotiate passage.

But repeated acts of necessity accumulated into something larger than necessity. They accumulated political knowledge.

And this is why rebuilding Sudan after the war cannot simply mean restoring the institutions that stopped working.

Previous Coverage

Sudanese ‘resistance theater’ animates a future without war

Sudan will need public institutions capable of functioning. No volunteer network can replace the state indefinitely, and asking it to do so would only turn another form of resilience into another form of abandonment.

But rebuilding the state without recognizing what society learned in its absence would be another kind of failure.

The question is not whether takiyyas should become ministries, or whether Emergency Response Rooms should become permanent government agencies.

The question is whether the people who learned to organize life without formal authority will be treated merely as beneficiaries of reconstruction — or as people who acquired something the postwar state urgently needs.

Because the most important legacy of these networks may not be the meals they served, the wells they reopened or the patients they treated. It may be the knowledge that accumulated among them: That authority can be exercised without office. That responsibility can be distributed without bureaucracy. That trust can function as infrastructure. That institutions can disappear without the capacity of society to act disappearing with them.

The people who built these networks were not trying to design a new political system. They were trying to survive.

But wars can produce political knowledge without anyone intending to produce it.

And perhaps the central question facing Sudan after the war is not simply whether the state can return to the places from which it disappeared.

It is whether it can return without pretending that the society waiting for it is the same society that existed before it left.

Perhaps the task after the war is not to return society to the state that existed before the war, but to rebuild the state around the knowledge that society was forced to produce when the state was gone.

This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Shell doubles down on Canada: LNG Canada Phase 2 turns Kitimat into a 28-million-tonne export hub

Shell has taken the final investment decision on LNG Canada Phase 2, committing with its partners to double the capacity of the Kitimat, British Columbia, export terminal from 14 million to 28 million tonnes of LNG a year. The decision substantially deepens Shell’s exposure to Canadian natural gas only weeks after it completed its acquisition of ARC Resources, adding roughly 370,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day of Canadian production. Shell Canada

For Shell, this is not a peripheral investment. The company owns 40% of LNG Canada, alongside PETRONAS with 25%, PetroChina 15%, Mitsubishi 15% and KOGAS 5%. Phase 2 will add two further liquefaction trains, an additional LNG storage tank, condensate storage, another loading berth and expanded utilities. The 670-kilometre Coastal GasLink pipeline will also be expanded through five new compressor stations. Commercial operations are expected in the early 2030s. Shell Canada

Shell says its additional entitlement from Phase 2 will be close to 6 million tonnes of LNG annually, and that the investment should produce returns above the hurdle rate for its Integrated Gas business. Its strategic rationale is straightforward: connect abundant western Canadian gas with Shell’s global LNG trading system and growing Asian demand. Shell’s own 2026 LNG outlook forecasts global demand rising from 422 million tonnes in 2025 to nearly 700 million tonnes by 2050. Shell Canada

Canada has made the project a national priority

The decision also reflects a major change in Canadian energy policy.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has identified LNG Canada Phase 2 as a project of national significance and has been working with British Columbia to accelerate major energy and trade infrastructure. Ottawa’s Major Projects Office says the expansion could attract around C$33 billion in private-sector capital, create thousands of jobs and help diversify Canadian energy exports beyond the United States. Canada

In May, the federal government, British Columbia and LNG Canada announced an “enhanced investment co-operation” arrangement intended to clear remaining commercial, regulatory, First Nations and infrastructure issues ahead of a possible final investment decision. The federal statement said Phase 2 could help make Canada a top-five LNG-exporting country. Canada

The Wall Street Journal places Shell’s decision squarely within that broader policy shift, describing the expansion as supportive of Carney’s ambition to make Canada a larger global energy supplier while streamlining project development and encouraging investment. The Wall Street Journal

That is government and press interpretation. It should not be confused with Shell’s own investment rationale, which centres on LNG demand, portfolio integration and returns.

A much larger Canadian gas position

The timing becomes more interesting when LNG Canada is viewed alongside Shell’s recent acquisition of ARC Resources.

Shell completed that transaction on 2 September 2026, acquiring a major producer with operations in British Columbia and Alberta. When announcing the deal, Shell said ARC’s assets complemented its existing Groundbirch gas business and LNG Canada exposure. The acquisition added approximately 370 kboe/d of production and increased Shell’s direct access to low-cost western Canadian gas. Shell

The strategic chain is therefore becoming increasingly clear:

Shell owns substantial upstream Canadian gas production.

It owns 40% of LNG Canada.

It has now approved a doubling of liquefaction capacity.

And it can market its proportionate LNG through one of the world’s largest integrated LNG trading businesses.

That is a much deeper vertical position than simply owning part of an export terminal.

From first cargo to expansion in little more than a year

LNG Canada Phase 1 shipped its first cargo in June 2025. Phase 2 has now received its final investment decision little more than a year later.

The expansion will use infrastructure deliberately designed from the outset to accommodate four trains rather than the original two. LNG Canada describes Phase 2 as building on the existing footprint instead of starting an entirely separate greenfield project. Newswire

That offers obvious advantages in infrastructure, permitting and construction compared with building another LNG terminal from scratch.

It does not, however, eliminate the scale of the investment. The Financial Times reports that the consortium is committing as much as US$23 billion to the expansion. Financial Times

The Asian market is central

Shell’s announcement repeatedly emphasises Asia.

Kitimat’s Pacific location gives LNG Canada direct access to Asian markets without requiring cargoes to transit the Panama Canal. Shell expects the facility to provide competitively priced gas into a region where it forecasts substantial long-term demand growth. Shell Canada

The broader commercial argument has also been strengthened by recent geopolitical disruption.

The Wall Street Journal notes that earlier concerns about an emerging LNG supply glut have been moderated by supply insecurity and geopolitical disruption, while Shell continues to forecast strong long-term growth in global gas demand. The Wall Street Journal

Again, those forecasts remain forecasts.

A final investment decision represents a commercial judgment about future markets, not proof that Shell’s demand assumptions will prove correct.

The environmental argument has not disappeared

The project also carries the familiar tension surrounding large LNG developments.

Shell promotes LNG as a flexible, secure energy source and cites International Energy Agency analysis indicating that electricity generated from LNG can, on average globally, have life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions around 40% lower than coal-fired generation. Shell Canada

Canadian government material similarly describes Phase 2 as comparatively low-emissions LNG and says projected emissions performance could be substantially below global LNG averages. Canada

Environmental groups dispute the broader climate case for continued expansion of fossil-gas infrastructure. Contemporary reporting on the Phase 2 decision records concerns that a larger LNG industry could increase upstream gas production and make national climate targets harder to meet. Financial Times

Those are competing assessments rather than an issue that can be settled by Shell’s marketing or environmental campaigning alone.

And Phase 1 has already had operational problems

LNG Canada’s commissioning period has not been entirely smooth.

The facility has issued repeated notices concerning both planned and unplanned flaring. An unplanned event at the end of August involved flaring reportedly reaching around 60 metres, with noise, visible emissions and intermittent black smoke. LNG Canada says flaring is a regulated safety measure associated with commissioning and abnormal operating conditions and is not expected to be routine in normal operation. LNG Canada

Further planned flaring was announced during September, with the company warning nearby communities about visible emissions and noise. LNG Canada

That does not establish that LNG Canada is unsafe or environmentally non-compliant.

It does show that the first phase is still experiencing the sort of start-up and commissioning events that accompany large industrial facilities — an important piece of context when the owners are simultaneously announcing a doubling of capacity.

Indigenous participation — and opposition

LNG Canada operates in the traditional territory of the Haisla Nation.

The project company announced in July an equity-option agreement involving economic-development organisations representing five neighbouring First Nations: the Gitga’at, Gitxaała, Haisla, Kitselas and Kitsumkalum. Newswire

That is a significant element of the project’s economic and political support.

It would nevertheless be misleading to imply uniform Indigenous support.

Wet’suwet’en land defenders and other opponents continue to object to infrastructure connected with LNG Canada, particularly expansion of the Coastal GasLink system across traditional territory. Peace Brigades International Canada

The Canadian LNG story therefore contains both Indigenous commercial participation and Indigenous opposition.

Both belong in any balanced account.

Shell’s Canada strategy is becoming unmistakable

Taken separately, the announcements are significant.

Taken together, they show something larger.

Shell has recently bought one of western Canada’s major upstream producers.

It already owns the largest interest in Canada’s flagship LNG export project.

It has now committed to doubling that project.

And it expects to receive nearly six million additional tonnes of LNG every year once Phase 2 begins operating.

Shell’s statement that LNG Canada is a “core part” of its Integrated Gas portfolio therefore deserves to be taken literally. Shell Canada

Canada is becoming one of the clearest examples of Shell’s present corporate strategy: more gas production, more LNG capacity and greater integration between upstream supply, liquefaction, trading and international customers.

That strategy sits somewhat awkwardly beside the public perception, cultivated for years by Shell and other majors, of an energy sector moving steadily away from hydrocarbons.

Shell is certainly still investing in lower-carbon businesses.

But the scale of LNG Canada Phase 2 makes equally clear where the company expects a substantial part of its future cash flow to come from.

Natural gas.

And a great deal of it.

Documentary position

Established: Shell and its LNG Canada partners have taken a final investment decision to double Kitimat capacity from 14 to 28 mtpa. Shell owns 40% and expects close to 6 mtpa of additional LNG from Phase 2. Commercial operations are targeted for the early 2030s. Shell Canada

Established: Phase 2 includes two additional liquefaction trains, new storage and loading infrastructure, and expansion of Coastal GasLink through five additional compressor stations. Shell Canada

Established: Shell completed its acquisition of ARC Resources in September 2026, substantially increasing its Canadian upstream production and complementing its LNG Canada position. Shell

Established as government policy: Canada and British Columbia have designated and promoted LNG Canada Phase 2 as a major economic and energy project and have worked to accelerate its development. Canada

Established as Shell’s forecast: Shell expects global LNG demand to rise materially through 2050 and expects Phase 2 to generate returns above its Integrated Gas investment hurdle. Those are corporate projections, not guaranteed outcomes. Shell Canada

Contested: The environmental and climate implications of expanding LNG exports remain disputed. Government and industry emphasise energy security, lower emissions intensity and economic benefits; environmental opponents emphasise absolute emissions, further gas development and long-term fossil-fuel lock-in. Canada

Sources

Shell’s own announcement provides the core transaction and capacity figures:

Shell Canada — Shell takes final investment decision to double LNG Canada capacity

LNG Canada’s project announcement provides additional detail on infrastructure, First Nations arrangements and project structure:

LNG Canada — Phase 2 Final Investment Decision

The Government of Canada’s Major Projects Office sets out the federal policy and investment context:

Government of Canada — LNG Canada Phase 2

The Canadian and British Columbian governments’ May agreement documents official efforts to advance the project ahead of FID:

Natural Resources Canada — Enhanced investment co-operation for LNG Canada Phase 2

The Wall Street Journal examines the commercial and global LNG-demand rationale:

Wall Street Journal — Shell to Double Production Capacity at LNG Canada

The Financial Times reports an investment commitment of up to US$23 billion and provides wider political, market and environmental context:

Financial Times — Shell-led consortium backs LNG Canada expansion

Shell’s September announcement confirming completion of the ARC Resources acquisition provides important context for the company’s rapidly expanding Canadian upstream position:

Shell — Shell completes acquisition of ARC Resources

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Shell doubles down on Canada: LNG Canada Phase 2 turns Kitimat into a 28-million-tonne export hub was first posted on September 29, 2026 at 8:16 pm.
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Greenbelt Alliance encourages voters in Sausalito to say YES to Measure X.
This measure amends and modernizes Ordinance 1022, passed by voters in 1985, and retires the Marinship Specific Plan. 

The Ordinance was initially created to reduce traffic from new development and preserve the maritime character of the commercial and industrial zones. Forty years later, those same rules now prevent waterfront businesses from growing, thriving, and adapting. Buildings are aging, infrastructure is crumbling, streets are flooding, and office buildings stand half vacant. Because 1022 was created by a citywide voter initiative, only a new citywide voter initiative can change it.

Why It Matters

As a Bay Area organization committed to ensuring the Bay Area’s lands and communities are resilient to a changing climate, we support Measure X.  

Utilizing developed footprint more effectively 

Decades ago, Marin County had the foresight to protect ridgelines, farmland, watersheds, and open space. Doing so protected our important natural resources, but it also limited space for our built environment. That means we must build more efficiently to make the most of our limited development footprint. But current Sausalito planning processes are slowing down the pace of progress.

By saying Yes on X, routine land-use decisions return to normal city government processes (with public hearings, environmental review, and community input). No ballot would be required for everyday decisions. This doesn’t bypass planning; it makes planning viable. 

The reality of sea level rise

Like many wartime Bay Area developments, the Marinship—a roughly 210 acres of flat, serviced, already-developed waterfront in the middle of Sausalito—was developed on filled marshland, and it’s subsiding. The shoreline is aging, privately fragmented, and deteriorating. Its flood risks are present and will increase as our climate changes. Bay Area communities like Sausalito need to adapt to keep pace with climate change. Measure X can generate revenue for roads, sea level rise, and resident services—reducing pressure for higher taxes.

By building more efficiently on developed footprints and adapting to a changing shoreline, we can create a more resilient Sausalito. On your November ballot, vote YES on X.

The post Vote Yes on Measure X in Sausalito appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 29, 2026

MEDIA CONTACTS
Madeline Bove, 202-683-2539, mbove@fwwatch.org,
Jill Hindenach, 202-494-6309, jhindenach@leadershipcounsel.org   
Mike Heymsfield; mheymsfield@aldf.org
Dashel Murawski; dmurawski@centerforfoodsafety.org

Yesterday, groups filed an opening brief in their case to force California’s Air Resources Board to reform its Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) so that it no longer perversely encourages factory farms to pollute at the expense of rural communities in California and across the country. 

In amending the LCFS in 2024 to double down on incentives for factory farm “biogas” production, the groups argue that the Air Resources Board violated the California Environmental Quality Act, the California Administrative Procedure Act, and the Global Warming Solutions Act, California landmark climate law from 2006. 

Groups include Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Límpio (“Defensores”), Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), the Center for Food Safety, and Food & Water Watch. 

The brief, filed in Fresno Superior Court, advances three main arguments: 

1. CARB violated California law by causing disproportionate impacts in low-income communities.
2. CARB violated California law by allowing fossil fuel companies to buy fake LCFS offset credits from factory farms to claim lower climate emissions.
3. CARB failed to disclose, analyze, and mitigate the significant environmental impacts caused by the LCFS Amendments.

“CARB is encouraging the production of, and has failed to regulate, excessive dairy manure pollution at the expense of air, water, and local communities,” said David Rodriguez, founding member of Defensores. “In the Central Valley, we live near 90% of cows in California and some of the largest dairy operations in the entire world. The impacts are getting worse as dairies are getting more cows and dairy digesters are installed.”

“CARB has known for years that its perverse and backward policies that reward factory farms for polluting with LCFS credits are bad for the program and bad for Californians. CARB prioritized industry profits over protecting vulnerable communities and achieving real climate progress, and they now have to defend those decisions in court,” said Food & Water Watch Staff Attorney Tyler Lobdell, “If California wants to be a climate leader, it needs to act like one.”

“CARB should prioritize Californians and their health by reducing dairy and livestock pollution. Instead, it’s incentivizing the production of even more manure despite the harm it causes to surrounding communities, the environment and animals suffering in factory farms,” said ALDF Litigation Fellow Christian Suarez. “It’s critical that CARB works on behalf of Californians to protect their health and well-being instead of helping the industrial animal agriculture industry line its pockets at the public’s expense.”

“By rewarding industrial dairies for producing factory farm gas, CARB’s LCFS program entrenches a harmful model of agriculture while putting smaller, more sustainable farms at a disadvantage,” said Center for Food Safety Staff Attorney Kristina Sinclair. “California should be investing in a food and farming system that protects our climate, our environment, and the health of rural communities—not propping up the largest and most polluting factory farms.”

BACKGROUND
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard has been the nation’s primary driver of factory farm biogas development, both in California and beyond. Food & Water Watch analysis reveals that 196 digesters in 16 states make money off of California’s LCFS — out-of-state projects make up 45%. 

The LCFS incentivizes pollution in communities across the nation already overburdened with factory farm pollution, including those in California’s San Joaquin Valley, through lavish financial incentives for so-called “biogas” produced from manure. 

By rewarding methane production on factory farms, the LCFS incentivizes the concentration of animals and animal waste production and exacerbates the negative health impacts of industrial factory farming, including mortality risks, kidney diseases, respiratory conditions, blood pressure elevation, and low birth weight. These impacts disproportionately fall on communities of color and low-income communities. 

Petitioners are Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio, Food & Water Watch, Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Center for Food Safety. Defensores is represented by Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, the Law Office of Brent Newell, and Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP.

The post Groups File Opening Brief in LCFS Biogas Lawsuit appeared first on Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability.

Restore the Delta’s Delta Science Program, led by Delta Science Program Manager Spencer Fern, received the Outstanding Environmental Projects Award on behalf of the Friends of the San Francisco Estuary Board. 

The award, presented at this year’s Bay-Delta Science Conference, recognized the program’s work under this year’s theme, “The Opportunity of Change: Building and Being the Future Together.”

In the summer of 2021, Restore the Delta learned of a strong, unpleasant odor coming from the downtown waterfront in Stockton, CA. The water was dark, green, and filled with Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), with no signs warning the public of their toxicity or an active public monitoring procedure in place.

With training from San Francisco Baykeeper and the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, our team spent that summer testing local Delta waterways for HABs while sharing our findings on social media to raise public awareness.

That work five years ago, became the foundation for what is now known as our Climate Water Advocates internship, a program that continues to train the next generation to monitor HABs throughout the Delta’s hottest months.

We are incredibly proud to see this work recognized and will continue to prioritize science-based water quality management for Delta communities, Tribes, and the entire Delta estuary. 

Measure O would modernize Albany’s zoning process, support housing availability, and restore transparent citywide decision-making. 

In 1978, Measure D created a special requirement for zoning changes in Albany’s Residential Single-Family (R-1) areas: before the City Council could act, at least 50% of resident voters within 300 feet of a proposed change had to sign a verified petition. After nearly five decades, this outdated rule makes it harder for Albany to respond fairly and effectively to today’s housing needs.

Measure O allows the City Council to consider future updates through the same processes to apply across Albany (such as public hearings and environmental review when required).

Measure O also brings the City into compliance with its 2023-2031 Housing Element, which commits the City to pursue repeal of Measure D’s neighborhood petition requirement. Greenbelt Alliance joins other partners in supporting this measure, including the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville.

Why It Matters

As an organization that advocates for climate SMART development and sensible land-use policies, we are excited to endorse Measure O.

Decisions about citywide housing policy should be made through a standardized, public process, not controlled by a narrow petition requirement limited to voters living within 300 feet of a project. Measure O is a good governance measure and a sensible approach to land use that expands participation and supports equitable housing opportunities.

Vote YES on Measure O for a fair, modern, and accountable zoning process that helps Albany plan responsibly for housing today and in the future.

The post Vote Yes on Measure O To Modernize Zoning and Unlock Housing in Albany appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

Following the appearance of a second television ad boosting the image of President Donald Trump and paid for by government funds, Public Citizen filed a complaint with the FCC, FTC, individual broadcasters urging media companies to immediately stop airing the ad.

Public Citizen also filed a second complaint with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) alleging that the new ad violates laws prohibiting the use of government resources for propaganda, the Hatch Act, and other related laws. The ads, which are airing in two media markets containing key districts in the upcoming midterm elections, include a disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” Public Citizen previously submitted a complaint to GAO and OSC after the first Trump-promoting government-funded ad appeared on air last week.

“That the Trump administration not only failed to acknowledge and investigate last week’s illegal ad, but instead doubled down and released a second piece of taxpayer funded political propaganda during the mass-viewing moment of Sunday football is appalling and alarming,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “These illegal ads should immediately be pulled from the air, and the White House’s many apparent violations of the law should be investigated.”

“This administration’s repeated and flagrant violations of the law, including the Hatch Act, are an affront to taxpayers and our democracy,” said Craig Holman, Ph.D., a government ethics expert with Public Citizen. “The FCC and other oversight agencies are charged with ensuring this type of abuse of taxpayer funds does not happen. But that system only works if they take action.”

The letter to broadcasters notes that they should refrain from airing advertisements that they know are otherwise illegal under the law, and that broadcasters must maintain a public file on any political ads they air. Failing to uphold this duty can result in broadcast license revocation.

The FCC/FTC complaint is available to read here, and the second OSC and GAO complaint can be found here.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate is expected to vote on a resolution (S.Res.852) that would force the government to issue an official report on Israel's human rights abuses in the West Bank. The resolution—led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD, and co-sponsored by 24 senators—would require the State Department to issue a report detailing the killings committed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank, abuses of Palestinian children and other gross human rights violations by Israel. If the resolution is adopted, the government would have 30 days to issue the report. If that fails to happen, certain covered security assistance programs for Israel would be halted until the report is submitted. Demand Progress is leading a campaign in support of the resolution and has also led campaigns that have driven more than 1.5 million contacts to Congress this year opposing military action in the Middle East and military aid to Israel.

The following is a statement from Demand Progress Senior Policy Advisor Cavan Kharrazian:

“We know that Americans have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers and that Palestinian children face detention and abuse in Israeli military custody. U.S. taxpayers deserve answers about what happened and what our government is doing to prevent its military aid from fueling human rights violations and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Demanding transparency and enforcing U.S. laws governing military aid should be the bare minimum for any senator. This resolution is a long-overdue first step. Every senator should support it, then follow through by supporting resolutions to block any new arms sales to Israel.”

The market for commercial systems will grow 27% over the next five years, say American Clean Power and Wood Mackenzie.

Shortages of skilled labor and equipment, as well as local opposition, are threatening even high profile projects backed by big tech companies. Developers are responding by embracing flexibility and alternative technologies once considered too unwieldy.

The Trump administration has scouted sites inside Grand Teton National Park to build a Major League Baseball field, the Washington Post reported Saturday, after MLB asked about staging a regular-season game in a national park.

National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands toured three potential locations, including one the Post described as “already disturbed land.” WyoFile, reporting from the park Sunday, noted that while a baseball field can cover about four acres, a stadium can take 25. A full complex with parking can occupy hundreds more. The park’s recently disturbed land is roughly 10 acres of sagebrush bulldozed for a trailhead parking expansion.

Visitors WyoFile spoke with in the park greeted the news with disbelief. “Keep America’s pastime in our baseball parks, not in our national parks,”said David Kelly, an Angels fan from L.A.

National parks are among the country’s most protected national public lands. Constructing a baseball field at Grand Teton could set a dangerous precedent for the entire park system.

“America’s national parks are already in a league of their own,”said Aaron Weiss, executive director at the Center for Western Priorities. “We have a responsibility to care for them, not turn them into a TV spectacle.”

Quick hits Increased traffic, shrunken monuments headline policy shifts on public lands

CPR News

More mining claims staked at Bears Ears

The Land Desk

Burgum brought Venezuelan gold bars to the Roosevelt Room

New York Times

After Trump opened Bears Ears land to business, prospectors swooped in

Grist

Trump admin eyes major BLM restructuring

Politico

The coal industry asked for a rescue. Trump obliged

New York Times

Peaches put this town on the map. The Colorado River drought could wipe it all away

Washington Post

A private ranch that wants 2,000 acres of federal land in Colorado has spent $200,000 to lobby a congressman

Denver Post

Quote of the day

MLB you should know that Grand Teton National Park, home to free ranging wildlife, including grizzly bears, bison, wolves, moose, cougars and elk, is not an appropriate or safe venue for your baseball fantasy.”

—Joan Anzelmo, former superintendent of Colorado National Monument, WyoFile

Picture This @nationalparkservice

Katmai’s brown bears are among the largest bears on Earth. Standing 3–5 feet at the shoulder and stretching 7–10 feet long, they are less “large animal” and more “walking pile of muscle with a snack agenda.”

By mid-summer, adult males are already tipping the scales at 600–900 pounds. But as winter approaches, they enter their annual transformation phase: less “bear,” more “professional food storage unit.”

By October and November, some large males can weigh over 1,000 pounds. Adult females are typically about one-third smaller than males, but still impressively chunky because in the bear world, “getting ready for winter” means turning calories into a luxurious layer of portable insulation. Same.

 

(Featured image: Grand Teton National Park near Jackson Lake Lodge. Photo by Chascar, Wikimedia Commons)

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The energy project developer sees opportunities in Texas, PJM Interconnection and the Southwest Power Pool, but officials say they must carefully navigate an uncertain regulatory backdrop.

The Stay Grounded network has launched a new project called ‘Red Lines for Airports’. It seeks to unite and support groups campaigning against airport expansion projects and build power for a reduction of air traffic. As part of it we’re running a European Tour, visiting members, and supporting with workshops and skill-shares. In September 2026, we joined local groups campaigning against the…

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Brazil’s environment minister says he is “very optimistic” that the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new rainforest fund to channel private and public finance to developing nations – can meet a key $10 billion funding target this year, and is not at risk from his country’s elections next month.

The TFFF, launched by Brazil at COP30 in the Amazon last November and co-led by Norway, is intended as an alternative to traditional grant-based forest finance. The fund aims to raise $125bn in public and private capital, invest it in bond markets, and then pay countries that keep their forests standing from the annual returns. Donor contributions needed to get it going have tailed off after an initial burst.

Speaking to Climate Home News on the sidelines of Climate Week in New York, Brazilian environment minister João Paulo Capobianco pointed out that in less than a year since its official launch, the TFFF has already secured $7.3bn from governments.

“How many other initiatives can say that?” he asked. “Of course, if you have $7 billion, it’s easier for more countries to consider their own contribution. And not just countries – non-governmental organisations also. We are expecting even more support.”

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As its initial target, the TFFF aims to raise $10bn in seed capital from governments by the end of 2026, and still needs to fill a gap of $2.7bn. Its backers say that for each dollar in public funding, they can secure $4 from the private sector. Critics say the $10bn goal barely covers the fund’s expenses and would not allow it to make any significant payments to forest countries.

Because setting up its financial architecture, raising the starting capital and making the first investments will take time, experts say the TFFF is unlikely to generate any payments for developing countries before 2028.

Seeking new pledges

Capobianco told Climate Home News that Brazil is still in talks with potential new contributors to the fund, among them China, Korea and Japan, and said he hoped to see more pledges announced at the upcoming biodiversity and climate COPs in October and November. The Netherlands is expected to up its first small contribution and Canada may also come in, according to other sources close to the TFFF.

Because the fund was not created as part of the UN climate talks and is hosted by the World Bank, developing countries can contribute without taking on wider donor responsibilities for climate finance. Brazil and Indonesia – both large emerging rainforest nations – have each pledged $1bn to the TFFF.

Earlier in September, the UK became the latest country to pledge funding – promising a loan of £400 million (about $540 million). Capobianco welcomed the contribution and noted that Britain has also said it will keep “under review” the possibility of putting in more.

Currently the largest donor is Norway, which announced a $3bn pledge last year at COP30 in Belém. However, that pledge came with conditions, among them that the fund must reach $10bn in sponsor capital by 2026, and that Norway’s contribution can’t make up more than 20% of that total. Over the longer term, this means the fund must raise $15bn from governments to unlock Norway’s full investment.

Comment: UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency

Speaking at a forest finance event in New York, Norway’s environment minister Sigrun Aasland said the country’s pledge was made not “only out of solidarity but because of shared interests”, adding that protecting rainforests is critical for climate and biodiversity goals as well as for national security.

“Tropical deforestation matters to people in the Amazon and in the Congo. But let’s not forget that it also matters to global food production and to the cost of living in Oslo or in London,” she said.

At the event, Guyana’s minister of natural resources Vickram Bharrat said the TFFF is “one in a menu of options” to finance forest protection in developing countries. He added that to boost its capital “maybe we should put some amount of pressure on oil companies to contribute to the fund”.

Upcoming election “not a risk”

Brazil, which has been pivotal to getting the fund off the ground, is now heading into a national election that could see the country swing back to an anti-climate stance if right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro beats current left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Capobianco, however, said the election result does not pose a risk to the TFFF.

“It’s a global initiative, not a Brazilian initiative. We proposed the first idea, but nowadays it’s a global initiative,” he said. “We believe the investor countries and the tropical countries together have the possibility to continue this process.”

In Brazil, the first round of voting is scheduled for Sunday, October 4. If no candidate wins more than 50% of valid votes, a run-off ballot will take place on October 25.

COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans

In July, the TFFF board adopted a charter, which outlines the instrument’s objectives and values, including that 20% of the payments made to tropical countries will go directly to Indigenous people and local communities.

The charter also says the TFFF board may comprise up to 12 member countries during the initial phase. Currently, seven seats are filled by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Germany, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Indonesia.

The board has also formally incorporated the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) – the TFFF’s investment arm that will trade bonds in financial markets – hosted in Luxembourg.

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