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Inclusive investment is a mechanism enabling distributed resources to scale beyond affluent early adopters, creating a broader pathway for virtual power plants, writes Zuha Maryam Shaikh at Clean Energy Works.

Agrarian reform is historical reparation. It is not only about economic restitution, although that is also important. We want the right to access land to be guaranteed.

The post Brazil: Agrarian Reform is Historical Reparation and a Condition for Democracy appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Many improved their performance through building upgrades and energy-efficiency measures like lighting upgrades, envelope work, installing heat pumps or implementing energy management systems, a city official said.

Internal emails show a department administrator stating “let’s let the comms shop find . . . the rationale behind their statistics” when asked to substantiate anti-solar claims underpinning the policy changes, the complaint says. 

LONG ISLAND – The National Audubon Society in New York has been awarded $1,631,254 through the EPA Long Island Sound Partnership Supplemental Grant Program to advance the next stage of the Sunken...

The average child born in the UK in the 1950s was toilet trained by the age of two years and four months. Five decades later, the average child wouldn’t reach that milestone until after their third birthday.

Those statistics are more than just a curious reflection of changing parenting practices. They also shed light on the growing plastic waste crisis. Later toilet training means more used diapers, and since the diaper market also shifted from mostly cloth to mostly disposable over the same decades, that all adds up to a lot more diapers being tossed in the trash.

Today, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown away every minute around the globe. In wealthy countries, the vast majority of disposable diapers and other absorbent hygiene products such as incontinence products and menstrual supplies wind up in a landfill or incinerator. In parts of the world that lack good waste collection systems, diapers are often dumped or burned, resulting in plastic pollution, contaminated water, and the risk of disease.

Absorbent hygiene product waste amounts to somewhere between 160 and 200 million metric tons each year and makes up nearly one-tenth of municipal solid waste by weight globally, according to a new paper in Nature Sustainability. “With a growing and ageing population this problem is only getting worse, so it is important we act now to reduce the waste, and find more sustainable solutions for the waste that is inevitable,” says study team member Elze Porte, a materials sustainability researcher at University College London.

Porte and her collaborator, UCL materials scientist Mark Miodownik, spent two and a half years (if their study were a child born in the 1950s, it would be toilet trained by now) talking with manufacturers of cloth and disposable diapers, government agencies, waste collection and processing companies, and caregiving and healthcare professional organizations. They even visited a factory and a diaper recycling facility.

The result is three broad strategies for making absorbent hygiene products more sustainable. (Their strategies focus on diapers but are more broadly applicable, they say.) One is to reduce the use of disposable hygiene products. That could be accomplished by switching to reusable diapers or earlier toilet training – or, more precisely, reversing the trend towards later toilet training.

Changes to workplace and childcare systems are needed to make this more feasible for parents, the researchers say. But earlier toilet training can also be better for children’s bladder and bowel health. “For us, this was interesting to learn, because it means that reducing diaper waste by bringing back down the toilet training age can save money for families, support children in their development, and is better for the environment,” Porte says. “It is rare to find such a win-win-win solution.”

 

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A second strategy is developing technologies to recycle absorbent hygiene products. This is challenging because disposable diapers are a complex mix of materials: different kinds of plastics, fibers, superabsorbent gels. So there needs to be a way to collect used diapers separately from other municipal waste, then separate the different materials and then recycle each one.

But recycling diapers isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it might first sound. There are several diaper recycling facilities already operating in multiple countries, although they generally only recycle part of the diaper and often result in downcycling of materials.

The final strategy is developing fully compostable absorbent hygiene products. The challenge here is making products that will break down in an industrial composter, but not when exposed to the similarly warm, moist environment of the human body.

A separate group of researchers have developed a biodegradable material based on cellulose and citric acid that could replace the fossil-fuel based absorbent gels used in conventional disposable diapers.

Both recycling and composting will require new technologies to remove pathogens and medicine residues from used hygiene products. Some jurisdictions restrict composting of human waste, so regulatory changes may also be necessary. In the meantime, “We are now doing more work on understanding worldwide toilet training practices in the Big Toilet Project,” Porte reports. “We ask parents and carers around the globe to help us by sharing their toilet training journey, helping us to gain insights into how and when they toilet train their children, understand best practices and identify where support is lacking.”

Source: Porte E. and M. Miodownik. “Research priorities for addressing global absorbent hygiene product waste.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine (baby photo: AndriyPorokhnenko/iStock.com)

As president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro not only weakened environmental regulations and gutted agencies charged with protecting the Amazon, he also railed against conservation. An analysis of his tweets and those of his ministers finds a link between their rhetoric and the acres of forest lost. 

Read more on E360 →

Earthworks begins on key substation for the Copperstring transmission line that will unlock some of the country's biggest renewable energy projects and mining province.

The post Earthworks begin on key substation for inland transmission line that could unlock Queensland renewable riches appeared first on Renew Economy.

Headline News:

• “Germany Sets PV Record, Produces Three Times As Much Solar Power As Australia So Far This Year” • By 27 September, Germany’s net electricity from solar had reached 90.2 TWh, exceeding the total of 90 TWh for last year, according to data from Fraunhofer ISE. This is almost triple the amount from solar in Australia in the same time. [Renew Economy]

German solar farm (Hansainvest Real Assets image)

• “US Renewables Additions Hit 89 GW” • US renewable energy and utility-scale battery storage capacity increased by more than 88.7 GW between 1 February 2025 and 31 July 2026, according to the SUN DAY Campaign. The combined capacity of renewable energy sources expanded by 14.6%, or 62 GW, while grid battery energy storage doubled. [reNews]
• “Solar Surpasses Nuclear Power Globally For First Time” • The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that the wind surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in March, 2025. This was followed by solar in April, so for the first time world solar generation exceeded nuclear. [pv magazine Global]
• “Electric Trucks Cheaper To Operate Than Diesel For Almost Half Of Trucks Sold In The EU” • Electric trucks have a lower total cost of ownership in six out of nine major EU markets, a T&E report shows. In the Netherlands and Germany, electric trucks reach their payback time after only two years, and savings can be over €85,000 in five years. [CleanTechnica]
• “Trump Administration Rolls Back Fuel Economy Standards For Automakers” • The Department of Transportation is easing fuel economy standards that were put in place during the Biden administration. DOT Secretary Sean P Duffy said that changing CAFE standards will make vehicles more affordable by creating “commonsense” guidelines for automakers. [ABC News]

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

In many rural and remote Indigenous communities, the buildings that matter most are often the ones under the greatest strain. These buildings – including schools, arenas, daycare centres, and supportive care homes – provide critical services to...

Patrick Schröder is a senior research fellow at Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre.

A climate summit serious about implementation cannot afford to leave major emissions reductions off the table. Yet, that is the risk COP31 faces unless it makes reducing raw material use central to the way countries decarbonise their economies. 

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last week, COP31 host Türkiye laid out proposals to accelerate emissions cuts in the next decade. Its plans include global goals to increase the share of recycled products in material use to at least 15% (up from 6.9% in 2025) and halve waste generation by 2035.

COP31 offers an opportunity to connect efforts to improve material circularity with stronger national climate commitments and mitigation pathways. But these targets could be a lot more ambitious.  

The case for circularity  

The Paris Agreement cannot be delivered through cleaner electricity alone. We must also reduce the emissions that are embedded in the way we extract resources, manufacture products, build infrastructure and dispose of waste.  

Circularity principles are pivotal to credible mitigation pathways: designing technologies and products to last, repairing and reusing them, and reducing demand for virgin resources.

The scale of the opportunity is striking. A recent European Environment Agency review found that adopting such principles could deliver average global emissions reductions potential of 52% in the waste sector against a business-as-usual scenario, 48% in construction and buildings, 28% in transport and mobility, 26% in industry and 24% in agriculture.  

• May 27, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Recycling could meet half of Europe’s critical mineral needs by 2050 A new report by an EU-funded research project says the bloc could harness its “urban mines” to reduce its dependence on China for energy transition minerals Read more
• Feb 9, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier China maximises battery recycling to shore up critical mineral supplies Beijing is bracing for a tsunami of spent EV batteries by taking steps to boost recycling – a strategy that could also cut its reliance on imports of clean energy minerals Read more
• May 28, 2024 Clean Energy Frontier The Canadian city betting on recycling rare earths for the energy transition As countries scramble to secure critical minerals, Kingston’s burgeoning clean tech ecosystem is attracting startups to create circular supply chains and reduce reliance on China Read more

These figures make a compelling case for raising circularity ambitions across the economy, offering the promise of far more than better recycling bins.

In fact, recycling minerals used in cleantech equipment, for example, illustrate the extent of the emissions savings available. The carbon footprint of minerals and metals recovered from secondary sources is up to 80% lower than those produced from new mining and processing, according to the International Energy Agency.

A major EU-funded project estimates that recovered materials could substitute up to 56% of Europe’s primary critical raw material requirements by 2050, provided they achieve the necessary quality. The main takeaway goes beyond Europe: yesterday’s products can become tomorrow’s strategic resources while mitigating climate change. 

In this light, a target to increase the share of recovered material use to 15% isn’t enough.

The evidence-based Circularity Gap Report found a 17% target by 2032 is possible and could unlock additional emissions reductions amounting to several gigatonnes of CO2.

Reducing material demand  

A higher circularity metric is only part of the answer, however. An economy can increase its recycling rate at the same time as extracting more primary materials if total material demand keeps growing.   

The tougher issue governments need to address is identifying what reductions in primary material use are needed.  

The Circularity Gap Report uses an indicative benchmark of eight tonnes of virgin materials consumed per person annually. This is already being translated into policy: Germany’s 2024 circular economy strategy aims to reduce primary resource consumption, with the German Federal Environment Agency identifying six to eight tonnes per person as an ambitious target. 

An engineer walks past a pump at the battery recycling pilot plant installed in the Eramet Research & Innovation center in Trappes, near Paris, France (Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes)

Reducing primary material demand will require a closer integration of energy and resource policies. Efficient EVs charged with solar power can complement better public transport and walkable cities, while batteries designed to be repaired and reused for stationary energy storage before being recycled will reduce the materials footprint of transport and clean energy services.

Coordinated infrastructure development and urban planning can prevent unnecessary overbuild, while renovating existing building stock reduces demand for new steel, cement and aluminium, which are emissions-intensive to produce. Connecting industrial waste heat to district heating networks can further reduce energy demand and emissions.

What governments should agree at COP31 

COP31 can translate this approach into three concrete commitments. 

First, governments should agree a stronger circularity ambition, supported by material-footprint indicators and milestones. The presidency should seek recognition of these priorities in negotiated outcomes, alongside concrete delivery partnerships under its COP31 Action Agenda. 

Second, countries should include quantified circular economy measures in their updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and implementation plans. Such measures should include reuse, material efficiency and circularity targets, as well as transparent estimates of emissions savings that avoid double counting across sectors. By the end of 2025, countries had developed 101 national circular economy roadmaps and action plans, yet these often remained disconnected from their NDCs.

• Nov 3, 2025 Clean Energy Frontier Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries As EV sales boom in Jordan, a lack of formal infrastructure for dealing with end-of-life batteries is leading to some innovative solutions Read more
• Jan 21, 2025 Clean Energy Frontier Indian start-ups mine e-waste for battery minerals but growing industry has a dark side Recycling e-waste can unlock a vast and sustainable supply of transition minerals but in India the sector relies on a neglected informal economy Read more

Third, climate finance should support the delivery of circular solutions such as material recovery at scale, investments into circular critical mineral value chains beyond mining, developing a circular plastics economy, and designing buildings and cities that support material reuse. Developing countries need technology, affordable finance and support to deliver these ambitions, including for the informal workers whose livelihoods depend on recovering and recycling materials.

The test for COP31 is to reach an agreement that can start the transformation of our production and consumption systems and how they are financed.  

A headline circularity target will achieve little without policies that address absolute resource demand and deliver measurable emissions cuts. But COP31 offers an opportunity to make circularity a central element of climate policy, with targets strong enough to matter and institutions equipped to deliver them.

The post COP31 must aim higher to cut emissions from the use of materials   appeared first on Climate Home News.

Technology used to build world's tallest wind turbine, to tap into high altitude winds, similar to the self-lifting tower technology being used by Fortescue's Nabrawind.

The post World’s tallest wind turbine reaches full height of 365 metres atop “telescopic” lattice tower appeared first on Renew Economy.

On September 16, Ontario education workers’ unions called a province-wide Day of Action in support of the 255,000 education workers currently in collective bargaining with...

The post A Day of Action for Ontario education first appeared on Spring.

September 2026—The central objective of the LAC meeting was to strengthen regional coordination, celebrate collective lessons learned, and establish shared strategic priorities to guide our joint work in the coming years toward environmental justice and zero waste.

In the first part of the day, participants collectively reflected on the political, social, and environmental realities of the different countries. Discussion sessions were organized on topics related to zero waste in educational settings, pyrolysis, and organic waste, followed by a celebration of the milestones that have marked our work since we last met in Lima in 2023.

For Karla Escoto of Basura Cero Nicaragua, “Being part of this gathering has been rewarding and rejuvenating. These gatherings not only allow us to exchange experiences and share the actions being taken by each of the organizations working toward zero waste, but they also enable us to have that direct contact, to humanize our actions, to share, to rethink our approaches, and to know that despite the different circumstances and contexts in each country, we continue to make progress from our own communities, working hand in hand with young people, local communities, and grassroots waste pickers.”

Other important opportunities included training sessions led by the members themselves and discussions centered on the region’s strategic priorities, with the aim of making progress on common goals that will guide our joint work in the coming years and recognize the capabilities that exist within the alliance.

“The gathering reaffirmed the value of sharing what we do in our communities. We were able to share the experience of León Cortés, but also to listen to and learn from other organizations in the region. That exchange strengthens our work and reminds us that, even though our territories are different, we can learn from one another.” said Julia Picado of the Asociación Defensores del Monumento Natural Zona de los Santos in Costa Rica.

The three-day gathering concluded in a festive atmosphere with a “causes fair,” where organizations presented the work they are carrying out in their territories. The shared experiences provided a better understanding of the diversity of work that sustains the movement and the various ways in which organizations are advancing environmental justice and zero-waste initiatives.

For Tania Ricaldi of CESU-UMSS in Bolivia, “The Santiago Gathering was a space for dialogue, listening, and mutual learning that allowed us to share experiences with zero-waste practices. These experiences show that through local action, solidarity, and creativity, we are building and rebuilding relationships and transformations that are essential for the care of life.”

The Santiago meeting will be remembered as a moment to celebrate what has been achieved and to outline the steps needed to develop strategies that will enable progress toward new goals and reinforce the achievements already made.

This is a guest blog by Tom Ellison, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a research institute tackling systemic climate and ecological security risks, and Phil Newell, Communications co-chair, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 leading climate and anti-disinformation organizations dealing with climate misinformation and disinformation.

This past summer’s extreme weather has brought home the intensity of the climate crisis for many of us around the world: from the catastrophic floods in Nepal, to the lethal heatwaves across Europe and India, to the choking wildfires in North America, France, and Spain. 

As if that isn’t enough, we are seeing these extreme weather crises going hand-in-hand with information crises. The danger of heatwaves is being downplayed. Flooding is getting blamed on foreign neighbors. Wildfires are being attributed to a land-clearing conspiracy. As fossil-fueled extreme weather continues, it is also fueling an information crisis, bringing climate denial, AI slop content, political propaganda, extremism, and online rage bait. This has ramifications that endanger lives, divide societies, and undermine climate action. 

We must protect ourselves and those around us not only from the physical impacts of extreme weather but also from the disinformation that comes with it. The good news is, we can keep ourselves safe by anticipating and short-circuiting lies and distortions.  A new toolkit ‘Weathering Extremes,’  by Jennie King  from CCS lays out some practical steps forward:  

 

A Spanish military unit battles wildfires in August 2026, which displaced more than 300,000 people across Spain and France. (Military Emergencies Unit, Spanish Ministry of Defense)

 

Understanding the Threat

Wildfires, floods, and other extreme events bring a host of problematic claims and narratives. Experts sometimes talk about false information that is spread knowingly (disinformation), or  false information spread unknowingly (misinformation), or even  cherry-picked facts that are spread to manipulate (malinformation). But the most important thing is the impact this kind of information has, not the mindset of the person clicking “share.” 

In the wild, we might encounter three main categories of deception around extreme weather. These can look different from traditional denialism in climate debates. But they have a variety of harmful impacts.

• The first category is environmental, which attacks science or cherry picks facts to separate a disaster from its climate-related causes. To use wildfires as an example, this could mean saying this wildfire was started by an arsonist, not climate change. That may be true, but it obscures the fact that climate change is making wildfires more likely and intense, regardless of how they start. Over time, this can weaken our understanding of climate change, and slow down climate action. 
• The second category is political, which attacks disaster response efforts, often to grind an unrelated partisan or geopolitical axe. For example, Russia falsely claimed the wildfire wouldn’t have been so bad if the US hadn’t wasted resources supporting Ukraine, or the US President misleadingly argued that the LA wildfires are the fault of his political rival’s water policies. These claims can polarize governance, undermine disaster relief or recovery, or empower authoritarian leaders.
• The third category is hateful and extremist, which blames disasters on minorities or promotes conspiracy theories. These deceptions might look like the wildfires were caused by Jewish weather control or that foreigners are stealing all the disaster aid. Such falsehoods can divide societies or endanger the safety of vulnerable people. 

 

The Perpetrators and Motives

These claims are mostly about directing blame, whether to “natural” causes, to conspiracies, to minorities, to political rivals or foreign enemies–basically, anything but climate change. So what is really behind the lies? It comes down to money and power that vested interests have on the line during chaotic, viral climate disasters.

Big Oil & Big Tech

Private interests have a great deal of money to protect or gain from high-profile extreme weather events. Most obviously, oil, gas, coal, animal agriculture, and other polluting sectors don’t want disasters to motivate climate action that threatens their profits. The role of corporate lobbying, advertising, and PR in climate disinformation and on climate  obstruction, i.e. creating doubt on the severity of the climate crisis has been documented for decades. But more recently, the interests of Big Oil are increasingly aligned with those of Big Tech. 

Social Media Algorithms

Once upon a time, social media promised an open shortcut for connecting with other people, be they friends, family, or strangers. But along the way, social media became a stew of addictive algorithms, with users forever scrolling in circles, where attention is sold to advertisers rather than browsing an open web. Now, online conversation around disasters favors whatever earns clicks and cash– whether it’s rumors, rage bait, AI slop, propaganda, or hate speech. As a result, the social media channel for public engagement has been hijacked by dishonest influencers, polluters, and bots. That leaves policymakers and the public struggling to find reliable information during disasters, right when they need it most.

Political Ideology

Besides money, disinformation about extreme weather is also motivated by ideology and politics. Authoritarian governments see extreme weather as a chance to attach their message to a major news event and to undermine opponents and critics. Political extremists, especially the far right, have started treating climate change not just as an energy debate but as an enemy cultural identity. These actors are not the cause of our toxic information environment, but exploit and shape it to serve their goals.

Often, all these motives are mixed. For example, Russia has covertly sponsored far-right climate ‘disinfluencers’ in the United States, and the state-owned gas company owns Russia’s largest media conglomerate, showing how directly fossil fuel interests, social media, and global politics are intertwined.

During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the far right, online provocateurs, and Russian media spread climate denial, partisan attacks, and xenophobic messages, fueling security threats to public officials and FEMA relief workers (FEMA).

 

What Can We Do?

There are ways we can protect ourselves and our communities from these threats:  

1. We as communities and climate concerned citizens should expect disinformation during extreme weather as the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, these information crises can happen anywhere, as local events are co-opted into viral narratives. By reading this and the resources here, you are already ahead of the curve. 
2. Second, we need to sidestep the algorithm and not rely only on social media. It’s tempting to focus all our energy online, but social media tends to reward lies and nonsense over truth. As Jennie King writes in Weathering Extremes, “information resilience is built on networks, not newsfeeds.” That means real-world connections matter – personal relationships, ties with local governments, or simple tools like email lists, phone trees, and group texts – that we can build before a disaster strikes. And it’s worth remembering: as Yale’s Climate Maps show, most people in the U.S, for example, support key climate actions – even if you’d never guess that from social media.
3. Third, we can build defenses ahead of time, rather than scrambling to counter or fact-check every rumor and lie during a crisis. One way is “pre-bunking”– warning people in advance about certain narratives, messengers, or tactics they are likely to run into. In fact, the disinformation examples earlier in this piece are themselves a form of pre-bunking. Another tool is the “truth sandwich” – leading with the truth, then knocking down a false claim or bad source, before reiterating the facts again. We can also work to get accurate information into the data AI chatbots learn and draw from – also called “generative engine optimization”. This is increasingly important as AI use grows, and because cunning governments and companies are already trying to feed their own messages into chatbots.

   A resource on prebunking and generative engine optimization, from Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster (CCS).

4. Finally, as citizens and civil society, we can push for the global, systematic reforms needed to make our online environment more trustworthy. Reforms that call for improved safety, transparency, privacy, and accountability standards for tech platforms endorsed by CAAD are a great starting point, and at will  unwind some of the toxic incentives that give lies and outrage the upper hand. 

 

Toward Information Resilience

Climate change and disinformation are two of the systemic challenges of our time, and they are colliding in harmful ways. Neither will be solved easily. But more people and institutions globally are tackling the challenge, from the UN to researchers to certain governments. Ultimately, reliable information is just as much a part of necessary climate infrastructure as is solar and wind power or flood defences. And everyone has a part to play from newsrooms to social algorithms and even family group chats. 

References and resources: 

• Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster
• Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition

 

The post Keeping Safe from Fires and Liars appeared first on 350.

After returning to office last January, President Donald Trump made it clear to America’s universities that federal money comes with strings attached. Since then, the administration has frozen or withdrawn billions of dollars in federal funding from top schools and launched investigations into them, using its leverage to influence admissions, hiring, and DEI policies. The consequences have been stark: According to the Academic Freedom Index, institutional autonomy in the United States dropped sharply last year, placing it on a steeper descent than those seen in Hungary, Turkey, and India.

A new study argues that this attack didn’t come out of nowhere. In the paper recently published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, researchers show how corporate interests, including oil companies, have sought to influence universities for at least half a century, using big donations to shape research agendas. That weakened schools’ defenses against outside influences, the authors say, paving the way for Trump’s attack.

“Private donors had been practicing a smaller version of the same playbook for years by offering funding in exchange for a say over how university programs are run,” said Noel Healy, the lead author of the paper and a professor of geography and sustainability at Salem State University, in an email.

This pattern, called “corporate capture,” gives donors sway over who gets hired, what researchers study, and what’s taught in classes. Some experts trace the current strategy to a 1971 memo written by Lewis F. Powell Jr. a year before he became a Supreme Court justice. Powell told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it should defend free enterprise by funding scholars to evaluate textbooks and urging boards of trustees to correct the “imbalance” caused by too many liberal faculty members.

The conservative Olin, Scaife, Koch, and Bradley foundations helped drive the corporate capture of higher education, the study says. These foundations, formed by tycoons who made their fortunes in fields such as chemical manufacturing and fossil fuels, also spent decades funding The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. That far-right playbook for the Trump administration lays out strategies to bring universities into closer ideological alignment with conservative priorities.

“I mean, you go back and read the Powell memo, you already had the agenda of the Trump administration,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.

A handful of schools have caved to some of the Trump administration’s demands, including Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern. The administration has targeted climate initiatives in particular, revoking $4 million in grants to Princeton partly because it said the research was fueling “climate anxiety.”

Many of the funders influencing universities are linked to the fossil fuel industry. One analysis found that Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips, and Koch Industries donated at least $700 million to 27 U.S. universities from 2010 to 2020. BP funded Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative for a quarter century before letting its contract expire in 2025. An email uncovered in a congressional investigation showed a BP executive in 2020 celebrating how its relationship with Princeton was “becoming increasingly synergistic (as of course we had planned!)”. 

A free after-school STEM program for students in Houston is hosted at the ExxonMobil Foundation Teen Engineering and Tech Center in January 2026.
Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

These kinds of relationships can sway the direction of research and even go on to shape policy discussions: A study in 2022 found that reports published by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford while they received funding from oil companies were biased in favor of natural gas compared to independent research. A 2011 report from MIT, funded by fossil fuel interests, popularized the framing of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner future, a phrase repeated by former President Barack Obama. Meanwhile, a famous 2004 paper from Princeton, which was significantly shaped by BP, vaulted carbon capture into international climate policy discussions — but it remains unproven at scale today.

“Corporate capture isn’t necessarily blatant propaganda; it’s a slow drift toward market-friendly climate solutions and away from anything that threatens the industry,” Healy said. It’s not just oil companies that have shaped higher education: pharmaceutical companies, agricultural interests, and other industries have followed a similar strategy — in some cases, for more than a century. Electric utilities ran a wide-ranging propaganda campaign in the 1920s to promote free-market ideals, hiring academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula, according to a congressional investigation at the time.

In addition to universities, K-12 education has been a target of oil propaganda for decades. Fossil fuels are such a part of the fabric of life in some states that the industry’s efforts aren’t questioned. The Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association claimed that “the oil and natural gas industry makes the back-to-school transition possible” in a post in 2022, highlighting how backpacks, glue, and crayons are all derived from petroleum.

The withdrawal of federal funding deepens universities’ reliance on these kinds of private donors. “As budgets have gotten tight historically, that’s been one of the reasons why university administrations have been more willing to make some of these deals with funders that bypass normal academic practices,” said Ryan Wishart, a co-author of the paper and a sociology professor at Creighton University.

Many funding arrangements remain hidden from public scrutiny. The authors of the paper call for a dedicated congressional investigation into fossil fuel influence in higher education and for schools to disclose their donor contracts and outside partnerships. Brulle, who wasn’t involved in the paper, warned that these solutions have limits. The University of Texas, he pointed out, is subject to the whims of the Texas state legislature, which has deep ties to the oil industry. 

The first step, in Wishart’s view, is for schools to stop falling in line with the Trump administration before it’s asked of them. “I think university leaders need to stop engaging in anticipatory obedience [and] self-censorship,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How elite universities got tangled up in politics and petroleum on Sep 29, 2026.

Declassified documents reveal that, prior to the crossing of over 70,000 people from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in July, Spain’s intelligence services had passed a warning to Rabat. Still, Morocco let it happen, demonstrating once again that border externalisation exposes Europe to the whims of autocrats and leads to needless death and suffering. What can Spain and the EU learn from Ceuta?

Between the morning of 30 July and the evening of 31 July 2026, more than 70,000 people crossed into Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 inhabitants on the North African coast, bordering Morocco. It was the largest single breach of the European Union’s external border on record.

At 1:52 pm on 29 July, an officer of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre in Ceuta informed the office of the government’s delegate in the city that calls were circulating online for a crossing “by fence and by sea” the following evening, on Morocco’s Throne Day. Facebook groups behind the call had around 180,000 members between them. That same day, the intelligence service alerted Morocco’s two intelligence agencies, the DGST and the DGED, and asked for their cooperation in stopping the plan.

We know all this thanks to 40 internal documents that the Spanish government later released, under pressure from both parliament and the courts. Yet the following morning, gendarmes on the beaches near Fnideq stood aside as tens of thousands of people – overwhelmingly young Moroccans – walked into the sea. At least 141 died, most of them in the sea off the Tarajal breakwater.

Within 72 hours, roughly 90 per cent of those who survived were back in Morocco. Most of them returned voluntarily, in cooperation with Rabat. Several thousand remained, among them more than 1,000 unaccompanied minors, who under Spanish law cannot be returned without a verified family placement, and applicants for asylum, whose removal is suspended until their claim has been assessed. Rabat has demanded that the minors be handed over.

Whether Moroccan authorities directed the crossing rather than merely failing to stop it remains contested. Pedro Sánchez told parliament on 3 September that during “the 10 central hours” of 30 July the Moroccan gendarmerie “permitted the crossing”, while maintaining that no proof had been offered that Morocco designed or executed the operation. But that is not the question that matters most. A state that polices its northern coast as tightly as Morocco does, and that two weeks later swiftly blocked a new online call to cross into Ceuta, does not just lose control for 10 hours by chance.

By design or by omission, the Moroccan state is responsible for the 141 people who died in the water. But other choices, too, made this tragedy possible.

A European failure

Two policy failures converged in Ceuta – one European, one Spanish.

The European policy in question is border externalisation. Since the agreement with Turkey in 2016, the EU has paid third countries to hold people back from its borders and has treated what happens to those people as a matter for the jurisdiction concerned. Libya in 2017, Morocco in 2019, Tunisia in 2023, Mauritania and Egypt in 2024; and now the Pact on Migration and Asylum, which extends the model rather than questioning it. Morocco receives more European border funding than any other state in North Africa.

Progressive forces have opposed this arrangement on humanitarian grounds for a decade. The countries the EU designates as safe are not safe for the people held in them, as the documented record of torture, rape, and abandonment in the desert makes plain. Moreover, defending the right to seek a life elsewhere means refusing to see people turned into a commodity exchanged between governments.

But Ceuta also exposes a second flaw in the model, one that governments indifferent to the first may find harder to ignore. Every externalisation agreement transfers to a third state a measure of control over the foreign policy of the state that pays. Turkey demonstrated this at the Greek border in 2020. Belarus demonstrated it against Poland and Lithuania in 2021. Morocco has now demonstrated it twice in five years, the second time on a scale seven or eight times larger than the first.

The EU believed it had purchased control over its external borders. What it has actually acquired is a set of dependencies, one per neighbour, each exercisable at that neighbour’s convenience.

Spain’s responsibilities

Spain, for its part, has pursued appeasement, attempting to secure a difficult neighbour’s goodwill through unilateral concession.

Morocco has used the border with Ceuta and Melilla as an instrument of pressure for decades. In 2002, it occupied Perejil, an uninhabited island close to the Moroccan coast but under Spanish sovereignty. In 2018, on the eve of Throne Day, it let several hundred people storm the Ceuta fence. In May 2021, after the leader of the Polisario Front – a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement that fights for the independence of Western Sahara from Moroccan control – was admitted to a hospital in Spain under a false identity, some 10,000 people entered Ceuta in under three days while Moroccan police looked on.

Spain did not respond by reducing its exposure. Instead, in March 2022, Sánchez sent an official letter to King Mohammed VI endorsing Morocco’s Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara, reversing half a century of Spanish neutrality over the decolonisation of its former colony and doing so without a parliamentary debate and without consulting the coalition partner then in government. In June that year, at least 23 migrants and asylum seekers died in a crowd crush at the fence in Melilla – Spain’s other city on the North African coast – on the Moroccan side of the border, as Moroccan and Spanish security forces moved to repel a mass crossing.

Four years on, the customs posts at Ceuta and Melilla still do not operate normally, and Spain and Morocco have not resolved their airspace dispute. That concession taught Rabat that pressure at the border produces results.

In August this year, Morocco’s justice minister, a royal appointee, went on state television to claim Rabat’s “historic and geographic right” over Ceuta and Melilla, demanding a bilateral commission on their “return to the homeland”. In September, responding to the documents declassified by the Spanish government, Morocco’s foreign minister, Nasser Bourita, issued a statement accusing Spanish politicians and media of “strategic blindness”, warning that this would produce “recurring tensions”, and reminding Madrid that “geographic proximity is an immutable fact”. The two cities have since featured in Morocco’s parliamentary election campaign.

Yet until the hours preceding this summer’s crisis, the Spanish state still trusted Morocco to act on its warnings that a crossing was being organised. Madrid’s posture was to fully rely on the goodwill of a neighbour that had already used the border against it, five years earlier, to extract the largest foreign policy concession in decades – and to double down on a policy that had already caused unnecessary deaths.

Responsibility for this failure lies with Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE). Sumar, the junior coalition partner of which I am a member, has warned for years that the relationship built since 2022 would produce a tragedy like this summer’s. After 30 July, it has repeated in parliament that Spain suffered an attack in which people in extreme vulnerability were used as the instrument, that the explanation attributing the crossing to smuggling networks is not credible, and that the response was belated and inadequate. It has done so not with the intention to bring down the government, but to change the policy.

The reticence of the Socialist side is structural rather than personal. To name Morocco’s responsibility is to concede that the 2022 concession bought nothing. A government that builds its regional policy on keeping a neighbour appeased loses the capacity to criticise that neighbour’s actions. Five weeks passed before Sánchez addressed parliament. The summoning of the Moroccan embassy’s representative on 21 August was kept secret for two weeks, while similar episodes in disputes with Israel, Italy, and Argentina were widely publicised. The prime minister’s most recent formulation is that he “exculpates no one” and will act “with the utmost firmness” if solid proof emerges. Morocco, for its part, has informed Madrid that it is conducting its own investigation. It has not said who is conducting it or when it will report back.

Why Europe did not help

Madrid’s reticence explains why no case for European solidarity was made, but does not justify how the EU and some of its member states reacted.

On 31 July, Italy’s right-wing government threatened to suspend Schengen with Spain and blamed the deaths on Spain’s extraordinary regularisation of undocumented migrants, a process opened in January which had drawn more than 800,000 applications by July. No emergency Council was called. The Treaty’s solidarity clause was not invoked. A member state had suffered a breach of its external border on a scale never seen before, and the response from the other capitals was silence.

The reasons are not hard to find. Spain recognised the state of Palestine in 2024, has been the most outspoken European voice on Gaza, has declined to make its bases fully available for offensive operations in the US war on Iran, and has decided to regularise migrants rather than deporting them. For many European powers and for the US, these count as serious transgressions.

In the months before the crossing, several of Spain’s allies moved closer to Rabat. On 15 July, two weeks before the mass crossing, the US House of Representatives passed the State Department funding bill for 2027. The report the Appropriations Committee had published in April to accompany it described Ceuta and Melilla as “administered by Spain” but “located in Moroccan territory”, remaining “the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim”. It also endorsed State Department efforts to facilitate dialogue on their future status. The report carries no legal force, and its sponsor has since described the wording as purely geographical. Still, it was the first time the US Congress put the Moroccan claim in writing.

Moreover, on 7 August, hours after taking office, Colombia’s new president, pro-Trump right-winger Abelardo de la Espriella, recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in the presence of Morocco’s foreign minister, and three days later recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which international law considers part of Syria. Morocco is Israel’s closest military partner in North Africa. No coordination needs to be alleged for these facts to matter: aligned interests move in the same direction without a masterplan.

The Spanish Right has managed to play both sides. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox spent the first days of the crisis in studied ambiguity, then rounded on Rabat, accusing Morocco of organising the crossing and Sánchez of covering for it. At the same time, they demanded the immediate return of the people who crossed, and said nothing about the US report on the “future status” of the two exclaves.

Severity towards those in the water, deference towards the governments backing the state that put them there: that combination is not a Spanish peculiarity, and progressives elsewhere in Europe will recognise it in their own opposition.

Another way forward

Spain, and the EU with it, built a border policy on the assumption that a neighbouring autocracy would act in their interest, and that assumption has now failed at a cost of 141 lives. What replaces that policy must start from a different premise.

The first needed change concerns the bilateral relationship. Every Spanish government has accepted that Morocco’s capacity to cause harm makes a working relationship necessary, and that is a reasonable starting point. But there is a difference between maintaining a relationship and organising an entire regional policy around keeping the neighbour placated. A relationship with Rabat that can survive Ceuta must rest on reciprocity that can be verified and consequences that can be enforced: accountability for 30 July before ministerial contacts resume at their previous level, auditable conditions on border cooperation, and diversification of Spain’s regional ties so that no single neighbour holds a veto.

There have been steps in the right direction: Sánchez visited Algiers in July to mend a diplomatic rift around Western Sahara, and on 10 September, the Spanish parliament approved a law extending nationality to Sahrawis born in the territory before August 1977, when the option to claim Spanish nationality granted at the end of colonial rule expired. However positive, these steps are not yet a policy.

The second necessary change is European. When Belarus pushed people towards the Polish and Lithuanian borders in 2021, the EU called it a hybrid attack, imposed sanctions on Minsk, and adjusted its legal framework accordingly. Applying the same standard to Morocco is the minimum. Beyond that, every externalisation agreement in force should be reopened to attach conditions and consequences, because funding without them amounts to a retainer rather than cooperation.

More fundamentally, the EU should reconsider its outsourcing model. That means offering safe routes that people can use without crossing a sea or a fence: work and family-reunification visas issued in countries of origin at a scale that corresponds to actual demand rather than to political tolerance; the possibility of applying for protection at European consulates and through humanitarian corridors, so that the right to asylum does not depend on surviving the journey; and mobility agreements negotiated with the countries migrants come from, as partners with interests of their own, rather than with the transit states through which they are pushed.

A shared European system of reception and relocation that does not leave the state where people first arrive to manage the consequences alone is also needed, alongside asylum procedures that take weeks rather than years, and the regularisation of those already present, because an undocumented population is the raw material of every form of exploitation. None of this is quick or cheap, but it removes the dependency at the root: a route that does not run through Morocco is a route Morocco cannot open or close.

The third change concerns the people at the fence. Treating the migrants as the threat shifts the responsibility away from the actors who sent them. The far right across Europe supplies that narrative, in Spain with demands for immediate pushbacks, and elsewhere with the argument that people used as a weapon may be handled as one. The two interests converge at the fence, and each relies on the other to keep the argument there. Refusing that argument is the only coherent answer. The people who crossed into Ceuta on 30 July have rights that do not depend on why they crossed, and a border policy that does not begin from that fact ends by rewarding the state that used them.

These three changes are not in tension. Defending the people who cross borders and defending the borders’ integrity are the same task. Any policy that does not recognise this is a recipe for more tragedies and blackmail by autocratic powers.

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“Unprecedented” reductions to federal transit and rail dollars in the latest stopgap bill could offer a taste of even steeper cuts to come, advocates fear — unless Americans demand stable funding for the shared transportation options we deserve, and on which our economy depends.

More than a hundred members of the American Public Transportation Association descended on Washington earlier this month to protest Congress’s decision to let billions of dollars for multimodal transportation lapse under a recent stopgap spending bill to fund the nation’s surface transportation programs until December 11.

That “fly-in” brought agencies, transit equipment manufacturers and more face-to-face with well over 100 lawmakers, who were forced to pass that extension because they’d failed to negotiate a bill to replace the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA. The IIJA had previously been set to expire September 30.

Rather than simply copying and pasting that law for a few more months, though, Congress opted to exclude programs subject to the wonky funding mechanism known as “advanced appropriations.” That category disproportionately includes programs that benefit shared modes, while leaving most highway dollars untouched.

APTA — which represents agencies as well as private-sector interests that benefit from transit — estimates that public transit funding will take a 20 percent hit under the measure, and passenger rail will lose a staggering 81 percent of its formerly-guaranteed funding. And if the bill that replaces the IIJA or a subsequent extension mirrors it, the resulting loss of funding could devastate our collective transportation future.

“We’ve never seen an authorization act that has cut funding,” said Ward McCarragher, APTA’s vice president of government affairs. “This is a first.”

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McCarragher explained that, while advocates have lauded the IIJA for making historic investments into mobility options besides driving, billions of those dollars were only guaranteed through the original five-year duration of the law. That left the door open for Congress to cut them now.

That’s because Congress funded a lot of discretionary programs using “advanced appropriations,” a novel funding strategy that critics argue is intended only for emergency situations where non-recurring programs need a chunk of guaranteed money for a few years, after which they’re expected to lapse.

But transit advocates argue that between sky-high traffic deaths, an escalating affordability crisis, a climate catastrophe and more, America is experiencing an ongoing transportation emergency — and as long as that emergency still rages, Congress must extend advanced appropriations for programs that could help address it.

“There have been some transit critics who said that this was intended as only a one-time investment, that this is not the way we’ve ever managed the transportation programs,” McCarragher added. “[But] you can’t address decades of underinvestment in public transit with a one-time, five-year investment — not when we’ve spent the last 50 years under-investing in the program.”

Many highway programs, by contrast, receive guaranteed funds under the IIJA, even though drivers haven’t paid enough in gas taxes and other road user fees to cover their costs for decades. The endless highway spending that followed has failed to deliver the congestion, safety, or affordability benefits that its backers promise.

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Worse, legislators originally designed many of the specific programs slashed by the extension bill to address America’s most urgent transportation needs.

Popular competitive grant programs to make streets safer, eliminate deadly railroad crossings, and give cities direct funds to build multimodal infrastructure have all been at least temporarily chopped, with total cuts amounting to a staggering $36.8 billion, the National League of Cities recently estimated.

To be fair, some car-focused programs, such as the Bridge Formula and Investment Program, ended up in the budgetary crosshairs, too.

But Kevin X. Shen of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that Congress made those cuts “without any measures to prioritize roadway maintenance over expensive expansions,” and that they’re unlikely to achieve the legislative body’s budgetary goals. That’s especially urgent against the backdrop of widespread attacks on shared mobility, which APTA says returns $5 to the economy for every public dollar invested — but whose benefits vanish when the money disappears.

“Regardless of budgetary mechanisms, in the end, a cut is a cut,” Shen continued. “Communities across the country will feel this in the coming months, amid tight budgets, high gas prices, and strained transit services.”

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Despite setbacks this fall, McCarragher and his fellow APTA advocates aren’t giving up on restoring what public transit has lost. After the “fly-in,” many left their meetings with congresspeople feeling optimistic about the future.

“We got broad support for the effort to restore [this funding], and I think there’s going to be a renewed effort to address this issue as we turn to December,” McCarragher said. “I think they recognize the great economic benefit of these investments … beyond just the impact to the riders themselves. Every billion dollars invested [in transit] creates more than 41,000 jobs. [These are] the things that lawmakers have really taken hold of and recognized as important, not only for transit riders but for the broader U.S. economy.”

And even if their message didn’t land this time, advocates will almost certainly get a few more bites at the apple.

Because they’re so difficult to negotiate, federal transportation bills are notorious for needing endless extensions to keep America moving, and some suspect the IIJA will require several more before a replacement bill is finally passed. And in the meantime, the midterms are nigh — which means voters have a unique chance to voice their support for better policies.

“I think the timing is perfect for every citizen to engage with their members of Congress as we head into an election in November,” McCarragher added. “There are many opportunities to get their attention on this issue, and demand that Congress restore these funds in December for public transit and passenger rail … We [need to] create that bridge, so that when we complete the long-term authorization, Congress will have an opportunity then to continue to build upon the success we’ve had and strengthen our economy.”