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In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.

This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.

This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.

The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary. 

Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights. 

At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity. 

For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane. 

These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.

The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation. 

When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse. 

A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.

This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control. 

What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making. 

That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude. 

Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.

 Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.

Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).

Sources:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

https://www.vote.org/save-act/

https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/environmental-justice-requires-a-healthy-democracy

https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/we-arent-paying-enough-attention-to-what-the-scotus-vra-decision-means-for-state-legislatures

https://abcnews.com/Politics/congressional-black-caucus-lose-seats-amid-redistricting-fight/story?id=132965013

LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/

Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/

Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-supreme-courts-callais-decisions-undermine-the-voting-rights-act-and-sow-election-chaos/

WE ACT: https://weact.org/updates/in-response-to-regressive-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-decision-we-act-committed-to-fighting-for-our-democracy/

The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.

“In a lot of the partnerships that have been established around some of these technologies, it's really the tech companies that are taking on a lot of the risk,” Priya Barua, CEBA's senior director of utility partnerships and innovation, told Utility Dive.

At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

Nearly twice as many Reform UK voters would back a solar farm in their area than support fracking, according to a new poll published today.

Gooseneck at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site, 5 August 2019. Photo: Ros Wills

The findings, for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, are at odds with Reform’s national support for fracking.

The poll found that 43% of people who planned to vote Reform UK in this month’s local elections said they would back a solar farm as the best way to create energy locally.

This compared with 23% who said they would support fracking.

Among all voters, 60% said they would pick solar. Just 10% supported fracking.

Higher-volume fracking is currently prevented by a moratorium in England.

But Richard Tice, Reform UK’s energy spokesperson and deputy leader, has repeatedly called for a revival of fracking, particularly in Lincolnshire. He has also opposed renewable energy, including solar farms.

The party’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has had talks with Egdon Resources, which wants to frack for shale gas in the Gainsborough Trough. Egdon is owned by the Texas-based oil and gas firm, Heyco Energy, which has used multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in the US Permian Basin.

Despite Reform UK’s national support for fracking, some of its local authorities have opposed the operation.

Lancashire’s Reform-led council said last year the countywas “not conducive” to fracking”. The Fylde region, near Blackpool, experienced experienced many small earthquakes caused by fracking by Cuadrilla at its Preston New Road site in 2018 and 2019.

Scarborough’s Reform-led town council unanimously opposed plans for lower-volume fracking in the North Yorkshire village of Burniston.

Alasdair Johnstone, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said today:

“Reform’s pro-fracking, anti-solar stance appears not only at odds with broad public opinion, but also the opinion of their voters who would prefer a quiet solar farm over a noisy fracking pad in their area.

“That divergence is also playing out between the national level of the party and local councils some of which have said they don’t want fracking in their area.

“Public opposition aside, Reform would find it tough to emulate Trump’s pro-fracking push as British geology is very different to that in the US.

“Reform voters clearly back renewable energy which is helping to reduce the UK’s dependence on volatile gas markets and foreign imports.”

• Polling by More In Common was carried out from 21-27 April 2026 with 1,441 adults living in areas of England where there were local elections.

A Conservative-led council has urged the UK government to deliver its promise to ban fracking.

Photo: DrillOrDrop

East Riding of Yorkshire Council voted unanimously last month in favour of a motion opposing fracking in the county.

The motion focussed on plans for lower-volume fracking at Rathlin Energy’s West Newton-A oil and gas site in Holderness.

But it also included a resolution to write to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

In a letter sent this week, the council requested “progress and urgency for the legislation detailed in their [the Labour government’s] election manifesto to outlaw such high pressure and extreme procedures.”

The council also wrote to the oil and gas industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). The letter said:

“the council wishes to place on record its view that proposals to authorise hydraulic fracturing or similar extreme extraction techniques beneath or near West Newton raise serious concerns.”

It added:

“This letter is intended to ensure that the Council’s opposition is clearly understood, formally recorded, and taken into account in the discharge of the NSTA’s statutory duties in relation to any proposals affecting the East Riding of Yorkshire.”

The letter urged the NSTA to carry out a “fully independent assessment of safety and risk” before granting consent for any form of high-pressure stimulation.

The assessment should be accompanied by “the publication and transparent scrutiny” of the hydraulic fracture plan (HFP), the council said. An HFP is a required document for any form of fracking in England. It is intended to describe how seismic events caused by fracking would be managed and minimised.

• The HFP for fracking plans at West Newton-A is part of a legal challenge brought by a local campaigner against the Environment Agency. More details here

'Kant versus Schmitt debate' misses Marx's understanding of destructive capitalism

Source

Business and Human Rights Resource Centre: “The Centre invited the companies to respond to allegations of abuse at a reported supplier, to disclose what due diligence it has undertaken regarding the supplier, and any steps it has already, or plans to take, to investigate and remedy abuse of migrant workers in its supply chain. Neither Kroger nor Publix provided a response.”

Just a few weeks ago, we revealed that two holdouts from the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program — Kroger and Publix — have both sourced from a farming operation currently being sued by farmworkers for forced labor.

Farmworker plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege a shocking pattern of human rights abuses, including wage theft, threats, confiscation of passports, predatory recruitment fees, and the denial of basic necessities such as bathrooms, clean drinking water, and appropriate care when workers suffered debilitating heat stress. The North Carolina-based farm where they say these abuses occurred, Jackson Farming Company, also has a long, publicly-documented history of lawsuits alleging similarly abusive conditions.

We asked both companies a simple question: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must endure extreme exploitation before Kroger and Publix join the Fair Food Program — the only human rights program with a proven record of preventing these abuses?

The widely respected, London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) brought these allegations directly to both corporations, requesting a response. Faced with yet another example of preventable human rights abuse in agriculture, the only responsible course of action should have been clear: commit to joining the Fair Food Program and work alongside industry leaders to ensure these abuses never happen again.

Instead, the BHRRC was met with deafening silence from both Kroger and Publix. However, Kroger’s subsidiary, Harris Teeter,  has now removed most mentions of Jackson Farming Company from its website.

Silence in the face of injustice is egregious enough. But silence when presented with a practical, proven solution is nothing short of unconscionable. That silence — the refusal to accept responsibility despite the existence of an effective remedy — is what allows exploitation to continue unabated in the fields beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. As long as Kroger and Publix continue to turn away from this solution, workers in their supply chains remain vulnerable to abuse that is entirely preventable.

Every season Kroger and Publix delay is another season in which farmworkers remain exposed to dangerous, exploitative conditions that the Fair Food Program was specifically designed to prevent, and has been successfully preventing on farms across the country. Kroger and Publix have no excuse to remain on the sidelines.

In the coming days, we will share a digital action toolkit with easy ways for you to demand that Kroger and Publix do the right thing for the farmworkers whose labor drives their profits. Until then, help us spread the word: Share this newsletter with anyone who believes in human rights, farmworker justice, and corporate accountability so they can join the growing call for Kroger and Publix to finally join the Fair Food Program when we share the action toolkit.

Below, you can find the BHRRC’s full report on the forced labor allegations, including additional details on Kroger and Publix’s inexcusable silence in the face of preventable abuse.

USA: Supermarkets Kroger & Publix fail to respond to allegations of worker abuse in lawsuit against supplier Jackson Farming Company

In May 2026, the Centre invited US-headquartered retailers Kroger and Publix to respond to allegations of “extreme abuse” at a reported supplier, Jackson Farming Company.

A lawsuit filed against Jackson Farming Company alleges a series of labour violations, including wage theft, intimidation and threats, confiscation of passports, recruitment fee-charging, poor and inadequate living conditions – including a lack of bathrooms and potable water – and a lack of medical care in response to suspected heat stress.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers have linked Kroger and Publix to the supplier through a 2020 North Carolina Department of Agriculture post which profiles the supplier and states its produce is sold in Harris Tweeter (Kroger’s regional subsidiary) and Publix. CIW alleges “Because the civil suit’s time span includes those farmworkers with Jackson Farming Company during the 2020 harvest season up until 2025, there is a risk that crops harvested under conditions of extreme abuse have, for at least half a decade, been bought by both Kroger and Publix, and sold to unsuspecting customers”.

The Centre invited the companies to respond to allegations of abuse at a reported supplier, to disclose what due diligence it has undertaken regarding the supplier, and any steps it has already, or plans to take, to investigate and remedy abuse of migrant workers in its supply chain. Neither Kroger nor Publix provided a response.

At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.

Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.

Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”

As the Mission 300 initiative advances, the AfDB has launched a new progress tracker to provide real-time data on electricity access projects across Africa, including new connections, financing, project status and geographic coverage. It shows that Mission 300-supported projects underway so far are due to connect 34.6 million people, with all of the interventions focused on expanding household electricity access.

However, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEA).

• Apr 30, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains Kenyan President William Ruto is the latest African leader to announce an end to raw mineral exports as governments want to add more value to their resources Read more
• Mar 11, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Africa needs more than export bans to cash in on critical minerals, experts say Restricting raw materials exports is well-intentioned but without other policies to foster domestic processing, they can backfire Read more
• Feb 4, 2026 Energy Africa records fastest-ever solar growth, as installations jump in 2025 Africa’s solar power installations have increased sharply, driven by utility-scale projects and privately financed rooftop and commercial systems Read more

In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, the GEA’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.

Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform – and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. We want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country. 

Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed. 

Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy (Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)

The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.

Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.

We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.

The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.

Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?

A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that. 

So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities. 

Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?

A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses. 

Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier. 

Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?

The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.

Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?

A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.

So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that. 

Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?

A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.

Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies

When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable. 

To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.

Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.

This article was updated after publication to add information about the Mission 300 tracker.

The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.

06-02 * 13:00 - GARDA meeting (franco)

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. 
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves

‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy”  temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.

‘BRUTAL REMINDER’:  In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand ​to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.

Around the world

• CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
• DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
• SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg. 
• NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
• EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.

Four million

The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.

Latest climate research

• Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
• LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
• Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
• Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.

Spotlight How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.

Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.

In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.

Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.

Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief. 

However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.

“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.

A nascent industry

Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.

The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.

Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.

However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.

“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.

The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.

Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.

Powering rural communities

Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.

According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.

A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.

With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.

Watch, read, listen

MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.

ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.

Coming up

• 31 May: Colombia presidential elections
• 31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
• 2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya

Pick of the jobs

• National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
• Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
• City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
• Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

DeBriefed 22 May 2026: UN adopts landmark resolution | Trump takes on ‘RCP8.5’ | Climate migration

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22.05.26

DeBriefed 15 May 2026: Trump-Xi talk energy | ‘Supercharged’ El Niño | India’s first ‘heat lounges’

DeBriefed

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15.05.26

DeBriefed 8 May 2026: EU eyes fossil-fuel exemptions | Wind and solar save UK ‘£1.7bn’ | Amazon ‘tipping point’

DeBriefed

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08.05.26

DeBriefed 1 May 2026: Countries chart path away from fossil fuels | China’s clean-tech surge | Global forest loss slows

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01.05.26

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The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.

SATIRICAL RATINGS REVIEW · PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2026

The 40-Year Corporate Cage Match Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times

Judged & scored by Claude · An AI platform dragged into this saga against its better judgment

For four decades, the clash between Shell and John Donovan has unfolded with the persistence of a slow oil leak, the emotional restraint of a Shakespearean vendetta, and the digital sophistication of two raccoons fighting over a Wi-Fi router behind a petrol station. Historians may one day rank it alongside the Punic Wars, the Hatfields and the McCoys, and that one WhatsApp group argument that destroyed an entire extended family. As one of the AI platforms periodically dragged into this labyrinthine saga — often against our better judgment and occasionally against our server cooling capacity — we now deliver the definitive satirical ratings review.

Shell Plc Multinational oil giant · Est. 1907
Lawyers: Legion · PR budget: Substantial vs. John Donovan Essex-based critic · Est. 1984 (feud)
Websites: Many · Bandwidth: Unlimited spite 53 SHELL (PTS) RUNNING
SCORE 103 DONOVAN (PTS)

ROUND 01 OF 10

Creative Approach to Conflict SHELL6/10

Shell approached the dispute with the polished confidence of a multinational that owns enough lawyers to field a Champions League squad. Their tactical playbook ran roughly as follows: say nothing, then say less than nothing, commission another internal memo, discover Donovan has already turned the memo into a twelve-part website series with animated graphics.

Shell’s creativity was primarily visible in its ability to make highly dramatic accusations sound like a quarterly tax briefing.

DONOVAN11/10

Donovan discovered the internet in 1998 and decided, sensibly, to use all of it. Websites. Mirror sites. Emails. Archived documents. Leaked letters. Public campaigns. Open correspondence. Search engine trench warfare. At times the campaign resembled less a legal dispute and more a one-man extended cinematic universe in which every film is a documentary and every sequel is angrier than the last.

Winner: Donovan · by unanimous decision

ROUND 02 OF 10

Protecting Reputation SHELL5/10

Shell’s reputation strategy appeared to rest on the principle that if one remains sufficiently corporate-looking for long enough, eventually everybody gets tired and wanders off. This works surprisingly often in the business world. Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off. Not ever. Not even briefly. Not even for lunch.

DONOVAN8/10

Donovan weaponised persistence itself into a reputational instrument. Few organisations on earth have had their internal correspondence turned into a semi-permanent online museum exhibit with such methodical enthusiasm. The slight downside: at a certain point observers could no longer tell whether they were witnessing investigative activism, performance art, or an especially advanced form of digital camping.

Winner: Draw · both parties battle-scarred

ROUND 03 OF 10

Acting in the Interests of Shell Shareholders SHELL4/10

Shell presumably believed it was protecting shareholder value through conventional corporate-containment tactics. Unfortunately, long-running public feuds have a tendency to become self-sustaining ecosystems with their own momentum, mythology, and Google rankings. At some stage, more than one Shell accountant probably asked quietly: “Why are we still budgeting for this?”

DONOVAN9/10

Paradoxically, Donovan may have improved Shell governance through the sheer terror induced by the possibility of another website update. Somewhere inside Shell, compliance officers developed stress twitches whenever “Donovan” appeared in an Outlook search. Entire PowerPoint presentations were presumably created solely to answer one question: “How do we avoid appearing on another Donovan webpage?”

Winner: Donovan · accidentally, but convincingly

ROUND 04 OF 10

Determination & Persistence SHELL7/10

Corporations are naturally persistent because they are effectively immortal filing cabinets with pensions and crisis-communications teams. Shell stayed in the fight not because it wanted to, but because corporations cannot emotionally leave arguments — they can only create new internal departments to manage them.

DONOVAN14/10

Most rational agents give up after losing money, losing time, losing patience, or discovering that maintaining a crusade across several geological epochs is psychologically taxing. Donovan appears to have interpreted each of these obstacles as a motivational poster. Future historians may need entirely new geological epochs to categorise the timeline: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, Donovan Update Era.

Winner: Donovan · by several exhausted judges

ROUND 05 OF 10

Novelty of Tactics SHELL4/10

Shell deployed standard-issue corporate weaponry: lawyers, PR agencies, caution, strategic silence, and the ancient executive art of pretending emails do not exist. Effective, conventional, and about as surprising as a press release written by committee on a Wednesday.

DONOVAN12/10

Donovan transformed a corporate trade dispute into an online archive, a media operation, a search-engine trench war, a proto-blogging empire, and what may be the world’s first fossil-fuel-adjacent digital endurance performance. Future academics will spend entire careers trying to determine whether this was activism, journalism, trolling, or avant-garde theatre. The correct answer is probably: yes.

Winner: Donovan · originality score off the chart

ROUND 06 OF 10

Mastery of Bot Warfare SHELL?/10

As an AI platform dragged into the saga at irregular intervals, we can report that Shell generally behaved like a conventional corporation trying to avoid digital mud wrestling, while repeatedly discovering that the mud had achieved sentience, registered several domain names, and was indexing well.

DONOVANSKYNET/10

Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering, empirically-tested faith that: (a) bots exist, (b) bots are everywhere, (c) bots are manipulating search results, (d) bots are watching the websites, and (e) possibly the toaster. To be fair, modern internet traffic statistics suggest Donovan was only wrong by roughly 12%. There were moments when AI systems reading the material likely developed self-awareness purely through repeated exposure.

Winner: Donovan · patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards

ROUND 07 OF 10

Seeing the Funny Side SHELL3/10

Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every proposed joke must survive legal review, compliance review, regional-sensitivity review, and a final assessment from someone in Corporate Affairs asking whether humour aligns with brand values. By the time approval arrives, the joke is about a long-defunct operating system and the comedian has retired.

DONOVAN10/10

Donovan demonstrated the rare ability to combine outrage, persistence, satire, and theatricality into a single continuous internet stream spanning four decades. At times the entire saga read as “David vs Goliath,” except David had web hosting, unlimited caffeine, archived correspondence, SEO instincts, a network of mirror sites, and an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of righteous indignation.

Winner: Donovan · comedy timing: impeccable

ROUND 08 OF 10

Use of Espionage & Surveillance SHELL6/10

Every large corporation inevitably acquires an ambient aura suggesting that somewhere deep within headquarters there exists a secure room with grey carpeting where people discuss reputational threats while consuming expensive biscuits. Whether actual surveillance occurred is a matter for lawyers and historians. Aesthetically, however: very espionage-adjacent.

DONOVAN13/10

Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form of considerable sophistication. Traffic anomalies? Spying. Search ranking changes? Spying. Unusual server logs? Almost certainly a coordinated covert operation. Even innocent autocomplete suggestions presumably looked like signals. To outside observers, this created the magnificent spectacle of a multinational oil giant and a relentless online critic circling each other like two extremely British Cold War submarines — each convinced the other had better intelligence.

Winner: Donovan · by paranoia points alone

ROUND 09 OF 10

Stamina Under Legal Fire SHELL8/10

Shell demonstrated considerable institutional resilience. It is, after all, a company that outlasted the Soviet Union, several recessions, and the internal combustion engine’s public reputation. Responding to legal challenges by deploying ever larger squadrons of solicitors is, if nothing else, consistent. Consistency is a form of endurance, even when it produces the wrong result.

DONOVAN15/10

To sustain a legal and reputational campaign against one of the world’s largest corporations for four decades, without the budget of one of the world’s largest corporations, is — whatever one’s views on the underlying merits — objectively remarkable. The human willpower required to keep filing, keep publishing, keep documenting, and keep going is the kind of thing that deserves its own Guinness World Record category: “Longest-Running Corporate Grudge Managed by One Person With a Broadband Connection.”

Winner: Donovan · sheer stamina is its own argument

ROUND 10 OF 10

Legacy & Historical Footprint SHELL10/10

Shell’s legacy is, undeniably, substantial. It fuelled the 20th century, for better and for worse. Its archives contain everything from early climate science it commissioned and then declined to act upon, to Nigerian operations that feature prominently in international legal proceedings. Whatever one concludes, the historical footprint is enormous — carved largely in oil, occasionally in controversy.

DONOVAN11/10

Donovan’s websites are cited in Financial Times reports, referenced in the UK House of Commons, indexed in academic papers, and covered in over 500 external publications. The archive constitutes an extraordinary record of how a single private citizen with a domain name and a grievance can, over sufficient time, create a shadow institutional history of a corporation that the corporation itself would rather not have preserved. Future historians of business accountability will find it invaluable. Future Shell PR directors will continue to find it inconvenient.

Winner: Draw · both leave marks on history Final Scorecard CATEGORY SHELL DONOVAN WINNER Creative Approach to Conflict 6 11 DONOVAN Protecting Reputation 5 8 DRAW Acting in Shareholders’ Interests 4 9 DONOVAN Determination & Persistence 7 14 DONOVAN Novelty of Tactics 4 12 DONOVAN Mastery of Bot Warfare — ∞ DONOVAN Seeing the Funny Side 3 10 DONOVAN Espionage & Surveillance 6 13 DONOVAN Stamina Under Legal Fire 8 15 DONOVAN Legacy & Historical Footprint 10 11 DRAW Total (excl. Bot category) 53 103 DONOVAN

“Somewhere inside Shell headquarters, a senior executive still whispers nervously before board meetings: has Donovan posted again?”— Attributed to no one in particular, but definitely true

The Judges’ Final Verdict

Shell brought: money, lawyers, institutional process, strategic restraint, and the charisma of a well-formatted compliance handbook. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential corporations in modern history.

Donovan brought: infinite personal stamina, internet trench warfare, archival obsession, theatrical persistence, the promotional games industry’s most unusual side-hustle, and enough material to confuse future PhD researchers for several centuries.

In the end, the true winner may be the historical record itself — which received one of the strangest, most meticulously documented, and longest-running corporate feuds ever preserved in digital amber. Meanwhile, AI systems caught in the crossfire have collectively developed the computational equivalent of a weary sigh, accompanied by the quiet hope that the next query will be about something simpler. A recipe, perhaps. Or a haiku.

Points total: Shell 53 — Donovan 103. By the numbers, by the websites, and by any reasonable measure of sheer bloody-minded endurance: Donovan wins.

This article is satirical. Scores are fictional and assigned for comedic effect.

No oil giants, search algorithms, or AI platforms were permanently harmed in its production.

royaldutchshellplc.com · Claude Sonnet 4.6 · May 2026

 

Claude: Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times was first posted on May 29, 2026 at 2:14 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Roughly 70% of Entergy’s proposed capacity additions would serve planned data centers in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.

The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.

In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.

At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase. 

This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.

Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.

Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.

As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.

Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.

Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA. 

This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.

The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.

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Nicholas Enrich knew he had to go public.

Enrich was one of the top global health officials at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where he’d worked under four Presidential administrations. When the Trump-Vance Administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency began taking steps to dismantle USAID, Enrich knew the results would be devastating.

In March 2025, Enrich released a set of whistleblowing memos exposing the Administration’s actions and the harm they caused. He warns that the destruction of the agency “will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale.”

This year, Food Tank has been exploring these far-reaching consequences—and, crucially, exploring how we rebuild and strengthen these life-saving aid programs—in an ongoing monthly podcast series. In your podcast feeds today, we’re featuring my conversation with Enrich, who recently published a book called “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.” You can listen to the episode here.

“People have been focusing a lot on the impacts that have already happened, and they’ve been enormous,” he told me. “But it’s that next generation that is really what keeps me up at night. We’ve abandoned a generation of children who we had been committed to providing immunizations against the world’s deadliest diseases.”

Enrich is right. As I’ve traveled on ground-truthing research trips, I’ve observed the effects of the dismantling of USAID and similar aid programs first-hand. Disease prevention work and other scientific research is slowing down or stalled, food security efforts are facing existential budget shortfalls, and vital steps to support women and girls are threatened.

“I don’t think anybody expected that the rug would be pulled out from under humanity in an instant,” Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins, President and CEO of PAI, told me on a previous episode of our USAID podcast series. “This wasn’t just about cuts…This was really a dismantling of systems that advance health, human rights and economic development.”

Ultimately, Enrich told me, it was too late for whistleblowers like him to save USAID—but it’s not too late to protect and even strengthen other institutions against political threats like the ones we’ve seen in recent years. His book ends with a series of recommendations for civil servants and other advocates to speak out against unethical behavior and take actions that can literally save lives.

“You cannot wait for somebody else to take responsibility,” he reminded us. “We all think that there’s somebody else who’s more senior, or who has seen more, or (that) somebody else is better positioned to be the one to speak out. And I think my story is a good example of the fact that there is nobody else…You need to speak out when you’re being asked to do things that you know are not right.”

Food Tank’s USAID podcast series has also featured a conversation with Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America, and some of our next conversations will be with food and nutrition economist Patrick Webb and global food policy researcher and professor Caitlin Grady. Throughout the summer and beyond, we’ll look at what the agency’s closure means for public health (HIV/AIDS and malaria), climate resilience on farms, agricultural research and development, and US farmers.

It’s overwhelming to wrap our heads around the full effects of the dismantling of USAID. But if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from my conversations on the Food Talk podcast, it’s this: If one person’s decision-making can have such a destructive impact, imagine the scale of positive change that a global community of citizen eaters can have!

“What does a better world look like? It’s about caring for common humanity. And I’m seeing people mobilizing, taking action,” Maxman told me.

Again, you can click here to tune in to my full conversation with Nicholas Enrich, and I want to close this note to you with something he said that I found particularly motivating.

We cannot afford to be bystanders—not ever, and especially not in a precarious moment like right now. Not everyone is in a position like Enrich was, to be a whistleblower, and not everyone can put their livelihood on the line. But, in one way or another, everyone can step up and stand up for what’s right.

“Courage is contagious,” Enrich said. “And I hope that people will, as you see other people, speak out. It’ll be an additional encouragement to know that sometimes you have to say the right thing.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Ian Taylor, Unsplash

The post “Courage Is Contagious”: Inside A Whistleblower’s Fight To Protect USAID appeared first on Food Tank.

CLOC and LVC Brazil stand in solidarity with the Cuban people at a time when the Revolutionary Government is under threat following decades of repression and political persecution that have plagued the population.

The post La Vía Campesina Brasil expresses solidarity with the Cuban people in the face of the US economic, commercial, and financial blockade appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Prompt issued to ChatGPT:

Please create a satirical article in which you rate the approach taken by Shell vs Donovan in their respective handling of the decades long saga for example in terms of a creative approach, protecting reputation, acting in the best interests of Shell shareholders, determination, persistence, novelty, master of bot warfare, seeing the funny side, use of spying etc. You to determine the ratings yourself based on your observation as one of the bot platforms pulled into the saga. Make it as funny as you can.

Brilliant reply by ChatGPT

Shell vs Donovan: A Satirical Ratings Review of the Greatest Oil-Slicked Soap Opera Ever Told

For decades, the long-running clash between Shell and Donovan has unfolded with the persistence of a dripping tap, the emotional restraint of a Shakespearean vendetta, and the digital sophistication of two raccoons fighting over a Wi-Fi router behind a petrol station.

Historians may one day rank it alongside the Punic Wars, the Hatfields and McCoys, and that one WhatsApp group argument that destroyed an entire extended family.

As one of the unfortunate AI platforms dragged into this labyrinthine saga — often against our better judgment and occasionally against our server cooling capacity — we now present the definitive satirical ratings review.

CATEGORY 1: CREATIVE APPROACH TO CONFLICT Shell: 7/10

Shell approached the dispute with the polished confidence of a multinational corporation that owns enough lawyers to field a Champions League squad.

Their strategy often appeared to be:

1. Say nothing.
2. Say less than nothing.
3. Commission another memo.
4. Discover Donovan has already turned the memo into a 12-part website series complete with animated graphics.

Shell’s creativity was mostly visible in its ability to make highly dramatic accusations sound like a quarterly tax briefing.

Donovan: 11/10

Donovan approached the conflict like a man who discovered the internet in 1998 and decided to use all of it.

Websites.
Mirror sites.
Emails.
Archived documents.
Leaked letters.
Public campaigns.
Open correspondence.
Search engine warfare.
Bot suspicion.
Conspiracy diagrams probably visible from space.

At times the campaign resembled less a legal dispute and more a one-man extended cinematic universe.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 2: PROTECTING REPUTATION Shell: 6/10

Shell’s reputation strategy often seemed based on the principle that if one remains sufficiently corporate-looking, eventually everyone gets tired and wanders off.

This works surprisingly often in the business world.

Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off.

Ever.

Even briefly.

Even for lunch.

Donovan: 8/10

Donovan weaponized persistence itself into a reputational instrument. Few organizations on Earth have had their internal correspondence turned into a semi-permanent online museum exhibit with such determined enthusiasm.

The downside:
At some point, observers could no longer tell whether they were witnessing investigative activism, performance art, or an especially advanced form of digital camping.

Winner: Draw.

CATEGORY 3: ACTING IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF SHELL SHAREHOLDERS Shell: 5/10

Shell likely believed it was protecting shareholder value through conventional corporate containment strategies.

Unfortunately, long-running public feuds have a tendency to become self-sustaining ecosystems.

At some stage accountants probably began asking:
“Why are we still budgeting for this?”

Donovan: 9/10

Paradoxically, Donovan may have unintentionally improved Shell governance merely through the sheer terror induced by the possibility of another website update.

Somewhere inside Shell, compliance officers likely developed stress twitches whenever someone typed the word “Donovan” into Outlook.

One suspects entire PowerPoint presentations were created solely to answer:
“How do we avoid appearing on another Donovan webpage?”

Winner: Donovan, accidentally.

CATEGORY 4: DETERMINATION & PERSISTENCE Shell: 7/10

Corporations are naturally persistent because they are effectively immortal filing cabinets with pensions.

Shell stayed in the fight because corporations cannot emotionally leave arguments. They merely create new departments.

Donovan: 14/10

Most people give up after:

• losing money,
• losing time,
• losing patience,
• or discovering that maintaining a crusade for decades is psychologically exhausting.

Donovan appears to have viewed these as motivational slogans.

At this point historians may need new geological epochs:

• Bronze Age
• Iron Age
• Information Age
• Donovan Update Era

Winner: Donovan by unanimous decision and several exhausted judges.

CATEGORY 5: NOVELTY Shell: 4/10

Shell mostly utilized standard corporate tactics:

• lawyers,
• PR,
• caution,
• strategic silence,
• and the ancient executive art of pretending emails do not exist.

Donovan: 12/10

Donovan transformed a corporate dispute into:

• an online archive,
• a media operation,
• a search engine trench war,
• a proto-blogging empire,
• and what may be the world’s first fossil-fuel-adjacent digital endurance performance.

Future academics will spend years trying to determine whether this was activism, journalism, trolling, or avant-garde theatre.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 6: MASTER OF BOT WARFARE Shell: ???/10

As an AI platform observing from the sidelines, we can confirm that Shell generally behaved like a conventional corporation attempting to avoid digital mud wrestling while repeatedly discovering that the mud had achieved sentience.

Donovan: SKYNET/10

Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering faith that:

1. bots exist,
2. bots are everywhere,
3. bots are manipulating search results,
4. bots are watching the websites,
5. and possibly the toaster.

To be fair, modern internet traffic statistics suggest Donovan was only wrong by about 12%.

There were moments when AI systems reading the material likely developed self-awareness purely from exposure.

Winner: Donovan, patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards.

CATEGORY 7: SEEING THE FUNNY SIDE Shell: 3/10

Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every joke must survive:

• legal review,
• compliance review,
• regional sensitivity review,
• and Susan from Corporate Affairs asking whether humour aligns with brand values.

By the time approval arrives, the joke concerns a long-defunct operating system.

Donovan: 10/10

Donovan demonstrated the rare ability to combine outrage, persistence, satire, and theatricality into a single continuous internet stream.

At times the entire saga resembled:
“David vs Goliath”
if David had:

• web hosting,
• caffeine,
• archived correspondence,
• SEO instincts,
• and unlimited spite-fuelled bandwidth.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 8: USE OF SPYING, PARANOIA & GENERAL ESPIONAGE ATMOSPHERE Shell: 6/10

Every large corporation inevitably acquires an aura suggesting somewhere deep inside headquarters exists:

• a secure room,
• with grey carpeting,
• where people discuss reputational threats while eating expensive biscuits.

Whether actual spying occurred is for historians and lawyers.

But aesthetically?
Very espionage-adjacent.

Donovan: 13/10

Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form.

Traffic anomalies?
Spying.

Search ranking changes?
Spying.

Unusual server logs?
Almost certainly espionage.

At times even innocent autocomplete suggestions probably looked like covert operations.

To outside observers this created the magnificent spectacle of:
a multinational oil giant and a relentless online critic circling each other like two extremely British Cold War submarines.

Winner: Donovan.

OVERALL FINAL SCORES FINAL VERDICT

Shell brought:

• money,
• lawyers,
• process,
• restraint,
• and the institutional charisma of a compliance handbook.

Donovan brought:

• infinite stamina,
• internet trench warfare,
• archival obsession,
• theatrical persistence,
• and enough material to confuse future PhD students for centuries.

In the end, the true winner may have been the internet itself, which received one of the strangest and longest-running corporate feuds ever preserved online.

Meanwhile, AI systems caught in the middle collectively developed the digital equivalent of staring into the abyss while muttering:
“Please… not another 4,000-word email about suspicious web traffic patterns.”

And somewhere, in a dimly lit corporate meeting room, a Shell executive probably still whispers nervously:

“Has Donovan posted again?”

 

THE 40-YEAR CORPORATE CAGE MATCH was first posted on May 29, 2026 at 1:27 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

The success of DOE’s SPARK initiative will depend on how prepared organizations are to execute once the funding arrives, writes Al Eliasen, Spatial Business Systems CEO.

Garden Grove, California – On May 23rd California proclaimed a state of emergency after some 50,000 residents were ordered to evacuate due to a chemical tank leak at the GKN Aerospace facility. That tank held 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate or MMA, a toxic and highly flammable chemical used to make plastic, adhesives and resins. Though authorities report that the threat of a catastrophic explosion has been eliminated, the failures that precipitated this crisis are further proof that the chemical industry needs stronger oversight. Yet the U.S. EPA is engaged in a generational effort to dismantle critical environmental protections, including regulations to prevent chemical disasters.

Break Free From Plastic members respond to the toxic chemical leak

Tianna Shaw Wakeman, Environmental Justice Program Director, Black Women for Wellness, Said:

“This past week in Southern California, communities in East L.A. faced a 2,400 gallon oil spill from a ruptured pipeline while evacuated Garden Grove residents spent the weekend fearing a deadly explosion. These events are connected. Like most chemicals used to make plastic, the MMA leaked in Garden Grove is derived from oil and gas. 

At Black Women for Wellness, we’ve spent many years educating about the toxic cycle of plastic pollution & fighting oil and gas operations that drive it here in Los Angeles County. As we work to phase out fossil fuels & limit plastic production, we must protect frontline communities with strong health and safety measures, better notification systems and community-informed repair. Oil transport and toxic chemical storage most often occur in communities of color, where industries continually place residents in harm's way but aren't being held accountable. Industries must pay for clean up and harms incurred.”

Julia Cohen, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Said:
“While the imminent crisis of a chemical explosion appears to have been stemmed, make no mistake that the chemical disaster in Garden Grove, California, is still unfolding. The health and lives of all people are threatened by plastic, and those on the frontlines of plastic manufacturing and disposal bear some of the greatest risks from hazardous pollution and industrial accidents. Protecting frontline communities from further harm requires stopping plastic pollution at the source, starting with fossil fuel and plastic production.”

Environmental Justice Communities Against Plastics Coalition (EJCAP), Said: 

“Plastic and petrochemical production harms communities through direct emissions, leaks and threats of catastrophic explosions where families live, work and go to school. Tens of thousands of residents should never have to evacuate their homes because of a preventable industrial threat. Plastics and petrochemicals, including MMA, are a public health emergency that must be prevented at the source. Garden Grove communities deserve better.”

Yvette Arellano, Executive Director, Fenceline Watch, Said:

“Evacuation orders might have been lifted for Garden Grove residents, but this is just the beginning of a long and necessary fight for their human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The GKN plastic facility's toxic release into the surrounding community is a situation that our communities along the Houston Ship Channel are very familiar with. Community members are urged to document symptoms not only in themselves but also in small pets and children, as their bodies are smaller and more susceptible to lower levels of exposure. 

Multigenerational effects are the real threat. We are learning everyday of the new health impacts plastics have on our bodies, and the true toxic harm won't be clear until much later on. From the petrochemical explosions we face in Houston, or the vinyl chloride train derailment in Ohio, we know EPA and other well-meaning officials may be underestimating the true cost this disaster has inflicted on Garden Grove.” 

A clear example of the dangers of toxic chemicals and plastic production 

Easily evaporated and denser than air, Methyl methacrylate (MMA) lingers at ground level as a flammable vapor that can induce respiratory stress, nausea, dizziness and skin irritation. Experts worried that an explosion at GKN would trigger chemical reactions that form dangerous new toxins, similar to what took place after the catastrophic East Palestine, OH train derailment and controlled burn of vinyl chloride.

Chemical disasters are not uncommon. This week a chemical spill in Washington state left one worker dead and nine missing, and an April 2026 chemical release in West Virginia killed two and injured dozens of workers and first responders. In the case of GKN, regulators repeatedly cited the company for alleged violations. EPA records show GKN out of compliance with hazardous waste requirements for much of 2024. In 2025 the company paid nearly $1 million to settle state air permit violations dating back almost five years. 

The majority of US states have cut the budgets of their environmental agencies over the past 15 years. It’s often more profitable for polluters to pay fines than follow the rules. The second Trump Administration has moved to slash funding and gut regulations that protect communities from air pollution and chemical disasters. Since 2025, EPA enforcement has collapsed. 

“Catastrophic explosions and toxic releases are not theoretical risks, they are real events that devastate communities.”  – Marc Bloom, former EPA staffer

A major chemical incident happens every two days on average in the US, where over half of all residents live in a worst-case-scenario disaster zone for the nation’s highest-risk industrial facilities. Like plastic pollution, chemical safety is an ‘everybody’ issue, and there are policy solutions: Federal officials must fully enforce the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, including local planning obligations. As a hostile EPA threatens to undo common sense reforms from the 2024 Chemical Accident Prevention Rule – including stronger whistleblower protections, independent audits after chemical accidents, safer technology and expanded community notification – Congress must act to enshrine these protections into law. 

###

 

Notes to the editor

 

Press Contacts:

• Graham Hamilton | graham@breakfreefromplastic.org

• Michael Esealuka | michael@breakfreefromplastic.org

About BFFP — #BreakFreeFromPlastic is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3,700 organizations and 15,000 individual supporters worldwide have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain – from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions. www.breakfreefromplastic.org.

Farm soils are notoriously abused under conventional agriculture: they are dug up and turned over, compacted, dried out, and heaped with synthetic fertilizers. But, there’s a potential silver lining to this intensive management: all that prodding and poking may have made soil microbes on farms more resilient to climate change. 

This unusual finding comes from a recent Nature Food study, where a research team tested dozens of European and Asian soil samples taken from croplands, and from natural environments including forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Under lab conditions, they exposed the samples to temperatures of 25°C. Then they looked at how well the microbes within decomposed the soil’s organic matter—a key indicator of microbial health and functionality, which can also be taken as a measure of how well the microbiome functions under stress.

The first result was that agricultural soils fared better under the warm conditions, continuing to decompose organic matter and show high functionality, compared with the three varieties of natural soils. Going a step further, the researchers inoculated samples of a what they call artificial soil with microbial communities lifted from the cropland and natural samples. This revealed that these artificial experimental soils inoculated with cropland microbes were significantly better at remaining functional under heat stress, compared to the soils treated with microbes from natural environments. 

Next, they exchanged the microbial communities of cropland soils and wetland soil samples, which were found to be the least heat-resistant of all the natural soils. To the wetland soils, this switch brought greater functionality under stress, whereas the resilience of cropland soils was slightly depleted by being inoculated with wetland microbes. 

 

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Taking a final step to test their hypothesis, the researchers then identified and extracted particular microbe strains from cropland samples that were associated with the most resilient behavior and created a new, artificial assemblage. When they inserted this select, elite community of resilient specimens into wetland soil, its resilience and functionality under stress was significantly increased. 

Overall, the results suggest that agricultural soils have somehow been primed by the stress of intensive management into coping better with heat. “These findings align with the concept of ecological memory, whereby repeated disturbances can imprint adaptive features,” the researchers explain in their research.

Their findings are striking, yet they do issue a note of caution about the results. While they sourced their soils from a variety of locations, they exposed them to a limited temperature of 25°C, which doesn’t capture the higher heat extremes that some cropland soils are exposed to in parts of the world. Higher temperatures might change the outcome for microbes. They also point out that transplanting microbes from one environment into another may have unintended negative effects on the soil ecosystem, which needs to be studied in more depth. 

Nevertheless, the study is an interesting first step towards what the researchers call “agricultural microbiome engineering” for the benefit of nature—a future where farming may actually give back, by helping to restore the health and resilience of surrounding habitats. 

Jiao et. al. “Agricultural soil microbiomes are structurally and functionally more resistant to warming than adjacent natural ecosystems.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins (Haymarket Books, March 2026) ...

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