News Feeds

Decades ago, in order to build up a solid foundation for I-95 through southeast Georgia, construction crews dug some earth near the town of Midway, Georgia, about 50 miles south of Savannah, and left a deep pit. There’s now a public park in that spot, bounded by a tidal creek on one side and the leftover dredge pit on the other. Although the park is more than 15 miles from the ocean, high tide washes up the creek twice a day. Lush marsh grass fills the space between solid ground and the creek, but it’s a different scene along the other bank, where the salt water has steadily eaten away at the land while depositing sediment in the basin. Now, what was once a deep pit is a shallow mudflat with little islands of marsh grass cropping up in the middle, naturally moving in now that the ground is suitable for it.

But the grasses halt abruptly where they reach the small, muddy cliff of the bank — shorn away sharply where the tide has battered it.

“If we walk that way, you’ll be able to see some of the, well, just plain erosion,” said Phil Odom, chairman of Liberty County’s Consolidated Planning Commission, on a recent afternoon. “This is how much it has collapsed. We’ve lost about 6, 8 feet right here.”

Local leaders are hoping to fix that erosion at the water’s edge, and they’re approaching it in a way that considers the lessons of the I-95 construction and prior, failed attempts to address the problem. Instead of putting up a wall or using chunks of concrete to hold the soil in place, the county is attempting to restore the marsh grasses that grow here naturally. Their roots will help hold the soil in place.

“We hope for it to replicate nature,” said Shannon Marino with Zulu Marine, which builds what are known as living shorelines. “When our solutions are done, you should look at it and not really recognize it as a repair or a bulkhead or a solution. It should just look like nature.”

It’s an increasingly popular way to address coastal erosion in the face of rising seas. Georgia is home to more than a third of the connected marsh habitat along the coast of the Southeastern U.S. — hundreds of thousands of acres. It serves as a critical buffer against storms, and it’s broadly protected under state law. But as sea levels rise due to climate change, protecting the existing marsh plants is only one step. 

With the sea level on Georgia’s coast projected to rise 1 to 2 meters in the next 75 years, the marshes will need to move inland too. They’re well equipped to do that, according to University of North Carolina wetland scientist Lori Sutter.

“Because of the magic of salt marshes,” she said, “they’re able to persist in this environment where they’re flooded twice a day, every day.”

But that magic of salt marshes only works if they have somewhere to go. Once a migrating marsh encounters a paved road or a building, they hit a dead end. There’s nowhere for new grasses to take root, which means the rising tide can sweep in unabated, flooding both the marsh and that road or building. 

That’s why a new action plan by a coalition of conservation groups, scientists, government agencies, and coastal communities calls for protecting not just the salt marsh itself, but also the adjacent land. The plan has identified more than 56,000 acres of land in Georgia where marshes will likely migrate that are also currently open to development. 

“That creates this really vast area that you’re trying to conserve, which can be overwhelming,” said Courtney Reich, the coastal director for Georgia Conservancy. Her group is working with Phil Odom and the other stakeholders in Midway and is spearheading the Georgia work under the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative, a multi-state effort to restore and protect coastal salt marshes. 

It’s a roadmap, not a binding policy or seizure of anyone’s land. Instead, the plan’s authors hope it can help landowners and public officials make informed decisions.

“You know, do we want to build up to the edge of the water or do we want to leave room?” Reich said. 

Short-term needs often drive land use conversations, she said. This plan aims to get people thinking about the long view.

Salt marshes by their very nature are always moving. Odom, an avid fisher, has watched Georgia’s dynamic coast change in slow motion over the last 75 years: deep salt water moving into areas that once teemed with marsh grass, marshes in new places, the tide creeping ever higher and leaving the ghostly skeletons of salt-choked trees in its wake. But sea level rise driven by climate change is forcing them to move faster — and adding urgency, because if the marshes can’t respond, Georgia’s coast will be left that much more vulnerable.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new plan to preserve Georgia’s marshes: Give them space to migrate on Aug 10, 2026.

by David Spratt, first published at Safe Climate Australia

The claim that four billion people could die in a 3°C warmer world has become a powerful climate narrative. But what does the science actually support, and where does evidence end and speculation begin?

The proposition that four billion people or more would be dead if — and more likely, when — global warming reaches 3 degrees Celsius (°C) has gained some currency, mainly due to the 4DB (four billion dead) website and associated activities.

Now, that is half the current global population, and on current warming trends of 0.3-0.35°C/decade, the world will hit 3°C around 50 years from now, perhaps earlier, in part because there is little prospect of a rapid decline in fossil fuel emissions.  So that’s a mind-blowing average of 80 million people a year dying due to climate impacts every year from now to 2075? Is that realistic?

The number of greater than four billion dead at 3°C first appeared in a 2025 report on Planetary Insolvency: Finding our balance with nature, published by the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter.ing our balance with nature, published by the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter.

The number appears in Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative) on page 32 of the report.  In this figure, the scale of impacts listed for 2°C of warming include mortality of “>2 billion deaths” and GDP losses of 25%, as well as “>4 billion deaths” and GDP of 50% for 3°C of warming (Figure 1).

Figure 1:  Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions   (Planetary Insolvency) 

The 2°C estimate is even more startling, because Earth has already hit 1.5°C for all practical purposes, with the average for 2023-25 above 1.5°C, and a strong El Nino likely on the way for later this year which could push annual warming towards 1.7°C for 2026-27. At the current, accelerated warming rate, the Earth will reach 2°C around 2040, just fifteen years from now.

So the figure of two billion dead at 2°C would mean an average of 130 million people a year dying every year from now till 2040 due to climate change?  To my mind, that is simply not credible, and nothing I have read tells me that is a remotely-likely estimate.

Likewise, the risk matrix gives a figure of 1-5% dead (80 to 400 million deaths) for 1.5°C, a level of warming Earth has already reached. Estimates of actual mortality are difficult due to the direct and second- and third-order impacts, such as: hotter-climate > drought > food-shortage > displacement > conflict > mortality, and so on. The 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change estimated heat-related mortality has increased to an average 546,000 deaths per year, though not all are specifically related to climate heating, and that is only one element of the story.

So it is important to understand what these numbers are, and are not, and where they came from.

There is no qualitative indication in the report as to their source. On page 27, the report acknowledges that “very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment”.

I asked a colleague in the UK who had worked with the authors of the report, and he was told that the figures came from the Climate Endgame paper. But its author, Luke Kemp, said this was not the case, and “he confirmed that he does not make any forecasts about mortality in the paper” (emphasis added).

As the caption to Figure 12 says, it is a risk assessment matrix that illustrates general levels of risk. I was told that the authors have now privately clarified that the mortality numbers “are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions and we don’t use them as such” (emphasis added). But this is now the way that sites like 4BD are using it.

One interpretation would be that the risk matrix was simply indicating orders of magnitude rather than specific projections. So either it was too subtle in its distinctions, and/or it was a bit of a stuff-up in that it was assumed that the four billion figure came from somewhere, but it did not. So there is still a question of how the four billion figure was derived.

I understand there have been suggestions that a correction or clarification be issued, at least saying that the figures “are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions”. And I had conversations with people working on the 4BD project outlining the story above and why some nuance was necessary in using such numbers, but the die had been cast.

So how can we think about this? One guess is the table was saying that at 3°C, an expert elicitation would find that mortality would likely be in the billions, rather than tens or hundreds of millions. Or alternatively, this was a plausible worst-case scenario, but not derived from models.  As discussed below, that is a reasonable proposition based on other literature. As for two billion dead at 2°C, I can see almost no credible evidence that is even in the ballpark, just half a degree warmer than at present.

Another, likely interpretation is that Figure 12 had used some numbers for GDP loss (in column 1) and had simply applied the same number for mortality (in column 2), so 50% loss in GDP equals 50% mortality. This in itself is a brave assumption: in one case, during the Great Depression — when, for example, US GDP fell 30% between 1929 and 1933 — mortality rates did not increase, and in some cases improved, though there were later adverse outcomes for children born at that time.

So there is no mortality analysis in the table at all, and no epidemiology; it simply flows from GDP impacts.

So where did the 50% decrease in GDP at 3°C come from? An earlier IFoA report in 2023, The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios, whilst recognising that “climate change is complex, nuanced and characterised by deep uncertainty”, provided a chart of damage functions relating temperature and GDP loss (Figure 9, page 25), and asks “at what point do we expect 50% GDP destruction – somewhere between 2070 and 2090 depending on how you parameterise the distribution”, and that’s around 3°C. Depending on assumptions about when GDP hits zero (called the ruin parameter), the figures could be higher (80%) or lower (30%) because these are abstract models of possible damage functions. So it looks like a 50% loss of GDP was a figure of choice.

So what is the basis of the damage functions? The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios says that  “Insurance leaders have unequivocally stated that if climate change raises average temperatures to 4˚C above pre-industrial levels most assets will be uninsurable”, and that “without insurance, investment, finance, business slow to a halt – we will no longer have an economy.” (page 27). I find this assumption highly problematic. As insurance premiums rise right now, in some cases dramatically due to extreme climate impacts, many households and small businesses are making decisions to continue to operate without asset insurance.

The only footnote to these statements is a view by one insurance CEO, Thomas Buberl of AXA at a Davos panel, reported by Bloomberg, that at 3-4°C “it’s not insurable anymore”, but what he said was much more specific: he was talking about basement retail premises in New York and Mumbai and that is what the headline said: “Climate change could make your basement uninsurable within a decade”. That is a very narrow and specific base on which to draw a global conclusion.

Now, how much of an economy would be left at 3, 4 or 5°C is a good question, but the method used here is far too narrow. I remember a long time ago James Lovelock saying at 4 or 5°C there may be 500 million people left eking out a miserable existence at the poles, or words to that effect.

To reiterate, it is almost impossible to put specific numbers on such future impacts, due to the radical uncertainty about the social impacts of a physical system that itself is non-linear in many important aspects, characterised by abrupt changes whose specific human consequences are somewhere between difficult and impossible to model, and where quantifying social impacts is of limited efficacy.

Vulnerability and adaptation

Even if future (non-linear) physical changes are well known, mapping their human impacts involves several more degrees of difficulty because the risk (potential damage) varies with exposure and vulnerability. There are three factors:

• Hazard: the physical changes in a climate system subject to abrupt change;
• Exposure: the presence of people, livelihoods and ecosystems in that physical space; and
• Vulnerability: the propensity of these human systems to be negatively impacted due to their sensitivity and/or limited adaptive capacity.

In the uber-rich, low-rainfall Gulf states, for example, whilst unlivable heat is becoming the norm, adaptation paid for by stupendous oil and gas revenue — desalination, 24/7 air conditioning, using flood-lit beaches at night rather than during the day, irrigating date palms, importing almost all the food and most of the labour — reduces vulnerability, even though the whole project seems a bit crazy.

So mortality in a hotter climate will be affected a great deal by adaptation capacities to reduce vulnerability, and that is largely a product of national income, and international assistance.

But there are also hard boundaries that cannot be easily adapted to, for example rice yields diminish once temperatures exceed 35°C at the time of flowering, and by 37°C the damage becomes critical.  By 2050, between one-quarter and two-thirds of rice production capacity will be subject to high or extreme heat stress risk (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Percentage of Rice production 
capacity exposed to heat stress risk 
(PWC: Climate risks to nine key commodities)

Smart adaptation would include moving to a plant-based diet to free a great deal of agricultural land now used to grow livestock and grow feed for livestock, and to reduce methane emissions. A well-planned and managed retreat from low-lying coastal land would also help, rather than just waiting for the inevitable to happen.  And it depends on the nature of international politics. A coordinated global mobilisation to face the coming crisis would yield a very different result from states pretending that climate collapse was simply not on the agenda. Will states cooperate in the face of unprecedented adversity, or close borders and go to war?

The timeline

Another unresolved issue is the time frame. Many impacts do not manifest immediately once a certain temperature level is reached. For example, climate history teaches us that every one degree of warming will likely result in 10-to-20 metres of sea-level rise in the longer term, over many centuries. The fastest rises in the paleoclimate record are three-to-five metres in a century, so the full sea-level rise from 3°C of warming could take a thousand years to manifest, perhaps less and perhaps a good deal more.

So when the figure of “4 billion dead” is raised, is that when the thermometer ticks past the figure “3°C” later this century, or over a thousand years as coastlines, agriculturally-rich deltas and low-lying states drown?  My hunch is that it would be the latter.

A similar issue is the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Whilst a number of recent research papers conclude this tipping point is close at hand, models suggest the process is likely to take 100 years, so once again the exposure increases over that time, and so does the opportunity to reduce vulnerability with adaptive measures, though only up to a point.

Many other system-level changes have similar characteristics.

The world at 3°C

In a 3°C hotter world, large parts of the tropics will suffer “near-unlivable” extreme heat conditions, there will be less rainfall over significant parts of the dry subtropics, and this combined with increased evaporation rates will lead to drying out and desertification across the dry subtropics. New extremes — of rainfall and heat, flooding and drought — beyond human experience and beyond model expectations will occur. And a committed sea-level rise of many metres will be in the slow process of inundating coastal cities and deltas.

Some research, which is contested, suggests 3°C could cut global GDP by half. Last year, Australian researchers concluded that at 3°C, by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy would be 40%, which “could devastate livelihoods in large parts of the world”.  Coral reef systems would be gone, and that alone means coastal ecosystems would only be able to provide 20–50% of the fish protein that they do today for half a billion people around the world.

In 2021, the Australian Academy of Science published a report co-authored by David Karoly on Risks to Australia of a 3-degree warmer world. Amongst other things, it said that at 3°C, heatwaves would happen as often as seven times a year, with events lasting 16 days on average, “fire risk (driven by record heat, dryness and fuel) will increase by 30 per cent or more in south-eastern Australia”, and yields of key crops would reduce “by between 5 and 50%, depending on crop and location”.  Other research estimates that “beyond 2°C warming, the declines in suitable areas for the 30 crops [analysed] become more pronounced – in some cases approaching and passing 50%”.  That in itself would cause global chaos.

A 2020 study on extreme heat found that at 2.7°C, up to 3.5 billion people will be exposed to temperatures outside the “human niche”, that is, the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6000 years. Further research published in 2023 described a zone of near unlivable heat, “a situation found in the present climate only in 0.8% of the global land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara, but in 2070 projected to cover 19% of the global land” (Figure 3). Prof. Marten Scheffer said those pushed outside the climate niche might consider migrating to cooler places: “Not just migration of tens of millions of people but it might be a billion or so.” 

Figure 3: Projected zone of heat of “near-unliveable conditions” at 2.7°C global average warming (“Quantifying the human cost of global warming”)

And at 2.7°C, scientists say that  the Arctic would be “transformed beyond contemporary recognition: the Arctic Ocean would be essentially ice free for several months in summer, the area of Greenland that reaches melting temperatures for at least a month would roughly quadruple, and the area of permafrost would be roughly half of what it was in preindustrial times.”

Potsdam Institute Director Prof. Johan Rockstrom says that such a level of warming is “something that humanity has absolutely no evidence that we can cope with… Push ourselves to 2.5°C – we’re in unknown terrain. It would lead to a complete melting of the big ice sheets, which would be a 10-metre sea level rise… There would be a collapse of all the big biomes on planet Earth – the rainforest, many of the temperate forests – abrupt thawing of permafrost, we will have complete collapse of marine biology, we will have a shift of large parts of the habitability on Earth.”

Twenty years ago, a group of US security analysts constructed a 3°C scenario:

“Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario, nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervour to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature’ (emphasis added).”

So how many would die, and how many would survive in this 3°C world?

Displacement and mortality 

The “human niche” papers on near-unliveable heat found that these extremes are projected to envelop 1.2 billion people in India, 485 million in Nigeria and more than 100 million in each of Pakistan, Indonesia and Sudan. Many would be forced to move to a more liveable climate. Another study from the same year of 2020 concluded that warming of 2°C could provide more than 500 million people additional incentive to emigrate, whilst warming of 3°C could provide additional incentive-to-emigrate to well over a billion people.

The idea that a billion people may be displaced may seem fanciful, but the UN also agrees with this figure: “Unless we change the way we manage our land, in the next 30 years we may leave a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.”

The figures may be much, much higher than this, but there are so many variables, so many social unknowns, that any figure can only be a guesstimate by social scientists and security analysts, based on a scientifically-credible scenario.

Climate disruption kills people in many ways, including by direct physical impacts (heat stress, floods, cyclones and other extreme events), by severe food insecurity, through displacement and conflict, by increased disease and poorer health outcomes, and so on.

The 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change reported a 63% increase in heat-related deaths since the 1990s, reaching an estimated 546,000 yearly deaths on average in 2012–21. The higher number of heatwave days and drought months in 2023 compared with 1981–2010 was associated with 123.7 million more people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity in 124 countries analysed. As hotter and drier weather increases the risk of wildfires, 2024 had a record-high 154,000 deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter (PM2·5) air pollution.

What about future mortality rates? Joshua Pearce of the University of Western Ontario says if warming reaches or exceeds 2°C, it is likely that mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century. This is based on a review of the literature by Pearce and Parncutt, which found mortality costs of carbon emissions converged on the “1,000-ton rule”: an estimate that one future premature death is caused every time approximately 1,000 tons of fossil carbon are burned. Their best- and worst-case figures were 300 million and three billion for 2°C.

By this logic, the mortality range at 3°C would be in the range of 450 million to 4.5 billion.  Of course, this assumes a linear relationship between emissions and mortality, but that assumption is based on observed conditions that are far different from those humans will face in the second half of the century.

It should also be noted that in 2019, Rockström told The Guardian that in a 4°C-warmer world: “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that. There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.”

So four billion dead at 3°C? Immediately or when the full physical and social impacts are realised over many centuries?  Depending on deeply uncertain adaptation and other political responses? Between expert estimates of degrees of magnitude and worse-case conjecture, it’s anybody’s educated guess.

 

 

 

 

Eco-populism or barbarism? Channel Comment brendan 10th August 2026 Teaser Media

A new documentary highlights the impact of Pamilo hydropower station to lake Koitere and other water bodies, land locked salmon and local communities in Koitajoki.

This documentary contains materials of community-based observations of hydropower impacts and ecological change in Koitajoki catchment, North Karelia. It is the home of a large Snowchange restoration project funded by Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme.

Impacts have accumulated since 1950s, including the loss of the migratory routes and habitat for the unique land locked salmon. A new restoration plan has been developed to address some of the issues.

You can see the film here.

Summer at the Audubon Center at Debs Park comes in many forms, from rust-colored California Buckwheat to the trill of Hooded Orioles. For the Public Programs team, it also means the return of Audubon...

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES SLF-2007-024 The Sakhalin Papers XIV: The Whales, the Scientists and the Financing Test

Archive reference: SLF-2007-024
Collection: The Sakhalin Papers
Principal record: IUCN Independent Scientific Review Panel report, Shell Sustainability Report 2005, International Whaling Commission Resolution 2005-3 and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development records
Supporting record: Contemporaneous press reporting, Parliamentary material and the later High Court record concerning ECGD scrutiny of Sakhalin-2
Evidence standard: Scientific findings, corporate statements, lender records and judicial material are distinguished from campaign claims and editorial interpretation. No court is represented as having adjudicated the underlying whale science.

Introduction

By early 2005, one of the smallest surviving populations of great whales had become entangled with one of the largest energy projects then under construction anywhere in the world.

The Western North Pacific gray whale population using the waters off north-eastern Sakhalin was estimated at only about 100 animals. IUCN described the population as critically endangered and said the surviving whales’ known feeding grounds lay alongside existing and proposed oil and gas development. Its scientific review identified potential threats including disturbance, underwater noise, ship collisions, oil contamination and changes to the prey habitat on which the whales depended.

The uncomfortable feature of this story is that the scientists were not imposed upon Sakhalin Energy from outside.

Sakhalin Energy itself asked IUCN to convene them.

What followed produced one of the clearest examples in the Sakhalin archive of independent science changing the physical design of Shell’s project — while simultaneously exposing how serious the unresolved risks remained.

And behind the science stood another question.

Could Sakhalin-2 still satisfy the environmental standards of the international institutions being asked to finance it?

1. Sakhalin Energy Calls In the Scientists

In 2004 Sakhalin Energy Investment Company asked IUCN — then commonly known as the World Conservation Union — to establish an independent scientific review of the project’s potential effects on the Western gray whales.

IUCN convened an Independent Scientific Review Panel, chaired by cetacean specialist Randall Reeves. The panel met four times between September 2004 and January 2005, including a meeting and site visit on Sakhalin itself. Its mandate was scientific: evaluate risks to the whales and related biodiversity, examine mitigation options and assess the adequacy of monitoring.

That provenance matters.

This was not simply an environmental pressure group preparing a report attacking Shell.

It was an independent scientific process established under IUCN auspices at Sakhalin Energy’s request. IUCN subsequently described the review as the beginning of a longer relationship with the company on whale conservation.

2. The Population Was Already at the Edge

The February 2005 report opened with an exceptionally stark assessment.

The panel described a population of roughly 100 animals, potentially including only about 23 reproductively active females. Commercial whaling had reduced the population so drastically that it had once been thought extinct. The surviving animals faced threats throughout their range, while the north-eastern Sakhalin feeding grounds placed them directly beside major offshore hydrocarbon development.

The International Whaling Commission later incorporated the essential population concern into its own formal resolution.

At its 57th meeting in 2005, the IWC recorded that the review panel had found fewer than 30 reproductive females and noted a population model under which a hypothetical additional death of just one female whale each year could result in extinction before 2050.

That model was not a prediction that extinction would occur.

It was a risk scenario illustrating how little additional mortality such a depleted population might be able to absorb.

That distinction is essential.

3. The Feeding Grounds Were the Problem

The whales were not merely migrating past Sakhalin.

They were feeding there.

The IUCN review identified the nearshore feeding ground around Piltun as particularly important, including for mothers and calves. Construction noise, pipelines, vessel traffic, spills and physical disturbance therefore presented a different class of risk from activity occurring in an incidental transit area.

The scientists also identified substantial uncertainty.

Their report said better information was required concerning underwater-noise propagation, exposure from multiple noise sources, whale behaviour and physiological responses. It regarded significant physiological stress from industrial noise as plausible, while acknowledging that further study was required.

This is one of the recurring themes of the Sakhalin environmental record:

uncertainty itself became part of the risk assessment.

The scientists were not saying that every feared effect had already been demonstrated.

They were saying that, for a population this small, waiting for definitive proof of serious harm could itself be dangerous.

4. The Panel Had Problems With Sakhalin Energy’s Risk Method

Sakhalin Energy applied an engineering risk-reduction concept known as ALARP — reducing risk to a level “as low as reasonably practicable.”

The panel did not reject that concept outright.

Its problem was transparency.

The scientists said they were often unable to determine exactly how Sakhalin Energy had applied the standard or how considerations such as conservation and cost-effectiveness had been weighed. According to the report, this lack of specificity prevented a rigorous independent evaluation of some important project decisions, including mitigation options associated with the offshore development.

That finding is significant because it goes beyond disagreement about a particular pipeline route.

It concerns how environmental risk decisions were being made.

A mitigation programme can contain sophisticated modelling, extensive monitoring and substantial expenditure and still be difficult to audit scientifically if the underlying decision criteria are unclear.

5. The Report Was Not a Simple “Stop Shell” Document

The panel’s conclusions need to be described accurately.

Its terms of reference did not require it to determine whether Sakhalin-2 should proceed as an economic or political proposition. The scientists expressly said they had not been asked to evaluate the strategic, economic, social or security implications of Sakhalin development. Their role was to analyse risks and options and provide evidence that could inform decision-makers.

Nevertheless, the scientific conclusion was severe.

Given the identified risks, uncertainty and doubts about the effectiveness of some proposed mitigation measures, the report said the “most precautionary approach” would be to suspend existing operations and delay further oil and gas development near the whale feeding grounds.

If development nevertheless continued, the panel said decisions needed to be conservative from the perspective of the whales and their habitat, with substantial monitoring and the ability to alter operations when necessary.

That is considerably stronger than saying merely that Sakhalin Energy should monitor the whales.

But it is also different from a legal prohibition on the project.

6. The Pipeline Became the Immediate Test

One of the clearest disputes concerned the offshore pipelines linking the Piltun-Astokhskoye facilities with the shore.

The panel examined several routing alternatives. Its analysis concluded that one alternative offered significant advantages because construction would create less disturbance to the nearshore foraging habitat and any release would occur farther from the Piltun feeding ground and lagoon. It also recognised a disadvantage: the longer route somewhat increased the probability of a pipeline leak or rupture simply because more pipeline would be installed.

This is worth emphasising.

The scientists did not pretend there was a risk-free option.

They compared competing risks.

A longer route could increase one category of pipeline risk while reducing potential consequences for the whales and their principal feeding habitat.

That is genuine risk analysis rather than slogan.

7. March 2005: Sakhalin Energy Changes the Route

On 30 March 2005, Sakhalin Energy announced that it would reroute the offshore pipelines.

Contemporaneous reporting described the pipelines as being moved approximately 20 kilometres south of the original route to take them farther from the Western gray whale feeding grounds. The decision followed publication of the IUCN review.

The company later incorporated the decision into Shell’s own official account.

The Shell Sustainability Report 2005 states that Sakhalin Energy had initiated the independent panel and then:

“took the Panel’s advice”

by moving the offshore pipelines 20 kilometres farther from the feeding ground.

That Shell document is particularly important for the archive.

There is no need to infer whether the independent scientific process influenced the design.

Shell itself said that it did.

8. Shell’s Own Version of the Whale Story

Shell’s 2005 Sustainability Report devoted substantial space to Sakhalin-2.

It acknowledged that the summer feeding grounds of approximately 100 endangered whales lay nearby and said harm needed to be avoided. Shell presented the rerouting decision as part of a broader programme involving acoustic modelling, external scientific observers, vessel speed restrictions and designated ship lanes.

Shell also stated that installation of the bases for two production platforms had been monitored externally and completed without signs of whale disturbance.

That is Shell’s corporate account of the monitored construction activity.

It should be recorded as such rather than converted into an independent finding that all project effects were harmless.

The same report said Sakhalin Energy was working with IUCN to establish a permanent Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel that would continue providing independent scientific advice during construction and beyond.

That longer-term panel was subsequently established in October 2006.

9. The International Whaling Commission Was Not Satisfied Yet

The reroute did not end international concern.

In its 2005 resolution, the International Whaling Commission expressly welcomed both the cooperation between Sakhalin Energy and IUCN and the proposed rerouting of pipelines around rather than through the feeding ground.

But the same resolution said the Commission remained concerned that noise from pipeline work, platform emplacement and onshore construction would affect the Piltun feeding ground.

The IWC called for industrial organisations to minimise received noise levels, supported development of a comprehensive conservation strategy and urged oil companies, governments, scientists and other organisations to cooperate and share relevant data.

That produces another important evidential distinction.

The reroute was a recognised improvement. It was not regarded as the end of the conservation problem.

Both propositions are supported by the official record.

10. Oil-Spill Risk Remained

Noise was only one issue.

The IUCN report examined possible oil spills, pipeline failures and blowouts.

Using information contained in Sakhalin Energy’s own Comparative Environmental Assessment, the panel calculated that different offshore pipeline options carried differing lifetime spill probabilities. It also emphasised that probability alone was insufficient: the location and consequences of a release mattered greatly because spilled oil entering the feeding areas could affect the whales directly or damage the benthic prey on which they fed.

The report criticised gaps in parts of the spill analysis, including the absence of calculations quantifying how much of the feeding areas might lie inside projected spill trajectories in particular scenarios.

Again, this was not a prediction that a catastrophic spill would occur.

It was an assessment that consequences potentially affecting such a vulnerable population required unusually conservative treatment.

11. The Scientists Were Working With Incomplete Information

There is another revealing detail buried inside the review process.

The panel said its work had been complicated because Sakhalin Energy’s Comparative Environmental Assessment — described as important to Phase 2 decision-making — was not completed and supplied until 30 November 2004.

By then, the panel’s original review period was largely over.

Its contracts therefore had to be extended and the final report delayed until February 2005.

This does not establish that Sakhalin Energy deliberately withheld information.

The panel explicitly explained that the relevant documentation had not yet been completed.

But it does establish a timing problem:

independent reviewers were being asked to assess a rapidly advancing industrial project while some of the central environmental analysis was itself still being finalised.

That fact becomes particularly significant when the financing timetable is added.

12. The Whales Meet the Banks

Sakhalin-2 required enormous amounts of capital.

Among the institutions considering Phase 2 financing was the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Shell’s own Sustainability Report stated in 2005 that the EBRD and other institutions were considering funding and that, late that year, the Bank had judged Sakhalin Energy’s environmental, social and health-and-safety approach “fit for the purpose of public consultation.”

Those words require care.

“Fit for the purpose of public consultation” was not an EBRD financing approval.

The distinction is confirmed by EBRD’s own later records.

13. EBRD: Due Diligence Was Still Open

At a May 2006 meeting of the EBRD’s Environmental Advisory Council, Bank staff reported that Sakhalin-2 remained in due diligence.

No decision had been taken to submit the project to the EBRD Board for financing approval.

The Bank identified numerous significant matters still requiring work, including the status of the Western gray whales, oil-spill planning, river crossings, fisheries, indigenous peoples, resettlement, cultural heritage, stakeholder relations, consultation and legal issues. EBRD staff also discussed the Bank’s commitment to applying the precautionary principle to biodiversity.

This is a crucial documentary correction to a common shorthand account.

The late-2005 milestone did not mean:

“EBRD approves Sakhalin-2.”

It meant that the documentation had reached a stage at which formal public consultation could proceed while due diligence continued.

That difference matters enormously in reconstructing the financing history.

14. Why the Whale Question Became a Financing Question

By this stage, the Western gray whale issue was no longer simply a dispute between conservationists and an oil company.

It was embedded in institutional finance.

The EBRD was examining environmental performance while considering whether to participate financially. UK export-credit officials were separately considering support. The IUCN process had generated independent scientific recommendations. The International Whaling Commission had adopted a formal resolution. Sakhalin Energy had altered its pipeline design.

The result was a form of external leverage that does not fit neatly into the categories of regulation or litigation.

No international scientist had the legal power to order Shell to move the pipeline.

But lenders could insist upon environmental standards.

Governments considering export-credit support could demand environmental assessment.

And a project seeking billions of dollars in external finance had strong commercial reasons to demonstrate that internationally recognised concerns were being addressed.

That is an inference from the documented financing and review structure, rather than a finding that any single lender forced the March 2005 reroute.

15. What the Contemporary Press Saw

The press immediately recognised the connection.

Contemporaneous reports in March 2005 described Shell and Sakhalin Energy moving the offshore route after intense concern over the whales. The Guardian reported that the change did not end the campaign against the project, with environmental organisations continuing to press prospective lenders and the UK Export Credits Guarantee Department not to provide support.

Other contemporary reporting noted the commercial importance of satisfying the environmental requirements attached to international financing. Energy-industry coverage explicitly linked the reroute with Sakhalin-2’s effort to obtain loans from international financial institutions.

Those articles are contemporaneous interpretations.

They support the proposition that financing pressure formed part of the public context.

They do not, standing alone, prove that Shell would have refused to reroute the pipeline in the absence of prospective financing.

16. The Court Record Later Captured the Same Collision

Three years later, Sakhalin-2’s whale controversy appeared in the English High Court record.

In Export Credits Guarantee Department v Friends of the Earth [2008] EWHC 638 (Admin), the court described the project as potentially having a major impact on the habitat and feeding grounds of the Western Grey Whale and recorded that approximately US$650 million of project finance support had been sought from ECGD.

As explained in SLF-2007-023, that case concerned disclosure of government environmental information.

It did not decide the scientific merits of the whale controversy.

It did, however, place into a formal judicial record the connection between the endangered whale habitat, Sakhalin-2 and the proposed taxpayer-backed financing.

The science and the money had become inseparable parts of the public controversy.

17. A Rare Example of Science Changing a Megaproject

With hindsight, one feature of the record is difficult to dispute.

The independent scientific process changed the project.

IUCN later highlighted the 2005 pipeline reroute as a concrete example of the advisory process influencing corporate action. Its retrospective account says Sakhalin Energy changed the route preferred by the independent panel, moving it roughly 20 kilometres south to reduce disruption to the feeding grounds.

Shell’s own contemporaneous sustainability report says essentially the same thing.

This should not be understated merely because serious criticism of Sakhalin-2 continued.

An independent scientific panel recommended a different route.

A Shell-led project changed its engineering design.

That is a real outcome.

18. But It Was Not a Scientific Clean Bill of Health

The opposite exaggeration would be equally misleading.

The pipeline reroute did not mean the independent scientists concluded that Sakhalin-2 was environmentally safe.

Their report remained concerned about cumulative effects, acoustic disturbance, vessel strikes, oil-spill risks, habitat alteration and uncertainty surrounding mitigation. The most precautionary option identified by the panel went considerably further than rerouting a pipeline.

The International Whaling Commission likewise welcomed the reroute while retaining explicit concerns about construction noise.

The accurate documentary conclusion therefore lies between two competing caricatures.

It would be wrong to say:

“Shell ignored the scientists.”

It would also be wrong to say:

“The scientists approved Sakhalin-2.”

Neither proposition reflects the record.

19. What Is Established

The documentary record establishes that the Western North Pacific gray whale population using Sakhalin waters was extraordinarily small and regarded as critically endangered in 2005. Sakhalin Energy asked IUCN to convene an independent scientific panel. That panel identified substantial risks and uncertainties associated with Phase 2 and concluded that the most precautionary course would be suspension or delay of development close to the feeding grounds.

It is also established that the panel preferred a different offshore pipeline routing from the original proposal and that Sakhalin Energy subsequently moved the pipelines approximately 20 kilometres farther from the feeding ground. Shell itself attributed the decision to the panel’s advice.

The International Whaling Commission welcomed the cooperation and reroute but remained concerned about industrial noise and the extreme vulnerability of a population containing fewer than 30 reproductive females.

And it is established that environmental performance, including whale protection, remained part of EBRD’s continuing due diligence while the Bank considered possible financing.

20. What Is Not Established

The records examined here do not establish that Sakhalin Energy’s activities caused the extinction, or near-extinction, of the Western gray whale population.

They do not establish that a major oil spill affecting the whales actually occurred.

They do not establish that IUCN approved Sakhalin-2 as an environmentally acceptable project.

They do not establish that the EBRD approved Phase 2 financing in 2005.

They do not establish that the English courts ruled Sakhalin-2 environmentally unlawful.

And while financing considerations plainly formed part of the institutional environment surrounding the project, the documents examined here do not prove that Sakhalin Energy changed the pipeline route solely because it needed lender approval.

Those boundaries are as important as the findings themselves.

Commentary

The whale file is revealing precisely because it refuses to fit a simple corporate morality tale.

Shell’s project faced serious environmental criticism.

But Sakhalin Energy did something corporations under attack do not always do: it voluntarily invited an external scientific body to examine the problem.

The scientists then produced conclusions considerably more uncomfortable than corporate public-relations language would normally welcome.

And at least one major engineering decision changed.

That deserves recognition.

But the same record also demonstrates why independent oversight was necessary.

The whale population was so small that conventional industrial assumptions about acceptable risk became difficult to apply. A low-probability event could have disproportionate consequences. Scientific uncertainty could not simply be treated as evidence of safety. And the panel itself complained that it could not always determine how Sakhalin Energy was balancing conservation risk against other considerations.

The financing dimension sharpened everything.

A lender assessing billions of dollars of exposure was not simply asking whether the project held Russian regulatory approvals. International financial institutions were asking whether environmental and social performance could satisfy their own standards.

That made the whales financially relevant.

The pipeline reroute is therefore more than an environmental footnote.

It is evidence of the moment when independent science, corporate engineering and international finance collided — and the physical route of Sakhalin-2 changed as a result.

The more difficult question was whether changing one route could resolve the much larger collection of risks accumulating around the project.

By 2005, the answer was plainly not yet known.

Source Record

The principal source is the February 2005 Report of the Independent Scientific Review Panel on the Impacts of Sakhalin II Phase 2 on Western North Pacific Gray Whales and Related Biodiversity, convened under IUCN auspices at Sakhalin Energy’s request. The report documents the population assessment, noise and collision concerns, oil-spill analysis, alternative pipeline routes, cumulative-risk modelling and the panel’s precautionary conclusions.

Shell’s own Sustainability Report 2005 provides the corporate account of Sakhalin Energy’s response, including the statement that the company took the panel’s advice and moved the offshore pipelines approximately 20 kilometres farther from the feeding ground. It also records Shell’s account of acoustic mitigation, external monitoring, vessel controls and prospective EBRD financing.

The International Whaling Commission Resolution 2005-3 independently records both the significance of the rerouting decision and continuing concern about noise, while documenting the exceptionally small number of reproductive females identified by the review.

EBRD records establish that environmental review continued beyond the late-2005 public-consultation milestone and that the Bank had not yet decided to submit Sakhalin-2 to its Board for financing approval in May 2006.

Contemporaneous reporting provides the public context surrounding the March 2005 reroute and the continuing campaign aimed at prospective project financiers.

The later High Court record provides additional confirmation that the Western Grey Whale issue formed part of the environmental controversy surrounding ECGD’s consideration of approximately US$650 million in project-finance support.

PS.

Encouragingly, subsequent monitoring indicated substantial growth in the whales using the western North Pacific feeding grounds. The International Whaling Commission lists a 2015 best estimate of approximately 200 animals for the Western Feeding Group, compared with an estimated 74 in 1995. Later research has, however, demonstrated considerable movement between the western and eastern North Pacific, complicating the older concept of a wholly separate western population.

Archive disclaimer: Scientific modelling describes risk scenarios and should not be confused with predictions that a particular outcome would necessarily occur. Corporate sustainability reports record the company’s own account and are identified as such. Environmental campaign statements and contemporaneous journalism are distinguished from independent scientific findings and judicial determinations. Nothing in this instalment should be read as asserting a finding of unlawful conduct unless attributed to a competent court, regulator or other authority. Site-wide disclaimer also applies.

Next Archive File SLF-2007-025 — The Sakhalin Papers XV: The $20 Billion Shock — When Shell Doubled the Price of Sakhalin-2

Only months after the whale-panel confrontation, another disclosure transformed the project.

The original Phase 2 cost estimate had been approximately $10 billion.

In 2005 Shell acknowledged that the expected cost had effectively doubled to about $20 billion, while first LNG deliveries were pushed back.

That was not merely an accounting revision.

Under Sakhalin-2’s production-sharing arrangements, project costs were intimately connected with when Russia would begin receiving substantial profits.

The next file will follow the documentary trail behind the cost explosion, what Shell told investors and the Russian authorities, and why the $20 billion figure became one of the central triggers in the confrontation that eventually stripped Shell of control of Sakhalin-2.

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES: 9 AUGUST 2026 was first posted on August 9, 2026 at 7:51 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

Disclosure Ruling Is Followed by a Timetable to Preserve Evidence

Archive reference: AUS-WB-2026-002
Jurisdiction: Supreme Court of Queensland
Case: Quinlan v Shell Energy Operations Pty Ltd [2026] QSC 115
Decision date: 10 June 2026
Evidence standard: Reported court proceedings and published case information. This article does not treat allegations in pleadings or media reports as established facts.

Site-wide disclaimer applies. Mr Quinlan’s substantive allegations remain contested and have not been proved in court. Shell denies wrongdoing.

The Update Since the March Hearing

In March, former ERM Power executive Kent Quinlan asked the Supreme Court of Queensland to require Shell Power to provide further internal documents. He alleges that he raised concerns about insider trading and “sham” transactions at ERM Power, and that he later suffered detrimental treatment. Shell disputes the claims.

On 10 June 2026, Cooper J delivered an interlocutory decision concerning disclosure, document searches and redactions. The ruling did not determine whether any alleged misconduct occurred. It addressed what material the parties must provide while the litigation continues.

The August Case-Management Hearing

On 8 August, Michael West Media reported that the Supreme Court had set a timetable intended to enable Mr Quinlan’s evidence to be preserved later in 2026. The report said the Court had been told that he has terminal brain cancer and a life expectancy of less than 12 months.

According to that report, Cooper J granted an application for Mr Quinlan to give evidence, with the evidence to be taken in closed court and audio-video recorded. If Mr Quinlan dies before trial, the recording is intended to be played publicly at the trial. The Court fixed a timetable aimed at taking his evidence-in-chief in December, with a further case-management hearing listed for 14 October.

This is a procedural step taken in light of Mr Quinlan’s reported medical condition. It does not decide the allegations against Shell or the other respondents. Those allegations remain contested and unproven; Shell denies wrongdoing.

What the Court Ordered

Published case information records that the Court ordered Shell Energy Operations to disclose a defined group of documents identified in the relevant affidavit within seven days. Beyond that limited order, Mr Quinlan’s broader application for disclosure relief was dismissed.

The Court also considered Shell’s requests concerning unredacted disclosure and Mr Quinlan’s own disclosure obligations. The dispute included whether redactions to employee salary and contact information were justified, and whether further searching of archived material was proportionate.

This is an important but narrow outcome. It means that a specified category of documents had to be disclosed; it does not mean the Court accepted Mr Quinlan’s allegations, found that Shell concealed evidence, or made a ruling on insider trading, market manipulation or retaliation.

The Earlier Reporting

The March hearing was reported by the ABC. It described Mr Quinlan’s case as alleging that he raised concerns about illegal insider trading and “bogus” trades during his time at ERM Power, an Australian energy business acquired by Shell in 2019. His counsel sought further documents, arguing that legal privilege could not protect communications said to further fraud.

Shell’s counsel told the Court that the company had already provided a substantial volume of material and that the additional document requests were not reasonable or sufficiently connected to the issues in dispute. That remains Shell’s position in the contested proceedings.

Why the Distinction Matters

Disclosure litigation is often mistaken for a verdict. It is not. Courts decide whether documents are relevant, protected, proportionate to retrieve or capable of being disclosed with proper privacy safeguards. Those decisions can affect what evidence becomes available, but they do not resolve the truth of every allegation in the case.

The responsible conclusion at this stage is therefore straightforward: Mr Quinlan obtained limited additional disclosure, Shell succeeded in resisting broader relief, and the central allegations remain unresolved.

What Happens Next

The immediate next development is the 14 October case-management hearing, followed by the proposed December evidence timetable, subject to the Court’s directions and Mr Quinlan’s health. The June disclosure order, any costs decision and ultimately the Court’s determination of the substantive claims will remain important. Until then, descriptions of the dispute must retain the words “alleged”, “contested” and “not proved”.

Sources

• Michael West Media: Court fast-tracks Shell whistleblower’s case after terminal cancer diagnosis, 8 August 2026.
• ABC News: Kent Quinlan asks Supreme Court to force Shell Power to hand over secret company documents, 31 March 2026.
• Quinlan v Shell Energy Operations Pty Ltd [2026] QSC 115, Supreme Court of Queensland decision summary, 10 June 2026.
• Case summary: Quinlan v Shell Energy Operations Pty Ltd [2026] QSC 115, accessed 9 August 2026.
• Earlier ShellNews article: Shell Inherits an Explosive Australian Whistleblower Battle, 17 July 2026.

Kent Quinlan v Shell: Court Fast-Tracks Evidence After Terminal Cancer Diagnosis was first posted on August 9, 2026 at 7:23 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

A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 2, 2026 thru Sat, August 8, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (11 articles)

• El Niño and climate change are affecting rice crops in weird ways Researchers explain how El Niño and global warming are combining to create "the haves and the have-nots." Grist, Tik Root & Frida Garza, July 31, 2026.
• Heatwaves and raging fires mark Europe’s ‘dystopian’ summer This article about the recent record-breaking heat and wildfires in Europe dives into the science about the causes, quoting several experts. ABC News, Romy Stephens, Alex Lim and Fran Rimrod, Aug 1, 2026.
• Climate shocks hit hydropower in Southern Africa, reviving interest in coal The Daily Climate, Chisapi Kumbutso, Aug 02, 2026.
• Climate change could dramatically reduce water flowing from the West's headwaters Phys.org, Northern Arizona University, Aug 02, 2026.
• Washington`s wildfires are a warning for the entire U.S. Dry conditions and climate change are putting forests across the country at risk for disaster Scientific American, Mary Randolph, Aug 03, 2026.
• Factcheck: How nuclear, gas, wind and solar power are affected during heatwaves Carbon Brief, Molly Lempriere, Aug 04, 2026.
• French wildfires are turning animals’ homes into ‘a desert of ashes’ The catastrophic fires have potential to do long-term damage to many wild animal populations, but a toad species could be the most affected. National Geographic, Melissa Hobson, Aug 4, 2026.
• Butterflies are on the move as the planet warms: new research A comprehensive survey indicates that one in ten known butterfly species have already shifted in range. The Conversation, Shawan Chowdhury, Aug 05, 2026.
• Summer of wildfires sees catastrophe bonds approach new record Wildfires raging across the U.S. and Europe this summer are pushing more and more insurers into slashing their risk by issuing catastrophe bonds to investors, and the so-called CAT bonds on the market are already nearing levels from all of last year. Callaway Climate Insights, David Callaway, Aug 06, 2026.
• Climate change created conditions for Canada fires, scientists say, as Trump blames mismanagement A new study calculates that human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada’s massive summer wildfires. The Okaloosa Herald, EHN Curators, Aug 06, 2026.
• Heatwaves have killed millions. Here’s how scientists tally lives lost Two very different methods are used to estimate the human toll of heatwaves such as those now hitting parts of Asia and Europe. Nature, Kaia Glickman, Aug 6, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (6 articles)

• ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to `core financial stability` Exclusive: As wildfires rage, Frank Elderson says more work needed to assess risk from collapse of ecosystem services The Guardian, Richard Partington, Aug 01, 2026.
• Climate Hushing Strategy May Cost Democrats At The Polls Argued from a foundation of ample research evidence, this colorfully written op-ed criticizing ''climate hushing'' suggests that tip-toeing around climate change isn't grounded in facts, and that addressing public concerns about climate change can be part of a winning electoral package. CleanTechnica, Steve Hanley, Aug 03, 2026.
• Opinion: Why local action is key to surviving America's climate crisis 'The current administration in Washington denies that climate change is even real,'' starkly reminding us that meaningful climate change mitigation is a political matter and begins with voting. Politico, William S Becker, Aug 03, 2026.
• Appeals Court Says E.P.A. Cannot Block Billions in Climate Grants The funds have been frozen since early in President Trump’s second term. New York Times, Claire Brown, Aug 04, 2026.
• Q&A: What is in China`s new five-year plan for climate change? The new plan does not include any major new targets, instead consolidating and reaffirming existing policies, but does include significant signals on key policy areas, such as non-carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouse gases, global climate governance and carbon markets. Carbon Brief, Carbon Brief Staff, Aug 06, 2026.
• Trump Administration to Pay RWE to Cancel Wind Leases It was the fifth such deal struck by the administration to get companies to drop offshore wind projects. NYT, Brad Plumer, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (4 articles)

• Why is gaining citizen support for climate policies so difficult? Phys.org, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Jul 31, 2026.
• A majority of Americans don`t actually fit either climate camp An analysis of 20 years of polling data shows how age, education and income—in addition to political affiliation—shape views on climate policy Anthropocene, Sarah DeWeerdt, Aug 04, 2026.
• Climate Trunk - The Persuadable Majority Progress on climate depends on speaking to the movable middle. Climate Trunk, John Lang, Aug 5, 2026.
• Extreme heat impact on travel, family increasingly felt by Americans: poll Americans are increasingly feeling a personal impact from extreme heat, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. AP News, Alexa St. John and Linley Sanders, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (3 articles)

• Climate adaptation at its limits, says one scientist A climate scientist says Earth is "passing the limits of adaptation" when it comes to withstanding the effects of climate change. NPR, Michelle Aslam, Jul 31, 2026.
• Q&A: Does the world need `carbon capture and storage` to reach net-zero? Carbon capture and storage is an expedience for the fossil fuel industry and frequently the target of emotionally overheated and shallow criticism, but also stands as a poster child for ''nothing is simple," as illustrated in this excellent explanation. Carbon Brief, Josh Gabbatiss, Aug 03, 2026.
• `The obsession with endless growth can only end in tears`: your questions on extreme weather this summer answered 'Every fraction of a degree of warming that we can prevent will help millions of people and billions of other forms of life,'' which pretty much answers why Skeptical Science exists and what each of us can help to achieve; we can do better or worse by fractions of degrees, and we choose better. The Guardian, Jonathan Watts and Ajit Niranjan, Aug 03, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 26, 2026 thru Sat, August 1, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Aug 02, 2026.
• 15 new books for five new takes on climate change Recent years have seen a boom in books on climate change. This collection spans from techno-optimism to philosophical pessimism. Yale Climate Connections, Michael Svoboda, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

• Supreme Court sets date for blockbuster climate case The case, Suncor v. Boulder, has spurred calls for two of the justices to recuse themselves as they weigh whether federal law or the Constitution bars local governments from suing fossil fuel companies over the costs of addressing climate change. Politico E&E News, Lesley Clark, Aug 05, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (1 article)

• A Short History of Climate Science #17 of the ClimateTrunk graphics published ClimateTrunk, John Lang, July 15, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

• Fixing one of climate`s worst plots The 1930s were hot over the U.S. Midwest, but not that hot The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler, Aug 03, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is considering regulations for dairy and livestock operations to reduce the impact of animal agriculture on the environment.

The Board is weighing emissions data, mitigation strategies, and regulations as they consider a variety of regulatory approaches to reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas.

Under a 2024 resolution, CARB’s Executive Officer was asked to develop a plan for livestock methane regulations, Joe DeAnda, Director of Communications at CARB, tells Food Tank. Following rule development in 2025, the resolution outlines potential regulation consideration by the CARB Board by 2028, and, if adopted, implementation in 2030.

In 2016, SB 1383 set statewide targets in California to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. For dairy and livestock sectors, legislation set a goal of reducing methane emissions 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2030.

The law directed CARB to approve and implement a strategy to meet targets and work with stakeholders to identify and address barriers to emissions reduction goals. During a recent public comment period, CARB sought feedback on the technological and economic feasibility of the dairy and livestock sector, says DeAnda.

Dairy and livestock operations are California’s largest source of methane emissions, originating from manure and enteric fermentation, CARB reports.

Since SB 1383 was enacted, the state has targeted manure-related emissions through incentive-based programs. These initiatives include grants for anaerobic digesters and alternative manure management practices, which reduce methane by changing how manure is stored, handled, or treated.

Voluntary incentive programs allow farmers to reduce emissions without taking on the full cost of new infrastructure, says Michael Boccadoro, Executive Director of Dairy Cares. “We’re more than two-thirds of the way to achieving the dairy share of livestock methane emission reductions,” he tells Food Tank.

Boccadoro believes state and federal funding are central to that progress. He says some alternative manure management projects can be fully covered by grants, while many digesters are financed, owned, or operated by outside developers. In those cases, farmers may provide manure as feedstock without paying to build the project themselves and can receive a small revenue stream.

“The beauty of the incentive program is it hasn’t impacted farmers financially, except in some cases in a positive way,” Boccadoro tells Food Tank. He says the projects can also offer additional benefits, including improved manure handling and water quality.

While mandatory reporting is important to Boccadoro, he believes the requirements should stop short of direct emissions mandates. He argues that demanding every dairy farm to achieve a specific reduction target is “catastrophically unhelpful” because it can undermine the credit and financing systems that have supported methane reduction. “If you lose the incentives, these projects don’t go forward because there’s nobody to pay for them,” he says.

Frank Mitloehner, Air Quality Specialist at UC Davis, also supports California’s incentive-based approach. “When the law was passed there weren’t many options to reduce methane emissions. It was ahead of the technology, but by pushing incentives it allowed for solutions to blossom and result in real methane reductions,” he tells Food Tank.

Mitloehner has been impressed by the speed of transition in the dairy industry. “It’s astonishing how quickly an entire industry sprung up and the sector moved to be in line with state laws,” he says. But now “we’ve tackled the low-hanging fruit and need further technologies to find solutions in other sectors.”

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 Haley Owens, Unsplash

The post California Eyes Methane Regulations for Dairy and Livestock appeared first on Food Tank.

Into a clear blue sky, the sweet-smelling smoke billows and spreads. Farmers have been burning and harvesting sugarcane this way for generations, but the practice creates ash fallout and hazardous air pollutants. Every year, farmers plan and coordinate the fires, to clear out pests like snakes and clear leaves, leaving behind only the stalks where the sugar lies.

Nobody in Iberia Parish thinks twice. Sugarcane smoke is a part of life.

But locals are wary of the dangers they suspect lurk within a different, newer industry. This new industry is going to be the ruin of Iberia Parish, they warn, with dangers ranging from toxic smoke and cancer-causing chemicals to homegrown tornados and flying debris, even poisoned farmland and worthless houses. 

Dangers that are almost entirely imagined, say experts, who now find themselves as the main line of defense against misinformation that could hamstring a vital field. It’s a dynamic being repeated nationwide.

This is a close-knit community, part of the Acadiana region of Louisiana best known as Cajun Country. But last year, opposition to solar farms became so heated here that speakers at Iberia Parish Council meetings were brought to tears. Hundreds of residents successfully mounted a campaign opposing a proposed utility-scale solar project that would have been sited northeast of town. Opponents voiced fears that solar panels would destroy farms and poison the soil. They wore anti-solar T-shirts and staked yard signs. They snubbed and scolded the project’s supporters.

A social media group for Nebraskans posted a meme aimed at Tennesseans opposed to industrial solar projects. Similar themes and images appeared in social media posts that targeted other states.
Facebook

They feared fires, falling property values and panels that they said would leach chemicals into bayous. “I’ve done my own research. I don’t need anybody to tell me that it can’t cause cancer, or that they don’t crack and things don’t seep out,” said opponent Cathrine DeGroat during a June 2025 council meeting.

After heated debate, the council passed an ordinance requiring utility-scale solar projects to be set back at least half a mile from the nearest residential property line. Solar opponents hailed it as a victory for Iberia Parish. 

The ordinance appears to have effectively killed the Acadiana Solar project, which could have brought millions in local tax revenue to Iberia Parish, a rural area that could sorely use the public funds. The project’s developers would have leased land from Andree McAnally’s family farm for part of the project, money that would have helped pay college tuition and other expenses in a household budget that has been tighter since the death of her husband from COVID in 2021, McAnally said. She felt the lost opportunity more sharply, she said, since the fight against it was not based on facts. 

The day of the vote, in July 2025, McAnally told parish council members that she was disappointed in them. “I thought you were going to call in your own experts and figure it out yourself,” she said. “People are fueled by misinformation.”

McAnally herself had once believed that misinformation, she told the council. When her parents first agreed to put a solar farm on her family’s land, she was furious — she believed that her family was sure to get cancer. So she dug deep into research. What she learned changed her mind. “We have three generations right there on the property. And I would not put myself or my children in harm’s way,” she said.

Misinformation has become one of the primary hurdles for utility-scale solar projects like the one once planned here.  “Sometimes you just have this opposition that develops from misinformation and disinformation that tends to spread like wildfire,” said Matthew Holland, energy policy outreach coordinator at the Blanco Center, who counsels solar advocates to counter misinformation through specific facts about the benefits of the projects. And, as solar projects become more commonplace, some misinformation may lose its grip. 

Posts aimed at solar opponents in Indiana, Texas, Iowa and California, clockwise from top left, repeated messaging and imagery. Composite image by Dominique Hodge / Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk

For some who live in Iberia Parish, the standoff seems more deep-seated. “I think you’re seeing the animus of people who feel like their opinion is not taken seriously,” said Josh Trosclair, a member of the United Houma Nation and native of the small community of Lydia, just south of New Iberia, who argued on behalf of solar in front of the council. After one meeting, agitated solar opponents followed him to his car, he said. 

It seems clear that unfounded fears of solar have found fertile ground here. 

Facebook groups and AI bots

In Acadiana, solar opposition appears to have been organized in large part through a 1,200-member social-media group known as “NO Industrial/Utility solar in Iberia Parish” on Facebook. “Panels are toxic, contaminate the soil and water, [and] are a huge fire hazard,” wrote one of the group’s administrators in an April 2024 post. 

The group appears to have been first created in 2024 by a local real estate agent, Angela Scott. Scott did not respond to multiple attempts to reach her for this story.

Many posts express concerns that Iberia would no longer be a farming community. “There’s about 500k acres of sugarcane in the state. About 250k of them are leased for potential solar farms in the future,” read a post reshared from a group for St. James Parish — which also saw an anti-solar campaign. “If we lose 250k acres of farmland in this state, the sugar mills will likely close.”

To date, experts project that, at most, Louisiana solar will require about 87,000 acres over the next 10 years, on sites spread out across the state — not just on sugarcane fields. Only about 1 percent of Louisiana’s total farmland would be impacted by the highest estimates of solar buildout over the next decade, researchers estimate. 

Read Next For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal Tik Root

Posts in the group echo the dangers cited by opponents in council debates, along with a few new alleged hazards, including “increased ambient temperatures” and suggestions that solar panels themselves create unstable weather, particularly tornadoes.

Many posts in the group are cross-posted from “Stop Solar-Wind-BESS-Carbon Capture Scams,” a larger, 11,000-member Facebook group, which has become a hub for people who oppose solar across the nation. It was created in 2020 by Indiana resident Franklin T. Wike. 

A pinned post by Wike under the name “David Herman” seeks people willing to be trained to spread anti-solar messages: “We are looking for volunteers that would be interested in learning how to HELP run anti-Solar or anti-Solar and Wind websites. We are willing to train the individuals if needed,” reads the post. “The position will basically involve copying and pasting news links from various Facebook Groups we run, then writing a short introduction to the news articles.”

Wike also did not respond to requests for comment.

Some members of the network of anti-solar groups are sharing nearly identical posts of AI-generated anti-solar content, tailored to different U.S. states.

“Once Louisiana is gone, there’s no way to get it back,” reads one AI-generated graphic, shared by user Sheila Thomson, the words appearing on a sign with a farm and red barn in the distance. “Solar panels belong on roofs, not on farmland.” In a Facebook group for Texans, a different user posted a similar image tailored to Texas: “Once Texas is gone, there’s no way to get it back,” reads the sign. The same message and graphic appears in other groups tailored to Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and elsewhere.

The accounts have been linked to a network of “AI slop machine” accounts, per an analysis released earlier this month by the threat intelligence company Alethea. The network has also targeted data centers. Many of the accounts are anonymously run, are based in Bangladesh, and appear to be rapidly producing a volume of “emotionally resonant, locally targeted content … to manufacture the appearance of organic, grassroots consensus.”

Highly charged issue divides neighbors

Iberia Parish is more familiar with a different aspect of the energy sector. Parish workers fabricate parts for oil and gas infrastructure, like offshore platforms and pipelines. They work for petrochemical companies that, historically, come in, extract resources, and leave behind poverty and pollution — and loss. Trosclair’s uncle, whom he’s named after, was doing oil and gas fieldwork when he was killed by a burst pipe in 1980 at 20 years old.

Fossil fuels also don’t provide the jobs they once did: A report this summer from The Data Center, a Louisiana nonprofit, found that oil and gas production and transportation in the New Orleans metro area lost over 6,500 jobs between 2004 and 2023, a 47 percent decrease. 

Solar, on the other hand, will keep growing, say analysts, because the technology has simply gotten so efficient and affordable that the low cost will keep driving demand despite the hostile federal policy landscape. Scientists say that the world must transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible as global climate change worsens. Energy generated by solar in the U.S. recently overtook coal for the first time. Even President Trump’s allies recently softened their once-hostile tone and began championing solar outright.

Read Next The state of solar: Despite partisan rhetoric, the industry is still booming Rebecca Egan McCarthy & Kate Yoder

Perhaps because of their fraught history with oil and gas, locals can be wary of large new developments on agricultural land. They rallied the council last year to discuss the risks of carbon capture and sequestration and weighed instituting a moratorium. For the past several years, the solar industry has instilled worries, turning longtime friends into enemies.

“This is a highly charged, emotional issue, not just for me but for all of my neighbors who are my friends,” McAnally told the Council, her voice shaking. “Or — were my friends.”

Sugarcane has long been the dominant crop in Iberia Parish, where some farms have been handed down through four or five generations. The hundreds of acres of sun-drenched land also appealed to Recurrent Energy, a division of Canada Solar, which selected about 1,000 acres for their proposed solar project, initially dubbed “Acadiana Solar.” It would have been a $175 million investment.

But amid passionate public opposition, Iberia Parish passed its first solar-related ordinance in February 2024, a moratorium on solar farms, described as a temporary measure until permanent regulations could be agreed upon. A year later, in July 2025, the council passed the second ordinance, requiring that solar farms in the parish be sited at least a half mile from the nearest residential zones and occupied structures.

At the state level, Louisiana legislators passed their first solar restrictions last year, with House Bill 459, which requires that solar projects 75 acres or larger be set 300 feet from the nearest residential property line. The law also allows local governments to set larger setbacks.

Louisiana’s setback law is “one of the larger distances that you’ll see in the country,” Mark Zappi, executive director of the Energy Institute of Louisiana, told 1012 Industry Report in April. The Iberia Parish ordinance, with a setback that’s more than eight times larger, is among the most restrictive in the state.

The full effects of that setback are unclear: Though Recurrent Energy has never officially announced that its project was canceled, there’s been no movement on the project since the ordinance passed, local advocates say.

Solar panels don’t leach toxins

It is clear that, for solar development in Louisiana, one of the most formidable hurdles is misinformation.

Some inaccuracies are spread among friends and neighbors, by mouth or by social media. Sometimes disinformation is spread deliberately by politically-linked groups or digital marketers sharing AI-generated posts.

Or, as Terrence Chambers, the recently retired director of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s Center of Efficiency and Sustainable Energy, testified in front of a Louisiana legislative committee in 2021: “I have recently heard many concerns expressed by members of the public, some of which are based on incorrect information, and I would like to address some of those concerns, so that public policy can be based on accurate information.” 

Read Next In a first, Utah got more power from solar than any other source Leia Larsen

In his testimony and in the 17-page written testimony that he supplied the committee, Chambers set the record straight. “The solar cell is completely protected from air and water during normal operation, and as such, rainwater does not wash any toxic materials into the soil,” he said. “Solar racks can easily be designed to wind speeds of 150 mph or higher,” he wrote, noting that data from 50,000 operational solar installations shows that “solar plants stand up well to hurricanes and hail.” Also, because solar panels are mostly made of non-flammable materials like steel, glass and aluminum, they will not catch fire.

A December study from Chambers and other researchers at UL-Lafayette reached a similar conclusion: “There are no harmful emissions or runoff from solar power plants that would negatively affect the soil.”

Some opponents’ concerns were valid decades ago, but have now been largely addressed. For instance, residents expressed worries that solar panels would depress property values, become eyesores amid the landscape, or  — like the “orphan wells” often left behind by fossil-fuel companies — that the projects won’t be properly decommissioned when the projects end, leaving farmland littered with aging solar panels.

Studies have drawn differing conclusions about property values, but another UL-Lafayette paper points to two recent ones, by appraisers in North Carolina and Virginia who found that solar projects have no effect. Abandoned panels are less of a concern now since Louisiana law requires every project to have a decommissioning plan, which must account for closure in case of disaster and be updated every five years, with the costs set aside before construction begins. The way solar projects are designed has improved dramatically as well, said Stephen Barnes, director of the Kathleen Babineaux Blanco Public Policy Center at UL-Lafayette. 

Today’s projects are designed to be less visible than older ones, partly because it’s become standard for projects to include vegetative barriers – tall plants and bushes used to blend solar arrays with surrounding landscape.  “The reality is that most people that live in a parish that does have a solar farm don’t think about it ever,” said Barnes. “You could be driving past one and never even know it.”

Solar continues to grow, and provide needed tax revenue, despite hurdles

Across Louisiana, 19 solar projects are operating. Five began operating after Iberia passed its strict ordinance. 

Rural parishes that may otherwise see little investment are reaping massive tax benefits by embracing solar projects, researchers at UL-Lafayette say. Even if solar facilities are granted massive tax exemptions, they’ll generate at least 40 times more local property tax than farmland. 

Near Iberia, in Pointe Coupee Parish, the Oxbow solar project  — the largest in the state — is projected to generate $9.7 million in local tax revenue within the first three years. Morehouse Parish has already brought in about $3 million in sales tax revenue thanks to the Oak Ridge Solar Farm that began operating in 2023, about half of which went to the School Board. 

Read Next Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be. Jake Bittle

The UL-Lafayette study predicts solar will bring in about half a billion dollars in state taxes through 2035. And once built, Barnes said, solar projects “tend to sit quietly with very little activity, generating significant, steady, predictable stream of tax revenue,” without requiring the increased public services — like fire protection or better roads  — that other large development projects need, said Barnes. Investment in a solar facility can also draw other businesses in, or prompt investment in improving the local electrical grid — what Barnes calls “broader spillover economic benefits.” 

“There will be continued expansion,” said Monika Gerhart, executive director of Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association. “The question is whether those projects will be over the state lines in Texas or Arkansas or Mississippi, or whether Louisiana is going to be able to avail itself of that revenue.”

Despite its opposition, Iberia Parish, too, has begun to see spillover benefits from investments in solar energy. 

Last year, a company called First Solar opened a $1 billion solar-panel production facility in Iberia Parish. It will manufacture 3.5 gigawatts of solar panels annually and is the largest investment in Iberia Parish history. 

The plant now employs hundreds of locals.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In rural communities, fears amplified by ‘AI slop’ and social media hamper solar boom on Aug 9, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Wildfire Smoke Poses Growing Risk To Pregnant Women As Climate Change Worsens” • A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Health tracked exposure to fine particulate matter from US wildfires from 2003 to 2019. It found that emissions from transport and industry fell in that time, smoke from wildfires offsets some of the gains. [Euronews]

Statue of Liberty in a smoky sundown (Chris Barbalis, Unsplash)

• “World’s Largest 12.8-GWh Battery Storage Cluster Activated in China” • Sources at Envision told Cleantechnica that its 4-GWh flagship plant could very well be “the world’s largest single-site electro-chemical energy storage facility.” It serves as the central anchor for a network of energy storage installations distributed across energy production centers. [CleanTechnica]
• “Renewable Energy Equipment Now Duty-Free for Import in Cuba” • A range of renewable energy components, including solar panels, transformers, lithium-ion batteries, and other batteries, can now be imported into Cuba without incurring customs duties. The plan is for this exemption to be in effect until December 31, 2027. [CubaHeadlines]
• “Harvesting Rainwater From Rooftops Could Cut The Number Of Heatwave Days And Reduce AC Reliance” • Rooftop rainwater could be a secret weapon to address urban heat. Researchers at The University of Manchester modeled capturing rainwater from rooftops and spraying it onto buildings during hot weather, reducing a need for air conditioning. [Euronews]
• “Twenty Thousand Flee Wildfires As British Columbia Declares State Of Emergency” • British Columbia has declared a state of emergency after a fast-moving wildfire destroyed homes and forced more than twenty thousand people to flee communities along Okanagan Lake in western Canada. Dozens of them were rescued by aircraft. [ABC News]

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

Vanadium batteries could be the answer to the expanding, energy-hungry artificial intelligence infrastructure sector, with data centres rising around Australia's major cities.

The post Vanadium: The silvery data centre storage metal that you may never have heard of appeared first on Renew Economy.

By KAY MATTHEWS

There’s good news for the many Questa area citizens opposed to the proposed Kit Carson Electric Cooperative hydrogen facility and solar array. Attorneys for the Cabresto Lake Irrigation Community Ditch Association and Acequia Madre del Cerro de Guadalupe filed suit against the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service over the agency’s Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) authorizing the Questa Hydrogen Project. Claiming that the ruling violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the notice seeks judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and requests that a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be conducted rather than the inadequate Environmental Assessment (EA). The plaintiffs also allege that the EA improperly limited the scope of the environmental review by excluding the proposed solar array from analysis.

Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, Inc. (“KCEC”) proposes to construct and operate a hydrogen-production facility, an associated electrical substation, and a solar-generation facility in the Village of Questa, New Mexico. The proposed hydrogen facility and related infrastructure are located on property associated with the former Questa Mine Tailings Site and within or adjacent to areas subject to ongoing environmental remediation and oversight under the federal Superfund program. The Project would use electricity generated by the proposed solar facility to support the production of hydrogen. The hydrogen facility, electrical substation, solar facility, and related infrastructure are intended to function together as components of the same overall development. The Project plans the use of groundwater from an existing well owned by Chevron mining identified as RG-14117 POD 18 (“POD 18”). At present, POD 18 is authorized for water use associated with reclamation and dust-control activities at the mine and tailings facility.

The two acequia plaintiffs, Cerro Acequia, which diverts water from Cabresto Lake, and Acequia Madre, which diverts water from Latir Creek and contributing streams, supply irrigation water for hundreds of parciantes and allege that USDA approved the Project without complying with NEPA’s procedural requirements by preparing an inadequate EA and failing to take the required hard look at significant environmental consequences.

Operation of the Project requires the continued withdrawal and destruction of substantial quantities of groundwater, including approximately 10,579 gallons per hour, from a well located within the Chevron Questa Mine Superfund Site. Once the water is introduced into the electrolyzer, it undergoes destruction as water and dissociates into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. The liquid water pumped from the ground no longer exists. The EA concluded that groundwater resources would not be affected but did not support that conclusion with a quantified analysis of the Project’s anticipated withdrawals. The EA did not include an aquifer-drawdown analysis, long-term water analysis, or other adequate assessment of how sustained Project pumping could affect groundwater levels, nearby wells, connected surface-water resources, or water historically available to Plaintiffs and their members.

The suit also raises the issue of KCEC’s lease of the Chevron mine. At the time USDA issued the EA and the FONSI, KCEC was “currently in the process of purchasing the land described from Chevron for the construction of the proposed project.” On May 8, 2026, five months after issuance of the EA and the FONSI, KCEC and Chevron entered into a 3-year lease for the property. The lease, with a term of 3 years without renewal provisions, addresses ownership and use of the property, the presence of contaminated materials, responsibility for damage to the existing environmental remedy, and the allocation of environmental risks. Because the lease postdated the FONSI, USDA did not evaluate the final lease terms before making its NEPA determination, including the terms governing the duration of KCEC’s site control, ownership of permanent Project infrastructure, groundwater limitations, and responsibility for environmental conditions caused or aggravated by project activities.

After KCEC and Chevron executed the lease, USDA did not reopen its environmental review, prepare a supplemental environmental assessment, or issue a new finding addressing the final lease terms. USDA therefore did not evaluate whether the executed lease altered or undermined assumptions concerning KCEC’s long-term control of the Project site, ownership of permanent infrastructure, authority to use groundwater, responsibility for environmental damage, or interaction with the existing environmental remedy.

Furthermore, hydrogen gas production poses the risk of explosion. Upon completion and operation, the Project will store up to 29 tons of produced hydrogen gas under pressure in 54 tanks, with 28 tanks situated south of the 42 electrolyzer units and 26 tanks situated north of the 42 electrolyzer units. While KCEC contracted with Entrust Solutions to conduct a “What If” assessment, using 79 scenarios to evaluate risk and likely consequences of a variety of hypothetical failures of key components across the hydrogen storage, electrolyzer, and fuel cell units, an explosion can occur without the ignition of hydrogen.

Because construction is currently ongoing the Plaintiffs request immediate conjunctive relief. For more information you can go to the Questa Watershed Protectors Facebook page where the attorney who filed the complaint in US District Court in Albuquerque, Guy Dicharry, thanks Honorio Justin Rael who has done most of the legal work on this case.

file:///Users/geographer/Downloads/FILED%20COMPLAINT%20(1).pdf

In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

Read Next In Michigan, the price of energy is on the ballot and both parties know it Marcus Baram, Capital and Main

Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025, and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”

The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling, and ​“ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.

Read Next The nation’s biggest public utility just doubled down on coal, gas, and nuclear Katie Myers

Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance ​“on a case-by-case basis to identity [sic] waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”

Then, in October, the DOE announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”

Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.

Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.

The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project was terminated in October, and the DOE has disbursed no money for it, according to federal records.

Read Next For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal Tik Root

This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.

According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains ​“at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.

“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.

All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. ​“You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”

The costs of losing federal funding

Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.

The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.

Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50 percent. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy, and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.

Alliant ​“voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.

Read Next The secret to a better grid? Electric vehicles. Matt Simon

Alliant is ​“actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. ​“While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.

Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds. 

That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capitol and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to ​“improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email. 

SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD ​“has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. ​“We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”

In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation ​“grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.

Read Next Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be. Jake Bittle

The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to ​“improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”

“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility ​“recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”

At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. ​“Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”

Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.

The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.

Read Next How Ann Arbor, Michigan, is creating its own clean energy utility Carey L. Biron

In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE ​“will honor its $464 million grant,” which will ​“unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”

A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a ​“number of criteria,” including whether it has ​“achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it ​“remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it ​“continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”

The spokesperson added that ​“none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were ​“based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them ​“had a recipient location and/​or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete, and that more than 80 percent of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.

But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the ​“blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.

The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.

“Once an administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, ​“the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is blocking billions of dollars of grants that would fix the grid on Aug 8, 2026.

Headline News:

• “US Battery Storage Capacity Averaged 70% Growth Over The Last Three Years” • Battery storage capacity in the US grew a lot over the last three years, with an annual average growth rate of 70%. By the end of 2025, the US had battery storage capacity of 43.6 GW operating. Over the first six months of 2026, operators added another 8.3 GW. [CleanTechnica]

Growth in utility batteries (EIA image)

• “Wildfires Keep Raging As Europe Swelters Under Extreme Heat” • Firefighters were battling multiple wildfires in Serbia on Friday, as temperatures remain extremely high. Serbia was not the only country affected, however. Days of extreme heat with temperatures reaching 40°C (104°F) fueled wildfires in several Balkan countries. [Euronews]
• “Rising Temperatures Could Keep More Flights From Taking Off On Time” • Airline passengers know to expect possible flight delays when forecasts call for rough weather. But extreme heat also disrupts flights. On the hottest days, thinner air can make it harder for aircraft to get off the ground safely. Airlines might even remove passengers to save weight. [ABC News]
• “California Produced Over Half Its May Electricity From Solar, A World Record” • California hit a major milestone in May, with over half its electricity coming from the sun. It is believed to be a global first, according to analysis from Ember. And in the first five months of 2026, California made more electricity from solar than from natural gas. [Arizona Daily Sun]
• “New Hampshire Law Empowers Homeowners With ‘Balcony’ Solar Panels” • A state law set to go into effect on January 1, 2027, gives Granite Staters an ability to install so-called “balcony solar” panels. DIY solar power users still need to do their homework to understand the technology, safety requirements, the potential for their home, and possible limits. [NH Business Review]

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

Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

United States Restores Some Health Aid

After the sudden elimination of humanitarian assistance last year, the United States is taking steps to restore some global health aid, the New York Times reports.

The latest funds—US$600 million—will go to Gavi an organization helping low-income countries secure essential childhood immunizations. In total, the U.S. government has made nearly US$2 billion in recent pledges to support international organizations tackling hunger and malnutrition, epidemic preparedness, disaster response, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria.  But the amount is still far below what the U.S. spent on foreign assistance in the past.

According to officials who have been a part of State Department conversations, public health threats including the recent Ebola outbreak, are one of the main drivers of this shift. And with the U.S. Agency for International Development gone, the infrastructure no longer exists for the U.S. to handle the humanitarian assistance itself. They must now partner with large international agencies to work at the scale needed. 

The reality of past decisions may be “sinking in,” says Mark A. Green, President of the ONE Campaign. He adds, “The good news is that Secretary Rubio clearly realizes that global health is what we do, and we’re really good at it. That’s why you’re starting to see more money moving.”

Countries Adopt First Global Framework on Sustainable Livestock Management

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Members have approved the first globally negotiated framework to sustainably transform the livestock sector. It marks a “a major achievement for FAO and all livestock stakeholders,” says Thanawat Tiensin, FAO Assistant Director-General, Chief Veterinarian and Director of the Animal Production and Health Division.

The Global Plan of Action for Sustainable Livestock Transformation (GPA) recognizes livestock as a key source of protein and other nutrients as well as the sector’s ties to zoonotic diseases, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. Its 85 recommended actions are designed to help countries promote healthy diets, control animal diseases, encourage climate mitigation and adaptation practices, improve animal welfare, and boost farmers’ livelihoods.

Food Companies Slow Efforts to Improve Public Health

Food corporations are costing countries billions of dollars in healthcare and legal costs by hindering the adoption of public health measures, according to the World Health Organization’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) make up half the calories consumed by eaters in countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. 

As governments try to implement programs and initiatives that help people adopt healthier diets, food corporations say they support these actions. But an investigation by The Guardian finds that these same corporations are quietly trying to overturn, weaken, or delay them. 

Between 2010 and 2025, corporations brought 235 lawsuits forward in five countries in response to policies targeting UPFs. Even though the companies lost around three-quarters of these cases, they were still successful in slowing the rollout of legislation and discouraging other countries from pursuing similar policies. 

Tedros recognizes that some food products are being reformulated to be made healthier, but stresses more must be done: “These efforts are welcome, but they are not sufficient on their own to meet the scale of this global health crisis. To contribute meaningfully to the solution, companies should also end litigation and other tactics that strain limited government resources and hinder efforts to protect public health.”

RFK Jr. Launches New Cooking Show

Last week, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced the launch of a new cooking show. Kennedy states that he will travel across the country, connecting with chefs to show families “how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients all at affordable prices.”

In the first episode of “The Real Food Show,” available on YouTube, Kennedy and Chef Andrew Gruel prepare salmon cakes with an arugula and white bean salad. 

Each recipe is designed to come out to US$5 or less per portion whenever possible but some experts question whether that’s possible. Registered dietitian Juliana Vocca says, “RFK Jr.’s cooking show may be promising in terms of educating the public on how to cook healthy.” But, she adds, “I’m not sure everyone can afford some of his recipes.”

Food prices in the U.S. are 33 percent higher than they were in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Tool Helps Women Farmers Unlock Water Security

A new tool known as the Agriculture Water InSecurity (AgWISE) module is tracking the realities of women facing water stress in coastal Bangladesh, helping decision makers develop gender-inclusive water governance and climate policies. 

Women are increasingly impacted by water stress, from increased flooding to erratic rainfall. At the same time, they are taking on larger roles in agriculture. But they remain largely excluded from decisions impacting water management and infrastructure.

AgWISE aims to change this by collecting information to understand the physical and emotional toll of water insecurity. A pilot study with 800 respondents revealed how age, class, land ownership impact a household’s vulnerability. 

By translating everyday experience into actionable evidence, the tool is supplying decision makers with the information they need to create policies. The insights from AgWISE are now being used to shape revisions to Bangladesh’s National Women Development Policy and guide discussions with the Ministry of Finance to integrate the tool into Gender Responsive Budgeting initiatives across climate hotspots. 

CGIAR sees this as an adaptable tool that can be used to support smallholder farming communities around the world.

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 Wietse Jongsma, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: U.S. Restores Health Aid, Companies Block Action on UPFs, New Tool Boosts Water Security appeared first on Food Tank.

EWG statement on FDA’s new GRAS proposal Iris Myers August 7, 2026

WASHINGTON – Today the Food and Drug Administration proposed a new rule to amend the “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, food chemicals loophole. 

The GRAS regulatory loophole has, for years, allowed companies to add new, potentially harmful chemicals and other substances to snacks, drinks and more without first undergoing FDA safety review.

When Congress created the GRAS loophole in 1958, it was meant to apply largely to ingredients widely recognized as safe, such as salt, yeast and chicken broth.

But the loophole means that now almost all chemicals added to food are greenlighted by the food industry, not the FDA. Since 2000, nearly 99 percent of food chemicals added to commerce came into the market through the loophole, a 2025 Environmental Working Group analysis found. 

The following is a statement from Melanie Benesh, EWG’s vice president for government affairs:

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is correct that the GRAS system is broken and in urgent need of reform. And eliminating the pathway that allows companies to self-certify chemicals as “generally recognized as safe” without notifying the FDA is the first step toward meaningful reform.

But true GRAS reform requires more than mandatory notification. It must also include strong, science-based safety standards and thorough, independent FDA review before chemicals are allowed in our food. And it must address the thousands of substances already on the market that have not been meaningfully reviewed in decades.

Americans deserve a system where food safety decisions are made by independent experts at the FDA – not by the companies that profit from selling these chemicals.

###

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.

Areas of Focus Food Ultra-Processed Foods Food Chemicals Press Contact Iris Myers iris@ewg.org (202) 939-9126 August 10, 2026

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This June, tenants in New York City notched a major victory: The city’s Rent Guidelines Board, or RGB, voted to freeze rents for all one- and two-year leases in rent-stabilized units. Quickly, local and national media trumpeted the decision as a victory, a proof of concept even, for NYC’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had pledged to ensure such a freeze on the first day of his campaign. Because the mayor appoints RGB members, the story became one of Mamdani conjuring the victory through sheer force of will.

But the freeze also comes as a result of decades of targeted tenant organizing across the city as longstanding communities are priced out of their homes. One of the groups that has led the charge is CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an organization of working-class Asian immigrants that launched the Chinatown Tenants Union, or CTU, in 2005. The group’s members have been showing up to RGB hearings for 20 years, testifying for freezes and staging actions to prevent expected hikes.

CAAAV Voice, CAAAV’s electoral arm, also holds the distinction of being one of the few groups that endorsed Mamdani on the first day of his campaign, thanks to his history of action — he was arrested at a June 2024 CAAAV protest — and his pledge to adopt the movement’s emerging demand that the next mayor freeze rents for the entire four-year mayoral term.

#newsletter-block_6b57a2c420023653f30aefae9f190b01 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_6b57a2c420023653f30aefae9f190b01 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

On the heels of the rent freeze victory, I sat down with Julie Xu, a longtime organizer with CAAAV and chapter lead of CTU, to discuss how initiatives to combine base building with electoral politics helped create the conditions for the freeze, and how having a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office  allows the tenant movement to “revisit the strategies of the past.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the origins of the rent freeze demand and how it is rooted in your organizing work.

So New York City’s rent stabilization system is the biggest in the United States, and one of the most important in the world when you’re talking about forms of rent control. 

As you zoom in on a neighborhood like Chinatown, it’s almost 50 percent of the housing stock and an incredibly important source of housing, especially for low-income immigrants. A lot of our members can only stay in a neighborhood like Chinatown that is in Manhattan because of rent stabilization. 

Previous Coverage

Abolish rent. Yes, for real.

From the beginning, our work has always been about organizing tenants. One of our founders, Ms. Liang, who is a teacher in the neighborhood, talks about doorknocking [early in CAAAV’s history] and seeing conditions of neglect: a student wearing a full puffer jacket indoors in the winter because there was no heat, or children being bitten by rats and pests because of the neglect of the apartments in Chinatown. So at our core it’s been about how we correct that and make the neighborhood a dignified landing place for folks and also prevent the violence of eviction, the violence of gentrification. 

CAAAV tenant leaders began testifying [for a rent freeze] and showing up to the RGB in 2006, just a year after the founding of the Chinatown Tenants Union. The core demand has always been about who has say over our neighborhoods: real estate or the tenant majority. 

CAAAV members rally at the preliminary vote of the Rent Guidelines Board on May 7, 2026. (Cal Hsiao/courtesy of CAAAV)

We understand rent hikes as part of a wheelhouse of tactics that organized real estate wields to maintain housing as a system of profit. This is why our tenant leaders have called for a rent freeze and rent rollbacks over the decades.

Our tactics have shifted over time, but the Rent Guidelines Board fights have been a critical vehicle for politicizing newer members around shared conditions of rent hikes and disrepair, and creating a ladder for leadership development through testimony and actions.

Did a lot of the work from the beginning center around establishing consciousness about the conditions and giving people ways to talk about the things that they were experiencing?

It’s really central to how we understand our work as an organization. I think having a base and having that orientation toward outreach is a large part of what makes the organization so strategically sharp. 

In the moment when Trump was elected, everybody was saying Asian and Latino voters were moving to the right. The reason that was perceived as a rightward shift was because the Democratic establishment was not making a case to our people. A lot of the movements of the right are far better resourced than those of the left, so it was like a vacuum. So what we were experiencing and seeing was that it’s not just that our people are moving to the right, it’s actually that we’re not giving them a vision. We’re not giving them something that they can actually see themselves in. 

What was CAAAV’s relationship to electoral politics prior to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign? Is that something that’s only recently become more of a strategic focus?

CAAAV Voice was founded in 2021, and the electoral work it did really came as a result of some of the changing strategies we had for organizing. 

[Before that, CAAAV] went through many different phases. There was experimentation around community land trusts. There was a vision of having a building tenant association on every block in Chinatown. We experimented with community-led rezoning plans as places to try to impact the logic of real estate and the logic of capital that’s shaping all of housing. We undertook all these different types of organizational experiments, and the lesson for us was that it always felt like it got stopped at the mayoral level. 

Especially in Chinatown, trying to pass the Two Bridges Community Plan [a 2016 proposal intended to stop the development of a series of luxury apartment towers in the neighborhood] under [former Mayor Eric] Adams became the chokepoint in realizing we actually didn’t have enough power to have a say. Our long-term strategy is about breaking the bonds between real estate and the state, and in this fight against these four luxury towers, we were correctly identifying that these were some of the worst speculative actors. But then in trying to pass the Community Plan, we were getting stopped at the Department of Buildings and getting stopped at the mayoral level. 

That was a big lesson for us. Additionally, there have been existing coalitions that show up to the Rent Guidelines Board every year, and under Adams it did feel like theater because it was very clear that the folks that were on the RGB were not really listening. They were looking at their phones. Everybody was very frustrated, and then the results would come out, and it was just not clear what type of power we had on this institution or in the process at all.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'2gdnIH13SiVNCdtnP6p2Vw',sig:'dQ6EV41dlhf_42aGLmGjVIRV0BWLnJs03fP_a5vTJKQ=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1394257087',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

I think so often organizations actually separate base building and electoral politics completely, right? Or run them on separate tracks. What we have been trying to experiment with [since forming CAAAV Voice], and have made some advancements towards, is how do we not separate those so much? 

This election was an amazing opportunity to talk to people about something with real stakes. We canvassed in new neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Sunset Park, to reach our base. Now, after the election, we’re going back to those neighborhoods to do deep outreach and build off of the election conversations to do long-term, neighborhood-centered base building. 

CAAAV Voice was one of only a handful of groups to endorse Mamdani on the first day he announced his campaign. What were some of the discussions that went into that decision, and was there any precedent within the organization for such an early endorsement?

This is where having a base and developed leaders was really essential to making an assessment of the moment. Our elders were very clear that we needed to have some demand during this election, especially because the mayor [appoints] the RGB. It was our youth who were hesitant about electoral politics. They don’t see how the government works well. They have a lot of doubts about elected officials making a lot of promises that they don’t keep or they won’t keep. So there was push and pull. 

It was at our annual CAAAV leadership assembly in 2024 that we were hashing these struggles out and getting clear on our annual goals for the organization. There, we made the decision to make the four-year rent freeze demand [for mayoral candidates] and committed to grow our organization to be able to actually have the power to enact that demand. 

We had also worked with Zohran in the past. We had worked with him in our Innovation QNS campaign [a successful 2022 effort to push for significantly more affordable housing within a proposal to build over 3,000 units in Astoria]. We had a trusting working relationship with him from that. He had also come to RGB and in 2024, Zohran was actually arrested at our action. So leaders had that memory of seeing him show up and seeing him being willing to put his body on the line for tenants. And internally our members were saying, “This is a moment for us to act.” All of those pieces coming together made our endorsement process very clear.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'TWvIwiRuQMtQW54nuCbMTw',sig:'NEmpifx5aJcLW9Pxc929o96vJfh539r6xBgMJXHHYC0=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2238635027',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

At that leadership assembly, did it feel like the demand had reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of winning a version of a rent freeze repeatedly under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and then having the Eric Adams administration so aggressively strip that away? Did it feel like that was part of the higher intensity of this demand?

[The Adams administration’s] 12 percent raise over four years was callous. Our members talk all the time about how shocking an experience it was when we actually went to where Adams was supposedly living in Brooklyn and were met by 30 to 40 police officers. This is just normal coordinated tenant action, and the amount of police repression was I think very impactful on them and how they experienced the Adams administration.

New York City has had a democratic socialist mayor for the last seven months, and the mayor got elected thanks in part to this promise for a four-year rent freeze. But until June, he hadn’t actually delivered on it yet. After Mamdani’s inauguration, how did CAAAV orient as an organization around making sure that this was a promise that was actually carried out?

One of the clearest pieces we could see from our study of history is that there needed to be a strong community labor coalition to make sure that this project is successful. 

We were one of the founding members of People’s Majority Alliance [a coalition to get out the vote for Mamdani in the November 2025 election that included organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and unions like United Auto Workers]. All the organizations in People’s Majority have membership bases and were willing to take the risk and organize and act.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'TngyP--fS3d3bznl8wydVQ',sig:'gFIkOftH2vafSQUsS5QzAMIUBLETS8vcLwV_26v1HZY=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2283354063',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

And so through building that coalition, and seeing that the rent freeze [vote] is coming up, we worked really hard to bring in labor siblings that weren’t always a part of the Rent Guidelines Board campaign. We chose to bring in two organizations where renters made up a majority of the membership — New York Taxi Workers Alliance, [or NYTWSA], and PSC-CUNY [or the Professional Staff Congress at City University of New York]. So much of organizing is siloed in different sectors. There’s immigration, there’s housing, there’s labor. But the reality is that our youth members are going to CUNY, whose professors are also union members. They are also paying high rent and are trying to fight for a contract that can give them more wages and benefits, so they can pay this rent. 

In practice, there’s so much more overlap, and so we were able to bring in labor siblings to this fight. Members from both NYTWA and PSC-CUNY spoke at the preliminary vote and publicly amplified our rent freeze demand in press interviews and on social media. Because the rent board’s hearings are held on CUNY campuses, PSC-CUNY also led a number of town halls and participated in testifying in borough-based hearings. These alliances carry forward and we want to keep figuring out how we organize together. 

Now that a rent freeze has been won again, including the first-ever two-year rent freeze, what are the conversations like among your members and within the organization as a whole? On the heels of such a massive victory, where does the focus turn now and what kind of work needs to happen in order to keep your members, especially those who have been showing up to the RGB for so many years, activated and engaged in the fights to come?

That’s the big one. We’re seeing this as a real opportunity, this moment, and we want the campaign that we eventually take on to be one that is structurally reforming the systems, so that whoever the next mayor is, tenants have more power. I think there’s a lot of ideas for what it could look like. 

But we’re really willing to revisit strategies of the past. Building organizing was [historically] really difficult and individualized, but how can that look different in this new period? What needs to happen for it to look different? How does government need to relate differently, or how does even the housing movement need to change our practices to be more effective? 

#support-block_f4a263de34e508cb5d7220e9e2406555 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

We’re really wanting to assess where we’re strong and where we’re weak, and build closely with aligned working class organizations. It’s also not useful to divide, so how are we creating new systems so that the cogovernance project that we’re all undertaking — making working class people the leaders of the city — is more possible?

We see our role very clearly as trying to build a tenant movement ecosystem, but how do we actually define what tenant unionism is in the city? There are real, interesting questions of structure that are coming up. What does a democratic union in a tenant structure look like, and how do we have that citywide? It’s always been a little bit of a wilderness, where there has been really great organizing that’s happening in this wilderness, but so much of it has been pockets where there are good organizers and the right conditions for it. 

Now it feels like the moment for us to actually be talking to each other or struggling with each other way more closely, because it’s such a golden opportunity.

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Protect the Southeast Lake Cahuilla Cultural District

blog by Maya Grace Hausman

“I know that the Earth is alive, and she should not continue to be abused … I am hopeful that this society is ready to wake up.” Carmen Lucas, Kwaaymii Elder 

What is the Southeast Lake Cahuilla Active Volcanic Cultural District?

The proposed Southeast Lake Cahuilla Active Volcanic Cultural District is a 11,162-acre landscape located along the southeastern shore of the Salton Sea in Southern California. It has religious and cultural significance to the Kwaaymii, Kamia, Kumeyaay, Cahuilla, and Quechan Peoples. 

The unique desert landscape there was formed by a group of active volcanoes. Boiling mud pots bubble, geothermal steam rises into the air, and the Salton Sea occupies part of what was once Lake Cahuilla, California’s largest lake that ebbed and flowed in the desert. The valley floor is below sea level, and the mountains rise more than 5,000 feet around it. Tribal elders describe the mudpots as the heartbeat of Mother Earth and the rising steam as her breath. 

This important landscape is tied to the Creation stories of a number of California Indian tribes, such as the legend of the Great Snake, and holds religious importance. The region’s resources were and still are used for obsidian tools, clay sources, medicinal plants, and mineral paints. The region also encompasses land that Tribes have used to teach and to pass down histories, identities, and traditional knowledge to their children since time immemorial. 

“You can see the heartbeats and the steam. That is her breath, Mother Earth.”  Carmen Lucas , Kwaaymii Elder

These lands are currently under threat from industrial development fast-tracked by the Lithium Valley Specific Plan. The plan would allow geothermal powerplants, lithium extraction, and data centers to be built next to these culturally important sites without environmental study. 

State experts have warned that these projects will cause “significant and unavoidable” harm to the tribes’ resources. Sacred views will be impacted. Huge industrial buildings and cooling towers may block views of the mountains and night sky, which are essential for tribal ceremonies. Furthermore, the “heartbeat” may stop beating, as heavy drilling could alter the underground pressure and potentially cease the bubbling of the mudpots.

A geothermal facility is visible from the sacred site at Obsidian Butte

On top of this, “Lithium Valley” may have severe environmental impacts that Imperial County fails to fully address in their Programmatic Environmental Impact Report, such as further impairment to air quality and overuse of limited water. 

Listing on the National Register would provide some protection for these sacred sites. Every future project in the district would have to confront its impacts on the landscape honestly, in public, under the law. 

Why the National Register of Historic Places?

The National Register of Historic Places was established in 1966 under the National Historic Preservation Act and is administered by the National Park Service. It is the official registry of historic places considered worthy of preservation by the United States government. Listing carries legal weight. Any project that needs federal permits or funding must go through a formal review of its impacts on a listed site. 

In California, a place listed on the National Register is automatically added to the California Register of Historical Resources. Under state environmental law, that means agencies must treat harm to the district as significant and take real steps to avoid or reduce it. 

Often, tribal historic sites emphasize natural features with sacred and cultural connections, such as archaeological sites or natural landscapes. Elements of these landscapes are “Tribal Cultural Resources.” California protects these under the California Environmental Quality Act (or CEQA). California law requires agencies to consult with local tribes early in any land development process. The aim is to avoid or lessen any impacts to tribal heritage resources.

The ultimate goal of any site on the National Register is “stewardship of place,” or preserving and respecting these special environments for both current and future generations. 

What comes next

Gaining state and federal protection for these irreplaceable sites is urgent. Here are the next steps:

1. Put the district on the agenda: we are calling on State Historic Preservation Officer Julianne Polanco to add the  Southeast Lake Cahuilla Active Volcanic Cultural District nomination to the November meeting of the State Historical Resources Commission, along with positive staff recommendation. 
2. Vote for eligibility: When the Commission meets, they must vote to recommend this place as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. This vote conveys that the landscape is a vital part of American and tribal history. 
3. Move the nomination to the national level without delay: Once the state board approves the nomination, it should be sent to the National Park Service. 
4. The National Park Service will conduct a federal review of the nomination, coming out with a final decision on the listing within 45 days. 

Take Action: Defend the Heartbeat of Mother Earth 

This land does not exist simply as a means of extracting resources – nor does any land, for that matter. Instead, it contains an important, living history for the Kumeyaay, Kwaaymii, Kamia, Cahuilla, and Quechan people. Right now, this landscape is under threat from industrial development that could silence its “heartbeat” and block sacred views. While renewable energy is something to strive for, it cannot come at the expense of sacred land, and of the people who care for it. 

You can help ensure these lands are protected. Sign your name today to tell state and federal decision-makers that you support the Southeast Lake Cahuilla Active Volcanic Cultural District. 

Take action now to protect this district, the natural landscape, and its people. 

The post Defend the Heartbeat of Mother Earth  appeared first on Earthworks.

Max Wilbert and Will Falk were recently interviewed on LEE CAMP's show, Unredacted Tonight. They joined to talk about the absurd, nearly $50,000 fine that the Bureau of Land Management has levied against them for building composting toilets on land that is currently being destroyed for the 1,100 acre, 400-feet deep open pit part of Lithium Nevada's "Thacker Pass" mine.

The post CELDF on the Lee Camp show, Unredacted Tonight: Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Should be Flushed appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.