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Prime Minister Mark Carney recently announced five proposals he intends to fast track to defend our economy from the hostile Trump administration, live up to Canada’s climate commitments, and demonstrate respect for Indigenous rights.

Do the projects live up to these aspirational values? Let’s take a closer look.

Among the first five projects is an expansion of the LNG Canada shipping facility close to Kitimat, B.C. The federal and provincial governments also recently approved the Ksi Lisims LNG proposal located in the territory of the Nisga’a First Nation in northwest British Columbia.

While the elected Nisga’a council is in favour of the Ksi Lisims project, many of their Indigenous neighbours are not – including those along the contentious 800-kilometre Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline route planned to transport fracked natural gas from close to the Alberta border. Almost half of the First Nations who participated in environmental assessment process for Ksi Lisims opposed the project.

Gitanyow hereditary chiefs are blockading the construction of the PRGT across their territory. Other Indigenous Nations including the Haida and Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs oppose the LNG terminal and PRGT pipeline, originally approved in 2014 to transport gas to a liquifying facility on Lelu Island at the mouth of the Skeena River. 

Malaysian LNG giant Petronas cancelled that project in 2017 due to fierce opposition from First Nations and collapsing global prices. Almost 10 years later a similar confluence of Indigenous opposition and an impending market glut looms over one of Carney’s signature infrastructure projects.

It turns out embracing gas exports does not bode well for defending Canadian economic sovereignty, avoiding climate catastrophe or respecting free, prior and informed consent of First Nations.

Who’s Buying?

Ksi Lisims and Canada LNG completion five years from now would coincide with a 40 percent increase of global LNG capacity being built between now and 2029, accompanied by declining demand from some of our largest potential customers.

Japanese LNG consumption peaked in 2014 after the Fukushima disaster and has since dropped 25 percent due to recommissioned nuclear capacity. Japan, Europe and South Korea account for half of global LNG consumption and these markets could see a 20 percent decline in demand by 2030 as cheaper generation displaces pricey gas shipments. Chinese imports of LNG are already down 12 percent from 2024 due to surging deployment of renewables and increasing pipeline supply from Russia.

What about emerging economies? India generates only two percent of electricity from natural gas, rapidly being displaced by cheaper wind and solar sources already providing six times more capacity. According to a recent report from the Institute for Energy Economy and Financial Analysis, “In FY2025 31 gas-fired power plants — with a combined capacity of nearly 8 gigawatts (GW) and representing 32 percent of [India’s] total gas power capacity — did not generate any electricity at all, rendering them stranded assets.”

Pakistan got badly burned by ballooning LNG prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and instead aggressively embraced renewables. Imports of Chinese solar panels increased fourfold since 2022. Distributed energy is now so pervasive in Pakistan that local grid sales have dropped 10 percent and the country is now reselling LNG cargos they are contractually obligated to purchase, but do not want or need.

Who Owns Ksi Lisims?

Carney campaigned on standing up to a hostile Trump administration and defending our economy. But Ksi Lisims will hardly help to “build Canada strong.” The floating LNG export facility will be constructed in South Korea using non-Canadian steel and labour. Majority ownership will be held by Western LNG based in Texas with financial backing from Wall Street giant Blackstone. Blackstone’s CEO was a prominent donor to the 2024 Trump campaign and remains a key advisor to a president who continues to threaten Canada’s sovereignty.

The American-based Atlas Network sought to undermine Canada’s adoption of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) to further fossil fuel approvals like Ksi Lisims. Now that UNDRIP is (slowly) being implemented, LNG insiders have suggested that making First Nations the public face of support for new oil and gas infrastructure has become the “magic sauce” for project approvals.

“This is a shapeshifting innovation in the position of industry,” Hayden King, executive director of the Indigenous-led public policy think tank the Yellowhead Institute told DeSmog in 2022. “First Nations are going to assert and enforce their own versions of consent. So the smart play for industry now is to get on board and attempt to manipulate what that consent means. I think that’s what you’re seeing happening now.”  

Climate Confusion

The LNG industry enjoys asserting that there is somehow a climate benefit from extracting and burning vast amounts of natural gas. To be clear, there is no compelling evidence that LNG is significantly displacing coal as a fuel source. Even if that was true, analysis from researchers at Cornell University shows that after accounting for unavoidable methane leaks, LNG has a larger greenhouse gas impact compared to equivalent coal generation.

Backers of B.C. LNG also boast that emissions will be lower than other projects due to plans to compress and cool the fracked natural gas with vast amounts of renewable energy. How vast? Fully completed, Ksi Lisims and LNG Canada would require the equivalent of the entire generating capacity of the newly completed and highly contentious Site C dam, which could otherwise supply clean electricity to 500,000 B.C. homes or power far less polluting industries.

Building a $3 billion transmission line – likely paid for by B.C. taxpayers – would only be completed years after Ksi Lisims becomes operational. In the meantime it will be powered by burning natural gas releasing 1.8 megatonnes of CO2 per year, equal to about 40 percent of the all home heating emissions in the province.

Rather than building Canada strong, Ksi Lisims and other LNG projects could undermine relations with many B.C. First Nations when our country is allegedly committed to reconciliation and can ill afford unnecessary conflicts with Indigenous peoples.

Canada’s climate goals and our national sovereignty are likewise undermined by another extractive fossil fuel project constructed overseas and bankrolled by American interests instead of investing in shovel-ready Canadian-built renewable solutions. Given the looming global glut, LNG export expansions are also at risk of failing financially and saddling the taxpayer with sunk costs and expensive subsidies.

Other than all that, well done Mr. Carney.

The post Why Is Canada Fast-Tracking LNG? Not for Economy, Climate or Reconciliation appeared first on DeSmog.

“Sometimes the most powerful acts of defiance don’t look serious at all. They look like play. Way back court jesters teased their kings and got away with saying what no one else could.” In today’s episode of Field Notes, award-winning photographer (and GJEP co-founder) Orin Langelle shares the story behind the iconic photo taken in […]

As Paramaribo, Suriname, flooded with shin-high water during a rainstorm in June, hundreds of taxis jostled for space on a recently paved street on the outskirts of the capital city. Passengers in suits disembarked alongside an overgrown canal. The visitors, some of whom had come from as far away as Texas and Malaysia, were there to commemorate this small country’s entry into the ranks of the world’s major oil producers.

Paramaribo sits on the northeast coast of South America, at the edge of a relatively undisturbed section of the Amazon rainforest. This massive jungle covers more than 90 percent of Suriname’s landmass, making it the world’s most forested country by percentage. It also allows Suriname to claim itself as “carbon-negative,” meaning that the nation absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits.

Sources: USGS / NaturalEarth / NASA. Offshore project location courtesy of Staatsolie. Jesse Nichols / Grist

As a result, Suriname is one of the few countries that can make an unimpeachable claim to being on the right side of the climate crisis. But all that is about to change.

In 2028, the country’s first offshore oil platform will begin pumping almost a quarter-million barrels of crude each day, roughly enough to supply the daily needs of all the drivers in the state of Colorado. In its first year alone, this project from the French oil major TotalEnergies is expected to generate billions of dollars of revenue for the government and billions more in private spending, causing the country’s economy to grow by more than half. More offshore rigs are expected to follow.

The air at the fifth annual Suriname Energy, Oil, and Gas Summit in June buzzed in anticipation of this coming prosperity. Hundreds of oil industry figures and Surinamese politicians crowded into the conference tents. They drank rum cocktails and sampled canapes, gabbed at trade show booths with representatives from drilling companies and construction firms, and then took taxis to after-parties where DJs shouted out conference sponsors such as the consulting firm EY.

Cars drive along a busy street in central Paramaribo. The capital city’s urban infrastructure can struggle to handle rainfall and floods during storms.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

All the while, they celebrated what they saw as a global shift away from aggressive climate policy. A speaker from Shell praised the emergence of a “balanced energy transition” approach, while those from development banks and market analysis firms spoke about a new emphasis on “energy addition,” rather than “transition.” As the attendees saw it, there was nothing odd about the spectacle of a carbon-negative country hosting a celebration of new oil extraction — amid damaging floods only likely to become more frequent with more global warming. 

From one angle, the launch of Suriname’s oil industry is a retelling of a familiar story: A massive oil company wins over a country with the promise of riches, enlisting it in an effort to produce more of a commodity that is destroying the world. But from another, it’s the story of a country seeking to balance its economic growth with the welfare of the planet, in the absence of global infrastructure to help it develop in other ways. 

To hear Suriname’s leaders tell it, the oil project would allow the nation to uplift its citizens without harming the climate. 

“The new dawn … means that Suriname is given a new chance for sustainable development,” said Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the country’s outgoing president, in his opening remarks at the conference. “The development of the oil and gas industry and carbon offsets go hand in hand in our country. We are not pursuing growth at any cost.”

A statue in Paramaribo celebrates the 25th anniversary of the founding of Staatsolie, the state oil company of Suriname. Jake Bittle / Grist

Up until now, Suriname’s coveted “carbon-negative” status has been inextricably linked to its underdevelopment. Its slice of the Amazon sequesters more carbon than the country can emit only because its citizens by and large cannot afford the energy-intensive lifestyles that much of the world takes for granted. The average resident earned less than $500 per month in 2024.

Now, Suriname’s leaders want to alleviate that poverty without becoming a net source of carbon. The plan is not just to make money and employ people, but also to use oil as a financing mechanism to build an economy that will someday become independent of fossil fuels, according to senior government officials who have served across the country’s recent administrations. 

This means a host of new infrastructure projects and social welfare programs that check the boxes of sustainable development: Suriname will seed green industries such as ecotourism and climate-smart agriculture, build mangrove sea barriers and storm-drain systems to stop flooding, and transition away from the use of imported bunker fuel and toward solar and hydropower.

Elsy Poeketie collects water at her daughter’s house in Paramaribo after heavy rainfall.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

But it also means allowing Total, the world’s sixth-largest oil company by market capitalization, to pump around 750 million new barrels of oil — more than will come from a massive oil development such as ConocoPhillips’s Willow project in Alaska. And that’s the bare minimum, assuming that no other multinationals strike crude and drill their own rigs.

“We have to diversify,” said Marciano Dasai, Suriname’s former environment minister. “We can say, ‘OK, we’re going to do the oil and gas,’ or we can say, ‘OK, let’s do the oil and gas … to get us out of debt and do the transformation to a green economy.’”

Suriname’s history reads like an argument against the idea that exploiting natural resources can bring about prosperity. When the country gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, the U.S. aluminum firm Alcoa had been mining a mineral known as bauxite in the country for decades, but it offshored most of the profits. Since independence, the government has helped develop gold mines and two small onshore oil fields, but living standards are still low and inequality high. 

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, Suriname sank into a debt spiral, the result of excessive household power subsidies and low prices for commodities such as gold that are its main source of export revenue. The country owed around half a billion dollars to China, $88 million to the Paris Club, and another half-billion to private bondholders that had lent money to the government to help it prop up public budgets. In 2020, the government defaulted on its sovereign debt, leading the International Monetary Fund to step in with strict curbs on government spending. 

But as this debt crisis unfolded, seeming salvation was waiting offshore. In 2015, Exxon Mobil made a major oil discovery off the coast of neighboring Guyana. Drilling studies soon found that the offshore ridge near Suriname contained billions of barrels’ worth of oil, much of it lightweight and easy to extract, plus vast stores of natural gas. A half-dozen firms started exploring in Suriname’s water, and in 2021, Total struck oil.

A discovery such as this often leads to disaster through the so-called resource curse: When poor countries become reliant on new fossil fuel revenue, it leaves them vulnerable to global price fluctuations, and their governments sometimes embezzle or misuse oil money rather than sharing it with citizens. 

A companion phenomenon, known as Dutch disease, occurs when a country’s overwhelming focus on one new industry leads to a decline in the rest of its economy, as Suriname’s former colonizer experienced after a gas field discovery in the 20th century. Countries including Cameroon, Guyana, and South Sudan, to name a few, have developed oil projects over the decades that never delivered broad prosperity.

The new headquarters of TotalEnergies rises above the outskirts of Paramaribo. The French supermajor plans to extract hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from an offshore platform starting in 2028. Jake Bittle / Grist

In theory, Suriname is in danger of falling into this trap. The country has a history of corruption, and until 2020, it was ruled by Dési Bouterse, a former soldier who staged a military coup in the 1980s and was later elected president. But it also had a secret weapon in its negotiations with Total. Because it had already developed a small onshore oil field in the 1980s, Suriname had a public oil company called Staatsolie, which operated relatively independently. While it had nowhere near the resources needed to drill for oil offshore — Total’s revenue was two thousand times greater — the state-owned company’s leaders had more fossil fuel expertise than those in most small countries.

Led by a mild-mannered engineer named Annand Jagesar, Staatsolie drove a hard bargain with Total: The smaller company insisted on a royalty rate of 6.25 percent, more than twice what Guyana was able to negotiate, as well as a 36 percent corporate income tax and a guarantee that Total would hire locals. Staatsolie also secured a $1.6 billion loan from development banks, which allowed it to take a 20 percent stake in the project. In all, Suriname will get up to 70 percent of the revenue from Total’s oil. 

The talks were so tense that at one point, Total threatened to walk out. But Staatsolie held firm, and the larger company came back to the table.

Total “was not nice in the beginning, and we were not nice in the beginning, but I must tell you, this project is one of the best projects in the world,” Jagesar said at the conference in June. (The company did not respond to interview requests.)

Even before the Total deal was final, Suriname used the promise of future wealth to reverse its debt spiral. In 2023, the government restructured its Wall Street debt, and it passed legislation the following year to divert a chunk of oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Norway’s. 

The turnaround was remarkable. Just a few years after defaulting on its debt, Suriname was on a path to being debt-free. Other major oil companies such as Chevron, Petronas, and Shell were staking out developments, encouraged by Total’s success.

Last October, Total made its final decision to proceed with the oil project, which the company called GranMorgu. The name was a pun — it is the name of a wide-mouthed fish that is native to Suriname’s offshore waters, but in the unofficial national language of Sranan Tongo, it means “new dawn.” Given the scale of change that the oil project would bring to Suriname, the name seemed more than appropriate.

A mural in the offices of Staatsolie celebrates the career of Rudolf Elias, one of the state-owned oil company’s former directors. Jake Bittle / Grist

This oil project is good news for Suriname — its people are poised to get higher-paying jobs, more foreign business, and far better public services. But in the eyes of many of the world’s climate advocates, it’s a disaster, particularly at a moment when governments are supposed to be turning away from fossil fuels. 

“As a sovereign state, we do have the right to exploit our resources in the way we see fit,” said Gina Griffith, the head of the Suriname chapter of Conservation International, a leading environmentalist nonprofit. “But it’s so contradictory.”

That Suriname has championed a new oil development is symptomatic of the impasse that plagues global climate policy. The 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined a principle known as “common but differentiated responsibilities”— in essence, the idea that rich countries, which got rich in part by producing the lion’s share of carbon emissions, must do more to fight climate change than poor countries. Wealthy nations have agreed in principle to not only reduce their own emissions but also to help protect poor countries against climate change and develop their green economies.

But rich countries have lagged on both tasks, particularly the responsibility to aid green development. They have failed to provide poor countries with anything like the money that would be necessary for “sustainable development,” or economic growth without fossil fuels.

This aerial view shows the coast of the Weg naar Zee resort in Paramaribo. Suriname faces severe challenges from flooding and coastal erosion.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

The reason is simple: Such development is expensive, even more so than paying for infrastructure to protect against disasters. There have been isolated efforts by rich countries to create so-called just energy transition partnerships, or investment consortia that would help speed up decarbonization in certain countries, but these have largely failed to achieve deep carbon reductions — despite channeling huge amounts of money toward places such as South Africa ($8.5 billion), Vietnam ($15.5 billion), and Indonesia ($20 billion). The Colombian government is struggling to raise money for its own proposal to build a post-oil economy. 

So countries fall back on the old models of development. This rush toward fossil fuels in places such as Nigeria and Senegal often elicits a lecture from wealthy countries that are decarbonizing, but the truth is that these countries don’t have much of a choice. President Donald Trump’s second administration, and in particular Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have argued that this is good, that ending “energy poverty” through coal, oil, and gas development is ideal even if it harms the climate. The administration has cut foreign aid, withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, and slashed funding for the United Nations and other bodies, which will make financing green development harder for the rest of the world.

Suriname’s leaders argue that they have found a way to thread this needle. The country is building out a fossil fuel industry, with two big caveats. First, it is taking every possible step to reduce the emissions from its oil infrastructure while protecting its rainforest. Second, it is only developing oil as a means of building a low-carbon economy and raising the living standards of its citizens. Essentially, Surinamese officials say they are using oil revenue to do the development that rich countries won’t pay for.

“A lot of countries say, ‘How can you do oil and gas, and then you have this forest? This is something that is contradictory,’” said Dasai, the environment minister. “We say that in this phase, especially now, the climate financing mechanisms are not working yet.” Given that the massive wealth transfer promised under the Paris Agreement has not happened, developing countries such as Suriname must both raise the living standards of their citizens and work to prevent harm to the global climate.

A view of the Staatsolie oil refinery in Wanica. Even as Suriname builds out a fossil fuel industry, it is also branding itself as a climate leader.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

Total could be a good partner for such an effort, as perhaps the only supermajor oil company that has not retreated from its climate commitments. During the conference in June, Total executives pointed to plans for an offshore rig that will cut down on carbon emissions. The entire rig will be electric, and Total has agreed to reinject almost all natural gas that comes to the surface, flaring it only in emergencies. (Electricity use and gas flaring account for a large share of the emissions associated with getting oil out of the ground.) Suriname’s carbon ledger will technically remain negative overall.

But the center of this mitigation effort will be the rainforest. Suriname’s relatively pristine Amazon jungle is the source of its carbon-negative status, but new mining and logging developments claim more of it each year. The country has lost about 1.5 percent of its forest cover since the turn of the century, according to one watchdog group. If left unchecked, deforestation could threaten the country’s carbon-negative status sometime in the next decade. So even as the country sells oil on the global market, it also wants to sell so-called carbon offsets, or monetized guarantees that the forest will stay intact. Many countries and companies purchase these credits on international exchanges to help counterbalance their own emissions. 

The carbon offset industry is rife with fraud and negligence, and many offset projects around the world have fallen apart, but most experts anticipate that demand for these offsets will grow over the next few decades. For Suriname, rainforest credits could act as a companion product to barrels of oil, allowing foreign countries to buy both the fuel that they need and a counterweight to that fuel’s emissions. For Suriname, the credits could be a way to replace the financial benefits of destructive sectors such as mining and logging.

“The world has everything to gain from Suriname protecting its forests,” said John Goedschalk, a policy consultant who advises Suriname’s new president on climate finance. Total has offered to buy $50 million of Suriname’s potential carbon credits to appease its climate-conscious shareholders, and countries including Japan and Singapore have expressed interest in purchasing credits as well. (The country has not yet made a deal with any of these parties.)

An aerial view of the Suriname River at Pokigron. More than 90 percent of Suriname’s land is undeveloped rainforest, which makes the country one of just a few carbon-negative nations on Earth.
Michael Runkel / Getty Images

For attendees of the fifth annual Suriname Energy, Oil, and Gas Summit, the promise of low-emissions drilling and carbon credits were enough to allay the potential climate guilt that the rum cocktails didn’t assuage. Everyone present, from Santokhi and his ministers to the senior Total executives, insisted that developing an offshore oil project would not threaten Suriname’s carbon-negative status, and that it was consistent with a world where fossil fuel growth slows relative to the explosion in renewable energy — a world, in other words, where “transition” takes place at a comfortable pace for all parties. 

However, this claim about carbon-negativity relies on imperfect arithmetic. Countries only tally the carbon emissions from within their borders. For Suriname, that means that it only has to count the emissions that come from pumping oil out of the ocean and loading it onto tankers for export; it does not have to worry about the emissions that come from burning the oil itself. 

Just counting in-country emissions, it’s true that Suriname can build GranMorgu without becoming carbon-positive. But Scope 3 emissions, from actually burning oil in trucks and planes, account for as much as 90 percent of the emissions produced by an oil company such as Total. The project will produce around 80 million barrels of oil per year, and burning all those barrels of oil will create more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide — dozens of times more than Suriname’s rainforest can sequester. The project may not add much to Suriname’s own side of the carbon ledger, but the oil will still be burned somewhere.

Yet not all barrels of oil are created equal. As long as the world continues to use crude, it will find that crude from somewhere, and Suriname’s leaders argue that their oil is better for the climate. It is far cheaper and cleaner to extract than oil from places such as the Canadian tar sands, and GranMorgu will produce far less methane leakage than oil infrastructure in places such as Iraq. If global oil demand flattens or declines, Suriname could, in theory, outcompete and displace oil from other places, with marginal benefit for the climate.

A view of fuel tanks operated by GOw2, a local fuel company in Wanica, in September 2022.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

In a scenario where demand falls fast due to rapid deployment of renewables and electric vehicles, Suriname may end up producing oil instead of rich countries rather than alongside them. Then, it could make a case for itself as a pragmatic climate leader, a country that is leveraging its resources while causing minimal new damage to the planet.

This was what gave the country such allure for Total, Chevron, and the other majors that staked out the conference. Even in 30 years, if oil prices fall and countries get picky about where they import from, GranMorgu and other projects will still be marketable. The European Union will impose a carbon tariff on oil imports by 2030, slapping an extra fee on dirtier barrels, and Total will be well-positioned to sell oil into the continent’s new climate-conscious market. 

Of course, if demand doesn’t fall — if countries scuttle their climate policies and keep using more fossil fuels — then Suriname will be taking the same path as other developing countries before it, compromising the world’s future for the sake of its economic development. Even the bullish oil executives and market analysts in Paramaribo acknowledged that oil demand could not go up forever, but the world’s experts are divided on when this peak demand will arrive: The International Energy Agency expects a peak as early as 2029, but BP expects demand to continue rising well into the 2030s. OPEC no longer forecasts a peak at all.

The trajectory of oil demand is critical for the future of the planet, but Suriname’s leaders couldn’t wait around to see whether and when the curve starts to fall. With no other pathways toward development and the rich countries of the world still lagging, they had no choice but to start pumping.

The other big uncertainty is whether Suriname will achieve the green development that its leaders have promised or get stuck in a fossil fuel rut.

Suriname’s leaders had only just begun to answer that question this year when the country held a national election in May. Santokhi faced voter ire during the campaign for cutting the fuel and power subsidies, which contributed to a cost-of-living crisis. In his reelection pitch, Santokhi unveiled an oil royalties program that promised every citizen a one-time dividend of at least $750, equivalent to about six weeks’ wages. This model is similar to the long-running Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays out regular oil dividends to state residents. 

Voters still spurned Santokhi’s party, depriving him of a majority. Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, whose party won the most seats, formed a coalition in July and became the country’s first woman to serve as president. Geerlings-Simons is seen as level-headed, but her populist party had serious baggage — it was the party of the disgraced Bouterse, who died in exile after being convicted of assassinating political opponents and trafficking cocaine.

Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, the leader of the National Democratic Party attends a rally in Paramaribo in May. This summer, Geerlings-Simons became Suriname’s first woman to serve as president.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

In Paramaribo, many Surinamese expressed skepticism about the new government. They said they trusted Staatsolie to regulate oil production but worried that elected officials would mismanage or embezzle new public revenue.

“If you look at the way the government has done things, there’s a lot of corruption,” said Jonathan Blackman, a vendor at a Javanese market in central Paramaribo. He said he wants the government to improve health care and road infrastructure in tangible ways rather than handing out cash. “They need to … make sure people have a better life,” he said. “Then they can keep the $750.” (Earlier this month, Geerlings-Simons’ administration paused the oil royalties program, saying it would instead invest future crude income in building a sustainable economy.)

Jonathan Blackman sells phone accessories and other products in the Javanese market in central Paramaribo. He hopes that the Surinamese government uses oil revenue to build new industries and expand social services. Jake Bittle / Grist

There is no shortage of ways in which the government of Suriname could improve people’s lives. One of the most urgent investment needs is for projects that help Paramaribo adapt to the floods that clog the city almost every time it rains. The government could use oil money to expand drainage networks, extend sewer systems to fortify Paramaribo against rainstorms, and restore mangrove forests to protect outlying communities from sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. It could also improve its roads and airports to stoke ecotourism, or build schools and hospitals to upskill workers and improve health outcomes. The government is already partnering with the Inter-American Development Bank to plan new investments in renewable energy, which will help the country end its reliance on the imported bunker fuel it burns for electricity. New revenue from Total’s crude could — somewhat paradoxically — help further those transition plans.

In the long term, the government will need to use oil profits to build an economy that plays to Suriname’s other strengths. Government leaders and climate experts in Suriname cite industries like rainforest ecotourism and sustainable agriculture as potential growth areas. Yet again, marketing carbon credits will be a centerpiece of this strategy: If the country can become an ecotourism destination, develop a thriving farm sector, and generate tens of millions of dollars a year through the sale of rainforest offsets, it may not need oil revenue by the middle of the century. 

To arrive at this outcome would take careful planning, but it can be done. Santokhi had only just begun to confront this dilemma when he was ousted. In February, his administration released a “green development strategy,” naming several options for what “green development” might look like. But the government drafted no formal plan for how to spend oil money, held no public engagement on the subject, and hasn’t managed to sell a single rainforest carbon credit, despite international demand. 

“There is no discussion being held, no national debate, about what we are going to do with our oil revenues,” said Griffith, of Conservation International, during the June conference. “We’ve been doing gold for the past 50 years and we’re still poor. I just think that we have been focusing too much only on the extractives and not diversifying and looking for other means of income.”

In her inaugural address, Geerlings-Simons said that her government has “the task of ensuring that the profits from the oil and gas sector improve the standard of living for every Surinamese.” Implicit in this promise was a recognition that it is not enough for the oil boom to improve Suriname’s dire finances. The country must also build a new economy with the consent and participation of its citizens. This will require ample public engagement, long-term planning, and transparency, none of which are hallmarks of the country’s recent past.

Suriname’s leaders have a cautious optimism that they can avoid the fate of other countries that have developed oil without planning for the energy transition and escape a legacy of corruption and instability. If Geerlings-Simons and her fellow leaders succeed, they will have done more than make the best of a bad hand — they will have gone a long way toward solving a problem that the rest of the world has failed to tackle. But if they fail, they will leave their own country dependent on the whims of the global oil market. They’ll also leave the world a little hotter and a little closer to catastrophe.

“If we do this right, then Suriname could become like a Valhalla,” said Goedschalk, the climate consultant, who will likely advise Geerlings-Simons on green development issues. “There’s so much to do, and a big part of what there is to do is to build an economy, because that was never done.”

A replica of an oil pumpjack in Block 58, a new oil-themed bar in central Paramaribo. The bar takes its name from the offshore zone where TotalEnergies will soon be pumping oil. Jake Bittle / Grist

The optimism is starting to catch on among some residents of Paramaribo. Down the street from the conference hotels, a computer technician named Jerry Goercharn runs Block 58, a bar that he’s named after the offshore section where Total found oil. Goercharn opened the bar a year ago amid the first news about the Total project. He filled the walls with maps of Suriname’s offshore oil and bought a model pumpjack for the entranceway, a sign of his optimism about the future.

“It’s definitely good, though it all depends on how the government will spend it,” he told me on an afternoon before the conference.

But it was too early to tell what Suriname’s future would look like, or to predict how the country would use its newfound wealth. Even as the sun set and dinner hour approached, the bar was still empty.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why one of the world’s greenest countries is betting its future on oil on Oct 23, 2025.

With relatively little fanfare, the first-ever global carbon tax was poised to be formally adopted as an international agreement this year.

The International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, had drafted a net-zero framework to move the sector toward cleaner fuels — a crucial step in the energy transition, since the industry that handles around 90 percent of global trade also accounts for 3 percent of the world’s emissions.

The framework would require shippers to pay a fee per ton of greenhouse gas emissions if their emissions rose above a certain threshold. The fees would then be pooled into a fund and distributed to support the development and uptake of alternative fuels and decarbonization in developing countries. The shipping industry, which had been seeking a consistent regulatory environment and level playing field, was largely supportive of the plan. So were the vast majority of U.N. member countries.

Then, in April, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew from IMO negotiations. As a vote over the framework approached this month, the administration began pressuring other nations to abandon the deal. The administration also released a statement, warning that the U.S. was considering additional tariffs, visa restrictions, additional port fees, and sanctions on officials from countries that voted for the framework. President Trump himself took to Truth Social, calling the proposal a “global green new scam tax on shipping.”

The campaign succeeded. Last week, at the tail end of negotiations, Saudi Arabia abruptly called for a vote to adjourn the IMO meeting for one year without making a decision on the net-zero framework. Since IMO rules dictate that a call to adjourn precedes all other considerations, the proposed delay was voted on immediately and passed with 57 countries in favor and 49 against. (Twenty-one countries abstained from the vote.) That means that it will be another year, at least, before the framework can be officially inked.

Close observers of the IMO’s decarbonization efforts told Grist that U.S. obstruction was a decisive factor in preventing the framework’s adoption. 

“It’s fair to say that the retaliatory measures and punitive threats that were shared by the U.S. administration in advance of the meetings played their part,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at Opportunity Green, a U.K.-based climate group that has been closely tracking the IMO negotiations. “The outcome last week is a devastating blow for climate multilateralism.”

The IMO has been inching toward emissions rules for several years, but the effort ramped up in 2023 when the agency’s 176 member countries agreed to a greenhouse gas strategy that would commit them to net-zero emissions by about 2050. In order to reach that goal, countries began negotiations on legally binding measures that included a standard capping the carbon-intensity of fuel used by shipping companies, as well as an economic measure to enforce that standard, which could take the form of a levy or carbon trading mechanism. 

On the economic measure, countries were split. An ambitious coalition of more than 64 countries, including European Union countries, the United Kingdom, Pacific and Caribbean nations, and African countries, proposed a relatively high flat tax on all maritime emissions. Under their proposal, every ton of their greenhouse gas emissions would be priced at the same level across the board. Another set of countries led by China, however, were in favor of a carbon trading mechanism that allowed countries to offset their emissions through carbon credits. (China and other emerging economies are large exporters, and a flat fee, they argued, would hurt businesses and reduce their competitiveness.)

Ultimately, the countries landed on a compromise with a two-tier system: High emitters in the top tier could engage in some amount of carbon trading. Those in the bottom tier would pay the levy based on a fee per ton of emissions. And those who comply with the zero or near-zero emissions fuel requirements would receive financial rewards. This approach became the net-zero framework that was supposed to be voted into effect this year. 

The shipping industry largely welcomed the framework. For one, the industry has had record profits in recent years. A report by Opportunity Green found that 139 of the world’s largest shipping companies, which make up more than 90 percent of the global fleet, made $340 billion in profits from 2019 to 2023. The 10 largest companies were effectively taxed at less than 10 percent on average — far lower than the average global corporation tax rate of 21.5 percent. 

The industry was also eager for regulatory certainty. Ahead of the meeting last week, a group of trade organizations representing the shipping industry issued a statement calling for the adoption of the framework. “Only global rules will decarbonize a global industry,” they noted. “Without the framework, shipping would risk a growing patchwork of unilateral regulations, increasing costs without effectively contributing to decarbonization.”

With the framework now in jeopardy, the path forward is unclear. Although the shipping talks won’t resume for another year, Fenton said countries should push for additional technical clarity during other interim meetings to reach a consensus and ensure the framework is adopted next year. 

Meanwhile, cities and ports across the world have been taking steps to green their infrastructure. Alisa Kreynes, a director of the ports and shipping program at C40, a global network of mayors taking climate action, pointed to various initiatives already underway to reduce carbon emissions from the shipping industry. Cities have built green shipping corridors, which are trade routes where ports and other partners work together to transition to zero or near-zero emission fuels. Ports have also begun establishing stricter emission standards for trucks, and supported the development of offshore wind. 

“The way we are reacting is that cities continue to deliver a just maritime transition, despite what happened at the IMO last week,” Kreynes said. “The cities will continue to push forward with advancing equitable port and shipping decarbonization.”

But those measures won’t put a significant dent in the industry’s primary source of emissions, which is the massive, fuel-hungry boats that crisscross the globe delivering goods. And the collapse of IMO negotiations rings as a warning about the fragility of international cooperation. The dynamic could continue at COP30, the international climate conference taking place in Belém, Brazil, next month. 

“The sort of playbook of delay-and-obfuscate is more likely to be on the table and visible at COP30 than it would have been if it had not prevailed here at the IMO,” said Fenton. “And that is hugely disappointing.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The entire world was ready to reduce shipping emissions. Then Trump stepped in. on Oct 23, 2025.

State and federal policies have led Puerto Rico to produce only 10–15% of the food it consumes, making it almost entirely dependent on maritime imports from the United States for its supply. This dependence makes Puerto Rico particularly vulnerable to climate change and international crises.

The post Puerto Rico: Rethinking How We Grow, Share, and Govern Food Systems appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Banking on rainforest destruction Channel News brendan 23rd October 2025 Teaser Media

Major meat and dairy producers emit more greenhouse gases than the nation of Saudi Arabia, the world’s number two oil producer — emissions that rival those of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, according to a new analysis published Monday. 

The assessment, which was produced by the nonprofit research firm Profundo and four environmental advocacy groups, estimates that the 45 largest meat and dairy corporations in the world were responsible for more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions in 2023. Only eight other countries worldwide emit more. 

About half the total came from just five companies — JBS, Marfrig, Tyson Foods, Minerva Foods, and Cargill. Together, those five firms emit 480 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent gasses annually, more than Chevron (454 million tons), Shell (429 million tons), and BP (366 million tons), the analysis shows.

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The report was released in advance of next month’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. At last year’s COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, representatives from big agribusiness corporations, meat and dairy trade groups, and lobbying firms representing the sector turned out by the hundreds. 

“As governments head to COP30 in the heart of the Amazon — an ecosystem devastated by global meat giants — scientists are clear that a failure to bring down agricultural emissions will torpedo us well past the Paris 1.5°C red line,” said Shefali Sharma, global agriculture policy expert for Greenpeace Germany, in a statement provided to DeSmog. Greenpeace Nordic was one of the four advocacy groups that contributed to the report, alongside Foodrise, Friends of the Earth U.S., and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. 

The meat and dairy sector’s biggest climate impacts are due to methane, a greenhouse gas that warms the planet 80 times faster than carbon dioxide when measured on a 20-year timescale. Methane, which cattle and other ruminant livestock burp up as part of their digestive process, accounted for more than half of meat and dairy’s climate pollution, according to the report. The 45 companies emit more methane than the entire European Union plus the United Kingdom, the assessment found.

But carbon dioxide is a significant factor too, mostly thanks to the the razing of forests for grazing and feed crops. Manure management practices also contribute to a sizable footprint from nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that’s about 270 times more potent than CO2. 

JBS was by far the biggest polluter among the 45 companies, responsible for 24 percent of the group’s total estimated emissions. The Brazilian meatpacking giant, which slaughtered an estimated 20.8 million cattle in 2023, had greater methane emissions than ExxonMobil and Shell combined that year, according to the report.

In 2021, JBS announced a commitment to reach net-zero by 2040, running a full-page ad in The New York Timesthat insisted “anything less is not an option.” But the company has since backtracked on the pledge, while gearing up for what it projects will be a 70 percent increase in global animal protein demand by 2050. 

“It was never a promise that JBS was going to make this happen,” JBS global chief sustainability officer Jason Weller told Reuters earlier this year. 

Though carbon dioxide emissions can linger in the atmosphere for thousands of years, methane is a comparatively short-lived greenhouse gas. It warms the planet for only about a decade before breaking down — which means ambitious methane cuts have the potential to rapidly cool the planet.

Some experts liken methane cuts to an “emergency brake,” what the United Kingdom-based environmental nonprofit Climate Crisis Advisory Group calls “the fastest and most cost-effective lever available to slow warming within our lifetimes.” 

Cows Burp Up Tons of Methane

Agriculture is the number one source of global methane emissions, due in large part to belching by ruminant livestock like cattle, who can burp up well over 150 pounds of methane per year. That adds up to a major per-capita impact in countries like the U.S. that consume much more beef compared to the global average. A study published Monday in Nature Communications found that the carbon footprint of meat consumption in America’s cities alone is roughly equivalent to that of domestic oil and gas combustion. 

University of Michigan professor Benjamin Goldstein, a lead author on that study, said dietary changes could be as significant as putting solar panels on your house — a similar impact at just a fraction of the cost. 

“If you just cut out half of your beef consumption and maybe switch to chicken, you can get similar amounts of greenhouse gas savings depending on where you live,” Goldstein said in a statement. “If we can get people to use this type of study to think about how diets in cities impact their environmental impacts, this could have huge effects across the United States.”

High- and upper-income countries currently consume 77 percent of the global meat supply, compared to just 2 percent in lower-income nations. But climate-minded dietary changes can still be a politically fraught topic in wealthier nations like the U.S., where meat tends to be a culturally important staple —  and industry-funded narratives often pour fuel on the culture war fire.

In a section of their report devoted to solutions, the four nonprofits outlined strategies that go beyond appeals to individual-level choices, including shifting public money away from animal agriculture and policies that make meat and dairy firms bear the financial cost of their own pollution. But above all the report emphasized the importance of transparent emissions accounting — the kind of information that helps the public connect the dots.

More than 40 percent of Americans incorrectly think eating a more plant-oriented diet wouldn’t help climate change at all, or aren’t sure that it would, according to research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

JBS, Marfrig, Tyson, Minerva, and Cargill had not provided comments by press time.

The post Top Meat and Dairy Companies Have Same Climate Impact as Biggest Oil and Gas Firms appeared first on DeSmog.

La Via Campesina expresses its deep solidarity with the courageous people of Ecuador, who are facing a serious escalation of repression, criminalization, and systematic human rights violations.

The post La Via Campesina denounces alarming authoritarianism, judicial persecution, and militarization of territories in Ecuador appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

A new snapshot analysis of BHP’s significant coal expansion plans for Central Queensland highlights the company’s lack of consistency on climate commitments and calls into question its ongoing criticism of QLD’s tiered coal royalties system.

Mississippi sides with Drax as Gloster now faces more pollution. The historic denial of Drax's permit is overturned as the state chooses profits over people.

The post Statement: Mississippi Fails Its People first appeared on Dogwood Alliance.

Protest against genetically engineered (GE) trees and carbon and biodiversity offsets at the UN CBD in Panama, October 21. Photo: Mirna Inés Fernández Pradel NOTE: Global Justice Ecology Project is in Panama City for UN Convention on Biological Diversity meetings to network with allies and take part in CBD discussions and decisions preparing for the UN […]

The city of Gabès has been experiencing a heroic struggle for several days, where its people have risen up, united under a clear slogan: “The people want the dismantling of the units”, driven by a legitimate demand and clear program.

The post Tunisia: Statement of Support and Solidarity with the People of Gabès appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The UN Working Group on Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food have issued a powerful joint statement calling for “binding accountability for agribusiness to safeguard peasants’ rights and global food security.

The post UN experts urge binding accountability for agribusiness to safeguard peasants’ rights and global food security appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The race is on to curb methane emissions and prevent energy waste through oil and gas supply chains. Readily quantifiable and comparable methane intensity metrics are sought after to meet this goal. Adopting such robust metrics will permit market actors and policymakers to assess companies, countries, and assets and comprehensively differentiate oil and gas methane intensities worldwide.

Methane intensity — the amount of methane waste generated when oil and gas are produced, processed, and transported — is a critical consideration in a growing number of applications. Corporate target setting and reporting, financial sector investment guidance, insurance underwriting, and policy implementation all need to factor oil and gas methane intensity into their decision making.

Methane intensity can be calculated in numerous ways, however. Without adherence to rigorous approaches, practicality, and harmonization of methodologies, there is a risk that methane intensity metrics will be meaningless or misapplied, and the data generated will not provide a credible indication of an entity’s methane performance. This article analyzes two leading methodologies for calculating methane intensity and highlights how they work together.

Parsing oil and gas

There is no standard oil or gas. Petroleum resources — and their resulting emissions intensities— are highly variable, defined by their disparate physical and chemical makeups, diverse corporate practices, inconsistent regulatory oversight, dynamic economic prospects, and powerful geopolitical factors.

Oil and gas co-exist underground together and are normally produced together. As such, it’s rare for gas to be extracted alone. Even “dry” gas stores can consist of liquid hydrocarbons that make plastics, liquid petroleum gas for cooking, petrol, and jet fuel. On average, one-half of the petroleum industry’s emissions footprint comes from methane. However, equivalent barrels of oil and gas emit varying amounts of methane that vary by over an order of magnitude, as plotted below. Further differentiation finds that assets that primarily produce gas (leftmost bars) as well as those assets that primarily produce oil along with associated gas (rightmost bars) have a significant share of their emissions intensity from methane waste. As such, future policies must attend to venting, fugitives, and flaring along both the oil and gas supply chain to be effective.

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Establishing two different methane metrics

Assessing how much gas ends up in the atmosphere and not in the market is a valuable way to track methane emissions and prevent waste. This metric — the gas loss rate — is calculated as the share of gas emitted compared to gas sold (or gas throughput). When the methane content of the gas is known, this can be expressed as a percentage of methane loss rate.

Knowing the methane content level is important because, while gas composition is often assumed to be about 90 percent methane, the share of methane in gas can vary widely from less than 70 percent to over 90 percent.

Methane content is influenced by the location of a methane release in a system: The closer the discharge is to the wellhead, the lower the methane content because gas contains variable amounts of non-methane hydrocarbons and other impurities when it is extracted. The closer the gas leak is to distribution and end use, the higher the methane content because heavier hydrocarbons and impurities have been removed.

A second essential methane intensity metric — volumetric methane intensity — considers the methane emitted based on combined oil and gas throughout certain system boundaries. The methane intensity is calculated as the mass (kilograms) of methane per barrel oil equivalent (boe oil and gas) throughput.

Taken together, these two metrics provide additional information on material differences between comparative methane waste from oil and gas systems operations. The most methane intensive activity is high on both metrics, and the least methane intensive is low on both.

However, when one metric is high and the other is low, these findings trigger increased analysis to offer a complete picture of methane emissions in this diverse and complex sector.
The graph below plots gas loss rate versus the volumetric methane intensity for nearly three-quarters of the world’s oil and gas assets that are currently modeled through RMI’s Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+). This analysis finds that those resources designated as “gas” (which includes dry, wet, and sour gas) have fundamentally different methane intensity profiles than those resources designated as “oil” (which includes condensates, ultra-light, light, medium, heavy, and extra-heavy oils).

While there is a close relationship between these different intensity metrics for gas assets, there is no relationship between these independent metrics for assets that are primarily oil. Additionally, for predominantly oil assets with little to no gas, a gas loss rate does not return a reasonable value and is not applicable. Therefore, a comprehensive look at oil and gas methane intensities requires the use of both metrics — gas loss rate and volumetric methane intensity — to fairly assess complex petroleum systems worldwide. This is especially critical for successful implementation to cut down on methane waste sector wide.

It is important to note that there are yet other metrics, in addition to methane intensity, that are needed to prevent energy waste. For example, operators should strive to flare less of their gas and keep their flares maintained at high efficiency when they must burn off unwanted gas. These are each evaluated in the OCI+ mitigation scenarios.

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Differentiating countries’ methane intensities

Oil and gas producing countries have highly variable average methane intensities. Moreover, the range in methane intensities within a country is also wide ranging. Countries like Norway, for example, have both very low average methane intensity and a small range between their different oil and gas assets. Other countries, like Algeria and Russia, for example, have both high average methane intensities and a large range between their different oil and gas assets, as plotted below.

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The economic value of methane policy

Historically, gas was viewed as an unwanted waste byproduct that was extracted along with oil. It was systematically flared and vented to maximize production of liquids. Today, gas is a highly traded global commodity with significant economic value.
The high price of gas in Europe and Asia — roughly five times greater than in the United States — should be sufficient to warrant significant capture to minimize waste and maximize its market return. The International Energy Agency finds that at least 50 percent and as much as two-thirds or more of wasted gas is cost-effective to capture, depending largely on the price of gas.

But energy markets are dynamic, and gas prices vary over time and place. Operators’ vigilance also varies widely. Capital investments can be sluggish. Upsets happen. As a result, progress toward abating methane waste and gas loss has been too slow — but targeted demand-side policy can help unlock the investments and operational changes needed to accelerate reductions and modernize the oil and gas industry.

Next steps for establishing methane intensity metrics

Directives are loud and clear. Whether it’s Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC) targets, methane abatement financial metrics, or EU methane regulations, methane intensity is a critical market and policy benchmark. Insurance companies are already using methane intensity as an underwriting guideline to gauge system safety. And other financial actors like banks and investors are following suit.

There is a growing need for more transparency and harmonization across methane intensity methodologies. This starts with clearcut metrics. Inputs need to be discoverable to be actionable. The two indicators presented — gas loss rate and volumetric methane intensity — are integral across use cases.

Spurring reductions in methane from oil and gas requires a combination of policy push and market pull. These dynamics shine a spotlight on the importance of durably designing and implementing a robust and comprehensive set of metrics that can accurately track the methane intensity of oil and gas through the supply chain.

If major gas and oil buyers in Europe and Asia adopt policies to prevent gas waste — and US states like California, Michigan, and New York, for example, follow suit — entities supplying oil and gas will start to produce commodities with low methane leakage. Together, these actors can cut energy waste, bolster national security, create jobs, protect public safety, and prevent super-heating the planet.

The post Establishing Measures to Achieve Near-Zero Methane Waste from Global Oil and Gas Assets appeared first on RMI.

October 22, 2025 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUWA Statement on Proposed Mass Firings at Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management During Federal Government Shutdown – 10.22.25

Contact: 
Steve Bloch, Legal Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (801) 428-3981 (steve@suwa.org)

Washington, DC – It has been reported that the Department of the Interior is planning mass firings of more than 1,500 public servants at the Department of the Interior, including the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages nearly 23 million acres of federal public land in Utah. Below is a statement from SUWA Legal Director Steve Bloch and additional information. 

“The Trump administration’s attacks on public lands and the federal workforce that manages them have reached a new low in proposing to fire more than 1,500 Interior Department career public servants during a government shutdown. The BLM is already chronically understaffed, under-resourced, and reeling from layoffs earlier this year,” said Steve Bloch, Legal Director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “In Utah alone, the administration is proposing to fire nearly 12% of the BLM’s workforce. Those cuts will further degrade the agency’s capacity to steward public lands, ultimately diminishing visitor experiences and harming Utah’s redrock country.”

“These are not faceless bureaucrats as the administration would like you to believe. If you live in places like Price, Moab, Richfield, or Kanab, these people are a core part of the local community. Federal employees, such as those who work for the BLM, make up a large percentage of the workforce in rural Utah. For example, government employees (including but not limited to federal employees) make up 23% of the workforce in Garfield County and 25% in Wayne County. It’s plain to see that the Trump administration couldn’t care less about the federal workforce and the benefit these public servants bring to all Americans.”

Additional information:

The Department of the Interior (DOI) is a Cabinet-level department that manages America’s vast natural and cultural resources; it has 11 Bureaus, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In Utah, the BLM manages 22.8 million acres of public land, ranging from “spectacular red-rock canyons and roaring rivers to high mountain peaks and expansive salt flats,” including Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (designated in 1996 and the first monument managed by the BLM) and Bears Ears National Monument (designated in 2017 and jointly managed with the US Forest Service). 

The BLM manages several congressionally designated wilderness areas in Utah, including remarkable places such as Muddy Creek (Emery County), Canaan Mountain (Washington County), and the Cedar Mountains (Tooele County). BLM-Utah also manages more than 80 Wilderness Study Areas and other significant public landscapes including Nine Mile Canyon, Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, and the Desolation Canyon and Labyrinth Canyon stretches of the Green River (designated Wild and Scenic Rivers). SUWA’s signature bill, America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, would designate more than 8 million acres of BLM land in Utah as wilderness. 

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The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards this world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org.

The post SUWA Statement on Proposed Mass Firings at Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management During Federal Government Shutdown – 10.22.25 appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to breed and lay their eggs.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”

Bright green sphagnum moss growing in Lindow Moss, a bog in Wilmslow, England. Anna North / Vox

But now, the fridge is hanging open.

Though they cover only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, peatlands store nearly one-third of the world’s carbon. And these ecosystems around the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within a protected area, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals. Part of the Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see the minerals there as key to Canada’s clean-energy transition and a crucial part of the fight against climate change. And it’s true; minerals like the ones found around Hudson Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries, and other technologies we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

But in the process of mining them, we may just destroy a crucial climate regulator.

The government of Ontario, where the Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “This is how we make ourselves less reliant on the United States,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this summer.

Peat looks like little more than fibrous dirt, but has near-magical properties. Anna North / Vox

And already, the area’s peatlands are at risk from mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem even though no mineshafts have yet been sunk. First Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands around Hudson Bay, but it’s a race against the clock as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.

The carbon stored in the Hudson Bay peatlands took thousands of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources for the Mushgewok Council, a group representing several First Nations in the area. If it’s released now, it could take thousands of years to replace. And if humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we don’t have that kind of time.

“These are the lungs of the earth,” Martin told me. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”

The power of peat

Peat is a kind of soil that forms whenever organic matter builds up faster than it can decompose, said Dan Zarin, executive director for forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The bogs of northern Europe, famous resting places for uncannily preserved bog bodies, are made of peat. But peat can also be found in the United States, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York and the huge Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

The soil also forms in the tropics, often in damp, forested areas where layers of different plant species stack on top of one another. In Panama, for example, peat can form giant domes, several meters deep and thousands of years old.

In colder climates like northern Canada, peatlands are usually created by colonies of sphagnum moss — a simple, easily overlooked plant that’s also a climate hero.

The structure of sphagnum includes large, empty cells that make the plant into a kind of sponge, absorbing up to 20 times its weight in water. Moss was so well-known for its absorbent properties that First Nations peoples once used it for menstrual products and diapers, Courtois said. That absorbency helps create the wet, low-oxygen conditions that slow down decomposition and aid in carbon capture.

Layers of peat can build up many feet high. Anna North / Vox

There’s more carbon stored in peatlands than in all the trees in the world — or about two-third of the world’s petroleum reserves — Zarin said. The peatlands in the Congo Basin store the equivalent of several years’ worth of carbon emissions for the entire world. That’s why peat is so critical to the world’s climate future, Zarin said, and yet, “it’s not really getting anything near the attention it deserves.”

Around the world, ecosystems like tropical forests and mangroves are much more likely to be protected than peatlands, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. And nearly a quarter of peatlands are under heavy pressure from human development.

In Indonesia, for example, forested peatlands are being cleared, drained, and planted with palms to feed the rapidly growing global demand for palm oil, a common ingredient in products from toothpaste to peanut butter. In Patagonia, they’re threatened by urban development, Jorge Hoyos-Santillán, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, told me. Around the world, peat is harvested and sold for use in potting soil — an 8-quart bag retails for less than $10 at U.S. hardware stores, where Americans can purchase it for their berry patches and flower beds.

And now, increasingly, peatlands are at risk, as governments and private industry seek new sources of the minerals needed for the batteries and related technologies that will likely power the world in the future.

Why damaging peatlands is so dangerous

Around Hudson Bay, conservation groups are watching with concern as mining companies begin to survey fragile wetland ecosystems. “People focus on the mining, but there’s a lot of damage that occurs before mining,” Sumner of the Wildlands League told me.

Mining exploration requires test drilling and the use of heavy machinery on a sensitive landscape, which can change its hydrology, causing areas of peatland to dry out, Sumner said.

When peat dries out, its carbon-storing superpower becomes a liability.

As water leaves the environment, decomposition starts again, and the soil begins to release all the carbon it’s stored up over thousands of years. You can think of it like the burning of fossil fuels, Julie Loisel, a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me. “It took a long time to put that carbon down into the soil, and then you really quickly release it back to the atmosphere.”

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Drying peat also turns it into a frighteningly powerful fuel for fires — in fact, communities in Ireland and elsewhere have long burned peat as an alternative to coal. Today, peatland fires can be especially insidious, because even when they appear to be extinguished, they can continue to burn underground for months and re-spark — a phenomenon known as a “zombie fire.”

Peatland fires can release 100 times the carbon of a wildfire and produce large amounts of noxious smoke. In Indonesia in the 2010s, peat fires released as much carbon in a single day as the entire emissions of the United States, Zarin of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me. Fires are already burning in the peatlands of northern Canada, spurred on by climate change, and experts fear they’ll only become more devastating if the landscape isn’t protected.

And now, research indicates we may have entered a new age of fire — where massive blazes around the world will be more frequent and destructive. It’s even more urgent to prevent peatlands from drying out and becoming fuel for these conflagrations.

“We want to keep the peatlands doing what they do, which is breathing for the planet,” Sumner said.

Protecting the world’s climate regulator

The carbon calculus involved in trading peatlands for EV batteries is a complicated one.

But conservation groups say mining in Canada’s Ring of Fire is less important for the clean energy transition than proponents have claimed. One issue is the remoteness of the area: the mining sites are currently accessible only by ice-road or float-plane, and a plan to build a major road to the area could take a decade, Sumner said.

Other sites in Ontario have more critical minerals, are more accessible, and are located in areas that are already environmentally degraded, Sumner said. Mining in the Ring of Fire “feels more like a dream than it does a reality, and it’s not going to meet the need for energy transition in any short timeline, which is what we need,” Sumner said.

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Meanwhile, First Nations have been at work for years on their own plans for the Hudson Bay lowlands. The Mushkegowuk Council is leading an effort to establish an Indigenous-led conservation project in northern Ontario that could protect peatlands and other ecosystems as well. The Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation has also proposed a protected area including peatlands around the Fawn River in northern Ontario.

“What makes an Indigenous approach to planning is that you look at what you need to keep in those ecosystems as opposed to looking at what you can take,” Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative said. Under such an approach, Indigenous leaders can also identify less vulnerable areas where activities like mining could occur.

“The more that provinces embrace the practice of land use planning — or land relationship planning as we like to call it — the better the conditions are for the exploration of potential development,” Courtois said.

Representatives of the Mushkegowuk Council have also said mining could potentially coexist with conservation. “You do need to reach into the ground to pull out the resources necessary to keep us fed,” the Council’s Martin told me. “But we need to do this with great conscience.”

The fate of the conservation project remains unclear, however, and Martin said the Council is still working to get the Ontario government on board.

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Meanwhile, peatlands around the world remain at risk, as lack of knowledge and political will collide with economic development. In some parts of the world, they’ve “been treated as wasteland areas,” Zarin said. Indeed, the swampy bogs of the global north are a common setting for horror stories, seen as a place humans should avoid and fear.

The first step toward changing that is a better understanding of peatlands, experts say. These ecosystems are often in remote locations that are difficult for humans to navigate, and since peat lies beneath the surface, it’s often invisible even to researchers. The peatlands in the Congo Basin, for example, were only documented by scientists in the 2010s, and their full size — as big as England and Wales combined — was revealed only in 2023. Those discoveries have helped drive funding and conservation efforts to the area, said Hoyos-Santillán, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Beyond understanding, people around the world need an appreciation of peatlands and their value, conservationists say. “My hope is that the province of Ontario and other places that have these sorts of landscapes look at them not just as some sort of breadbasket for the development of the province, but also see it as a feature of who they are,” Courtois said.

“You can’t destroy everything for capitalism,” Martin said. “You have to be able to save enough for your children, for your future generations, for them to enjoy life.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it on Oct 22, 2025.

'We must end animal testing - and solve sepsis' Channel Comment brendan 22nd October 2025 Teaser Media

¿Vives o realizas actividades recreativas en alguno de los siguientes condados de la región central de Utah: Wayne, Juab, Millard, Sevier, Sanpete o Piute? En este momento, la División de Utah de Recreación al Aire Libre (Utah Division of Outdoor Recreation) está desarrollando un plan a largo plazo para la recreación, ¡y busca recibir opiniones del público! Esta es una oportunidad para alzar tu voz en defensa de los espacios naturales de Utah y ayudar a definir cómo los gobiernos federal, estatal y local administrarán la recreación en esta amplia e importante región.

El área cubierta por este plan incluye decenas de miles de acres de zonas administradas por la oficina de Administración de Tierras (Bureau of Land Management (BLM)), tanto como áreas de estudio de vida silvestre y otras tierras de calidad silvestre incluidas en la America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, así como partes de los parques nacionales Capitol Reef y Canyonlands, y del área nacional recreativa Glen Canyon (see map).

Según el sitio web del Utah Central Region Recreation Master Plan website, este plan ofrecerá “una visión para el futuro de la recreación en la región y guiará la inversión estatal en recreación al aire libre”. Estas inversiones podrían incluir proyectos y desarrollos recreativos en tierras públicas administradas por el BLM y el National Park Service.

Hay dos maneras de participar:

1. Completa esta encuesta antes del 31 de octubre – solo toma aproximadamente 10 minutos.
   
2. Usa este mapa interactivo para colocar marcadores y compartir información sobre tus lugares favoritos, incluyendo zonas que te gustaría ver protegidas, áreas donde podrían necesitarse mejoras recreativas o donde podrían ser apropiadas nuevas instalaciones o senderos.

Independientemente de cómo participes, te alentamos a hacer un llamado a una gestión recreativa basada en la ciencia. Esto significa dar prioridad a la protección de los valores naturales y los recursos sensibles en áreas silvestres poco o no utilizadas, mientras se enfocan las mejoras recreativas y el acceso en zonas ya impactadas o de uso frecuente. Según nuestroreporte (Recreation Report), “concentrar el uso de visitantes en sitios y senderos previamente impactados o reforzados probablemente será una estrategia de gestión exitosa, mientras que las estrategias de dispersión podrían generar una proliferación de impactos causados por la recreación”.

Asegúrate de completar la encuesta antes del viernes 31 de octubre. Gracias!

The post ¡Participa para ayudar a definir la gestión recreativa en la región central de Utah! appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Despite considerable public funding, aggressive ad campaigns, and optimistic pronouncements by politicians of various stripes over the last few years, there were no major project announcements at Canada’s annual carbon capture expo this year. 
 
Neither were there any announcements related to Pathways Alliance, the signature carbon capture and storage project (CCS) of Canada’s tar sands producers.

The fourth edition of the annual Carbon Capture Canada expo, held September 23 to 25 in Edmonton, appeared to have fewer panel discussions and keynotes, did not feature speakers from the tar sands consortium Pathways Alliance, and did not include addresses from federal government representatives, as was the case in previous years. 

Though employees of Environment and Climate Change Canada and Natural Resources Canada attended, representatives of the federal cabinet were conspicuously absent. This is significant because it is the first carbon capture expo to be held under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new government, and Carney has been aggressively pushing for energy infrastructure development to counteract the tariff war instigated by U.S. President Donald Trump.

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In 2021, the Pathways Alliance — a consortium of six major Canadian tar sands oil producers — proposed a massive carbon capture and storage project for Northern Alberta. The project would connect more than 20 tar sands production facilities via a 400-kilometer network of carbon dioxide pipelines to a massive subterranean storage facility in the vicinity of Cold Lake, Alberta. 

The initial estimated cost of the project was $16.5 billion, with Pathways Alliance expecting the federal government to cover up to 75 percent of the total cost. Pathways has claimed the project will be able to store 1,100 megatonnes of carbon dioxide and has advocated for it by arguing it will help “decarbonize” Canada’s emissions-intensive tar sands heavy crude oil.

However, these claims have been challenged by environmentalists, climate scientists and energy economists. Among other criticisms, experts have derided the Pathways project as nothing more than greenwashing, noting that downstream emissions from continued tar sands production would exacerbate climate change. As previously reported by DeSmog, Pathways Alliance scrubbed their website of practically all content before Canada’s anti-greenwashing laws came into effect in June 2024.

Pathways Project Not on Carney’s List

Prime Minister Carney stated on September 11 that the Pathways plan for reaching net zero by expanding CCS infrastructure was a “potentially viable project,” and also said that the government would accelerate work on it. However, Carney did not include Pathways among the first five projects referred to Canada’s new Major Projects Office, a federal government initiative to fast-track infrastructure development deemed in the national interest.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month that the federal government would fast track the Pathways plan for reaching net zero by expanding its CCS project. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

LNG Canada Phase 2, which aims to double liquid natural gas (LNG) production at the Kitimat British Columbia facility, was the first project on the list.

Carney indicated federal support for a new West Coast pipeline could be tied to progress on the Pathways carbon capture project, which the Globe and Mail described as “stalled.” Championed by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the new proposed oil pipeline does not have a private sector project sponsor, nor a planned route, and has been rejected by the government of British Columbia as well as Indigenous communities in northern B.C. 

Because of the lack of a private sector partner, Smith recently declared that Alberta would sponsor the project, despite concerns the proposed pipeline may not be financially viable. 

Pathways’ latest public statements do not mention their CCS project. On October 1, the group issued a statement supporting Danielle Smith’s announcement that the government of Alberta would be the chief proponent of the proposed West Coast pipeline. The brief statement made no mention of carbon capture whatsoever, though it did describe the so-called ‘Emissions Cap’ and ‘West Coast tanker ban,’ as well as the Federal Impact Assessment Act, as barriers to future development that must be addressed.
 
 In a potential indication of major project retooling, new advertisements from Pathways Alliance, recently spotted in Alberta, are moving away from references to carbon capture. An electronic billboard photographed by DeSmog in Edmonton stated “This is not just a pipeline. It’s a stronger economy.” 

The ad was part of a national campaign that launched in mid-September, part of what Pathways describes as their “commitment to communicate on behalf of the oil sands and the many Canadians who work in the industry.” Whether this is indicative of fundamental changes to Pathways’ proposed multi-billion-dollar carbon capture project isn’t clear.

Pathways Alliance’s new ads, like this one spotted in Alberta in September, are moving away from references to carbon capture. Credit: DeSmog Pathways Project Missing from 2025 Conference

Pathways Alliance officials did not speak at the carbon capture expo’s strategic conference, and there were no speakers representing any of the six major tar sands producers who compose Pathways Alliance either. In 2024, by contrast, a Pathways official provided a keynote address on the first day of the convention. DeSmog found only one representative from one Pathways tar sands company — Imperial Oil — participating in an “executive dialogue session” taking place in the convention hall, separate from the main strategic conference.

The first full panel talk of the convention was “Navigating CCUS Uncertainty in a Global Market: An Opportunity for Canada?” The discussion was centered on a recent decision by the Trump administration to cancel $3.7 billion USD in funding for carbon capture and other so-called emissions reduction technologies.

Whether or not this means the Pathways project is dead in the water isn’t clear.

Pathways Alliance did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

Though the project was listed on the prime minister’s September 11 major projects announcement, it was only mentioned in a secondary section of projects believed to be potentially transformative, but which need additional development. 

However, the statement from the Prime Minister’s Office referred to the project as “Pathways Plus,” perhaps reflecting the idea that the original Pathways project will be modified to include pipelines for conventional fossil fuel transport purposes. The government’s Pathways Plus description suggests both an “Alberta-based carbon capture, utilization, and storage project and pipeline that will substantially reduce emissions” with additional energy infrastructure that “will support a strong conventional energy sector while driving down emissions from the oil sands.”

The government also said in the announcement that Pathways Plus “creates the prospect of facilitating low-carbon oil exports from the Alberta oil sands to a variety of potential markets.”

A backgrounder on the major projects under consideration by the federal government doesn’t provide much more detail, other than to say that the Major Projects Office would “develop a strategy to build the Pathways project which would reduce upstream emissions from the conventional energy sector, while catalyzing private investment in additional energy infrastructure that would support a strong conventional energy sector while driving down emissions and emissions intensity from the oil sands.”

The Deception Behind ‘Low-carbon Oil’

Experts have long argued that carbon capture projects such as Pathways are misleading because any reduction in upstream emissions would be compromised by the downstream emissions that would be a consequence of continued oil production.
 
The term “low-carbon oil” — widely used by Carney in describing Pathways and other fossil fuel projects — is an inherently misleading industry term whose continued use by the prime minister is a serious concern to experts. Speaking to CBC News, Memorial University political scientist Angela Carter stated, “Low-carbon oil is not a thing. It doesn’t exist. It’s an impossibility.” 

It is also unclear how federal support for the new oil pipeline Smith is proposing will encourage the Pathways Alliance tar sands producers to move ahead with their CCS project, since Pathways has already been promised government support for initial capital costs, and demand for Canadian oil seems insufficient to merit additional pipeline infrastructure.

High operating costs — not start-up capital — are likely the Pathways project’s chief stumbling block, according to the Globe and Mail. Both the federal government and the government of Alberta had already indicated they would cover more than 60 percent of the project’s capital costs. However, a major report from the Institute for Financial Analysis and Energy Economics published earlier this year revealed that Pathways would be a subsidy-dependent financial risk with limited revenue potential.

How exactly the federal government plans to “catalyze private investment” given the already considerable promises of additional public subsidy has not been explained in any of the government’s recent statements pertaining to Pathways. The government of Alberta’s recent statement that it would champion new pipeline development — because no private sector proponent could be found — suggests that the fossil fuel sector isn’t interested in new energy infrastructure projects nor in various government incentives.

The Pathways idea — which was originally called Oilsands Pathways to Net Zero —dates back to 2021, and the alliance’s partners announced its signature carbon capture project in June of 2022. According to timelines laid out in the first iteration of the Pathways Alliance website, the project aimed to develop its carbon transport and storage system by 2030.

In September 2023, DeSmog reported that Pathways had not consulted with Cold Lake First Nations about their carbon capture project, a task central to getting it produced. Chief Kelsey Jacko was an invited guest of that year’s carbon capture expo, and made the announcement during a panel discussion. At the time, Pathways was engaged in a nationwide advertising campaign that included misleading advertisements on public transit that insinuated the CCS project was in development.
 
 Prior to that, Pathways’ news release from September 16th reiterated the ‘Build Canada’ manifesto in another open letter to Mark Carney. Though Pathways Plus is mentioned once in the letter, carbon capture is not.

The post No Federal Ministers or Major Announcements at Leading Canadian Carbon Capture Expo appeared first on DeSmog.

Three-day Agroecological Workshop for Women Peasants in Kuntaveshi, Mandan Municipality-7, Kavre District.

The post Rural Women, Food Sovereignty, and Peace: Three-Day Agroecology Workshop Strengthens Women’s Leadership in Nepal appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.