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Surging rates of high blood pressure in pregnancy – does chemical exposure play a role? Anthony Lacey September 30, 2026

• Rates of high blood pressure in pregnancy rose 73% between 2016 and 2024, building on a trend of rates more than doubling between 1989 and 2016.
• The increases are not limited to people with established risk factors and span all age, weight and racial/ethnic groups.
• A growing body of research links exposure to environmental chemicals with hypertensive disorders in pregnancy.
• To reduce exposure to chemicals, consumers can check product labels, choose glass over plastic and consider using a water filter.

Rates of high blood pressure during pregnancy have risen sharply, up 73% between 2016 and 2024, according to a report from the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention. 

The 2026 report, finding the rate of gestational hypertension jumped from 6% in 2016 to 10.4% in 2024, draws on data from U.S. birth certificates collected during this period.

The increase during this period extends an upward trend observed in previous years – rates more than doubled between 1989 and 2016. 

True rates of gestational hypertension could be even higher: the CDC notes it may be underreported on birth certificates.

Disorders affecting many

Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, usually referred to as HDP, affect roughly 10% to 15% of pregnancies in the U.S.  

HDP is an umbrella term covering several related but distinct conditions, each with their own health risks. The CDC report focuses on one of these disorders – gestational hypertension – but any of them can pose major threats to the health of the mothers giving birth and the developing fetus:

• Chronic hypertension. High blood pressure present before pregnancy or diagnosed before 20 weeks of gestation.
• Gestational hypertension. High blood pressure that develops after 20 weeks of pregnancy, without signs of organ damage or protein in the urine.
• Preeclampsia or eclampsia. High blood pressure after 20 weeks of gestation, with the presence of protein in the urine or signs of other organ dysfunction, such as liver or kidney issues. Preeclampsia becomes eclampsia with the onset of seizures.
• Superimposed preeclampsia. New or worsening symptoms or organ dysfunction in a person with chronic hypertension diagnosed before the pregnancy. 

Long-term harms

These common pregnancy disorders are among the leading causes of illness and mortality among pregnant people in the U.S. 

Adverse health outcomes of any of these disorders have been linked to placental abruption, organ damage or failure, maternal mortality, and cardiovascular disease later in life. They can also contribute to poor birth outcomes, such as stillbirth, neonatal mortality, restricted fetal growth, preterm birth and low birthweight. 

Some of these birth outcomes, like preterm birth, are known to be associated with worse health outcomes, such as developing chronic respiratory or renal problems, later in life. 

Known HDP risk factors

A person is more likely to develop HDP if they have any of the following: 

• Pre-existing health conditions, like chronic high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease
• An autoimmune disease such as lupus
• Certain characteristics and types of pregnancy, such as a pregnancy of multiples, a first pregnancy, conception through IVF, or a previous history of HDP. 

Demographic factors, including being 35 or older, having obesity, income status, and race and ethnicity, have also been associated with increased risk. 

The CDC report showed that the increased rates spanned all racial and ethnic groups, though not equally. Black and Native American women had the highest overall rates, up to 12.3% for Black women and 13.2% for Native American women. 

Although the overall rate among Asian pregnant people is lower than the average, they also have experienced the steepest percentage increase, with rates more than doubling from 3.5% to 7.1% during the study period. 

Consistent with prior research, the CDC report found gestational hypertension rates were higher among people with known risks, such as obesity and pregnancy at an age over 40. 

Rates also rose across all age groups and in every body mass index category, not just among those already considered high risk. 

This finding suggests existing risk factors alone do not account for the increase, though the exact degree to which any single factor contributes to this trend remains unclear.

Could environmental chemical exposure increase the risk?

While the CDC report cites other studies on HDP risk factors, those references do not examine environmental exposures. But regular exposure to harmful chemicals in personal care products, food and water, and household items could be contributing to this rise in HDP.

Pregnancy is a period of heightened biological sensitivity to environmental chemicals. Exposure to a specific chemical can affect a pregnant person differently than it would affect someone who is not pregnant, partly because of rapid physiological changes in the body and the developing placenta.  

For instance, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, such as phthalates, lead and cadmium, and the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, can interfere with hormone signaling and have been linked to worse maternal cardiometabolic health, including HDP. Research suggests that this link holds independent of established risk factors like obesity and age. 

Harmful chemical exposure may also increase risk of other conditions associated with HDP. This is because chemicals affect the same hormones and body systems. For example, EDC exposure has been linked to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes and metabolic disorders like obesity. 

EDC exposure may not just be a unique risk associated with HDP, but may also be a reason why certain risk factors, like obesity and diabetes, develop in the first place. 

Reducing chemical exposure may offer a way to also reduce risk of some of these established factors before they fully develop, along with managing HDP risk after these risks are already present.

Evidence of an HDP-environmental chemical exposure connection

A growing number of scientific studies show evidence of the connection between HDP and exposure to specific environmental chemicals. The chemicals are widely used in consumer products, detected in drinking water and used in industrial applications.

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PFAS are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances widely used in personal care products, food packaging, children’s toys and household cleaners. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they can persist in the body and do not break down in the environment.

Studies have linked exposure to some PFAS and increased risk of HDP. A 2026 study of women in Puerto Rico found a mixture of six PFAS was associated with more than double the odds of developing gestational hypertension.

Similar associations between eight PFAS and gestational hypertension were also observed in a 2022 study of pregnant people in the Boston metro area. This is consistent with an older study, where researchers used data from the C8 health studies, a large court-mandated public health investigation of the forever chemical PFOA. They reported links between PFOA exposure and several health outcomes.

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes, or ECHO, cohort reported in a 2026 study that PFAS levels in the body were linked to higher odds of preeclampsia. ECHO is a National Institutes of Health-supported research program designed to enhance the health of children by combining data across multiple U.S. geographical sites. 

They also reported a suggestive association between PFOA and gestational hypertension risk, but the findings were not consistent among all study sites.

Phthalates

Based on EWG data, the average adult uses 12 personal care products a day. These products can expose people to hundreds of chemicals, including some, like phthalates, associated with health harms.

Phthalates are used to soften plastic or stabilize scents and are found in consumer products, including in personal care products, such as nail polish. Studies report associations between phthalates and HDP, but findings differ based on when during pregnancy exposure is measured and by the specific phthalate.

In a longitudinal cohort collecting data of women in Boston between 2016 and 2020, mixtures of phthalate concentrations detected in urine samples were associated with increased blood pressure during pregnancy.

A 2026 nested case-control study in China noted similar findings: Increased levels of phthalate mixtures in urine were associated with 1.49 times the odds of having had gestational hypertension.

A 2025 study of 291 pregnant people in Texas and Virginia found a replacement phthalate, diisononyl phthalate, was linked to higher odds of HDP – but only when exposure was measured during early pregnancy, not later.

Replacement phthalates are chemicals that became more popular in use after others were phased out due to concerns about their toxicity.

In a 2024 ECHO study of 3,430 pregnant participants across eight U.S. cohorts, researchers found that two-fold higher levels of certain phthalates in urine were associated with higher odds of preeclampsia/eclampsia and other hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. Exposure to a mixture of individual phthalates was also linked to higher odds of preeclampsia/eclampsia.

Flame retardants

Flame retardants are chemicals added to electronics, furniture and building materials to slow down or stop fires. These chemicals leach off into household air and dust over time, because they are not chemically bound to the products they are added to.

Only a few studies have examined whether there is a relationship between exposure to flame retardants and HDP.

A 2023 review identified just two studies that examined the link between polybrominated flame retardants, or PBDEs, and hypertensive disorders during pregnancy. The first, a case-control study in the U.S., reported increased odds of gestational hypertension for two PBDEs, BDE-66 and BDE-47. The other, a case-control study based in Iran, reported higher levels of all PBDEs were associated with 2.19 times the odds of having preeclampsia.

PBDEs were phased out of furniture, mattresses and baby products in the mid-2000s due to concerns about their toxicity. Now companies mostly use organophosphate ester flame retardants, or OPEs, as replacements. OPEs also help make plastic more flexible and are used in vinyl flooring, children’s toys and in personal care products, like nail polish.

Evidence of an association between OPEs and HDP is mixed. A small 2021 prospective cohort study of 346 pregnant women in Cincinnati found modest associations between some OPE flame retardants in urine and higher diastolic blood pressure later in pregnancy.

A more recent 2025 study of 900 pregnant women in Boston found no link to preeclampsia, though it did find some increases in continuous blood pressure measurements.

Given how few studies exist and how inconsistent their findings are, this evidence should be considered preliminary.

Bisphenols

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been phased out of many consumer products. But it remains in epoxy resins used to line water pipes and metal food cans, and in printed thermal receipt paper. Evidence linking BPA exposure to HDP is limited to a few studies and overall is inconclusive.

A 2016 study of 481 pregnant women living in the Boston metro area found that urinary concentrations of BPA and several phthalate metabolites were associated with increased risk of preeclampsia. But this association was not observed at all doctor visits during the study period and differed by child sex.

A 2017 nested case-control study of 173 pregnancies in China found a similar link. BPA, measured in urine samples, was associated with risk of preeclampsia.

When the European Food Safety Authority reviewed this evidence in 2023, it concluded the link between BPA and preeclampsia was “as likely as not,” meaning the evidence was not strong enough to confirm a link but also not weak enough to rule one out.

Heavy metals

People can be exposed to heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury through drinking contaminated water, ingestion of certain foods, particularly fish, polluted air and contaminated personal care products. Several heavy metals, including lead and cadmium, are recognized endocrine disruptors.

A 2022 review noted that heavy metals like cadmium and lead have been linked to HDP. Globally, evidence linked cadmium exposure to preeclampsia, the review found. One well-known source of cadmium is cigarette smoke.

A 2026 review linked lead exposure to gestational hypertension, and a 2018 meta-analysis identified lead exposure as a significant risk factor for preeclampsia.

It’s worth noting that heavy metal levels are present at very low levels in most everyday consumer products, and U.S. regulations set limits for lead, cadmium and other heavy metals in a range of products.

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Biomonitoring data show that levels of several once-common chemicals, like brominated flame retardants, BPA, some PFAS, and certain phthalates, have declined in the U.S. population since bans and phase-outs began, in the mid-2000s and 2010s. 

But that decline was offset by rising exposure to newer replacement chemicals with similar chemical structures, and in some cases, similar health effects. This pattern is called a “regrettable substitution.”

For example, U.S. biomonitoring data showed median BPA levels fell 15% nationwide from 2013 to 2016, but levels of its replacement bisphenol S rose 20% over the same period. 

European biomonitoring data documents the same pattern – as BPA levels fell, its replacements bisphenol S and bisphenol F rose. 

The phthalate substitute diisononyl cyclohexane-1,2-dicarboxylat showed a similar rising trend. And OPE flame retardants, which largely replaced PBDEs, are now detected in urine samples from over 95% of the U.S. population. 

Image

Not every chemical class follows this substitution pattern. Blood lead levels have fallen substantially since leaded gasoline and paint were phased out, without a comparable replacement taking its place. 

Concentrations of the forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS have also declined continuously since regulatory restrictions began in the early 2000s. 

Whether a chemical has been substituted or has truly declined, research continues to link even lower exposure levels to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. 

This may point to the absence of a clearly safe exposure threshold for these endocrine-disrupting chemicals. 

Or it may reflect the fact that people are rarely exposed to one chemical at a time, and the combined effect of many low-level chemical exposures may matter more than any single compound.

Research designed to study these combined, real-world mixtures, rather than one chemical at a time, is still developing and is an important direction for future work.

How to reduce exposure to concerning chemicals

Collectively, these studies suggest that exposure to environmental chemicals during pregnancy may be one contributor to the risk of developing hypertensive disorders.  

People who want to reduce their exposure don’t have to try replacing all their belongings at once. Small changes, such as swapping out one product for a safer alternative or filtering your water, can help reduce exposure to harmful chemicals.

Here are some tips:

• Find safer personal care products free from chemicals of concern by searching EWG’s Skin Deep® database or using EWG’s Healthy Living™ app. 
• Avoid products whose labels do not disclose their fragrance. Phthalates used in personal care products might not always show up on the label if they are part of a fragrance blend. The umbrella term “fragrance” or “parfum” can contain up to 100 ingredients, some of which may be chemicals associated with health harms. 
• Consult EWG’s Tap Water Database to find which contaminants are detected in drinking water around the country. EWG’s water filter guide can help consumers match a filter to the specific contaminants in a particular location’s water and individual budget. Not every filter removes every harmful chemical.
• Choose glass, porcelain or stainless steel containers, particularly for hot food or liquids, and avoid reheating foods in plastic.
• If avoiding flame retardants in mattresses is a priority, consumers should look for a mattress or crib mattress made by a company that’s transparent about how it meets fire-safety requirements and what materials it uses in products. Or look for EWG Verified® mattresses for the highest level of confidence.

 

Areas of Focus Women's Health Children’s Health Toxic Chemicals BPA Flame Retardants PFAS Chemicals Phthalates Authors Alexa Friedman, Ph.D. Guest Authors Eunice Daudu September 30, 2026

• The latest version of Transportation for America’s “Deadly by Design” report ranks congressional districts by pedestrian deaths, with the highest by far being the Arizona 3rd in Phoenix. Congress distributes billions of dollars in transportation funding to cities and states each year, but steadfastly refuses to hold those state and local agencies accountable for safety improvements.
• Almost half of parents report that their child has experienced a close call from dangerous drivers at a school bus stop or near a school, according to a survey by the Governors Office of Highway Safety. (Jalopnik)
• AAA says the average annual cost of owning an operating a new vehicle has risen more than $1,000 since last year, to nearly $13,000.
• Traffic congestion should be viewed as something motorists impose on themselves and other road users, as opposed to casting drivers as the victims. (Planetizen)
• Why do more Philadelphians die in car crashes than in comparable cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.? (The Conversation)
• Private passenger rail company Brightline cut a deal with investors on a $490 million lifeline to save it from bankruptcy (Miami Herald). Brightline demonstrated the appeal of high(ish)-speed rail in South Florida, but its financial problems once again beg the question, who will pay for the infrastructure? After all, airlines don’t pay for airports (Grist).
• Orange County, Florida is seriously considering an ambitious citizen-led plan for an Orlando mass transit system combining light and heavy rail with bus rapid transit. (Central Florida Public Broadcasting)
• Both Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy and Republican challenger Mike Minogue want to suspend the state gas tax, which may be popular, but it only saves drivers a few bucks and sends the wrong message about transportation priorities. (Commonwealth Beacon)
• Dallas leaders believe the city needs a grand strategy tying together planning, transportation and infrastructure to keep up its economic momentum. (Morning News; paywall)
• Sacramento opened a new light rail station four months early. (ABC 10)
• Police have started ticketing violators in Pittsburgh’s new Oakland bus-only lanes. (TribLive)
• The Charlotte Area Transit System is implementing the first of improvements called for by last year’s transit funding referendum. (Queen City News)
• China opened four new high-speed rail lines with a combined length of about 700 miles on Monday alone. (China Daily)
• Spacing obtained the actual request for proposals Ontario issued for a construction company to physically tear up Toronto bike lanes, and it looks like retrofitting those streets for even more cars will be extremely disruptive and cost a lot of money.
• Meanwhile, cyclists in Alberta are pushing back on a similar policy, showering lawmakers with postcards. (Cycling Magazine)

The Trump Administration’s takeover of East Potomac Park is devastating for the residents of DC. East Potomac Park is home to some of the city’s best green space. Trump wants to redevelop the entirety of East Potomac into a single, PGA-caliber golf course, likely to be financially inaccessible to the majority of the course’s current demographic.

Trump’s approach reinforces elitism and promotes poor land use — the exact opposite of what an urbanist approach to green space should be.

As an urbanist, one of the most ironic qualities about me is I love golf. There’s nothing like the feeling of spending your weekend mornings outside and chasing the high of hitting a perfect shot. Yet at the same time, I often struggle with the moral conundrum of whether golf is fundamentally antithetical to the urbanist mission. There’s a world in which golf and urbanism can coexist, and DC is the best example of it, making Trump’s takeover uniquely problematic. 

Recommended A Lot of Golf Courses Should Probably Be Parks Roger Rudick April 28, 2020

Golf is a prime target for urbanists due to inefficient land-use. Other critics argue that golf courses serve a niche population who are typically older, wealthy white men.

While that may be true of many private country clubs in the suburbs, municipal golf looks quite different. It serves a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and age groups. People of color and women are amongst the fastest growing groups of golfers, and the game has been shifting towards younger age groups. Cities also need green spaces, and those parks should come in a variety of shapes and sizes, whether they are traditional parks, gardens, a soccer field, or a golf course.

This shift is only possible when courses aim to grow the game and commit to accessible, affordable golf. The National Links Trust (NLT), a non-profit, 501c3 organization achieves this goal through its mission of “positively impacting our community and changing lives through affordable and accessible municipal golf.” NLT prioritizes sustainability and biodiversity in its core missions, focusing on reducing energy and water usage and ensuring that a variety of species can thrive in its golf courses.  NLT currently manages Rock Creek Golf Course, Langston Golf Course, and, for now, East Potomac Golf Links in DC.

The Langston Golf Course in DC is a historic course celebrated as a beacon of African American golf heritage. Today, the course offers free lessons and a caddie internship program for high schoolers to increase access to golf at minimal costs. Langston keeps green fees at an affordable rate.

The East Potomac Golf Course offers a similar blueprint for accessible recreation, with three affordable courses, 36 holes of golf, a driving range, several practice areas, and a mini golf course. The park surrounding the golf course is also filled with cyclists, runners, and fishers, while neighboring West Potomac Park hosts numerous recreational sports such as softball.

Cities need to prioritize these types of courses — easy access, low cost environments where people of all backgrounds can gather together.

Recommended How Rethinking the Golf Course Could Help Seniors Age in Place Tanya Snyder January 9, 2013

Yet in December, the Trump Administration terminated the lease agreement between the National Links Trust and National Parks Service for lease violations, leaving the future of East Potomac in limbo. After several months of uncertainty, NLT reached an agreement with the Department of Interior for new long-term leases at Langston and Rock Creek. NLT will temporarily manage East Potomac until the Trump Administration redevelops it.

Trump’s takeover does not shrink the game of golf. But it does capture publicly-owned land and privatizes it for use by an elite population. A park that serves thousands of DMV residents on a single day will now serve a few hundred, on a good day. On top of that, the reconstruction could cost between $20 and $49 million. Taxpayer money is quite literally subsidizing land-use for the wealthy. 

This discrepancy becomes more evident when evaluating the price of a round of golf. Right now, green fees for an 18-hole round at Langston or East Potomac cost anywhere between $34-48, depending on the day of the week. By contrast, green fees for some of the more ‘affordable’ PGA Tour courses start around $80-150 a round, while the most expensive courses can cost over a thousand dollars.

It is extremely likely that Trump’s new course will price out the average East Potomac golfer, at least if the President’s other courses are any indication. Trump’s Los Angeles golf course costs somewhere between $95-$575 a round. Using an average of $335 green fees as a benchmark for Trump’s course, and the high-end of $48 for an NLT course, a golfer would need to spend almost 600% more on green fees alone. This does not account for membership fees, caddy fees, or other expenses typical with private courses. 

What the game of golf needs, in DC and around the country, is more organizations like NLT to expand and grow the game. There should be an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, rather than exclusivity.

Within this framework, golf can thrive in an urban environment rather than be a competitor. Pairing this with access to high-quality public transportation options, such as bus routes terminating at course entrances, makes golf an urban amenity that will attract more residents to a city.

Upzoning the land around golf courses can encourage housing and businesses to open, too. The ease of access to a green space will in turn promote social and economic activity, rather than isolating golf from it. None of this is where East Potomac is headed.

The irony is not that an urbanist like me cares about preserving golf. It is that golf is not in competition with cities. The biggest threat to the game is exclusivity — which is all the Trump administration cares for. 

Lock the Gate Alliance has condemned the Independent Planning Commission’s (IPC) decision to approve a 19-year extension to the Hunter Valley Operations (HVO) coal mine, saying it exposes the failure of NSW’s planning system to prioritise community wellbeing over mining lobby interests.

A new way of simulating wind turbines in the field shows how tweaking turbine operation could unlock tens of thousands of dollars per turbine every year.

As our skies increasingly crowd with buzzing, hovering, flitting drones, spare a thought for the humble hopping robot.

Dominik Fleitmann, how did you come to study the climate using stalagmites?

This November, Cupertino voters have the chance to make sure their parks and open spaces stay just like that. 

Greenbelt Alliance proudly endorses a YES vote on Measure L, which would require two-thirds voter approval before the City could rezone any designated park, parkland, or open space for residential, commercial, or industrial use, or approve development on that land. In short, it puts the decision about Cupertino’s green space in the hands of voters, not subject to a simple council majority.

Why It Matters

Parks and open space are not just amenities. They are the places where Cupertino residents cool off during extreme heat, where stormwater is absorbed instead of flooding streets, and where kids and families get safe, free access to the outdoors. As Silicon Valley continues to face intense development pressure, the land we set aside for community and ecological health is exactly the kind of asset that can quietly disappear, parcel by parcel, without anyone getting a real say.

Measure L does not ban future changes to parkland outright. It simply raises the bar, requiring a supermajority of voters to sign off before park or open space land is converted into something else. The higher threshold protects against short-term political or financial pressure driving long-term irreversible decisions about land that belongs to the whole community. 

Measure L comes at no cost to taxpayers and gives Cupertino residents a durable, voter-backed layer of protection for parks and open space, ensuring any future development in these valuable areas has to clear a high bar and earn broad community support first. 

Protecting green space is protecting climate resilience. Vote YES on Measure L in Cupertino.

The post Vote Yes on Measure L to Protect Cupertino’s Parks and Open Space for Good appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

Smart, sustainable growth means building the housing our communities need in places that protect both people and our environment—which is why Greenbelt Alliance is proud to endorse Measure Q in Half Moon Bay.

Measure Q asks voters to approve a 99-year ground lease and related agreements between the City of Half Moon Bay and affordable homebuilder Mercy Housing. This approval is the final key to unlocking a transformational 40-unit affordable housing community specifically designed for senior farmworkers at 555 Kelly Avenue.

Why It Matters

This project represents the very best kind of infill development. Located in the heart of downtown Half Moon Bay, 555 Kelly sits just steps away from vital daily services, grocery stores, local retail, and community spaces. By placing deeply affordable housing in a walkable, central location, it’s possible to reduce reliance on personal vehicles, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and connect some of the city’s most vulnerable residents directly to their town’s core.

Equally important is climate resilience. As the coast faces increasing climate threats, this downtown site ensures senior farmworkers, the very people who have nourished our region for decades, have dignified, safe, and affordable housing in a location protected from severe climate hazards. It honors their lifelong contributions by offering a secure, comfortable space to age in place with dignity.

While a “Yes” vote affirms the City Council’s approval of the ground lease, allowing Mercy Housing California to move forward seamlessly with construction, a “No” vote blocks the ground lease and brings this long-awaited project to a screeching halt. If that were the case, it would also leave Half Moon Bay’s Housing Element in a continued state of non-compliance, exposing the city to escalating legal penalties, substantial state fines, the potential loss of critical state grant funding, and the Builder’s Remedy.

Yes on Q is the right choice for housing affordability, for climate resilience, and for the Half Moon Bay community. Vote YES on Measure Q.

 

Photo credit: Visit Half Moon Bay, Facebook Page.

The post Vote Yes on Measure Q to Unlock Affordable Housing for Seniors in Half Moon Bay appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

A recent review in Frontiers in Microbiology finds that heavy fertilizer use by rice farmers in China is limiting the ability of soil microbes to promote crop growth. The result is a greater dependency on artificial inputs, which threatens water and terrestrial ecosystems. But researchers find that integrating legumes can help mitigate these harms and help farmers use fertilizer more efficiently.

Nitrogen fixation is a natural process that converts atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can use. While nitrogen is vital for plant health, too much can harm ecosystems, says soil health expert Yuting Liang of the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“In flooded rice paddies, excessive nitrogen can increase nitrogen losses and nitrous oxide emissions, affecting microbial processes involved in the nitrogen cycle,” Liang tells Food Tank.

Liang notes that in contrast to conventional fertilizers, biological nitrogen fixation “supports a slower and more efficient nitrogen cycle.” But if the soil is already rich in nitrogen from fertilizers, microbes will respond by shutting the process down. “Many nitrogen-fixing microorganisms tend to reduce their activity because the need to fix atmospheric nitrogen becomes much lower,” she explains.

This leads to a paradoxical feedback loop, the study explains. The more fertilizer a farmer adds to secure a harvest, the less nitrogen the soil makes on its own, and the more fertilizer the next crop needs. Instead of helping farmers cut back on fertilizer, it encourages overuse.

“It is so connected to many problems while it is essential for food production,” Wim de Vries, a soil scientist and professor at Wageningen University, tells Food Tank.

De Vries argues the first solution is to apply less fertilizer. He points to what he calls the four-R principle: the right amount, right type, right time, and right place. “The right rate is extremely important in regions like China where they over-fertilize,” he says. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, China is the largest producer and consumer of nitrogen fertilizers and remains one of the largest rice producers globally.

Soil scientists like Mark Peoples of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization say crop diversification can help reduce reliance on artificial fertilizers.

“A diverse system is likely to be more resilient and have better environmental outcomes than a landscape dominated by highly specialized, frequent cereal cropping that is heavily reliant upon fertilizer,” Peoples tells Food Tank. He notes that legume cover crops can increase soil nitrogen availability for cereal crops like rice, suggesting that increased global and regional demand for legumes can support sustainable farming.

Liang agrees, stating, “In regions where conditions are suitable, rice-legume rotations or green manure systems can further strengthen natural nitrogen cycling and increase microbial diversity.” By planting legumes during the dry season and rice during the wet season, farms retain nitrogen-fixing microbes which support soil nutrient availability.

But to encourage farmers to plant more legumes, the demand must exist, says Adrian Leip, co-chair of the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe’s Expert Panel on Nitrogen and Food. “It’s often not the farmers who have the power to change, at least not alone, because they are constrained by contracts and value chains,” he tells Food Tank. He notes that farmers need these market signals to transition to more sustainable practices, including crop rotation.

But dietary trends seem to be moving in the opposite direction, Peoples says. He sees that more eaters are seeking animal protein over pulses and legumes while governments subsidize cereal production and fertilizers.

Leip and De Vries call for a systemic approach to change this. “It’s dietary change, it’s food waste reduction, it’s circular agriculture, and it’s improved practices,” De Vries tells Food Tank. “These are the four. If you want to reduce the problem, you need to look at all four of them. And never only one is the answer.”

Leip also underscores that these solutions must work for producers: “This should be done in a way that is not harmful for the farming community. They are keeping the land intact; if they can, they would like to make it in a way that is sustainable… [while] conserving biodiversity.”

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

Photo courtesy of Ivan Bandura, Unsplash

The post How Cover Crops Can Support Sustainable Rice Farming appeared first on Food Tank.

RUDOLPH, WISC. (September 29, 2026) — The National Audubon Society announces that Flaig Family Farm, home to the Prairie Pastured Beef business owned and operated by Carl Flaig and his family near...

If you scroll down on the list of “Carbon Majors,” the 178 producers that are responsible for most of the world’s fossil fuel emissions, you will eventually get to a company called Continental Resources. This firm is ranked around 150, well after giants like Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil, but it has still produced almost 600 million tons of carbon dioxide since 2005 alone, equivalent to the combined carbon footprint of around 2 million Americans over that same time. The founder of this company is a man named Harold Hamm, the spitting image of an American oil executive — he grew up dirt-poor in Oklahoma and worked his way into fracking riches, but he still speaks with a Southern drawl. He now uses his wealth to influence the government, raising millions of dollars for Republican candidates and funding crusades against green energy.

If you squint, the protagonist of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger could pass for Hamm, or for the Hamm-like archetype that has bled into the American psyche. The film centers around an oil executive named Digger Rockwell, a Texas-accented plutocrat who has built his father’s wildcat oil company into a global concern with offshore rigs in Greenland and Alaska. As depicted by Tom Cruise, he is the ideal of the Southern businessman-ideologue, partial to monogrammed private jet seats and roaring rants about his own genitalia. Other than making money, his sole concern seems to be the welfare of his white cat Maggie, whom he is trying to keep alive against veterinary advice even as she decomposes in his arms.

Digger examines two questions. First, how much responsibility does such an individual bear for the deaths and displacements caused by global climate change? Second, what is the right way for an artist to consider the first question? If you think you already know the answers to these questions, this may be the movie for you, though I can’t promise you’ll enjoy watching it. In trying to construct a fable about the hubris of oil titans like Hamm, Iñárritu has produced a film that says nothing except what the viewer already knows. He is all too aware that political parables about corporate greed are of limited artistic value, but he can’t manage to escape the confines of parable. The result is a mess of shrieking and spittle that will leave even the most climate-conscious viewers reaching for an Advil. 

After an opening scene in which the audience is given the chance to marvel at Cruise’s physical metamorphosis into a flabby oil executive, the plot arrives with the delicacy of a tornado siren. A technician on Digger’s rig in Greenland calls to tell him that a methane leak has opened up a large crack that threatens the stability of the island’s enormous ice sheet. Before Digger can even finish a monologue about how he’s not going to shut down a billion-dollar platform because of a tiny crack, another group of company officials arrives on his doorstep to tell him that the rig has blown up and the Greenland ice sheet has already collapsed. Now a massive iceberg is headed straight for Europe, with the potential to flood the continent and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Digger confers with the president (John Goodman) to figure out what to do, and they quickly decide to keep drilling.

This opening act achieves a level of heavy-handedness that remained out of reach even for Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, the last major film to satirize those responsible for global warming, which likened climate change to a comet about to hit the earth. Digger’s proposed response to the crisis is to deploy a digital tool called the “firewall” to censor all mentions of “methane,” “iceberg,” and “climate change” from the Internet, while the president and his conservative cronies make predictable suggestions about bombing the iceberg or praying to God for deliverance. Whereas McKay opted for CNN-toned realism, Iñárritu’s aesthetics are a more interesting mix between Wes Anderson and Thomas Hart Benton — Digger’s boardroom is full of Art Deco murals depicting oil discoveries, and above the table hangs an obvious sculpture of a snake eating its own tail.

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) meets the president in a boardroom to discuss the iceberg approaching Europe. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The dialogue is full of jokes about climate change that will likely be catnip for the small minority of viewers who already spend most of their days thinking about it. There are references to the outsize global warming potential of methane and to a supposed “COP30 fiasco” at which the U.S. alienated its allies by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. (In reality, they were almost happy to see us go.) There’s even a reference to thawing Arctic permafrost that will be familiar to devoted Grist readers. The vehicle for these revelations is a series of dialogues between Digger and his in-house scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), each of which devolves into a fusillade of worn-out culture war tropes. Ganesh rejects Digger’s offer of delectable sashimi on the grounds that the bluefin tuna population has declined by 97 percent, “even though this administration won’t label them endangered.” He then tries the sashimi and loves it. 

Whether or not this satire provides an accurate picture of the world economy, it does not make for enjoyable moviegoing. Well over half the movie consists of people screaming their lungs out about methane or the stock market, culminating in an unbearable scene in which Digger berates the European parliament, calling them hypocrites for using his product while condemning his company. The Danish and German legislators howl at him from the benches, accusing him of genocide for allowing the iceberg to hit Europe, and Digger screams back for several minutes about how the world needs his crude. “You want me to keep producing,” he says. “You demand, and I supply!” If you’ve ever worked in climate change, participated in climate politics, or gotten into a debate about climate change on social media, the whole exchange will feel familiar, and not in a good way.

If I hadn’t been assigned to review the film, I might have walked out after the European parliament scene — not because of what Digger was saying, but just because it was ugly, loud, and unpleasant. Regardless of whether you agree with Digger or with the Europeans, who wants to listen to all that? In a Cruise-appropriate twist, the most pleasant moment of the entire film is when the U.S. Air Force scrambles a squadron of fighter jets to carpet bomb the iceberg. It’s almost the only moment in the movie where everyone shuts up. 

The movie includes a twist, or perhaps better to say a reveal, that is intended to show that Iñárritu is up to more than McKay was in Don’t Look Up. At the risk of giving too much away, this isn’t just a parable about climate change, it’s a parable about a parable about climate change. The apparent intention of this narrative complication is to ask what might be achieved by subjecting a viewer to a ham-fisted metaphor like the one the audience has just endured.

McKay’s obvious hope in Don’t Look Up was that such fables might spur people to action, and we can see how well that worked out a few years later — Donald Trump, a climate denier, received almost 80 million votes and triggered a global trend of “climate hushing,” or refusing to look up. Watching a movie about a tyrannical oil executive isn’t likely to make anyone buy an electric vehicle any more than reading the list of the largest emitters would. 

So why bother? Iñárritu seems to want to make the case for the value of chronicling our state of affairs, even if that chronicle drifts into caricature. A few guys really have gotten rich selling a product that has enabled global welfare while also threatening the continuity of that welfare. Those guys are much more inclined to continue selling their product than to stop. Isn’t there some value in preserving that truth for our descendants? During a scene whose context I won’t reveal, one character says the following: “It’s ridiculous, and it’s scary, and it’s funny, and it’s stupid. It makes no goddamn sense, but it’s what happened.” 

Be that as it may, a film still needs a heart, and Digger doesn’t have one any more than Digger himself does. Despite the shots of Cruise looking longingly at his disintegrating cat or at an oil rig sunset, it doesn’t even achieve the level of emotional resonance of a Marvel movie. It has about as much human warmth as a Twitter debate about permitting reform, and its final suggestion that stories can provide solace in times of great calamity is a classic instance of an artist telling where he should be showing. 

If Iñárritu’s point is to show through metaphor that corporate greed has abetted the climate crisis, well, he has made that point only too well. If the point is that this kind of metaphor is simplistic and of dubious political utility, he has also made that point. Even so, viewers looking for stories about the sins of big business may wish they had spent their hard-earned wages on a showing of Coyote vs. Acme, the acclaimed recent Looney Tunes revival. At least there, when the TNT crate drops, you don’t have to think before you laugh.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Digger’ is the year’s big climate movie. This climate reporter hated it. on Sep 29, 2026.

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

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

Why It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Global warming levels

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

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

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

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

Recommendation

Reject the proposed amendment in its entirety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a remarkably candid description of reputational engineering.

The same case study boasted extraordinary results.

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

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

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

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

That is why this is worth an article now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It does mean the presentation was selective.

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

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

The style was upbeat, global and aspirational.

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

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

It is not really about music.

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

Sources

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

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

World Media Group — Shell Case Study 2017

Shell #makethefuture campaign success story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The arrangement was informal. But it was not unorganized.

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

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

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

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

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

Before the war

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

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

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

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

The experience of Gezira State reveals something even more striking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The contradiction could hardly have been clearer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same pattern appeared in medicine, evacuation and information.

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

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

When neutrality becomes suspicion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge that survives

And yet the networks continued to grow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vacuum itself changed the society inside it.

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of resilience

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

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

Nor are they equal.

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

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

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

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

Yet the practices themselves did not necessarily disappear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sudanese ‘resistance theater’ animates a future without war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canada has made the project a national priority

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

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

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

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

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

A much larger Canadian gas position

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

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

The strategic chain is therefore becoming increasingly clear:

Shell owns substantial upstream Canadian gas production.

It owns 40% of LNG Canada.

It has now approved a doubling of liquefaction capacity.

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

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

From first cargo to expansion in little more than a year

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

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

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

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

The Asian market is central

Shell’s announcement repeatedly emphasises Asia.

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

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

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

Again, those forecasts remain forecasts.

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

The environmental argument has not disappeared

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

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

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

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

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

And Phase 1 has already had operational problems

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

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

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

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

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

Indigenous participation — and opposition

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

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

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

It would nevertheless be misleading to imply uniform Indigenous support.

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

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

Both belong in any balanced account.

Shell’s Canada strategy is becoming unmistakable

Taken separately, the announcements are significant.

Taken together, they show something larger.

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

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

It has now committed to doubling that project.

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

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

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

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

Shell is certainly still investing in lower-carbon businesses.

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

Natural gas.

And a great deal of it.

Documentary position

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

LNG Canada — Phase 2 Final Investment Decision

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

Government of Canada — LNG Canada Phase 2

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Times — Shell-led consortium backs LNG Canada expansion

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

Shell — Shell completes acquisition of ARC Resources

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Shell doubles down on Canada: LNG Canada Phase 2 turns Kitimat into a 28-million-tonne export hub was first posted on September 29, 2026 at 8:16 pm.
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