You are here
News Feeds
The smart choice: How the energy transition made Australia the perfect option for this technology innovator
Australia has become the ultimate global testbed for decentralised energy. Indian energy tech giant Kimbal is leveraging this unique environment to deploy its Edge Intelligence platform.
The post The smart choice: How the energy transition made Australia the perfect option for this technology innovator appeared first on Renew Economy.
How many people does heat actually kill?
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler
You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe:
linkIt’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the extreme heat? Or the number of deaths above what we would expect in a normal summer? Or something else.
This matters a lot. If we want to accurately communicate the impact of climate change on human mortality, we need to be precise about what we’re actually counting.
A graduate student and I just published a paper on this in GeoHealth (link), using heat-related mortality in Texas to demonstrate the issue. Here’s what we found.
the basic picture: a u-shaped curveThe relationship between daily average temperature and daily mortality is a U-shaped curve. The temperature at which the minimum number of deaths occur, often called the optimal temperature (abbreviated OT)1, is around 20°C (70°F) in most places. Mortality goes up as the temperature departs from the OT towards either hotter or colder temperatures.
This temperature-related mortality curve is calculated statistically by looking at how total (non-accidental) deaths vary with temperature. This produces curves like the one above.
By convention, the number of deaths occurring at the OT provides an estimate of the baseline (non-heat-related) deaths. At any other temperature, deaths above this baseline are assumed to be heat related.
For example, if there are 50 deaths on a day at the OT and 75 deaths at 10°C above the OT, we attribute the difference — 25 deaths — to heat.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s go over the different ways of quantifying heat-related mortality.
method 1: the optimal temperature method (OTM)The most common approach in the scientific literature counts all deaths above the OT. In other words, for all days where the daily average temperature was above the OT, we calculate the heat-related deaths on those days and sum them. This gives us an estimate of the total number of heat-related deaths. The red shaded region in the plot below shows this graphically.
We will refer to this as the optimal temperature method (OTM).
That European headline of 62,000 deaths? That’s this method. The problem is that a lot of these heat-related deaths are occurring at temperatures like 75°F, 80°F, 85°F — temperatures that nobody would consider extreme. While the number of deaths on these days is small, those temperatures occur often, so they dominate the total number of heat-related deaths.
So most of what this method counts isn’t really about heatwaves or record-breaking temperatures. It’s just... summer. It also means that the CNN headline was wrong: most of those 62,000 deaths were not due to extreme temperatures and many of them would have occurred even if the summer had been mild.
For Texas, we estimate roughly 1,130 deaths per year (over 2010-2023) using this method — about 2.2% of all summer deaths.
method 2: the extreme heat method (XHM)A more intuitive approach is to sum heat-related mortality occurring on days that are extremely hot — say, days above the 95th percentile daily average temperature threshold (the red shaded area in the plot below). This is a more direct metric for what the warmest temperatures are doing.
We will refer to this as the extreme heat method (XHM). Using this method for Texas, we estimate that extreme heat caused an average of 248 summertime deaths per year or about 0.5% of summertime deaths. This is much lower than the OTM because we’re not counting the large number of deaths that occur at moderately hot temperatures.
When we compare these numbers to the official death certificate numbers provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services — which counts cases where a medical examiner determined heat was the cause or a contributor to death — the agreement is good, at least in normal years. In extremely hot years like 2011 or 2023, the official death numbers appear to significantly undercount the true number.
comparison between heat-related deaths from the Extreme Heat Method (XHM) and the official number from the State of Texas (Official Deaths)The overall agreement between the extreme heat method and the official count makes sense. A medical professional will only attribute a death to heat when the connection is unambiguous and extreme (e.g., a patient comes into the emergency room with core body temperature of 106°F). Such deaths will mainly occur on very hot days.
On the other hand, if someone has a heart attack when it’s 85°F outside, no medical examiner is going to attribute that to heat. The only way to see the impact of heat on such deaths is with a statistical analysis, so you don’t expect these to show up in the official count.
method 3: the excess death method — what climate change actually didNeither of the first two methods answers the question most people actually want the answer to: how many people did climate change kill?
For that, we use what we refer to as the Excess Death Method (EDM). Our approach is to take today’s mortality risk curve (based on today’s population, today’s demographics, today’s level of adaptation to heat), but plug in the temperatures from a past period — in our analysis, we used 1950-1963.
This gives us an estimate of what today’s mortality would have been had we had temperatures of the mid-20th century. Then we subtract that from the same calculation using the present-day (2010-2023) temperatures. The difference is a measure of the deaths attributable to global warming.
For Texas, this comes out to roughly 900 additional deaths per year due to climate change that occurred since the 1950s, equal to 1.7% of summertime deaths. Using a typical value of a statistical life of $10 million, this corresponds to a value of $9 billion per year due to climate change, or about $300 per Texas resident.
why this mattersThe optimal temperature method counts all deaths above the optimal temperature. It’s the most common method in the literature and produces the largest numbers. It’s not wrong, but you should remember that most of these deaths are occurring at mild temperatures that happen every year, so it’s not measuring the impact of “extreme heat” in any intuitive sense2.
The extreme heat method counts only deaths on genuinely hot days. It produces smaller numbers that align well with official death counts from the medical examiners. It’s the better proxy if you want to understand the impact of acute heatwaves.
The excess death method compares mortality in two periods with different climates, holding everything else constant. It’s the best answer to the question “how many people did global warming kill?” For Texas, it’s about 900 people per year or about 1.7% of summertime deaths.
The official numbers from death certificates are almost always lower than all three modeled estimates because it is genuinely hard to establish heat as a cause of death except in the clearest cases. They should be treated in most cases as a lower bound.
The different ways of counting mortality from heat are fundamentally answering different things. Using them interchangeably, or reporting one without specifying which method, creates confusion about the impacts of climate change on mortality.
Because of this, the field would benefit enormously from agreeing on standard metrics. Right now, if you read ten papers on heat mortality, you may be seeing estimates from ten different methods. Getting them standardized and clearly defined matters for accurately reporting the impacts of heat to the public and policymakers.
Our paper: “Quantifying Heat-Related Mortality in Texas: A Comparison of Methods,” published in GeoHealth. Read it here.
You can also watch a talk I gave at NCAR over this material.
If you’re a reporter who wants to do a story on this, email me.
related postsI’ve written a bunch of other posts about mortality related to extreme heat & cold:
-
Unraveling the debate: Does heat or cold cause more deaths? Part 1
-
Unraveling the debate: Does heat or cold cause more deaths? Part 2
1 This temperature is also sometimes called the Minimum Mortality Temperature, abbreviated MMT.
2 This is also true of ‘cold-related mortality’. Most of those deaths are occurring at moderate temperatures just below the OT.
Media Advisory: The Bonn Setback or Bonn Fast track?
Media Advisory
For Immediate Release
The Bonn Setback or Bonn Fast track?
Unpacking what it takes to advance climate justice at Bonn
Bonn, Germany— The climate crisis is often described as a crisis of emissions but it is also far more. With week one of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change intersessional negotiations (SB64) in Bonn, Germany underway, governments are now getting deeper into the nuances of negotiations on critical topics such as just transition, climate finance, adaptation, carbon markets and more.
SB64 convenes at a moment when it is impossible to ignore the US-Israel led imperialist wars and genocide happening outside the halls of the UNFCCC and its impact around the world. Communities are not only confronting escalating climate impacts but also abuses of militarisation, debt crises, economic instability, shrinking civic space, rising authoritarianism and the continued concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of states, corporations and financial actors. In this context climate negotiations are not politically neutral spaces but are shaped by the same neo-colonial, imperial, fossil fuel driven economic system and the global inequalities that produced the climate crisis. Every major issue on the agenda for SB64– from climate finance and adaptation to just transition, mitigation and false solutions– reflects a broader struggle over rights, responsibility and the future of multilateralism.
Climate justice will not be delivered– at the UNFCCC or anywhere– through tiny tweaks to an unjust and failing global system. Real action requires the Global North to stop being the primary blockers of progress and instead get serious about delivering on its historical responsibility to do its fair share, protecting human rights and pay its long overdue climate debt. It requires transforming the structures that created the crisis and building pathways rooted in justice and equity to deliver on collective survival, dignity and liberation. The Bonn climate talks can either help deliver a setback or a fast track to climate justice.
Join members of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) as the Bonn climate talks kick off to hear more about what governments must deliver here in Bonn.
WHEN: Wednesday 10 June 2026, 11-11.30 CEST (UTC + 2)
WHERE: Nairobi 4, Main building, Inside the World Conference Center and webcast here
WITH:
- Meena Raman, Third World Network
- Leon Sealey-Huggins, War on Want
- Thomas Joseph Tsewenaldin, Indigenous Environmental Network
- Aleijn Reintegrado, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development
- Moderated by Rachitaa Gupta, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice
CONTACT: dcj.comms@demandclimatejustice.org
For more detail on DCJ’s demands across all topics on the agenda for Bonn, read DCJ’s SB64 Position Paper– Advancing Climate Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
The post Media Advisory: The Bonn Setback or Bonn Fast track? appeared first on Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.
MEIC Challenges Trump’s “Energy Emergency” EO at Bull Mountain Mine
by Derf Johnson “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emmanuel Anyone with even a dab of political sense knows the benefits of a “crisis” in terms of accomplishing administration …
The post MEIC Challenges Trump’s “Energy Emergency” EO at Bull Mountain Mine appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.
Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record — 550+ Articles, 110 Books, 40 Years
REGULARLY UPDATED: Links to over 500 articles (and radio and TV broadcasts) by publishers including the FT, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg, New York Times, CNBC, Forbes, plus UK House of Commons Select Committee Hansard records, U.S. SEC website records, and legal documents filed in U.S. Courts — all containing references to the Donovans, their Shell-related websites, or their former company Don Marketing. Syndicated duplicates removed except where published by a prestigious outlet (New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Bloomberg, Financial Times, etc.).
Background: Alfred Donovan’s Essex garage business held a Shell supply relationship from 1957. His company Don Marketing partnered with Shell on promotional games 1981–1991. Disputes over intellectual property rights led to four settled lawsuits and the registration of royaldutchshellplc.com, which attracted the coverage below spanning 40+ years. Shell’s WIPO attempt to recover the domain (Case D2005-0538) failed in August 2005. In all, over 550 externally published references to date, plus references in 110 books.
Contents1981–1991: The Shell Partnership (23 articles) | 1992–1999: Dispute & Litigation (58+ articles) | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 Onwards | 110 Books | TV, Radio & Video
1981–1991: The Shell Partnership — 23 ArticlesDuring this period Don Marketing and Shell operated as close commercial partners. Don Marketing invented and ran a series of highly successful petrol forecourt promotional games for Shell across Britain and internationally. All coverage is positive trade press reporting on joint activity.
Rubbing away to goodwill — Incentive Marketing and Sales Promotion, November 1983
Early trade press feature on Don Marketing’s scratchcard game concepts for Shell forecourts.
Fast flowing Don — Marketing Magazine, 16 February 1984
Profile of Don Marketing and its expanding roster of Shell promotional games.
Shell is back making money — Incentive Marketing and Sales Promotion, March 1984
Coverage of the relaunched Shell Make Money scratchcard game.
The Finale: Interview with Shell Manager Ken Danson — Shell In-house Magazine, March 1984
Interview on the promotional games partnership with Don Marketing.
Anatomy of a Shell winner — Campaign Magazine, 27 April 1984
Campaign’s analysis of the Shell Make Money game’s commercial success.
The play’s the thing — Marketing Magazine, 31 May 1984
Feature on Don Marketing’s game design philosophy and Shell partnership.
Marketing Magazine Sales Promotion Survey — 6 September 1984
Don Marketing and Shell games featured.
Why games became big business — Campaign Magazine, 14 September 1984
Wider industry analysis citing Don Marketing / Shell as the benchmark.
Cerebral promotion for drivers: Shell Mastermind — Trade Press, September 1984
Trade coverage of the Shell Mastermind game.
“Shell starts up a new promotion” (Shell Make Merry) — Marketing Week, 2 November 1984 — [POS Display]
Launch coverage of Shell Make Merry with point-of-sale display.
Don Marketing launches dual forecourt attack — Campaign Magazine, 2 November 1984
Campaign covers the simultaneous Shell Make Merry and second-game launch.
Shell offers ‘lucky deal’ — Marketing Magazine, 2 May 1985
Launch coverage of Shell Bruce’s Lucky Deal game.
Old favourites that never die — Campaign Magazine, 14 June 1985
Feature on the longevity of Don Marketing’s Shell game formats.
Don does it again, this time with Bruce — Promotions & Incentives Magazine, June 1985
Dedicated feature on Shell Bruce’s Lucky Deal.
It’s game, set and match as forecourts fight it out to the finish — Campaign Magazine, 27 September 1985
Industry analysis of the petrol forecourt promotional games market; Don Marketing / Shell as market leaders.
Learning the right rules of the game — Marketing Week Magazine, 11 October 1985
In-depth feature on promotional game mechanics; Don Marketing central.
John Chambers has left Don Marketing and game cards to set up a new sales promotion operation for the world’s sixth largest ad agency — Promotions & Incentive Magazine, February 1986
Don plans huge bingo promotion — Marketing Week, 7 February 1986
Don Marketing announces next-generation bingo-format game.
Marketing Magazine article “Games people play” involving John Donovan — 18 September 1986
Feature on the future of promotional gaming.
Shell launches Star Trek scratchcard game — Sales Promotion Magazine, March 1991
Launch article for the final major Shell / Don Marketing collaboration: the Shell Star Trek game.
Will Shell’s intergalactic experiment pay off? — Promotions & Incentives Magazine, July–August 1991
Cover story plus seven pages of coverage with extensive colour photography of the Shell Star Trek scratchcard promotion. The last major game in the Don Marketing / Shell partnership.
Shell Star Trek Promotion — Promotions & Incentives Magazine, February 1992
Follow-up coverage on results and performance of the Star Trek game.
Up to Scratch — Promotions & Incentives Magazine, June 1993
Retrospective industry feature on scratchcard technology and games; Don Marketing referenced.
Following the end of the Shell promotional games partnership, a dispute arose over intellectual property rights and Shell’s use of concepts developed by Don Marketing. This period produced extensive trade press coverage across Marketing Magazine, Marketing Week, Campaign, Incentive Today, Promotions & Incentives, Forecourt News, Forecourt Trader, and the national press. Don Marketing issued four writs against Shell; Shell settled out of court each time.
New DPP ruling: plain paper entries are ‘legal and acceptable’ — Promotion & Incentives Magazine, February 1992, Page 4
Shell faces libel threat from Don — Marketing Week, 31 March 1994
First major trade press report of the developing dispute between Don Marketing and Shell.
Shell struck by writ — Marketing Magazine, 20 October 1994 — Front-page headline
Marketing Magazine leads on Don Marketing issuing legal proceedings against Shell.
Shell stole intellectual property, alleges Don — Debrief Newsletter, November 1994
Debrief reports Don Marketing’s core intellectual property claim against Shell.
Don issues writ number four to embattled Shell — Marketing Magazine, 10 November 1994
Shell Shock: Editorial by Incentive Today Magazine — November/December 1994
Incentive Today editorial comment on the Don v Shell dispute.
Shell fails to block agency’s legal action — Incentive Today Magazine, January 1995
Shell ‘legal block fails’ in promotions agency row — Forecourt News, January 1995
Promotion Wrangle: Forecourt Trader uncovers the background to the legal dispute between Shell (UK) Ltd and promotions company Don Marketing UK (Ltd) — Forecourt Trader, January 1995
Don Marketing trade ad seeks help of dealers — Marketing Magazine, 12 January 1995
Don Marketing places trade advertisements appealing to Shell dealers for evidence.
Marketing Week News — 20 January 1995
Irate Don hits Shell investors — Marketing Week, 27 January 1995
Don Marketing steps up its attack on Shell — Debrief, February 1995
Pressure group to target Shell — Forecourt Trader, February 1995
‘Shell knew of flaws in Make Money’ — Forecourt News, February 1995 — Front page
Marketing Week News — 24 February 1995
Shell seeks guarantee over costs in Don case — Marketing Week, 24 March 1995
Shell promotions dispute intensifies — Promotions & Incentives, April 1995
Shell: ‘claim will fail’ — Incentive Today, April 1995
Shell row steps up a gear — Forecourt News, April 1995
Stop Press: Don Marketing founder Alfred Donovan has issued a libel writ — Marketing Magazine, 20 April 1995
Alfred Donovan personally issues a libel claim against Shell.
Shell faces libel action as Don’s founder issues writ — Marketing Week, 21 April 1995
Shell speaks out over Don — Forecourt Trader, April 1995
Donovan issues Shell libel writ — Promotions & Incentive Magazine, May 1995
Briefly Column — Forecourt News, May 1995
Stop Press: Shell has confirmed that its senior management will hold talks with Don Marketing — Marketing Magazine, 25 May 1995
Don takes its payment fight to Shell’s AGM — Marketing Week, 26 May 1995
Alfred Donovan confronts Shell management at the annual general meeting.
Marketing Week News: John Donovan, of sales promotion agency Don Marketing… — 2 June 1995
“Will have a team picketing Shell’s London headquarters for four days a week”
David Don and Goliath Shell: Episode 3,651 — Debrief Newsletter, June 1995, Page 63
Debrief’s running commentary headline on the dispute.
Lucky Numbers — Incentive Today, July/August 1995
Substantial feature including John Donovan on scratch card game mechanics, security, and the industry.
Extract: “Donovan quoting a cost of 4p per card to run a scratch card promotion… cards printed in the United States by printers Dittler Brothers, who are specialists in printing scratch and lottery tickets and even have armed guards securing their plant.”
Shell UK and Don Marketing — Marketing Week, 8 September 1995
Debrief Newsletter — October 1995
Shell faces High Court battle over Smart Card — Marketing Week, 16 April 1998 — Front-page cover story
Marketing Week leads on Don Marketing’s new legal action over the Shell Smart loyalty card scheme.
Shell card in legal row — Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April 1998
National press picks up the Smart card dispute.
Don Marketing booking full-page ads to alert Shell shareholders to its dispute with Shell — Marketing Magazine, 23 April 1998
High Court papers unveil ‘secret’ Shell writ losses — Marketing Week, 23 April 1998
Shell reveals plans for challenging Smart writ — Marketing Week, 30 April 1998
Donovan brings new Shell writ — this time for libel — Marketing Magazine, 30 April 1998
Shell stands firm on Smart charges — Promotions & Incentives, May 1998
Don’s Smart writ — Forecourt Trader, May 1998
New clash for Don Marketing and Shell — Incentive Today Magazine, May 1998
ASA dragged into Shell UK Smart battle — Marketing Week Magazine, 7 May 1998
Shell broadens base — Marketing Magazine, 7 May 1998
Shell in legal row — Sales Promotion Magazine, May 1998
Shell faces new threat to Smart card scheme — Marketing Week, 21 May 1998
Shell: Don is more than ‘disgruntled’ — Marketing Week Letters, 21 May 1998
Shell’s response published in Marketing Week letters column.
Don Marketing posts warning about Shell — Marketing Week Magazine, 28 May 1998
Shell Smart copyright battle gets nastier — Loyalty Magazine, May/June 1998
Safe Ideas — June 1998
Donovan’s beef with Shell online — Daily Telegraph, 11 June 1998
The Telegraph reports on Don Marketing taking the dispute to the internet; an early online activism story.
Don Claims first round in Shell libel action — Marketing Week, 30 July 1998
“McShell” case continues — Loyalty Magazine, August 1998
On cyberpicket lines — London Evening Standard, 28 September 1998
Subheadline: “Don’t get mad, get even” — the Evening Standard covers the Donovans’ early internet campaigning as a new form of corporate pressure.
Shell smacked over libel action — Incentive Today Magazine, September 1998
Judge Shell by actions not words — Marketing Week, 25 February 1999
Shell loyalty row continues — Incentive Today, June 1999
Donovan takes Smart case against Shell to court — Sunday Business, 6 June 1999
Promotions expert claims Shell stole his Smart card idea — Sunday Telegraph, 6 June 1999
The Sunday Telegraph covers the High Court proceedings.
Shell faces court battle on its Smart scheme — Marketing Magazine, 10 June 1999
Ideas man sues Shell — The Times, 16 June 1999
The Times national coverage of the High Court action.
Oil giant stole my promotion idea, alleges businessman — East Anglian Daily Times, 16 June 1999
Into battle with Shell — Bury Free Press, 18 June 1999
Local press in the Donovans’ home county covers the High Court proceedings.
Shell in High Court suit over Smart card scheme — Debrief, July 1999
Don ends legal proceedings against Shell UK — Marketing Week, 8 July 1999
Shell settles out of court.
Shell has settled out of court with John Donovan… — Marketing Magazine, 28 July 1999 — Stop Press Column
Shell claim is settled — Bury Free Press, 9 July 1999
Stalemate for marketing firm’s ‘stolen’ idea claim — East Anglian Daily Times, 7 July 1999
Shell action abandoned — Forecourt Trader, August 1999
Don and Shell end Smart row — Incentive Today, July–August 1999
Shell in High Court suit over Smart card scheme — WARC, 1 August 1999
Industry database records the settlement.
Speak Out! — West Pasco Press Newspaper (Florida, USA), November 1999, Page 2
Alfred Donovan interviewed for comment in Florida. US local press coverage of the dispute’s resolution.
Wall Street Journal Europe — 3–5 June 2005, Page A4
“Shell Fights Over Domain Name Ahead of Parent Firm’s Merger”
Wall Street Journal (US Edition) — 2 June 2005
“Shell Wages Legal Fight Over Web Domain Name” — The WSJ broke the story globally: Alfred Donovan, 88-year-old British army veteran, had registered royaldutchshellplc.com before Shell itself.
Extract: “Later this summer, oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell Group is expected to merge its two parent companies, creating a new corporate entity: Royal Dutch Shell PLC. But go to www.royaldutchshellplc.com and you will find a crude Web site in garish colors where Alfred Donovan, an 88-year-old British army veteran, posts dozens of media reports and commentary, most of it negative, about Shell…”
Bloomberg — 2 June 2005
“Shell in Legal Battle Over Name of Web Site, Journal Reports”
Extract: “Donovan and his son John have waged a longstanding anti-Shell campaign that started in the 1990s in a dispute over rights to Shell gasoline-station promotions, the Journal said.”
Algemeen Dagblad / De Mirror (Netherlands) — 5 June 2005
“Hoogbejaarde Brit zit Shell dwars” — Dutch national coverage of the domain dispute.
The Times (City Diary) — 21 June 2005
“Hostile Domain”
Reuters / Washington Post — 24 June 2005
“Shell shareholders to back unification” — Reuters article syndicated to the Washington Post, noting the domain dispute as a complication to Shell’s corporate restructuring.
New York Times (Reuters syndication) — 25 June 2005
“Shell Shareholders to Back Unification”
Extract: “Another dampener on Shell’s biggest corporate overhaul since the two holding firms tied up in 1907, is a spat over the rights to the web domain ‘royaldutchshellplc.com.’ Disgruntled shareholder Alfred Donovan beat Shell to register the domain name.”
Variations also published by: The Washington Post · MSN Money · Yahoo · The Gulf Times (Qatar) · The Boston Globe — all June 2005.
Newstalk Radio 106fm Dublin — “The Breakfast Show with Eamon Dunphy” — 4 August 2005
John Donovan interview, broadcast 8.17am.
The Times — 16 August 2005
“AN ATTEMPT by Royal Dutch Shell to claim the website royaldutchshellplc.com has failed.” — Reporting the WIPO ruling (Case D2005-0538).
CommTech Newsletter — 9 September 2005
WIPO panel ruling summary.
Extract: “A World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) panel has found against Shell in a dispute over ownership of the domain names royaldutchshellgroup.com, royaldutchshellplc.com and tellshell.org. Alfred Donovan, an 88 year old war veteran and Shell shareholder, uses the domain names to direct to his website which offers a forum for criticism of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies.”
Fortune Magazine — 2 August 2006 — [PDF]
“Executive Bookmark” — Fortune listed royaldutchshellplc.com alongside shell.com as one of the two principal Shell websites.
Argus FSU Energy — 27 October 2006
“Shell weights its options”
Interfax / Johnson’s Russia List — 13 November 2006
“Russian Ministry Says Sakhalin Energy Measures on Environment Unsatisfactory”
NASA.gov — 1 January 2007 — [PDF1] [PDF2]
“Future Fuel Scenarios and Their Potential Impact to Aviation” — 18-page NASA technical report citing a royaldutchshellplc.com article on page 17.
Business New Europe — January 2007
“Shell Gets Stuck in a Sakhalin blog-mire”
Prospect Magazine — February 2007
“Rise of the gripe site” — Major feature on the Donovans and royaldutchshellplc.com as a new force in corporate accountability.
Financial Times — 5 June 2007
“‘Pipeliners All!’ Shell’s memo to Sakhalin” — FT story breaking the Patton-style Sakhalin memo, sourced from royaldutchshellplc.com.
WikiLeaks / Stratfor (email-id 340835) — 6 June 2007 — [PDF]
Global Intelligence Files record relating to the Sakhalin-2 Patton-style memo.
Moscow Times — 9 June 2007
“Sakhalin Pep Talk From ‘Old Blood and Guts'”
Financial Times — 22 June 2007
“‘Patton’ e-mail man resigns SEIC post” — SEIC Deputy Chairman David Greer resigns following the Sakhalin leak.
Moscow Times — 22 June 2007
“Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down”
One World Trust Newsletter — July 2007
“Royaldutchshellplc.com – The Power of a Website”
Daily Mail — 1 September 2007
“Shell on back foot as ‘gripe site’ alleges safety concerns”
Reuters — 4 September 2007
“Shell loses exec on troubled Kazakh project — source”
Extract: “John Donovan, who runs a Web site critical of Shell and acts as a conduit for whistleblowers at the company, said Shell insiders had told him that John Stubbs, a senior project manager on Kashagan, had left the Anglo-Dutch oil major.”
Daily Telegraph — 8 September 2007 — [PDF]
“Pressure on Shell over safety of platforms”
Sunday Telegraph — 10 September 2007 — [PDF]
“Online revolutionaries”
Prospect Magazine — 12 September 2007
“Shell’s Colchester headache”
The Times (City Diary — Martin Waller) — 22 September 2007
“Royal Dutch Shell at war with family”
Extract: “Since the 1990s, Royal Dutch Shell has been at war with a family who registered a website, royaldutchshellplc.com. The Donovan family, led by 90-year-old Burma veteran Alfred, perhaps quixotically want Shell to change its management. Shell has failed to shut down the site…”
BBC Radio Essex — 11 October 2007
Presenter Etholle George interviews John Donovan (transcript).
Nikkei BP (Japan) — 13 November 2007
“Gripe sites are becoming more powerful”
Extract: “The fate of Sakhalin 2 was changed by two British men… It is not well known in Japan that actions of a 90-year-old man and his son who live in a countryside in UK contributed to the above movement.”
Lloyd’s / Dow Jones Newswires — 19 November 2007
“US Court Ruling Paves For Shell Reserves Settlement To Proceed”
Reuters — 21 December 2007
“Shell to cut thousands of IT jobs”
Sunday Telegraph — 30 December 2007 — [PDF]
“Shell plans to outsource 3,600 jobs”
Financial Times — 30 December 2007 — [PDF]
“Shell looks to outsource about 3,200 IT jobs”
Guardian — 31 December 2007
“Shell to outsource 3,600 IT jobs”
Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones — 2 January 2008
“Shell Plans Cost Cutting As Profit Is Threatened”
Extract: “Shell intends to transfer ‘close to 3,000 positions’ from its IT staff to outsourcing companies, according to a Shell newsletter obtained by Royaldutchshellplc.com.”
Bloomberg — 2 January 2008
“Shell Will Cut Finance Jobs, Reorganize in Nigeria, WSJ Says”
ComputerWorld UK — 2 January 2008
“Shell plans to outsource 3,200 IT jobs”
Dow Jones Newswires — 5 January 2008
“Shell CEO Reassures Staff After Outsourcing Leak”
Extract: “Royal Dutch Shell PLC Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer is seeking to reassure staff after leaks over the company’s plans to transfer 3,000 IT employees, according to a document obtained by Royaldutchshellplc.com.”
The Times — 25 January 2008
“Demand for oil and gas will outstrip supply within 7 years says Shell chief”
The Times (City Diary) — 25 January 2008
“A curious letter from Jeroen van der Veer”
Dow Jones Newswires — 25 January 2008
“Shell: Easy Oil No Longer Matching Demand After ’15 – Web Site”
Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones — 24–25 January 2008
“Shell OKs Extra $27M Legal Fee In Reserves Case — Website”
Wall Street Journal — 18 March 2008
“Shell Addresses Output Issue”
UK House of Commons — WWF evidence to Select Committee on Environmental Audit — 20 June 2008
WWF Sakhalin Evidence — Parliamentary evidence citing royaldutchshellplc.com’s Sakhalin II whistleblower reporting. Also published in House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee Eleventh Report of Session 2007–08.
WikiLeaks / Stratfor (email-id 1161378) — 1 December 2008 — [PDF]
Global Intelligence Files record relating to Gazprom loans and Sakhalin-2.
Guardian / International Herald Tribune / Reuters / Financial Times — 12–13 December 2008
Multiple outlets covered Shell’s pension fund falling 40% in value — Guardian · International Herald Tribune · Reuters · Financial Times
Reuters (syndicated) — 30 January 2009
“Shell gets tough on costs as oil prices bite” — Reference: “Copies of the emails are available at www.royaldutchshellplc.com”
Syndicated to: AOL Money Canada · CNBC · Forbes · Financial Post · Guardian · International Herald Tribune · London Stock Exchange AFX · MSN · STV · USA Today · National Post
Santa Barbara News-Press — 7 February 2009
“Gripe sites are all the rage now”
Reuters (syndicated) — 9 February 2009
“INTERVIEW — Shell eyes Mid East growth, to cut some jobs” — Reference: employees posted comments on royaldutchshellplc.com.
Syndicated to: Guardian · Forbes · Forexpros · Trade Arabia · ArabianBusiness.com · Economic Times of India
The Intellectual Property Strategist (Law Journal Newsletter) — February 2009
“Gripe Sites: Sue or Stew” — Legal analysis of the Shell v Donovan WIPO case as precedent for corporate gripe site disputes.
Reuters (syndicated) — 12 February 2009
“Shell to stall hires and get ‘ruthless’ on contractors” — Reference: “A copy of the email is available on Shell protest site royaldutchshellplc.com.”
Syndicated to: Upstream Online · BNET · Singapore Retrenchment · Interactive Investor · ExecutiveDigital · LondonSouthEast.co.uk
Financial Times — 26 May 2009
“Shell shake-up widely rumoured; E&P and G&P tipped to merge” — Royaldutchshellplc.com broke the story of the Berlin restructuring summit.
Financial Times (multiple editions) — 26–27 May 2009
Three separate FT editions cited royaldutchshellplc.com as the source reporting that more than 30% of senior managers were expected to be cut. [FT 1] [FT 2] [FT 3] [FT 4]
Daily Mail — 26–27 May 2009
“Shell shock as long-timer Cook is first to go in Voser cull” — described royaldutchshellplc.com as “company gossip site” that had “regularly obtained leaks from Shell insiders.”
Dow Jones Newswires — 27 May 2009
“Shell To Restructure, Merge Three Units” — Dow Jones listed www.royaldutchshellplc.com as the company’s web address.
London Evening Standard — 27 May 2009
“Shell braced for massive job cuts in Berlin summit” — described royaldutchshellplc.com as “Shell insiders’ website.”
International coverage — 27 May 2009
AFP (France) · Romandie News · De 529 (Netherlands) · le nouvel Observateur · China Money 163.com · DutchDN (Norway) · DutchFEM · fd.nl (Het Financieele Dagblad) · koersalarm.nl · z24.nl · Denver Post — all citing royaldutchshellplc.com as the source of the restructuring story.
Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones (syndicated) — 22–23 June 2009
“Leaked Shell E-mail Reveals 62 Senior Executive Appointments”
Extract: “An internal e-mail from Royal Dutch Shell PLC leaked to a blog critical of the company has revealed the appointments of 62 senior executives to new roles within the restructured company. The e-mail dated June 16, sent by incoming Chief Executive Peter Voser, was published Saturday on the blog royaldutchshellplc.com.”
Syndicated to: ADVFN · easyBOURSE · SmartMoney · MorningStar · Dow Jones Deutschland · IEX.nl · fd.nl het Financieele Dagblad
Reuters (syndicated) — 30 May 2009
“Shell to cut 350–450 senior managers in overhaul — website” — “The Royaldutchshellplc.com website was the first to reveal news of the planned restructuring.”
Syndicated to: New York Times · CNBC · Forbes · MSN Money · USA Today · BNET · Economic Times India · Straits Times Singapore · Interactive Investor · Brazil Globo · Reuters China · SINA.com
Sunday Times — 19 July 2009
“Two men and a website mount vendetta against an oil giant” — Major Sunday Times feature with photo spread; subtitle: “They just go on digging: the Donovans’ campaign has caused Shell expense and embarrassment at its operations in Russia.”
Financial Times Energy Source — 20 July 2009
“Why royaldutchshellplc.com do what they do”
Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones (syndicated) — 17 July, 21 July, 3 August 2009
“Shell Email Leak Says US Convent Refinery Income Dismal — Blog” and “Shell’s Leaked 300 VPs List Shows Deepening Restructuring”
Syndicated to: NASDAQ · SmartMoney · EasyBourse · MorningStar · ADVFN · Borsa Italiana · New York Daily News
Reuters — 2 December 2009
“Shell critic says oil major targeting his website” — Key Reuters investigation; includes the email from a Shell communications representative to Fox News describing royaldutchshellplc.com as “an excellent source of group news and comment… far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”
The source page at royaldutchshellgroup.com/2016/09/19/88205/ continues with entries through 2026, covering over 300 further articles. The page is regularly updated. Key themes from 2010 onwards include: the 2010 and 2015 data breach coverage (176,000+ employee records); the Shell reserves fraud and related U.S. class action; ongoing Sakhalin-2 and Nigeria coverage; the 2022 Shell corporate renaming fiasco; AI “bot war” coverage from 2024–2026; and the Guardian and Reuters articles on the Donovans’ campaign attracting over 550 external references.
17-page report by Michael Priestley entitled “China’s reliance on Australian LNG exports” published by Parliament of Australia Department of Parliamentary Services on 6 January 2010. Reference link on page 4 to an article on royaldutchshellplc.com
*United States Trademark Law book published by BOOKS LLC in 2010
Chapter 11 is devoted to the website ROYALDUTCHSHELLPLC.COM
Extract: royaldutchsheUplc.com is a Royal Dutch Shell gripe site and blog operated by Alfred and John Donovan, who engaged in several marketing campaigns with Shell during the 1980s and early 1990s. The father and son duo believe Shell violated intellectual property agreements and filed several law suits against Shell prior to starting several websites critical of Shell, including royaldutchshellplc.com. The site has been oft quoted in news sources and is known for its activities as an Internet leak and forum for Shell whistleblowers.
Syndicated version:
*ADVFN.COM/ DOW JONES NEWS
*DataBreaches.net: Shell employee contact data breach affects over 100,000: 7 February 2010
Syndicated version ends
*Financial Times: Shell staff details leaked to campaign groups: 11 February 2010
*Times Online: Confidential Shell database published on web: 12 February 2010
*ComputerWeekly.com: Did activists infiltrate Shell to obtain contacts database?: 12 February 2010
*ComputerWeekly.com: Shell staff details revealed in security breach
*Evening Express: Alert after Shell workers data leaked on web: 12 February 2010
*Financial Times: Shell employees’ details leaked to environmental campaigners: 12 February 2010
*Financial Times Blog: Shells directory leak shouldnt be taken lightly: 12 February 2010
*Dark Reading: Shell Employee Directory Leaked, Allegedly By Activist Workers
*Financial Times: Shell staff contact list leaked to environmental campaign groups
*Irish Herald.ie: Shell staff details exposed online in security leak risk
*The Times: SHELL INVESTIGATES INTERNET POSTING OF PERSONAL DETAILS:13 February 2010
*Reuters: SHELL INVESTIGATES INTERNET POSTING OF PERSONAL DETAILS: 13 February 2010
*The Register: Shell hit by massive data breach: 15 Feb 2010
*ITPRO: Shell hit by massive data breach: 15 Feb 2010
*ITWIRE: Shells internal directory leaked to activists: 16 Feb 2010
*ITPRO: Shell data hackers hoped to kick-off ‘revolution’: 16 Feb 2010
DATA BREACH STORIES END
*WikiLeaks THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE FILES 19 Feb 2010 Email-ID 5033529. Stratfor.com Nigeria database – Open “Attached Files” 167401.
*ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: The Corrib Gas controversy: October 2010: Book – can be purchased on Amazon
Extract: Four years later, in November 2007, the RoyalDutchShellplc.com website run by Alfred and John Donovan – long-time critics of the multinational – published details of minutes of a meeting of Shell group managing directors on 22 and 23 July 2002. Planning refusal for the Ballinaboy gas terminal in north Mayo was discussed, according to the website, which quoted from the minutes: ‘The committee queried whether the group had sufficiently well placed contacts with the Irish government and regulators. Paul Skinner undertook to explore this issue further in consultation with the country chairman in Ireland.’
2011*CRC Press: “The Four Stages of Highly Effective Crisis Management” by Jan Jordan-Meier Book Published March 2011
Extract:
Not only have they been actively campaigning against the company for nearly a decade (they started in 2001), but they own the domain name www.royaldutchshellplc.com–Shell’s proper name, you guessed it, Royal Dutch Shell.
According to an interview on their blog, the site receives millions of hits per month and many of the people using the site are shell employees.
Influential–you bet. The Donovans and their blog are regularly quoted in the mainstream media–no doubt that the father-and-son team is an ongoing headache for Shell.
Extract: The RoyalDutchShellplc.com website is highly critical of Shell’s operations worldwide. It was established in 2005 by the Donovans, owners of a marketing company which was involved in court actions with Shell.
*66-page report authored by Albert ten Kate entitled: “Royal Dutch Shell and its sustainability troubles” published by Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) in May 2011
Extract
Research
Assessing the online library of news articles and leaked documents (over 25,000 articles and documents) about Royal Dutch Shell via http://royaldutchshellplc.com
*OUR INVOLVEMENT IN A SUNDAY EXPRESS ARTICLE: SCOTTISH OIL RIGS IN DIRE STRAITS: 11 September 2011
*THE MAYO NEWS ARTICLE: Natural resources they have’nt gone away you know: 7 October 2011
Extract: The royaldutchshellplc.com website had this on its home page last Friday. This website, subtitled, ‘News and information on Royal Dutch Shell Plc’ has nothing whatever to do with the said company. A disclaimer states: “This is not a Shell website nor is it officially endorsed by or affiliated with Shell in any way.” The site was founded by 94 year-old Alfred Donovan, the former Chairman of the Shell Corporate Conscience Pressure Group. He is assisted by, among others, his son, John, who has been involved in the gasoline retailing industry for over 40 years. John is best known for his long association with the Royal Dutch Shell Group, firstly for devising marketing campaigns on an international basis and more recently as a long-term Shell shareholder and critic of Shell senior management. The site is a mine of information on Shell’s activities worldwide.
2012*Extract from the ebook by Robert Eringer, Suck My Pen: How to Gut Goliath by Becoming an Interactive Hub of Dissent (Published March 2012 Kindle Edition)
EXTRACTS:
…the most successful gripe site of all time, which targets Shell Oil, actually operates under the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com, Shell’s legal trading name.
IX. CASE STUDY: SHELL OIL
1. Royal Dutch Shell Plc is a multinational Goliath that makes billions of dollars annually in profits from high oil prices and employs 100,000 persons in over a hundred countries; but if you go to royaldutchshellplc.com you will not find Shell Oil; you will find a gripe site operated by father and son Alfred and John Donovan.
2. In 1993, Shell allegedly stole promotional ideas disclosed to it in confidence by the Donovans; they resorted to legal means to remedy their predicament, resulting in many court battles; in the midst of litigation, the Donovans created an anti-Shell gripe site; Shell eventually paid to settle all court actions.
3. Nonetheless, the Donovans continued to use their site to hold Shell accountable whenever Shell’s policies did not correlate to their public relations and advertising rhetoric.
4. In March 2005, Shell initiated legal action to try to stop the Donovans from using royaldutchshellplc.com as their domain name; Shell lost.
5. Over time, the Donovans constructed the most comprehensive Shell-related news service on the Internet, gathering and publishing many news stories on Shell each day on a 24/7 basis; additionally, the Donovans write and publish an outspoken blog about Shell on which they discuss various news stories while voicing their expert opinions; if you Google “Royal Dutch Shell,” there are approximately of 1,120,000 results; the Donovan site consistently ranks number four.
6. Visitors to royaldutchshellplc.com site can post comments on its Live Chat feature without having to register, thereby allowing anonymous offerings; thus it attracts Shell insiders who reveal confidential information about Shell without them having to give up their identities; some such insiders graduated to leaking Shell internal correspondence documents to the Donovans.
7. Royaldutchshellplc.com receives several million hits monthly and has become an interactive hub of dissent, attracting whistleblowers who use the Donovan site as a means to leak numerous Shell secrets to the media, resulting in huge embarrassment to Shell’s senior management and even the resignation of a Shell senior executive.
8. A confidential Shell memo leaked to the Donovans tabled strategies for combatting the Donovan site; Shell conducted surveillance and deployed dirty tricks against the Donovans, including the use of an undercover agent who presented false credentials from a company that did not exist and was subsequently caught examining private mail inside the Donovans office.
9. The significance of the Donovan website has been acknowledged by mainstream media; One World Trust, an independent research organization, announced that the Donovan site has had a “profound” impact on Shell.
10. Profound, indeed; revelations published on royaldutchshellplc.com have cost Shell billions of dollars; as such, David gutted Goliath.
*The headline is “Konzernfeind No.1″ freely translated as: “The Company’s (Shell’s) Enemy No.1″
*PRESSEUROP: John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare: 27 March 2012
Extract: Thanks to a network of “moles” inside the company, this early retiree from Britain is posting on his website reports on shortcomings inside the world’s largest oil group. It’s a dogged pursuit that has already cost the Anglo-Dutch giant several billions.
*VOXeurop: John Donovan, l’incubo di Shell: Published in Italian 27 March 2012
*VOXeurop: John Donovan, o pesadelo da Shell: Published in Portuguese: 27 March 2012
*VOXeurop: John Donovan, coşmarul celor de la Shell: published in Romanian: 27 March 2012
*ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF A FRENCH ARTICLE BY MYEUROP.INFO: The man who shook Shell: 29 March 2012
Extract: John Donovan, 64, is a meticulous man and very knowledgeable. For several years he has spent most of his time on what he describes as his “super-hobby”: the website royaldutchshellplc.com with scoops on the evils of the multinational.
Contacted by telephone Wednesday, Shell declined to comment about this annoying site.
It is not uncommon for John Donovan to find in his mailbox job applications, professional sales proposals and even terrorist threats directed at the oil company. It should be clear that it is an anti-Shell site, but there are many people who do not pay attention.
*BNR News Radio (Netherlands): JOHN DONOVAN, THE NIGHTMARE OF SHELL: 29 March 2012
*Article by MyEuro.info: The Man Who Knew too much… about Shell: 3 April 2012
*European Journal TV news magazine. Documentary segment “Britain: Shell’s Enemy No. 1” First broadcast 2 May 2012 VIDEO LINK
*Ground Report: THE GRIPE SITE – ROYAL DUTCH SHELL VS. ROBERT ERINGER: 17 May 2012 pdf version
*TRANSLATION OF DUTCH MAGAZINE “VRIJ NEDERLAND” ARTICLE: How Shell pleased Qaddafi: 1 August 2012
Extract: The list was given to Vrij Nederland by the Englishman John Donovan of the website Royaldutchplc.com which has critically monitored the multinational for many years. John Donovan says he has a network of people who work for the oil and gas company or used to work for it.
2013*WikiLeaks: Internal global intelligence company Stratfor email about an article relating to the Sakhalin project in Russia. (FT Article). One of several WikiLeak files citing royaldutchshellplc.com: Released by WikiLeaks 18 March 2013
Extract: The news about Mr. Lawrence’s departure was first reported on the website of John Donovan, a blogger critical of the company.
*Wall Street Journal: Head of Shell U.S. Arctic Program to Depart: 22 March 2013
Extract: The news about Mr. Lawrence’s departure was first reported on the website of John Donovan, a blogger critical of the company.
*RIGZONE: Shell Executive Managing Arctic Alaska Oil Program to Leave Company: Friday March 22, 2013
*Shell Executive From Arctic Alaska Oil Program to Leave: Fox Business: 22 March 2013
*FORBES ARTICLE: Did Shell Axe Exec Responsible For Alaska Drilling Fiasco?: 26 March 2013
Extract: Much correspondence between Shell and OSSL is posted on a website which then came to play a key role: royaldutchshellplc.com, run by John Donovan and until recently his father, Alfred, who died last month. The site, a thorn in Shell’s side, is a watchdog on the company and repository for material leaked by whistleblowers and discontents, with more than 30 million monthly hits. The Donovans had secured places for Kane and Rooney at Shell’s AGM last month, to raise their grievances. Cornered, the company’s CEO, Peter Voser, suddenly ordered a further inquiry, a move echoed by the Garda.
*Luxfer Group Limited Press Release: Luxfer Group enters into North American joint venture: 12 Aug 2013: PDF
*U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission website: Luxfer Group Enters into North American Joint Venture to Produce Gas Transportation Modules: 12 Aug 2013 PDF
*IRISH TIMES ARTICLE: Shell welcomes Garda examination of alcohol claims: 13 August 2013
Extract: The Garda Ombudsman confirmed yesterday that it was not currently investigating the claims, which first surfaced on the whistleblowers’ website royaldutchshellplc.com.
*THE MAYO NEWS ARTICLE: Gardaí deny booze bribes: 13 August 2013
Extract: The invoice for the consignment of alcohol is on-view on www.royaldutchshellplc.com, the site of well-known Shell watchdog, John Donovan.
Donovan told The Mayo News yesterday he ‘made it plain to Shell that if they categorically stated that the invoice was fabricated, then [he] would remove it from [his] website’. The Observer also asked the gardaí and Supt John Gilligan, who was the garda chief at the time in Belmullet, to deny the claim but they simply re-sent a a prepared statement.
Extracts
In the first email published on the anti-Shell whistleblower website, royaldutchshellplc.com, OSSL alleges that a Shell contacts manager for Corrib “used OSSL to make payments of cash and gifts to various parties in Erris and beyond” and “gave instructions regarding the purchase of various items to be gifted to local householders with a view to advancing the project in a particularly difficult part of the construction program”.
Just a month later, OSSL decided to take its campaign public and posted its allegations on the anti-Shell website, royaldutchshellplc.com.
Six months later John Donovan, who runs royaldutchshellplc.com, received an invoice from OSSL. The invoice, drawn up five years after the event, outlines how two consignments of alcohol costing €29,500 were purchased in Northern Ireland by OSSL. They were then allegedly brought across the border in a commercial vehicle on the instruction of a Shell E&P Ireland employee and stored in OSSL premises in Bangor Erris.
2014*FORBES MAGAZINE ARTICLE: Big Oil’s $3 Billion Homage To A Nazi War Criminal: 20 Dec 2014
2015*THE JEWISH CHRONICLE: World’s biggest ship named after Nazi: 22 Jan 2015
*DUTCH FINANCIAL TIMES: Criticism swells of Heerema’s ‘bad name’ heavy lift: 25 Jan 2015
*GUARDIAN ONLINE: Jewish outrage as ship named after SS war criminal arrives in Europe: 25 Jan 2015
*Maldon Standard: Man’s fight to change ship’s Nazi-linked name succeeds: 12 February 2015
2016*CNBC: UPDATE 1-Shell takes sacked UK workers overseas service tax break: 8 July 2016
*DAILY MAIL ONLINE: Shell takes sacked UK workers overseas service tax breaks: 8 July 2016
*Reuters Syndicated article: Shell faces possible Dutch lawsuit over Nigerian activist’s execution: 16 October 2016
Also published by the following from 16 to the 17th of October 2016:
*OAN – One American News Network
*WIBQ THE TALK STATION (US TALK RADIO)
*THE FISCAL TIMES (US WEBSITE)
*YouTube.com Wochit: Shell May Face Lawsuit Over Nigerian Activists Execution
*Shell Faces Lawsuit over Activists’ Execution: THIS DAY
*defenceWeb Zambia 17 Oct 2016
Syndicated article ends 2017*Reuters syndicated article: Shell’s attorneys ordered to give Nigerian activist’s widow files for Dutch lawsuit: 11 Jan 2017
*TV260 Nigeria: US court orders Shell to release files to Nigerian activist’s widow
*biznes.onet.pl (Poland)
Syndicated article end
Reuters syndicated article: Shell Plans 400 Job Cuts at Dutch Projects and Technology Department: 31 July 2017PDF versions in brackets
*Reuters (Reuters 31 July 2017
*The New York Times (Shell Plans 400 Job Cuts at Dutch Projects and Technology Department – The New York Times)
*Daily Mail (Daily Mail 31 July 2017)
*YAHOO FINANCE: (YAHOO FINANCE 31 July 2017)
*New York Daily News: (New York Daily News 31 July 2017)
*One America News Network: (One America News Network 31 July 2017)
*WIBQ TALK Radio (WIBQ Talk Radio Website 31 July 2017)
*Euronews (EuroNews: 31 July 2017)
*THE TIMES OF INDIA: (THE TIMES OF INDIA 31 July 2017)
*THE ECONOMIC TIMES OF INDIA (THE ECONOMIC TIMES OF INDIA 31 July 2017)
*Business Standard: (Business Standard 31 July 2017)
*BUSINESS INSIDER: (BusinessInsider.com 31 July 2017)
*CHANNEL NEWSASIA (CHANNEL NEWSASIA 31 July 2017)
*LONDON SOUTH EAST (LONDON SOUTH EAST 31 July 2017)
*THE FISCAL TIMES (THE FISCAL TIMES 31 July 2017)
*TimesofMalta.com (TimesofMalta.com 31 July 2017)
*RigZone (Rigzone 31 July 2017)
*The Star (The Star 1 Aug 2017)
*4-traders (4-traders 31 July 2017)
*HARTENERGY E&P Mag (E&P 31 July 2017)
*NewEurope (NewEurope 31 July 2017)
*The Chemical Engineer (Chemical Engineer 2 Aug 2017)
*THEEDGEMARKETS (THEEDGEMARKETS 31 July 2017)
*SIFY Finance (India) (SIFI INDIA 31 July 2017)
*SRN News (SRN News 31 July 2017)
*KITCO News (Kitco News 31 July 2017)
*Netscape World News: (Netscape 31 July 2017)
*MoneyControl.com: (MoneyControl.com 31 July 2017)
*Prometheism.net (Prometheism.net 31 July 2017)
2018
*Mossmorran Action Group Website. Royaldutchshellplc.com related article. 17 July 2018 pdf
Reuters Syndicated Article: Shell sees Nigeria corruption trial lasting many months – memo: 11 October 2018“We do not yet know how long the trial will last but expect this to be many months, continuing into next year,” Ching said in the Sept. 20 memo, provided to Reuters by John Donovan, who runs the independent royaldutchshellplc.com website.he website often serves as a forum to criticise the oil major.
*CNBC
MAY 2021
openDemocracy article dated 29 May 2021 headlined: Calls for Shell to apologise for ‘fuelling Nazi war machine’. A review of a new hardback and Kindle book by James Marriott and Terry Macalister – ‘Crude Britannia’ – reveals the extent to which the oil company played a key role in Hitler’s war effort. Photo credit reference to John Donovan in the article. “The Royal Dutch Shell Company HQ in The Hague, flying a Swastika | Image via John Donovan.” pdf
AUGUST 2021
John Donovan supplied the leaked Shell email and attachment information used in the following articles published 8/9 August 2021:
*FT: Shell weighs vaccine mandate and firing staff who resist: 8 Sept 2021
REUTERS SYNDICATED ARTICLE, MANY PUBLISHERS
*Shell weighs COVID-19 vaccine mandate, firing staff who resist – FT: PUBLISHED SEP 8, 2021 11.50 PM BST
REUTERS SYNDICATED ARTICLE, MANY PUBLISHERS
*Shell weighs ‘jab or job’ policy for employees -document: Sep 9, 2021 | 5:49 AM
*The Telegraph: Live Coronavirus latest news 11:07am
*Shell considering vaccine mandate for some workersTHE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
*Shell Weighs Mandating Covid-19 Vaccines for Workers: Sept. 9, 2021 4:40 pm ET
OCTOBER 2021
*October 2021 Channel 4 TV documentary Joe Lycett vs The Oil Giant aired at 9pm in the UK on 24 Oct 2021. Included a segment with John Donovan being interviewed by Joe Lycett.
*Trailers briefly featuring John Donovan were broadcast on multiple Channel 4 TV programmes and on Channel 4 News in the days before the documentary was broadcast on 24 October 2021. The video trailer was also posted on Instagram.
*Related coverage on the British Comedy Guide: Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back: Joe Lycett Climate Investigation: Ahead of the COP26 climate change summit, Joe Lycett takes on one of the world’s most powerful companies – Shell – as he investigates whether its eco-friendly advertising really paints the right picture of a corporation that still drills a huge amount of oil and gas. Joe meets climate experts and attempts to engage Shell in his own uniquely fearless fashion, before deciding to make his own version of their ads and tries to get his parody broadcast on national television. pdf version
*John Donovan is listed in the related British Comedy Guide Guest cast of “Joe Lycett Climate Investigation“.
*John Donovan and his royaldutchshellplc.com website are listed on a separate page devoted to John Donovan. pdf version “John Donovan is a whistleblower. He runs the website https://www.royaldutchshellplc.com.”
*20 December 2021: Several pages in a legal exhibit filed on 20 December 2021 with a U.S. court in Texas contain references to John Donovan and several of his Shell focused websites. (Case 4:20-cv-01465 Document 22-1 Filed on 12/20/21 in TXSD). The litigation details, including the relevant exhibit, can be seen here. (Relevant article headline: “Shell gripe website sucked into US litigation between warring Shell global security spymasters”.)
JAN 2022
*Wikipedia article “Joe Lycett vs the Oil Giant” downloaded 15 January 2022. Mentions “John Donovan a man who runs an anti-Shell website for whistleblowers to contribute to…”
CAN SHELL GREEN: Article authored by Matthias Lauerer. English translation of extracts from a Forbes article published in German in March 2022.
1st March 2022
Is Shell on its way to a carbon-neutral future? Will this be a reimagined world, where green hydrogen, e-mobility and decarbonization have become a reality? Or do they prefer to greenwash to perpetuate the dirty old business model on which the global economy hangs?
Speaking to Shell critic John Donovan, he said: “Shell has been forced to make drastic changes in response to pressure from climate change organizations and financial activists like Daniel S. Loeb, who wants to break up the corporation.” Also helping, he said, is the “change in jurisdiction in countries like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, which now allows for lawsuits alleging wrongdoing in countries like Nigeria.” What Donovan, who has sharply criticized the company for years, is hopeful about now? “Shell seems to have realized that it needs to go green to fight climate change and stay in business – and not face ostracism like the tobacco companies.article
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan Shell Copilot Transcript: AI, Surveillance, and the Archive Saga: 31 Oct 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: AI Biographies and Provenance: The Donovan Shell GROK Fiasco: 6 December 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan Shell Archive: AI Summaries, Provenance and Shell Ethics: 6 Dec 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan Archive vs AI: Shell Allegations and AGM Accountability: 26 Dec 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: Shell vs The Bots: Adversarial Archives and AI Hallucination Risks: 28 Dec 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan Shell AI Experiment: AI Hallucinations and Governance Risks: 29 Dec 2025
WNDOWS FORUM: AI Hallucinations and the Donovan Shell Archive: A Governance Challenge: 28 Dec 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: AI Governance Gap in Public Archives: The Donovan Shell Experiment: 29 Dec 2025
WINDOWS FORUM: Shell Donovan Bot War: AI Narratives in Contested History: 5 Jan 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan Shell Bot War: Adversarial Archives and AI Hallucinations: 6 Jan 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Generative AI and Corporate Memory: The Donovan Shell Bot War: 11 Jan 2026
The AI Mag: Sir Henri Deterding’s Unexpected Return: Powered by Generative AI – Royal Dutch Shell Plc: 13 Jan 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Shell Governance Gaps Revealed by AI Pattern Analysis: 19 Jan 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: John Donovan’s December 2025 experiment — feeding decades of adversarial material about Royal Dutch Shell into multiple public AI assistants and publishing the divergent outputs — transformed a long‑running supplier feud and documentary archive into a live test of how generative systems handle contested archives, and in doing so exposed a set of practical governance failures that lawyers, platform designers, corporate boards and journalists must now confront.. :25 Jan 2026: Source: Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com More Than Dynamite: How AI Reframes the Donovan–Shell Archive as Persistent Risk
WINDOWS FORUM: Bot War: Archival AI Amplification of the Donovan Shell Feud: 13 Feb 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: AI Amplified Bot War: Shell vs Donovan Over Archival Critique: 4 March 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Shell’s Long-Fought Domain Feud: AI Roundtable Satire and Reputational Fallout: 23 March 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Shell vs Donovan Feud: Domain Loss, Leaks, and Self-Inflicted PR Humiliation: 28 March 2026
WINDOWS FORUM: Donovan–Shell “Bot War”: How AI Rewrites Archives Into Reputational Pressure: 8 April 2026 WindowsForum.com: AI Satire and Defamation Risk in the Shell Archive: A Public RAG Experiment: 16 May 2026 110 Books — Containing References to the Donovans, Don Marketing, or Their WebsitesSource: royaldutchshellplc.com books index. Listed in the order they appear on the source page.
1. Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation — Dr Leslie Gaines-Ross (January 2008)
Page 20: “One such empowered activist is arch Shell critic Alfred Donovan. No one was more surprised than Royal Dutch Shell PLC to learn that this 88-year-old British army veteran had purchased the Internet domain name www.royaldutchshellplc.com…”
2. Beyond Redemption: The First Ever History of Sales Promotion — Colin Lloyd & Ken Spedding
Page 70: John Donovan MD of Don Marketing took Shell to court claiming rights to a card-based multi-brand loyalty scheme; Shell settled out of court.
3. Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary — Page 1480
Lists royaldutchshellplc.com as Shell’s corporate website address.
4. A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice — Page 337
5. The Four Stages of Highly Effective Crisis Management — Page 164
“Alfred Donovan, now 90-plus years old, and his son John have been collecting and publishing information online about Shell’s activities since 2001… they own the domain name www.royaldutchshellplc.com — Shell’s proper name.”
6. Law of the Internet — George B. Delta & Jeffrey H. Matsuura (October 2008)
Supplement 8-28: cites Donovan v Shell as an example of domain name dispute as protected First Amendment expression.
7. Corporate Social Responsibility in the Digital Age — Pages 114 and 123
Describes royaldutchshellplc.com as “dedicated to exposing Shell’s dark side.” Quotes John Donovan: “We want Shell to honour its own business principles… they are a ruthless, mean oil company.”
8. Once Upon a Time in the West: The Story of the Controversial Corrib Gas Project — Lorna Siggins (2010), Page 126
9. The BP Corollary — Fiction reference to John Donovan
10. Marketing, Vol. 21 — Page 6: Don Marketing chairman John Donovan on international promotional game design including Shell Make Money.
11. Marketing, Vol. 23 — Page 40: Full list of Don Marketing / Shell promotional games.
12. International Arbitration in the Energy Sector
13. Arctic Governance: Volume 2 — Edited by Soltvedt, Rottem, Hønneland
14. California Management Review, Vol. 56 — Page 22
15. Die Welt auf Kriegskurs — Page 10
16. Journal of International Commerce & Economics, Vol. II — Page 95
17. The Practical Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility — Page 260
18. Multinational Management — Page 171
19. Iraq Investment and Business Guide, Vol. 1 — Page 39
20. The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Quest for Resources is Reshaping the World — Page 152
21. Handbook of Research on Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility — Page 144
22. Changing Energy: The Transition to a Sustainable Future — Page 324
23. Generation Busted: How America Went Broke in the Age of… — Alan J. Zemek (2010), Page 151
24. Shale Gas and the Future of Energy: Law and Policy — Page 211
25. Jacob Schiff and the Art of Risk: American Financing of… — Adam Gower (2018), Page 318
26. Reputation Risk and Globalisation — Terry O’Callaghan (2016), Page 189
Cites Donovan’s article on Royal Dutch Shell’s Nazi secrets (2010).
27. Environmental Technologies, Intellectual Property and… — Abbe E. L. Brown (2013), Page 127
28. Greenhouse Gases: Worldwide Impacts — Julie Kerr Casper (2010)
29. Business Ethics in the 21st Century — Norman Bowie (2013), Page 59
30. Human Rights Obligations of Business: Beyond the Corporate… — Surya Deva & David Bilchitz (2013), Page 348
31. Big Business and Hitler — Jacques R. Pauwels (2017), Page 286
Cites Donovan’s “Royal Dutch Shell Nazi Secrets: Introduction” (November 2010).
32. Strategy For A Networked World — Rafael Ramirez & Ulf Mannervik (2016), Page 123
33. The Global Politics of Science and Technology, Vol. 2 — Mayer, Carpes, Knoblich (2014), Page 98
34. The Return of the Public in Global Governance — Best & Gheciu (2014), Page 218
35. Proceedings of the Annual Institute — Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Institute (2010)
Page 3-11: “RoyalDutchShellPlc.com consistently appears in the top 10 organic results in a Google search of ‘Royal Shell Oil.'”
36. Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump — Dan Bongino et al. (2018)
Cites Donovan’s article “Hakluyt & Company Spying for Shell” (March 2018).
37. Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and… — Bobby Sullivan (2018)
38. Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire — Corey Ross (2017), Page 234
39. Methods in Chemical Process Safety — Page 33
40. The Reform of Class and Representative Actions in European Legal Systems — Christopher Hodges (2008), Pages 75–76, Front Cover, Back Cover
41. Handbook of Industrial Polyethylene and Technology — Spalding & Chatterjee (2017)
42. Delivering Collective Redress: New Technologies — Christopher Hodges & Stefaan Voet
Books 43–110: The full list of all 110 books is maintained at royaldutchshellplc.com. Topics in books 43–110 include: Shell reserves fraud legal analysis; Nigerian operations and human rights; Arctic drilling; Shell and Nazi Germany (multiple volumes); corporate whistleblowing and digital activism; internet law and domain name jurisprudence; environmental governance; oil and gas industry economics; and promotional marketing history.
TV, Radio & Video CompilationBBC / ITV / Channel 4 News — Compilation — Mid-1980s
YouTube compilation of filmed interviews with Alfred and John Donovan across BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 News broadcasts in the mid-1980s, together with TV adverts for promotional games invented by John Donovan (including Shell Make Money, Shell Mastermind, and Shell Bruce’s Lucky Deal).
Sources: royaldutchshellgroup.com articles index · royaldutchshellplc.com books index · Donovan v Royal Dutch Shell background. Syndicated duplicates removed; prestigious syndications (NYT, Washington Post, Guardian, Bloomberg, FT etc.) retained. Reconstructed June 2026.
Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record — 550+ Articles, 110 Books, 40 Years was first posted on June 9, 2026 at 8:23 pm.©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net
ICYMI: Indigenous Water Rights Bill Unanimously Passes State Assembly
Last week, AB 2218, authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, unanimously passed the California State Assembly, a move toward ensuring state water policy aligns with Tribal rights, stewardship, and justice. The bill seeks to address a water rights system that excludes Indigenous People as lawful water users, despite their longstanding role as the original stewards of California’s watersheds.
“Tribal Leaders recognize that California’s water rights system, based on the ‘first in time, first in right’ principle, purposefully disenfranchised the original water users,” said Russell “Buster” Attebery, Chairman of the Karuk Tribe. “This resulted in California Tribes losing access to their water, traditional foods, and culture. We believe that healthy rivers and restored fisheries are inseparable from Tribal sovereignty in water governance.”
As California faces growing climate-driven challenges, policymakers and communities increasingly recognize that equitable and sustainable water management must incorporate Tribal rights, traditional ecological knowledge, and Tribal governance. AB 2218 directs state agencies to strengthen consultation with Tribes during water rights investigations and develop policies that address water related harms resulting from state-sanctioned termination, removal, and assimilation of California Native American tribes.
“My tribe was displaced from our ancestral villages along the Sacramento River and Delta waterways, but we have not and will not abandon our role as guardians of the water,” said Malissa Tayaba, Vice Chair of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. “It is imperative for state policy to recognize and repair the harms tribes have suffered. State agencies should protect our water uses and ensure that tribes receive just compensation for the destruction of our lifeways.”
Read the full press release from the Karuk Tribe here.
###
MEDIA FILE – UNDER CONSTRUCTION
*New DPP ruling: plain paper entries are ‘legal and acceptable’: Promotion & Incentives Magazine: Page 4 February 1992
*Shell faces libel threat from Don: Marketing Week 31 March 1994
*Shell struck by writ: Marketing Magazine front-page headline article 20 October 1994
*SHELL STOLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, ALLEGES DON: Debrief News Letter November 199
*Don issues writ number four to embattled Shell: Marketing Magazine: 10 November 1994
*SHELL SHOCK: EDITORIAL BY INCENTIVE TODAY MAGAZINE: November/December 1994
*Shell fails to block agency’s legal action: Incentive Today Magazine January 1995
*Shell ‘legal block fails’ in promotions agency row: Forecourt News January 1995
*Don Marketing trade ad seeks help of dealers: Marketing Magazine 12 January 1995
*Marketing Week News 20 January 1995
*Irate Don hits Shell investors: Marketing Week 27 January 1995
*DON MARKETING STEPS-UP ITS ATTACK ON SHELL: Debrief February 1995
*Pressure group to target Shell: Forecourt Trader February 1995
*‘Shell knew of flaws in Make Money’: Forecourt News front page article February 1995
*Marketing Week News 24 February 1995
*Shell seeks guarantee over costs in Don case: Marketing Week 24 March 1995
*Shell promotions dispute intensifies: Promotions & Incentives April 1995
*Shell: ‘claim will fail’: Incentive Today April 1995
*Shell row steps up a gear: Forecourt News April 1995
*STOP PRESS: DON MARKETING FOUNDER ALFRED DONOVAN HAS ISSUED A LIBEL WRIT: Marketing Magazine 20 April 1995
*Shell faces libel action as Don’s founder issues writ: Marketing Week 21 April 1995
*Shell speaks out over Don: Forecourt Trader April 1995
*Donovan issues Shell libel writ: Promotions & Incentive Magazine May 1995
*Briefly Column: Forecourt News May 1995
*STOP PRESS: Shell has confirmed that its senior management will hold talks with Don Marketing: Marketing Magazine 25 May 1995
*Don takes its payment fight to Shell’s agm: Marketing Week 26 May 1995
*Marketing Week News: John Donovan, of sales promotion agency Don Marketing…: ( Will have a team picketing Shell’s London headquarters for four days a week”): 2 June 1995
*DAVID DON AND GOLIATH SHELL: EPISODE 3,651: Debrief Newsletter Page 63, June 1995
*LUCKY NUMBERS: Incentive Today: July/August 1995
John Donovan, managing director of Don Marketing, which produces a range of scratch-card games for on-pack promotions, also believes that the National Lottery has helped increase the popularity of scratch cards. But printer’s errors are a nightmare for scratch card producers, he admits. One of the horror stories he relates is when the Daily Mirror published an incorrect combination of ‘called numbers’ for its bingo-type game and left thousands of readers thinking they had won the game.
Donovan is more open than Venters about the tricks that the public get up to in order to cheat in the games. This even includes children tampering with cards which are then sometimes unwittingly sent in by parents. Don Marketing also now insists on videoing the opening of all prize claims so that players cannot dispute the validity of the games.
With Donovan quoting a cost of 4p per card to run a scratch card promotion, it is hardly surprising that everyone from oil. companies to brewers is rushing to take part. And Donovan says his company can deliver scratch cards to any promotional agency with as little as two months’ notice. He guarantees security, even to the extent of having cards printed in the United States by printers Dittler Brothers, who are specialists in printing scratch and lottery tickets and even have armed guards securing their plant.
*Shell UK and Don Marketing: Marketing Week 8 September 1995
*Debrief Newsletter: October 1995
*Shell faces High Court battle over Smart Card: Marketing Week front page cover story 16 April 1998
*Shell card in legal row: Financial Mail on Sunday 19 April 1998
*Don Marketing booking full-page ads to alert Shell shareholders to its dispute with Shell: Marketing Magazine 23 April 1998
*High Court papers unveil ‘secret’ Shell writ losses: Marketing Week 23 April 1998
*Shell reveals plans for challenging Smart writ: Marketing Week 30 April 1998
*Donovan brings new Shell writ “this time for libel”: Marketing Magazine 30 April 1998
*Shell stands firm on Smart charges: Promotions & Incentives May 1998
*Don’s Smart writ: Forecourt Trader May 1998
*New clash for Don Marketing and Shell: Incentive Today Magazine May 1998
*ASA dragged into Shell UK Smart battle: Marketing Week Magazine 7 May 1998
*Shell broadens base: Marketing Magazine 7 May 1998
*Shell in legal row: Sales Promotion Magazine May 1998
*Don Marketing posts warning about Shell: Marketing Week Magazine 28 May 1998
*Shell Smart copyright battle gets nastier: Loyalty Magazine May/June 1998
*Shell faces new threat to Smart card scheme: Marketing Week 21 May 1998
*Shell: Don is more than ‘disgruntled’: Marketing Week LETTERS 21 May 1998
*Safe Ideas: June 1998
*Donovan’s beef with Shell online: Daily Telegraph 11 June 1998
*Don Claims first round in Shell libel action: Marketing Week 30 July 1998
*“McShell” case continues: Loyalty Magazine August 1998
*On cyberpicket lines: London Evening Standard 28 September 1998 (DON’T GET MAD GET EVEN)
*Shell smacked over libel action: Incentive Today Magazine September 1998
*Judge Shell by actions not words: Marketing Week 25 February 1999
*Shell loyalty row continues: Incentive Today June 1999
*Ideas man sues Shell: The Times 16 June 1999
*Donovan takes Smart case against Shell to court: Sunday Business 6 June 1999
*Promotions expert claims Shell stole his Smart card idea: THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 6 June 1999
*Shell faces court battle on its Smart scheme: Marketing Magazine 10 June 1999
*Oil giant stole my promotion idea, alleges businessman: East Anglian Daily Times 16 June 1999
*INTO BATTLE WITH SHELL: Bury Free Press 18 June 1999
*SHELL IN HIGH COURT SUIT OVER SMARTCARD SCHEME: Debrief, July 1999
*Don ends legal proceedings against Shell UK: Marketing Week 8 July 1999
*Shell has settled out of court with John Donovan…: Marketing Magazine STOP PRESS Column 28 July 1999
*Shell claim is settled: Bury Free Press 9 July 1999
*Stalemate for marketing firm’s ‘stolen’ idea claim: East Anglian Daily Times 7 July 1999
*Shell action abandoned: Forecourt Trader August 1999
*Don and Shell end Smart row: Incentive Today July-August 1999
*SHELL IN HIGH COURT suit OVER SMARTcard scheme: WARC :1 Aug 1999
*SPEAK OUT!: West Pasco Press Newspaper, Page 2: November 1999. Alfred Donovan interviewed for comment in Florida.
23 NEWS MEDIA ARTICLES FROM THE TEN YEAR PERIOD WHEN WE WERE FRIENDS WITH SHELL*Rubbing away to goodwill: Incentive Marketing and Sales Promotion, November 1983
*Fast flowing Don: Marketing Magazine 16 February 1984
*Shell is back making money: Incentive Marketing and Sales Promotion March 1984
*The Finale: Interview with Shell Manager Ken Danson: Shell In-house Magazine: March? 1984
*Anatomy of a Shell winner: Campaign Magazine 27 April 1984
*The play’s the thing: Marketing Magazine 31 May 1984
*Marketing Magazine Sales Promotion Survey 6 September 1984
*Why games became big business: Campaign Magazine 14 September 1984
*Cerebral promotion for drivers: Shell Mastermind: Sept 1984
*“Shell starts up a new promotion” (Shell Make Merry) Marketing Week 2 November 1984 (POS DISPLAY)
*Don Marketing launches dual forecourt attack: Campaign Magazine 2 November 1984
*Shell offers ‘lucky deal’: Marketing Magazine 2 May 1985
*Old favourites that never die: Campaign Magazine 14 June 1985
*Don does it again, this time with Bruce: Promotions & Incentives Magazine: June 1985
*It’s game, set and match as forecourts fight it out to the finish: Campaign Magazine 27 September 1985
*LEARNING THE RIGHT RULES OF THE GAME: Marketing Week Magazine 11 October 1985
*John Chambers has left Don Marketing and game cards to set up a new sales promotion operation for the world’s sixth largest ad agency: Promotions & Incentive Magazine: February 1986
*Don plans huge bingo promotion: Marketing Week 7 Feb 1986
*Marketing Magazine article “Games people play” involving John Donovan: 18 Sept 1986
*Shell launches Star Trek scratchcard game: Sales Promotion Magazine March 1991
*Will Shell’s intergalactic experiment pay off?: Cover story plus coverage on 7 pages with extensive colour piks: Promotions & Incentives Magazine July-August 1991
*Shell Star Trek Promotion: Promotions & Incentives Magazine February 1992
*UP TO SCRATCH: PROMOTIONS & INCENTIVES MAGAZINE: JUNE 1993
MEDIA FILE – UNDER CONSTRUCTION was first posted on June 9, 2026 at 7:54 pm.©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net
Party time?
David Camfield: If you’re serious about socialist politics, you recognize that socialists need to work together. For a socialist not to be a member, or at least a supporter, of any socialist political organization is a sign that either they’re living somewhere where there’s no group that’s worth joining—which is sadly true in too many places today—or that they’re not serious about being politically active.
But does the need for socialists to be organized to be as effective as possible mean that socialist groups today should consider themselves to be parties or the beginnings of parties? How can we best work towards socialist political organizations that genuinely deserve to be called parties? These are the questions that this episode’s guest Charlie Post and I are going to discuss.
So Charlie, would you introduce yourself and tell listeners about your political background, particularly with respect to these issues?
Charlie Post: Okay. I’ve been living in New York for about 40 years now. I’m originally from New York, and being that I’m a bit older than you, I’m actually part of the tail end of what was sometimes called the “Generation of 1968.”
I radicalized as a young teenager around Vietnam and the Black struggle in the U.S. and became a Marxist in the wake of the postal wildcat strike of 1970, where, for the first time, I saw the capacity of industrial workers to exercise much more social power than students and others. And I saw the effects of collective struggle on working-class consciousness.
That was around the time I was 16, and I started looking for a Marxist group to join. Shortly after I turned 17, I ended up in the youth group of what was then the largest Trotskyist organization in the United States, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had very different politics than the British Socialist Workers Party, which most people are familiar with.
I was involved in a series of debates and was expelled in 1974. Afterwards, I was involved in various attempts to create groups and ended up coming around, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of comrades who were both coming out of my political tradition—which was the European-based Fourth International and the U.S. International Socialists—called Workers’ Power.
Then from there, Workers’ Power became involved in a regroupment of three small socialist groups in 1986 that formed Solidarity, of which I was a member until 2015. There was a period of time when I didn’t feel I could actually join a group and be a committed member, but I became one of the founding members of the Tempest Collective, of which we’re both members.
The attempts by various Trotskyist groups that were committed in one way or another to the politics of revolutionary socialism from below to transform small groups of former students into either the core of a revolutionary party or a revolutionary party with real influence among working people were failures.
But every other current on the Left was also unable to make that transition, including the much larger and more influential currents influenced by Maoism and Marxism-Leninism. Part of the foundation of Solidarity was a recognition that this model of building socialist groups was a dead end.
And over time, through discussions within Solidarity and our experimentations and practice, another comrade and I wrote a pamphlet for the organization called “Socialist Organization Today.”. In the pamphlet, we try to explain why the various attempts of small groups to transform themselves into the core of or an actual revolutionary party failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and why a different model of revolutionary socialist organization was necessary.
While I left Solidarity for very specific political reasons that had more to do with its political perspective than it did with its organizational perspective, I felt comfortable being part of the group of comrades who formed Tempest. Many of them came out of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States, and they, too, recognized the limits and failure of what they labeled the microsect model
So, my thinking on this question of socialist parties has been shaped by a little over five decades of political activity and an attempt to understand why—despite the best efforts of very committed, very honest revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the effort of socialist formations to actually become significant organizations that were able to influence the course of working-class struggles failed so miserably. This is why we must ask what revolutionary socialists need to do today to prepare for that eventuality, without pretending to be it in miniature.
DC: Thanks for that. We’ll pick up on some of these things you’ve talked about as we go. I should mention that, for my part, the first socialist group I was in was the International Socialists, which I joined in 1988 and left early in 1996, along with a minority of other IS members who, with some other socialists, then formed the New Socialist Group, which formally dissolved in 2017.
In the early 1990s, the IS had become more aggressively self-promoting, declaring that it was beginning to build a revolutionary party. And this was a shift that was happening across the international network headed by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, a network called the IS Tendency. The Canadian IS was its affiliate.
That shift led to changes in the group that a couple of years later led to the split that I was part of. The New Socialist Group, which I was in, rejected the idea that tiny socialist groups should try to organize “as if” they were socialist parties, but only smaller— the micro-party or micro-sect model. Some people also call that vanguardism.
So, to start, there’s some debate among socialists about whether socialist parties are even needed for the transformation of society. There’s more debate, though, about what kind of party would be needed. Then, there’s even more debate about how to work towards the creation of such parties.
Before we talk about those things, though, we need to clarify what exactly we mean by a revolutionary socialist party, since I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about that. What’s your take on that?
CP: A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles. I believe such a party is necessary. I believe organization is necessary because I believe that working-class consciousness always develops episodically and unevenly. And this comes from the basic tenet of socialism from below: It’s through the self activity of working people coming together—striking in a workplace, confronting a landlord, opposing an imperialist war, confronting the state and capital—that these people develop radical consciousness, a notion that their interests are fundamentally different and opposed to those of capital and the state, and that there is a need for a fundamentally different type of society now.
Working people in their vast majority cannot be always engaged in struggle, particularly strike activity, because as Marx tells us, we’re separated from the means of production and we need to sell our labor power and go to work for capitalists and be exploited in order to survive. This means that working people enter struggle episodically and that consciousness develops unevenly.
Without organizing those who’ve come to similar conclusions, these lessons and ideas dissipate. So, I believe that a revolutionary socialist party is necessary, but it has to be a party that actually has real roots in a large layer of the working class that is actually radicalized. And it’s because that layer doesn’t exist, for very specific historical reasons, that I believe that many of the previous attempts to turn small groups into revolutionary parties have failed.
DC: So let’s dig into the history of socialist party-building and go back to its beginning in the late 1800s. Do you want to start taking us through some of that history?
CP: You begin to see the emergence of independent working-class and socialist groupings as early as the 1860s and 1870s. Many of these get grouped together in what was called the International Workingman’s Association, or the Socialist and Labor or First International. Many of these parties and organizations were relatively small, a few thousand members, but they had real roots among the more militant, the more radical layers of workers.
Most of them did not survive the economic downturn of the late 1870s-early 1880s. Now, in the period of the 1880s and 1890s, there was a long period of relative capitalist stagnation—low profits, continuous recessions, etc. In this period there was also wave after wave of working class struggles.
Most of them were defensive in relation to wages, working conditions, and the like. These struggles happened in a number of countries, particularly in capitalist Europe, with Germany being the most important. But we also see them, to some extent, in France, Italy, and the United States, where we see the emergence of small mass parties, with 20,000 to 50,000 members, and some ability to actually contest elections and elect working-class representatives to various legislative or parliamentary bodies.
A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles.These small mass parties, outside the U.S., were based on relatively small minority or non-majority unions, most of them organized along industrial lines, but generally whose members were radicalized skilled workers, machinists, etc. In other countries—France, Spain, Portugal, and other parts of the world—we also see the emergence of mass trade unions that present themselves as revolutionary. You see the growth of what’s sometimes called revolutionary syndicalism.
Capitalism entered a period of growth and high profitability between the mid 1890s and the First World War. In this period, we see the emergence of truly massive working-class parties and radical political organizations out of a wave of strikes, first in the 1890s, then around 1905-1907, the most visible manifestation being the Russian Revolution of 1905-1906. Then, there’s a wave of strikes between 1911 and 1914, which confronted issues of de-skilling.
Mass parties, the largest being the German Social Democratic Party, emerged from these strike waves. As hard as it will be for those who are familiar with German social democracy today to believe, the Party presented itself to the world as a revolutionary party, as a party intent upon the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. We see similarly sized parties to some extent in France and Italy, and smaller organizations in the underground in the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Canadian state.
These parties brought together two distinctive groups of workers. On the one hand, the activist core of these parties was a layer of militant workers– a real workers’ vanguard of shop floor and community leaders. These were the women and men who attempted to continue the struggle between mass upsurges and who actually could lead real working-class struggles. On the other hand, these social democratic parties also included a growing layer of full-time officials in the newly legalized trade unions and of elected officials, party functionaries, journalists, etc. whose livelihood depended on the growth and stability of the parties and unions.
Tensions emerged between a revolutionary left wing, based on the militant worker activists, and a more reformist right wing and center, based in the union and party officialdom. The first manifestation of this conflict emerged in German social democracy in the late 1890s, in the debates between the majority of the party and the revisionists around Eduard Bernstein. By 1910, 1911, we see a three-way differentiation between a right wing of trade union and party officials, who openly abandoned revolutionary politics; a center around Kautsky, which claimed to be Marxist and revolutionary; and a left wing that argued for a break with the formists and for preparing the working class today for revolutionary struggle through mass strikes.
On the revolutionary Left, you start to see people like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Poland, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy, and what becomes known as the Bolshevik faction of Russian social democracy. We also see in this period the growth in many countries of revolutionary syndicalism, of attempts to build unions that are not only trying to organize workers around their immediate interests— their wages, hours, and most importantly working conditions—but also that are explicitly revolutionary and anti-capitalist. The best known to people in North America is the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. Later in Canada, there was also the One Big Union.
The First World War creates a schism within the mass political and industrial organization. The question of whether or not to support your capitalist government in imperialist war leads to splits in these mass organizations. This rupture crystallized in the years after the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were a unique formation in the pre-1914 period. Because Russia was an absolutist autocracy, there was no space to consolidate a layer of officials either in trade unions or parliament. Unions were illegal for the most part, and parliament was an empty shell in Russia. So, the Bolsheviks, I would argue, unintentionally built an organization of the most radical and revolutionary workers independent of the reformist officialdom.. By 1913, they recruited most of the leaders of the big strike waves in the big factories in Moscow, Petrograd, and other Russian industrial centers.
The Russian revolution forced socialists and radicals all over the world to make choices about their organizational affiliation. By 1921, the radical workers’ vanguard had formed independent parties in a number of countries. The largest was the Germany Communist Party, with some 400,000 members. I once did a calculation and found that that would be the equivalent of 1.2 million workers in the United States, and it was mostly made up of industrial workers and their family members, particularly in the metal working industries, longshore and mining. We see smaller mass parties in Italy and France, and smaller Communist Parties in countries like Britain, the United States, and Canada.
Even these smaller parties gathered together thousands of experienced working-class militants, both from the left wing of the socialist parties that existed in these countries and from the ranks of revolutionary syndicalists. Through the 1920s, these parties struggled with varying degrees of success to displace social democracy, reformism as the main voice of the working class.
They had some degree of success depending on the pace of the class struggle, but they had through the 1920s, organized and consolidated a layer of radicalized, revolutionary minded workers. So, just to give you an example on the smaller end of things. By 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression in the United States, the Communist Party had gone through several very damaging splits, but it still had a membership of 10,000 to 15,000 workers, which today would be a hundred thousand. It was the largest organization of radicalized revolutionary workers in the United States.
Now, the big problem was that these Communist Parties, which had been grouped together in a new International, the Communist International, the Third International, that increasingly dominated by and eventually subservient to the emerging new ruling class in Russia. As the Russian revolution was isolated and council democracy and party democracy were strangled in the Soviet Union, a new ruling class emerged around the officialdom of the Party and the state. This officialdom justified itself as building socialism in one country. This ruling class transformed the Communist Parties from instruments of world revolution, which needed to be rooted in their national realities to advance the class struggle, into what Trotsky called “border guards for the Soviet Union.” The role of revolutionaries outside the “socialist fatherland” was now preventing the capitalist powers from strangling the Stalinist ruling class’s attempt to build so-called socialism in one country. This led to tremendous distortions and errors in political orientation.
From 1928 to 1933, the Communist Parties proclaimed that capitalism in the West was entering its terminal crisis.And in this terminal crisis, the only thing that kept capitalist capitalism in power was social democracy. Communists around the world labeled the social democratic parties “social fascist” and argued that they were, in fact, the main enemy, not actually growing fascism in countries like Germany.This policy led to sharp divisions in the labor movement and the inability, particularly in Germany, to mount a united front in the streets—not in the ballot box, but in the streets—to stop the fascist gangs.
When Hitler took power, the German Communist Party firmly believed that he would last a few weeks and then they would come to power within a year. Hitler was able to demolish the oldest, largest, and best organized working-class movement in the world. The mass parties, both of social democracy and Communism and the largest trade union movement in the world were completely destroyed. By 1934, the Communist International finally realized that it had a very potent threat practically on its borders in fascist Germany and fascist Italy, and began to search for an alternative strategy to protect itself.
After a couple of years of experimentation, they hit upon what is known as the Popular Front strategy. The Popular Front saw the Communist Parties adapting the Social Democrats’ strategy for fighting fascism and reaction. Rather than organizing working-class unity in the streets and on the picket lines.to confront fascist gangs and capital, they looked to electoral alliances, both with the reformist political parties like social democracy, and with liberal capitalists.This strategy turned away from building rank and file movements in workplaces and unions, while Communists aligned with progressive trade union officials. In Spain the Popular Front led to disaster– to the derailing and defeat of an actual workers’ and peasants’ revolution. In France , there were mass strikes and factory occupations in 1936, which the Communist Party disorganized.
The popular front strategy adopted in 1935-1936, shaped the political and sociological transformation of the Communist Parties for the next.70 years. Particularly after the Second World War, when they grew to mass scale in countries like Italy and France because of their role in the Nazi resistance, becoming essentially parties of left-wing reform, not revolution. They recruited and educated workers in the ideas that “revolution is somewhere off way in the distance.And what we need to do today is build a progressive alliance in one form or another,” which included not only reform socialists, but also trade union officials and certain liberal capitalists—those who are willing to “defend democracy” and enter diplomatic alliances with the Soviet Union.
This changes both the political coloration of the Communist Parties and also their sociological character. Before the mid thirties, the Communist Party recruited the most militant working-class people who were intent upon finding every possible way to advance the struggle against the boss, the landlord, the state, and who, particularly in the workplaces, saw themselves as independent of the full-time officialdom of the unions, which they saw, correctly in my opinion, as inherently conservative. After 1935, 1936, as the Communist Parties began to become integrated into that trade union officialdom– in some countries leading the left wing of the officialdom in Britain and the US; and in other countries becoming the officials of the largest trade union federations in France and Italy.
At that point, people who joined the Communist Parties were no longer the most uncompromising workplace militants who were willing to do anything possible to stop the boss, including confronting their union leaders. Instead, the Communist Party becomes a vehicle to be recruited into the labor officialdom. If you join the party, you can become a shop steward and get time off from work. If you follow the “line” you could move up and become a full-time official of a local or an international. Thus, the Communist Parties by the late 1950s, early 1960s, were no longer mass organizations of revolutionary-minded workers, but organizations that primarily attracted workers who were attracted by a left-reformist politics and many became left-leaning trade union officials.
Now this, in my opinion, poses a huge and unacknowledged problem for the layers of young people who radicalized from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These are people who radicalized in the wake of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions and the Chinese “cultural revolution,” and in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, in anti-racist struggles. By the late 1960s, these young radicals were orienting toward the growing wave of working-class militancy in the wake of the French May-June events and the strike waves that swept the global North. Even in the U.S. and Canada, which have the more politically conservative labor movements,you see sharp increases in strike activity, much of it opposed by the official leaders of the unions. In this cauldron,thousands of young people, mostly college students and ex-college students but also some young workers who were increasingly alienated by the war, racism ,and by the incredibly alienated, degraded work they had to do in factories, began to move left.
And many of them correctly said, Okay, if we’re serious about revolutionary politics, we’ve got to form organizations, and we eventually have to build a party. Now, most of us at that point, and I will include myself as a somewhat naive late-teen, early-twenties person, believed that we were in a new epoch of world revolution equivalent to what swept across the world from 1917 to 1923. We were convinced that we were going to see, especially as the global economic crisis took hold through the early 1970s, growing class battles. The labor officials would be unable to deal with the capitalist offensive, and that this would create opportunities to build new mass revolutionary parties.
What we didn’t acknowledge was that there had been a break in the history of what we can actually call a workers’ vanguard, the layer of radical and revolutionary minded workers that had been created and recreated the class battles from the late 1870s-1880s through the 1930s. That layer had been disorganized, both politically and ideologically by Popular Front politics and sociologically by its increasing integration into the trade union officialdom.
So what you see again in the late 1960s and early 1970s is dozens of groups throughout the capitalist world, whether they are leaning towards some variant of socialism from below or some version of Marxist-Leninism, usually inspired by Maoism and the Chinese Revolution, throw themselves into working-class struggles and “centralize” themselves. Others were inspired by variants of socialism from below. All of them “Bolshevized” their organizations— become really tough, clamp down on internal discussion, and build an “authoritative,” actually authoritarian, leadership. They believe that if they just pursue their” line and act as parties in miniature, as micro-sects, they would become mass parties. With very few exceptions, these end in disaster.
The two groups that were able to get through this period and have some cadre and some base among a much thinner layer of workers were the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire in France—which maintained 1000-2000 members, the equivalent of 5,000 to 10,000 in the U.S., before growing to over 3,000 in the wake of the 1995 mass strikes—and what becomes the British Socialist Workers Party, which also had several thousand members and some real influence in British society. Now, for a variety of reasons, these groups shrank radically in the early part of this century.m
For the most part,most of my generation, people who had gone into party building activity, whether of a Trotskyist variant or a Maoist variant, ended up by the 1980s either leaving politics completely or simply becoming reformist socialists. By 1985, almost everyone I knew who had been a Maoist back in the 1960s and 1970s was eagerly supporting Jesse Jackson’s run in the Democratic primaries.People who had believed that every trade union official above a shop steward was automatically a sellout were now pursuing careers in the trade union officialdom, either as elected officers or as staffers.
The crisis of the revolutionary Left and the reformist Left’s embrace of neo-liberalism opened a period of experimentation from the 1990s onward, during which we see the emergence of new “broad” parties that reject neo-liberalism and, in a few cases, capitalism.. The most successful of these was the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which emerged out of struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, in the workplaces, in the favelas, etc.. They looked in some ways, like pre-war social democracy. They brought together radicalized layers of workers and intellectuals and some left-leaning trade union officials, parliamentary politicians, etc. We also saw the emergence of the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy, and Die Linke in Germany. All of these groups were attempting to respond to both the failure of previous revolutionary party-building movements and the crisis of reformism. In the early 1990s, both the social democratic parties and what’s left of the Communist Parties after the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” are no longer even capable of successfully fighting for reforms. For periods of time, these “broad Left” parties had some resonance, but all of them went through their own crises as tensions between the two wings—the radicalized, revolutionary minded base, and their officials—lead them into an impasse.
Now, I firmly believe that these sorts of broad parties will continue to emerge because the material conditions for the revolutionary Left to transform itself into a mass independent revolutionary party simply don’t exist; and the official parties of the labor movement and the Left have abandoned the struggle for reform.Today, we see the revival of Die Linke in Germany after they threw out some of their most extreme right-wing elements. In Britain, there’s Your Party, which seems to be intent on aborting itself before it’s ever born.
Just to sum up, and this is a sort of broad sweep: from the 1870s to the 1930s, we see, through continuous waves of working-class struggles, the emergence of a true mass working-class vanguard of radicalized workers who are active in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, etc., who formed the left-wing before the First World War of social democracy, and then became the mass base of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s. As the Communist Parties are bureaucratized, Stalinized, subordinated to the ruling elites—the ruling classes in the Soviet Union and then later China, etc.— they, even while going on zigs and zags through ultra-leftism, fundamentally begin to move in a reformist direction and become themselves very similar to the mass social democratic parties.
This not only politically disorients radical workers, it transforms them sociologically from workplace and community fighters into candidates to become full-time officials. This throws up a tremendous obstacle to the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. And since then, what’s left of the revolutionary Left has tried to figure out how to proceed in a situation that all of us find, in many ways, unexpected.
DC: That’s a very helpful overview of a lot of history, so thanks for that, Charlie. Let’s go back now and just pick up on the thread about the so-called party-building groups that started to emerge in the late 1960s. As you said, most of those groups had either collapsed or shrunk dramatically by the early 1980s, and these groups attracted lots of very committed young fighters of your generation.
Why do those groups do so poorly? Today many people who went through that experience and lots of people who didn’t but watched them would say it was because any kind of revolutionary politics is wrong. But I think that’s not a very helpful explanation.
CP: It’s not because revolution is impossible, and it’s certainly not because a revolutionary transformation of society is not necessary to the future survival of our species. The “microsect” strategy fails for a variety of reasons. The most fundamental was that the human material, the layer of radicalized workers, working people, that would be the base for a real revolutionary socialist party— rooted in that significant minority of workers who actually can play leading roles in struggles—had ceased to exist. Now, it didn’t help that most of the party-building groups made all sorts of subjective errors. In North America, the majority of these groups openly identified with one strand or another of socialism from above, some variant of Stalinism, mostly pro-Chinese Stalinism, some pro-Cuban, but they were basically Stalinists. They had, as a result, a limited repertoire of how to relate to actual struggles they might be involved in. These groups would swing wildly between ultra-left abstentionism and adaptation to whoever was leading the struggle.
For the Trotskyist groups, who had ostensibly better politics, they shared with the Maoist and Stalinist groups a notion that, in order for us to win leadership in this growing layer of radical workers, we had to be organizationally and politically homogeneous. Internal debate and discussion was not seen as a sign of the health of a group that was rooted in reality and was grappling with new challenges, but instead as deviations.But again, the fundamental problem was that the human material for these projects didn’t exist. And that only actually worsens their commitment to an ideological purity and an organizational despotism in order to make up for that fact.
Rather than acknowledging that what they were trying to do might not be possible in their particular historical moment,they began to beat up themselves and their members by saying, you’re not trying hard enough,you’re not disciplined enough, you’re deviating from the line. Most of the people who went into these projects had incredibly unrealistic expectations, and I have to include myself here as well. I firmly believed until the late 1970s that we were on the verge of the most important political recomposition of the working class since the Russian Revolution. I was convinced there would be mass splits in the social democratic and Communist parties in Europe, and that one or another variant of socialism from below would emerge as a mass current. A very small minority of comrades and I were able to adjust our expectations while maintaining a revolutionary politics, a politics that understood that, even in a period of working-class retreat, the difference between reformists and revolutionaries matters in terms of how you conduct even those defensive struggles.The vast majority of the people I radicalized with weren’t able to make that transition, and most of them left politics completely because they thought it was simply pointless. And the majority who remained political adapted to a social democratic or reformist realism.
DC: I think that really highlights the importance of having a historical and materialist understanding of the working class, not treating the working class as an abstraction that jumps from the pages of Marx’s Capital into social reality. There’s a very complex process the working class goes through in terms of how forms of organization develop, how relationships within the class and among different sections of workers are made and then remade, and so on. And so we have to be much more concrete in how we think about the working class.
We’re trying to contribute to the self-organization and self-emancipation of that class, but again, the working class is not an abstraction and we have to recognize the ground on which we fight— not just in terms of how capital is organized and what’s happening to capitalism, but also where the working class is in relation to all of that.
CP: Right. Despite waving the selected works of Lenin, people in my day ignored his most important contribution, which is that the “living soul” of Marxism is the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture–the actual balance of class forces and state of working-class self-organization and self-activity.
DC: Unfortunately, most of what’s there on the far Left today has not learned useful lessons from the experience of the generation that you’ve just talked about. The most visible far-left groups either organize using the kind of micro-party model and proclaim themselves to be parties, like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the Canadian state, or they use the micro-party model, what they would call building a Leninist organization, while recognizing in some sense that they’re not yet what they see as a party. For example, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and Left Voice voice in the U.S. and the International Socialists in Canada, I think would all fall into that category.
This party-building approach generates very strong pressures to act in sectarian ways that don’t actually help advance the struggles of working-class and oppressed people, but which may be good for that group in a narrow sense— boosting the group’s profile, recruiting more members, and so on.
And for those groups on the far left that do have at least some commitment to the idea that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, it leads to making the group the center of politics instead of thinking and acting in terms of what that group can do to contribute to the long, complex, messy, and non-linear process of the working class becoming a force that can change society.
And here I think we should also mention that, in a society that is shaped by sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, all organizations are going to be scarred by those forms of oppression. Of course, all those of us who are members of these kinds of groups are products of the same society like everybody else, no matter how much or how sincerely people oppose oppression.
Far-left groups that use the micro party model are, I think, especially prone to dealing badly with oppressive behavior, especially by their leaders. I and three other former members of the New Socialist Group wrote a public letter about this in 2019. We argued then that:
There is often a connection between the micro-party approach and inadequate responses by a socialist group to oppressive actions by members. This approach tends to inflate the importance of the group in the minds of its members. Preserving the group often becomes an end in itself. When people make the stability or preservation of the leadership and its “Leninist” authority their top concern, they may avoid suspending or expelling members, especially “leaders,” for oppressive behavior.
Organizing on micro-party lines with a “fetish of leadership” can fuel an abusive group culture. That kind of culture reproduces rather than challenges our societies’ oppressive forms of behavior. And socialist groups that treat their own expansion as what matters most are usually resistant to opening themselves up to struggles against oppression, learning from them, and changing.
CP: Yes, and you were writing in response to the crises of two of the largest revolutionary organizations in the English-speaking world: the Socialist Workers’ Party of Britain, which had lost a significant layer of its membership because it covered up the fact that a member of its Central Committee was involved in sexual violence and sexual abuse, and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., which implodes precisely because its leadership had covered up a rape by someone who, at that the time they were involved in the sexual assault, was one of the leadership’s favorites.When this came out, it created a tremendous level of demoralization. While the British Socialist Workers Party survives in a shrunken form today, the International Socialist Organization had no choice but to dissolve itself,
DC: So, these are particular forms of the debacle of the micro-party model.
What’s the alternative to the micro-party model? That’s the key question that comes up in the U.S. today, as you know very well. There are a lot more politically active people who consider themselves socialists who are part of the Democratic Socialists of America than who belong to all the other socialist groups combined.But DSA is politically really pretty broad. Why not, in the U.S.,just join and build DSA and perhaps one of the many political caucuses within DSA that supports a more defined kind of socialist politics?
CP: DSA was a small and moribund social democratic organization prior to 2017. One of its younger members, who joined sometime around 2010, said it was a socialist version of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), which is a nonprofit that collects dues from its members, doesn’t expect them to do anything, and sends them a newsletter.
DSA explodes as a small mass organization reaching 90,000 members—not because of the 2016 Sanders campaign, as most DSA leaders claim, but in response to Trump’s first election., And at that point, I was one of the people on the far left saying that the revolutionary socialist Left had to relate to this, possibly join it as a grouping with a coherent worldview and with some proposals on how to move DSA forward. The alternative, I believed, would be DSA’s reversion into a staid, reformist, electorally-oriented grouping. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so there had to be revolutionaries posing the alternative of building DSA into an activist organization that was really committed to workplace, community, anti-war, anti-imperialist organizing.
Now, I believe that, from 2017 to early 2020, there were a lot of opportunities to work in DSA. And, in fact, when Tempest first formed and for a period of time thereafter, I’d say a majority of our comrades were members of DSA.We worked in various DSA branches trying to push for the idea that DSA should not be involved in the DemocraticParty and that members should be educating and agitating for an independent workers’ party. We agitated for DSA to orient itself towards building effective rank and file organizations and unions, rather than looking to left-leaning officials who might be friendly to DSA politics.
Now, there was space for all of that for quite a while, and some currents did grow. The problem was that none of these currents had enough size, political coherence, and weight to really have much of an impact. A turning point came in 2021-2022 In 2018, a number of DSA members and DSA-endorsed candidates won Democratic primaries and actually got elected to the House of Representatives in the U.S.—the so-called Squad, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being the best known. There was also Rashida Tlaib and an African American congressperson from the Bronx and part of the suburbs outside of New York named Jamal Bowman, who was also elected. Now all of these candidates, in order to get DSA endorsement publicly endorsed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel and pledged to promote those politics.Bowman, almost as soon as he’s elected, ends up voting to fund the Iron Shield missile system that essentially allows the Israeli state to rain terror on Palestinians and on its Arab neighbors without much worry about them sending missiles in and actually hitting Israeli targets.
This sparked a tremendous debate in DSA, and our comrades played a big role in initiating a movement in various branches calling for, at the minimum, Bowman to be censured, if not expelled, from DSA for basically disregarding the politics of the organization. In other words, this was an attempt on the part of the members of DSA to hold their electeds accountable. The DSA leadership, including those who claimed to be on the left of the DSA leadership, responded by saying, “Our main priority is to support Jamal Bowman.” And they ended up basically making a number of organizational moves against centers of opposition on this question. In particular, they shut down the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Working Group, which had been involved in the call to expel Bowman and basically removed its leadership and appointed a leadership that would not openly criticize Bowman.
In the wake of that, thousands, probably up to 20,000 members of DSA, left the organization, stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings, etc., By 2022, when several DSA members and Sanders supported Biden’s breaking of the railway strike, there was practically no opposition.
And what you started to see in many of the branches is that they became more and more bureaucratic and authoritarian. So, for example, our comrades were very active in the New York City Labor Branch of DSA, which had been a place where people involved in organizing rank and file caucuses in various public sector unions had been very active in talking about their work and trying to coordinate it. Increasingly, the leadership of that branch was appointed by the citywide leadership, which is very conservative, and branch discussions no longer included discussions of the fight in the teachers union or the fight in the big public employees unions but what candidates DSA was going to support for state assembly and city council. It became more and more narrowly electoralist.
Today in New York Tempest, we’re beginning to reassess this. There seems to be, in the wake of the election of Zoran Mamdani as New York City mayor as an open member of DSA, some ferment within New York City DSA. A few weeks back, the leadership of the branch held a meeting during which they instructed people not to share any information online. And if they did, they’d be expelled from DSA. Despite that, information from the meeting was shared, and DSA’s line was, “Our job, once Mamdani is elected, is not to hold him accountable, but to help him govern,” which means they will help cover for him as he retreats in the face of pressure from the Democratic Party and capital.
Now, there seems to be a considerable minority of members in New York CityDSA who are not going along with this. And that’s something. So, we’re beginning to reassess. For me, it’s a tactical question. DSA is, in its majority, a social democratic organization, which in the United States means that it doesn’t even advocate its own political electoral party.It tries to remake the capitalist Democratic Party. DSA, as an organization, has come to see electing people as taking power. All other forms of political organizing get subordinated to that.
But there have been times, particularly from 2017 to 2021, where it attracted a lot of radicalized people who wanted more than that, and there might be some opportunity today.The problem is something we saw with many of these caucuses that formed in DSA. As the group shrank in the early 2020s and there was less opportunity to actually influence new people, these groups became sort of power groups concerned solely with winning positions on leadership bodies rather than organizing politically, which is always the problem with revolutionaries working in larger, predominantly reformist organizations. But again, it’s a tactical question. There may be openings in DSA in the coming year or so in New York. We’ll see. I am, in principle, not opposed to it. In fact, I actually thought that it was imperative that revolutionaries join DSA and promote our ideas within DSA when it was a growing radicalizing group.
DC: I should add that in the Canadian state, we don’t have anything like DSA, and there’s a certain amount of unfortunate DSA envy among people on the Left here (and in the UK too). What we have is the New Democratic Party, which is a weakened social democratic party that has really adapted to neoliberalism. The European term social liberal fits pretty well for it, although there certainly are people who are NDP members who are more left wing than that. There’s currently an election process for the new leader of the federal NDP where there is one or possibly two Left candidates running.But at the grassroots level, NDP constituency associations are not, with very few exceptions, activist organizations or places that attract people who are looking to do more than be involved in some way around elections. In Quebec,there’s also Québec Solidaire, which is a left-wing party that was originally formed as an alternative to the nationalist Parti Québécois and more right-wing parties. And Québec Solidaire originally talked about being a party of the ballot box and the streets, combining both elections and non-electoral work, although it, I think,fundamentally leaned in an electoral direction. It became more successful in electing more members of the National Assembly in Quebec but has also moved to the right through that process, with more influence of the MNAs and their staff and so on within the party apparatus.And so, although it certainly remains a not insignificant organization, there’s not very much of the “party of the street” – it has a fundamentally electoral approach.. The Left has had a difficult time organizing itself in relation to Québec solidaire.
If people who’ve been listening to this discussion have been listening carefully, you recognize that Charlie and I understand that it’s a mistake to think that the only options people have when it comes to socialist organization are, on the one hand, broad organizations like the DSA with members that range all the way from moderate reformists to revolutionaries, and on the other hand, micro-parties and other far-left groups organized along those lines.
There have been, and there still are revolutionary socialist groups that reject the micro-party model. Affirming the commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society, these groups try to organize in ways that make sense where they are. In the spirit of what British socialist Duncan Hallas once wrote, which is that “organizations do not exist in a vacuum, they’re composed of actual people in specific situations attempting to solve real problems with a limited range of options open to them.” And one of those groups that tried to carve out a different path was the one that you were in, Charlie, Solidarity. And Solidarity was certainly an influence on the New Socialist Group in Canada.
Can you share some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Solidarity in the years that you were a member, between 1986 and 2015?
CP: Throughout the history of Solidarity, there was an extremely strong and healthy commitment to training comrades to be activists and militants, particularly at the workplace.
Two of the groups that we had that came together to form Solidarity, Workers’ Power and the International Socialists, had a decade or more of experience doing workplace activism as revolutionary socialists. And there was a layer of comrades who were my age and a bit older who were very excited about training younger people to continue doing that work.
And in the early years, I’d say up until about 1993 there was also a continued strong commitment to training people in the broad politics of revolutionary socialism from below on the need for revolution, the need for class independence, the importance of anti-oppression struggles, etc.
Over time, and this became more and more evident in the later 1990s and then later, particularly in the 2000s, Solidarity was unable to maintain those two strengths, both a commitment to a training people in revolutionary politics combined with grappling with the world as it is today—attempting to understand the nature of the economic crisis, the nature of the restructuring of the working class and the oppressed, etc. We were doing both of these, I’d say,until the mid 1990s. I think we began to abandon the second, and that had an effect on how we trained people as activists. Our commitment to maintaining revolutionary politics and training people in these politics weakened over time, and this affected how we were training people to do day-to-day organizing.
The weakening of our commitment to training people in revolutionary politics had two sources. One source was the demoralization of a layer of older comrades of my age and older about the prospects of revolutionary politics.A number of them, including leading comrades, came to the conclusion that the idea of revolution was simply unrealistic and that the best we could hope for was to build left reformism
At the same time, we had projected ourselves as a regroupment organization—an organization that would bring together people from a variety of political traditions and try to cohere something new. Initially, in the mid 1980s, we thought we could include some of the people coming out of the Maoist milieu, who had drawn conclusions about micro-sects and about Stalinism. Those folks never showed. And by the early 1990s, regroupment came to mean integrating layers of people who had come out of primarily the crisis of the main Trotskyist organizations in the United States who had not drawn lessons about the micro-party.These are people who thought that their previous organization had gone wrong because of some ideological deviation and unclarity about what Trotskyism is, rather than thinking that the project was flawed because the layer of working people that would be the basis of a revolutionary party simply didn’t exist.
So, we had a layer of older comrades who were saying all this stuff about how the restructuring of the working class, the restructuring of the economy, etc. was not that important anymore. They were saying that we just had to do practice. But other folks were going, all we need to do is read Trotsky and memorize the Transitional Program and be able to spit it out and we’ll be fine.
The result was we would periodically recruit layers of young people who would either become good workplace militants but drift to the right, politically adapting to the trade union officialdom, or who would try to transform the group into a more coherent, revolutionary group that did real activism but would leave.
And by 2011, to be quite honest, I had been trying to keep the group on what I saw as a reasonable path. I’d been very active through the 1980s and 1990s in my branch in New York, which at points was fairly successful, had up to 40 or 50 people, which for us was large. And I served in national leadership from 2000 to about 2008.I came to the conclusion by 2011 that the group was going nowhere, and I was pulling back from my activity. For personal reasons. I dropped to a sympathizer in 2013, but then in 2015, the group, which had shrunk tremendously from 350 to 400 members to at most 100 members on paper and 30 active— voted to participate in the Sanders challenge in the Democratic primary, at which point I left and decided that this group had reached its limits and wasn’t going anywhere. Now, Solidarity still exists. They still have some very good comrades who I have tremendous personal and political respect for,but they don’t seem to be a vibrant organization that’s recruiting new people, that’s capable of having an impact on the Left, not on the world, but at least on the Left. So, for me, the big failure of Solidarity was its inability to define what broadly it means to be a revolutionary socialist group and also the boundaries of being a revolutionary socialist group, and then the concomitant failure to train new members in the fundamentals of these politics while encouraging them to think about the world and think about their activity as revolutionary socialists.
And what we ended up with was that the group—politically, not organizationally— liquidated itself into a more amorphous left-reformist current.
DC: Thank you for that. It’s a sad story, but an instructive one. And it brings us to the question of the Tempest Collective, of which you’re a member. I’m also a member.
It’s a U.S. organization that also welcomes members in the Canadian state, and Tempest is trying to build a socialist group that rejects the micro-party model and tries to avoid repeating the problems of Solidarity and other really loose groups.
The Tempest website puts it this way:
We need new forms of revolutionary organization that can better meet this moment, that can bring fresh eyes to how we make revolutionary organization relevant to what’s happening and what needs to be done. We do not claim to have the answer to how a new revolutionary organizational form will come about. We want to contribute to the process of figuring out how to strengthen organized socialist forces in this era of worsening crises, a process that is underway in many different publications and organizations.
And, of course, there are groups in other countries with a similar approach to Tempest.
So, just to wrap up, what do you think is the most important thing for people in very small groups like this to bear in mind about how we approach building a socialist organization?
CP: I think the most fundamental thing is to be aware of and have a real grip and analysis of the pitfalls of ideological and political and organizational looseness. This is the notion that all we have to do is be active. We don’t really need to develop our thinking as revolutionary Marxists. We need to reject that, which, I think, was the problem with Solidarity. And at the same time, we need to reject the micro-sect model, which was the problem with the ISO. Tempest was formed mostly by people who survived the breakup of the ISO and a small number of us who survived as revolutionaries from the disorganization of Solidarity.
We know these are the two directions. We don’t want to go on the broad path in the middle. We have at best a compass but not a roadmap. Tempest comrades joked at our founding conference that we’re building the plane while flying it. This is an experiment, and I have been very pleased by how Tempest has collectively attempted to find our way.
We were willing to be active in DSA as revolutionaries but not as sectarians who were going there to lecture people on the correct program. We are seen as good workplace activists, as good social movement activists, but also as people who have a clear politics. We related to Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani not by being purist or sectarian. Rather than simply denouncing, we’ve tried to understand the support for these left-wing Democratic Party politicians as a sign of people searching for a left-wing, collectivist, solidaristic alternative to the crisis, to capitalist politics and to rightwing populism, while the same time arguing honestly that the Democratic Party is a trap for revolutionaries and for radicals.
There is no guarantee that we will be successful. The pressures on small groups to adapt to either sectarianism, a comfortable micros-sect model, or to just adapt to the milieu you’re in are very strong. But I’ve been very happy so far and very pleased with the way in which our collective has responded to political pressures and continued to grow, integrate new people, etc. And to be honest, it is also one of the most internally healthy organizations I’ve been in since Solidarity in its early days. We have really good, honest, healthy debates about real questions facing revolutionaries.
As Solidarity became depoliticized, not only did the discussion level drop to the mundane:,What do we do next? Not in terms of, What is to be done, but rather, What do we advocate tomorrow? And it became an incredibly personalized and toxic atmosphere, as bad as what comrades described in the micro-sects.
So, Tempest has succeeded so far, but, again, we know what our guardrails are— the micro-sect, on the one hand, and political adaptation, on the other. On that broad path, we at best have a compass. We don’t have a roadmap.
DC: And I think we can say that the fate of Tempest and all other attempts to build non-sectarian, revolutionary socialist organizations of one kind or another is really deeply wrapped up and shaped by the fate of the working-class and social struggles that are happening and will happen in the future. Those are the powerful forces that will ultimately blow an organization one way or another.
The best you can do is try to understand where those forces are blowing and where they’re moving, and how you can most effectively try to navigate through that. Our fate is not going to be something that we make in a vacuum but in the circumstances we find ourselves thrust into.
CP: You actually do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
The post Party time? appeared first on Tempest.
U.S. Representative Bonamici Joins Rally to Tell Trump Administration to Protect NOAA
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Amid proposed draconian budget cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and as Americans face escalating extreme weather risks, U.S. Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) joined former NOAA assistant administrators and dozens of advocates to rally in defense of the agency on Monday, June 8, on the National Mall. The rally, hosted at Constitution Gardens’ East End Plaza, was held outside a pop-up Museum of Unnatural Disasters.
Watch the live stream recording on Instagram HERE.
“NOAA saves lives and powers the economy, and we can’t let the Trump administration gut it,” said Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR). “What if the next storm hits while the National Weather Service is understaffed? What if farmers and fishermen can’t get the accurate data they need to make good decisions? I choose NOAA, science, and the American people because they deserve a government that cares about them, their livelihood, and their safety. And I’m not stopping this fight until we win.”
President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 would eliminate 100% of the funds for NOAA’s research department and cut the agency’s overall funding by 28%. Although the House of Representatives has proposed smaller reductions, any cuts risk undermining NOAA’s critical work at a time when NOAA’s life-saving services and critical research are needed more than ever.
“Cutting NOAA and our government weather forecasting budgets is both expensive and dangerous,” said Monica Medina, former Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce. “Accurate government forecasts are free and help farmers protect crops, utilities prepare for storms, airlines avoid disruptions, emergency managers evacuate communities, and businesses plan operations. With extreme weather events increasing, every dollar cut from forecasting translates into higher costs and real safety risks for every American.”
“NOAA’s research department has brought innovation, advancement, and connection across the agency for over fifty years,” said Craig McLean, former NOAA Assistant Administrator for Research. “Breaking up and fractionating NOAA research destroys synergies that bring you enhanced fishery forecasts, coastal community resilience and prosperity, weather forecasts you can trust, and climate realities without politics.”
Meteorologists are forecasting one of the largest El Niño warm water systems in human history to begin this summer. With it will come more deadly heat waves in the Midwest and West and more extreme storms in the South. At a moment of growing climate volatility, advocates emphasized the need to strengthen weather research agencies, especially those at NOAA, rather than weaken them.
“As communities across the country face more frequent and severe weather disasters, cutting NOAA’s research and resources would put lives at risk,” said Gabrielle Walton, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Coordinator. “NOAA’s science and forecasting capabilities are essential to protecting public safety, strengthening resilience, and preparing for the growing impacts of climate change. We should be investing in this critical agency, instead of dismantling it when Americans need it most.”
Watch the live stream recording on Instagram HERE.
###
Chesapeake Climate Action Network is the first grassroots organization dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the impacts and solutions associated with global warming in the Chesapeake Bay region. Founded in 2002, CCAN has been at the center of the fight for clean energy and wise climate policy in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, DC and beyond.
The post U.S. Representative Bonamici Joins Rally to Tell Trump Administration to Protect NOAA appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Trump effort to solicit negative feedback on national park signage backfires
A new report from the Center for Western Priorities found that less than one percent of 35,700 comments submitted to the National Park Service in response to signage asking the public to report negative depictions of American history in parks actually used the comment form as intended. The comments were received via a QR code sign that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered to be posted at national park sites. The sign asked park visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
The Center for Western Priorities analyzed 35,700 comments submitted across 475 national park units between June 2025 and January 2026, organizing the comments into categories based on content and sentiment. The vast majority of comments expressed opposition to the order, support for national parks, the importance of telling a complete history, criticism of the Trump administration generally, as well as a number of jokes and off-topic responses. However, a negligible number of comments actually flagged signage or supported removal, with only 47 comments, or 0.1 percent of the total comments submitted.
“These comments pass the vibe check with flying colors. Americans support our parks and the stories they tell, and they aren’t happy about the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite history,” said Lilly Bock-Brownstein, Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager. “Instead of helping Trump censor our national parks, visitors used the comment form to tell the Trump administration to respect our parks or get lost.”
A former Interior department official explains what’s wrong with mining on public landOn a new episode of The Landscape, Kate and Aaron are joined by Dr. Steve Feldgus, an independent consultant who served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Interior department under President Biden. Dr. Feldgus talks about how to improve mine permitting in the U.S., a topic he worked on while at Interior.
Quick hits Effort to get national park visitors to snitch on signs backfiresCenter for Western Priorities [report] | KOAA | Source NM | West Central Tribune | Salt Lake Tribune
New BLM grazing rules eliminate Tribal bison from public landsInside Climate News | Public Domain | Idaho Statesman [opinion]
BLM and Utah Lt. Governor sign co-management agreement for San Rafael SwellABC4 | Salt Lake Tribune | Deseret News
Elk herd habitat near Dinosaur National Monument to open for drillingHigh Country News | International Business Times
Forest Service admits cabin project in Alaska was cancelled due to mining interests, after previously denying it Trump administration waives environmental laws to allow border wall in Big Bend National ParkNational Parks Traveler | Common Dreams
Opinion: Federal policies put public lands elk habitat on the chopping block Once underwater, Colorado River canyon country reemerges as drought-stricken Lake Powell’s levels drop Quote of the dayFolks need to understand the long-term impacts of a rush to lease so much public land. Once those leases are issued they are very hard to get rid of — they stay on the land for a long time, even if they aren’t developed.”
—Peter Hart, legal director of the Wilderness Workshop, High Country News
Picture This @u.s.forestserviceThe rings on the shells of wood turtles reveal their age — giving them something in common with the trees in the forests they live in.
Forest Service scientists’ partner with land managers across the Midwest, finding ways to care for wood turtles threatened by habitat loss, stream pollution, disease, and poaching.
Data from long-term monitoring shows that protecting nests and constructing roadside barriers help turtles survive to adulthood and ensure the next generation of hatchlings.
(Forest Service photo by Donald Brown)
Featured photo: Lower Delicate Arch viewpoint, Arches National Park. NPS/Chris Wonderly
The post Trump effort to solicit negative feedback on national park signage backfires appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
The two countries set to lead this year’s COP31 have unveiled three headline goals for November’s UN climate summit – on electrification, waste and buildings – following six months of consultations with governments.
At mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Turkish COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum and the talks’ chief negotiator, Australia’s Chris Bowen, billed the targets as a blueprint for climate action, with electrification emerging as the top priority.
Bowen said he wanted this year’s COP negotiations in the Turkish city of Antalya to “take inspiration” from the targets, adding that he would push in particular for a “strong outcome” on switching from fossil fuels to electricity to run vehicles, industry and buildings.
“35 by 35” goalThe electrification target – dubbed the “35 by 35” goal and based on analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) – would strive to ramp up the share of final energy consumption provided by electricity to 35% by 2035 from about 20% today.
That would be achieved by accelerating the switch to technologies such as heat pumps, electric vehicles (EVs) and electric cookers.
Murat Kurum (centre-right) and Chris Bowen (far-right) speak at a press conference in Bonn on June 9, 2026 (Photo: UN Climate Change/Lucia Vasquez)Bowen said he wants to lead a push focused on “electrifying everything that can be electrified and making sure as much of that electricity as possible is renewable”.
He said electrification is “the key to transitioning away from fossil fuels”, urging negotiators to keep in mind that 2035 is just nine years away.
Bonn Bulletin: Tackling climate crisis is “hardest” challenge ever, Stiell says
Kurum said the COP presidency would work to forge “a strong global coalition that is ready and determined to act”, promising to facilitate access to technical assistance, particularly to developing countries.
Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which will produce a special report to map out pathways to achieving the target, said the world was already electrifying because of the current global oil shock and the growth of electricity-using sectors such as air conditioning, EVs and AI data centres.
Previous COPs have seen similar goals on boosting renewables, energy efficiency, nuclear, biofuels, grids and other technologies. Some of these have been agreed by all governments as part of a negotiated COP decision, while others have remained as goals that only some countries have put their names to.
Bowen told reporters in Bonn there was strong interest around the world in electrification as he continues his talks with governments, saying the COP presidency wanted “to seize that for the negotiations”.
Climate campaigners generally welcomed the announcement. Duygu Kutluay, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, said elevating electrification to a flagship priority was a “positive step”.
But she cautioned that “electrification can only deliver meaningful climate benefits if the power comes from renewables, not fossil fuels”.
Berkan Ozyer, director of Greenpeace Türkiye, said the electrification goal was “vital”, noting however that Türkiye has 37 active coal power plants and was “leaving the door open” for more.
Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. REUTERS/Umit Bektas Last-minute change on buildingsAt the same time, the COP presidency quietly overhauled its goal for reducing energy use in buildings.
An initial press statement on Monday set out a target “to achieve at least a 25% increase in energy efficiency in buildings by 2035”. But in “a small update” issued on Tuesday, that was replaced with a different goal to “reduce energy consumption intensity in the building sector by at least 25% by 2035”.
No reason was given for the change and Kurum did not directly address a question from Climate Home News about the decision to remove the energy efficiency target, a step that experts said raised potential questions about ambition and implementation.
“Energy efficiency improvement and energy intensity reduction are complementary metrics: efficiency targets drive the deep physical upgrades that lock in long-term performance and, crucially, higher resilience, while intensity targets keep operators accountable for real-world outcomes. What matters is that both remain in the frame,” Roxana Dela Fiamor, global policy lead at the U.S. Green Building Council, told Climate Home News.
“Only looking at energy intensity is really delaying the crucial role that buildings can play in the energy transition,” she added.
Focusing only on energy intensity risks delaying deeper structural changes, she warned, as it can be achieved through short-term measures like switching off lights or optimising usage, rather than investing in retrofits.
“Energy efficiency requires a lot of investments and structural measures, energy intensity is easier to achieve. But energy intensity is not sufficient,” she said. “It doesn’t tackle the systemic changes needed, it doesn’t look at all the different components that drive energy consumption in buildings.”
Missing details on waste targetThe COP31 presidency has set a goal to halve the growth in global waste by 2035, but key details about the goal are still missing.
Announcing the target, Kurum said waste was “one of the areas where the fastest results can be achieved” in climate action, but he did not specify the baseline for the target, or what types of waste it covered. A COP31 spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.
Türkiye prioritises cleaning up garbage emissions in COP31 ‘action agenda’
Mariel Vilella, climate director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said it was “encouraging” to see waste getting more attention, but warned that the target “remains difficult to assess without clarity on the baseline, scope and implementation pathway”.
She said success should be judged not by a headline figure alone, but by whether it drives real change – including waste prevention, methane cuts, lower plastic production and protections for waste workers.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that municipal waste could rise from 2.1 billion tonnes today to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050 without significant action.
Cutting waste generation would curb planet-heating emissions, protect ecosystems and improve human health, the UN says.
An Ideal Heating heat pump is seen in front of a cottage in Newbiggin-on-Lune, Britain, February 18, 2024. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett An Ideal Heating heat pump is seen in front of a cottage in Newbiggin-on-Lune, Britain, February 18, 2024. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett New initiative on climate finance?The COP31 joint presidency has also floated a new climate finance initiative – the so-called Climate Implementation Bridge (CIB) – to help countries make progress on the three proposed targets.
Kurum said the initiative would not involve creating a new fund or financial mechanism, describing it as “a complementary initiative that supports climate finance and strengthens partnerships among countries”.
While few further details were immediately available on how it would work or fit into the existing climate finance landscape, Rebecca Thissen of CAN International said adding new processes without simplifying existing systems risked causing confusion and proving counterproductive.
The post COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification appeared first on Climate Home News.
Together, we can defend our wild forests
'Donald Trump's Policies Are Hurting Social Security': Statement on the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report
The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, on the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report:
“This is the first Social Security trustees report that begins to take Donald Trump’s second term policies into account: A tax bill that largely benefited the wealthy, economy-wrecking tariffs, a needless war with Iran, and hostility to immigrants. All of these have reduced the amount of money going into Social Security, weakening the system’s finances.
Despite Trump’s damaging policies, Social Security remains fully affordable if the wealthy are required to contribute their fair share. Congress has only two options to address the projected shortfall: Bring more money into Social Security, or cut benefits. Any politician who refuses to raise revenue, including by making the wealthy pay their fair share into Social Security, is telling us that they support benefit cuts.
The American people, including Republicans, are overwhelming in their opposition to even a penny of benefit cuts. Support for means-testing and other benefit cuts (even if paired with revenue increases) is a betrayal of the American people.
Social Security’s future is on the ballot. Any of the U.S. Senators elected this November could become the deciding vote. Accordingly, all of them should tell the public how they would vote.
This is particularly important for Republican candidates, given that Speaker Mike Johnson just announced plans to ‘adjust and fix’ Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid next year. That’s DC-insider speak for ‘cut benefits.’ Outrageously, Johnson claims this is necessary to reduce the federal deficit — even though Social Security is an earned benefit that doesn’t add a single penny to the deficit!
As the Trustees Report plainly states, if there is insufficient revenue, Social Security benefits will be automatically cut. Johnson’s ‘solution’ is to cut them sooner (and likely by a larger amount) instead of making his billionaire donors pay their fair share. Sen. Ted Cruz and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are more specific than Johnson, saying that the Republican plan for Social Security is privatization, handing Social Security over to Wall Street. Do Republican House and Senate candidates agree with Johnson, Cruz, and Bessent?
Ultimately, the Social Security shortfall is cause for action but not for undue alarm. Congress has acted to avert such shortfalls before and will again. When members of Congress act, they should listen to their voters who overwhelmingly value Social Security, not their ultra-wealthy donors who want to steal their voters’ hard-earned benefits out from under them.”
Congress Must Act Now to Protect Social Security—Make the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share
The following statement was issued by Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance, regarding the Trustees’ reports on the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds released today.
The report states that the Social Security Trust Fund is able to pay full benefits and expenses until 2032, while the Medicare Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2033. If Congress does not make any changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will only be able to pay 78% of scheduled benefits to all current and future beneficiaries.
“The new Social Security Trustees Report serves as a warning. Congress must act to increase revenue into the Social Security system. This will prevent current and future beneficiaries from losing roughly $500 a month in Social Security benefits they have earned over a lifetime of work in just six years.
“The wrong response is to continue down President Trump and congressional Republicans’ path: passing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that undermine Social Security's finances, and implementing tariffs and policies that harm our economy and put Americans out of work, while laying the groundwork to gut the program through benefit cuts, a higher retirement age, and privatization.
“The right solution is simple, has broad support from the majority of Americans, and would fix Social Security's finances for the next 75 years. Today the wealthiest Americans benefit from a loophole that lets them stop paying Social Security tax after the first $184,500 they earn while the rest of us pay on every dollar we make.
“This loophole is indefensible. Millionaires and billionaires should pay into Social Security at the same rate as everyone else. Closing this loophole would mean a strong, solvent Social Security for the next 75 years.”
“A bankrupt Social Security system is not inevitable, and Americans should reject these scare tactics. However, any politician who refuses to make the wealthy pay their fair share is actively supporting cuts to earned benefits.”
“We also urge Congress and the Administration to strengthen Medicare’s finances by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for more prescription drugs, holding Medicare Advantage insurance corporations accountable, and cracking down on practices that increase corporate profits without improving patient care.”
Bellona Raises NOK 13 Million, Avoids Bankruptcy
A fundraising campaign launched by the Bellona Foundation has succeeded in securing the organization’s future and averting bankruptcy.
“I would like to express my deepest gratitude for the support we have received, on behalf of everyone at Bellona,” said Bellona founder Frederic Hauge.
On June 1, Bellona announced that it faced the prospect of bankruptcy unless it could raise at least NOK 8 million within one week. The crisis was triggered by the loss and postponement of key sources of funding, leaving the organization in an acute liquidity crunch. After a week-long fundraising effort, the final total reached an impressive NOK 13 million.
“We received NOK 3 million from 4,370 individual donors. That provided a crucial foundation for businesses, entrepreneurs, and major supporters to contribute an additional NOK 10 million,” said Bellona CEO Sveinung Rotevatn. “Together, these contributions ensure that we can continue our operations.”
Bellona’s board met on Monday evening and concluded that the funds raised were sufficient to meet the foundation’s immediate obligations and allow it to continue operating. Nevertheless, Rotevatn emphasized that significant challenges remain.
“This was an emergency effort to ensure Bellona’s survival. We are enormously grateful for the response. At the same time, Bellona still faces a difficult second half of the year, during which we will substantially reduce costs and work to secure a more sustainable financial footing. We take that responsibility seriously. Bellona must never find itself in this situation again.”
On June 16, Bellona will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Until recently, it seemed uncertain whether the milestone would be marked at all. Now, Frederic Hauge is looking forward to celebrating four decades of the organization he founded in 1986.
“Bellona is my life’s work, and I am deeply relieved that this 40th-anniversary crisis has ended well. The fight for the environment continues, and Bellona will remain at the forefront of developing new solutions and advancing the green transition—as we always have.”
The post Bellona Raises NOK 13 Million, Avoids Bankruptcy appeared first on Bellona.org.
DOE reinstates $57M American Battery grant
American Battery Technology Co. won its appeal after the agency canceled the grant last year. It will continue plans to build a $115 million commercial-scale lithium refinery alongside its lithium-ion battery recycling efforts.
Supreme Court sends furnace case back to appeals court
The top court agreed with the Trump administration that Biden-era rules effectively eliminating non-condensing gas furnaces and water heaters from the market are based on an incomplete legal review.
ANHE Hill Days: The Power of Nurse Advocacy
One nurse’s experience attending ANHE’s Hill Day and witnessing nurse constituents voice their concerns about environmental issues affecting their local communities.
By Amanda Dowe, RN, BSN| Chamberlain College of Nursing
Preparation for the Hill
A few weeks ago, I was blessed with an opportunity to participate in the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environment’s Legislative Hill Day. The day before meetings began ANHE held an intensive Hill Day preparation call and walked us through the importance of nursing advocacy, the impact of climate change on public health, and effective means of influencing legislators through storytelling. We not only reviewed the key legislative asks involving rollbacks of the Endangerment Finding, Toxic Substance Control Act, Clean Car Standards, Per-and Poly-Fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), and cuts to agencies like Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but we made connections to what we as nurses have seen in our practice or personal lives and how it impacts the health of our communities.
On the Hill
During the virtual Hill Day Meetings, nurse constituents from several states met with their elected representatives staffer and engaged in very focused conversations about how the repeals and rollbacks of the laws above would impact the public’s health. There were fifty three meetings scheduled and although I didn’t attend all, I still gained valuable insight. In the first meeting, a nurse from Connecticut explained how in the industrial town of Waterbury, children are experiencing asthma at alarming rates due to poor air quality. Another nurse asked for tax incentives for solar energy. A home infusion nurse discussed the implications of data centers and how decreased water pressure could present a risk for infection to patients if the nurse is unable to wash their hands. A Texan nurse constituent shared a personal experience of her son and husband using inhalers and how she couldn’t imagine the economic burden of emergency room bills for patients with exacerbation of respiratory conditions caused by poor air quality. On day 2, a New Mexico home health nurse expressed concerns of drought conditions and data centers posing a threat to their already low water supply.
After the Hill
ANHE’s Hill Day was a powerful experience! It was a breath of fresh air to witness nurses from all over the United States, unified with ANHE zoom backgrounds, taking time out of their day to advocate and voice their concerns about repeals and rollbacks of laws that members of their communities aren’t even aware of. The majority of the staffers were very appreciative and had “aha” moments when nurses were able to make relatable connections between climate change and health. But of course, there were some who weren’t impressed by the scientific findings. The one thing we all can agree on is, ANHE’s Legislative Hill Day 2026 proved that nurses have the power to influence policy decisions by reaching out to elected officials, and asking for support of protective policies that impact our environment and our health.
Author’s Reflection
To make changes and improve outcomes, nursing advocacy at the systems level is essential. Many times as nurses we don’t feel autonomous and we always feel as though decisions are being made for us without our inputs. ANHE’s Hill Day helped me realize that ADVOCACY is AUTONOMY! Think about it, at the bedside you can only impact one patient at a time but at the systems level you can help change laws that impact public health! Nurses are trusted messengers who close the gap between patients and legislators. Climate change is a threat to humanity and as nurses we have a moral obligation to raise climate awareness in elected officials as they have no idea of how their laws affect healthcare.
Bio
Amanda Dowe is a Registered Nurse, and a Chamberlain College of Nursing student pursuing a MSN with a concentration in Healthcare Policy. Her nursing expertise is in Oncology, Home Infusion, and Utilization Management. She knows the disproportionate effects of climate change on vulnerable populations first hand when Hurricane Melissa destroyed Jamaica and she advocated for her family via email to government officials to ensure they received basic human necessities like food, water, and sanitation. Currently, she is working with ANHE to complete a practicum project on data centers.
The post ANHE Hill Days: The Power of Nurse Advocacy appeared first on ANHE.
The Great Forgetting
There’s a particular weight to memory when you’ve lived through a time that others now only reference in shorthand. I don’t mean nostalgia. I mean the physical act of remembering who is missing.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, as AIDS moved through my community with a speed and indifference that still feels impossible to explain, I had address books that became, over time, records of absence. Names crossed out. Numbers that no longer rang. Whole clusters of friends and colleagues gone. Not abstractly, not statistically — specifically. People with voices, habits, jokes, plans. People who should have had the chance to grow older.
They didn’t.
At the same time, I was an undergraduate in marine biology, expected to keep pace — labs, exams, problem sets — as if the world were intact. Animal physiology, genetics, statistics, organic chemistry. Show up. Perform. Pass. All while a plague burned through my community with terrifying precision.
There was no accommodation for grief. No pause. No recognition that anything unusual was happening. The expectation was continuity — business as usual — no matter what was being lost.
And while that was happening, the federal government — under Ronald Reagan — withheld urgency in a way that still feels difficult to describe without anger. Years passed before the crisis was even named at the highest level. The silence was ambient, structural. It told us exactly how much our lives were worth in the hierarchy of concern.
So we filled the silence ourselves.
We marched. We organized. We protested in the streets and in front of federal buildings and in hospital wards. I remember the lines of police in riot gear, the pressure of bodies pushing forward, the stinging waft of tear gas, the sound of voices refusing to be contained. I remember the fear and the adrenaline and the clarity that comes when you understand that no one is coming to save you.
You either act or you disappear.
My generation built something out of that refusal. Not just activism but systems — care networks, research pipelines, legal strategies, cultural shifts. It was blood and sweat and grief. It was also ingenuity and persistence. It forced recognition where there had been none. It changed policy, medicine, and public understanding.
We didn’t win everything. But we won enough to believe that progress, once secured, might hold.
Now I’m in my 60s. There are more years behind me than ahead. This is supposed to be the part where you take a breath. Where you look around and see what endured. Where you enjoy, at least in part, the world you helped fight into being.
Instead I’m watching something else.
A kind of thinning. A quiet unraveling. A great forgetting. I’m watching it in civil rights language. I’m watching it in public institutions. And I’m watching it just as clearly in the environmental work I’ve spent my life in — where the stories we tell about land, water, and who belongs in them are being quietly rewritten.
The language shifts first. What was once widely understood becomes contested again. Terms that carried hard-won meaning — equity, inclusion, justice — are recast as excess, as ideology, as something to be rolled back in the name of neutrality. The current administration under Donald Trump has leaned into that reframing, encouraging a broader cultural move to strip away the very frameworks that made broader participation possible.
It’s familiar, in the way bad patterns often are.
You don’t erase history outright. You erode it. You question its premises. You remove it from curricula. You flatten it into something unthreatening or dismiss it as irrelevant. Over time the edges blur, the urgency fades, and the lessons become optional.
What makes this process so effective is its efficiency. Recast hard-fought struggles under a single dismissive label — “DEI” — and you don’t have to argue against their substance. You simply make them suspect. From there the cascade is predictable. Funding becomes conditional. Curricula are scrutinized. Research agendas narrow. Writing, teaching, and public engagement that reflect lived realities begin to carry professional or financial risk. Not always through explicit bans, but through signals — what is rewarded, what is questioned, what quietly disappears.
Fear does the rest. Institutions grow cautious. Individuals self-edit. The story contracts. And over time a generation comes of age not just without the full history, but with a lingering sense that perhaps those earlier gains were excessive, that something went too far. That equality and justice themselves were the overreach.
And alongside that, something even more unsettling: the return of silence from people who know better.
Allies who once spoke up now hesitate. Institutions hedge. The language becomes cautious, then vague, then absent. Even much of the media — consolidated, risk-averse, and increasingly billionaire-owned — pulls its punches, shaping silence as much as it breaks it. The same dynamic that defined the early years of the AIDS crisis, the gap between what was happening and what was publicly acknowledged, begins to widen anew.
There is, however, a distinction worth naming. The silence of the Reagan years was neglect — devastating in its indifference but defined by what was not done. What we’re seeing now is more deliberate. Federal agencies are being directed to reshape the narrative itself — to remove language, narrow scope, and determine whose experiences are permitted to remain visible. The effect may echo the past, but the mechanism has changed. This is not just silence. It is its construction.
That silence carries a memory for those of us who have seen it before.
As Pride Month arrives, we’re asked — publicly, collectively — to celebrate how far things have come. And there’s been real progress worth marking. But memory doesn’t move on a calendar. For some of us, it remains immediate, shaped by what it took to get here — the years when a “normal” life was never really on offer, when the choice was to fight or risk erasure. Sacrifice isn’t always something you commemorate cleanly. It lingers. It returns. In certain moments, it opens wounds again, often accompanied by a quieter, more persistent weight: the survivor’s question of why I am still here when so many are not.
We learned, very early on, what it meant. “Silence = Death” wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was observation.
The throughline doesn’t belong only to the LGBTQ+ community. It runs through the broader arc of civil rights in this country.
Black communities fought to be seen in a nation structured to abuse and ignore them. Asian American communities refused to disappear into exclusion and incarceration. Indigenous nations resisted erasure from land and history. Women refused the legal and cultural frameworks that reduced them to property.
None of these struggles were granted recognition voluntarily. Each required pressure against systems that preferred quiet. These histories are not separate from environmental protection. They shaped it. And now, as those same voices are pushed to the margins again, the consequences are showing up in the places we claim to protect.
And here’s where the environmental story enters more fully — because public lands and waters have never just been about scenery. They’re where this country tells itself who it is.
Walk through a national park, a monument, a protected shoreline, and you’re walking through a narrative. These places carry the imprint of who was displaced, who resisted, who built, who endured. They are supposed to hold the full story — messy, uncomfortable, unfinished.
That’s precisely why they are now being rewritten.
What’s less clear to me is what is ultimately gained by narrowing that story. I understand the intent — the impulse to recast this country as the product of a singular lineage, to smooth complexity into something more orderly, more reassuring. There is a kind of counterfeit comfort in that version of history: simpler, less contested, easier to claim. But it comes at a cost. Because the fuller story of American lands and waters — of Indigenous stewardship, of displacement and resistance, of communities shaping and being shaped by these places — is not a burden. It is the substance of what “out of many, one” has always meant. To strip that away is not to clarify who we are. It is to trade a living, contested inheritance for something thinner, quieter, and far less true.
Recent directives have pushed federal agencies to scrub or soften references to slavery, Indigenous dispossession, civil rights struggles, LGBTQ+ history, and even climate science from the very places meant to preserve them. Exhibits have been altered, language removed, context narrowed. In some cases the stories of entire communities are being reduced or erased in the name of removing “divisive” narratives.
This isn’t just cultural housekeeping. It’s structural.
Because those same communities — the ones whose stories are now being minimized — were often central to the modern conservation movement itself. Indigenous stewardship shaped landscapes long before they were designated as parks. Black, Latino, and Asian communities have borne disproportionate environmental burdens while also driving environmental justice movements that expanded what conservation even means. LGBTQ+ advocates helped build coalitions, institutions, and public will at moments when environmental protection needed it most.
To erase those voices from the story of public lands is to do more than distort history. It is to narrow the present.
If conservation is recast as something neutral, apolitical, and disconnected from lived experience, then it becomes easier to exclude. Easier to decide who belongs in decision-making spaces and who does not. Easier to ignore whose communities are most affected by pollution, climate change, and ecological decline.
The land doesn’t just lose its history. It loses its witnesses. And once that happens, the decisions that follow begin to reflect that absence.
We see it in policy rollbacks framed as efficiency. In weakened protections justified as balance. In the sidelining of environmental justice as unnecessary complication. The same logic that dismisses DEI as “woke” is being applied to conservation — stripping away the very perspectives that made the field more honest, more effective, and more accountable.
Remove those perspectives and the system doesn’t become clearer: It becomes more brittle. Because ecosystems don’t exist in isolation from people. And conservation that refuses to see people clearly will fail to protect either.
This is the same pattern I watched unfold decades ago. Information existed. Communities spoke. The impacts were visible to those closest to them. But the systems in power chose not to see, not to listen, not to act.
That gap — between reality and recognition — is where harm multiplies.
There came a point when I threw my old address books away. The accumulation of loss had become unbearable — page after page of names, each one a life interrupted, a story cut short.
I think about it now as a warning. What we’re seeing this time around is a different kind of erasure. It starts quietly: histories softened, contexts removed, voices pushed to the margins. By the time the loss is visible, the record has already been rewritten.
What I carry from that time isn’t just grief. It’s a kind of pattern recognition — the moment systems begin to look away, the subtle softening of language to avoid discomfort, the speed with which urgency dissolves into ambiguity and then into silence.
And I know what it takes to interrupt that erasure. It takes people willing to challenge the rewriting of the story, to hold onto memory even as it’s being erased, and allies who understand that silence is not neutrality — it is participation in the outcome.
Because silence is still available as an option. It always is.
You can choose to look away. You can tell yourself that things aren’t that bad, or that they’ll correct themselves, or that it’s someone else’s fight. You can let the language erode, let the policies shift, let the history blur.
Or you can recognize the pattern and decide, again, not to accept it.
For those of us who have lived through earlier versions of this, that decision feels less like a choice and more like a reflex. We’ve seen where silence leads. We know what it costs.
And we know, just as clearly, what it takes to break it.
Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:Environmental Groups: Earn Your Place at Pride
The post The Great Forgetting appeared first on The Revelator.
Not-for-profit utilities turn to energy storage as data centers drive cost, reliability concerns
Reliability, power price hedging and avoided infrastructure investment are among the top reasons for the battery push.
Pages
The Fine Print I:
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this site are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) unless otherwise indicated and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s, nor should it be assumed that any of these authors automatically support the IWW or endorse any of its positions.
Further: the inclusion of a link on our site (other than the link to the main IWW site) does not imply endorsement by or an alliance with the IWW. These sites have been chosen by our members due to their perceived relevance to the IWW EUC and are included here for informational purposes only. If you have any suggestions or comments on any of the links included (or not included) above, please contact us.
The Fine Print II:
Fair Use Notice: The material on this site is provided for educational and informational purposes. It may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of scientific, environmental, economic, social justice and human rights issues etc.
It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have an interest in using the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. The information on this site does not constitute legal or technical advice.
This site is not the official webpage of the Industrial Workers of the World.