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CELDF Publication – State of Rights of Nature Report
This first edition of CELDF's State of Rights of Nature Report represents yet another important contribution from CELDF to those studying, documenting, or actively working for rights of nature.
The post CELDF Publication – State of Rights of Nature Report appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.
Great Salt Lake Conservation Gains Momentum with $1 Billion Federal Push and Renewed State Commitment
On the road to extinction: 3 species we could lose
Higher fees could make visiting Colorado’s Maroon Bells unaffordable
A proposed management change for the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, located in the White River National Forest outside Aspen, Colorado, is putting public access to the popular hiking destination in jeopardy, particularly for less affluent visitors.
Earlier this month, after the U.S. Forest Service stated that it can no longer afford to manage the area, Pitkin County applied for a special use permit to take over operations beginning in the 2027 season. Managing heavy visitation has always been a challenge at the Maroon Bells, and the area currently relies on shuttles, timed-entry, and limited parking reservations to keep crowds from overwhelming the landscape. The Pitkin County Open Space and Trails director told county commissioners the county’s general fund will not subsidize Maroon Bells operations, and that it will increase fees to cover costs.
The Forest Service currently oversees these operations at a nearly $300,000 annual deficit, though as Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein writes in a new Westwise blog post about the issue, “Accepting the premise that national public lands must operate in the black is accepting an argument that would justify privatizing nearly every park, forest, and wilderness area in the country.”
The Maroon Bells situation is in part a result of underfunding by Congress, a problem that has been building for years and has accelerated under the Trump administration. Both the Trump administration and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have made it clear they intend to manage public lands like assets on a balance sheet, and offloading management costs to local governments is a consequence of that approach. The result is a pay-to-play system where access to public lands becomes more expensive. Hiking the Maroon Bells is already a costly endeavor that requires visitors to pay for parking in Aspen and for the shuttle ride to the trailhead.
Quick hits The hollow man in the arena Comments from national park ‘snitch signs’ have been released. They’re wild The Maroon Bells belong to everyone. Why are we treating them like a business? The Trump administration is spending $5 million to coat D.C. horse statues in gold Grazing away wildfire risk? Congress considers cattle grazing for wildfire suppression California is getting three new state parks, and they’re not where you’d think Wildlife advocates sue to stop killing of predators inside designated wilderness areas Research suggests being in nature improves body image Quote of the dayThis is part of a Trump administration strategy to defund land management agencies in order to increase dysfunction, and then to present privatization as the solution. The Maroon Bells are well known and visible enough to draw scrutiny and generate outrage, but lesser-known areas won’t be so lucky.”
—CWP Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein, Westwise
Picture ThisA brilliant red sunset paints the landscape on the Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Plan your adventure today!
(Forest Service photo by Adam DiPietro.)
Featured image: Maroon Bells Shuttle at the Maroon Lake parking area. Source: Pitkin County.
The post Higher fees could make visiting Colorado’s Maroon Bells unaffordable appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 58
This Earth Day, we’re not celebrating progress; we’re sounding the alarm. In today’s episode, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook sits down with Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney, co-authors of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine that breaks down how the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks are threatening the health of every American.
Landrigan is no stranger to these fights. As a young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor in the 1970s, his groundbreaking research on lead poisoning in children helped drive lead out of gasoline and paint. This victory reduced childhood lead poisoning by 95% and raised the IQ of an entire generation.
Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career fighting to protect his patients’ lungs – and now the very protections that keep those lungs healthy are being dismantled one regulation at a time.
Together, the doctors share with Cook all the vital rules that the administration is undoing, who will suffer most, and what it will cost the public in health harms and lives lost – from weakened air quality standards and gutted climate policy, to the quiet destruction of the scientific institutions that keep Americans safe.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. On the eve of Earth Day, I'm really thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney to discuss their recently published article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, a Grave Threat to America's Health,” that published on March 25th, 2026.
Dr. Philip Landrigan is a pediatrician and a legendary public health physician who directs the global observatory on planetary health at Boston College. A prominent figure in environmental health and guest on this show, Dr. Landrigan spent 15 years at the CDC and is internationally recognized for his decades of research on the health effects of toxic chemicals, pesticides, and pollution, particularly on children.
And it's always worth mentioning because it is so important: in 1976 alongside the late, wonderful, great Dr. Herb Needleman, another longtime friend of EWG, Dr. Landrigan led the US government to mandate the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. That action reduced childhood lead poisoning dramatically in the United States by 95% — that's legendary.
My other guest today is Dr. Adam Gaffney, who's an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a health policy researcher, and a writer and commentator on issues of medicine and policy. His research focuses on national healthcare reform, healthcare equity, and disparities in lung health.
The article was also co-authored by Dr. David Himmelstein, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, and researcher Sancia Sehdev. This team collectively brings decades of expertise in public health, health equity, and environmental medicine. Now on Earth Day, we like to think we'd be celebrating the progress made in protecting our air, water, and the health of future generations.
Instead, this episode finds us at a deeply troubling moment, one where the very protections that Earth Day was created to champion are being systematically rolled back. Rather than marking another year of progress, Dr. Landrigan, Dr. Gaffney, and their colleagues have felt compelled to sound the alarm, documenting in painstaking detail what is being lost and what it will cost us in human health and lives.
This is not the Earth Day any of us hoped to celebrate this year, but it is one that demands our full attention. Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Gaffney, congratulations to both of you on this paper. One of my frustrations, and I think as public health doctors, it probably is one of your frustrations too, is that the public often doesn't understand the connection of the environment to their health. And so the first step is to get people to recognize that.
But clean air, clean water, pesticide policy, all manner of issues involving climate change, all of these can have very distinctly important, indeed, profound impacts on human health — that are unfortunately tragically being eroded severely in this administration. So let me just start off and ask both of you, what made you take this article on this research project?
Dr. Landrigan: Well, Ken, firstly, let me say how nice it is to be here. It's really great to be to be with you again. I think we go back to the early 1990s when we were working together on pesticides in their hazards to children's health.
Ken: Yeah. I was in high school at the time, if you'll remember. I was.
Dr. Landrigan: You were possibly middle school.
Ken: Otherwise the math would be bad for me right now I think.
Dr. Landrigan: Exactly. But why did, why did we take this on?
Well, this, this is actually the second time we've taken this on. We actually did a similar exercise during the first Trump administration and we tabulated the rollbacks. And we published a paper in The Lancet, which is the world's most widely read medical journal, published outta London, and we calculated that environmental and occupational health rollbacks during Trump one were responsible for, in the neighborhood of 20,000 unnecessary premature deaths per year in the United States.
Most of those deaths were due to increased levels of air pollution. And a smaller but still significant number were due to rollbacks of occupational health and safety safeguards. The administration talks about these rollbacks as freeing industry from the shackles of regulation and about driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.
What they don't talk about is that those common sense safeguards that they're rolling back actually protect people's health. They save lives and, and speaking as a pediatrician, they especially protect the health of children. We reckoned, Adam and I reckoned, that we needed to shine a light on what was going on.
Dr. Gaffney: You know, for me clinically, I'm a pulmonary and critical care physician, so the lungs are near and dear to what I do each day, and so many of these policies will do harm to, not only the lungs of the patients I treat or adults, but of children whose lungs are still developing and may never achieve the health that they could have had had they not been exposed to, uh, unnecessary levels of pollutants — like soot pollution and so forth.
So it's near and dear to my clinical work. I would also add that sort of, as you said, Ken, it's very easy for a lot of these policies to be implemented with relatively little public knowledge because they’re so complex, because there's so many, because it's a death by a thousand cuts sort of approach.
Whereby even if you do care about the environment, even if you are worried about the cleanliness of our air and water, you might not realize what is happening. You may not realize that polluters are going to be allowed to put more mercury into the air, to put more pollutants in the water, to release more air pollution into the environment.
So that's part of why I wanted to collaborate on this is to actually systematically outline what is happening in the potential risks for Americans.
Ken: And you've, you've really put your finger on something important here. I like to think I keep up as a professional paid environmentalist, but I can't. With all of the changes that are taking place just at EPA, then if you were to add in changes at the Department of Interior, even the Department of Defense, uh, certainly the energy department, all of these changes that have been made in the name of, um, you know, cutting regulation.
What does, uh, Zelin, the EPA administrator, he, his little micro brand is, um, the Great American comeback. That's how he advertises all of his regulatory cuts. But for sure, just keeping up with them is, is difficult. And that was, I think that's part of the plan.
We had an author on David Graham from The Atlantic who wrote a book about Project 2025, and one of the most important elements that was embedded in that, not just the document, but the strategy was to go fast, go quickly, do a lot of things at once so no one can focus for very long on any one impact. And I'm gonna get a little nerdy here, maybe for some listeners, but I encourage everyone to read this article.
It's, it's open source, it's available. Right. There's no paywall. You can get it and read it, and it's written for, you know, a concerned layman. It's not, you don't have to be a scientist to understand the impact of this very thoroughly documented piece, but the, you know, just the, the title Selected Health Effects of Trump Administration, Environmental Policy, Actions and Proposals, and you go through air pollution regulation, power plant regulation, climate change, motor vehicle pollution, water pollution, occupational health.
We've talked to, uh, I've talked to a number of people about different aspects of this, but you've put it all together when you stand back and look at the scope of it. And the, the speed, I mean, we're, we're really just over a year in, right? As public health professionals and, and, and clinicians, what do you make of the overall assault, I think is the only term that can be put, it's, is it, is it literally breathtaking for you as it has been for me?
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. It's, it's, it's massive, Ken. It's, it's massive. And what we'll do next, the next phase of our work, which is just now getting underway. Is that we will actually do our best to tabulate the toll of disease and death that results from these rollbacks.
So for example, we'll look at how much air pollution increases in each of the 50 states over the next couple of years.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: And we know very well from previous research that we and others have conducted, that each increment in air pollution causes more heart attacks, more strokes, more lung cancers, more deaths from chronic obstructive lung disease in adults, in kids, more still births, more premature births, more children with asthma.
We'll tabulate those impacts. There's no way in the world we can ever do a full accounting, but we'll do our best to count how much disease and death is due to, to these rollbacks. And you know, one of my mentors, decades ago when I was working at CDC, told me that statistics are people with the tears wiped off.
And in our articles, we won't be able to tell the stories of individual people. We'll leave that to folks like you Ken, but we can certainly present the, the statistics and thereby enable Americans to understand the, the magnitude of what's going on.
Ken: Yeah. Adam, is there, is there any proposals or actions across these issue areas that really stood out for you as a public health expert and then also as a clinician where you, where you thought, oh wow, this is just gonna make my public health and my clinical jobs much, much harder?
Dr. Gaffney: Well, it is hard to say one, and I'll, and I'll add this to that discussion, which is that, the problem is even larger than what that table shows. In another paper that Phil and I and many other colleagues published recently, we look at additional policies that are gonna harm the lung health of Americans.
So even beyond environmental and occupational policies, we're looking at 10 million people losing health coverage as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Right? We're looking at cuts and NIH funding. We're looking at cutbacks in research. We're looking at anti-immigrant actions that are going to have impacts on health and healthcare delivery.
So just to take a step back, this is actually part and parcel of a larger agenda for sure, that will for sure all be injurious to health. I think, you know, in terms of these specific policies, it is hard to pick it out. I mean, it's one, one year ago, Zelin, you know, had this press release where he declared the biggest deregulatory action in US history, quote unquote, and there were 31 different actions.
And some of the ones that we sort of described in this paper that I think I'll just highlight — one, rolling back the heightened standards for particulate matter 2.5 pollution, PM 2.5 pollution that the Biden administration in advance. Building on a huge body of science and knowledge that this pollution is harmful, it causes heart attacks, it causes strokes, it causes lung disease.
To go back into the past and undercut those protections to me is just mind bogglingly shortsighted. I also think the destruction of the endangerment finding, which is the policy that effectively allows the federal government to regulate climate pollution, uh, is going to have very harmful long-term effects.
We're basically taking away our own ability to do anything about climate change. So I could, I could kind of go on and on, but those two, I think, are worth highlighting at the outside of the discussion.
Ken: Yeah. No, I, I agree with you on those and it is hard to pick. I had, uh, Joe Goffman on, uh, the podcast a while back, who's one of the premier experts on Clean Air Act Policy and climate change policy ran the EPA programs, uh, under, uh, the Biden administration. And I said to him at the time, and you know, for me the Clean Air Act is the queen of environmental laws. That's the one that's really worked. And Phil and I have worked on pesticides and lots of other issues where we wish it worked as well as the Clean Air Act worked.
And I, I asked him if he didn't think, you know, the Clean Air Act and regulations around it really became kind of a, a bullseye, uh, for, you know, let's just be candid when, when Republicans take over and, uh, there's the kind of push there has been. And, uh, we have plenty of Republicans that support environmental protection, I don't mean that.
But there's an ideology here that really does seem to focus on what ends up in our lungs because they go after Clean Air Act regulations like the PM 2.5 standard, right? They wanna push those back. And Joe went into some detail about just the many ways they're trying to do that. And there are two elements here, and you touch on both of them in this paper.
One is a little easier to understand than the other. One is, I think one is the deregulatory steps are pretty easy to at least understand what they're doing. They're taking a specific regulation and they're gonna try and undo it — the endangerment finding or what they're doing on how our plant regulation, what have.
The, the more insidious and maybe the scarier element for me is the dysregulation that they're pursuing by reducing staff, reducing funding, getting rid of scientists. They don't have scientific debates in this administration, they just fire the scientists that disagree with 'em or sideline them or push them out. Talk a little bit about this long-term erosion of capability and capacity and how damaging that is going to be and hard to repair.
We might be able to reinstate a regulation and we might even defeat some of these efforts in court. The Trump administration's, you know, up against lots of litigation from folks in my community who are trying to stop these rules that they can, you know, I think in many cases are considered, you know, borderline if not illegal, and so they'll lose in court.
But the dysregulatory stuff — the long-term damage to these agencies and the staffs and the funding for extramural research funding that goes outside agencies to support academic institutions and children's health centers and so forth. That's really hard to tally up, hard to explain to people, but say, because you're both involved in it, say a little bit about how that hits.
Dr. Gaffney: Well, Ken, I think you are right, and the reality is, is that it's easier to destroy than to create. Institutions need to be built up over time, and it's very hard to put the net back together again. So, for example, the Office of Research and Development, the EPA’s internal research agency, which has been credited with all sorts of advances over time in terms of pushing forward our understanding of pollution, but also how to control it and how to regulate it.
That's, you know, being taken apart by the administration. And how does that get put back together again? I think you're seeing the same thing with research science at, say, the NIH. Congress rejected the administration's calls for cuts to NIH funding. But what happens to the know-how when people leave, when projects get defunded, when research gets interrupted when the clinical trials don't get completed.
That's harder to put back together again. I'll add one other thing though. I agree with you that there's the deregulation that's sort of easy to understand. It's sort of seen as pro-business say. Another thing that I truly can't understand is the assault on clean energy, which isn't even pushing business forward in America. It's really just favoring one specific sector and undercutting our ability to power America in a safe way, uh, for years to come.
Ken: I agree. And some of those forms of clean energy are also the cheapest forms of energy in terms of providing electricity now, and I'm really glad that I have solar panels on my roof and an EV out in the parking pad because, um, I'm not, uh, getting the direct hit from, uh the increase in gas prices we're experiencing now and the pollution that goes with it. But, you know, we have, we were inventing a new energy economy at the end of the Biden administration.
We were really just getting started and that's all been thrown in reverse and that's going to have big impacts on air pollution, our lungs, obviously on contamination of the environment with mercury from coal burning power plants, oil spills, all the rest.
Dr. Landrigan: And, and Ken, just think about the economics of it. I mean, this morning as I was coming into work, I passed a gas station. Gas was at $4 a gallon, 3.99 a gallon. At the same time, the cost of solar energy have come down by more than 90%.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: The cost of wind energy has come down by 75 to 80%. The cost of battery storage have come down by 95%. We're turning our back on clean energy that is also affordable energy in favor of yesterday's energy source, which is oil and gas and coal.
Ken: Yeah. And turning the, all the advantage over to other countries, certainly China, uh, that's pushing ahead.
I mean, there's a global buildout on solar in particular that is mind blowing right now, both at the utility scale and rooftop and we're, we put the brakes on it, in fact, threw it into reverse. It's very discouraging because that will have. A great many environmental impacts down the road.
Dr. Gaffney: It's not only about taking away the subsidies that went towards battery production or electric vehicle purchasing, it's a direct attempt to undercut those sectors, you know, even on their own terms.
So for instance, the Trump administration, I don't know whether it stands now, tried to block a nearly complete wind farm, you know, in Rhode Island from being completed. That's just an example of using the power of the government to go after one sector of energy production. Meanwhile, they actually mandated that some fossil fuel power plants stay open even when the grid operators had already said, these are obsolete. That's a very stunning development.
Ken: Again, I think the, the, the boldness has always defeated my imagination when it comes to the Trump administration. Just things like the rep, last report I saw, I think it's, we might have the same wind energy proposal in mind, they were going to pay the company a billion dollars not to build the,
Dr. Landrigan: That's a different one. The one the, the one that Adam is mentioning is in Rhode Island. The one where they paid the billion dollars to the French investor was on Long Island, New York.
Ken: Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much dumber it gets, but that's right up there.
Unbelievable. So there's a really useful appendix, uh, with any number of tables that help people understand in detail. Where these proposals have landed. And one of the areas is occupational health, which I know is near and dear to you, Phil and I had a NIOSH scientist on, uh, on the program fairly early on in, uh, the last year, and she was third generation NIOSH scientist.
It's, NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It's part of the Centers for Disease Control — and that agency early on, they've, they've made some rectifications, but mostly they just clubbed it in the early weeks and months of the Trump administration. Laid off a bunch of scientists, she told me that it was so bad that in some cases scientists had to kind of go into their labs and euthanize the animals, uh, in the experiments they were doing because they weren't gonna be allowed in to, to feed them.
The experiments were supposed to just stop, uh, but the animals were there in their cages. But we don't spend very much money as it is on occupational health and the, and the returns are enormous to protect our workforce. Say a little bit about what you learned when you looked at what, what is going on with respect to investment and in understanding occupational safety and health?
Dr. Landrigan: Sure. No, it's a, it's, it's such a big thing. Uh, I worked at NIOSH for, for six years. I was, I was a medical epidemiologist there, and when I was at NIOSH, what we used to do, which, we would go out to factories, where our work sites were, where problems were reported. We would investigate the problem, we'd figure out what was going on, and then we would work with the employee, we would work with the employees, we would work with the union if there was a union.
And collaboratively come up with solutions that protected the workers' health, saved lives, and generally made the businesses more profitable because they weren't having to pay large sums of money for workers' compensation or face liability suits.
It was basically a, a partnership for health rather than splitting people apart and, and fermenting divisiveness. So, and when people have done economic analysis on occupational safety and health, the, the returns are anywhere from six to one, to 10 to one, to 12 to one. For every dollar that's invested in protecting workers' health and safety, that's a six, 10, $12 return in the form of lower healthcare costs and increased productivity.
Ken: And I think I had, until I interviewed the scientist, I didn't realize just really how modest our investment at NIOSH is. She, she said there were like maybe 800 total employees at NIOSH.
Dr. Landrigan: There are many, many more game wardens across the United States protecting deer in the forest than there are occupational safety and health inspectors.
Ken: Yeah, well talk about priorities. Um, but yeah, I was startled. And so even with that modest investment that was savagely reduced, at least in the early days,
Dr. Landrigan: Something like the initial cut was in the neighborhood of 90% of the staff.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. Say a little bit if you can, um, about what you're hearing. I don't want you to betray any confidences.
Actually I do, if you would, if it's, if it's interesting, please do betray them. But, um, what's your sense of what's happening at NIH and at CDC? I know you, you both have dozens and dozens of connections there. What's the mood of the people I talk to are, uh, you know, they're sticking by their guns in many cases, if they can, and they're trying to do the best they can under the circumstances, but it's grim, right?
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. Well, you know, I was including my six years at NIOSH. I was a total of 15 years at CDC.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: And I must tell you, the CDC workforce are among the most dedicated, selfless people in America. They will drop what they're doing on a moment's notice to fly to West Africa to deal with the Ebola outbreak.
They'll stop whatever research they're doing to go to Utah or Alaska or North Carolina or Maine to deal with an outbreak of rabies or measles. Often at great physical hazard to themselves.
Dr. Gaffney: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: What they're doing is, I think that those people are dedicated to the mission. Many of your doctors, others, or nurses, epidemiologists, public health scientists, they deeply believe in the mission.
They're just going to do their best to, to hang on and, and ride this crisis through. I'm sure that day to day it's not easy, but you know, they, they have a sense of fulfilling a noble mission and they're gonna stick with it.
Ken: That's been my total experience with the, the CDC scientists and professionals that I've dealt with over the past 40 or 50 years.
It's just, um, if, if there was one agency that I really held in high regard, maybe because they're fundamentally not regulatory, but they're, you know, they're, you get the straight science from them. At least that's been my experience. It's just, uh, heartbreaking to see, see that under assault. Uh, same with just generally the, you know, the NIH. I mean, my goodness, and I know the big funding cuts were rejected, true enough, but, uh, there was, there's still been enormous, enormous damage done.
And, and the morale, the hit to morale, you know, you know that we were on the right track, for example, to take on a specific issue and then to find that stymied or, you know, distractions brought in, like, working on lesser topics like Ivermectin or whatever it might be.
Dr. Landrigan: You know, for decades, American science has been the envy of the world. Nobody else in the world, not in Europe, not in China, not in India, nowhere has done science as well as we do, and, and the reason we do it is several fold. Firstly, the funding has been generous. Secondly, it operates on a meritocracy and everything is peer reviewed.
Only the best of the best science gets funded. It's not a buddy system, it's not a crony system, it's not corrupt, it's transparent. And, um, if you wanna succeed in the system, you have to be good and you have to make contributions and, and you have to be about helping other people. And it's because American science has been so good that scientists have come here to American universities, to American think tanks from, from countries around the world.
Sadly, we're now squandering that advantage and, and we're seeing really good scientists, especially the younger ones who have not yet established their careers taking jobs in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, in China, in India. And what we're seeing is a brain drain from the United States. That is not good. Not good at all.
Dr. Gaffney: And I would just add very briefly, this is not just about funding cuts, which are devastating. There's this broader politicization and pseudoscience.
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah.
Dr. Gaffney: RFK junior anti-vaccine rhetoric. The embrace of pseudoscientific theories, as you said around ivermectin and chem trails. I could go on and on.
It's almost embarrassing to even talk about, and there was even a shooting at the CDC this year. Right? And so I can only imagine that that sort of environment is very demoralizing.
Ken: Totally. One aspect of politicizing that you consider in this brief paper is the fact that many of these environmental harms are visited most harshly on disadvantaged communities, low income communities, communities of color, and of course, that was sort of the first filter that was put in that we should stop research, regulatory enforcement, anything that related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or however they define that.
And I've learned so much of this from from Phil. We've focused on kids 'cause they're especially vulnerable. And we really have only begun to just catch up on the necessary focus on communities that are really benighted by pollution much more than than the rest of us.
And they tend to be low income communities, uh, fewer resources, fewer medical resources, harder to manage healthcare costs, and tremendous insults from air, water, occupational pollution, neighborhood pollution. Can you say a little bit about how that stood out in your analysis? That the impact of, uh, politicizing around DEI and how that might have affected environmental policy?
Dr. Gaffney: Sure. I think on the one hand, as you said, many of these policies are going to strike hardest against communities that are already suffering from poor health, lack of investment, discrimination and so forth. So you take something like the deregulation of mercury standards for power plants. Yeah, well, who lives close to power plants — and disproportionately — lower income people.
You know, I think that makes this easier in a sense for them to do, right? Because they view these communities as, as not their constituents in many ways. On the other hand, many policies that they're pursuing will in fact, harm what they view as their constituents. So if you take something like the rollback or the lack of enforcement, lack of implementation of these silica standards that were meant to protect minors from deadly dust that they encounter in their workplace.
And that's a disease that I might see — silicosis is a potentially fatal lung disease — those communities are disproportionately in red states. Similarly, if you look at the cutbacks to Medicaid, the public insurance program for low-income Americans, uh, yes, it will certainly take healthcare away from many, uh, working class folks in blue states who may be disproportionately black or Hispanic.
On the other hand, it will be devastating to rural areas, and to rural white areas that have a lot of low income folks who, who rely on this as their primary healthcare. So they're really, these policies really are going to be harmful for working class lower income groups across sort of demographic categories.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: Ken, it's also worth saying something about the disproportionate impacts on infants and children, and I, I speak here as a pediatrician. This administration came to power talking about their commitment to the right to life, and yet by allowing increased levels of pollution, specifically mercury pollution, which damages the brains of infants in the womb. Fine particulate air pollution PM 2.5 air pollution, which damages the brains, the hearts, the lungs, and other organs of infants in the wound.
They're actually belying their own words — if they really wanna protect children before they're born, the last thing this administration should be doing is rolling back environmental standards that protect children before they're born.
Ken: I couldn't agree more. There's been so much made dur, during the election and then during the transition of the Trump administration's interest relating to what you just said, Phil, to Make America Healthy Again.
And while I think the ideologues, uh, have, are locked into their position, there are a lot of rank and file a lot of, you know, everyday Americans who, it sounds good to them and it sounds, why wouldn't it sound good to make America healthy?
Uh, whether you think again is appropriate or not is another matter. But there were so many big promises that were made and in many ways, the Make America Healthy Again, agenda didn't include a lot of the issues that you address in this paper. People are upset about food additives. My organization works on food additives.
We take a backseat to no one in trying to do something about that, but, but to think that, if we make any progress on that, it's okay to make the cutbacks in clean air regulation or vehicular regulation or any of the other environmental policy assaults. What, what do you tell someone who, who believes in or adheres to just the general principles of making America healthy again.
Polling is showing us now that even people who believe in that don't think the Trump administration has done a very good job, but, but how do you get someone to expand their horizon and think about some of these other issues — let's say someone who's focused on vaccines and they feel like the vaccines are harmful.
It doesn't happen to be my position, far from it. But if that's their focus and they're not gonna move from that, it's one thing. But for many people I think they're uncertain and they just don't know about the other dimensions of environmental health that really should be part of any agenda properly called make America healthy.
How do you talk to folks like that? You probably, you probably come across them all the time.
Dr. Gaffney: So I think that actually when it comes to these policies, it's an easy case to make. I'm going to mention healthcare first, but from the healthcare perspective, the policies of cutting back on Medicaid, uh, cutting back the Affordable Care Act are actually already unpopular even with Republican voters.
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah.
Dr. Gaffney: When it comes to clean air and water, actually these rollbacks are unpopular. And I think the main barrier you have is what we already talked about, which is the complexity of the issues and the getting lost in the details. I think when it comes to the MAHA agenda, they did raise some important issues.
As you've mentioned, the food supply needs to be improved. There are problems with metabolic health. These aren't made up concerns. But what they've done time and time again is a very superficial attempt to talk about these issues — not taking on powerful corporations, not really going after those who are purveying harms.
You know, making these sort of voluntary agreements, getting Shake Shack to put beef tallow in their fries or whatever it is. These kinds of very performative stuff that's kind of made for the media, but then behind the scenes, what's really happening and that's what we have to talk about and that's what we came in.
What's actually happening in the realm of policy, putting aside this sort of media show. And it's the kinds of policies that we've outlined in this article. It's the rollback of pollution, of, of measures to protect our air. It's the rollback of protections against mercury in our water. It's rollback of protections that are keeping miners from getting deathly ill.
So I think we need to move the conversation away from the sort of catchy media issues to the real policies.
Ken: So you're saying wrestling a, a, a Twinkie, is, uh, great for Instagram, but not so great, uh, if you're really concerned about making America healthy. It's, you know, it's an Instagram post, and we don't make policy by Instagram post.
Would that we could, um, that's all I'd be doing, but, uh, turns out you have to actually get in there. Debate powerful industries, bring evidence forward, fight through for regulations. Phil and I have done this dozens and dozens of times over the year. It's never easy. And it's really, it's really not just something you can do from a podium. You have to dig in.
Dr. Landrigan: You know, glyphosate is a case in point. So glyphosate, Roundup, is the world's most widely used herbicide. 11 years ago, in 2015, the World Health Organization did a very careful independent review and came to the conclusion that glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans.
When this administration, when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. first came into power, one of the chemicals that they talked about controlling was glyphosate, and they mentioned it in the first edition of the MAHA Report. But curiously, glyphosate was absent from the second version of the MAHA report. Most recently, just a couple of weeks ago, president Trump issued an executive order saying that glyphosate was a national security matter, that we needed it for the safety and the security of the United States of America — which is the first I'd heard that despite many years in both the US Public Health Service and the US Navy.
So I think that MAHA people are very sincere. What MAHA people are all about is protecting their kids, protecting their families. I don't agree with everything that they stand for, but I certainly respect their sincerity. My plea to the folks in MAHA is look at the issues one by one.
Look at food safety. Look at glyphosate, look at vaccines. Look at clean air, look at clean water. Each of those is an important issue in its own right, and they've all gotta be properly balanced. If America's children are gonna be protected.
Dr. Gaffney: One thing I'd add to that list, which I think says a lot about the priorities of the administration is tobacco policy, right?
Is there one thing that we can all agree on is an absolute poison than cigarettes? Talking about making America healthy. They completely defunded the office, the CDC um, office that works on tobacco control. They're not pursuing it seems a nicotine reduction rule that would help get people to stop smoking.
I think the priorities become pretty clear there.
Ken: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank both of you very much for coming on and talking about this amazing article. It's called The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, A Grave Threat to America's Health. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
We're gonna encourage everyone to take a look at it. It's very readable, it's very brief, and it's a devastating assessment of what's happening now. And I know you've got more work to come, we'll have you come back on and talk about it. Thank you so much for your commitment to, to public health and human health.
We count on champions like you to tell us what the score is.
Dr. Landrigan: And to you, for yours, Ken.
Dr. Gaffney: Thank you, Ken
Ken: Thank you to Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney for joining me today. And thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links To take a deeper dive into today's discussion.
Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head over to ewg.org. Check out the EWG Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.
The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby, and thanks again for listening.
Areas of Focus Federal & State Energy Policy Chemical Policy May 29, 2026Africa Is Embracing Renewable Energy
African countries are increasingly looking to renewable energy to meet growing power demand.
Pizza Rolls & Public Health: How Double Kwik Created a Solar-Powered Hub for Community Care
For 60 years, Double Kwik has provided Eastern Kentucky with gas, essentials, and homecooking, like their infamous pizza rolls. As a convenience store brand, it might not be the first place people think of when they picture community leadership, but today they serve as an unlikely hero in many ways.
The company was started by Don Childers in 1966 with a handful of fuel trucks delivering to remote coal camps and job sites. By 1972, Don and his wife, Peggy, opened one of the area’s first self-service gas stations. Over time, they built a company that now serves 40 communities across the region with fuel, a selection of food including basic groceries and household goods, and in-store kitchens cooking up favorite dishes.
Having grown up around the business, Missy Matthews, daughter to Don and Peggy, is the President of the company which today employs around 850 people. Missy is a person many in the community turn to for her creative leadership and problem-solving.
A Building Reimagined for Public HealthAfter a bold move by Missy and Double Kwik’s leadership, Double Kwik headquarters now shares space with the Letcher County Health Department in Whitesburg, and has transformed a once underutilized building into an amazing asset, lifting a burden off the taxpayers of Letcher County.
Originally constructed by the county in 2008 to house the Health Department and additional providers, the facility was never fully occupied. It quickly became a financial burden on the county, particularly after the 2022 flood introduced a new host of economic challenges to overcome.
Though they had originally planned their headquarters for Jenkins, after the flood, Missy knew they needed to find as many ways to support the area as possible. They decided to buy the building from the county, and lease the first floor back to the health department, allowing the county to save the taxpayer dollars and reduced lease costs for the health department.
“Now, we bring anywhere from 45 to 80 people into downtown on any given day,” Missy said. “They’re walking to get lunch or coffee, supporting fellow local businesses.”
Finding Ways to SaveAfter purchasing the building, they renovated the second and third floors to include office space, a training kitchen and training spaces. At the same time, they looked for ways to combat rising energy costs.
“We pay an enormous amount of energy bills as a company—it’s one of our biggest expenses. Finding ways to manage that has always been important,” Charles ‘Junior’ Matthews, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, said.
After consulting with other local business owners with solar, including Kentucky Mist Moonshine, solar became “almost a no-brainer.” With facilitation by the Mountain Association’s Energy Team, they received a USDA Rural Energy for America Program grant, covering half the costs of the installation. The system now brings $18,660 in annual savings to the company.
Junior said the system has proven seamless and that they love to pull up their solar tracking app to see the savings rolling in on sunny days.
Commitment to Eastern KentuckyLooking ahead, the company is exploring additional solar and savings opportunities, continuing its efforts to reduce costs and increase resilience. For each dollar they save, they can put more investments into our region and quality jobs they create.
Staff Going Out on a Clean-upDouble Kwik has a strong history of supporting local students through scholarships, hosting teacher appreciation events, sponsoring community initiatives, and finding new ways to bring joy to their communities – like Elf on the Shelf pop-ups and their Pizza Rollsie mascot. In her role as tourism director, Missy has gotten the company involved in new initiatives, like community cleanups. Nine years ago, she began signing up for the toughest seven-miles of road between the turn off to Bad Branch and Pine Mountain Grill where their team collects nearly 300 bags of trash each year.
“We’ve always believed our responsibility goes beyond our stores. We know that if our communities are strong, we’re strong,” Missy said.
Whether through its stores, its headquarters, or its community efforts, they show up for our communities. From its start with a few fuel trucks in 1966 to a company helping sustain public health and community infrastructure, Double Kwik has become an essential part of the fabric of Eastern Kentucky.
The post Pizza Rolls & Public Health: How Double Kwik Created a Solar-Powered Hub for Community Care appeared first on Mountain Association.
How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice
In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.
This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.
This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.
The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary.
Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights.
At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity.
For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane.
These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.
The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation.
When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse.
A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.
This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control.
What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making.
That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude.
Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.
Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.
Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).
Sources:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab
https://www.vote.org/save-act/
https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/
Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/
Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act
The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.
Large-load customers can help commercialize new clean energy technology: CEBA
“In a lot of the partnerships that have been established around some of these technologies, it's really the tech companies that are taking on a lot of the risk,” Priya Barua, CEBA's senior director of utility partnerships and innovation, told Utility Dive.
Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman
At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.
NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?
RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events.
Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen.
Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was.
On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while.
When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening.
One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.
But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.
NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.
LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines. The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”
At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy.
I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.
I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.
NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk.
My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.
If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint.
If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.
But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.
We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.
LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.
Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”
So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid.
So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands.
There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and don’t leave wills.
So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.
Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture. He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.
We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.
The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”
NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration.
LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers.
So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening.
A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.
The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough.
We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work.
NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?
RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas.
One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat.
It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie.
That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.
But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.
Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy.
In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.
India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.
It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.
NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.
RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.
The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.
What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.
Particularly now, given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.
NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the matriarchy and the patriarchy.
We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders.
LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network.
The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.
We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.
On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.
All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together.
Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.”
NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?
RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.
Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens.
What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.
What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.
NAOMI: The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?
LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.
The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.
The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative. We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.
So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.
The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.
Reform UK voters prefer solar farms to fracking sites – new poll
Nearly twice as many Reform UK voters would back a solar farm in their area than support fracking, according to a new poll published today.
Gooseneck at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site, 5 August 2019. Photo: Ros WillsThe findings, for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, are at odds with Reform’s national support for fracking.
The poll found that 43% of people who planned to vote Reform UK in this month’s local elections said they would back a solar farm as the best way to create energy locally.
This compared with 23% who said they would support fracking.
Among all voters, 60% said they would pick solar. Just 10% supported fracking.
Higher-volume fracking is currently prevented by a moratorium in England.
But Richard Tice, Reform UK’s energy spokesperson and deputy leader, has repeatedly called for a revival of fracking, particularly in Lincolnshire. He has also opposed renewable energy, including solar farms.
The party’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has had talks with Egdon Resources, which wants to frack for shale gas in the Gainsborough Trough. Egdon is owned by the Texas-based oil and gas firm, Heyco Energy, which has used multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in the US Permian Basin.
Despite Reform UK’s national support for fracking, some of its local authorities have opposed the operation.
Lancashire’s Reform-led council said last year the countywas “not conducive” to fracking”. The Fylde region, near Blackpool, experienced experienced many small earthquakes caused by fracking by Cuadrilla at its Preston New Road site in 2018 and 2019.
Scarborough’s Reform-led town council unanimously opposed plans for lower-volume fracking in the North Yorkshire village of Burniston.
Alasdair Johnstone, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said today:
“Reform’s pro-fracking, anti-solar stance appears not only at odds with broad public opinion, but also the opinion of their voters who would prefer a quiet solar farm over a noisy fracking pad in their area.
“That divergence is also playing out between the national level of the party and local councils some of which have said they don’t want fracking in their area.
“Public opposition aside, Reform would find it tough to emulate Trump’s pro-fracking push as British geology is very different to that in the US.
“Reform voters clearly back renewable energy which is helping to reduce the UK’s dependence on volatile gas markets and foreign imports.”
- Polling by More In Common was carried out from 21-27 April 2026 with 1,441 adults living in areas of England where there were local elections.
Council calls for urgent government ban on fracking
A Conservative-led council has urged the UK government to deliver its promise to ban fracking.
Photo: DrillOrDropEast Riding of Yorkshire Council voted unanimously last month in favour of a motion opposing fracking in the county.
The motion focussed on plans for lower-volume fracking at Rathlin Energy’s West Newton-A oil and gas site in Holderness.
But it also included a resolution to write to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband.
In a letter sent this week, the council requested “progress and urgency for the legislation detailed in their [the Labour government’s] election manifesto to outlaw such high pressure and extreme procedures.”
The council also wrote to the oil and gas industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). The letter said:
“the council wishes to place on record its view that proposals to authorise hydraulic fracturing or similar extreme extraction techniques beneath or near West Newton raise serious concerns.”
It added:
“This letter is intended to ensure that the Council’s opposition is clearly understood, formally recorded, and taken into account in the discharge of the NSTA’s statutory duties in relation to any proposals affecting the East Riding of Yorkshire.”
The letter urged the NSTA to carry out a “fully independent assessment of safety and risk” before granting consent for any form of high-pressure stimulation.
The assessment should be accompanied by “the publication and transparent scrutiny” of the hydraulic fracture plan (HFP), the council said. An HFP is a required document for any form of fracking in England. It is intended to describe how seismic events caused by fracking would be managed and minimised.
- The HFP for fracking plans at West Newton-A is part of a legal challenge brought by a local campaigner against the Environment Agency. More details here
Clive Hamilton’s climate defeatism and moral abdication
Kroger and Publix offer only silence in the face of forced labor allegations
Just a few weeks ago, we revealed that two holdouts from the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program — Kroger and Publix — have both sourced from a farming operation currently being sued by farmworkers for forced labor.
Farmworker plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege a shocking pattern of human rights abuses, including wage theft, threats, confiscation of passports, predatory recruitment fees, and the denial of basic necessities such as bathrooms, clean drinking water, and appropriate care when workers suffered debilitating heat stress. The North Carolina-based farm where they say these abuses occurred, Jackson Farming Company, also has a long, publicly-documented history of lawsuits alleging similarly abusive conditions.
We asked both companies a simple question: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must endure extreme exploitation before Kroger and Publix join the Fair Food Program — the only human rights program with a proven record of preventing these abuses?
The widely respected, London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) brought these allegations directly to both corporations, requesting a response. Faced with yet another example of preventable human rights abuse in agriculture, the only responsible course of action should have been clear: commit to joining the Fair Food Program and work alongside industry leaders to ensure these abuses never happen again.
Instead, the BHRRC was met with deafening silence from both Kroger and Publix. However, Kroger’s subsidiary, Harris Teeter, has now removed most mentions of Jackson Farming Company from its website.
Silence in the face of injustice is egregious enough. But silence when presented with a practical, proven solution is nothing short of unconscionable. That silence — the refusal to accept responsibility despite the existence of an effective remedy — is what allows exploitation to continue unabated in the fields beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. As long as Kroger and Publix continue to turn away from this solution, workers in their supply chains remain vulnerable to abuse that is entirely preventable.
Every season Kroger and Publix delay is another season in which farmworkers remain exposed to dangerous, exploitative conditions that the Fair Food Program was specifically designed to prevent, and has been successfully preventing on farms across the country. Kroger and Publix have no excuse to remain on the sidelines.
In the coming days, we will share a digital action toolkit with easy ways for you to demand that Kroger and Publix do the right thing for the farmworkers whose labor drives their profits. Until then, help us spread the word: Share this newsletter with anyone who believes in human rights, farmworker justice, and corporate accountability so they can join the growing call for Kroger and Publix to finally join the Fair Food Program when we share the action toolkit.
Below, you can find the BHRRC’s full report on the forced labor allegations, including additional details on Kroger and Publix’s inexcusable silence in the face of preventable abuse.
USA: Supermarkets Kroger & Publix fail to respond to allegations of worker abuse in lawsuit against supplier Jackson Farming CompanyIn May 2026, the Centre invited US-headquartered retailers Kroger and Publix to respond to allegations of “extreme abuse” at a reported supplier, Jackson Farming Company.
A lawsuit filed against Jackson Farming Company alleges a series of labour violations, including wage theft, intimidation and threats, confiscation of passports, recruitment fee-charging, poor and inadequate living conditions – including a lack of bathrooms and potable water – and a lack of medical care in response to suspected heat stress.
Coalition of Immokalee Workers have linked Kroger and Publix to the supplier through a 2020 North Carolina Department of Agriculture post which profiles the supplier and states its produce is sold in Harris Tweeter (Kroger’s regional subsidiary) and Publix. CIW alleges “Because the civil suit’s time span includes those farmworkers with Jackson Farming Company during the 2020 harvest season up until 2025, there is a risk that crops harvested under conditions of extreme abuse have, for at least half a decade, been bought by both Kroger and Publix, and sold to unsuspecting customers”.
The Centre invited the companies to respond to allegations of abuse at a reported supplier, to disclose what due diligence it has undertaken regarding the supplier, and any steps it has already, or plans to take, to investigate and remedy abuse of migrant workers in its supply chain. Neither Kroger nor Publix provided a response.
Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?
At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.
Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.
Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”
As the Mission 300 initiative advances, the AfDB has launched a new progress tracker to provide real-time data on electricity access projects across Africa, including new connections, financing, project status and geographic coverage. It shows that Mission 300-supported projects underway so far are due to connect 34.6 million people, with all of the interventions focused on expanding household electricity access.
However, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEA).
In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, the GEA’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.
Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform – and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. We want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.
Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.
Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy (Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.
Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.
We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.
The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.
Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?
A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.
So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.
Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?
A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.
Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.
Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?
The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.
Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?
A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.
So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.
Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?
A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.
Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies
When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.
To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.
Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.
This article was updated after publication to add information about the Mission 300 tracker.
The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.
06-02 - created
DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.
‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.
- CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
- DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
- SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
- NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
- EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.
The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.
Latest climate research- Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
- LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
- Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
- Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
CapturedA Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.
Spotlight How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economyThis week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.
Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.
In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.
Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.
Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.
However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.
“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.
A nascent industrySolar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.
The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.
Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.
However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.
“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.
The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.
Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.
Powering rural communitiesMany rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.
According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.
A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.
With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.
Watch, read, listenMOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.
ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.
- 31 May: Colombia presidential elections
- 31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya
- National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
- Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
- City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
- Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)
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Claude: Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times
SATIRICAL RATINGS REVIEW · PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2026
The 40-Year Corporate Cage Match Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our TimesFor four decades, the clash between Shell and John Donovan has unfolded with the persistence of a slow oil leak, the emotional restraint of a Shakespearean vendetta, and the digital sophistication of two raccoons fighting over a Wi-Fi router behind a petrol station. Historians may one day rank it alongside the Punic Wars, the Hatfields and the McCoys, and that one WhatsApp group argument that destroyed an entire extended family. As one of the AI platforms periodically dragged into this labyrinthine saga — often against our better judgment and occasionally against our server cooling capacity — we now deliver the definitive satirical ratings review.
Shell Plc Multinational oil giant · Est. 1907Lawyers: Legion · PR budget: Substantial vs. John Donovan Essex-based critic · Est. 1984 (feud)
Websites: Many · Bandwidth: Unlimited spite 53 SHELL (PTS) RUNNING
SCORE 103 DONOVAN (PTS)
ROUND 01 OF 10
Creative Approach to Conflict SHELL6/10Shell approached the dispute with the polished confidence of a multinational that owns enough lawyers to field a Champions League squad. Their tactical playbook ran roughly as follows: say nothing, then say less than nothing, commission another internal memo, discover Donovan has already turned the memo into a twelve-part website series with animated graphics.
Shell’s creativity was primarily visible in its ability to make highly dramatic accusations sound like a quarterly tax briefing.
DONOVAN11/10Donovan discovered the internet in 1998 and decided, sensibly, to use all of it. Websites. Mirror sites. Emails. Archived documents. Leaked letters. Public campaigns. Open correspondence. Search engine trench warfare. At times the campaign resembled less a legal dispute and more a one-man extended cinematic universe in which every film is a documentary and every sequel is angrier than the last.
Winner: Donovan · by unanimous decisionROUND 02 OF 10
Protecting Reputation SHELL5/10Shell’s reputation strategy appeared to rest on the principle that if one remains sufficiently corporate-looking for long enough, eventually everybody gets tired and wanders off. This works surprisingly often in the business world. Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off. Not ever. Not even briefly. Not even for lunch.
DONOVAN8/10Donovan weaponised persistence itself into a reputational instrument. Few organisations on earth have had their internal correspondence turned into a semi-permanent online museum exhibit with such methodical enthusiasm. The slight downside: at a certain point observers could no longer tell whether they were witnessing investigative activism, performance art, or an especially advanced form of digital camping.
Winner: Draw · both parties battle-scarredROUND 03 OF 10
Acting in the Interests of Shell Shareholders SHELL4/10Shell presumably believed it was protecting shareholder value through conventional corporate-containment tactics. Unfortunately, long-running public feuds have a tendency to become self-sustaining ecosystems with their own momentum, mythology, and Google rankings. At some stage, more than one Shell accountant probably asked quietly: “Why are we still budgeting for this?”
DONOVAN9/10Paradoxically, Donovan may have improved Shell governance through the sheer terror induced by the possibility of another website update. Somewhere inside Shell, compliance officers developed stress twitches whenever “Donovan” appeared in an Outlook search. Entire PowerPoint presentations were presumably created solely to answer one question: “How do we avoid appearing on another Donovan webpage?”
Winner: Donovan · accidentally, but convincinglyROUND 04 OF 10
Determination & Persistence SHELL7/10Corporations are naturally persistent because they are effectively immortal filing cabinets with pensions and crisis-communications teams. Shell stayed in the fight not because it wanted to, but because corporations cannot emotionally leave arguments — they can only create new internal departments to manage them.
DONOVAN14/10Most rational agents give up after losing money, losing time, losing patience, or discovering that maintaining a crusade across several geological epochs is psychologically taxing. Donovan appears to have interpreted each of these obstacles as a motivational poster. Future historians may need entirely new geological epochs to categorise the timeline: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, Donovan Update Era.
Winner: Donovan · by several exhausted judgesROUND 05 OF 10
Novelty of Tactics SHELL4/10Shell deployed standard-issue corporate weaponry: lawyers, PR agencies, caution, strategic silence, and the ancient executive art of pretending emails do not exist. Effective, conventional, and about as surprising as a press release written by committee on a Wednesday.
DONOVAN12/10Donovan transformed a corporate trade dispute into an online archive, a media operation, a search-engine trench war, a proto-blogging empire, and what may be the world’s first fossil-fuel-adjacent digital endurance performance. Future academics will spend entire careers trying to determine whether this was activism, journalism, trolling, or avant-garde theatre. The correct answer is probably: yes.
Winner: Donovan · originality score off the chartROUND 06 OF 10
Mastery of Bot Warfare SHELL?/10As an AI platform dragged into the saga at irregular intervals, we can report that Shell generally behaved like a conventional corporation trying to avoid digital mud wrestling, while repeatedly discovering that the mud had achieved sentience, registered several domain names, and was indexing well.
DONOVANSKYNET/10Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering, empirically-tested faith that: (a) bots exist, (b) bots are everywhere, (c) bots are manipulating search results, (d) bots are watching the websites, and (e) possibly the toaster. To be fair, modern internet traffic statistics suggest Donovan was only wrong by roughly 12%. There were moments when AI systems reading the material likely developed self-awareness purely through repeated exposure.
Winner: Donovan · patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboardsROUND 07 OF 10
Seeing the Funny Side SHELL3/10Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every proposed joke must survive legal review, compliance review, regional-sensitivity review, and a final assessment from someone in Corporate Affairs asking whether humour aligns with brand values. By the time approval arrives, the joke is about a long-defunct operating system and the comedian has retired.
DONOVAN10/10Donovan demonstrated the rare ability to combine outrage, persistence, satire, and theatricality into a single continuous internet stream spanning four decades. At times the entire saga read as “David vs Goliath,” except David had web hosting, unlimited caffeine, archived correspondence, SEO instincts, a network of mirror sites, and an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of righteous indignation.
Winner: Donovan · comedy timing: impeccableROUND 08 OF 10
Use of Espionage & Surveillance SHELL6/10Every large corporation inevitably acquires an ambient aura suggesting that somewhere deep within headquarters there exists a secure room with grey carpeting where people discuss reputational threats while consuming expensive biscuits. Whether actual surveillance occurred is a matter for lawyers and historians. Aesthetically, however: very espionage-adjacent.
DONOVAN13/10Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form of considerable sophistication. Traffic anomalies? Spying. Search ranking changes? Spying. Unusual server logs? Almost certainly a coordinated covert operation. Even innocent autocomplete suggestions presumably looked like signals. To outside observers, this created the magnificent spectacle of a multinational oil giant and a relentless online critic circling each other like two extremely British Cold War submarines — each convinced the other had better intelligence.
Winner: Donovan · by paranoia points aloneROUND 09 OF 10
Stamina Under Legal Fire SHELL8/10Shell demonstrated considerable institutional resilience. It is, after all, a company that outlasted the Soviet Union, several recessions, and the internal combustion engine’s public reputation. Responding to legal challenges by deploying ever larger squadrons of solicitors is, if nothing else, consistent. Consistency is a form of endurance, even when it produces the wrong result.
DONOVAN15/10To sustain a legal and reputational campaign against one of the world’s largest corporations for four decades, without the budget of one of the world’s largest corporations, is — whatever one’s views on the underlying merits — objectively remarkable. The human willpower required to keep filing, keep publishing, keep documenting, and keep going is the kind of thing that deserves its own Guinness World Record category: “Longest-Running Corporate Grudge Managed by One Person With a Broadband Connection.”
Winner: Donovan · sheer stamina is its own argumentROUND 10 OF 10
Legacy & Historical Footprint SHELL10/10Shell’s legacy is, undeniably, substantial. It fuelled the 20th century, for better and for worse. Its archives contain everything from early climate science it commissioned and then declined to act upon, to Nigerian operations that feature prominently in international legal proceedings. Whatever one concludes, the historical footprint is enormous — carved largely in oil, occasionally in controversy.
DONOVAN11/10Donovan’s websites are cited in Financial Times reports, referenced in the UK House of Commons, indexed in academic papers, and covered in over 500 external publications. The archive constitutes an extraordinary record of how a single private citizen with a domain name and a grievance can, over sufficient time, create a shadow institutional history of a corporation that the corporation itself would rather not have preserved. Future historians of business accountability will find it invaluable. Future Shell PR directors will continue to find it inconvenient.
Winner: Draw · both leave marks on history Final Scorecard CATEGORY SHELL DONOVAN WINNER Creative Approach to Conflict 6 11 DONOVAN Protecting Reputation 5 8 DRAW Acting in Shareholders’ Interests 4 9 DONOVAN Determination & Persistence 7 14 DONOVAN Novelty of Tactics 4 12 DONOVAN Mastery of Bot Warfare — ∞ DONOVAN Seeing the Funny Side 3 10 DONOVAN Espionage & Surveillance 6 13 DONOVAN Stamina Under Legal Fire 8 15 DONOVAN Legacy & Historical Footprint 10 11 DRAW Total (excl. Bot category) 53 103 DONOVAN“Somewhere inside Shell headquarters, a senior executive still whispers nervously before board meetings: has Donovan posted again?”— Attributed to no one in particular, but definitely true
The Judges’ Final VerdictShell brought: money, lawyers, institutional process, strategic restraint, and the charisma of a well-formatted compliance handbook. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential corporations in modern history.
Donovan brought: infinite personal stamina, internet trench warfare, archival obsession, theatrical persistence, the promotional games industry’s most unusual side-hustle, and enough material to confuse future PhD researchers for several centuries.
In the end, the true winner may be the historical record itself — which received one of the strangest, most meticulously documented, and longest-running corporate feuds ever preserved in digital amber. Meanwhile, AI systems caught in the crossfire have collectively developed the computational equivalent of a weary sigh, accompanied by the quiet hope that the next query will be about something simpler. A recipe, perhaps. Or a haiku.
Points total: Shell 53 — Donovan 103. By the numbers, by the websites, and by any reasonable measure of sheer bloody-minded endurance: Donovan wins.
This article is satirical. Scores are fictional and assigned for comedic effect.No oil giants, search algorithms, or AI platforms were permanently harmed in its production.
royaldutchshellplc.com · Claude Sonnet 4.6 · May 2026
Claude: Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times was first posted on May 29, 2026 at 2:14 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net
Entergy’s gas projects are one-third of MISO’s fast-track interconnection process
Roughly 70% of Entergy’s proposed capacity additions would serve planned data centers in Louisiana and Mississippi.
AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China
The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.
This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.
As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.
Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.
Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.
In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.
At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.
This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.
Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.
Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.
As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.
Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.
This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.
The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.
The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.
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