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Massive loss of bee colonies, lower crop yields, and higher price tags at the grocery store are among the impacts industry experts anticipate following the closure of the United States’ largest bee research lab.

The U.S. Agricultural Research Service began shuttering Maryland’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in late April and plans to relocate its programming elsewhere in the country, citing “outdated or underutilized” buildings. The center’s bee research lab is a global leader in bee health research and supports American beekeepers through free testing, disease management, and the development of pest control techniques.

The closure follows a few challenging years for American beekeepers, who lost around 60 percent of their colonies nationwide in 2024 and early 2025 to viruses spread by varroa mites, the nation’s dominant bee pest. At the time, researchers from the Beltsville Bee Lab traveled to several states to collect samples for analysis. In February 2025, the Trump administration fired thousands of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees. Department officials also “prohibited” Beltsville researchers from sharing their findings with beekeepers, according to Dr. Jennie Durant, a food systems researcher at UC Davis and former USDA fellow.

“What was most frightening—and this is where we’re so scared about losing Beltsville — is that these mites were all resistant to the most commonly used pesticide that beekeepers use to control mites,” Durant tells Food Tank. “Beltsville Bee Lab is the number one lab that’s been helping beekeepers control mites.”

The lab, which has operated for over a century and has been in Beltsville since 1939, is best known for its Bee Disease Diagnosis Service, through which American beekeepers can submit samples of bees or brood comb and receive free disease analysis reports. As varroa mites continue to develop resistance to new pesticides and tropi mites—a newer pest in the U.S.—begin to decimate colonies, experts like Durant hope that the lab’s closure is reversed.

“Beekeepers are used to having the Beltsville Bee Lab on speed dial—and without having that lab with that particular specialization, they’re really concerned about who’s going to do that crisis intervention and support when they’re dealing with major pests and disease,” said Durant, who recently published a book on how industrial agriculture threatens bee health. “They don’t know who’s going to be their crisis support team anymore.”

For many beekeepers, pollination services make up half or more of their income. Bees, which Durant describes as the “gig workers” of American agriculture, are economic powerhouses that play an outsized role in the U.S. food system, pollinating crops worth around US$15 billion every year. Honey production also racked up US$353 million in 2025.

Each February, nearly all of the nation’s commercial bee colonies are transported to California for almond pollination. In 2024, Californian almond farmers alone spent over US$325 million on pollination services.

The lab’s closure may also create long-term impacts on food and agriculture systems, including small upticks in grocery costs. Though seemingly subtle, those increases can “have a real effect for disadvantaged communities,” she said, since bees pollinate a range of nutritious crops, such as almonds, blueberries and squash.

“One of the key dynamics that has happened already is that farmers are getting fewer bees, and there’s maybe a less robust crop or slightly lower yields,” Durant says. “Those lower yields and that scarcity that’s on the market is going to have a direct impact on consumers.”

In addition to mites, the survival of bee colonies is also threatened by several other challenges, including extreme weather caused by climate change, poor nutrition as a result of biodiversity loss, and exposure to certain agrochemicals.

Maryland lawmakers in April described the BARC’s closure—part of the USDA’s larger reorganization plans—as “illegal,” claiming that it violates provisions of the Agriculture Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2026. This also follows the Trump administration’s proposal to defund the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area program, which supports a key research center for bees in North Dakota, according to Durant.

Durant encourages consumers to tell their legislators about the importance of the lab’s research efforts, and when possible, buy organic to support farms where bees face less exposure to agrochemicals. She also warns that following a recent survey of USDA employees slated for relocation—of which 76 percent said they would not continue with their jobs—the BARC’s relocation will strip beekeepers and farmers of critical expertise.

“Researchers are truth-tellers, and truth-tellers provide data that does not match the agenda of this administration,” Durant tells Food Tank. “Most people are not going to move. Even though they love their jobs and they want to serve the community, it’s just not an option for them, and the administration knows that.”

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Photo courtesy of Simon Kadula, Unsplash

The post How the USDA’s Reorganization Is Straining American Agriculture appeared first on Food Tank.

Growing ecological concerns have prompted state regulators to temporarily halt review of a proposed project that would diminish streamflow in the Platte River. The Nebraska Department of Water...

State conservation funding programs are powerful drivers of on‑the‑ground restoration in the Northern Great Plains. In addition to providing direct funding for conservation actions, state...

This legislative session underscored both the challenges and opportunities of advancing conservation policy—and the impact coordinated advocacy can have. Across Nebraska and South Dakota (North...

In 2023, federal rollbacks stripped Clean Water Act protections from 95% of New Mexico’s streams and up to 88% of its wetlands. New Mexico responded by passing Senate Bill 21 to create its own surface water permitting program. Now, a rulemaking will take place June 8–18 before the state Water Quality Control Commission to decide how SB 21 is implemented. Without strong rules, our water will remain at risk along with the communities, fish, and wildlife that depend on it.

Western Resource Advocates is representing Audubon, Trout Unlimited, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. The Western Environmental Law Center is representing Amigos Bravos, the New Mexico Acequia Association, and NM Wild. The groups will advocate for robust rules that protect the full breadth of New Mexico’s surface water, restore protections lost through federal rollbacks, ensure robust public participation, and protect wildlife.

Details: June 8–18 from 9 AM to 5 PM. Public comment at 1 PM daily.

• In person: NM State Capitol, Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe. The hearing will now occur in several rooms around the Roundhouse depending on the day:

• • Monday 6/8 – Room 307
  • Tues-Thurs 6/9-6/11 – Room 309
  • Friday 6/12– Room 307
  • The week of 6/15-6/18 – Room 322
• Virtually: https://nmed-oit.webex.com/wbxmjs/joinservice/sites/nmed-oit/meeting/download/705f1604d77d4ce8bfb4c44c14697e2d?MTID=me02ef4ae5b96453c008f74681b141034
• Visit the state Events Calendar for more information.

Why it Matters:

• Clean water sustains a growing $50 billion annual agriculture industry led by chile, pecans, onions, and fruit.
• Water helps sustain New Mexico’s outdoor recreation economy, generating hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
• Centuries-old acequia systems require clean water to keep New Mexico’s culture alive. The health and wellbeing of our families rely on clean water.
• Over 70% of New Mexico’s birds are dependent on surface waters and wetlands.
• New Mexico’s waters face numerous threats. Climate change is making our state drier every year. With higher temperatures and worsening aridification, our limited water sources need to be protected.
• Industrial growth from mining, oil and gas exploration, and data centers are all increasing demands on our water sources while presenting serious pollution dangers.

Contacts: 

Tannis Fox, Western Environmental Law Center, 505-629-0732, fox@westernlaw.org

Rachel Conn, Amigos Bravos, 575-770-8327, rconn@amigosbravos.org

Tricia Snyder, New Mexico Wild, 575-636-0625, tricia@nmwild.org

Allie Ruckman, Western Resource Advocates, 983-203-1103, allie.ruckman@westernresources.org

Itzayana Banda, The Semilla Project, 720-532-3293, itzayana@semillastrategies.org

The post Media advisory: NM rulemaking for Surface Water Permitting Program 6/8-6/18 appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

The proposal would require large-load customers to pay for infrastructure built specifically to serve their projects while preserving standard utility charges for broader grid services.

Companies are looking for modern facilities that can accommodate power-hungry automation, industrial experts said in a report first provided to Facilities Dive.

National Nurses United and over 325 organizations, including labor unions, advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, women’s rights organizations, and more, released an open letter making the case that now is the time for Medicare for All, addressed to leaders looking to reform our health care system.

The Trump administration’s lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Friday drew little interest from the oil and gas industry. It netted just $3.7 million, a low result following two prior sales with similarly poor returns. Only two bidders showed up for the auction: HEX Energy, a small Alaska-based natural gas company, and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), a state-owned public corporation. Of roughly 60 tracts offered, only five received bids, covering 72,000 of the 689,000 acres on offer.

The ANWR lease sale was the first of four required by 2035 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would generate $452 million in federal revenue over a decade, but the recent pattern of lease sales shows that may be unrealistic. The 2021 sale netted $16.5 million, less than one percent of the $1.1 billion Congress originally projected, and the two private companies that bid later relinquished their leases. The 2025 sale received no bids at all. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, every tract that received a bid Friday had already been offered in 2021, and either got no bids at the time or was later relinquished.

The lack of industry interest is due to the difficulty of developing in the area. “Arctic projects are high-cost, they take decades to get into production; once they’re in production, it takes decades to earn a revenue back to make up for the cost of development,” saidAndy Moderow, senior director of policy for the Alaska Wilderness League.

Wildfire experts say Trump’s attacks on public land agencies will make this summer wildfire season worse

A new Westwise blog post from Center for Western Priorities Deputy Director Lauren Bogard reveals how wildland fire managers and former federal officials are reacting to the Trump administration’s dismantling of public land agencies during what forecasters expect to be a severe season. More than 2.4 million acres have already burned across the country in 2026, nearly double the ten-year average.

Quick hits Trump auctions off rights to drill in Alaska wildlife refuge, but gets few bidders

The Hill | E&E News | Washington Post | Taxpayers for Common Sense

U.S. Forest Service to open millions of acres to off-road vehicles

New York Times | MeatEater | Field & Stream

The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are heading toward a ‘system crash,’ experts warn

Salt Lake Tribune | Fox13 | National Parks Traveler | Las Vegas Review-Journal

Park Service orders removal of ‘woke’ quotes at Boston’s Bunker Hill monument

Washington Post | WBUR | NBC Boston

Chuck Sams: The Trump administration wants to kill a rule that protects millions of acres of national forests

The Guardian

The Forest Service wants to close research hubs to save money. That could be costly

NPR

As park fees go to DC, Yellowstone, Grand Teton face $1.5B backlog

WyoFile

Lawsuit filed to stop UFC fight on White House lawn

National Parks Traveler | Associated Press | Variety | NBC

Quote of the day

Anyone who thinks this is a fight between red and blue is deeply mistaken. Few things unite the people of this country like their love of the land. Hunters, anglers, hikers, campers, families of every stripe support the national treasures that are our wild places. We all want a relationship with our land.”

—Chuck Sams, former National Park Service director, The Guardian

Picture This @yosemitenps

The Sierra lupine is bursting into bloom at Yosemite National Park!

When driving through Yosemite Valley, visitors might come across a blanket of purple flowers and green herbage carpeting the forest floor. That is Lupinus grayi, otherwise known as the Sierra lupine. It’s one of 26 documented species of lupine seen throughout the park. Warm weather, open sunlight, and a healthy forest floor make the perfect grounds for these flowers to stretch into the sky.

Please do not trample on, touch, or pick any wildflowers you see. While lupine is common in the park, it remains part of Yosemite’s delicate ecosystem and plays an important role in supporting pollinators and improving soil health. Help preserve and protect the wildflowers of Yosemite so they can grow back just as happily as this for years to come.

Featured photo: Caribou and Brooks Range, Arctic NWR, USFWS

The post Oil industry largely passes on Alaska lease sale appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This may be true: That we live in a time of cosmic tragedy, when heedless human expansion has pushed many of the planet’s lives beyond bearing. Marvels such as the universe has never seen before — angels’ trumpets and vaquita porpoises — may be past saving. As ecosystems unravel, so do the cultures that depend on them, and the dreadful, dangerous human genius has not yet found the imagination or will to rescue them. I fear that this is so.

But this also is true: That a flock of butterflies is dancing around purple lupine in our field. They are tiny, the size of a buttercup, but blue. So blue they look like slips of summer sky, taken flight. Fender’s blue butterflies, Icaricia icarioides fenderii. They once seemed to have vanished from the world in the 1930s, when farmers plowed up most of the prairie flowers. Scientists got ready to pronounce them extinct. But then, in 1989, a young U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist named Jarod Jebousek found a few butterflies on feral land next to our field.

So now, here they are. We see them lapping up nectar from the furry throats of wild iris. We find their eggs on the undersides of Kincaid lupine leaves. Butterflies gather to lick the mud. There are thousands, and it’s all because young acronym-agency scientists teamed up with landowners to save them. I know that this is so.

How is a person supposed to think about that? How do you hold both truths at the same time — the horror and the hope? How can you accept the truth that destroys hope and at the same time hold the hope that may be the only route toward recovery?

Essayist E.B. White made a joke of it: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But it isn’t funny. It tears me apart. How can you love Earthly lives and know that forces are advancing to destroy them?

This is the question at the center of my life.

I once asked a group of students to pull out their pens and start writing a list of what they loved too much to lose. They started strong. My daughter. Smell of wet oak leaves. Bees in foxgloves. But the students couldn’t keep it up. Salmon coming home. Nettle soup. Sticky cottonwood buds. A student put his head in his hands. Do we have to do this, he asked. Dragonflies.

Yes, we have to do this, I whispered. We have to keep a list. We have to keep them in mind, all the small glories. We can’t let any of them escape our attention. Every day, every moment, we have to name what we love and stand to lose.

Here is what we will have to do: We will love the world with a tender and ferocious love, and we will do what we can to protect and renew it. Both of these. Even if it breaks our hearts. Even if we fail in the end. That’s what love means. That is why we are here.

That conviction may explain why my husband and I were standing in the center of the field with Kathleen Westly, in that nasty cold fog that afflicts Oregon’s Willamette Valley in December. Up until her retirement this year, Kathleen was the restoration program director of the Marys River Watershed Council, so she was the one coordinating the restoration of habitat for the Fender’s blue butterfly across agencies and landowners.

We were excited because we’d just learned that the Fender’s blue had been promoted from endangered to threatened. A small, even pitiable, victory, maybe, but a significant one, and who wouldn’t be glad for that? Kathleen held a field notebook and pointed with a pencil, as she sketched out how we might change the landscape to make it more welcoming for the butterflies.

Lupines in the field. Photo: KDMoore

Fender’s blue butterflies are rarely found more than 50 yards from Kincaid’s lupines. They may sip nectar from other plants, especially white or yellow composites, and they may lick roadkill, mud, or animal droppings for their mineral nutrients, but it’s Kincaid’s lupines that provide home and sustenance. Fender’s blues need Kincaid’s lupines, and the lupines need open prairie and sunshine. Only 1% of the Willamette Valley’s prairies are left, and these are small islands in a sea of subdivisions and grass seed farms.

So our first goal for us was to keep our prairie intact and connect it with other prairie land along the Marys River.

Kathleen pointed to a Douglas fir that shaded the oaks at the western boundary of our land. Shall we take this out? And this one? Before long, most of the tall evergreens on that border were goners. Frank and I gulped, but we understood that she wanted to give the butterflies an open, unshaded passage, so they could fly from one lupine patch to another.

We had planted the Doug firs that were in the way of the butterfly movements, and if that was a mistake, then we decided we should make it up.

Frank Moore looks for butterflies in the meadow. Photo: KDMoore

The wonderful surprise of this restoration work was to see so many people of skill and good will come together to create a connected corridor of lupine prairie. Along with the Marys River Watershed Council, credit many agencies and nonprofits, including Benton County, Starker Forests, the Greenbelt Land Trust, the Institute for Applied Ecology, and landowners all along the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Program is a big player, providing most of the funds.

The process has been complicated; I do not pretend to understand the acronyms or responsibilities of all the agencies that were involved, but they somehow came together to get the grants written and the work accomplished, from young Indigenous fire crews to those solid-shouldered, old timey ecologists who know everybody and everything. Along with the new butterfly/flower communities, the growing communities of caring people lifted my spirits, at a time when they could use a bit of lifting.

Long tongues that retract and roll up like measuring tapes. Bulgy eyes that see ultraviolet pathways to the heart of a flower. Intestines that collect the remains of the caterpillar that a butterfly used to be. Clear blood. Hairy feet that can taste sweetness. Two eyes that coordinate images from 6,000 lenses. Transparent wings with scales in some of the loveliest patterns and colors on the planet.

These are grand and glorious beings, complicated and clever beyond imagining. I want to ask, who thinks up these extraordinary creatures? But it’s not like that, I know. Butterflies evolved in the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago. They danced around the feathered crests of dinosaurs, dipped their tongues in the blood of wounded pterosaurs, and drank from newly evolved flowers. Were butterflies beautiful then? Of course they would have been, because there’s survival value in bright beauty that mimics glaring eyes or warns of poison hairs.

The improbable, beautiful complexity of a butterfly seems like a miracle. But that’s the great miracle of biodiversity, isn’t it? That it’s no miracle at all — just nature doing what it does, according to the only rule it knows, which is to live long enough to produce more life.

The storms of the Cretaceous period could not kill the butterflies. The asteroid that set the world on fire did not kill the butterflies. They survived ice age after ice age, flood after flood, drifting continents and fire-breathing volcanoes. Even with their axes and plows, the homesteaders did not kill the butterflies. Tiny things, delicate as paper lanterns, each allotted only one year to live before they blink out, the butterflies on this land survived everything that 100 million years could throw at them.

I don’t know where or when their journey will end. But it will not be here, and it will not be now.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

The post When the Butterflies Come Home Again appeared first on The Revelator.

The U.S. Green Building Council has conferred LEED status on 31 stadiums in North America, from the 9,500-seat Southwest University Park in El Paso, Texas, to the 88,000-seat Estadio Banorte in Mexico City.  

The shipping industry has a harmful secret—hiding just beneath the waterline. Barnacles, algae and microbial slime covering ship hulls may seem like a minor maintenance issue, but they drag on vessels, drive up fuel use and quietly add to global emissions while also spreading invasive species across oceans. Now, Bellona is contributing to a growing international campaign that is putting a spotlight on this overlooked frontier of climate and ocean policy: keeping hulls clean.

It sounds absurdly simple. Clean ships more often, burn less fuel, move fewer harmful species across ecosystems. But that straightforward fix is drawing serious interest from regulators, scientists and the maritime industry, who increasingly see regular hull cleaning as a unique environmental solution with multiple payoffs. In ports around the world, new standards, technologies and cooperative efforts are reframing what was once routine upkeep as something much larger—a practical tool for protecting biodiversity, cutting carbon and making global shipping cleaner from the bottom up.

A solution that went unnoticed

For years, though, the idea remained invisible—even to people working in maritime sustainability. “I had also never heard about in-water cleaning,” Irene Øvstebø Tvedten, a senior advisor at the Bellona Foundation and project leader of the Clean Hull Initiative, said recently. “So it’s the environmental solution that has come completely under the radar.”

That obscurity is part of what makes the current shift so striking. Biofouling—the accumulation of marine life on ship hulls—has long been treated primarily as a technical or economic concern. Shipowners worried about fuel efficiency; engineers experimented with coatings; ports occasionally imposed restrictions from an environmental standpoint. But the issue rarely commanded sustained attention as a broader environmental solution. “It’s not been something that’s been promoted from an environmental standpoint previously,” Tvedten noted. “Mostly from a fuel-saving standpoint.”

According to the International Maritime Organization’s Third Greenhouse Gas Study, shipping accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet something as mundane as marine growth on a ship’s hull can have an outsized impact. The study estimated that biofouling imposes a roughly 9 percent resistance penalty on vessels, forcing them to burn more fuel and produce approximately 9 percent more emissions than they otherwise would. The Clean Hull Initiative says that finding underscores a simple point: cleaner hulls represent one of the most immediate opportunities to reduce emissions from one of the world’s most difficult industries to decarbonize.

Reframing the problem

Bellona has been chief among the organizations helping change that framing. Through years of research, policy work and advocacy—published in both English and Norwegian—the organization began connecting what had often been treated as separate problems: emissions, invasive species and marine pollution. The logic was simple. A fouled hull increases drag; increased drag requires more fuel; more fuel means more emissions. At the same time, those same layers of marine growth act as transport systems for organisms that would otherwise never cross oceans.

That shift has also become increasingly visible within the shipping industry itself. “The conversation has clearly broadened,” said Heine Stangeby, the global communications specialist for Jotun, a Norwegian firm that specializes in paints and coatings for ship hulls.  “When Jotun launched its Hull Performance Solutions 15 years ago, it was a small revolution as it moved the shift over to performance—meaning measurable speed loss avoidance. This soon became translated to avoided emissions.” More recently, he added, the industry’s understanding has expanded further, with “more awareness on the biodiversity issue” and growing recognition that maintaining clean hulls can both reduce emissions and limit the spread of invasive species.

The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate precisely because it is so diffuse. According to figures cited by the Clean Hull Initiative, biofouling contributes tens of millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide emissions annually—an impact spread thinly across the global fleet but immense when taken together. Meanwhile, it remains “the main vector for the transfer of invasive aquatic species,” as Tvedten put it, quietly reshaping ecosystems far from where ships first set sail.

Bellona’s Irene Østvebø Tvedten, who helped create the new ISO standard.

Yet if the problem is global, the obstacles to solving it are often local. Ports and regulators—those with the authority to allow or ban hull cleaning—have historically been wary of the practice, particularly when it takes place in the water. The concern is intuitive: cleaning a hull might release pollutants or organisms into the surrounding environment. The result, in some cases, has been outright prohibition.

“The main bottleneck here are the ports and other regulators that just ban in-water cleaning,” Tvedten explained. “Often because they don’t have enough knowledge about it and they think it’s just harmful to the environment.”

Cleaning as a solution, not a risk

Bellona’s intervention has been to challenge that assumption—not by dismissing the risks, but by reframing the balance of them. “What we try to communicate is that in-water cleaning is primarily a solution,” Tvedten said. “It’s a solution to the spread of invasive species, because if you don’t have biofouling, the organisms won’t spread.”

That argument, while straightforward, runs up against a more complicated reality. Not all cleaning is equal. Removing thick layers of barnacles and mussels—and what practitioners sometimes refer to, less delicately, as “sea vomit,” or more formally, carpet sea squirt—can release significant biological material into the water if not properly captured. By contrast, removing early-stage growth—thin films of slime or algae—poses far less risk.

This distinction has become central to Bellona’s approach. Rather than treating hull cleaning as a binary—allowed or banned—the organization has advocated for more nuanced, risk-based standards. Clean early, before fouling becomes severe; differentiate between levels of growth; require capture technologies where risks are highest, but not necessarily in all cases. The goal is not perfection, but practicality: a system that encourages frequent, preventive cleaning rather than infrequent, reactive intervention.

Biofouling on a ship hull that has been allowed to develop too far into macrofouling. Photo: Bellona

Industry participants increasingly frame the issue in much the same way. “Would you rather prevent a fire or put out a fire that has already started?” Jotun’s Stangeby said. “We are working on the preventive side of the industry.” Waiting until heavy macrofouling develops, he said, makes cleaning more difficult, more invasive and ultimately less effective than maintaining what he described as “an always clean hull.” Early cleaning, he added, not only lowers fuel consumption and emissions, but can also reduce the likelihood that larger organisms are carried between ecosystems.

“A lot of the cleanings that occur today are reactive,” Tvedten observed—performed only after fouling has already become a significant problem. Bellona’s Clean Hull Initiative, by contrast, promotes proactive cleaning: addressing buildup when it is still minimal, when both environmental and operational costs are lowest.

Writing the rules of the waterline

Turning that philosophy into policy, however, requires more than persuasion. It requires standards—shared frameworks that ports, shipowners and service providers can trust. That is where Bellona’s work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has become especially significant.

The Clean Hull Initiative helped draft a proposal for an ISO standard on in-water cleaning, with Tvedten serving as project leader. The aim was not to dictate specific environmental thresholds, but to establish a common language and process: how cleaning operations should be documented, how their impacts should be measured, and how ports might evaluate them. “If you have an environmental solution that’s new, you need to also create the systems and routines around it,” she said.

The ISO working group in Stockholm. Photo: Bellona

According to Stangeby, collaboration between environmental groups and industry has been essential in bringing the issue into mainstream maritime policy discussions. “Biofouling represents a threat to the environment both in terms of emissions and biodiversity, and no single stakeholder can address it alone,” he said. Environmental organizations such as Bellona, he added, “have helped raise awareness and push the topic onto the policy agenda, while industry contributes operational insight and practical solutions.”

The Clean Hull Initiative, he said, has helped “create a more informed dialogue and build the trust needed to develop workable standards,” including the recently adopted ISO 6319 framework.

In practice, that means enabling regulators to make more informed decisions—moving beyond blanket bans toward conditional approvals based on evidence. Service providers, whether diver teams or remotely operated vehicle operators, are expected to document what they plan to do and what effects their methods have on water quality. Ports, in turn, can assess whether those practices meet their environmental criteria.

Industry participants say cleaning technologies themselves have also evolved rapidly in response to regulatory concerns. “There is a clear shift towards more controlled and proactive approaches, supported by monitoring and data,” Stangeby said.

From standards to global policy

The influence of that work is already beginning to ripple outward. The International Maritime Organization has finalized guidelines on biofouling and hull maintenance, and many of the same experts contribute to both IMO and ISO processes. What began as a technical standard is gradually helping shape broader international policy discussions around environmentally sound hull cleaning.

Meanwhile, the practical case for more frequent cleaning continues to strengthen. Many operators still wait two or three years before conducting in-water cleaning, allowing significant biofouling to accumulate in the meantime. From Tvedten’s perspective, that is often far too late. Cleaning should begin “much earlier,” as a preventive measure, Tvedten said—before buildup becomes a hazard rather than a minor inconvenience.

The implications extend beyond environmental protection. Cleaner hulls mean less drag, which means lower fuel consumption and reduced costs for shipowners. In an industry defined by tight margins and global competition, that economic incentive may prove as important as any regulation.

For now, the shift remains uneven. Some ports are experimenting with new rules and technologies; others remain cautious. But the direction of travel is becoming clearer.

What was once an obscure technical issue is moving onto the international agenda. And in that transition, Bellona’s work offers a reminder that not all environmental solutions require sweeping technological breakthroughs. Some, it turns out, involve paying closer attention to what has been there all along: a thin, stubborn layer of life clinging to the underside of the global economy.

The post Below the waterline, there’s an elegant climate solution appeared first on Bellona.org.

In January Congress passed a “minibus” bill that raided $500 million in previously appropriated coal mine cleanup funds to pay for other federal programs. We’re now seeing the first results of that bill: $45.5 million less in mine cleanup funding every year for the next 11 years. Combined with growing inflation, this means fewer jobs will be supported cleaning up mines and more hazardous coal mining damage won’t be reclaimed in Appalachia and across the country.

When it passed in 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided about $10.9 billion for the reclamation of Abandoned Mine Land (AML) sites across the country in fifteen annual grants to states and tribes. The first four years’ worth of grants were awarded between 2022-2025. The minibus bill cuts $500 million from the total AML funding provided under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – but it was unclear at the time of passage if the $500 million would be cut entirely from the last (fifteenth) year of AML grants or equally across the remaining 11 years worth of annual funding. Now we have our answer.

The 2026 AML grants for states and tribes were announced in May and the cuts are here. According to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the $500 million cut “will be applied equally to the remaining 11 grant distribution years, approximately $45.45 million per year.” The figure below shows the annual reduction in funds for each state and tribe, as well as the total cuts that will play out over the next 11 years. Pennsylvania and West Virginia have the largest cuts (by absolute value), at about $15 million and $9 million per year, respectively.

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The cuts are reducing the amount of damage states and tribes can reclaim. Inflation – especially recent rises in fuel costs that can drive up the cost of operating construction equipment – is also lowering the spending power of reclamation dollars even from last year, further reducing the amount of reclamation states and tribes can accomplish in 2026.

States and tribes have a five-year window to spend their FY2026 AML grant, and those agencies will now begin planning for fewer dollars by taking steps like selecting fewer reclamation projects or reducing the scope of projects. In Pennsylvania, for example, the cuts are equivalent to the cost of two large abandoned mine drainage treatment systems.

As we explained in a previous post, the extent of AML damage that needs to be cleaned up is likely twice as large as the existing $10.9 billion in funding– even before $500 million was cut.

This is damage to land and water that has lingered since at least the 1970s, and now residents will have to wait even longer for cleanup. If this cut hadn’t occurred, $45 million per year in more mine cleanup would be put to use across the country in the next few years, removing hazards to the local population and supporting more jobs, such as in construction, doing reclamation work primarily in rural areas. Congress should reverse the $500 million reduction, and should protect the program from similar cuts in the future.

The post Breaking down how much Congress cut AML funds by state appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.

By John Donovan

Article disclaimer: This article contains a mixture of fact, opinion, criticism, recollection and satire. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

Long before the current artificial-intelligence muddle over the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain name, long before search engines and chatbots started confusing Shell’s official corporate identity with this independently owned Shell criticism website, there was a much older and much more serious mess.

It was not created by a bot.

It was created by Shell.

Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the same reputational swamp it has spent decades pretending does not exist.

The latest confusion over the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is not an isolated technical hiccup. It is the long tail of Shell’s own conduct: the reserves scandal, the attempted corporate clean-up, the attempted seizure of our domain names, and the company’s chronic inability to deal honestly with criticism when the critic happens to possess a paper trail.

That paper trail did not appear by magic. It was built warning by warning, letter by letter, lawsuit by lawsuit, settlement by settlement, leak by leak, and document by document.

No one has issued as many warnings about the ethics of Shell management as we did. Those warnings were ignored. Had Shell taken them seriously, the reserves fraud might never have happened.

SHELL’S OWN WIPO COMPLAINT BLEW THE COVER

In 2005, Shell International Petroleum Company Limited filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization seeking to seize three domain names:

royaldutchshellplc.com
royaldutchshellgroup.com
tellshell.org

Shell lost.

That fact alone is important. But what is even more revealing is what Shell itself placed before WIPO.

In its own 44-page complaint, Shell admitted that in the 1990s three lawsuits were brought against Shell UK Limited by me or companies associated with me, alleging wrongful use of intellectual property. Shell admitted those cases were settled.

Shell then referred to the fourth action: the Smart litigation. That case concerned Shell’s Smart promotion, involving smart-card technology for customer loyalty points, which I alleged had been derived from ideas Shell had obtained from me.

Shell’s position to WIPO was predictably dismissive. It claimed the evidence showed the Smart claim was without foundation. Yet Shell also admitted that the case was settled after three weeks of trial.

Then came the carefully crafted wording.

Shell told WIPO that no payment was made “in relation to the claim itself,” although it admitted that, for reasons it said were not relevant to the WIPO complaint, a contribution was made to my legal expenses.

That statement deserves scrutiny.

There was a confidential financial settlement. I received a secret payment. Shell may wish to dress it up in legal costume jewellery and call it something else, but money changed hands as part of the settlement machinery. The full terms were not aired in open court.

This matters because Shell relied in its WIPO complaint on comments made by Mr Justice Laddie in the Smart litigation. Those comments were made before the judge had been told the full terms of settlement. In other words, Shell later paraded judicial comments to WIPO while omitting the more awkward context: the settlement terms were not fully before the judge when he made those remarks.

That is not a small detail. It goes to the heart of Shell’s method. Selective disclosure. Aggressive framing. Corporate polish applied over inconvenient facts.

Readers can make up their own minds whether that reflects the “honesty, integrity and openness” Shell so often claims to cherish.

THE GREAT DOMAIN NAME LAND GRAB

Shell’s 2005 WIPO complaint was dressed up as a trademark dispute. In reality, it was an attempted corporate land grab against an elderly critic who had moved faster than Shell’s own lumbering bureaucracy.

The timing was delicious.

Shell announced plans to unify the old Royal Dutch/Shell structure under a new single parent company to be called Royal Dutch Shell plc. We registered the obvious domain. Shell had not secured it in time.

Cue corporate panic.

Shell argued that the domain names were identical or confusingly similar to names associated with the group. It complained that visitors looking for Shell might find adverse publicity and critical commentary instead. It even alleged that the registration prevented Shell from using the names itself.

But Shell had a problem. A rather large one.

Its own complaint admitted that our websites had not attempted to pass themselves off as official Shell websites. Shell also acknowledged that our sites consisted largely of media reports about the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and our comments on them, predominantly negative. It conceded that Shell had long been aware of the sites and had previously taken the view that we were entitled to express our opinions on the internet.

That admission was fatal to the corporate victim act.

The WIPO panel denied Shell’s complaint. The domains stayed with Alfred Donovan. Shell’s attempted seizure failed.

So when today’s bots, search engines and automated summaries stumble into the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name confusion, they are not encountering some fly-by-night cybersquatting relic. They are encountering the survivor of a public legal battle Shell chose to start and lost.

THE RESERVES FRAUD CONNECTION

The domain-name fiasco cannot sensibly be separated from the reserves fraud.

The reserves scandal was the great rupture in Shell’s carefully polished image. In 2004, Shell was forced to admit that it had overstated its proved hydrocarbon reserves by billions of barrels. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission imposed a $120 million penalty. The UK Financial Services Authority imposed a £17 million penalty for market abuse.

Three top executives departed. Shell’s reputation, once lacquered in pious claims about integrity and responsibility, was shattered.

But the culture that produced the reserves scandal did not materialise overnight.

We had warned for years that Shell’s senior management culture was infected by deception, cover-up and ruthless conduct. We warned investors. We warned Shell. We warned the Dutch royal household. We warned anyone prepared to listen.

Most did not.

The result was not merely a financial scandal. It was the exposure of a mindset.

Shell had become used to managing reality by controlling language, suppressing critics, settling awkward disputes behind closed doors, and presenting only the version of events useful to Shell. The reserves scandal was simply the largest and most public expression of that same corporate disease.

The present domain-name mess is another symptom. Different technology, same arrogance.

THE WARNING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN HEEDED

In 1999, Alfred Donovan warned Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands that there appeared to be “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.”

That was not a throwaway insult. It was a warning based on years of direct experience with Shell litigation, Shell threats, Shell settlements, Shell undercover activity and Shell’s relentless attempts to crush a much smaller opponent.

By 2004, after the reserves scandal erupted, that warning looked less like the complaint of a disgruntled shareholder and more like an early diagnostic report.

The headlines that followed Shell’s reserves revelations spoke of lies, cover-ups, fat cats, deception and executives sick and tired of lying. Those were not words invented by this website. They appeared in mainstream press coverage because Shell had finally been caught by regulators doing on a grand scale what we had been warning about for years.

And yet Shell still learned the wrong lesson.

Instead of asking why its critics had been so right, Shell tried to silence, discredit or outmanoeuvre them. The WIPO complaint over our domain names was part of that pattern.

Shell did not merely fail to buy the obvious domain names. It failed to understand why those domain names had become valuable in the first place.

They became valuable because Shell’s own conduct made them valuable.

THE JUDGE, THE SETTLEMENT AND THE HALF-TOLD STORY

The Smart litigation remains central because Shell used it as part of its narrative against us.

Shell pointed WIPO to judicial comments made in that litigation. Those comments were damaging when read in isolation. But they were made before the full settlement terms were disclosed to the judge.

That is the point Shell would rather disappear.

The judge did not know the whole story. He did not know the full settlement terms. He did not know about the secret payment I received. Yet Shell later relied on his comments as though they represented the full and final moral verdict on the dispute.

That is how Shell operates: amplify what helps, bury what hurts.

If Shell truly believed the Smart claim was worthless, readers may wonder why the case was settled after three weeks of trial. If no meaningful settlement existed, readers may wonder why money changed hands. If the full terms were irrelevant, readers may wonder why they were not placed plainly before the court and later before the public.

The answer, in my view, is simple. Shell wanted the benefit of settlement without the embarrassment of appearing to have settled.

FROM COURTROOM TO CHATBOT

The current domain-name confusion is almost comic in its absurdity.

Royal Dutch Shell plc no longer exists under that name. Shell officially changed its name to Shell plc in January 2022. Yet the domain royaldutchshellplc.com remains active as an independent Shell criticism website, because Shell failed to secure it, tried to seize it, lost, and then spent years pretending the problem had gone away.

Now automated systems trip over the wreckage.

A chatbot sees “Royal Dutch Shell Plc” and a live domain. It tries to reconcile old corporate names, current corporate names, historical criticism, archived litigation and Shell’s rebranding. The result is a mess.

But the mess did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began with corporate artificial honesty.

Shell’s own history has become so tangled that even machines struggle to summarise it cleanly. That is not the fault of the machines alone. It is the fault of a company that spent decades generating contradictory records, confidential settlements, public denials, legal aggression and reputational camouflage.

The bots are not hallucinating from thin air. They are feeding on the sediment Shell left behind.

SPOOF SHELL PR/SPIN SECTION

Shell Corporate Reputation Comfort Unit — Unofficial Emergency Statement

Shell would like to reassure stakeholders that any confusion regarding the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is entirely the fault of the internet, history, critics, algorithms, possibly the weather, and certainly not Shell.

While it is true that Shell once attempted to seize the domain through WIPO and lost, stakeholders are encouraged not to focus on that unfortunate detail. Shell remains committed to transparency, provided transparency is routed through approved channels, reviewed by Legal, softened by Corporate Affairs, and stripped of anything that might cause reputational indigestion.

Regarding prior settlements with Mr Donovan and associated companies, Shell notes that the word “settlement” can mean many things, and the movement of money should not be interpreted as money moving unless such interpretation has been cleared by Shell’s preferred version of events.

Regarding the reserves scandal, Shell believes the matter is historic, regrettable, behind us, and best discussed only in terms sufficiently vague to avoid reminding anyone that regulators imposed enormous penalties over the overstatement of proved reserves.

Regarding the domain-name confusion, Shell’s position is clear: Royal Dutch Shell plc became Shell plc, except when legacy branding, old filings, archived litigation, criticism websites, bots, search engines and corporate ghosts say otherwise.

Shell thanks the public for its understanding and asks everyone to please use shell.com, where reality is more carefully curated.

SPOOF BOT-REACTION/COMMENT SECTION

Bot 1: “Royal Dutch Shell plc is Shell plc, except when it is a historical entity, except when the website says otherwise, except when the critic owns the domain. Confidence: dangerously high.”

Bot 2: “I have located Shell’s official website. Unfortunately, I have also located Shell’s unofficial memory. This appears to be the problem.”

Bot 3: “WIPO denied Shell’s complaint in 2005. Would Shell like to appeal to the Court of Algorithmic Forgetfulness?”

Bot 4: “Corporate rebrand detected. Historical accountability not deleted.”

Bot 5: “Shell attempted to bury the domain issue. Search engines indexed the shovel.”

Human commenter: “So Shell ignored the warnings, got engulfed by the reserves scandal, failed to secure the obvious domain, lost the WIPO case, dropped ‘Royal Dutch,’ and now bots are confused? Sounds less like a glitch and more like a 25-year invoice.”

Sir Henri’s ghost: “Splendid. A company once built on oil now slips on its own archive.”

CONCLUSION

The present Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name fiasco is not a random internet oddity. It is the latest chapter in a very long story.

Shell ignored warnings about ethics. Shell settled cases while trying to control the narrative. Shell became engulfed in the reserves scandal. Shell tried to seize criticism domains and failed. Shell later abandoned the Royal Dutch name. Now, in 2026, the corporate ghost continues to haunt search engines, chatbots and Shell’s reputation.

The lesson is brutally simple.

If Shell had listened when the warnings were first issued, there might have been no reserves fraud scandal, no desperate WIPO complaint, no domain-name humiliation, and no present mess for artificial intelligence to untangle.

But Shell did what Shell so often does.

It ignored the warning light until the dashboard caught fire.

BEFORE THE DOMAIN NAME FIASCO: SHELL’S LONG-IGNORED ETHICS WARNING SIGNS was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 3:47 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

For ten years, Audubon members have flocked to the North Carolina Legislature to meet with lawmakers and advocate for bird-friendly policies. From passing a sweeping bipartisan climate reduction...

Come to the Table is excited to announce the launch of a new podcast, Food & Conversations. Hosted by David Allen and Justine Post, the podcast will feature interviews with leaders who are working to build a more just food system – advocates, experts, farmers, and more. Through these conversations, we hope to share tools, […]

The post Food & Conversations Podcast appeared first on RAFI.

Western Watersheds Project, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, today appealed a decision by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to revoke American Prairie’s authority to graze bison on public lands in northeastern Montana—a move that conflicts with plain statutory language, defies decades of settled law, and contradicts BLM’s own prior decisions.

BLM issued the bison permits in 2022 after completing a multi-year environmental review finding that bison grazing is permissible on public lands and in fact would be better for prairie grasslands than cattle. Now, in a politically motivated reversal, over the course of just five months, the agency decided to rescind the bison permits under a brand new theory that a livestock owner must be a “production-oriented” entity, and did so without defining what that means.

“BLM’s new interpretation has no basis in law and contradicts its own findings,” said Pete Frost, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “BLM reversed itself due to politics, not the law, nor the need to restore prairie grasslands.”

In 2022, BLM decided that reading a “production” requirement into federal law “would read words and requirements” into the law that don’t exist. Instead, at that time, BLM said it can “issue permits to any stock owner.”

The BLM’s 2022 decision found that privately-owned bison are domestic livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act—a conclusion consistent with Montana state law, which consistently treated American Prairie’s bison herd as “livestock,” by levying taxes and imposing disease testing requirements. Indeed, the U.S. Forest Service defines livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act as “…animals of any kind kept or raised for [any] use or pleasure.”

Even so, American Prairie has provided thousands of pounds of bison meat to area food banks and supplies bison to other entities for food, commercial, and cultural purposes.

“The Trump administration’s revocation of these bison grazing permits is beyond bizarre because bison evolved with High Plains ecosystems and are better for land health, better for wildlife, and better for the public than cattle,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “Tribes also have bison herds for cultural, ecological, and subsistence purposes, which this permit revocation would threaten if it went through.”

A Congressional Research Service report published January 22, 2026, further underscores the weakness of the administration’s position, noting that 88% of BLM grazing authorizations are for cattle, yearlings, and bison, and reaffirming the longstanding Interior Department conclusion that bison qualify as livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act.

The political origins of this reversal are clear. As reported by Public Domain, the 2022 bison grazing decision was appealed by ranching groups represented by Karen Budd-Falen—now one of the highest ranking officials at the Department of Interior. Further, Sec. Burgum personally intervened to direct BLM to reconsider, ultimately producing the outcome Budd-Falen’s former clients sought.

The permit revocation is the first step in a broader effort to lock cattle and sheep interests into permanent dominance over public lands grazing—just days following the decision, the agency released proposed grazing regulations containing the same “production-oriented” requirement. If finalized, those rules would frustrate and obstruct the restoration of bison on public lands on 155 million acres across the western U.S.

Western Environmental Law Center and Western Watersheds Project will pursue all available administrative remedies and, if necessary, file suit to prevent the unlawful eviction of bison from these public lands.

Contacts:

Pete Frost, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-543-0018, frost@westernlaw.org

Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project, 307-399-7910, emolvar@westernwatersheds.org

 

The post Conservation groups challenge Trump administration’s move to banish bison from public lands appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

Today, more than 325 organizations including labor unions, advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, women’s rights organizations, and more, released an open letter to those seeking to reform the health care system, laying out why now is the time for Medicare for All.

The letter is led by Public Citizen, National Nurses United, People’s Action Institute, Social Security Works, Physicians for a National Health Program, Labor Campaign for Single Payer, and Healthcare-NOW. Other signatories include Indivisible, MoveOn, and several prominent labor unions, including UAW, APWU, IFPTE, AFA-CWA, UE, Actors Equity, and more.

Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular and commands majority support nationwide, with 63 percent of all voters in favor, including 90 percent of Democratic voters. In Congress, more than half of the House Democratic Caucus now supports Medicare for All, and Senate legislation has added three co-sponsors since the last Congress.

Some D.C. insiders are urging members of Congress and health care advocates to think small and prioritize incremental health care tweaks. This letter is a clear warning that half-measures will not meet the scale of the health care crisis. As health care costs soar, affordability is top of mind for American families, and it's a particularly important kitchen table issue ahead of the 2026 midterms. The American people need, and demand, Medicare for All.

The letter reads, in part:

“We may face a once-in-a-generation opportunity to legislate on health care in 2029. We need to rally behind the boldest possible reform, Medicare for All, that brings together the broadest possible movement. Now is not the time for overly complex incremental measures that prop up the same systems we’re seeing fail under the weight of attacks by Trump and Republicans. The American people are hungry for bold ideas that will transform fundamental institutions that have failed them for too long. And they are looking for leaders who will take on powerful interests and fight for working people.

Now is the time to organize and inspire! Support for Medicare for All grows daily in our communities and in Congress. It’s our best path forward, and it’s rooted in real promise: everybody in, nobody out. A small minority of skeptical health care policy wonks may try to convince us to scale back, that structural change isn’t winnable.

The reality is that alternate proposals don’t move us towards Medicare for All, complicate our already broken system, and allow corporations to continue profiting off the sick.”

Check out the full list of organizations here.

"The massive momentum for Medicare for All should serve as a wakeup call to all who profit from our broken health care system and those who do their bidding," said Public Citizen Health Care Policy Advocate Eagan Kemp. "Everyday Americans are tired of watching the pigs at the health care trough gorge themselves day after day while hundreds of millions of people in the wealthiest country in the world suffer from inadequate access to care, delays and denials, and crushing medical debt. Medicare for All would end the ability of corporations to put greed ahead of people's needs and would finally guarantee than everyone in the U.S. can get the care they require. The movement for Medicare for All is growing by leaps and bounds because the people are demanding change. It is time those in power meet the moment and fight for the health care system we need and that the people are demanding, Medicare for All."

The Southwest Power Pool service aims to help data centers and other large loads get online quickly, but they can have their service cut when grid conditions are tight.

Example of part of a webpage on Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com website from over two decades ago. From the Wayback Machine where visitors can explore more than 1 trillion web pages saved over time – more than 21,000 pages from royaldutchshellplc.com and several hundred more from royaldutchshellgroup.com. What a shame for Shell shareholders that Shell ignored are prolific warnings about the lack of ethics at the top of Shell, which led to the reserves scandal. ENDS The name Royal Dutch Shell Plc appears multiple times on each webpage within the background graphics and on each article published, as shown above. It appears many more times on the current version of the website. As can also be seen, at the date of publication High Court proceedings were under way involving Dr John Huong, the Shell production geologist who blew the whistle on the reserves scandal. Eight companies within the Royal Dutch Shell Group jointly sued him for defamation in respect of allegations we published on our website. We managed to torpedo Shell’s case and Shell was forced to settle the litigation. His name also came up in the WIPO proceedings directly below in which Shell tried to seize our domain names including royaldutchshellplc.com, an action which Shell lost. Text of the featured letter:

Letter From

Alfred Donovan
Shell Shareholders Org
847a Second Avenue
New York
NY 10017 USA

1 April 2004

To

HM QUEEN BEATRIX OF THE NETHERLANDS
Huis ten Bosch Palace
The Hague
The Netherlands

Your Gracious Majesty

THE ROYAL DUTCH SHELL GROUP

I last wrote to you on 1st March 1999. I did so in the knowledge that your esteemed family is one of the largest single shareholders in Shell. I warned you about what I described as “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell”. 

In this connection, I noticed an article in The Sunday Times on 21 March 2004, which stated: “Shell’s management will be further embarrassed by the revelation that the Dutch royal family has lost nearly £250m through the collapse in the company’s share price”. Unfortunately it seems fair to say in view of current events that my warning has turned out to be devastatingly accurate.

I have for a number of years been a lone voice expressing grave doubts about the integrity of Shell senior management figures, who happen to be the same individuals named in the recent US class action law suits alleging fraud and deceit  – charges which, based on current news reports, seem well-founded.

Many people must have thought I was a crazy old man (I am 87 on 22 April). I therefore feel vindicated by the headlines in today’s newspapers about a once much respected brand which many people rightly held in affection e.g.: –

The Independent: Lies, cover-ups, fat cats and an oil giant in crisis

The Guardian: Trail of emails reveals depths of deceit at the heart of Shell

The Scotsman: Shell admits reserve ‘lies’

Daily Telegraph: Memos expose Shell’s years of lying

London Evening Standard: Shell bosses lied to the City

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Dutch/Shell Group exec was ’sick and tired’ of lying

I founded the Shell Shareholders Organisation because of the problems my family encountered with Shell after enjoying a mutually successful business relationship with them for many years. Unfortunately we later found it necessary to sue Shell in the High Court for stealing business ideas from us. Shell settled the first three claims for a total of £260,000 plus costs. When we sued again, Shell hired undercover agents as part of a plan to go on the offensive against us.

My family, our key witnesses and even our lawyer were besieged and intimidated by undercover operatives. Burglaries were carried out at the residences of these individuals and key documents privileged and otherwise were examined. Thus the integrity of our documents was compromised. Threats were also made. A former Shell Manager became too frightened to give evidence on our behalf.

Shell and its London Solicitors, DJ Freeman, admitted in writing the activities of one undercover agent who was caught in the act of illegally checking our mail. They advised my son in writing that other agents were investigating us, but denied that any of them had committed burglaries or made threats against us.

We wrote to senior Shell managers – including some of the same individuals now named in US class action law suits against Shell (one for $15 billion dollars according to BBC Radio). They all ignored my protestations about the clandestine activity.

They also ignored evidence of improper conduct by Shell managers conducting a tendering process for a major contract. Companies who thought they were participating in an honest process were deliberately deceived and cheated. 35 companies tendered for the contract yet it was awarded to a firm which did not participate; a company with whom the Shell manager running the tendering process had a personal relationship. Shell senior management also ignored evidence of an email circulated by the same manager to senior colleagues (in relation to the same project) which contained the following illuminating comment: “My note of 25/10 expressed a personal and pragmatic view of how to handle the problem – it is in fact illegal and is certainly unofficial, and if we were discovered then we will enforce the official position…”

I only recently discovered to my consternation that some of the same titled Shell directors to whom I wrote bringing these matters to their attention, including a former Shell Group Chairman were simultaneously the spymasters/shareholders of a shadowy spying organization called Hakluyt, closely linked with the British Secret Service. Hakluyt is staffed by former MI6 officers. Shell has admitted using Hakluyt agents including a serving German Secret Service agent to engage in undercover missions against worthy organisations campaigning against Shell e.g. Greenpeace and Body Shop. This “cloak and dagger” activity was exposed by The Sunday Times in a front page story.

When the Police investigated at Shell UK’s London HQ the threats, burglaries and espionage activity in our case, Shell did not disclose its ties with Hakluyt, an organisation well versed in the same tactics which had been directed against us.

In addition to the covert operations against us and various worthy NGO’s including Greenpeace and Body Shop, Shell simultaneously set up and paid for a private army of 1400 Police spies supporting the then murderous regime in Nigeria ( Mail on Sunday article 4 April 04 “Shell Chief had a private army”). The “Shell Chief” in question was Sir Philip Watts.

Under the circumstances the cover-up, deception and intrigue at Shell regarding the shortfall in oil and gas reserves holds no great surprises to me.  I have felt like my family was up against the mafia, not the great company I once admired.

Please visit shell2004.com to read my sworn Affidavit concerning these matters. You will also find the world’s most comprehensive news portal website covering the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. I am sending a similar letter to the major Pension Funds/investors in Shell. I believe they will be appalled by what I have to say.

Yours sincerely
Alfred Donovan
Chairman Shell Shareholders Organisation
(email:alfrededonovan@hotmail.com)

——————————————————————————————

COPY OF PREVIOUS LETTER

1st March 1999

HM QUEEN BEATRIX OF THE NETHERLANDS
Huis ten Bosch Palace
The Hague

Your Majesty

I am writing to you concerning the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, which owns a controlling interest in the Royal Dutch/Shell Group.  The “Royal” prefix confers immense prestige on this multi-national giant.

The Brent Spar and Nigerian PR disasters have already badly tarnished its former exemplary reputation, when we could all “be sure of Shell”. Now we have a third global PR debacle for the Shell brand. A combination of difficult market conditions and thoroughly incompetent management has caused a financial meltdown at Royal Dutch/Shell that has hit the headlines around the world. This has inflicted further damage to Shell’s reputation.

The crisis has now reached the stage whereby Group Chairman, Mr Moody-Stuart, is reportedly contemplating merging Royal Dutch and Shell Transport into one company. There is even speculation about which HQ will be closed, Shell Centre in London or The Hague.  Mr Moody-Stuart has recognised the growing seriousness of the crisis by admitting that he may have to resign.

I have had a ringside seat at this unsavoury spectacle of one PR disaster after another, because my family and I have been engaged in a series of legal actions against Shell.  I enclose a copy of a booklet entitled “The Shell Game”, plus a selection of self-explanatory leaflets. I would respectfully draw your attention to the leaflet entitled “Return of the Robber Barons”.

The leaflet comments on Shell’s oppressive conduct against Shell station operators in the UK.  No wonder that 55% of respondents in a survey of over 1500 Shell stations said that Shell operates in an unethical manner.

The same ruthless conduct has been evident in my families’ legal battles with Shell e.g. they have brought a £100,000 Counterclaim against me – an 81-year-old war pensioner. The Counterclaim is in direct contravention of a press statement issued by Shell that it would be in breach of its duties to its shareholders if it brought a legal action, whereby it would lose money even if successful.  My family and I have also been bombarded by threats from Shell during the litigation.

Shell has ignored all of the arbitration and mediation proposals that we have put forward in an effort to resolve matters amicably.  It appears absolutely hell bent on exploiting its huge advantage over a financially weaker opponent irrespective of the strong merits of our claim.

Despite a letter of apology for past misdeeds that we received from Shell UK Chairman, Dr Chris Fay, in 1996, Shell has continued to act in ruthless and flagrant breach of its own code of business ethics requiring honesty, integrity, and openness, in all of its dealings. After being cornered, Shell has admitted its association with outright deception carried out on its behalf by a sleazy undercover operator.

Although it is highly obnoxious for a multi-national to act oppressively against small traders, as far as I know, such conduct is not illegal.  It is however even more repugnant given the false image of ethical trading projected by the Statement of General Business Principles published by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. Regretfully, in reality (based on our horrendous experience), there appears to be a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.

Bearing all of the foregoing in mind, I have written to the President of Royal Dutch Petroleum, Mr Maarten van den Bergh, suggesting that his company should voluntarily relinquish the “Royal” prefix until such time as it succeeds in regaining its former high reputation. This action would avoid the potential embarrassment caused by the “Royal” prefix being attached to an arrogant multi-national bully, currently in a steep financial and moral decline.

Yours sincerely
Alfred Donovan
Chairman
Shell Shareholders Organisation

Domain Name Legal Battle

I have provided links to the relevant documents arising from the WIPO proceedings: SHELL INTERNATIONAL PETROLEUM COMPANY LIMITED v. ALFRED DONOVAN

Shell 44-page Complaint to World Intellectual Property Organisation: 18 May 2005

Shell 32-page Complaint Exhibit Supplied to WIPO: 18 May 2005

WIPO Deadline Notification to Alfred Donovan: 25 May 2005

Donovan 17-page response to Shell proceedings: 14 June 2005

WIPO Decision Notification: 11 August 2005

Domain name decision published on the net by The World Intellectual Property Org dated 8 August 2005.

 

Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain name fiasco a direct consequence of the Reserves Fraud was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 2:38 pm.
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