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Field Notes: Paraguay’s Ayoreo People and the Disappearing Chaco (Season 2 Episode 2) https://youtu.be/bbLXmhOzlXg?si=EAy-Nt-DvUk7phWf In Paraguay’s Gran Chaco forest, one of the fastest-disappearing forests on Earth, the Ayoreo people—some still uncontacted—face existential threats from expanding cattle ranching, land grabs, road building, illegal logging, and human-set fires. Narrated by photojournalist Orin langelle. Field Notes — Dispatches […]

The Cascade Institute has partnered with Seequent, 400C Energy, INRS, and Simon Fraser University to develop the Canadian Thermal Model — a comprehensive mapping of the vast geothermal resources beneath our feet.

This national initiative will reveal Canada’s deep geothermal resources and accelerate the development of renewable energy. The announcement happened on the opening day of the world’s biggest geothermal event, being held in Calgary from June 8 to 11.

As investment in geothermal energy surges globally as a reliable, always-on clean power source, the Canadian Thermal Model will create a comprehensive national view of deep heat resources using novel machine learning methods to address a long-standing challenge for the sector: limited subsurface data coverage. Seequent is providing access to its world-leading geophysics software to accelerate research into the Earth’s subsurface.

This initiative advances knowledge of Canada’s geothermal energy reserves by integrating geologic and geophysical datasets into InterPIGNN machine learning algorithm for deep heat modelling. By improving confidence in where geothermal resources are located, the model provides a critical foundation to inform investment, policy planning, and project development nationwide.

“Canada has a significant opportunity to advance geothermal when the need for reliable, always-on clean energy has never been greater,” said Jeremy O’Brien, Energy Segment Director, Seequent. “Realizing that potential starts with greater subsurface certainty and making data accessible to key stakeholders. Combining this access with best-in-class geophysics enables more accurate mapping of heat at depth. The Canadian Thermal Model brings these elements together to create a national view of deep geothermal resources, helping to reduce risk, guide investment, and accelerate development.”

Cascade Institute specialists, working with a team of geoscientists and research partners, including Simon Fraser University, 400 C, and the Geological Survey of Canada Pacific Division, the Institute will develop the model using data integration workflows supported by Seequent’s Oasis montaj geophysics software. Seequent’s technology will process and visualize the data required to inform energy markets on resource availability and development costs.

“Canada has world-class subsurface expertise and a growing opportunity to lead in geothermal,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, Executive Director of the Cascade Institute. “This project will provide a foundational resource to demonstrate the technical and economic viability of geothermal energy at scale.”

The Canadian Thermal Model reflects a broader industry shift toward data-driven geothermal development, including next-generation technologies and national-scale resource assessment. It also underscores the growing importance of partnerships between research institutions, technology providers, and the wider energy sector to scale geothermal from opportunity to infrastructure.

Seequent supports more than 60% of the world’s geothermal power generation, with experience spanning next-generation projects such as Fervo Energy’s Cape Station in Utah, and long-established operations including Ormat’s global footprint, reflecting deep expertise that drives the sector forward.

To kick off the collaboration, Cascade and Seequent hosted a discussion at WGC on June 8, titled “The Next Frontier: Exploring the Potential of Canada’s Deep Geothermal Resources.

The post Cascade Institute partners with Seequent to map Canada’s geothermal resources appeared first on Cascade Institute.

Bad Men Behaving Badly Chap. 746: 'Cause it's not awful enough we have to endure the racist crap spewing from our home-grown jackasses, the rest of the world bore grim witness to it as dunk-tank Christofascist Pete Hegseth chose a D-Day remembrance to flip the script on World War 2, trash European allies for not being fascist enough, and liken (good-guy) Allies landing at Normandy to an "invasion" of brown people "with "dangerous ideologies." Fact: "This is repulsive and confused, unless you're a Nazi."

Speaking of: Last week, under cover of darkness, "shameful" Senate Republicans pushed through a "Secure America Act" (sic) gifting yet more billions to keep out more of the swarthy hordes Pete's so scared of. Without making any of the reforms Dems had demanded, they added to last year's obscene $191 billion gift to DHS another $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP, 4 to 7 times their previous budgets, with most allocated to expand detentions, deportations, facilities, goons - not, as it could, to fund free childcare for over a million kids, groceries for over 10 million households, a year of SNAP benefits to 31 million people, health care tax credits for a year etc etc ad nauseum. Their wise leader, meanwhile, was throwing tantrums on TV - "Dude is losing his shit" - because a reporter dared ask for evidence of his flood of unhinged claims.

And greasy, self-proclaimed Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete lurches along on his unholy quest to turn America into a white nationalist theocracy. A blood-lusting warmonger though (because?) he never saw combat, he acts the macho, racist buffoon at every turn. He posts klutzy videos of himself working out; in one, he prances in a t-shirt that reads, "This Is War." (No, this is reality TV). Sporting Crusader tattoos - Deus Vult, but whose God wills it? - he stripped 180 faiths from those the military recognizes - all the Christian ones remain - "a religious purge dressed up as paperwork (telling) thousands of service members their beliefs don't matter to the government they're risking their lives to protect." He cut dozens of female and Black Navy officers from leadership-approved promotions, dissing "historic so-called firsts” that make the military "less lethal."

And to mark this weekend's 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landing of Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy - perhaps the most pivotal moment in a long bloody fight to defend democracy against fascism - he gave a pro-fascism speech, embracing a Great Replacement theory that calls for a return to the racial ideology on which fascism is based. Speaking at the American Cemetery in north-west France where about 9,400 are buried, he'd barely recalled the courage of Allied Forces from multiple countries wading ashore in history's largest amphibious operation to liberate Europe before pivoting to warn "their legacy requires our active vigilance." European leaders may have grown too "comfortable," he said with the chutzpah of the deeply ignorant, and they may have somehow "forgotten that freedom is not free."

"Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies," he intoned. "On beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive....When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not." What a pompous asshole. So: On D-Day, Ugly Americans hawking xenophobia. Equating brown-skinned migrants who want to feed and keep safe their families with "dangerous ideologies." Also: Equating anti-fascism with "dangerous ideologies"? Wait, weren't the Allies the good guys? And wait, so the Nazis were...? Americans were horrified by so much repulsive and confused: "Sewage," "straight-up white nationalism," "a cheap suit full of hate and racism - what an evil shit," "Crystal Meth Rumsfeld strikes again," "We get it, dude. Just come out and say you hate black and brown people."

Especially in Europe, critics did not hold back, and we are here for it. English historian Simon Schama decried Hegseth's "special kind of loathsomeness, a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance...As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the 3rd Reich, and entitles this comic-book nobody to lecture the actual heroes." Others blasted "something profoundly ugly happening" in our right wing..."and on D-Day, D-Day!" and "an obscene desecration" of the memories of those who fell. Like many, French P.M. Sébastien Lecornu rightly paid tribute instead to the "3,000 men, barely 20 years old," who died, offering "the breath of their youth and the sacrifice of their lives."

Europeans also called bullshit on the faux drama and utter hypocrisy of Hegseth's angry claim that, after a united D-Day era when "each nation bled," Europe is not "standing with" a U.S. now run by a lying, racist, narcissistic, war-mongering toddler who does nothing but abuse them. "America will lead and we must, but capable allies must be Right. There. With Us...In the Breach. When It Matters," he bloviated. "The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe,. Now freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war-fighters...We stand by our allies, and we expect our allies to stand beside us." "So much nonsense," retorted Swedish economist Anders Åslund. "'We stand by our allies!’ No you don’t. You just attacked them. Immigration policies are internal matters...Doesn’t Hegseth know the most unreliable ‘ally’ by far is the US?”

And now, in the name of their mythical, bigoted, white, male, Christian Republic, the US - Hegseth, Trump, Vance et al - have the audacity to be hectoring their European “allies” to “up their white supremacy game” to stop an “invasion” of what Trump has called the brown and black “vermin” who once flocked to our “shining city on a hill,” now a beacon of hate. Hamlet's ghost: “O, what a falling-off was there.” Last weekend, in France, Hegseth didn’t even stay for the international ceremony at the cemetery where so many are buried - per Trump, all those suckers and losers. Pete likely didn’t know the denizens of a nearby village had weeks earlier asked that his visit be cancelled. "It seems to us," they said in their request, "that this man does not share our democratic values." We feel your pain.

Kate and Aaron are joined by Dr. Steve Feldgus, an independent consultant who served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Interior Department under President Biden. Dr. Feldgus talks about how to improve mine permitting in the US, a topic he worked on while at Interior.

News

• Falling behind: Forest Service fuel treatment gap puts communities at risk – Center for Western Priorities
• Americans’ national parks passes will pay for Trump’s July 4 plans, documents show – Washington Post
• Wyoming’s ‘Path of the Pronghorn’ is a signature away from protections fought over for a quarter century – WyoFile

Resources

• Red Tape is a Red Herring: Deregulation Will Not Speed Critical Mineral Development
• Watch this episode on YouTube

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Lauren Bogard, Kate Groetzinger, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: Construction equipment at a bentonite mine on BLM land near Greybull, Wyoming; Source: Photo by Gretchen Hurley, Geologist, BLM Cody Field Office

The post A former Interior department official explains what’s wrong with mining on public land appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Update: Santa Clara voters made their support for open spaces clear by saying YES to Measure D! With over 54% of the vote, the measure to enhance the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority’s capacity to care for open spaces in its jurisdiction passed!

Also known as the Santa Clara Valley Wildfire Protection, Clean Water, and Open Space Act, Measure D will implement an equitable parcel tax to generate approximately $17 million annually to steward these lands.

Greenbelt Alliance proudly endorsed and advocated for this measure and is thrilled to see that voters embraced this cause!

Why It Matters

The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority is an essential steward and protector of vital landscapes in Santa Clara County, and it currently needs more resources to manage these lands sustainably.

Just in the past decade, the lands under the agency’s management more than doubled, from 12,000 to 30,000 acres, while revenue has remained flat, limiting its ability to carry out its stewardship and resilience mission.

Since 1993, the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority has been a steward of the irreplaceable natural landscapes of central and southern Santa Clara County. The Authority conserves the natural environment, supports agriculture, and connects people to nature by protecting open spaces, natural areas, and working farms and ranches for today and for future generations. Visitors enjoy free, year-round access to hike, walk, bike, horseback ride, or simply relax in a beautiful landscape. With preserves such as Sierra Vista, Rancho Cañada del Oro, and the iconic Coyote Valley—a campaign that Greenbelt Alliance fought for for many years—, thousands of residents have access to nature near their homes. 

Protected open space is not a luxury. Healthy watersheds, managed grasslands, and restored wildlife corridors reduce wildfire risk, protect drinking water, filter runoff, and give communities a better chance to withstand extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent and intense.

Supporting this measure is the smart thing to do because it advances key priorities, including:

• Reducing catastrophic wildfire risk by removing hazardous brush
• Protecting our drinking water sources, including rivers, creeks, and streams, from pollution
• Helping clean up pollution and litter in natural areas
• Protecting our area’s farms and healthy, local food sources
• Maintaining and restoring wildlife habitats and corridors

Investing in Resilient Landscapes

At a time when the cost of living and economic challenges are top of mind for American voters, asking voters to support a new tax is never a small request. However, unlike a traditional flat-rate parcel tax, this new measure applies a rate of two cents per square foot of building area. For the average homeowner in the Authority’s jurisdiction, that represents approximately $32 per year, while large commercial and industrial property owners, including the corporations and campuses that benefit enormously from the Bay Area’s livability and natural amenities, will pay proportionally more, but still have a cap of $7,500 per parcel annually. 

The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority has already proven it knows how to deploy this kind of investment effectively. For every dollar of local funding collected, the Authority has leveraged significant matching funds from state, federal, and private sources, bringing in more than $180 million in outside resources to date. This measure will expand that leverage, unlocking additional state and federal dollars that require local matching commitments. 

Endorsement originally published on March 19, 2026.

The post WIN: Measure D Reaffirms Santa Clara’s Protection of Open Spaces appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

California’s leaders have spent years telling the public that fighting climate change requires giving people alternatives to driving.

They were right.

The transportation sector remains California’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. If California hopes to meet its climate goals, it must give people realistic alternatives to getting behind the wheel. That means better transit, more homes near jobs and transit stations, safer streets for walking and bicycling, and communities designed around choices instead of traffic.

Unfortunately, Sacramento just made that job much harder.

Last month, the California Air Resources Board approved sweeping changes to the state’s cap-and-trade program, which the state insists on calling cap-and-invest. State officials argued the changes would reduce costs for consumers and provide relief to industries facing increasingly stringent climate regulations.

The changes will significantly reduce the amount of money generated through emissions allowance auctions that will go into the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the same fund the state uses to support public transit, affordable housing near transit, active transportation projects, and other programs designed to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. Some estimates say they will reduce available transit funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. Others put the estimates even higher.

As we noted last week, for transit agencies, the decision could not have come at a worse time.

And for California’s climate goals, it raises an uncomfortable question: How does the state expect to meet its emissions targets while cutting funding for the programs that are supposed to help achieve them?

After slashing funding for the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, regulators with the Air Resources Board who oversee the cap-and-trade program gave us the answer: lobby your legislator.

“Nothing that we’re doing here is setting the priority for how the legislature may decide to appropriate funds,” Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer for climate change and research at the Air Resources Board, told KQED.

Climate Goals and Policy Changes

California’s self-created climate mandate is to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, in accordance with Senate Bill 32. Furthermore, the 2022 Scoping Plan maps an aggressive trajectory aiming for an even deeper 48% reduction by 2030 to eventually reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

These are great goals, and California is making some progress. Emissions are dropping, but at an average annual pace of roughly 2.8%, whereas a 4.4% year-over-year reduction is required to meet the 2030 deadline. The state would need to double the decrease in emissions every year between now and 2030 to make its own goals. 

The Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom reauthorized the cap-and-trade program last year but changed how revenues are distributed. High-speed rail now receives guaranteed funding. A substantial portion is also directed toward broader state budget priorities. Transit and many other climate programs were left to compete for whatever money remains.

That may have seemed manageable when policymakers assumed auction revenues would remain robust. As we’re seeing, that is no longer a safe assumption.

But as noted above, it’s the legislature and governor that ultimately decides how funds are spent. If there’s less money to spend, then the elected leaders have choices to make.

California’s budget year goes from July 1 until the following June 30. The state has a habit of passing budgets at the last possible moment, and this year is no exception. Last month, Newsom unveiled his final proposed budget and it did not include increased funding for transit to offset the changes to the cap-and-trade system. However, in recent years the legislature has acted to fix the governor’s shortcomings on transit funding.

In 2024, lawmakers rejected Newsom’s proposal to slash funding for the Active Transportation Program and intercity rail projects, arguing that California could not afford to abandon climate and mobility investments simply because they were politically easier targets than highway spending. While the final budget did not fully restore every dollar, legislators significantly softened the proposed cuts and preserved funding for programs that had been slated for the chopping block.

The same thing happened last year. Newsom’s May Revision proposed deep reductions to transit funding and declined requests for additional emergency operating support. After weeks of negotiations, legislative leaders restored much of the threatened funding and approved a package designed to prevent devastating service cuts at transit agencies across the state. The lesson from the past two budget cycles is clear: the governor’s May budget proposal is often the opening bid, not the final word.

So in 2026, as lawmakers negotiate the final state budget, they should be asking a simple question: if cap-and-trade revenues decline as expected, where will the replacement funding come from?

The answer cannot be nowhere.

Otherwise, the state is effectively admitting that its climate goals are aspirational rather than operational.

DENVER—A new report from the Center for Western Priorities found that less than one percent of 35,700 comments submitted to the National Park Service in response to signage asking the public to report negative depictions of American history in parks actually used the comment form as intended.

The analysis looked at 35,700 comments submitted across 475 national park units between June 2025 and January 2026, organizing the comments into seven distinct categories based on content and sentiment. The largest category was “General opposition to the order,” which accounted for nearly 10,000 responses. This was followed by “Defend historical accuracy” (over 5,000 responses) and “General pro-parks support” (over 4,000 responses).

Other notable categories of public feedback included comments on the “Park visit experience,” “Trump / Burgum criticism,” and a number of “Off-topic / jokes / spam” submissions. In contrast, only 47 comments, or 0.1 percent of the total comments submitted, “Flagged signage or supported removal.” 

Background: In March of 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In response, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered national park staff to put up signs asking park visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”

Methodology: In May 2026, the Department of the Interior released 35,700 comments submitted through a QR code system in response to a FOIA request by KOAA News 5 and others. The Center for Western Priorities sorted the full dataset into categories based on content and sentiment through a combination of pattern-based classification and a manual verification/refinement process. More information on methodology is available in the full report.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following quote from Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein, who conducted the analysis and authored the report:

“These comments pass the vibe check with flying colors. Americans support our parks and the stories they tell, and they aren’t happy about the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite history. Instead of helping Trump censor our national parks, visitors used the comment form to tell the Trump administration to respect our parks or get lost.”

Learn more:

• ‘Censorship:’ See the National Park visitor responses after Trump requested help deleting ‘negative’ signage – Government Executive

• The National Park Service race to rewrite history becomes a slog – Politico

• America’s 250th anniversary and why history matters in our parks – The Landscape (Center for Western Priorities’ podcast)

• Confidential database reveals which items NPS thinks may ‘disparage’ America – Washington Post

The post New analysis finds Trump effort to solicit negative feedback on national park signage completely fails  appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

June 8, 2026 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUWA Statement on new Cooperative Management Agreement for the San Rafael Swell – 6.8.26  Latest effort by State of Utah to exert control over federal public lands 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org

Salt Lake City, UT– Today, the State of Utah announced it signed a Cooperative Management Agreement with the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) regarding the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area in southern Utah; the Area was established as part of the 2019 Dingell Act. Below is a statement from SUWA Legal Director Steve Bloch and additional information.  

“Today’s announcement has all the hallmarks of the fox being put in charge of the henhouse,” said Steve Bloch, Legal Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “Under Governor Cox’s leadership, the state has conspired to place control of American public lands into the hands of politicians who have their own agenda: prioritizing off-road vehicle use over everything else. Gov. Cox has found a willing parter in the Trump administration, who sees public lands as little more than figures on a “balance sheet” to be dismantled and monetized for short-term gain. We will be watching closely for any shenanigans that stem from this agreement.” 

Additional information: 

The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, which was signed into law on March 12, 2019, designated 663,000 acres of BLM-managed wilderness within 17 new wilderness areas. In addition, the legislation established the 117,000-acre San Rafael Swell Recreation Area, added 63 miles of the Green River to the National Wild and Scenic River System, designated the John Wesley Powell National Conservation Area and the Jurassic National Monument, and directed a land exchange between the BLM and Utah’s Trust Lands Administration. Additional information can found here. 

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a federal agency, is part of the Department of the Interior, a Cabinet-level department headed by Secretary Doug Burgum. In Utah, the BLM manages 22.8 million acres of public land, ranging from “spectacular red-rock canyons and roaring rivers to high mountain peaks and expansive salt flats,” including Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (designated in 1996 and the first monument managed by the BLM) and Bears Ears National Monument (designated in 2017 and jointly managed with the US Forest Service).  

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

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

 

 

The post SUWA Statement on new San Rafael Swell Management Agreement – 6.8.26  appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson

It might have seemed exotic when it first appeared, but the forecast “cone of uncertainty” used by the NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center (NHC) is now a familiar part of tropical cyclone readiness in U.S. states and territories. For 2026, NHC has made a couple of key tweaks to its standard cone product. It’s also testing an expanded version of the cone – one made feasible by a new way of understanding how and where forecast errors arise.

Since its debut in 2002, the cone has become what a University of Miami writer called “arguably [the center’s] most iconic graphic,” a mainstay of TV coverage and weather apps. Prior to the cone, hurricane maps simply showed a line depicting the official multi-day forecast for the storm center, as issued every six hours by NHC. Experts urged the public not to “focus on the skinny line,” keeping in mind that a hurricane’s path can easily deviate from the forecast track and that impacts will typically extend far beyond that center.

When you see a cone graphic, that ‘skinny line’ may or may not appear (NHC provides both versions), but the cone itself has gone a long way to fix the skinny-line problem.

However, just as a hurricane’s impacts do not just lie along a narrow line, a hurricane’s damage doesn’t stop when it comes ashore. Some of the worst U.S. hurricane disasters in recent years have occurred well inland, including billions of dollars in wind-driven destruction across Georgia in 2018’s Michael, and the catastrophic, deadly flooding from 2024’s Helene, which killed more than 100 people in and around western North Carolina.

Up through last year, NHC’s cone graphics only showed watches and warnings along the coastline. Starting this year, the full extent of inland watches and warnings will be portrayed. In the example shown in Fig. 1 below, the revised graphics make it crystal clear that the hurricane warning for 2024’s Milton extended almost completely across the entire Florida Peninsula, including the Orlando area.

Another improvement shown in Fig. 1 is the addition of a crosshatched area to denote locations that are under both a hurricane watch and a tropical storm warning. It’s an important way to show that being in a tropical storm warning doesn’t mean you are necessarily off the hook for potential hurricane-level impacts.

Figure 1. A comparison of the original forecast cone for Hurricane Milton issued at 4 a.m. CDT October 8, 2024 (left) and how the same forecast would look in the revised cone graphic being used this year (right). The area crosshatched in blue and pink lines is under both a hurricane watch (pink) and a tropical storm warning (blue). The revised cone graphic will also use gray shading for the entire length of the cone, rather than for only the first three days of the five-day forecast period. (Image credit: NOAA/NWS/NHC)

When bad stuff happens outside the cone

Maybe because it’s so visually intuitive, the cone can deceive. The most common way to misinterpret the cone is to assume that it includes all possible hurricane tracks and that all serious hurricane impacts will fall inside the cone. It’s a problem that experts across disciplines have dubbed the “containment effect.”

The misunderstanding has led to some painful lessons. One of the most dramatic was in 2022, when Hurricane Ian veered toward the right-hand edge of the cone. Ian made a high-end Category 4 landfall near Fort Myers less than 36 hours after the official skinny-line track forecast had projected a strike near Tampa Bay. Because Ian was such a large and potent hurricane, its storm surge extended well to the right of the cone, delivering major flooding as far south as Naples. Ian took at least 161 lives and inflicted $112 billion in damage (USD 2022).

Multiple lines of social science research confirm that many laypeople make the mistake of assuming hurricanes simply don’t stray outside the cone. One survey of more than 2,800 Floridians led by Scotney Evans (University of Miami) and published in 2022 by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that nearly half of respondents assumed that the cone showed all of the potential tracks for a hurricane. 

“Our analysis suggests that many residents have difficulty interpreting several aspects, suggesting a rethink on how to graphically communicate aspects such as uncertainty; the size of the storm; areas of likely damage; watches and warnings; and wind intensity categories,” Evans and colleagues wrote. In some cases, better-educated respondents were actually more likely to misinterpret certain aspects of the cone. 

READ: Building a better hurricane cone of uncertainty

The issue is especially acute because of the cone’s sheer popularity. “The cone is one of the most, if not the most, commonly shared hurricane visuals,” said Robert Prestley (NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research).

A 2020 overview of hurricane risk communication in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society, led by Barbara Millett (University of Miami), noted that during the five days as Hurricane Irma approached Miami in 2017, the cone map accounted for more than 70% of independent pageviews at the NHC website. In a 2023 study published in the same journal, Prestley and NCAR’s Rebecca Morss found that cone graphics were retweeted more often than watch/warning graphics on Twitter.

With all this in the mix, “it was taking people by surprise when the hurricane would move outside the cone,” said Robbie Berg, warning coordination meteorologist at NHC.

In fact, the cone’s width is calculated for each storm based on the previous five years of track locations in the official NHC forecasts, rather than on how well or poorly behaved a particular storm might be. Based on average track errors from those preceding five years, the cone width is calibrated to include about two-thirds (67 percent) of all potential storm positions. This means that by design, one would expect the center of a hurricane to stray outside the cone margins about one-third of the time.

Making the cone substantially wider might seem like an obvious fix, but this approach carries its own hazards. Evacuations are based largely on storm surge risk rather than the cone itself, and storm surge warnings can extend well beyond the cone. However, a greatly expanded cone could mean a larger number of people finding themselves in a cone year after year, perhaps without significant impacts each time.

“Research shows the public perceives the cone as an area of concern – an indication to continue monitoring the forecast,” said Gina Eosco, director of NOAA’s Weather Program Office and a pioneering researcher on how people interpret the cone and other forecast products.

Since 2007, forecasters at NHC have used the two-thirds index for the cone width as a working compromise between overly narrow and overly broad. But a new way of analyzing errors from past years has paved the way to an experimental cone that would alert more people without including all that much more territory.

The key, according to Berg, was to decompose the total track error. A track forecast can make mistakes that are either “cross-track” (erring in the direction of motion) or “along-track”  (moving the system too quickly or too slowly). Standard practice is to draw the cone’s edges along each side of a series of circles straddling the forecast track, with the radius of each circle set to include 67 percent of potential positions and the circles growing larger with each forecast day.

As it turns out, timing mistakes (along-track) tend to produce bigger errors than do directional mistakes (cross-track), as shown in Fig. 2 below. Using circles to pool all of these errors obscures the difference between the two types, thus making the cone wider and less elongated than it ought to be.

Figure 2. Schematic showing a circle that denotes absolute error, pooling the along- and cross-track errors into a single value, and the ellipse that results when the two types of errors are assessed separately rather than pooled. (Image credit: NOAA/NWS/NHC)

When NHC examined the two types of error, they discovered that only a minor widening and lengthening of the cone could enclose 90 percent of possible positions, as opposed to the current 67 percent. This 90-percent cone is being used in experimental mode for the first time this season (see Fig. 3 below), alongside the traditional 67-percent version. The center will solicit comments and feedback before any move to finalize and adopt the experimental version. It’s been well received at conferences, according to Berg.

“Especially as we get out toward day 4 or 5, most of the error is in the along-track part of the storm,” said Berg. “Going to 90% doesn’t increase the width of the cone much. It’s more that you’re increasing the length.”

Figure 3. Comparison of the current operational cone (dashed red line) with the slightly larger experimental version (white shading). The dashed red line is only for illustrative purposes, so that the two versions can be compared here in one graphic. (Image credit: NOAA/NWS/NHC)

Another benefit of the 90% cone: some other NHC products already use the same threshold. For example, peak storm surge forecasts depict the maximum inundation one would expect from a given tropical cyclone approaching a given stretch of coast. These forecasts are calibrated so that a value higher than the maximum shown would be expected only 10% of the time. “So we’re trending in this direction: reasonable worst case, trying to capture as much of the risk as possible,” Berg said.

“The changes to the cone show remarkable scientific advancement,” said Eosco.

Meanwhile, the traditional version of the forecast cone will slim down a bit this year. Because of reduced error in the forecasts for 2021–2025 compared to 2020–2024, the two-thirds probability circles for 2026 will be 4 to 8 percent smaller on average in the Atlantic and 3 to 8 percent smaller in the Northeast Pacific. Such incremental improvements over the past couple of decades have led to striking reductions in cone size (see embedded post from 2025 below).

A timely year for new storm surge products in Hawaii

With El Niño boosting the odds that tropical cyclones will affect Hawaii this season, it’s fortuitous that NHC is now launching the same type of storm surge products for the main Hawaiian Islands that are regularly issued for the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. These will include the peak storm surge forecasts noted above.

Behind the storm surge forecasts are exhaustive calculations carried out across more than 20 years of work using the P-Surge (probabilistic storm surge) model. The resulting datasets show the potential inundations at coastal points separated by 2.5 kilometers (about 1.6 miles) based on winds and atmospheric pressures from as many as 1,000 simulated tropical cyclones. As this work continues, NHC is looking to expand storm surge forecasts more broadly through the Caribbean in the coming years.

As stressed by Eosco: “Regardless of the cone’s shape or size, monitoring the forecast is a critical first step in assessing personal risk and empowering personal decision-making.”

If you ever find yourself at a river’s bank, a lake’s edge, or an ocean’s coast, keep an eye out for one of nature’s most skilled fishers—the Osprey. Distinguished by its bright yellow eyes...

OVER TWO DECADES AGO SHELL UNSUCCESSFULLY TRIED TO SEIZE THIS WEBSITE DOMAIN NAME: ROYALDUTCHSHELLPLC.COM. THERE HAVE BEEN SPECTACULARLY EMBARRASSING CONSEQUENCES FOR SHELL, INCLUDING WRITTEN PERMISSION FOR JOHN DONOVAN TO DEAL ON SHELL’S BEHALF WITH EMAILS MEANT FOR SHELL.
‘Alfred Donovan was right about the culture of deception. He was right about the reserves. He was right about the spies. He was right about Nigeria. He was right about Hakluyt. He beat Shell in the High Court, in the WIPO proceedings, and in the court of public opinion.’  *By our Special Correspondent in the Department of Ironic Outcomes*

There is a particular kind of hubris that afflicts very large organisations — the unshakeable belief that, because you employ 119,000 people across 145 countries and own more than 3,300 trademarks in nearly 190 nations, you are entitled to win everything. Every lawsuit. Every arbitration. Every domain name dispute. Every confrontation with a retired British marketing consultant and his octogenarian father.

Royal Dutch Shell — now rebranded to the snappier “Shell plc,” presumably in an effort to distance itself from its own history — learned this lesson the hard way in the summer of 2005, when it filed a 44-page complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) demanding that one Alfred Donovan, an 87-year-old war pensioner operating from 847a Second Avenue, New York, hand over three domain names: royaldutchshellplc.com, royaldutchshellgroup.com, and tellshell.org.

Shell lost. Comprehensively. Embarrassingly. At the hands of a pensioner who represented himself.

But the story of *how* Shell ended up in this predicament — suing an elderly shareholder critic over a website domain rather than simply, you know, registering its own company name before announcing it to the world — is a masterpiece of institutional incompetence, decades in the making. To understand the fiasco properly, you have to go back much further than 2005. You have to go back to the reserves fraud, and to the extraordinary family that watched it all unfold from the ringside.

—

## PART ONE: THE ANATOMY OF AN OWN GOAL

On 28 October 2004, Royal Dutch/Shell made a public announcement that it was restructuring its notoriously baroque corporate structure — two parent companies, one Dutch, one British, lashed together since 1907 in an arrangement that had served mainly to make accountability extremely difficult — into a single parent company to be called “Royal Dutch Shell plc.”

The very next day, Alfred Donovan registered royaldutchshellplc.com.

This is, when you stop to think about it, an astonishing fact. One of the largest corporations on earth had just announced the name of its new parent company, and it had failed to register the corresponding .com domain *before making the announcement*. Not a month before. Not a week before. Not even an hour before. The morning of 29 October 2004, Shell’s legal and communications teams awoke to discover that the name of their new company was already occupied — by a pensioner with a grievance, a working internet connection, and, one imagines, an excellent sense of timing.

To be fair, Shell did eventually register royaldutchshell.com. But royaldutchshellplc.com — the exact name of the actual company — was gone.

The natural response to this situation, one might think, would be a quiet word in the legal department along the lines of: “Right, we’ve rather made a hash of this, let’s see if we can find a polite solution.” Or, alternatively: “Actually, does it matter? The man is using it to host critical commentary, not to impersonate us. We have admitted he’s entitled to criticise us. Let’s not embarrass ourselves further.”

Shell’s response, instead, was to file a 44-page legal complaint.

—

## PART TWO: THE WIPO DEBACLE IN DETAIL

The WIPO proceedings — formally styled *Shell International Petroleum Company Limited v. Alfred Donovan*, Case No. D2005-0538 — unfolded with the stately inevitability of a corporate tragedy. Shell deployed a legal representative. Alfred Donovan represented himself. A three-person WIPO panel was assembled, consisting of Daniel J. Gervais, Michael D. Cover, and Diane Cabell.

Shell’s argument, stripped of its 44-page lawyerly scaffolding, ran roughly as follows: the domain names royaldutchshellplc.com and royaldutchshellgroup.com were “essentially identical” to the company name; an innocent internet user searching for Shell might accidentally land on Donovan’s criticism site; and anyway, Donovan had registered royaldutchshellplc.com the day after the restructuring announcement specifically to pre-empt Shell from owning it — which, the company argued, constituted bad faith.

There was also a certain amount of creative huffing about how Donovan had been known to refer to himself as “Alfred Donovan of royaldutchshellplc.com,” which Shell suggested might mislead people into thinking he had “some connection with the Complainant or at least some authority to speak on behalf of the Group.”

The WIPO panel was not persuaded.

On the question of trademarks, the panel found a fundamental problem with Shell’s case: Shell had never actually registered “ROYALDUTCHSHELL” as a trademark. The reason for this, Shell’s own legal filing helpfully explained, was that the name had “always been used as a collective name for a related group of companies” and that registering it as a trademark “would therefore be of questionable validity.” In other words, Shell was attempting to claim intellectual property rights over a name that Shell itself admitted was not really a trademark.

The panel, noting this with what one imagines was barely concealed judicial amusement, found that the Complainant had failed to establish trademark rights in “ROYALDUTCHSHELL.” Same problem with “TELLSHELL.” The whole edifice of Shell’s complaint rested on foundations that Shell had, in its own filing, described as shaky.

On the question of bad faith — did Donovan register the domains to harm Shell? — the panel was equally unimpressed. The evidence showed that Donovan ran non-commercial criticism websites, had never attempted to sell the domains, had never traded under Shell’s name, and had been doing this sort of thing for years before the disputed domains were registered. His purpose, the panel found, was plainly to draw attention to his criticism of Shell’s conduct, not to prevent Shell from using its marks.

The Complaint was denied.

Shell — operator of more than 3,300 trademarks worldwide, employer of 119,000 people, a company with a legal department larger than most nations’ judiciaries — had just been beaten by an octogenarian with no legal representation, writing from a flat in New York.

—

## PART THREE: THE LONGER BACKSTORY (OR: HOW SHELL EARNED THIS)

To appreciate the full richness of this outcome, you need to understand the history between the Donovan family and Shell, which makes the domain name dispute look like a minor parking disagreement.

Alfred Donovan — described in his own letter to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands as being 87 years old at the time of writing and a “war pensioner” — founded the Shell Shareholders Organisation after what he described, with magisterial understatement, as a “series of legal actions against Shell.” The Donovan family had previously enjoyed a “mutually successful business relationship” with Shell that had, by Alfred’s account, deteriorated rather dramatically when Shell allegedly stole business ideas from them.

Shell settled the first three claims for a total of £260,000 plus costs. When the Donovans sued again, Shell’s response was, according to Alfred, to hire undercover agents. His sworn affidavit, filed in the High Court, alleged that his family, key witnesses, and their lawyer were “besieged and intimidated by undercover operatives,” that burglaries were carried out at their residences, and that threats were made.

Shell and its solicitors, DJ Freeman, admitted in writing the activities of one undercover agent who was caught “in the act of illegally checking our mail.” They also advised Alfred’s son in writing that other agents were investigating the family, though they denied the burglaries.

Shell’s spying activities extended beyond the Donovan family. The company, it emerged, had used Hakluyt & Company — a private intelligence firm staffed by former MI6 officers — to run undercover operations against campaigning organisations including Greenpeace and the Body Shop. This was exposed in a front-page Sunday Times story. Some of the Shell directors to whom Alfred had written complaints about the surveillance turned out, he later discovered, to be shareholders and, in some sense, “spymasters” of Hakluyt itself.

Meanwhile, Shell was simultaneously funding a private army of 1,400 police spies supporting what Alfred described as “the then murderous regime in Nigeria,” and — as would emerge in full legal horror much later — engaging in what prosecutors would describe as a $1.3 billion corruption scheme involving Nigerian oil licences.

Alfred Donovan had been warning Shell’s board, Shell’s shareholders, pension funds, and the Dutch royal family (who had, he noted, personally lost nearly £250 million when the share price collapsed) about the company’s ethical culture since at least 1999. His letters to Queen Beatrix warned of “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.”

In April 2004, following the eruption of the reserves scandal — in which Shell was forced to admit it had been systematically overstating its oil and gas reserves — newspaper headlines confirmed his warnings with remarkable fidelity:

*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”*

“Many people must have thought I was a crazy old man,” Alfred wrote to Queen Beatrix on 1 April 2004, with impeccable timing. “I therefore feel vindicated.”

—

## PART FOUR: THE RESERVES FRAUD CONNECTION

It is at this point that the domain name fiasco reveals itself as something more than mere corporate embarrassment. It is, as the headline of John Donovan’s original article correctly identifies, a *direct consequence* of the reserves fraud.

The reserves scandal — in which Shell’s senior management repeatedly misled investors about the scale of the company’s proven oil and gas reserves, ultimately restating them downwards by a catastrophic 20% — produced the class action lawsuits, the regulatory investigations, and the corporate restructuring that begat the announcement of “Royal Dutch Shell plc” in October 2004.

And that announcement, fatefully, was made without anyone in Shell’s vast legal empire thinking to check whether the domain name was available.

Why not? One theory: the company was rather distracted by, say, US Securities and Exchange Commission investigations, multiple class action lawsuits alleging fraud, and the small matter of having to explain to shareholders why its reserves were substantially less than previously claimed. Shell paid $120 million to settle SEC charges. It paid $90 million to settle US shareholder class action suits. It faced investigations in multiple jurisdictions.

Another theory: institutional arrogance. The possibility that a pensioner critic might race them to their own company name simply had not, in the fever dream of corporate hubris, occurred to anyone.

Either way, the result was the same. The company announced its new identity to the world, and Alfred Donovan registered the domain the following morning. This was, one must acknowledge, a feat of either extraordinary prescience or extremely good reflexes.

—

## PART FIVE: THE DEFAMATION CASE THEY ALSO LOST

The WIPO fiasco might have been dismissed as an isolated embarrassment, had it not been accompanied by another legal adventure of comparable outcome. Eight companies within the Royal Dutch Shell Group jointly sued Dr John Huong — the Shell production geologist who had blown the whistle on the reserves scandal — for defamation over allegations published on the Donovan website.

Eight companies. Against one geologist. Represented by the Donovans.

“We managed to torpedo Shell’s case,” John Donovan notes, with admirable restraint, “and Shell was forced to settle the litigation.”

One begins to detect a pattern. Shell, it seems, had a remarkable capacity to pick legal fights it then lost. This is expensive. It is also, in retrospect, quite funny — in the way that watching a very large man repeatedly walk into the same glass door is funny, provided you are not the one paying his medical bills.

—

## PART SIX: THE MOST IRONIC DETAIL

Perhaps the richest detail in this entire saga is one that rewards close reading of the WIPO proceedings. Shell’s 44-page complaint argued, among other things, that Donovan had registered royaldutchshellplc.com on 29 October 2004 — “the day immediately following the re-structuring announcement” — as evidence of bad faith.

The WIPO panel, reviewing this argument, essentially responded: yes, that’s true; but it doesn’t prove bad faith if the person’s intent was legitimate criticism rather than commercial exploitation. And anyway, if Shell was so concerned about someone else registering this domain, perhaps Shell might have considered registering it first.

This is not a direct quote from the panel’s decision. The panel was considerably more decorous. But it is an accurate summary of the logic.

Shell had, in the very act of filing a complaint about someone else registering its company name, drawn an international arbitration panel’s attention to the fact that Shell had failed to register its own company name before announcing it to the world. The complaint itself was an exhibit in the case against Shell’s competence.

This is, in the annals of corporate legal strategy, difficult to surpass.

—

## EPILOGUE: THE WEBSITE THAT WOULD NOT DIE

Today, more than two decades after Alfred Donovan first registered his Shell-focused domains, royaldutchshellplc.com continues to operate — now run by his son John Donovan — accumulating more than 21,000 archived pages on the Wayback Machine, cited by the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes, CNBC, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and the UK House of Commons Select Committee, among others.

Shell, having failed to acquire the domain through legal proceedings, having rebranded to “Shell plc,” having paid hundreds of millions in regulatory settlements, and having navigated the OPL 245 Nigerian corruption scandal (in which a secretly recorded phone call of its CEO discussing how to handle the matter was published on the Donovan website), has apparently concluded that the better part of wisdom is to let this particular battle go.

It now even has its own chatbot on the site — “Sir Henri Deterding, resurrected” — the controversial and outspoken founder of Royal Dutch Shell, haunting the very website Shell once tried to seize, dispensing “informative and satirical insight” to all comers.

There is a poetry to this that no corporate communications department could have planned.

The lesson, if any is needed, is straightforward: if you are going to announce the name of your new company to the entire world, you might want to check whether the domain is available first. Especially if you have spent the previous decade accumulating enemies with internet connections and long memories.

Alfred Donovan was right about the culture of deception. He was right about the reserves. He was right about the spies. He was right about Nigeria. He was right about Hakluyt. He beat Shell in the High Court, in the WIPO proceedings, and in the court of public opinion.

And he got there by a day.

—

*This article is satirical commentary based on publicly documented legal proceedings, published correspondence, and the WIPO arbitration decision in Case No. D2005-0538 (Shell International Petroleum Company Limited v. Alfred Donovan, decided 8 August 2005). The WIPO decision is in the public record. The letters quoted were published by the Donovan family. All characterisations of legal outcomes are drawn from the official published decisions.*

A Deep Dive Into the Most Spectacular Own Goal in Corporate Legal History was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 8:41 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

Kalamazoo registered nurses, who are members of Michigan Nurses Association and its parent union National Nurses United, will hold a rally and community event on Saturday, June 13 to demand long-term solutions to maintain services at Beacon Kalamazoo Hospital and advance nurses’ Vision for a Healthy Society.

Contact: Madeline Bove – mbove@fwwatch.org; (202) 683-2539

Earlier this week, environmental justice, climate and animal welfare groups submitted a comment calling on the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to reject the latest, and most egregious, factory farm biogas scheme being pushed through the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). 

The proposed biogas project would allow Bar 20 dairy, one of the San Joaquin Valley’s largest mega-dairies, to gain unprecedented incentives under California’s LCFS by selling factory farm biogas to a nearby facility that will burn that biogas to produce hydrogen. Factory farm biogas is a noxious mixture of climate intensive methane gas and other air pollutants that large factory farms generate when they irresponsibly manage their waste. 

While certainly not the first factory farm to be granted lucrative incentives from their pollution under the LCFS, this instance is particularly alarming because the hydrogen produced is poised to be assigned an unheard of carbon intensity (CI) value of -1887.35 CI (for comparison, most biogas falls around -250 CI while solar panels and wind energy are typically limited to a CI of zero or higher). A lower CI means more money from credit trading. This is the lowest CI in the history of the LCFS. 

In other words, no matter how much pollution they spew into nearby communities, these facilities will be set to gain unprecedented amounts of money from that pollution. 

“The application from Bar 20 takes the LCFS’s “pay to pollute” model to a higher level than we ever thought possible,” said Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability Co-Executive Director Phoebe Seaton. “And, once again, it’s California consumers who are paying with their hard-earned dollars and San Joaquin Valley residents who are paying with their health.”

“The California Air Resources Board has an obligation to regulate the factory farming industry’s climate pollution—not encourage it with massive subsidies,” said Animal Legal Defense Fund Senior Staff Attorney Christine Ball-Blakely. “Bar 20 is a mega dairy factory farm choosing to use a liquid manure management system that creates large quantities of methane, which is a potent climate pollutant. Such intentionally created methane can never become renewable fuel. Paying factory farms like Bar 20 to create as much methane as possible is not just bad math—it’s perverse policy.”

“What we’re seeing here is the expected result of what the LCFS has become after it was amended to double down on factory farm biogas production at the largest and most polluting dairies,” said Food & Water Watch Staff Attorney Tyler Lobdell. “Despite the warnings of environmental advocates and community members, CARB has allowed this program to morph into an increasingly perverse giveaway to factory farms that undermines real climate progress. This project shows that in real time as one of the state’s largest dairies is poised to greenwash dirty hydrogen production so that it appears better than zero-emission hydrogen production, on paper. Unfortunately, it’s Californians that will pay for this foolishness at the pump and in their healthcare costs.”

The comment was submitted by Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Límpio (“Defensores”), Animal Legal Defense Fund, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, and Food & Water Watch. 

This comment was also submitted days after another cohort of groups provided CARB with a robust list of suggestions on how to regulate California’s dairy industry to center the concerns of community members and prioritize actual reducing methane emissions over programs like the LCFS that pay polluters to keep polluting. Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Límpio (“Defensores”), Animal Legal Defense Fund, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, and Food & Water Watch also submitted a comment. 

###

About the Animal Legal Defense Fund 
The Animal Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1979 to protect the lives and advance the interests of animals through the legal system. To accomplish this mission, the Animal Legal Defense Fund files high-impact lawsuits to protect animals from harm; provides free legal assistance and training to prosecutors to assure that animal abusers are held accountable for their crimes; supports tough animal protection legislation and fights harmful legislation; and provides resources and opportunities to law students and professionals to advance the emerging field of animal law. For more information, please visit aldf.org.

About Food & Water Watch
Food & Water Watch brings together more than 2 million people nationwide to fight for safe food, clean water, and a livable climate. For over 20 years, we’ve partnered with communities to take on polluting industries and win real, meaningful protections for people and the environment.

About Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability
Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability works alongside the most impacted communities in the San Joaquin Valley and Eastern Coachella Valley to advocate for sound policy and eradicate injustice to secure equal access to opportunity regardless of wealth, race, income, and place. Leadership Counsel focuses on issues like housing, land use, transportation, safe and affordable drinking water and climate change impacts on communities.

The post CA Regulators Poised to Approve Most Egregious Biogas Scheme Yet  appeared first on Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability.

To come.

The National Audubon Society recently awarded Wachiska Audubon Society (WAS) a $5,900 Audubon in Action Grant to support its Prairie Pines Buffer Plan, an effort to guide development around its...

Last month, Louisiana’s state legislature officially passed HB670. Soon the governor will sign the bill. This opens the door for a major expansion of the biomass industry. It makes it […]

The post Statement: Louisiana Passes Legislation to Bail Out Biomass first appeared on Dogwood Alliance.

In the midst of increasing grocery prices and decreasing nutrition assistance benefits, food security and access challenges are multiplying by the day across North Carolina. As food security organizations and emergency food assistance programs continue to help their neighbors, Come to the Table (CTTT) is here to help, too.

The post Come to the Table Technical Assistance Opportunities appeared first on RAFI.

As wildfire seasons grow longer, storms intensify, smoke travels farther, heat waves become more dangerous, and power outages become more common, disaster preparedness can’t stay trapped inside the bunker fantasy.

Listen to the full podcast episode

We all know the image: shelves of canned food, buckets of grain, a generator in the garage, weapons by the door, and a plan built around keeping everyone else out. Some of the basic advice is useful. Water, flashlights, batteries, radios, medication, first aid supplies, and backup power can save lives. Preparedness itself is not the problem. The problem is the story that’s been wrapped around preparedness.

The bunker fantasy tells us that disaster reveals our neighbors as threats. It teaches us to imagine survival as something that happens inside a fortified private household. It turns structural vulnerability into individual blame: were you ready or not? Could you afford the supplies or not? Did you have a car, storage space, a generator, a spare room, and somewhere to flee, or not?

But real disasters don’t work that way. In real disasters, people survive because someone checks on them. Someone shares information. Someone has a truck. Someone clears a road. Someone translates an alert. Someone brings medication. Someone opens a church basement, school gym, library, union hall, or community center. Someone knows which neighbor lives alone, who uses oxygen, who has kids, goats, dogs, cats, mobility equipment, refrigerated medication, or no car.

In other words: people survive because of relationships. That is why the first tool in a solarpunk disaster-prep kit isn’t a bunker. It’s a care map.

What is a care map?

A care map is a living picture of the people, needs, skills, tools, spaces, and relationships that already exist around you.

It isn’t a surveillance map. It’s not a secret list of everyone’s private business, or a spreadsheet where one self-appointed neighborhood captain decides who is “vulnerable” and who is “useful.”

A care map is a way to notice connection. It helps us ask: Who might need support if the power goes out?

Who has transportation? Who needs medication kept cold? Who knows the back roads? Who speaks more than one language? Who has tools, first aid training, a clean-air room, a generator, a solar charger, or a spare room? Who is likely to be missed by official alerts? Who is already doing the quiet care work that keeps people alive?

The point isn’t to divide people into helpers and helpless people. Everyone has needs. Everyone has capacities. Not the same needs. Not the same capacities. Not at the same time. But everyone belongs to the network.

A disabled neighbor might need help getting downstairs during an outage and also be the best person to design the communication plan. A teenager might not own a car but might be the fastest person

on the block at texting everyone. An elder might need help carrying water and also know which roads flood first. A renter might not control the building, but they may know every neighbor by name. You are not building a hierarchy. You are building a web.

1. Start small

Don’t begin with the whole city. Start with an area small enough to act.

That might be your block, apartment building, workplace, school community, church, union local, mutual aid group, or circle of friends. It might be five households. It might be three people in a group text.

A citywide disaster plan is too big for one person. A building is possible. A neighborhood is possible. A small network of people who know how to reach each other is possible.

Keep it small enough to finish, to update, and to actually be usable when something happens.

Listen to the full episode 2. Ask with consent

Care mapping begins with conversation, not extraction.

You don’t need to open with, “Hello, I am making a disaster map.” That might be a bit intense. You can start simply:

“A few of us are trying to make sure people are more connected before fire season, just in case. Is there anything you would want neighbors to know or help with in an emergency?”

Or: “If the power went out for a couple days, what would you be worried about?”

Or: “If we had to evacuate quickly, would you have transportation?”

The point is consent. Ask. Don’t assume. Don’t pry. Don’t collect sensitive information people do not want to share. Share only what needs to be shared, and protect what needs to stay private. A care map isn’t about control. It’s about trust.

3. Map needs

Once people are willing to participate, start with the practical questions.

Who lives alone? Who is elderly? Who has young children? Who has pets or livestock? Who might need help evacuating? Who does not drive? Who may need medical equipment powered or medication refrigerated? Who might not get alerts on a smartphone? Who might need information in another language? Who works outdoors during smoke or heat? Who is unhoused nearby? Who may be isolated, anxious, or unlikely to ask for help?

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re survival questions. An evacuation order without transportation support isn’t a plan. A power outage without backup for medical-device users isn’t just an inconvenience. A smoke alert that does not reach people in a language they understand isn’t enough. Information only becomes useful when people can act on it. A care map helps us see what official systems often miss.

4. Map capacities

Next, map what people can offer.

Who has a vehicle? Who has a trailer? Who has tools? Who has a chainsaw? Who has first aid training? Who knows the back roads? Who has a generator, battery pack, solar charger, or extra power strip? Who can cook for a crowd? Who can watch kids? Who can help with animals? Who speaks more than one language? Who has organizing skills? Who knows local officials, librarians, school staff, nurses, firefighters, or community groups? Who has a spare room? Who has a cool room? Who has a clean-air room?

This is where mutual aid differs from charity. Charity says: I have something, so I’ll give it to you. Mutual aid says: Our survival is connected, so we organize together to meet needs that systems are failing to meet.

Everyone has something to contribute. A phone call. A ride. A porch. A language. A memory. A spare outlet. A list of names. A cooler. A relationship. A skill. A willingness to check on someone else.

5. Build a contact tree

After you begin mapping needs and capacities, create a contact tree in three layers.

The first layer is digital: a group text, Signal group, WhatsApp chat, email list, Discord, Facebook group, or whatever people actually use.

The second layer is phone: a basic call list for people who do not use apps, do not check them, or may miss alerts.

The third layer is analog: door-knocking, printed flyers, a porch sign, a bulletin board, a known meeting place, or a list taped inside a cabinet where people can find it when the internet is down.

The analog layer matters more than we often think. When the electricity fails and the signal dies, paper still works. Feet still work. A knock on the door still works. A text from the county may be ignored. A knock from a neighbor you know may save a life.

6. Pick one hazard and one project

Do not try to solve every possible disaster at once. That is how people freeze.

Pick one likely local hazard. If you live in the West, maybe it is wildfire smoke. If you live near the coast, maybe it is hurricanes or flooding. If you live in a city, maybe it is extreme heat. If you live rurally, it might be blocked roads, well pumps, livestock, and power outages.

Then choose one practical project. A smoke plan. An evacuation ride list. A list of who needs power for medical devices. A shared shelf of water. A clean-air room.

A neighborhood check-in system for heat waves. A pet evacuation list. A printed resource sheet. A small gas fund. A box of N95 masks. A first aid kit. A charging station. Make it small enough to finish.

Solarpunk is not only the beautiful future city covered in vines and solar panels. It is also the folding table with bottled water, masks, phone numbers, and a handwritten sign that says: “Check in here if you need help.”

7. Practice it

A plan that has never been tested is mostly a wish.

Test the phone tree. Walk the evacuation route. Assemble the box-fan filter before the smoke arrives. Print the contact list. Ask who did not get the message. Find out whether the proposed meeting place is actually accessible. See whether the person who said they could help with rides is home during the day. Update the plan.

Preparedness is not a one-time purchase. It is a living practice.

This week, talk to three people. Ask them three questions:

What would you worry about most in a fire, flood, heat wave, outage, or evacuation?What would you need help with?
What could you offer someone else?

Write it down. Share what needs to be shared. Protect what needs to stay private. Start small. Keep going.

Listen to the full episode

In a striking op-ed published today by the Sacramento Bee, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director at Restore the Delta, argues that the Delta Tunnel is on track to become California’s next High Speed Rail project, a massively expensive project that fails to deliver on its promises. 

In the piece, Barbara notes that the Department of Water Resources (DWR) has already spent more than $700 million planning the Delta Tunnel, yet key information about that spending and the project itself remains inaccessible to the public. As costs continue to escalate, the project still lacks a clear financing plan. She asserts that the consequences extend far beyond taxpayers’ wallets, threatening the ecological future of the Bay-Delta estuary as well as the communities, industries, and wildlife that depend on it.  

Barbara points to the urgent need for California to pursue alternative solutions, such as the Water Renaissance Plan, which would move the state away from costly, unreliable water imports toward local, sustainable solutions that provide reliable water supplies at an affordable price.

In addition to advancing these solutions, Barbara calls on lawmakers to conduct a full audit of DWR’s spending on the Delta Tunnel so Californians can understand how their money is being spent. She also urges legislators to reject AB 2215, a bill that would pave the way for controversial projects like the Delta Tunnel while weakening regulatory oversight.

Read the full op-ed here. 

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This legislative session, Audubon Great Plains was proud to stand up for Nebraska’s clean energy future—and for the birds, wildlife, and communities that depend on it.We successfully helped...