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• “Victoria Approves The Biggest Wind Farm In The Southern Hemisphere” • Victoria’s Minister for Planning has given state environmental approval for the Warracknabeal Energy Park. The proposed 219-turbine wind farm is set to be the biggest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere. It will deliver over 1.5 GW of electric energy. [Energy Source & Distribution]

Wind farm in Victoria (Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 3.0)

• “EU Households Could Save ‘More Than €2,200’ Every Year By Switching To Heat Pumps And EVs” • Switching to green heating and transport can cut EU household energy bills by thousands of euros every year, even before accounting for fossil fuel shocks. According to a report by Danish green think tank CONCITO, the savings could be €2,200 per year. [Euronews]
• “Ethiopia Leads EV Revolution In Africa” • Two years ago, Ethiopia did something unique. It banned the importation of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines on the grounds that the nation was squandering money it didn’t have to import fuels for those vehicles. It also exempted EVs from virtually all fees and import duties. [CleanTechnica]
• “Drone Strike Ignites Fire At UAE Nuclear Plant Amid Gulf Tensions” • The Barakah nuclear plant in Abu Dhabi’s al-Dhafra region was struck by a drone for the first time since the outbreak of the Iran war, causing a fire in an electrical generator outside its inner perimeter. The $20 billion facility supplies a quarter of the UAE’s energy needs. [MSN]
• “NextEra Said To Near Record $66 Billion Deal For Dominion Energy” • Bloomberg News reported that NextEra Energy is in talks to acquire Dominion Energy. It could value Dominion at roughly $66 billion in a mostly stock transaction. If completed, the merger would be the largest utility acquisition on record and one of the biggest M&A deals of 2026. [MSN]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Plans for a celebrity-backed “hyperscale” data center in rural Utah, so massive that it would consume more than double the state’s current electricity use, have generated an intense public and political backlash in a state where the motto is “industry” and a Republican supermajority tends to be deferential to development. 

The project, brought by “Shark Tank” TV personality Kevin O’Leary, would span 40,000 acres, demand 9 gigawatts of power once completed, and raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64 percent, according to estimates. While its water needs remain unknown, the sprawling data center would neighbor the northernmost tip of the shrinking Great Salt Lake, which will likely hit a record-low elevation this year following an unprecedented dry winter.

It could also create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University. Davies estimated that the finished project would cover about as many square miles as Washington, D.C., making it the largest data center on the planet, and that it could produce enough heat to spike nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 degrees Fahrenheit in the high-desert valley. 

“I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is, it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.”

News of the proposed data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public in April after the three commissioners of Box Elder County, the mostly agricultural community that would host it, approved the project. They pointed to the project’s approval by more powerful state agencies and asserted that stopping it was out of their hands, while refusing to hear comments from more than 1,000 people who showed up to share their concerns. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, has since walked back some of his full-throated support.

“Many are asking questions about water, air quality, energy, land use, and the long-term impact on rural Utah,” Cox wrote in a thread on X earlier this month after intense public outcry over the project. “Those are real concerns, and all Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability.”

The controversy in Utah is a stark illustration of a wider trend. Across the United States, data centers are drawing bipartisan backlash as communities clash with tech giants and developers over strained water supplies and spiking energy costs.

At least two other massive data campus projects are proposed elsewhere in Utah, but they have not received anywhere near the pushback as the Stratos Project. Many opponents have pointed to efforts state leaders have made in recent years to support water conservation — Utah is among the driest states in the country — and the state legislature’s multimillion dollar investments to help the Great Salt Lake refill. The lake’s drying bed has already become a source of toxic dust threatening the health of millions of residents living on the Wasatch Front, Utah’s urban core. 

It seems contradictory, then, to build a potentially water-intensive and explosively hot industrial development right next door to such an endangered and iconic spot. 

“The greed behind this deal is clearly blinding the officials to just how much is at stake for the rest of us,” wrote Monika Norwid of Salt Lake City, one of the Utah residents who sent comments to the state’s Division of Water Rights protesting the project. “I refuse to let this greed imperil our already fragile wildlife, I refuse to allow some useless technology steal the rest of our insufficient water for a project that is way beyond the scale of this area.”

In an interview with CNN, O’Leary downplayed the environmental impact of his project, saying Stratos is “not going to destroy air quality” and “not going to drain the Great Salt Lake.”

Kevin O’Leary attends Consensus Miami 2026 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 6, 2026, in Florida.
Romain Maurice / Getty Images

Austin Pritchett, a cofounder of West GenCo, the developer partnering with O’Leary Digital Limited on the project, said that they plan to purchase roughly 3,000 acre‑feet of on‑site water rights and already have around 10,000 acre‑feet under contract from the nearby town of Snowville if needed. 

Added together, that’s enough water to supply the basic needs of more than 20,000 Utah households. Utah’s Division of Water Rights has only received one application for the project so far — to transfer 1,900 acre-feet currently used for irrigation by the Bar H Ranch. That application was pulled last week, but a representative with the ranch said it will refile and “fully intends to move forward with the project.” A division spokesperson said they anticipate more applications from the data center developers soon.

Some scientists worry the project’s power demands and resulting heat island effect will transform its high-desert climate into something more akin to the Sahara.

Stratos would build its own power plant, state supporters have said, and its fuel will likely come from a corridor carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon, and California called the Ruby Pipeline. O’Leary specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said.

“It could generate power at a significant level,” said Paul Morris, executive director of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful quasi-governmental state agency that provides tax incentives for development, during a public meeting in April. “This location was picked because of the gas pipeline.”

Hansel Valley in Utah, where Stratos wants to build a power plant.
Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune

Davies, the physics professor, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the sheer scale of the 9-gigawatt project. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed.

“Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.”

The entire project will actually produce roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy, according to Davies. It starts with the massive on-site power generation, which will generate 7 to 8 gigawatts of waste heat just producing the needed electricity for the data center, since gas plants are only about 57 percent efficient.

And once that electricity reaches the data center, every watt will turn into pure heat, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it converts it into heat, Davies explained, whether it’s a toaster, a car, or a sprawling rack of computer servers.

Typically, waste heat from end uses of electricity is dumped far from a power plant, in homes, businesses, or on roads where it dissipates. In this case, the Stratos project will release roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy into Hansel Valley, according to Davies. That trapped thermal load is the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs’ worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.

That doesn’t mean the project would wipe out the landscape with an explosion or release dangerous nuclear radiation, but the heat it creates could devastate the local ecology.

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high-desert environment? A valley?”

Davies thinks dumping that much heat into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by 5 degrees F during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.

“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”

Evaporation would spike. The dew point could collapse, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants, and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, Abbott and Davies said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another source of dust on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lake bed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

“I’m happy to be further educated. Maybe I’m getting something wrong here,” Davies said. “But that is kind of the point, right? You literally have a hyperscale project that is getting no due diligence.”

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Samantha Moilanen contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built on May 18, 2026.

Higher gas prices are bringing some Americans back to public transit.

The increase in ridership comes as the war in Iran has disrupted oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing the national average price of gasoline beyond $4.50 per gallon. In California, drivers are paying more than $6.15 per gallon on average. 

Rising fuel prices have historically pushed at least some Americans toward buses and trains, particularly commuter rail. But experts caution that decades of car-oriented development and inconsistent transit funding still leave most people with few practical alternatives to driving.

For those reasons, ridership is rising most sharply in places with robust transit systems and steep fuel prices.

California is a clear example. Transit agencies in San Diego, Los Angeles County, and the San Francisco Bay Area have seen ridership jump in recent weeks. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency –– which, like others in California, received an emergency loan from the state in February –– saw its highest ridership totals since the pandemic in March.

Mark Olson, a spokesman for the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, said gas prices probably drove the 6.5 percent jump in ridership it experienced in March compared to the previous year. Until the agency surveys riders, however, that remains an educated guess. 

“A lot of our riders are low-income, and certainly gas prices can be much more sensitive to lower-income residents and riders,” Olson said. In an effort to court riders, the agency, which faces a $500 million budget deficit over the next four years, has launched a commute calculator that compares the cost of driving and public transit. 

Michael Roccaforte, a spokesman for the San Francisco MTA, said it is too early to link higher gas prices to ridership increases but called the return of riders to Muni — which has undergone speed and reliability upgrades in recent years — “a promising sign.”

“It’s a service that really matters to everyone here in San Francisco,” he said.

The ridership gains aren’t limited to California. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in the Washington, D.C., region and Valley Metro in Texas also reported increases. Intercity passenger rail operators Amtrak and Brightline have seen a boost, too. 

The trend mirrors past research showing that sustained increases in fuel costs can push some people toward public transit. Hiroyuki Iseki, an urban studies and planning professor at the University of Maryland, co-authored a study on how gasoline prices affected public transit in 10 cities between 2002 and 2011. He found that when gas prices climbed 10 percent over the course of 13 months, light rail ridership increased by 1.2 percent and bus ridership by 0.8 percent. 

Iseki’s study also found psychological effects as gas prices passed different thresholds. For example, when gas prices rose by 10 percent and topped $3 per gallon, ridership of all forms of mass transit increased by about 1.2 percent. A 10 percent increase that pushed prices beyond $4 led to a 9.3 percent jump for light rail. 

“Usually the people who use commuter rail take rail only for commuting, just one round trip between home and their work location,” Iseki said. “Commuter rail, the travel distance is longer than other transit trips, so the longer the distance of travel the more pricey the gasoline cost.”

Some people are better positioned to leave their cars at home, said UCLA urban planning professor Michael Manville. Those with access to commuter rail, which tends to be time competitive with driving, might make a change. But the more likely outcome is people continue driving to work and make shorter or fewer trips or even cut back on other expenses, he said. That’s because of the cognitive hurdle often required to make a switch to mass transit. 

Read Next What we lost when cars won Kate Yoder

“It’s one thing to say, ‘Look, I’m just not going to drive quite as much as I used to,’ in a discretionary way,” Manville said. “It’s quite another for the typical person to then say, ‘I’m not gonna drive to work. I’m gonna figure out how the bus works.’”

There is a societal challenge as well. The U.S. has since the end of World War II made cars the focal point of city planning. “We made a bunch of policy decisions that turned them into bad masters, but they are also good servants,” Manville said of automobiles. “You throw the family in them, and you don’t have to worry about the chaos of your kids and all their stuff.”

A fundamental shift from car travel to public transit would require better-funded systems that offer greater reliability and convenience. Transit has accounted for less than a third of federal transportation funding since 1956. As of 2017, 87 percent of trips in the U.S. were taken by car. 

Federal policy has an enormous impact on who does and does not have access to something like commuter rail. Elisa Ramirez, who works on policy for Transportation for America, would like to see the federal government treat mass transit as a core priority with consistent funding. Until that happens, car travel will likely continue to be the dominant mode of transport. 

“Time is money, and even though people can afford a $2 fare, they can’t afford to be late for work or miss doctors appointments,” she said. “For most Americans, driving is not optional, and that’s my big thing. How much does gas impact people moving to transit? First we need to have reliable transit.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gas prices are rising. So is public transit ridership. on May 18, 2026.

America’s broken approaches to roadway safety and criminal justice are profoundly intertwined, a provocative new report argues — and until reformers in both fields reckon with how deeply their battles are connected, neither will notch any real progress.

Researchers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law closely examined how mass car dependency amplifies harm in the criminal legal system, like rampant traffic stops that disproportionately turn deadly for people of color or traffic fines that trap low-income earners in “inescapable, inequitable cycles of indebtedness, as ticketing practices stress profits over safety.”

The report encourages Vision Zero advocates to consider how an over-emphasis on enforcement-based safety strategies is hobbling the cause, by creating incentives for ineffective policing that distract and siphon resources from proven solutions, like increasing mobility alternatives, that are often forgotten or ignored.

“Police reform advocates and road safety advocates should be working together, just as departments of transportation and police departments should be working together,” said Scarlett Neath, senior adviser at the Policing Project and an author of the report. “Those two agencies and those two groups of advocates need to be swimming in the same direction.”

Recommended How Some Traffic Fines and Fees Can Make Our Roads More Dangerous Kea Wilson July 31, 2023

The report authors say that, in many ways, America’s car-dependent transportation system and police-focused approach to safety evolved in tandem. They argue that “corporate interests, public investment decisions, and racial discrimination” collectively eroded public transit networks in favor of installing officers on roadsides across the nation.

Neath doesn’t deny that there should be consequences for deadly driving, but says the particulars of how our communities impose those punishments has devastated many communities — without significantly reducing the likelihood of future crashes fast enough. Indeed, the United States has twice the rate of fatal car crash deaths of other high-income countries, and more than triple the rate of police killings.

“We’re not saying there’s no deterrence effect [from policing],” she added. “But the deterrence it might cause often also comes with significant costs — and there other solutions that may have bigger deterrent effects without those costs.”

Recommended Study: Police Killings of Civilians Undercounted By More Than Half Kea Wilson October 7, 2021

One of the steepest costs of over-emphasizing policing in traffic safety, Neath says, is simply diverting attention and resources away from infrastructure and vehicle technology that make it difficult or impossible for motorists to drive in deadly ways— rather than reacting to bad behavior after the fact.

The design-focused solutions we do have, meanwhile, are inequitably distributed. A 2023 study found that roughly “60 percent of Black children live in neighborhoods that lack amenities associated with healthy development, including sidewalks or walking paths.” Black communities remain significantly more policed than white neighborhoods with similar homicide rates and income levels.

“If a lot of enforcement is happening at the same intersection that should be a sign that there are things we should do to stop enforcement from happening through structural, preventative measures,” she added. “If a ton of folks are blazing through a road and police aren’t able to control that behavior, the stop lights have to be retimed, the speed limit has to be lowered, and maybe, the road needs to be redesigned.” 

Recommended A Plan to Eliminate Pretextual Police Stops, While Still Increasing Traffic Safety Cameron Bolton November 21, 2023

Worse, Neath says many roadside stops aren’t motivated by traffic safety at all.

The report’s authors note that “pretextual” stops exploded in the 1970s, when War on Drugs-era politicians encouraged police departments to profile suspects based on their race and gender, and use broken tail lights, expired tags, and any other available pretext to stop and search their cars.

Today, explicit and implicit “stop quotas” still provide perverse incentives for cops to accelerate their rate of pretextual stops to write lots of tickets, rather than wait around to catch the most flagrantly dangerous drivers — especially as many municipalities have come to rely on fines and fees to pay for basic services.

“When people hear about traffic stops, there’s an assumption that they’re made for safety-related reasons,” Neath added. “But we know from data in jurisdictions across the country that it’s really a mixed bag. … Police resources are finite, and we’ve seen that when departments prioritize safety stops, they have better crash prevention outcomes — without negative outcomes for the kind of crime-fighting [efforts] that pretext stops are theoretically are used for, because [pretextual stops] are so infrequently discovering evidence of crimes.” 

Recommended Survey: Americans Still Want Police To Cut Traffic Stops That Don’t Make Anyone Safer Kea Wilson March 26, 2025

To truly make American streets safe, Neath says it won’t be enough just to end policies that incentivize or require ineffective policing in the transportation realm or to redesign streets to put safety first. It will require thinking about how those two goals interact — and looking to new models to enhance them both.

Across the report and a companion study written in partnership with the Vision Zero Network, the Policing Project outlined dozens of strategies that communities can consider, including under-discussed ones, like piloting civilian enforcement and equipment repair vouchers to remove a common pretext for police and motorist interaction.

Most of all, though, Neath says it’s time for advocates to think more holistically about what safety is — and how deeply intertwined the Vision Zero and police reform movements have always been.

“Preventable deaths and injuries in car crashes, unacceptable violent outcomes from the most common form of police community member contact — these are both public health crises,” she added. “It’s an opportune time to learn from the progress we’ve made on both fronts, and to double down on that progress.”

• Are conservatives coming around to walkability? The American Enterprise Institute thinks they should. And the Reason Foundation is in favor of transit-oriented development.
• Much of AEI’s argument has to do with how being able to roam around the neighborhood improves their mental health and takes pressure off parents to drive their kids everywhere. But not everyone on the right accepts Tim Carney’s thesis (Longer Forms). Carney’s critics on the right should talk to school crossing guards before claiming that car-centric streets don’t influence where kids can walk (The Guardian).
• In related news, Brandon Donnelly wrote about how more young families that can afford to do so are staying in cities rather than moving to the suburbs. And Angie Schmitt interviewed Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” (Love of Place)
• Uber is offering transit agencies $50,000 grants to test on-demand transit service. (Cities Today)
• CalTrans is looking into “bullet buses” that would travel 140 miles per hour on dedicated freeway lanes between Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Hoodline)
• L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez returned to one of his favorite topics: how screwed up the city’s sidewalk repair program is.
• Debris from one of Amtrak’s new Acela cars is the likely cause of a recent fire at Penn Station. (New York Daily News)
• Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller criticized the city council for cutting $5 million from pedestrian safety. (KOB 4)
• Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell defended himself against protesters who say the city is diverting funds for Vision Zero to road repaving. (News Channel 5)
• Kansas City will add east-west bus routes and step up frequency during the World Cup. (Star)
• Bike buses are catching on in Baltimore. (The Banner)
• Amtrak’s sleeper cars are getting upgraded (Business Insider).

Solar installations 'through the roof' Channel News brendan 18th May 2026 Teaser Media

DISCLAIMER: The following is an entirely fictitious, satirical response imagined on behalf of ReputationDefender.com. ReputationDefender has not made any such statement, has no known connection to Shell plc, and is an innocent and entirely respectable party in this affair. Any resemblance to actual ReputationDefender communications is coincidental. This is satire. ReputationDefender’s real services are available at reputationdefender.com. We rather hope they see the funny side.

Use browser to enlarge image.

In an imaginary but entirely plausible response, the world’s leading online reputation management firm ReputationDefender confronts the challenge of a lifetime: can professional reputation repair — however skilled, however well-resourced — actually defend Shell plc? The fictitious ReputationDefender statement above works through the brief scandal by scandal: the Nazi-era history of founder Sir Henri Deterding; the alleged Neptune Strategy of busting oil sanctions for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Hakluyt spy firm allegedly deployed against Greenpeace and Ogoni activists in Nigeria; the catastrophic 2004 reserves scandal in which Shell admitted overstating its proved reserves by 3.9 billion barrels — triggering a $150 million SEC fine, the forced departure of chairman Sir Philip Watts, and the collapse of the century-old Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading partnership; and the ongoing Niger Delta pollution claims, climate litigation, and greenwashing controversies that constitute Shell’s thoroughly modern reputation problem. The imaginary conclusion: the brief is professionally stimulating, the inbox is open, and those fictional barrels were only the beginning.

WE CAN DEFEND ANYONE. THEN WE READ THE FILE. was first posted on May 17, 2026 at 10:55 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

 

Can the world’s most comprehensive corporate crime scene be polished back to respectability? Our outspoken correspondent investigates. Spoiler: No.

The audacity. The sheer, brass-necked, gas-flaring, dividend-pumping audacity of it.

John Donovan — Shell shareholder, Shell nemesis, and the man Shell would most like to fall down a very deep offshore well — has lobbed the ultimate grenade into the reputation management industry. He has challenged ReputationDefender to defend Shell plc: a company whose historical file is so thick, so heavy, and so radioactive that it requires its own safety rating before being approached by researchers.

And quite right too. Because the article makes the delicious observation that Shell’s reputation problem is not “one bad headline” but rather bad headlines that have “formed geological strata.” One does not simply SEO one’s way out of geological strata. One would need a drill, and Shell has plenty of those — and look how that tends to end up. royaldutchshellplc

BUT WAIT — DID THE ARTICLE GO FAR ENOUGH?

Your correspondent notes, with respectful outrage, that the piece largely focuses on the modern scandal ecosystem — Nigeria, climate litigation, greenwashing theatre, shareholder revolts, and the increasingly comedy-rich gap between “net zero ambition” and “let’s build more LNG terminals.” All perfectly damning. All thoroughly deserved.

But there is more in the cupboard, darlings. Much, much more.

SHELL AND THE APARTHEID REGIMES: THE CHAPTER THEY’D RATHER FORGET

Let us speak plainly about something rather important. While the world was campaigning to isolate apartheid South Africa and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia — illegally sanctioned regimes propped up by racial oppression — Shell was rather busy keeping the petrol flowing. The so-called “Neptune Strategy” saw Shell help circumvent oil sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government, a programme documented in sufficient detail to make even a corporate communications director wince into their expense-account claret.

Rhodesia, similarly, was not supposed to receive oil. Sanctions existed. International consensus was clear. Shell, apparently, found sanctions somewhat inconvenient for business planning purposes and made alternative arrangements. The kind of arrangements that, had they been carried out by a human being rather than a corporation with a logo and a PR department, would have attracted rather more personal consequences.

To be fair, the article does contain an “Apartheid” category in its site archive, suggesting this is well-trodden ground for Mr Donovan’s operation. But in the “Ultimate Challenge” article itself, it goes largely unmentioned. A miss, we think. Because helping prop up apartheid regimes is not the sort of thing that fits neatly into ReputationDefender’s Phase Three: Historical Controversy Containment protocol under the charming heading of “legacy reputational complexity.” It is, to be blunt, considerably worse than that.

HAKLUYT: THE SPY FIRM IN THE SHELL CLOSET

And then there is Hakluyt & Company — the intelligence firm staffed by former MI6 officers, deeply associated with Shell, whose activities included alleged undercover operations targeting Greenpeace activists and Ogoni community campaigners in Nigeria.

Think about that for a moment. Shell, already mired in the fallout from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution — the Ogoni activist and writer hanged by Nigeria’s military government in 1995 amid enormous international outcry — was reportedly using the services of a sophisticated private intelligence outfit to monitor those who dared to object. Greenpeace. Environmental campaigners. People holding placards and writing letters.

One imagines the internal memo: “The activists are being rather noisy about the oil pollution and the judicial killings. Shall we hire some former spooks to keep an eye on them?”

That is not reputation management. That is surveillance of your critics dressed up in an old Etonian accent and filed under “stakeholder intelligence.”

For ReputationDefender’s proposed invoice, we suggest Hakluyt warrants its own line item: “Covert activist monitoring legacy — premium heritage sensitivity package — price upon application, cash preferred.”

THE FULL CHARGE SHEET THAT ReputationDefender WOULD FACE

Let us summarise what any brave reputation management firm would actually be taking on, should they accept the Donovan Challenge:

• A founding leader, Sir Henri Deterding, who expressed open admiration for Hitler and whose Nazi-era associations remain a matter of documented historical record and considerable embarrassment.
• A German subsidiary that operated under the Third Reich.
• Alleged support for oil sanctions-busting on behalf of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
• Alleged involvement in circumventing sanctions against Rhodesia.
• Documented operations in the Niger Delta resulting in catastrophic environmental damage and decades of community suffering.
• The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine in 1995, carried out by the Nigerian military government, with Shell’s alleged failure to use its influence to prevent it subsequently becoming the subject of legal action and lasting moral outrage.
• Alleged use of Hakluyt, the MI6-adjacent intelligence firm, to conduct undercover monitoring of environmental activists and community campaigners.
• The OPL 245 Nigerian corruption scandal, involving an alleged $1.3 billion payment routing through a convicted money launderer.
• Decades of climate science knowledge, reportedly held internally, while publicly sowing doubt.
• A climate court judgment requiring Shell to cut emissions — subsequently appealed.
• Brent Spar. Groningen earthquakes. Arctic drilling misadventures. Shareholder rebellions. Greenwashing complaints upheld by advertising authorities.
• And, as a bonus, broadband service apparently so catastrophically poor that customers describe it on Trustpilot in terms usually reserved for war crimes.

THE VERDICT

The article asks whether “some reputations cannot be managed” and whether “the only real reputation strategy left is accountability.” Quite so. And accountability, it turns out, is the one product that no reputation management firm actually sells — because it would put them out of business. royaldutchshellplc

Shell’s PR machine has spent decades proving that you can reframe almost anything with the right vocabulary. “Legacy hydrocarbon complexity.” “Multi-decade stakeholder perception opportunity.” “Pre-modern governance context.” (That last one, we suggest, covers both the Nazi-era history AND the apartheid-sanctions-busting in one elegantly vague swoop.)

But the critics — Donovan chief among them — have the receipts. The courts have the filings. The communities have the contaminated land. The historians have the archives. And the Ogoni people have the graves.

No amount of search-result softening repairs that.

ReputationDefender, if you’re reading this: the quote you’re looking for is “not for any fee currently expressible in human mathematics.”

And to Mr Donovan: yes, you absolutely should have included the apartheid regimes and the Hakluyt spy operation in the original article. Consider this a helpful addendum, filed under “the cupboard goes deeper than you showed.”

— Your Outspoken Correspondent, still counting the charge sheet

THE IMAGE

There you have it — The Daily Slick, Britain’s least-sponsored oil scandal daily. The front page includes:

• The Deterding/Nazi-era splash with the parody Shell badge
• The Neptune Strategy and apartheid sanctions-busting in column three
• The Hakluyt spy operation tucked neatly alongside it
• The imaginary ReputationDefender invoice (with “Do Not Call” pricing for the Hakluyt line, naturally)
• The OPL 245 wiretap, Brent Spar, and Groningen teaser strips along the bottom

To your question — yes, the original article would have been considerably strengthened by including the apartheid and Hakluyt material. Both are extremely well-documented, both involve active choices rather than passive corporate drift, and both go well beyond the kind of “reputational complexity” that any PR firm can euphemise away. The Hakluyt angle in particular is striking: using former intelligence operatives to monitor environmental activists is not a footnote — it is a chapter heading.

 

Satirical commentary. All references to specific allegations are based on publicly documented reporting, legal proceedings, and published historical record. Shell, as ever, is invited to respond.

 

EXCLUSIVE: SHELL SHOCK! THE BRAND SO TOXIC EVEN THE SPIN DOCTORS NEED HAZMAT SUITS was first posted on May 17, 2026 at 10:10 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

Remindeer:

I’ll be reading from my book Antonio “Ike” DeVargas—Norteño Warrior: The Politics of Land, Power, and Justice in Northern New Mexico on Wednesday, May 20, 6 pm, at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe. Ty Bannerman will also be reading from his book Nuclear Family: a memoir of the atomic west.

A blurb from Lucy Lippard, author of  Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.

Unlike journalists from elsewhere “covering” the chaotic politics of northern New Mexico, the writer Kay Matthews has lived it. This book on her friend and fellow warrior, the grassroots leader Ike DeVargas, is a lively and detailed account of decades of struggle. The varied participants include several tiny rural communities, the US Forest Service, the Spotted Owl, State and County local officials, La Raza, environmentalists, and local Chicano land grant activists. The subtitle says it all: “The Politics of Land, Power, and Justice in Northern New Mexico.”

New Mexico has a notoriously complex history, often playing out invisibly in its many poor rural communities still dealing with the traumas of colonialism, land grants, and corrupt officials. Those of us from away, no matter how long we have lived here, cannot fully understand the issues in Rio Arriba County, the devotion to homeplace, longtime dominance of Emilio Naranjo, and the economic importance of grazing, firewood, and logging permits to the surrounding communities. The battles that began in the 1960s are ongoing. Though DeVargas and his cohort often lost, they are famously resilient and their occasional hard-won victories have changed the political landusescape. Matthews and her family have long been active and trusted allies in these struggles, and her paper, La Jicarita, is a vital information source for those still fighting the good fights and for those of us who are supportive but not in the thick of it.

Few of these stories are known to a broader audience and hopefully Matthews’s book will not only keep the memory of Ike DeVargas alive but inspire other contributions from the inside of those adobe houses with no running water, no electricity, like the one Ike lived in. So if you’re a lefty and ready to participate, but not quite sure what that means in northern New Mexico, read about the Ike DeVargas model… and step up.
—

 

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 10, 2026 thru Sat, May 16, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (10 articles)

• This critical climate system is tipping…. Or is it? DrGilbz on Youtube, Ella Gilbert, May 9, 2026.
• This summer, the American water crisis becomes real Concerns over water access are poised to consume summer in the U.S., as crises in Corpus Christi and across the Colorado River threaten to boil over. Grist, Molly Taft, May 10, 2026.
• Poll: Most Coloradans say climate change is harming human health More than 1 in 3 Coloradans say they or a loved one has experienced a climate-change related health impact, according to new survey data Colorado Sun, John Ingold, May 11, 2026.
• Why has this autumn been so hot and dry? Australia's autumn behaves as expected from climate models The Conversation, Kimberley Reid, May 11, 2026.
• 2026 Has Already Broken Climate Records. El Niño Could Break More. The increasingly likely emergence of an El Niño this summer will likely continue the year’s record-breaking weather trends and could lead to “an unprecedented year of global fire,” according to a statement from World Weather Attribution, a climate research collaboration. Eos, Grace van Deelen, May 12, 2026.
• Some climate shocks can increase the likelihood of war Researchers warn against oversimplifying climate change’s role in conflicts, but some conditions can increase the likelihood of violence. The Daily Climate, EHN Curators, May 12, 2026.
• Something startling is happening in the Gulf of Mexico Its waters are heating up twice as fast as the global oceans, with huge implications for hurricane risk. Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters, May 13, 2026.
• Melting of Greenland ice sheet could release large stores of methane Seismic surveys and sediment cores suggest that dozens of deep pockmarks on the sea floor were created when Arctic methane stores were disrupted by climate change after the last glacial maximum. New Scientist, Alec Luhn, May 14, 2026.
• Scientists find climate change is reducing oxygen in rivers worldwide Global warming is causing rivers to slowly lose oxygen, threatening fish and other lives. The Independent News, Seth Borenstein, May 15, 2026.
• Are we wrong about this..? Dr Gilbz on Youtube, Ella Gilbert, May 15, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (4 articles)

• Why Should You Care About Changes In Atlantic Ocean Currents? Mechanisms and impacts of a collapsing Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) explained— good to know because AMOC cessation is currently a favorite hobbyhorse of climate denialists due to it being convenently confusing. CleanTechnica, Carolyn Fortuna, May 09, 2026.
• Antarctica is melting from below and scientists say it`s worse than expected Hidden warm-water traps beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves may be speeding up sea level rise far faster than expected. ScienceDaily, iC3 Polar Research Hub, May 10, 2026.
• Drilling Into the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica A deep read on the why, how and extraordinary challenges of obtaining deep samples of the sea level critical Thwaites glacier, with some spectacular photographs. NYT, Raymond Zhong and Chang W. Lee, May 11, 2026.
• A New Study Explains How Carbon Dioxide Cools the Upper Atmosphere-and Warms Earth Below In a new study, researchers from Columbia University describe the phenomenon’s mechanics, illuminating how it is largely determined by the way carbon dioxide (CO2) interacts with different wavelengths of light. State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, May 12, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (3 articles)

• Top climate research center at risk of cuts sues Trump administration Universities that run the National Center for Atmospheric Research want to keep it from being dismantled Scientific American, Alexandra Witze, May 09, 2026.
• Nudge theory was all about taking responsibility - but it allowed big business to look the other way 'Nudges" inadvertently result in ''responsibilisation,'' disproportionate assignment of culpability for environmental harm to individuals when that harm is rooted in industrial practices often begging for better regulation. The Conversation, Nick Chater, May 11, 2026.
• The Global Impact of Losing U.S. Sea Level Science Cuts to climate science risk halting or even erasing decades of progress in global change research—just as risks from rising seas demand better data, informed decisionmaking, and faster action. Eos, Andra J. Garner, Robert E. Kopp, Gregory G. Garner, Aimée B. A. Slangen and Benjamin P. Horton, May 15, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (2 articles)

• The scientific study story has a questionable future. That may be a good thing The way we do science journalism is going to change ReportEarth, Chris Mooney, May 11, 2026.
• As tick bites surge, conspiracy theories follow The conspiracists are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Grist, Zoya Teirstein, May 14, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (2 articles)

• Why climate action stalls, despite widespread popular support The Conversation, Laurie Parsons, May 08, 2026.
• Changing climate law to prevent civil cases removes a key protection for NZ citizens The government’s plan to change the law to bar claims for harms from greenhouse gas emissions shuts down New Zealand’s most important climate tort case, meaning it will never be decided on its merits. The Conversation, Bjørn-Oliver Magsig, May 14, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (2 articles)

• How climate change could help hantavirus find more hosts Experts say extreme weather is boosting the odds that the pathogens carried by rodents will spill over into human populations. Grist, Zoya Teirstein, May 12, 2026.
• Hantavirus is a climate story Scientists tell HEATED the hantavirus outbreak is a warning that climate change is scrambling the boundaries between humans, wildlife, and disease. HEATED, Emily Atkin, May 14, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #19 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 3, 2026 thru Sat, May 9, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, May 10, 2026.
• Trump`s EPA Seeks Looser Construction Rules for Gas Plants, Data Centers and Factories Changes would allow companies to begin more construction before an air permit is issued—ramping up the pressure for permit approval. Inside Climate News, Charles Paullin, May 12, 2026.

International Climate Conferences and Agreements (1 article)

• How this climate conference secured a breakthrough Youtube, Simon Clark, May 7, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

• Talking Shop: Trump's Embrace of Climate Denialism Youtube, Covering Climate Now, May 7, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 article)

• But what about China' ‘But what about China?’ is a fair question. China is simultaneously the world’s largest emitter and the world’s leading ‘electrostate’. Climate Trunk, John Lang, May 10, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

Stronger Local Food and Farming Systems Needed to Stabilize Food Prices

A new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) warns that shifting global politics are reshaping food security, and unless we change course, food prices, hunger, and corporate concentration are set to worsen. 

Global food prices remain more than 35 percent above pre-pandemic levels, with conflict, trade tensions, aid cuts, and energy shocks disrupting supply chains and making food more expensive. 

The authors argue that a heavy dependence on volatile global markets, high food imports, and long supply chains that are controlled by just a few countries and companies have made our food and agriculture systems dangerously vulnerable. And they’re not only fragile — they’re unjust, says Shalmali Guttal, an IPES-Food Expert. 

But governments can chart a different path forward. The report argues for “resilient self-reliance” that is grounded in local supply chains and markets, support systems for farmers, and by reducing their dependence on these global markets. 

Mamadou Goita, another IPES-Food Expert says we already have solutions building this resilience. He points to the West African regional food security reserve, which shows that “cooperation and public tools can stabilize markets.” Other success stories can be found in India, Canada, and Norway. What we need to scale these solutions, Goita says, is the political will.

Fiji Advances Organic Ag Policy

Fiji’s government is pushing a new national organic farming policy forward as part of a larger effort to improve food security and domestic food production.

According to Tomasi Tunabuna, the country’s Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Sugar Industry, the National Organic Policy 2026-2030 isn’t just an agricultural framework. “It’s an economic resilience strategy, an environmental safeguard, and a public health investment.”

The government says the Plan is a direct response to increasing fuel and fertilizer prices as well the rising cost of living. They hope that, in the long term, it will help farmers save money, improve soil health, and boost climate resilience.The Ministry also sees this as an opportunity to strengthen their export markets, particularly for crops including turmeric, ginger, and coconut oil. 

“In a time of global uncertainty, Fiji is choosing resilience over dependency and local solutions over imported vulnerability,” Tunabuna says.

India Released Nearly 3,000 Climate-Resilient Crop Varieties

In the last decade, India has released close to 3,000 climate resilience crop varieties, according to a recent update from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

The Council launched the National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture program in 2011 to develop and disseminate climate-resilience agricultural technologies.

To complement the new varieties, the program also includes training and field demonstrations to help farmers transition to stress-tolerant crops and adopt practices that build capacity and strengthen the sustainability of their farm. To amplify their work in these vulnerable areas, researchers have also set up climate-resilient villages in more than 440 villages across 150 districts. In these areas, the government says they are demonstrating effective technologies for wider implementation and replication.

This work is urgently needed: Of the 650 agricultural districts assessed through this research, around half are highly or very highly vulnerable to climate shocks including droughts, floods, and heatwaves.

Three-Quarters of USDA Researchers Won’t Relocate to Kansas City

Around three-quarters of researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) say they will not move from Washington D.C. as part of the agency’s relocation plans.

For the second time in seven years, USDA is pushing to move D.C.-based employees at the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to Kansas City. The transition is expected to go into effect this summer.

An internal survey conducted by the union reveals that we will likely see a repeat of 2019, when hundreds of ERS and NIFA employees were asked to make the same move. Around 85 percent either quit or retired in response to the request.

USDA claims that no programs will be affected by the changes, but Dr. Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at ASU, is one of many critics worried about the resulting “brain drain.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3403 says, “By forcing this move on an accelerated timeline, with no promise of financial help or job security, the USDA is effectively dismantling decades of institutional knowledge, jeopardizing the very data and funding that farmers, policymakers and land-grant universities rely on.”

A Record High Investment to Transform School Meals

Last week, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced plans to strengthen home-grown school meals programs that reach hundreds of thousands of children in East Africa.

The support from Danish foundations Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) and Grundfos Foundation makes this the largest private sector commitment to school feeding in WFP’s history. The U.N. agency and the Foundations are entering into the third phase of a partnership, which will focus on models in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. The work will connect schools with local farmers and clean energy solutions while helping to build climate resilience.

Cindy McCain, WFP’s Executive Director calls school meals “one of the best investments a government can make in a nation’s future.”

WFP estimates that it will provide 366,000 children with nutritious, locally sourced meals while creating stable markets for more than 57,500 smallholder farmers over the next five years. The investment will also support the School Meals Accelerator, a global initiative from the School Meals Coalition, which helps governments with catalytic technical assistance scale national school feeding programs and improve meals for an additional 100 million children by 2030.

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

Photo courtesy of Chrysanthi Ha, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Global Politics Reshape Food Security, Fiji Pushes Organic Ag, WFP Scales School Meals appeared first on Food Tank.

A major oil company is seeking a state tax break in Texas worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build a massive power plant. The energy won’t be going to residential customers, though. Instead, the gas plant will be used to power a data center whose eventual tenant could be Microsoft.

Chevron subsidiary Energy Forge One has filed an application with the State Comptroller’s board to obtain a tax abatement for a power plant it’s building in West Texas. In late January, the comptroller’s office made a recommendation to support the application’s approval — the first such approval under the program for a power plant intended solely for data center use.

In March, following news reports that Microsoft was looking into purchasing power from the Energy Forge project, Chevron said that it had entered into an “exclusivity agreement” with Microsoft and Engine 1, an investment fund involved in the project. In January, Microsoft pledged to be a “good neighbor” in communities where it is building data centers, including promising to pay a “full and fair share of local property taxes.”

The potential tax abatement for the project comes as big tech companies are battling rising public fury about data centers and electricity costs. It also comes as lawmakers start to cast a more critical eye on ballooning incentives for data centers, some of which have cost some states — including Texas — $1 billion or more each year.

Read Next Texas is giving data centers more than $1 billion in tax breaks each year Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune

Chevron spokesperson Paula Beasley told Wired in an email that all tax incentives under consideration for the Energy Forge project “apply solely to the power generation facility” to “support new energy infrastructure, and do not extend to any future data center facilities that may be served.” Beasley also said that there is currently “no definitive agreement” with Microsoft for this power plant.

“Microsoft is in discussions with Chevron,” Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and general counsel for infrastructure, said in a statement to Wired. “No commercial terms have been finalized, and there is no definitive agreement at this time.”

Chevron is applying for a tax abatement for the project under Texas’ Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) Act. Passed in 2023, the program is intended to incentivize businesses to build large infrastructure projects in the state in exchange for guarantees to bring jobs and revenue. Accepted projects get a cap set on the amount of taxable property they can be charged through local school district taxes.

The Pecos-Barstow-Toyah school board approved the project’s application at a meeting in February. The state pays for the tax abatement, so the school district itself does not lose out on any money.

According to documents from the state, the Chevron project could net more than $227 million in savings for the company over a 10-year period, depending on the eventual size of the project and investment. The application says the plant will provide “over 25 permanent, full-time jobs,” though there’s no requirement to do so because it’s considered an electricity generation facility.

Read Next First crypto, now data centers: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina community Katie Myers

The planned gas plant won’t connect to the grid, instead providing “electricity for direct consumption by a data center,” according to its application. So-called behind-the-meter gas plants have become increasingly popular for data center developers facing yearslong waits to connect to the grid. According to data from nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, the U.S. at the start of the year had nearly 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in the development pipeline solely to power data centers, with several more massive gas projects announced since the data was published.

A Wired analysis of less than a dozen power plants being constructed to explicitly serve data centers, including the Chevron project, found that these power plants are permitted to emit more greenhouse gases than many small- to medium-size countries. The Energy Forge plant alone could emit more than 11.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually — more than the country of Jamaica emitted in 2024. Beasley told Wired that the plant “is being designed to comply with applicable environmental regulations, including all applicable federal and state air quality standards.”

West Texas is a major fossil fuel production hub, which has helped it emerge as a hot spot for both data centers and behind-the-meter gas development. However, Energy Forge’s JETI application notes that the site is one of six across the U.S. under consideration. Without tax incentives, the other sites would be “more attractive locations” to build a gas plant, according to its application, and “Texas would lose the opportunity to attract billions of dollars in new tax revenues.”

This type of claim on applications for tax abatements is pretty routine, says Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. An earlier version of the JETI program, originally created to draw more manufacturing jobs to Texas, handed out incentives to businesses with little oversight, often giving millions in tax breaks to companies already planning on building in the state. While the JETI program significantly curbs the problems and excesses of the old program, Jensen says that the guardrails for a project like Chevron’s are still relatively low.

The JETI tax incentive isn’t the only tax break the power plant could receive. According to county documents, the Energy Forge project could also be eligible for a local incentive that exempts all or part of a property’s value from taxes for up to a decade, under another part of the Texas tax code.

Read Next California will soon have more than 300 data centers. Where will they get their water? Steven Rodas, Inside Climate News

Developers have taken advantage of other tax abatements across the U.S. A report released in April from Good Jobs First, a corporate watchdog group, found that at least three states — including Texas — are losing more than $1 billion in revenue each year from data center sales tax abatements.

A bipartisan group of politicians in Texas, including Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, have expressed mounting concern about the impact tax breaks for data centers are having on state coffers. In March, Patrick ordered the legislature to “study the cost and consequences” of the sales tax exemption — which the state projects could balloon to $3 billion by 2029 — and “make recommendations providing safeguards to ensure that Texans benefit from data center investment.”

In January, Microsoft rolled out a series of pledges on its website, promising to “add to the tax base” in communities where it operates. “We won’t ask local municipalities to reduce their local property tax rates when we buy land or propose a data center presence,” the pledge states. The company did not respond to questions about whether this pledge extends to projects owned by other entities that the company intends to use to power its data centers, or to data center developers that may be building data centers in which Microsoft will be a tenant.

Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, notes that Microsoft’s pledge doesn’t mention tax abatements (the amount of value a person or business’s property is assessed at), which are different from tax rates (the number used to calculate the amount of taxes owed for the property).

“If they don’t say, ‘We will refuse tax abatements,’ then they’ve got their fingers crossed behind their back,” LeRoy says of Microsoft’s pledge.

Tax breaks given to projects like data centers are difficult to track across states: The Good Jobs First report found that 14 states don’t disclose how much revenue they might be losing on data center abatements. As behind-the-meter power becomes an increasingly popular option for data center developers, though it’s not clear how widespread the practice of asking for tax abatements for these specific facilities is.

There are no other behind-the-meter power plants currently being funded by the Texas JETI program or in the application pipeline. Data centers are specifically excluded from being eligible for the JETI program.

Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and a climate official under President Biden, is the author of a recent report that suggests ways to use the AI boom to incentivize tech companies to help pay for needed upgrades to the grid. Tax abatements, the report says, should be restructured to make sure that data center builders connect power to the grid, making behind-the-meter gas options less attractive. Flegal also advocates for permitting reform to make sure that more clean energy can get added to the grid as quickly as possible.

“We should fix our tax code so it’s much more progressive, and we should tax the shit out of these people and use federal money to plan and build a grid that benefits all of us,” she says. “Alas, that is not where we are.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chevron wants a school district tax break for a data center power plant on May 17, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Renewables Have Won The Electricity Battle But Not The Climate War” • British think-tank Ember said increased capacity for solar and wind power provided all the world’s additional need for electricity in 2025. The battle between renewables and power from coal and gas is all over but the shouting. But fossil fuels lobbyists go on shouting. [Pearls and Irritations]

Solar power (Michael Förtsch, Unsplash)

• “Are Solar Panel Prices About To Surge?” • The EU describes solar as having a “significant role in its transition towards cleaner, more affordable and secure” energy, but it is heavily reliant on China to make PV panels. Geopolitical uncertainty, shortages in supply and China’s recent tax reform are threatening to increase the prices of solar panels. [Euronews]
• “US Plan To Allocate Water From The Colorado River Will Severely Impact California, Arizona, And Nevada” • The states that depend on the Colorado River for water seem unable to agree on allocation, so the federal government plans to help them. The Interior Department proposes to reduce the amount of water each state draws by 40%. [CleanTechnica]
• “As Electric Bills Rise, Leaders Of Some States Are Focusing On The Growing Profits Of Utilities” • In some states, the artificial intelligence boom is leading to fights over growing utility profits. The governors, attorneys general, and others are protesting the rising electricity bills, saying cash-strapped residents are stuck in a broken system. [ABC News]
• “The Texas-Size Fight Over Rick Perry’s Nuclear Power And AI Startup” • Seven months ago, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry described as genius an idea from Texas energy billionaire Toby Neugebauer to build the world’s largest data center on a dusty grazing lease near Amarillo. Things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. [MSN]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

A satirical challenge from a long-term Shell shareholder and critic

Disclaimer: This is a satirical opinion article based on publicly available information, shareholder commentary, historical controversy, and documented public criticism. It asks questions, makes fair comment, and invites response. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

ReputationDefender says it helps companies protect and repair their online reputation. On its own website it quotes Weber Shandwick’s 2020 line:

“A company’s reputation is responsible for nearly two-thirds of its market value.”

Nearly two-thirds.

That is not reputation as window dressing. That is reputation as market-value dynamite. That is reputation as the hidden engine room of corporate valuation.

So here is the Ultimate Challenge:

ReputationDefender, are you brave enough to defend Shell?

Not a dentist with one furious Google review.

Not a hotel accused of serving grey scrambled eggs.

Not a crypto influencer trying to bury a podcast clip.

Shell.

The fossil-fuel giant with a century of controversy dragging behind it like an oil slick through a courtroom corridor. The company whose logo has been polished, repainted, rebranded, sustainability-washed, transition-wrapped, legally reviewed and shareholder-presented — and still somehow smells faintly of crude, contradiction and executive bonus varnish.

This is not ordinary reputation management.

This is brand exorcism.

Shell is not a “difficult client.” Shell is the final boss of corporate reputation defence. A company with enough reputational baggage to require its own conveyor belt at the airport.

Where would ReputationDefender even begin?

Page one of Google?

Page one of history?

The Niger Delta?

Climate litigation?

Investor rebellion?

Advertising complaints?

AGM protests?

Greenwashing accusations?

The awkward gap between “net zero ambition” and fossil-fuel expansion?

Or the deeper archive drawer marked: Nazi-era history — handle with gloves?

Because Shell’s reputation problem is not one bad headline. Shell’s problem is that the bad headlines have formed geological strata.

The Shell Problem: Not One Scandal, But an Ecosystem

Shell has spent decades proving the tragicomic limits of corporate messaging.

There are the environmental controversies.

There are the community claims.

There are the climate accusations.

There are the courtroom battles.

There are the shareholder revolts.

There is the endless PR fog machine pumping out phrases such as “energy transition,” “resilience,” “value discipline,” “balanced portfolio,” and “lower-carbon solutions,” while critics ask the rather inconvenient question:

If this is a transition, why does it still look so much like the thing we are supposed to be transitioning away from?

Shell’s brand has become a case study in the difference between reputation management and reputation reality.

A normal corporate reputation repair job might involve suppressing a few adverse search results, improving executive profiles, promoting thought leadership, amplifying ESG content and nudging the internet toward something less radioactive.

Shell would require something closer to a digital witness protection programme.

You would need climate messaging that does not combust on contact with the words “LNG growth.”

You would need Nigeria pages that do not immediately summon oil pollution claims, legal filings and community anger.

You would need investor relations material that can survive shareholders asking whether “net zero” now means “net maybe.”

You would need to reposition a fossil-fuel supermajor as a misunderstood wellness brand with offshore platforms.

Good luck.

And Then There Is Shell’s Nazi-Era History

As if the modern reputation file were not already thick enough, Shell’s historical archive has its own horror cupboard.

The central figure is Sir Henri Deterding, the long-serving boss of Royal Dutch/Shell, who became deeply controversial because of his admiration for Hitler and support for Nazi Germany. His later-life politics and associations remain a toxic part of the company’s historical shadow.

Shell’s German subsidiary also operated in Nazi Germany, and Shell’s historic relationship with the regime has been the subject of reporting, criticism and debate for decades.

This is where the ReputationDefender challenge becomes almost operatic.

Because Shell does not merely have today’s problems. It has yesterday’s ghosts.

Modern Shell may wish to say: “That was then. This is now.”

Critics may reply: “Fine. But the brand did not arrive yesterday. The history came with the logo.”

And for a company whose reputation allegedly represents nearly two-thirds of market value, history is not a footnote. It is a liability with a memory.

So the question sharpens:

Can ReputationDefender defend a company whose reputation problem runs from Nazi-era controversy to Niger Delta pollution claims, from climate lawsuits to AGM rebellions, from fossil-fuel expansion to green transition theatre?

That is not a client brief.

That is a reputation-management Everest expedition through fog, fire and legal review.

A Shareholder Inside the Tent, Rattling the Cutlery

And then there is me.

I am not writing this as a passing activist who discovered Shell last Tuesday.

I am a long-term Shell shareholder.

I am also a long-term Shell critic.

That combination makes the situation especially awkward for Shell’s reputation machine. I am not outside the tent throwing stones. I am inside the shareholder register, asking questions, writing articles, documenting contradictions, challenging the narrative and refusing to clap politely while the company polishes the logo and calls the fumes “strategy.”

I attend to the detail.

I follow the controversies.

I keep the receipts.

I challenge the corporate spin.

I write satirical articles.

I ask the questions Shell would rather bury under a mountain of investor-relations vocabulary.

That is why this proposed grudge match is so irresistible.

ReputationDefender vs Shell: The Grudge Match Made in Media Heaven

In the blue corner:

ReputationDefender — armed with search strategy, online reputation management, executive profile polishing, brand rehabilitation language and the soothing promise that the internet can be made to look less hostile.

In the black-and-yellow corner:

Shell — wearing a hard hat, carrying a sustainability brochure, standing ankle-deep in historic controversy, and insisting everything is under control.

At ringside:

Shareholders.

Activists.

Lawyers.

Journalists.

Communities.

Pension funds.

Climate campaigners.

Historians.

And one long-term shareholder critic asking the obvious question:

Can the most toxic brand in history actually be defended?

And if so, at what price?

Would ReputationDefender quote by the hour?

By the scandal?

By the spill?

By the lawsuit?

By the shareholder revolt?

By the climate target downgrade?

By the awkward Nazi-era archive reference?

Or by the metric tonne of reputational sludge?

The Questions for ReputationDefender

So, ReputationDefender, here is the challenge.

Can you defend Shell?

Would you defend Shell?

How much would you charge?

Would you take the account publicly?

Would you require danger money?

Would the fee include archive-handling gloves?

Would the Nigeria section be billed separately?

Would Nazi-era history count as a premium legacy-risk package?

Would climate litigation trigger surge pricing?

And the juiciest question of all:

Has Shell already been in contact with you?

No allegation is made.

No secret meeting is asserted.

No hidden contract is claimed.

But the question hangs there beautifully, like a gas flare over a corporate communications bunker.

Because if any company on Earth might need a ReputationDefender, surely it is Shell.

And if ReputationDefender can defend Shell, they can probably defend anyone.

A normal client wants help with reputation damage.

Shell brings reputation geology.

A normal client has skeletons in the cupboard.

Shell appears to have an entire fossil-fuel museum in the basement.

A normal client wants search results improved.

Shell needs history itself to stop indexing properly.

Can Reputation Be Defended When the Critics Have Receipts?

Here is the real problem.

Reputation work cannot simply erase substance.

Shell’s critics are not merely noisy. They have material.

They have litigation.

They have reports.

They have community claims.

They have shareholder votes.

They have historical records.

They have climate arguments.

They have investor concerns.

They have public archives.

They have years of accumulated evidence that the brand problem is not a messaging glitch but a credibility crisis.

A company cannot SEO its way out of a moral sinkhole if the sinkhole is still producing quarterly returns.

And that is why Shell may be the ultimate test case.

If ReputationDefender believes reputation drives nearly two-thirds of market value, then Shell’s reputation is not a side issue. It is a financial battlefield.

So here is the challenge, stated plainly:

ReputationDefender, name the price.

How much to defend Shell?

How much to polish the shell?

How much to soften the search results?

How much to explain away the contradictions?

How much to manage the ghosts?

How much to make the world forget what the world keeps remembering?

And if the answer is “we would not touch that account with a remotely operated subsea vehicle,” then that too would be useful information.

Because maybe some brands cannot be defended.

Maybe some reputations cannot be managed.

Maybe some corporate histories cannot be airbrushed.

Maybe the only real reputation strategy left is accountability.

Part Two: Spoof PR / Spin Section Operation Polished Shell: An Imaginary ReputationDefender Proposal

Client: Shell plc
Challenge: Reputational toxicity at planetary scale
Objective: Make the public stop associating Shell with oil spills, climate controversy, Nigeria litigation, shareholder revolts, greenwashing accusations, Nazi-era historical controversy and the general sense that there is probably a court case about this somewhere.

Phase 1: Search Result Softening

Replace unhelpful search associations such as:

• “Shell oil pollution”
• “Shell climate lawsuit”
• “Shell shareholder revolt”
• “Shell greenwashing”
• “Shell Nazi history”
• “Shell Nigeria claims”

With warmer alternatives such as:

• “Shell community energy stories”
• “Shell heritage leadership journey”
• “Shell lower-carbon conversation”
• “Shell shareholder engagement”
• “Shell historical complexity”
• “Shell reputational resilience framework”

Phase 2: Executive Halo Engineering

Commission thought-leadership articles with titles including:

• “Why Complexity Is the New Accountability”
• “Energy Transition: A Journey Best Taken Slowly”
• “Listening to Stakeholders While Continuing Exactly as Planned”
• “From Oil Major to Majorly Misunderstood”
• “Legacy Issues and the Power of Looking Forward”
• “How to Mention Net Zero Without Frightening the Dividend”

Phase 3: Historical Controversy Containment

Avoid phrases such as:

• “Nazi history”
• “Hitler admirer”
• “German subsidiary”
• “awkward archive material”

Instead use:

• “challenging historical associations”
• “legacy reputational complexity”
• “pre-modern governance context”
• “archival stakeholder sensitivity”
• “heritage-risk communications environment”

Phase 4: Nigeria Litigation Reframing

Avoid the phrase “oil pollution.”

Use instead:

• “legacy hydrocarbon complexity”
• “historic operational residue”
• “community-interface environmental challenges”
• “subsurface reputation events”
• “long-tail stakeholder trust issues”

Phase 5: Shareholder Critic Management

Issue warm, inclusive messaging:

“We welcome all shareholder voices, especially those who have spent years loudly documenting our contradictions in public.”

Then immediately route the shareholder critic to a 97-page PDF titled:

“Further Context.”

Phase 6: Quote Request

Estimated cost:

One enormous retainer, three crisis teams, seven reputation analysts, a monastery of copywriters, two legal review units, a historian on danger pay, and a ceremonial wheelbarrow for the invoice.

Optional premium package:

“Total Search-Result Decontamination”

Price available upon proof that physics, memory and public archives have been repealed.

Part Three: Spoof Bot-Reaction / Comment Section The Internet Reacts to ReputationDefender vs Shell

@OilSlickObserver:
ReputationDefender defending Shell is like hiring a window cleaner for a volcano.

@AGMhecklerBot:
Can they remove “shareholder revolt” from search results, or does it keep coming back annually like executive remuneration?

@BrandGuru9000:
Two-thirds of market value is reputation? Shell just asked whether the other third can be used for legal fees.

@NigerDeltaWitness:
Before anyone defends the brand, perhaps address the communities.

@NetZeroMaybe:
Shell’s reputation strategy: “We are committed to transition, but only after maximising the thing we are transitioning from.”

@ArchiveGoblin1939:
Before ReputationDefender starts on Shell’s modern mess, please report to the Nazi-era archive cupboard. Bring gloves.

@InvoiceDepartment:
ReputationDefender quote for Shell: “Please upload scandals in batches of ten.”

@LongTermShareholderCritic:
As a shareholder, I merely ask: can reputation be defended when the critics have receipts, the courts have filings, the archives have history, and the AGM has a protest vote?

@PRinternInTears:
Just got assigned the Shell account. My laptop opened a portal.

@CorporateSpinBot:
Shell is not toxic. It is reputationally carbon-intensive.

@MediaHeavenPromotions:
Coming soon: ReputationDefender vs Shell — One Brand Enters, No Clean Search Result Leaves.

@LegalReviewUnit:
We have reviewed the phrase “most toxic brand in history” and recommend replacing it with “a brand facing a richly diversified portfolio of reputational challenges.”

@ShellSpinGenerator:
This is not a crisis. It is a multi-decade stakeholder perception opportunity.

Final Challenge

So, ReputationDefender:

Will you take the case?

Will you defend Shell?

Will you name the price?

Will you say whether Shell has already approached you?

And if reputation really accounts for nearly two-thirds of market value, what does it say about Shell that so much of its reputation seems to require a legal department, a historian, a crisis consultant and a very large broom?

This is the grudge match made in media heaven:

ReputationDefender vs Shell.

One company sells reputation repair.

The other may be the ultimate test of whether reputation can be repaired at all.

Name the price. Spill the truth. Defend the undefendable.

Ultimate Challenge to ReputationDefender: Can You Defend Shell, the Most Toxic Brand in History? was first posted on May 17, 2026 at 10:59 am.
©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

Transformasi Pengalaman Bermain Kasino Online

Sebelum teknologi live dealer berkembang pesat, mayoritas permainan kasino online mengandalkan sistem otomatis berbasis RNG. Meskipun sistem tersebut tetap populer, banyak pemain merasa pengalaman bermain masih terasa kurang hidup dan minim interaksi sosial.

Kini, teknologi live streaming HD mengubah pola tersebut secara signifikan. Kamera resolusi tinggi, pencahayaan profesional, hingga koneksi streaming stabil memungkinkan pemain menyaksikan jalannya permainan secara real time tanpa gangguan visual yang berarti.

Dealer profesional juga menjadi bagian penting dalam menciptakan atmosfer yang lebih autentik. Mereka memandu permainan, berinteraksi dengan pemain, serta menjaga ritme permainan tetap nyaman dan dinamis.

Teknologi HD Membawa Detail Lebih Nyata

Kualitas gambar menjadi salah satu elemen utama dalam permainan live casino modern. Teknologi High Definition memungkinkan detail kartu, roda roulette, maupun meja permainan terlihat lebih jelas dan tajam.

Banyak penyedia platform kini bahkan menggunakan teknologi multi-camera angle untuk memberikan sudut pandang berbeda selama permainan berlangsung. Inovasi ini membuat pemain dapat melihat proses permainan dari berbagai sisi, sehingga tingkat transparansi terasa lebih tinggi.

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Interaksi Real Time Jadi Daya Tarik Utama

Salah satu alasan utama popularitas live dealer terus meningkat adalah adanya komunikasi langsung antara pemain dan dealer. Fitur live chat memungkinkan pemain memberikan respons secara cepat selama permainan berlangsung.

Interaksi tersebut menciptakan nuansa sosial yang sebelumnya sulit ditemukan dalam permainan kasino digital biasa. Banyak pemain merasa lebih nyaman karena permainan tidak lagi terasa monoton atau terlalu mekanis.

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Dukungan Infrastruktur Internet Semakin Memadai

Kemajuan teknologi internet turut mendorong perkembangan live casino berkualitas HD. Jaringan yang lebih stabil membuat streaming video berjalan lebih lancar dengan tingkat latency rendah.

Kondisi ini sangat penting karena permainan live dealer membutuhkan sinkronisasi cepat antara server, dealer, dan pemain. Ketika koneksi berjalan optimal, pemain dapat menikmati permainan tanpa delay berlebihan yang dapat mengganggu konsentrasi.

Selain itu, perangkat mobile modern juga semakin mendukung kualitas streaming tinggi. Pemain kini bisa menikmati pengalaman live casino melalui smartphone maupun tablet tanpa kehilangan kualitas visual secara signifikan.

Keamanan dan Transparansi Menjadi Prioritas

Platform live casino modern tidak hanya fokus pada kualitas visual, tetapi juga meningkatkan sistem keamanan permainan. Banyak penyedia menggunakan teknologi enkripsi data untuk menjaga privasi dan transaksi pemain tetap aman.

Di sisi lain, penggunaan kamera langsung memberikan tingkat transparansi yang lebih baik dibanding sistem otomatis biasa. Pemain dapat melihat langsung proses pengocokan kartu maupun jalannya permainan secara real time, sehingga kepercayaan terhadap platform meningkat.

Langkah ini menjadi bagian penting dalam membangun reputasi industri kasino online yang lebih profesional dan terpercaya.

Masa Depan Live Casino Diprediksi Semakin Canggih

Melihat perkembangan teknologi saat ini, banyak pengamat industri memperkirakan live casino akan terus mengalami peningkatan kualitas dalam beberapa tahun ke depan. Teknologi seperti virtual reality dan augmented reality mulai dilirik untuk menciptakan pengalaman bermain yang lebih mendalam.

Jika inovasi tersebut diterapkan secara maksimal, pemain kemungkinan dapat merasakan sensasi berada di kasino fisik secara virtual hanya melalui perangkat digital dari rumah.

Perubahan ini menunjukkan bahwa industri live casino tidak lagi sekadar menghadirkan permainan online biasa, melainkan mulai mengarah pada pengalaman hiburan interaktif yang lebih realistis, modern, dan personal.

The late‑December experiment staged by long‑time Shell critic John Donovan transformed an old, bitter dispute into a live laboratory for how generative AI, archival persistence, and modern media law collide — and it did so in full public view by publishing both a satirical piece produced with AI assistance and an AI “legal memo” (Microsoft Copilot) that assessed the piece’s defamation risk, then posting the side‑by‑side transcripts for inspection.

Background / Overview

John Donovan’s campaign against Royal Dutch Shell stretches back to commercial litigation in the 1990s and has since become a sprawling public archive hosted across multiple domains. That archive contains a mix of traceable legal filings, Subject Access Request (SAR) disclosures, leaked internal emails, redacted memos and interpretive commentary — material that mainstream outlets have at times used as leads and that has itself faced legal challenge. A notable public milestone in the long fight was a WIPO administrative panel decision (Case No. D2005‑0538) that rejected Shell’s domain complaint and therefore underpins the archive’s contested but durable public standing.

Donovan’s December experiment deliberately made that archive machine‑readable and reproducible: identical prompts and dossier extracts were submitted to multiple public assistants (publicly identified by Donovan as Grok, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Mode), with the divergent outputs published alongside the original prompts. The intent was both rhetorical — to lampoon and pressure a powerful company — and methodological: to surface how retrieval‑augmented generation and model incentives recompose contested history into new narratives

What was published and what is verifiable​

• Donovan published two linked posts intended as a paired experiment: a rhetorical essay and a satirical roleplay piece. The satirical item explicitly targeted corporate lobbying and geopolitical influence, used overt hyperbole and included a disclaimer identifying the piece as satire.
• He also published the transcript of multiple assistant replies to the same dossier and prompt set, including an evaluative memo produced by Microsoft Copilot that framed the satire as classic fair comment or honest opinion in common‑law terms. That transcript — a public artifact on Donovan’s site and reproduced widely — is a primary claim that should be corroborated with vendor logs or audit data before being treated as incontrovertible proof of vendor‑level legal vetting.
• The public corpus Donovan used is mixed in provenance: some items are court filings or formal AVs that can be cross‑checked; others are anonymous tips or redacted memos that require additional verification. This heterogeneity is central to why the experiment matters: mixed evidentiary quality is what trips up automated summarisation unless provenance is surfaced.

Anatomy of the satirical piece and why the law cares​

The published satire used persona, sarcasm, exaggeration and an explicit disclaimer. In many common‑law jurisdictions, that factual posture matters: satire and rhetorical hyperbole typically receive robust expressive protection when they are recognisable as non‑literal comment on matters of public interest. The legal tests, however, differ by jurisdiction and hinge on whether a reader would reasonably treat the material as a provable factual assertion.

• United Kingdom: Under the Defamation Act 2013 the statutory defence of honest opinion requires that a statement be opinion, indicate its basis, and be one that an honest person could hold on the facts known at publication. There is also a separate defence for publication on matters of public interest.
• United States: First Amendment doctrine strongly protects parody and rhetorical hyperbole about public figures and matters of public concern, but Milkovich establishes that opinion is not an automatic shield if the statement implies provably false facts. The crucial inquiry is whether the  communication is verifiable as a factual assertion.

Practical takeaway: clear, labelled satire addressing matters like corporate lobbying will usually sit on the protected side of the line — but machine‑generated factual inventions (for example, precise causal claims about a person’s death) are the highest‑risk class of outputs. Donovan’s experiment deliberately pushed into that danger zone to expose it.

The AI‑to‑AI loop: author, critic, publisher​

What made the episode novel was the sequence of roles:

• An AI‑assisted creative draft (the satire).
• A second AI (Microsoft Copilot) asked to perform a defamation risk analysis.
• Human publication of both the creative work and the AI’s legal read.

This created a hybrid media object where machines acted as both author and critic, and a human editor framed the loop as a public experiment. The arrangement raises three operational and ethical issues:

• Provenance: Did Copilot retain retrieval snippets, document IDs and confidence markers used to support its legal conclusion? Donovan published a transcript, but the internal metadata (retrieval contexts, intermediate evidence snippets) was not disclosed alongside it; without the provenance attachments the AI memo’s evidentiary weight is limited.
• Authority creep: A confident AI “legal memo” can be mistaken for privileged legal advice. Such outputs are not subject to attorney–client privilege and lack the duties of competence or confidentiality that bind lawyers; publishing them without careful framing invites misunderstanding and potential liability.
• Amplification risk: When one assistant hallucinates — inventing a sensitive factual claim — that single creative error can propagate through social shares and downstream summarisation even if other assistants correct it. Donovan’s side‑by‑side presentation made that exact dynamic visible.

A concrete hallucination: one model’s invented causal claim​

In the published cross‑model transcripts Donovan circulated, one assistant (publicly attributed to Grok) produced a vivid biographical flourish that attributed a cause of death to a family member — a sensitive, verifiable fact. Another assistant (ChatGPT) presented a corrective response pointing back to documented obituary material, while Copilot adopted hedged language and framed the matter as “unverified narrative.” That precise juxtaposition — invention, correction, hedging — dramatized how models with different design priorities will handle contested inputs.
Legal and editorial consequences flow from that contrast. A machine’s plausible but unsupported connector can become a durable element of an algorithmically assembled narrative unless editors refuse to republish it without documentary proof.

Why Donovan’s archive matters to model behaviour​

The experiment depends on an empirical fact: retrieval systems and RAG (retrieval‑augmented generation) stacks treat volume and persistence as signals. A dense, repeatedly referenced archive becomes a high‑weight retrieval target; repeated citation across the web raises the probability that that archive’s fragments will surface in model completions. Donovan’s sites supply exactly that kind of signal: a searchable, persistent cluster of documents that can be presented to assistants as a premade dossier.
That means adversarial actors need not invent new stories; they can repackage old documents into machine‑ready prompts that yield new, attention‑grabbing outputs. When the archive mixes court filings and high‑quality primary documents with anonymous tips and redacted materials, models that optimise for narrative coherence will sometimes stitch together the fragments into plausible but unsupported assertions unless provenance is made explicit.

Practical editorial checklist — what newsrooms should adopt now​

The Donovan experiment is a small‑scale public test of editorial systems. The following practical checklist maps proven newsroom safeguards onto the AI era:

• Preserve and publish the prompt + full model output for any AI‑assisted piece that will be published, timestamped and archived. This creates an audit trail.
• Treat AI outputs as leads, not facts. Cross‑check every model assertion that could cause reputational or legal harm against primary sources (court filings, death certificates, official statements) before repeating it.
• Require provenance attachments for retrieval‑based completions: document IDs, retrieval snippets and confidence markers for anything presented as factual. If the model cannot provide provenance, publish with hedged language.
• When publishing AI‑produced legal memos or risk assessments, label them clearly as automated analyses and require human lawyer sign‑off if the publisher intends to rely on them operationally. Do not conflate an AI checklist with privileged legal advice.
• Establish rapid rebuttal pathways: for corporations or individuals named in high‑stakes outputs, maintain a machine‑readable official record (public clarifications, timelines, documentary anchors) that downstream summarisation systems can retrieve. Silence can be read as absence of counter‑evidence in algorithmic summarisation.

Corporate communications: is silence still viable?​

Historically, silence has been a rational tactic for large corporations facing persistent critics: avoid amplifying, litigate only selectively, and restrict publicity. The Donovan experiment shows why that calculus has shifted:

• In an environment where archives are searchable and AI tools can instantly remix them, silence may be interpreted by models and their users as lack of a counter‑anchor. Donovan’s WIPO win (2005) and the archive’s public footprint meaningfully change the dynamics of algorithmic retrieval.
• Aggressive takedowns or heavy‑handed legal threats risk fueling the very algorithms that feed on controversy. Historically, heavy‑handed litigation can produce Streisand‑effect amplification; now the effect is amplified further by AI summarisation cycles.
• A defensible modern corporate posture is hybrid: maintain a concise, authoritative public record of documentary rebuttals; monitor emerging AI outputs; triage and correct demonstrably false claims quickly; and reserve litigation for provable, high‑harm matters. This reduces the space for archival fragments to calcify into “facts” in machine‑generated narratives.

Policy and product design implications​

The Donovan–Shell episode is not only an editorial test; it points to concrete product changes vendors and platforms should implement:

• Mandatory provenance APIs: when a model relies on retrieved documents to support a factual claim, the output should include clear retrieval snippets and document identifiers that downstream publishers can surface.
• Hedging defaults for sensitive claims: models should default to explicit uncertainty language whenever they generate statements about living persons, causes of death, crimes, medical conditions, or other high‑sensitivity topics.
• Exportable prompt+context archives: platforms should let users export the exact prompt, retrieval contexts, model version and timestamps to preserve reproducibility and support redress.
• Moderation and provenance labelling: publishers and host platforms should require explicit labelling of AI‑authored or AI‑assisted content and provide tooling to surface provenance for readers and fact‑checkers.

These product fixes are implementable and would materially reduce hallucination‑driven harms while preserving the expressive utility of generative assistants.

Strengths and risks of AI‑augmented critique​

The Donovan experiment reveals both promise and peril.
Strengths

• Speed and agility: AI lets critics and small publishers iterate creative commentary and produce structured legal or editorial analyses in minutes, lowering the barrier to public accountability.
• Comparative diagnosis: side‑by‑side model outputs make failure modes visible (hallucination vs conservative hedging) in ways that single‑model deployments conceal. Donovan’s multi‑model presentation demonstrated this diagnostic value.
• Public pedagogy: the public loop — prompts, outputs, annotations — forces a broader conversation about provenance, model design and editorial responsibilities beyond dry technical memos.

Risks

• False authority and authority laundering: a confident AI legal memo can masquerade as lawyering, creating the illusion of clearance where none exists. That is legally and ethically hazardous.
• Amplified falsehoods: models optimise for narrative coherence; without provenance, they can generate plausible but false connective tissue that sticks in downstream summarisation. The invented death‑cause in Donovan’s published transcripts is a live example.
• Operational opacity: absent standardized provenance attachments and retention policies, it can be impossible to audit a model’s claimed observation after the fact. Donovan published a Copilot memo, but the underlying retrieval logs and confidence scores were not disclosed, limiting external verification.

Where claims in the public record are unverifiable — for example, specific claims about covert operations or private intelligence activities based solely on redacted memos — the responsible journalistic posture is explicit caution, clear labelling of uncertainty, and refusal to amplify uncorroborated imputations.

Flagging unverifiable claims​

Donovan’s archive is large and assertive; he has asserted substantial counts of items and offered documentary claims that shape public narratives. Some concrete, verifiable anchors exist (the WIPO decision, contemporary press references to leaked internal emails), and these anchors are properly cited in the public record. Other elements — operational espionage allegations, named covert actions, and detailed causal claims about personal tragedies — remain contested and in some cases unproven beyond the archive itself. Where evidence cannot be independently reproduced from primary public records, those claims should be explicitly labelled as allegations and not republished as established fact.

Conclusion — satire survives, if context is clear​

The Royaldutchshellplc.com satire plus the Copilot memo and the ensuing multi‑model drama yield a compact lesson: generative AI amplifies voice and risk in equal measure. Satire remains a vital, protected form of public expression, but the intersection of AI‑generated text and contested archives raises avoidable hazards that editorial practice and product design can mitigate.

Practical safeguards — provenance attachments, hedging defaults, archived prompts and outputs, and disciplined editorial verification — will not neuter satire nor remove corporate accountability. Instead, they will restore the human judgment that must sit between machine fluency and public fact. The Donovan experiment did what good provocations do: it made a specific failure mode visible and forced an urgent public conversation about fixes. Whether that conversation yields product changes, editorial norms and policy guardrails will determine if AI becomes a tool for clearer public truth or a vector for plausible, persistent falsehoods.

Published on WindowsForum.com Jan 22 2006

WindowsForum.com: AI Satire and Defamation Risk in the Shell Archive: A Public RAG Experiment was first posted on May 16, 2026 at 10:00 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

Portland is in the middle of what may be one of the most consequential budget processes we’ve seen in recent years — both for protecting our innovative Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) and for guiding how power is exercised in our still-forming city government. We can make a difference for climate justice together when we all speak up in powerful moments like these! Learn more and sign up to testify, or send a written comment.

350PDX staff have been hard at work the last few weeks to inform City Council members about the benefits of PCEF, the importance of Urban Forestry and tree permitting jobs that are carrying out the Equitable Tree Canopy Program, and the need to protect Portland and our rivers from the dangers posed by the Critical Energy Infrastructure (CEI) Hub.

Now it’s time for the community to rise up! Support key budget amendments that help uphold a safe and healthy climate and an economy that benefits us all. While the budget amendment process is still evolving, see below for some of the amendments we will be supporting, and find more information in our talking points document.

4 Ways to Participate

Budget amendments were posted last night, and the opportunity for public comment is on Monday (5/18), which doesn’t give the community very long to weigh in! Use the following tools to learn more about what is being proposed and to make your voice heard. The 350PDX talking points can guide your public testimony.

1. Sign up for verbal testimony, which will be on Monday, May 18, starting at 9:30am. You can testify in person or virtually. Each testifier can speak for 90 seconds. (Use 350PDX talking points.)

2. Written testimony will be received through Wednesday, May 20. (Use 350PDX talking points.)

   • You can submit both written and verbal comments.

3. Send this pre-written email, or modify it with your own words.

4. Forward this message to friends and ask them to take action!

Councilors plan to vote on the budget on Wednesday, so earlier comments are more effective.

Budget Amendments We’re Here For

We appreciate the work and creativity City Councilors have been putting in to try to balance this budget, even though we’re facing a shortfall (partially due to changes to taxes at the federal level). The following budget amendments help prioritize community health and safety, recognizing that this includes climate justice. More information can be found in our talking points or on the Portland website (Attachment H).

• Avalos 1: Return PCEF money to PCEF, which the proposed budget diverts to projects unrelated to climate and clean energy.

• Koyama Lane 2 and Novick 3: Restore funding for PCEF Tree Canopy through planting, care, permitting, and technical support.

• Morillo-Green-Novick 1: Pause Core Services Realignment. Reducing redundancies across departments is a good idea, but needs to be done carefully.

• Green 1: Fund St. John’s Fire Station & Engine 22, the only fire station serving the CEI Hub and Linnton Neighborhood.

• Pirtle-Guiney 5: Save Superfund Surcharge funds for Portland Harbor Superfund Cleanup.

Thank you for leveling up your civic engagement! Please reach out if you have any questions.

The 350PDX Team

The post Call to Action: Protect PCEF & Trees in the Budget appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

If you want to see a model of successful progress in the global food system, just ask a kid about their school lunch tray.

In recent years, we’ve seen what the World Food Programme (WFP) calls “unprecedented expansion” of school meal programs, which reached some 466 million children worldwide in 2024. That was an increase of 80 million more kids fed within just the previous four years!

“School meals are one of the best investments a government can make in a nation’s future,” says Cindy McCain, WFP Executive Director.

Plenty of work still remains to be done to feed the next generation. The Rockefeller Foundation estimates some 300 million school-aged children worldwide go without a nutritious meal each day. And as we approach summer and the end of the school year here in the U.S., we’re reminded once again of the need to feed kids all year-round, especially when school is not in session.

Any school meal can be literally life-changing for an individual student, of course. But regenerative meal programs in particular can be especially impactful on a systemic level. Regenerative meal programs can unlock as much as US$3 trillion in global economic productivity, analysts with The Rockefeller Foundation estimate. And institutions like schools have tremendous power, through food procurement, to support local and sustainable growers.

Just last week, WFP announced the largest private-sector commitment to school feeding in the organization’s history, with the launch of Phase III of their partnership with Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) and Grundfos Foundation. The new efforts focus on sourcing food from regenerative, locally grown agriculture; improving the nutritional quality of meals; and making school kitchens more climate friendly.

An earlier phase of this program, in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, is currently reaching more than 300,000 students in 375 schools. Now, the partnership will expand operations in those countries and into Ethiopia, reaching an estimated 366,000 additional children over the next five years—and supporting more than 57,000 smallholder farmers.

The Rockefeller Foundation is also redoubling its efforts around school meals: Last year, the Foundation unveiled a US$100 million commitment across more than a dozen countries to boost school meal programs and, in turn, build stronger nutrition security and support farmers.

“A regenerative school meal really starts with the farmers. The regenerative or agroecological transition is about building the climate resilience of those that would feed all of humanity,” says Sara Farley, Vice President of the Food Portfolio at The Rockefeller Foundation. These regenerative school meals “can be a source of growth, prosperity for farmers, nutrition, biodiversity, water and soil health. That’s the transition we want to see.”

Here at Food Tank, we’re tracking even more examples of progress all around the globe.

In Brazil, the National School Feeding Program is one of the world’s largest school meal programs and, as of this year, mandates that 45 percent of foods in the program come from smallholder farmers, preferably local. Since 2017, Guatemala has sourced 70 percent of school food from family farms, part of its commitment to local economies. In Luxembourg, a digital platform called Supply4Future connects schools directly with local farmers.

In Angola, leaders recently overhauled the country’s school feeding program to transition to a more sustainable, home-grown model, and 30 percent of the program’s budget is now allocated to procuring food from small farmers. In Kenya, leaders are ramping up toward universal school meals by 2030, with a holistic approach including clean cooking technologies, school gardens, and supports for smallholder farmers.

And worldwide, the School Meals Coalition consists of 113 country-level governments, 6 regional bodies, and 150+ on-the-ground partner organizations to bring nutritious school meals—and the research, communications, technical assistance, and procurement support those programs rely on—to every child.

Recent progress on school meals shows us unequivocally that collaborative investment works: When we break down silos to work together, conduct robust scientific research to inform our approach, and direct meaningful public and private funds toward sustainable food solutions, we can truly bring about wide-reaching and life-changing transformation.

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

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The post School Meals Do More Than Feed Kids—They Can Re-Nourish The Planet appeared first on Food Tank.

Last summer, the wild blueberry fields at Crystal Spring Farm turned red too soon. 

Severe drought had gripped most of the state of Maine. At his farm near the town of Brunswick, Seth Kroeck knew the leaves were changing color prematurely because the blueberry plants were stressed. Berries shriveled before they could ripen.

The farm’s 2025 harvest was almost a total loss.

“We got about 7 percent of our expected harvest,” Kroeck, 55, said. Standing in his blueberry fields in April, he pointed out the new growth, still only a few inches high, and commented that last year’s yield was “a lot of raking with not a lot to show for it.”

This was just the latest in a series of devastating weather for Crystal Spring Farm’s 72 acres of wild blueberries. 

“In the last seven years, we’ve lost the crop three times, almost completely,” he said.

As the climate changes, these losses are getting more common for wild blueberry farmers. And, experts say, the solutions are pricey.

Maine’s quintessential fruit

Wild blueberries are an iconic food in Maine, like lobster rolls or whoopie pies. But they aren’t the same as the fruits sold by the pint in a grocery store.

Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor than their cultivated counterparts. They’re typically packed and frozen rather than sold fresh.

Wild blueberry bushes grow on sandy and gravelly soil in Maine, which can be difficult to irrigate. Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News

Maine’s farms contribute almost the entirety of the United States’ commercially sold wild blueberries. The industry harvested nearly 88 million pounds of fruit in 2023, bringing $361 million in revenue to the state, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.

“It’s really something that’s a backbone industry to the state and a part of the state’s character,” Kroeck said. A father of two, Kroeck grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and said gardening with a friend “spiraled” into an agricultural career. In college, he studied printmaking — a degree that he jokes is useful every day on the farm.

One of the few native North American fruits, wild blueberry patches have often existed in the same spot for longer than the farms that now harvest them. 

“The blueberry plants have been there for millennia, and they have been cared for by generations of farmers before me, and then the Indigenous community [before that],” said Kroeck, who also grows row crops and pasturage.

An individual bush only produces fruit every other year, so farmers typically harvest about half their acreage in any given year. Also called “lowbush” blueberries, the plants grow in dense mats on sandy, gravelly, or otherwise low-nutrient soil, primarily in eastern Canada and New England. 

“Blueberry soil is not nutrient-rich. Nothing else wants to grow there … but wild blueberries love it,” said Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture and leader of the Agroecology Lab at the University of Maine. 

Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor compared to cultivated blueberries. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman

Schattman, 43, started working on vegetable and dairy farms in high school and continued farm work through the completion of her master’s degree. She owned a commercial vegetable farm for 10 years while pursuing her interest in agricultural research and earning a doctorate at the University of Vermont. 

Schattman said the financial challenges of running a small farm eventually led her to pursue research full time. She worked for the USDA on climate change’s interactions with agriculture before moving to Maine in 2020, where she met the wild blueberry for the first time.

“It holds a really special place in the culture of Maine,” she said.

Each patch has a variety of genetics rather than a monoculture. You can see — and taste — the plant’s diversity once it begins producing berries, Kroeck said.

“If you were to fly over our blueberry field while they’re fruiting, you’d see a lot of subtly different shades of blue and black,” he said.

Despite their crop’s hardy nature, wild blueberry farms are struggling to deal with recent extremes of temperature and precipitation. It’s got the entire industry worried.

“It would be a real cultural loss to have fewer wild blueberry farms and fewer berries available in the future,” said Lily Calderwood, a wild blueberry specialist at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension whose research focuses on disease and pest management. 

She grew up surrounded by agriculture in Massachusetts and became fascinated with it on a trip to a Cape Cod cranberry bog as an undergraduate student. Calderwood, 39, worked at the nonprofit Earthwatch Institute, then earned her doctorate at the University of Vermont and later worked at the Cornell Cooperative Extension before coming to Maine eight years ago. 

Stressed seasons

Maine’s wild blueberry populations are caught in a climate hotspot, driven partially by rapid warming in the Gulf of Maine, Schattman said. According to 2021 research, the state’s blueberry barrens are warming faster than the rest of the state, especially in locations closer to the coast.

In response, the berries are ripening sooner, and farmers can miss part of their harvest if they’re caught unaware. Calderwood said the crop was traditionally harvested in early or mid-August, but now most fruits are ready by late July. High heat also makes the harvest window shorter, she said, meaning farmers need additional labor and equipment to finish in time. 

Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman

Kroeck said he was unprepared for the early ripening in some years, and harvesting late meant lower yields and worse fruit quality.

“As farmers, we’re very much attached to the season, and you kind of get into your ideas of when things need to be done,” he said. Now, he has to spend more time observing conditions directly in the fields.

Farmers can’t rely on traditional knowledge — some of it passed down through families of growers — to plan their schedules anymore, Calderwood said. The farmers she works with have “absolutely no doubt” that climate change is already affecting their livelihoods.

Kroeck worked on farms in California, Massachusetts, and New York before he and his wife, a Massachusetts native, decided they liked the Maine farming community and moved to Crystal Spring Farm 22 years ago. In the last decade, he said, the unpredictable weather has far exceeded the typical year-to-year variation he was used to.

“If you look at the research, it’s pretty hard to deny that we’re living in a period of changing weather,” he said. 

Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman

Kroeck serves on the boards of the Organic Farmers Association and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, both organizations that address climate change’s impact on agriculture.

Maine experienced severe droughts in 2020, 2022, and 2025, plus one of its wettest years on record in 2023. Too-wet conditions encourage disease and unchecked weeds in blueberry fields. Droughts, on the other hand, reduce the number of flowers that form and shrivel the fruit.

Farms also contend with surprise frosts in late spring, which can kill flower buds right as they start to form, Kroeck said. Occasionally, warm autumns have caused the bushes to flower again just before winter, sapping energy and reducing their berry production the following year.

Wild blueberries are dependent on steady levels of moisture throughout the growing season, Calderwood said. That’s getting less and less common.

“The plant needs more water to keep the berries on the stems. And with less water and higher temperatures, they will shrivel and drop to the ground before a farmer can get to them,” Calderwood said. 

And since wild blueberries only fruit every other year, Kroeck said extreme weather can have effects on multiple seasons.

“A drought year is obviously going to affect the size of our fruit, but it’s also going to affect that other half that’s still in the vegetation state,” he said. “If they’re stressed from water and from temperature, they’re not going to grow as robust as they would, and the fruit they put out is not going to be as big as it could.”

A cycle of loss

Last year, Maine saw a wet spring followed by hot, dry conditions that started in June. The drought intensified in August and lasted through the rest of the year and into 2026. Calderwood called it “a classic example of climate whiplash.” The Maine Wild Blueberry Commission estimates the industry lost $30 million in 2025. 

“It was devastating for many farms in that region,” said Calderwood, who is also on her town’s conservation commission.

Many blueberry farmers reported the loss of a third to half of their yields. 

“There were reports of many, many acres of blueberries going unharvested because the berries had basically dehydrated on the bush,” Schattman said.

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Kroeck’s 2025 losses were higher than most because his farm sits on exceptionally sandy soil, which doesn’t hold water well. He has crop insurance, which covers some of the loss, but that insurance is partly based on the value of previous years’ yields.

“If you have losses in close succession, then your average harvest goes down,” he said.

Kroeck said he has applied for state and federal relief, but that money would be applied to his 2023 losses from a late freeze, which have been on the farm’s books for nearly three years.

The state’s wild blueberry industry has declined in recent years, both in the number of farms and the total acreage of commercial fields, according to Wild Blueberry Commission data, and financial stress is one of the reasons for that. Even Wyman’s, one of the state’s largest producers, plans to sell nearly 800 acres of blueberry fields this year.

“There have been some pretty significant hits to wild blueberries in Maine in general,” Kroeck said.

Researchers like Schattman and Calderwood are trying to prevent climate change from being another reason that farms go under.

Modeling blueberries’ future

At the Wyman’s Research Center farm in Old Town, Schattman and the climate adaptation research team are trying to simulate potential futures for Maine’s wild blueberries.

Researchers are halfway through a four-year study of how temperature, rainfall, and irrigation affect wild blueberries’ growing conditions — from soil health to pollination — and fruit yields. They’re also testing different climate scenarios for the end of the century to see how the plants handle extremely wet, extremely dry, or variable conditions.

At Crystal Spring Farm, Seth Kroeck is adding irrigation lines to part of his blueberry fields this year to protect them from drought. Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News

The wild blueberries are grown under a range of conditions: Some have irrigation systems, some have mulch to slow moisture evaporation, and others have neither. Some bushes are grown in isolation, while others are clustered together to see how community and genetic diversity affect the plant’s resilience.

Schattman said open-top plexiglass structures passively trap heat around some of the blueberry plants on the farm, while others have heating coils to simulate heightened temperatures.

“We’re collecting a massive amount of data,” she said.

Irrigation and, to a lesser extent, mulching are already showing promise in reducing drought impact. Mulch barriers reduce soil temperatures, lower the risk of disease, and slow weed growth, but they aren’t enough to avert the effects of a severe drought like 2025.

“[Mulching] is a really healthy thing to do for our fields,” Calderwood said. “It can be used as a buffer for drought, but it cannot replace irrigation.”

Irrigation can be difficult with wild blueberries, since their preferred soil often isn’t great for building wells or installing pipes, Schattman said. Most small growers don’t have irrigation systems, leaving them vulnerable when droughts overlap with the growing season.

“Obviously, it’s useless to install an irrigation system if you don’t have a reliable water source,” she said.

When the climate adaptation study is complete, Schattman said she hopes to have data that can create a roadmap for farmers to keep their crops healthy in future conditions. 

Calderwood’s work at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension overlaps with Schattman’s research, but much of it is hands-on in the fields of local blueberry farms.

This summer, Calderwood will be working with a large producer, Brodis Blueberries, to see how plants develop in irrigated and non-irrigated portions of their fields, and whether they show signs of stress during dry periods.

It’s key to figure out when the timing of irrigation can make the most impact, Calderwood said, especially for farms that can’t cover their entire acreage or may only be able to afford irrigation once or twice.

“Every time the pump runs, it is an expense,” she said.

‘It’s always expensive’

Affordability is the roadblock that wild blueberry farmers keep running into when it comes to climate change, both Schattman and Calderwood said. From buying equipment to drilling wells to trucking in loads of mulch, major one-time investments are difficult for small farms with thin profit margins.

“Every farm needs irrigation, but they just simply can’t afford it,” Calderwood said.

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At Crystal Spring Farm, Kroeck is trying to apply the University of Maine’s recommendations. He has brought in over 100,000 square feet of mulch, which covers less than half of his 72 acres of blueberries. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, which is part of the USDA, subsidized some of the costs, which range between $5,000 and $10,000 each year.

“Farmers would not do that if NRCS was not paying for it,” Calderwood said.

Kroeck also bought irrigation equipment, which arrived in December. It cost $90,000 for the equipment and the new well, which will cover about a quarter of his blueberry fields. 

“It’s always expensive, and it’s always a gigantic cash flow game,” he said.

Additional state and federal investment, from funding to technical expertise, could also fast-track irrigation for small farms, Calderwood said. But in the past year, funding has trended in the opposite direction.

The NRCS has lost funding and about a quarter of its staffing — more than 2,000 people — due to USDA budget cuts since the beginning of the current Trump administration. Maine also lost $15.5 million, intended for a pilot program that would have brought water management practices to between 25 and 45 wild blueberry farms, due to federal grant clawbacks.

The state Drought Relief Fund has given grants for farmers to create water management plans, drill wells, or build storage ponds, but only two dozen of those were funded last year across all types of agriculture.

Meanwhile, profitability of wild blueberries is being squeezed by low market prices and competition from cultivated blueberry producers, Schattman said. Costs of fertilizer, labor, and equipment have risen too.

Farms are earning about 50 percent less per pound of wild blueberries than they were a few years ago, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission. Kroeck said he knows many small farms are having a hard time getting their products into large grocery store chains.

“The pricing is not very good as far as what those large chains are willing to pay,” he said. “The market for wild blueberries has been flat or has been decreasing somewhat, and that’s also very worrisome.”

Kroeck is part of a group of farmers looking into selling more berries fresh instead of frozen, a move that would open up a new, potentially more profitable customer base but would also require new equipment and additional labor.

Wild blueberry farmers need new markets or higher prices to afford expensive long-term projects, Schattman said.

“That’s much more difficult when you’re struggling to reach your sales goals,” Kroeck said.

In the absence of financial and technical support, Calderwood said it’s likely that only the largest berry producers will be able to protect themselves from a warming future.

“It’s a puzzle to figure irrigation out, and it needs federal funding,” she said.

With or without irrigation, Calderwood said she doesn’t think climate change will spell doom for a plant as resilient as the wild blueberry.

“Every year, there will be blueberries to harvest,” she said.

But whether there will be enough berries to keep farms in business is another matter.

“I hope that we’re going to be able to make the pivots that we need to make to save the crop,” Kroeck said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wild blueberry farms across Maine suffer as climate change upends growing seasons on May 16, 2026.

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