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14 Charming Photos That Showcase the Beautiful Bonds Between Birds and Native Plants
National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects
The National Park Service is spending at least $67 million from national park entrance fees to help fund President Donald Trump’s beautification projects in Washington. According to a New York Times analysis of federal records, the Trump administration is funding nearly $60 million in repairs to nine ornamental fountains in D.C., and another $7 million toward the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
In April, the administration awarded a no-bid contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to repair the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. Federal records show that the contract is worth $13.1 million, more than seven times what Trump initially promised the work would cost. Additionally, the firm is being paid an inflated profit margin, according to federal documents obtained by The New York Times. The profit margin for federal construction contracts is typically between 6 to 12 percent. Atlantic Industrial Coatings submitted a bid that charged 20 percent, adding at least $850,000 to what a more typical contract would have cost.
“Our parks and public lands have been underfunded for decades, and there are many genuinely urgent projects in need of funding across the country,” said Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is determined to divert millions of dollars to projects that President Trump can see out his window.”
The Park Service has a backlog of deferred maintenance projects for repairs to bathrooms, campgrounds, roads, visitor centers and other aging infrastructure that came to an estimated $23 billion at the end of 2024.
Quick hits Fast-track copper mine review put Arizona owl habitat at risk National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects Corporation claims it’s running out of money and can’t afford cleanup of a former Colorado uranium mill Forest Service treated 35% less dangerous fuels for wildfire risk in 2025 Colorado state forester says pine beetles’ assault on ponderosas expanded nearly 150% in 2025 Reflecting Pool contract has ‘inflated’ profit margin, according to analysis of federal documents Growing body of research examines the affect of wildfire smoke on fertility Opinion: Wyoming’s public lands—why they’ve always felt like home Quote of the dayThe Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant civic landscapes in the country, and it deserves care. The question is whether Congress and the federal government are providing enough funding for the entire national park system.”
—Natalie Britt, the president and chief executive of Zion Forever Project, New York Times
Picture ThisAh, camping. It can be in-tents!
Sometimes spending a day in the wilderness isn’t quite enough to truly capture the feeling of a special place. Let’s be honest, though…sometimes it is. You know who you are. <slowly raises paw> For others, maybe you’ve really wanted to experience a park after dark: taking in the starry night sky, getting lost in the howling of a distant coyote (wait, what??), hearing the rustling sound of something on the other side of a very thin tent wall (why didn’t you splurge on the more moderately affordable tent with better zippers?), wondering if it’s just your partner…until you remember you’re single and out there alone. Then things get really existential. Is anyone ever really alone? Who am I? How far is the car? Also, something is definitely now crawling in the tent. How many hours until dawn?
Magical.
Story time: What are some of your favorite camping stories or experience from some nights spent in a national park? Are you in a tent right now and have a visual on the spider? It’s not a spider?
Well, good luck with that.
Image: Tent seen illuminated from within under a night sky @joshuatreenps NPS/ Hannah Schwalbe
Featured image: Contractors painting the Reflecting Pool surface blue. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The post National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
California bill tackling toxic ‘forever chemical’ pesticides clears Assembly floor
SACRAMENTO – The California Assembly voted May 27 to advance a bill targeting the use of toxic PFAS “forever chemical” pesticides found in nearly 40% of state-sampled California-grown non-organic fruits and vegetables.
The vote on Assembly Bill 1603 moves the nation’s largest agricultural state closer to phasing out a pervasive source of PFAS contamination. The bill now heads to the Senate.
PFAS pesticides were also found in up to 50% of California surface water samples, and in about 45% to 55% of sediment samples, according to a recent Environmental Working Group analysis.
EWG is cosponsoring AB 1603, introduced by Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank). If enacted, it would require these pesticides to be clearly identified as being PFAS and it would halt approvals of the use of new PFAS pesticides in California.
The California Department of Pesticide Regulation currently allows 53 pesticides to be used in the state. Meanwhile, 17 PFAS pesticides approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency could be added to the state’s crop fields in the near future if not for this legislation.
As approved by the Assembly, AB 1603 would also properly identify and notify the public when PFAS pesticides are used on agricultural fields and require growers to obtain county permits before using the chemicals on crops.
Under pressure from the pesticides industry and some agricultural interests, Schultz committed to removing sections of the bill that would outright ban all uses of PFAS pesticides, a vow necessary for the Assembly to support advancing the legislation.
Other bill cosponsors include Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Center for Environmental Health and the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network.
“The country depends on California for its fruits and vegetables, but right now they’re being seasoned with chemicals that never break down,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, EWG’s senior vice president for California.
“We cannot claim to lead the world in public health while allowing millions of pounds of toxic PFAS to be deliberately sprayed on our most iconic crops,” she said.
A growing crisis in California fieldsAn EWG analysis of state data found PFAS pesticide residues on 37% of 930 samples of non-organic California-grown produce, including nine out of 10 samples of peaches, nectarines and plums.
Farmers applied 15 million pounds of PFAS pesticides across all 58 California counties between 2018 and 2023. These chemicals don't break down in the environment and can build up in the body, creating the potential for long-term harm.
“As a father, I don't want my kids eating strawberries contaminated with chemicals that will stay in their bodies for decades,” said Schultz.
“AB 1603 is a vital step toward ensuring California’s agricultural legacy is defined by health and innovation, not by the accumulation of toxic PFAS in our soil and water. We need to help our farmers transition away from these persistent chemicals so that California can be a global leader in food safety,” he said.
Why are some PFAS pesticidesPFAS are a group of thousands of human-made chemicals used in a wide range of consumer, industrial and electronic products, in addition to pesticides.
PFAS’ carbon-fluorine bond is among the strongest in chemistry. It is the reason they don’t break down – and the reason they’re called “forever chemicals.”
“The scale of this contamination is staggering,” said Susan Little, EWG’s legislative director in California. “Millions of pounds of PFAS are used on everyday California crops.
“AB 1603 takes a big step forward by immediately banning new state approvals and requiring full transparency regarding their use,” she added.
As these chemicals partially break down over time, they can form other harmful compounds, including trifluoroacetic acid, or TFA, which is increasingly being detected in the environment, wildlife and people. One study estimates that PFAS pesticide use in California could generate between 185,000 and 616,000 pounds of TFA each year.
Emerging research links TFA to reproductive harm and immune suppression, raising growing concerns about its spread and potential health risks.
An EPA analysis noted that 36 PFAS pesticides – 25 of which are registered in California – lack updated developmental and reproductive toxicity tests. Immunotoxicity studies are routinely waived in pesticide applications, despite growing evidence that PFAS chemicals are particularly harmful to the immune system.
“By the time these PFAS residues reach our plates, they have become part of a toxic cocktail that can suppress the immune system and harm reproductive health,” said Varun Subramaniam, EWG science analyst. “That raises serious concerns about the long-term health risks of using these chemicals on food crops.”
“The most troubling part is how little we know about their safety. We’re spraying millions of pounds of chemicals on food without understanding their full health impacts or considering what little we do know. It’s unconscionable,” he added.
California’s agricultural PFAS use means residents of the Golden State get hit twice – through contaminated food and through contaminated water. PFAS pesticides leave residues on fruits and vegetables, and the chemicals get into the surface water that become drinking water.
States leading on regulationThe federal EPA regulates and approves pesticides for national use, but states aren’t required to follow suit. California operates its own approval system: The state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation must independently evaluate and authorize each chemical before farmers can use it.
That gives California the much needed authority to protect residents – power the state has largely chosen not to use when it comes to PFAS pesticides.
While California remains one of the world’s largest users of PFAS pesticides, other jurisdictions have moved to restrict or ban them. In 2023, Maine enacted the nation’s first ban on PFAS pesticides, starting in 2030. In 2023, Minnesota passed a broad ban on nonessential PFAS uses, including pesticides, phasing them out by 2032.
Denmark banned six PFAS pesticide ingredients in 2025. And the European Union has prohibited 23 of the PFAS pesticides heavily used in California, including bifenthrin, trifluralin and flufenacet.
AB 1603 would start to move California in line with these other states and jurisdictions, laying the groundwork for the nation’s “salad bowl” to once again be a public health leader and help ensure what we are putting on America’s kitchen table is free from PFAS pesticides.
“California has been a public health bellwether for decades, from car emissions to chemical safety,” said Del Chiaro. “But we've been silent on PFAS pesticides, even though we are one of the biggest users.
“AB 1603 begins to change that. This is the least we can do for families and communities struggling to contain widespread PFAS contamination in our soil, air, water and food,” she added.
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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.
Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Pesticides PFAS Chemicals Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 May 28, 2026What Really Happened to USAID? A Former Civil Servant Tells All
A new book by former civil servant Nicholas Enrich offers an insider’s account of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—and the steps he took to speak out against the destruction.
During the early months of the Trump-Vance Administration, USAID was the target of funding freezes, program cancellations, staff layoffs, and more. Federal officials said they were “clearing significant waste, before the agency officially shuttered in July 2025. But Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID paints a different picture.
“The agency was dismantled, not because it was wasteful, not because it wasn’t working or inefficient or to better align foreign aid with the President’s agenda,” Enrich tells Food Tank. “It was demolished by a group of uninformed and unqualified sycophants who were working to satisfy the ego of the world’s richest man.” He says he needed to write this book to set the record straight and explain what really happened.
Enrich worked at USAID under four administrations, most recently serving as Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health. Like any institution, there were ways that USAID could operate more productively, he believed. And before officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived, he optimistically prepared a list of ways he thought he could be helpful.
But within a couple of weeks, it was obvious to Enrich that DOGE wasn’t interested in making the agency operate better. The tipping point, he says, is when Elon Musk posted on X in early February that the government had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Just a day before, Musk also called the agency “a criminal organization”—a statement that Enrich says was painful to hear. “I thought there was a certain valor in dedicating your career to public service,” he tells Food Tank. “You felt like this is a country that you want to make better, that you’re willing to make that sacrifice….It was a calling.”
After this, Enrich watched with alarm as life-saving aid was eliminated. Programs to tackle infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria and support maternal and child health were canceled overnight.
“I think people have been focusing a lot on the impacts that have already happened, and they have been enormous,” Enrich says. But it’s the impact on future generations that “really keeps me up at night.”
Enrich and colleagues began to document what was happening, which he compiled into three memos. The first tracked every effort he and others made to re-start the agency’s work and the roadblocks they encountered at every step of the way. The second focused on the destruction of the workforce “that made it impossible to do our work even if we had been allowed to,” Enrich says. The third highlighted the extent of the damage, based on modeling and projections from technical experts.
Enrich knew that distributing these memos publicly would cost him his job, but by that time DOGE was terminating contracts needed to continue USAID’s work. “Once it became clear that’s where we stood, I realized that I was not going to be able to fix this from within,” Enrich tells Food Tank. “And my silence, if I continued, would really be complicity.”
Listen to the full conversation with Nicholas Enrich on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about what made USAID so vulnerable, the impact of the agency’s closure on local communities, and the advice he gives to anyone in a situation like his.
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 U.S. Embassy Apia, Samoa
The post What Really Happened to USAID? A Former Civil Servant Tells All appeared first on Food Tank.
Statement by the NYC chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace on the illegal sale of Palestinian land
“Tonight, the municipality of Jerusalem and the Israeli Building Center are hosting a discriminatory event in which they plan to sell stolen Palestinian land, open to Jews only. This event is illegal under international law and has no place in New York City.
“Right now, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are being expelled from their homes through a coordinated campaign of state policy and settler violence. In East Jerusalem, families are being harassed and attacked while the developers hosting this event build luxury developments available to Jews only.
“The municipality of Jerusalem is directly involved in imposing and administering discriminatory apartheid policies, and should not be hosted anywhere in the city.
“As Jewish New Yorkers, we condemn the sale of stolen Palestinian land and we condemn racist housing practices that discriminate based on race, religion, and national origin. New Yorkers know the importance of fair housing practices and reject these racist events. We, along with Palestinian New Yorkers, know that apartheid practices have no place in New York City.”
Background
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion
The Mayor of Jerusalem will be in attendance at today’s event. He has publicly stated his intention to oversee the construction of at least 100,000 new housing units in Jerusalem, as part of a “Judaisation plan” for Jerusalem.
Illegal annexation in the West Bank
Israel is illegally annexing the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, resulting in over 50 attacks of settler violence and displacing nearly 1,700 Palestinians in the first three months of 2026 alone. The number of Palestinians displaced in early 2026 surpasses the total displaced in all of 2025. Land sales in New York City further contribute to this annexation.
Talking Headways Podcast: Community Severance by Road
This week on Talking Headways, Jaime Benevides and Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou of Brown University discuss their new paper showing how community severance by road infrastructure and traffic has led to more mental health-related hospital visits in New York City.
We talk about the role of roads cutting people off from social connections and how impacts of roads on mental health were separated out from air quality.
There are three ways of following the conversation: The audio player embedded below; a full transcript generated by artificial intelligence; and further down this page, a partial, human-edited transcript.
Jeff Wood: I think it’s so interesting that you all kind of lasered in on that specific idea of, like, traffic severance or transportation severance because you mentioned, the research and the findings are independent of the traffic-related air pollution, which has been shown to have impacts on things like Alzheimer’s and dementia and other brain health things.
I wonder what made you look past the air quality impacts and laser in on this specific thing that was the traffic and the connections that people are severed from.
Jamie Benavides: On one side, we have scientific evidence on space used in a way that benefits social cohesion and also exercise, and also that this green space benefits mental health as well. You know, like things like parks or green space. But we don’t have awareness or understanding of what happens on the other side of the range of how we use the space in the city, right?
Like, there is a lack of understanding of if we occupy all that open space with, again, huge volumes moving very fast of these machines, is that good or bad for our mental health? So yeah, it was, as Marianthi said, from my perspective at least, looking beyond air pollution and imagining if the city will have still the same levels of noise and air pollution but had another use of space, would it be more healthy or not?
Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou: Exactly. I think it was similar for me. I’ve been working on quantifying air pollution effects on adverse health outcomes, including depression, Alzheimer’s, all of the above. And I started getting a little bit antsy and frustrated that, okay, we’ve characterized this impact, but two things: One, and so what?
We don’t necessarily see the regulations following in the rate that I would have wanted to protect human health. And so how can we then figure out modifiable, intervenable pathways so communities can protect their residents? And the urban form is one such intervenable pathway. That’s part of it.
The other big part of it is, okay, as we are electrifying our fleet, I will keep saying that the cons of car dependency are not only noise and air pollution, it’s lack of physical activity, it’s lack of social cohesion and in-person social cohesion.
It’s very interesting. We were talking with a colleague of ours who’s from Texas, and Jaime and I both grew up in Europe in very dense, not car-oriented societies, or not so much at least, and our colleague from Texas was saying, “But it’s so easy. I get into my car, in 10 minutes I can go and see my brother. What are you talking about isolation?”
And so that’s a disconnect there because, okay, you are more connected to a family member, but you’re not necessarily connected to our neighbors. Neither of us lives in New York anymore, but we used to live [there] and I did not know any of my neighbors in the buildings I was living in. Maybe that’s on me. But, I think that’s a general trend, right? We don’t know our immediate community, and there’s so much work on the benefits of both physical activity. Even if I have to walk for five minutes to go get a bus, that’s five minutes more than, you know, garage door and driving, right, door to door.
If you have the plaza, as Jaime said, you go there, you interact with the people more. People check in on you. So that’s beyond just removing the air pollution from the equation. There are so many other benefits from reshaping our immediate environment outside of the house to help us build healthier lives that I think we haven’t looked as much, or at least in environmental epidemiology, other fields probably have, but as much into.
Jeff Wood: There was an interesting part of this as well, is like how you split out the air quality impact, which was like looking at black carbon data. And I’m curious about that data, like what that is and how that impacted the ability to split out the traffic impacts versus the air quality impacts.
Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou: So when we started talking, when Jaime came up with the idea of looking at community severance and mental health and came to me and said, “I want to do this,” and we had the hospitalization data for mental health, my main concern was exactly because of the very big literature on the air pollution impacts on mental health.
My concern was, okay, but if we publish this as is, everybody will just say, “Okay, then it’s just all through air pollution.” Obviously, what you’re capturing is air pollution, so we wanted to see, is it all air pollution, or if we could somehow block the air pollution effect, do we still see impacts? So we used black carbon predictions. Black carbon is a combustion byproduct that is usually associated with traffic in urban cores. And New York City has an amazing program, NYCAS, that has multiple rotating monitoring sites. The number of monitoring sites varies from year. I think it goes from 60-something to 100-something. But they rotate these, and they then integrate these with land use data and traffic data and all other kinds of data to build these pretty high resolution, 300 meter predicted annual surfaces for different pollutants. Black carbon is one of them. And so we then included black carbon in our model, hoping to block the path from community severance to mental health from air pollution. So we said, okay, if we compare now two communities to zip code levels that have the same air pollution, but different community severance, do we see differences in mental health outcomes?
And indeed, what we saw was, as expected, once we added air pollution into the model, our effect estimates attenuated a little bit, became somewhat smaller in magnitude. But importantly, they didn’t completely disappear, which does mean that, yes, air pollution explains some of the effects that we saw, but not everything.
So community severance doesn’t solely act through air pollution to induce the increased rates in mental health hospitalizations that we saw. And I keep saying mental health hospitalizations. We examined multiple causes, but our biggest finding was on schizophrenia hospitalizations, actually.
So it’s not all of it through air pollution, but there are some other pathways, we don’t know exactly how yet, that’s to be, you know, next studies, future studies, but that not through air pollution, that community severance results in higher rates for these mental health hospitalization rates.
Getting Electric Truck Chargers Online Faster
The post Getting Electric Truck Chargers Online Faster appeared first on RMI.
The ripple effects of organizing against data centers
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.
They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes.
Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said.
#newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January.
By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system.
Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.
Monterey Park residents rally outside City Council chambers to protest the proposed data center. (Amy Wong)Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.
“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.
Mobilizing community membersThe San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.
Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions.
“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said.
Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November.
“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”
Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community.
“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”
Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for.
Residents of Monterey Park gather for a community teach-in about a proposed data center. (Amy Wong)No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.
Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.
Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support.
Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.
“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”
Echoing through the valleyOther cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.
Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.
Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons.
He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said.
No Data Center Monterey Park tabling outside City Council chambers to petition against the proposed data center. (Nicholas Rabb)Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.
“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.
One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.
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DonateWong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”
She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.
“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Bing: John Donovan Role in Shell Sakhalin 2 Debacle
Related information generated by Bing on 27/28 May 2026 in response to the initial and follow-up prompts: “Donovan’s feud with Royal Dutch Shell” John Donovan, a British entrepreneur and former chairman of the sales promotion agency Don Marketing, engaged in a prolonged and highly publicized conflict with Royal Dutch Shell spanning several decades. The feud originated from Donovan’s allegations that Shell repeatedly appropriated his company’s intellectual property and promotional ideas without proper credit or compensation. Background
- Donovan’s agency, Don Marketing, developed large-scale national and international promotional campaigns for Shell and other oil majors, often involving budgets of millions of dollars.
- Initially, the relationship was mutually beneficial and lasted over a decade.
- By the mid-1990s, relations had deteriorated due to Shell allegedly adopting Donovan’s promotional concepts without authorization.
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Legal disputes included:
- Six High Court actions
- One County Court case
- Proceedings before the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
- Many cases, including libel suits arising from Shell defaming Donovan and his late father, Alfred, were settled out of court, though Donovan won a WIPO case.
- Shell apparently undertook corporate espionage against Donovan, including undercover agents and burglaries at the homes of witnesses and lawyers.
- Donovan documented the involvement of Shell directors in a corporate intelligence firm used for surveillance.
- Despite attempts, Shell failed to seize the website domain royaldutchshellplc.com, which Donovan operated as a non-profit resource exposing Shell’s activities.
- Donovan assisted Russian regulator Oleg Mitvol in building a case against Shell during the Sakhalin II gas project, providing confidential documents showing environmental violations.
- Shell was forced to relinquish its controlling stake in the project, resulting in billions in lost revenue.
- Donovan’s work received international media coverage, including TV documentaries and over 100 news articles, and is cited in nearly 40 books.
- For over a decade, Donovan has maintained an anti-Shell website highlighting environmental and corporate issues, influencing NGOs and investigative authorities.
- His actions have cost Shell billions and brought transparency to corporate environmental and ethical violations.
- Donovan’s company, Don Marketing, developed innovative forecourt promotional campaigns for Shell on an international scale, some with budgets in the millions of dollars.
- Initially, Donovan and Shell enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship lasting over a decade, before litigation erupted.
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Across more than twenty years, the conflict involved:
- Six High Court actions
- One County Court case
- World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) proceedings, specifically regarding the domain royaldutchshellplc.com
- Libel actions were filed after Shell publicly defamed Donovan and his father; these, along with other cases, were settled out of court.
- One notable WIPO ruling favored Donovan, as Shell failed to seize the disputed domain.
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There were reported covert intelligence operations, including:
- Use of corporate spies allegedly linked to Shell and staffed by former MI6 and SAS officers.
- Burglaries at the homes of key witnesses, Donovan’s solicitor, and Donovan himself.
- Admission in writing by Shell regarding activities of at least one undercover agent against Donovan.
- Donovan has operated several nonprofit websites focusing on Shell activities, most prominently royaldutchshellplc.com, which Shell attempted but failed to seize.
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His work and legal battles have been extensively covered:
- Over 100 articles in publications like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters
- Referenced in nearly 40 books
- Featured in a TV documentary broadcast internationally, highlighting his role in Shell disputes including the Sakhalin2 project
- All domestic court cases were settled, generally in favor of Donovan or his terms.
- Shell lost the WIPO case concerning the domain name.
- Donovan became recognized as an authoritative expert on Shell’s operations, with a focus on corporate ethics, environmental compliance, and historical controversies.
Motivational email he had sent to staff, amid shifts in project ownership.
Background on Greer and Sakhalin-2
David Greer served as the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy, overseeing the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project in offshore Siberia, one of the largest LNG projects in the region
HeraldScotland
+1
Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone
HeraldScotland+2
.
Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project
HeraldScotland+2
.
Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts
The Moscow Times+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.
HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times
The Email Incident
Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts
The Moscow Times
+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.
HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times
Shell Plc .website
Reuters: Shell Sakhalin boss quits after email leake
-
Whistleblowing Activities:
- Donovan, along with his father, provided confidential documents alleging environmental violations and mismanagement by Shell at the Sakhalin-2 project.
- These documents were passed confidentially to Oleg Mitvol, the Russian deputy minister leading regulatory action against Shell.
-
Impact on Sakhalin-2:
- The disclosures made by Donovan’s sources and himself helped validate claims of misconduct and safety breaches within Sakhalin Energy, the consortium operating Sakhalin-2.
- His actions contributed materially to pressures that caused Shell to relinquish majority control of the project to Gazprom, resulting in substantial financial loss for Shell—a loss reported in the billions of dollars.
- Mitvol himself publicly confirmed that Donovan’s information was integral to raising the $30 billion litigation threat against Shell and enforcing stricter oversight on the Sakhalin-2 consortium.
-
Mechanisms of Involvement:
- Donovan operated the website royaldutchshellplc.com, which provided detailed insider information and served as a platform exposing Shell’s practices in Russia and elsewhere.
- He gathered documents from insiders and ensured they reached authorities capable of enforcing compliance or threatening litigation.
- Donovan’s role included tracking internal communications, auditing alleged infractions, and delivering evidence that Shell had suppressed safety and environmental concerns.
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Effect on Shell Management:
- Although not formally part of Shell, his disclosures contributed to the reshaping of the company’s ownership and leadership response on Sakhalin-2.
- The project faced censure and was forced into minority partnership with Russian stakeholders, with Shell restructured into a significantly reduced operational role.
- Donovan’s own accounts via royaldutchshellplc.com and interviews quoted in European media (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutsche Welle, The Guardian).
- Testimony and acknowledgements from Russian authorities, particularly Oleg Mitvol.
- Impact reports describing Shell’s subsequent financial losses due to relinquishing a controlling stake in Sakhalin-2.
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Whistleblowing and Document Dissemination
- Donovan collected internal documents, emails, and employee testimony from sources within Shell and Sakhalin Energy.
- His channels—most notably royaldutchshellplc.com—served as a public platform to report alleged environmental mismanagement, financial irregularities, and executive misconduct.
- Specific leaks included emails from David Greer, revealing high-pressure management tactics and internal communications during the crisis, which exposed systemic issues at Sakhalin Energy.
-
Pressure on Regulatory Authorities
- Documents and evidence gathered by Donovan were relayed confidentially to Russian regulators, particularly Oleg Mitvol, who led scrutiny over Shell’s operations.
- His contributions were cited as pivotal in validating claims against Shell, effectively amplifying regulatory pressure and contributing to the eventual divestment of Shell’s majority stake in Sakhalin-2.
-
Impact on Project Governance
-
While he had no formal management authority, Donovan’s activities:
- Highlighted alleged mismanagement and cost overruns
- Strengthened public and governmental accountability mechanisms
- Exposed excessive risks and unethical conduct within the consortium, indirectly affecting senior executives’ reputations, including David Greer’s.
-
While he had no formal management authority, Donovan’s activities:
-
Mechanism of Influence
- Operated as a mediator of internal knowledge, turning confidential corporate correspondence into actionable intelligence for regulators and public scrutiny.
- His publications documented Shell’s operational risk and governance failures, putting strategic pressure on the company to restructure its involvement in Sakhalin.
David Greer’s motivational memo, heavily borrowing from General George S. Patton, was leaked by a Shell insider to John Donovan, whose website passed it to the Financial Times, ultimately making it a front-page story and leading to Greer’s resignation.
Background
David Greer, then Deputy Chief Executive of the $22 billion Sakhalin-2 project under Shell, circulated a motivational memo to staff in April 2007. The memo drew extensively from U.S. General George S. Patton’s speeches during World War II, including phrases like “Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way” and exhortations about winning and avoiding cowardice
The Moscow Times
+1
. Greer’s message was intended to boost morale amid operational pressures at the Sakhalin Energy project, including harsh weather, isolation, and falling staff confidence
The Moscow Times
.
Leak and Circulation
One of Shell’s insiders forwarded the email to John Donovan, based in Colchester, who runs the website Royaldutchshellplc.com. Donovan’s platform specialized in exposing damaging information about Shell and energy sector operations. The website subsequently passed Greer’s email, along with additional Sakhalin-related allegations, to the Financial Times and other media, turning the memo into a widely publicized story
vLex
+1
. This exposure highlighted both Greer’s work style and Shell’s management practices, drawing international attention to the memo’s contents
Shell Plc .website
.
Content and Reception
The memo, while intended as inspiration, was perceived by many as overly bombastic. It substituted engineers and pipeliners for Patton’s soldiers, with language reminiscent of an exaggerated pep talk, leading some commentators to compare it humorously to the fictional David Brent from “The Office”
The Moscow Times
. Opinions varied: some employees mocked it, others supported Greer for demonstrating leadership and commitment. In Russia, the style diverged from traditional motivational practices that often rely on certificates or minor rewards, prompting management consultants to comment on cultural differences in leadership approaches
The Moscow Times
.
Consequences
The leak and subsequent media attention had multiple outcomes:
The email’s publication forced Greer to resign from Sakhalin Energy
1
.
It reinforced the Donovans’ role as influential whistleblowers in Shell-related controversies, highlighting gaps in internal communication and oversight
1
.
Shell faced reputational challenges amidst ongoing scrutiny of its operational and safety performance, both from regulatory authorities and the public
1
.
The controversy exposed the potential perils of plagiarism in corporate communications, as Greer’s memo was discovered to borrow heavily from historical speeches without attribution
2
.
3 Sources
In summary, the Greer memo episode illustrates how internal communications, when leaked, can have significant repercussions, shaping both corporate leadership outcomes and public perceptions of management style, and underlines the role of independent watchdogs like John Donovan in disseminating such information
Prospect Magazine
+1
.
Shell Discovers The Perils Of Plagiarism – Mondaq United States …
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Pep Talk From ‘Old Blood and Guts’ – The Moscow Times
©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
The flashing-red bond market is the thread that may unravel the entire world economy
By Christopher Collins, Cascade Institute Fellow
The version of record of this op-ed appeared in The Globe and Mail.
Previously in these pages, I argued that the global financial system was developing the “architecture of a polycrisis” – interconnected systemic risks were emerging across sovereign debt, leveraged finance, private credit, equity concentration in technology and geopolitics. These risks were poised to synchronize; if one thread was pulled, the cascading effects could accelerate and amplify the total harm. The question was which thread would be pulled first. The U.S. bond market may have answered that question.
If the bond market is the engine temperature gauge on the global economy’s dashboard, it’s flashing red. Last week, the yield on the benchmark 30-year U.S. Treasury hit its highest level since before the 2008 financial crisis. The highly watched 10-year yield – which shapes the price of mortgages, car loans and corporate borrowing worldwide – climbed to more than 4.65 per cent, up roughly 65 basis points since the start of March.
These are not normal moves. Rather, they reflect the fact that the bond market is now pricing something it has spent years politely ignoring: The United States is increasingly behaving like a volatile emerging-market economy. And the U.S. President may be running out of cheap ways to reliably defuse this pressure. In a contest between the bond markets and political rhetoric, the bond markets will win.
For most of 2025, President Donald Trump was able to calm the bond market. When yields spiked after his April tariff announcements, his Greenland threats and his musing about firing then Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, he paused.
Eventually, markets front-ran the pattern: Yields rose, Mr. Trump blinked, yields settled and the so-called TACO traders (Trump always chickens out) who figured this out first made a great deal of money. But now, that escape hatch may be closed. The drivers of this month’s U.S. bond repricing are structural, not rhetorical, and bringing yields down will require more than a few of Mr. Trump’s tweets.
Look at what happened earlier this week when Mr. Trump announced he had called off a potentially imaginary planned attack on Iran. Yields continued their inexorable march upward. Mr. Trump’s announcements do not address the underlying conditions driving the repricing of U.S. Treasuries, and the bond market realizes that the Consumer Price Index does not respond to Truth Social posts.
To bring yields down, Mr. Trump will need to pull structural levers. This may be difficult and politically unpalatable, especially in an election year. While progress has reportedly been made toward a deal with Iran to lower energy prices, a lasting peace would require concessions many supporters in Mr. Trump’s coalition would call appeasement. A China pivot will be difficult. Spending cuts to Social Security, Medicare and defence have all been ruled out, and tax increases are off the table.
This leaves one cheap lever for Mr. Trump: leaning on the Federal Reserve. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, confirmed last week in a highly partisan vote, is now one of the most important figures in global markets. Mr. Trump may try to pressure him into cutting interest rates.
The historical parallel is sobering. More than 50 years ago, then U.S. president Richard Nixon pressured then Fed chair Arthur Burns to keep monetary policy loose ahead of the 1972 election. Mr. Burns largely complied, and while the short-term political win was real, the long-term cost was a decade of stagflation. It took the 1981-82 Paul Volcker recession to break this dynamic.
Even if Mr. Warsh yielded to the President’s pressure, this might not bring down yields. Markets are no longer pricing in rate cuts this year; rather, some traders see a non-trivial chance of a rate hike before year-end. If any future cuts are perceived as politically driven rather than data-driven, yields will rise further as investors demand more compensation for dollars whose purchasing power is politically contested. The trap snaps shut. The easiest move worsens the problem.
Right now, if anything props up the U.S., it is that America remains one of the cleanest dirty shirts in the OECD. British 10-year gilt yields are more than 5.1 per cent, as the country faces the prospect of having its seventh Prime Minister in 10 years. French politics are similarly dysfunctional, and Japanese yields are at multidecade highs. Global pension and sovereign wealth funds still see U.S. Treasuries as the least-bad option.
Yet “least bad” is no solution. It points to a slow grind higher in yields. And this connects directly to the polycrisis risks outlined earlier. Higher yields threaten leveraged Treasury basis trades, pressure bank and shadow-bank balance sheets, and tighten financial conditions at the worst possible moment. The architecture was already fragile; the question now is whether Washington still possesses the credibility to stop the threads from unravelling.
Read article in the Globe and Mail The post The flashing-red bond market is the thread that may unravel the entire world economy appeared first on Cascade Institute.National Nurses United endorses Dr. Adam Hamawy for New Jersey’s 12th District
Hyperscalers didn’t set out to be power companies. The grid left them no choice.
The power gap left hyperscalers with no alternative but to take on utility-scale obligations and lock up gigawatts of generation, writes Peak Nano CMO Shaun Walsh.
Oregon PUC approves PGE’s large-load tariff framework for data centers
The order shifts more infrastructure costs and interconnection obligations to hyperscale customers while positioning Oregon’s 2025 POWER Act as an early test of how states manage AI-driven load growth.
China Briefing 28 May 2026: Deadly rains | China pushes back | Examining China’s carbon intensity metric
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing.
China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments Several dead as record rainfall hit several provincesDEADLY DOWNPOUR: Multiple rounds of heavy rainfall have hit central and eastern China, with Agence France-Presse reporting that at least 25 people were killed in the first round, which affected provinces including Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan and Hubei. Shortly afterwards, nine people died in south-western Chongqing province, reported finance news outlet Caixin, after receiving “nearly 300mm of rain in just two hours, a deluge local residents described as the worst in more than 60 years”. The government has dedicated 280m yuan ($41m) to support affected provinces, reported state news agency Xinhua. The Communist party-backed newspaper China Youth Daily reported that more than 20 provinces have been affected so far, with rains expected to continue throughout June.
CLIMATE CONTRIBUTION: National rainfall over 11-23 May was 46% higher than the seasonal norm, said Xinhua. Nearly 500 weather stations nationwide have logged record rainfall levels, according to state-sponsored newspaper Guangming Daily. The rains were described as “quite unusual”, according to Xinhua, with the National Climate Centre’s chief forecaster Gao Hui telling the agency that the heavy rains were caused by a combination of factors. These included a convergence of several climate systems carrying in strong flows of moisture from nearby marine regions, as well as “rapid global warming, compounded by a fast-developing El Niño” increasing the atmosphere’s moisture content.
The EU ‘overcapacity’ debate‘CONCERNS’ REGISTERED: The EU will debate proposals in June to “step up efforts” to reduce economic reliance on China and protect its industries, including “safeguard investigations” for at-risk sectors and an “overcapacity instrument”, reported Politico. Finance news outlet Yicai said China in turn has registered its “concerns” with the World Trade Organization over the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA), which includes local content requirements for industries including clean-energy technologies.
上微信关注《碳简报》PATIENCE ‘WEARING THIN’: A report by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post cited “some observers” as saying a trade war characterised by the EU “clos[ing] its market down to Chinese imports” may be the “only” way in which the EU can get China to fully engage with its concerns. A China Daily editorial states that China’s “patience” over the EU’s “politicisation and over-securitisation of trade and economic issues” is “wearing thin”. An editorial in the state-supporting Global Times says “erecting higher trade barriers” against Chinese cleantech is “clearly unwise”, given the Iran conflict, adding: “China will never sit idly by while the EU unreasonably suppresses Chinese companies.”
MISSING AGREEMENTS: Meanwhile, Bloomberg covered US president Donald Trump’s claims that his counterpart Xi Jinping “likes the idea of buying more US oil”, following Trump’s state visit to China. [None of the Chinese government readouts or press briefings covering trade outcomes have mentioned any energy agreements so far.] Similarly, the “Kremlin said…a general understanding” had been reached on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline following Russian president Vladimir Putin’s visit to China, according to Reuters, but that there was “no mention of any oil and gas deals among documents signed” during his meeting with Xi. A joint statement published by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said China and Russia will “deepen” cooperation around oil and gas, coal, nuclear and renewable energy, adding that they will “strengthen cooperation in addressing climate change”.
Coal-power generation rose in April‘INFLEXIBLE’ COAL: Thermal power generation in China “grew for a fourth straight month in April”, rising 3.1% year-on-year in the face of reduced wind and nuclear generation, reported Bloomberg. “Unfavorable weather” was not the only reason for weaker clean-energy generation, wrote Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air lead analyst Lauri Myllyvirta on Bluesky, with “grid congestion due to inflexible operation of coal plants and transmission lines” also a factor. Separately, research by Global Energy Monitor found that Chinese coal-plant developers “requested approval for 51 gigawatts (GW)” of new capacity in January-March 2026, reported Bloomberg.
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SOLAR SLOWDOWN: Total power demand grew 6% year-on-year in April, according to Xinhua. Total capacity rose 14% by the end of April, reported energy news outlet International Energy Net, with China’s total solar-power capacity now exceeding 1,250 gigawatts (GW) and wind reaching 661GW, while thermal capacity rose 7% to 1,556GW. However, the growth rate of new solar installations continued to fall for a “fourth straight month”, said Bloomberg, with 9.5GW added in April 2026 compared to 45.2GW the year before.
POLICY EXPANDS: Meanwhile, the government has expanded its renewable power “direct connection” policy to allow clean-energy generators to supply multiple users directly “through dedicated [power] lines”, rather than just one consumer, reported finance news outlet Caixin. It cited a government official saying the policy is “intended to support cleaner energy use in industrial parks…and other large energy-consuming facilities”, which comprise more than two-thirds of total energy demand. Economic news outlet Jiemian quotes an expert saying the policy enables both “lower electricity prices” and “higher utilisation rates” for renewables, “reducing curtailment rates”.
More China news- ‘SOLIDARITY AND RESOLVE’: China voted in favour of a UN general assembly resolution to back the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) landmark 2025 opinion on states’ legal obligations to tackle climate change. The Chinese embassy to Vanuatu said on Facebook this displayed its “solidarity and collective resolve”.
- BOND DISCLOSURE: According to a disclosure report by China’s finance ministry, the country raised 6bn yuan in “green sovereign bonds” in 2025, said finance news outlet EastMoney ($884m), of which 700m ($103m) was spent on clean-energy retrofitting.
- WAR ON SAND: The central government has pledged to “improve” and expand its ecological compensation mechanism, including to now provide compensation for building solar farms in desertified areas, said power news outlet BJX News.
- SPACE-BASED SOLAR: Chinese scientists have begun “initial experiments” in a project to “collect [solar] energy in orbit and beam it wirelessly to Earth”, said PV Magazine.
- MINERAL STRATEGY: China has pledged to “accelerate the construction of strategic mineral-reserve sites”, reported Reuters. It will also work with the US on “reasonable” concerns around its rare-earth export controls, Reuters also reported.
Hydrogen in China continues to be mostly produced from coal, according to a National Energy Administration report. A new Carbon Brief article explored how a series of new policies in China could help scale hydrogen, particularly “green” hydrogen made with renewable power.
Spotlight China’s new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissionsA major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years.
The revised measure of “carbon intensity” implies that China’s emissions have only gone up by 7% from 2020-2025, just half of the 14% rise indicated by previous official statistics.
This spotlight is an excerpt of an analysis explaining how the metric appears to have shifted and its implications for China’s climate goals. The full article can be found on the Carbon Brief website.
Germany-sized gapReducing carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of GDP – has been China’s key climate commitment since the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.
Neither China’s international climate pledges nor other official documents have ever set out a definition of carbon intensity.
However, until this year, it was possible to closely reproduce the reported numbers, based on a straightforward interpretation of what carbon intensity means – combining official GDP data with estimates of emissions from the use of fossil fuels.
Now, the types of emissions that are included in the carbon-intensity metric have changed.
The previous carbon-intensity measure apparently included emissions from the use of fossil fuels to generate energy and as chemical feedstocks, so-called “non-energy uses”. It did not include non-fossil fuel CO2 emissions from industrial processes, such as the production of cement.
Based on reported progress against this old scope, China’s carbon intensity had fallen by 12.4% from 2020-2025, well short of its 18% target under the 14th five-year plan.
Yet the 15th five-year plan reported that China had cut its carbon intensity by 17.7% over the same period, indicating a major shift in which types of emissions are included.
A footnote in China’s latest statistical communique indicates that carbon intensity now includes industrial process emissions and excludes non-energy uses of fossil fuels.
The shift has implications for estimates of the country’s emissions.
China’s total emissions were 11.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) in 2020. Based on the original methodology, its fossil-fuel CO2 emissions had grown 14% by 2024, an increase of 1,430m tonnes (MtCO2).
In contrast, the newly reported carbon-intensity figures imply that China’s CO2 emissions only grew by 7% between 2020 and 2025, up just 690MtCO2.
The gap between these figures amounts to 730MtCO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of Germany or South Korea.
Decoding the new methodologyThe methodology change could have significant implications, making it important to understand how it is being calculated.
The new scope includes industrial-process emissions. One of the largest sources of these emissions, the cement industry, has been contracting, helping explain the improvement to carbon intensity under the new scope.
In addition, the new scope excludes non-energy use of fossil fuels – largely relating to the chemicals industry – which have seen rapid growth in the past five years.
One way to make the numbers add up would be to assume that the amount of carbon embedded in chemical-industry products has increased by the equivalent of 500MtCO2.
However, the reported output of major chemical-industry products cannot account for this level of embedded carbon.
Neither the change in scope of the carbon-intensity calculation, nor the change in the amount of carbon retained in products, can explain the size of the revision in the newly reported numbers. There must be another explanation.
Either the new scope broadly aligns with the explanation outlined above, but also excludes a subset of the CO2 emissions. Or the scope does not exclude any of the CO2, but there are gaps in the monitoring of some energy or industrial-process emissions.
Either explanation would mean China is not accounting for some of its CO2 emissions.
Implications for China’s targetsThis change has the effect of weakening China’s climate targets and introducing more uncertainty into tracking progress.
The new numbers means it will require less effort to hit the 2030 carbon-intensity target in its Paris pledge. This target can now be met even if emissions rise, whereas the previous metric would have required a reduction.
It will also require less effort to hit the carbon-intensity target in China’s 15th five-year plan.
In addition, China would be able to officially meet its target to peak emissions by 2030, even if its overall CO2 emissions do not actually peak. The change could also affect delivery of China’s targets to cut emissions by 2035.
While China may use any definition it wants for carbon intensity under the UN climate framework, retrospective changes or inconsistent accounting could erode the value of its commitments.
Moreover, it will ultimately have to close any gaps in its emissions data and reporting, under the transparency rules of the Paris Agreement.
This spotlight is adapted from an article by Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air lead analyst Lauri Myllyvirta for Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listenMINING ACCIDENT: A column in Bloomberg argued that “continuing to veer…toward cleaner [energy] development” could avoid coal-mine accidents such as the one that claimed 82 lives in Shanxi province.
INDONESIAN NICKEL: The European Guanxi Podcast recorded a discussion with Ember’s Dr Muyi Yang about the role China plays in Indonesia’s coal-reliant nickel industry.
INDUSTRIAL HURDLES: A new article in Yicai investigated the reasons why companies are holding back on relocating to zero-carbon industrial parks.
NEGATIVE PRICES: The Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily published a widely-read article on how the emergence of “negative electricity prices” signals a need for a more “coordinated” buildout of clean energy.
In billion tonnes, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that China could avoid between 2025-2060 by transitioning to clean energy, according to a new study published by several leading academic institutions in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. Scientists estimate that the remaining global budget for keeping temperatures below 1.5C is 130bn tonnes of CO2.
New science- Population exposure to heatwave-drought events “increased markedly” across China during between 1961-90 and 1991-2020, driven by a combination of population growth and more frequent heatwave-drought events | Atmospheric Research
- Fossil-fired power generation accounts for three-quarters of China’s total water consumption for energy production | Mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change
China Briefing is written by Anika Patel, with contributions from Lekai Liu, and edited by Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
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Rosatom’s Uneasy Spring: Armenia Turns Away, Europe Hesitates, China Steps In—that and more in our new nuclear digest
Russia’s nuclear ambitions abroad are increasingly colliding with geopolitical reality. In Armenia, Moscow’s once-dominant position in the nuclear sector is beginning to erode as Yerevan turns toward Europe. Across the EU, governments are still struggling in fits and starts to reduce their dependence on Russian nuclear fuel. And in Russia itself, Rosatom appears strangely reluctant to publicize the arrival from China of a major component for one of its flagship Arctic energy projects.
These are among the trends highlighted in Bellona’s April 2026 Nuclear Digest.
Armenia’s nuclear drift away from Moscow
Nowhere is the political dimension of nuclear energy clearer than in Armenia. Rosatom remains deeply involved in extending the life of the Metsamor nuclear power plant, whose second VVER-440 reactor was shut down in April for an unusually long five-month maintenance and modernization campaign. The work—carried out with the participation of multiple Rosatom subsidiaries—is intended to extend the plant’s operational life to 2036.
But while Russia still services Armenia’s aging Soviet-built reactor fleet, its chances of building Armenia’s future reactors appear increasingly slim.
“Russia and Rosatom traditionally play an important role in servicing the Metsamor nuclear power plant,” Bellona nuclear analyst Dmitry Gorchakov writes in the digest, noting Moscow’s continued role in supplying fuel, components, and modernization work. Yet he adds that “the prospects for Rosatom’s participation in Armenia’s new nuclear program remain extremely uncertain.”
That uncertainty is largely political. Armenia has accelerated discussions over building a new nuclear plant focused on small modular reactors, considering proposals from the United States, France, South Korea, and China alongside Russia’s. At the same time, relations between Moscow and Yerevan have deteriorated sharply as Armenia pivots toward the European Union.
“The current political dynamic and the likelihood of pro-European forces winning upcoming elections make the prospects for Rosatom building a new Armenian nuclear plant extremely low,” Gorchakov writes.
Europe’s sluggish nuclear divorce
Europe, meanwhile, continues its own uneasy disentanglement from Russia’s nuclear industry—though progress remains uneven.
Bellona’s digest shows that EU countries operating Soviet-designed VVER reactors are slowly introducing alternative fuel suppliers, primarily Westinghouse and Framatome. Westinghouse now has fuel supply contracts with every European VVER operator, while countries including Finland and the Czech Republic have already begun receiving non-Russian fuel deliveries.
But despite the political rhetoric surrounding energy independence after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian nuclear fuel continues flowing into Europe in substantial quantities.
“After peaking in 2023, purchases of Russian nuclear fuel have begun declining, and that trend continued in 2025,” Gorchakov writes. “But overall procurement levels still remain above prewar levels.”
Indeed, Bellona’s analysis notes that between 2022 and 2025, EU countries paid Rosatom roughly 70 percent more for nuclear fuel than during the previous four-year period.
The result, Gorchakov argues, is two distinct European strategies. The first includes countries such as Finland and the Czech Republic, which are shifting toward Westinghouse fuel and actively reducing Russian purchases. The second includes countries such as Hungary and Slovakia, which remain reluctant to break with Rosatom and instead are gravitating toward France’s Framatome as an alternative supplier.
Yet even that alternative comes with caveats. Framatome still lacks a fully independent fuel-production chain for VVER reactors and is preparing to assemble Russian-designed fuel under license at facilities in France and Germany. “This effectively preserves dependence on Russian technology in a more indirect form,” Gorchakov writes.
In other words, Europe’s nuclear decoupling from Russia remains partial, politically fragmented, and technologically incomplete.
Rosatom’s Quiet Dependence on China
If Armenia and Europe illustrate Rosatom’s geopolitical vulnerabilities abroad, developments in Russia’s Arctic suggest another problem: growing dependence on China.
In late March, according to industry publication SeaNews, the hull for a new floating nuclear power unit arrived from China at St. Petersburg’s Baltic Shipyard. The floating reactor platform is part of Rosatom’s ambitious plan to power the remote Baimskaya mining region in Chukotka using a fleet of floating nuclear reactors equipped with RITM-200S reactors.
But Rosatom itself said almost nothing publicly about the delivery.
“The arrival of the first hull for the floating nuclear power unit from China took place in an atmosphere of complete informational silence from Rosatom and its subsidiaries,” Gorchakov writes.
The silence is striking because the project is both strategically important and deeply symbolic. Rosatom has long promoted floating nuclear plants as a showcase of Russian technological prowess. But the first hulls are being built not in Russia, but at the Chinese shipyard Wison Heavy Industry because Russian shipyards lacked the capacity to complete the order on schedule.
The delays have been substantial. Under the original contract, the first hull was supposed to arrive in Russia by October 2023. Instead, it arrived roughly two and a half years late.
Why Rosatom has chosen not to highlight the delivery remains unclear. Gorchakov suggests several possibilities: security concerns, reluctance to expose Chinese partners to sanctions risks, or discomfort with publicly acknowledging that a major “prestige project” for Russia was substantially built in China.
Taken together, the stories in Bellona’s latest digest point toward a broader reality facing Rosatom in 2026. Russia’s nuclear industry remains globally active and technically capable. But geopolitical fragmentation, sanctions pressure, and shifting political alliances continue to complicate Moscow’s ability to dominate the nuclear landscape as confidently as it once did.
The post Rosatom’s Uneasy Spring: Armenia Turns Away, Europe Hesitates, China Steps In—that and more in our new nuclear digest appeared first on Bellona.org.
A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales
For bassist and composer Garth Stevenson, improvisation is not just a musical practice. It’s a way of listening deeply enough to search for connection across species. Over the last two decades, Stevenson has explored music as a form of interspecies encounter, creating improvised performances in forests, on remote coastlines, and even underwater with whales. Rather than trying to mimic animal communication, he’s interested in something more elusive: the possibility that music can create moments of connection between beings that experience the world in fundamentally different ways.
Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.
The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.
GARTH STEVENSON:
I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.
After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.
I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.
I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.
I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.
I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.
What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.
Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”
When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.
I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.
A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico.
One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.
He said, “I want to hear the whales.”
I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.
We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.
Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.
Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.
We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.
Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.
When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.
Continue exploring interspecies intelligence and connection: Read how neuroscientist Gül Dölen used octopuses and psychedelics to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is uncovering the shared “forest pharmacies” humans and animals have relied on for generations in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.
The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.
Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication
Research is increasingly confirming what many Indigenous communities and traditional healers have understood for generations: Humans are not the only species that knows how to use the natural pharmacy of the living world. Around the globe, scientists are documenting how animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to birds seek out medicinal plants to treat illness, parasites, and injury.
For Elodie Freymann, a primatologist, botanist, filmmaker, and conservation advocate, that realization has reshaped the way she thinks about medicine, intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Freymann recently attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest documenting how wild chimpanzees use medicinal plants to self-medicate. But one of her most important discoveries came through conversations with local healers, who explained that many of the same plants used by the chimpanzees were already part of nearby communities’ traditional medicinal knowledge systems.
Freymann’s work now focuses on what she describes as “shared forest pharmacies” — the overlapping medicinal relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems. Blending primatology, anthropology, ecology, and art, her research explores how species learn from one another, how medicinal knowledge moves across generations and ecosystems, and what modern science still has to learn from Indigenous and local knowledge systems. She is currently expanding this research through the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Peruvian Amazon.
The following is an edited excerpt from Freymann’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Read more about Freymann’s incredible work in our recent interview.
ELODIE FREYMANN:
I took a very winding path to end up where I am, doing what I’m doing. As a child, I was always fascinated by two things that I never thought went together. The first was chimpanzees. I’ve tried hard to figure out where that fascination came from, and I think it probably traces back to climbing as a kid and being called a monkey by family members, so I started associating myself with primates. Like many young people, I was also deeply influenced by the work of Jane Goodall. For me, she was a hero — someone I could look up to and think, “Okay, this is possible. I can do this too.”
I was also passionate about medicinal plants. I remember finding out when I was a kid that the Earth produces medicines, and I thought that was so cool.
I think what those interests have in common is that, like many of us, I was raised within a culture that teaches humans to see ourselves as separate from the natural world: exceptional, more intelligent, more complex, and more emotional than the other beings we share this planet with.
But when I looked at chimpanzees, I saw cousins. I could look into their eyes and recognize something familiar. And with medicinal plants, I began to understand that we share a long and complex co-evolutionary history with them. Somehow, the chemicals plants produce to heal and protect themselves can also heal us when we consume them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because we are part of the same community of life. We’ve co-evolved for millions of years. We even share a common ancestor with plants.
So plants and chimpanzees brought me into the natural world. And as someone who grew up in New York City surrounded by buses and tall buildings and not a lot of trees, that was very intoxicating.
But it’s been a long, winding road. I did a lot of art as a kid. Both of my parents are artists, and for a long time, I never saw myself as a scientist. I briefly worked in documentary filmmaking and studied social anthropology in college, but I still felt this deep need to reconnect with the things that fascinated me as a child. Somehow, I ended up finding a master’s program where I could study how chimpanzees use medicinal plants. How cool is that?
I learned about this field no one has heard of and no one knows how to pronounce: zoopharmacognosy. When you break down the word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition/knowledge. It’s the study of how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems.
It’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, but the more researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible. The more we study animal self-medication, the more examples we discover across the animal kingdom.
It turns out that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart; it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter and find food, know how to find medicine as well.
When I began my master’s research at the University of Oxford, which later transitioned into a Ph.D., I wanted to start with a very simple question. I knew I’d be working in the Budongo Forest in western Uganda, and I wanted to identify new medicinal plants used by chimpanzees. At that point, researchers only knew about a small handful of plant medicines chimps used, partly because the field had slowed down for a while. Funding was limited, there were methodological challenges, and after several decades of research, we still only knew of a few plants chimpanzees used to treat internal parasites.
I wanted to expand that dataset so we could begin asking more complex questions, like how chimpanzees know which plants in their environment are medicinal and which are simply part of their regular diet.
To do this, I had to use a very interdisciplinary methodology, which for me was ideal, because I had a very interdisciplinary and weird past. I had studied social anthropology and had an art background, but I didn’t have much formal training in the quantitative sciences. I had never even taken a statistics class, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself, learning new methods, and talking with researchers who had found unusual ways to bridge disciplines and combine fields.
Then I headed out into the field, completely green. I had never seen a chimpanzee in the wild before. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic and began what became a completely life-changing experience: spending nine months living alongside wild chimpanzees at a research station.
And I learned so much, not just about the chimps but about the forest ecosystem. My first paper wasn’t even about chimps; it was about red-tailed monkeys. And I wrote another paper about birds from my observations there. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that science is everywhere and everything. You have to keep your eyes really wide open, and the more you do, the more you see.
As for the chimps, I was collecting a lot of their poop and examining it under microscopes to identify parasites. I was analyzing urine samples for signs of infection, carefully monitoring their diets, and paying close attention to any plants they ate that seemed unusual. I was also collecting plant samples themselves and bringing them to a lab in Germany, where we ran pharmacological tests to see whether they had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.
Spoiler alert: they absolutely did.
The final part of the research, and the part that excited me most, was having the privilege of sitting down with healers in nearby villages who also used the forest as a pharmacy and medicine cabinet. I spoke with them about several plants I had been watching closely because the chimpanzees were seeking them out in unusual ways. By that point, I had gathered evidence suggesting the chimps were occasionally using the bark of certain trees that were not part of their normal diet.
The healers generously shared that some of those same trees were also used as medicines in their own communities. Surprise, surprise.
It was groundbreaking for me. I had been so focused on these natural medicine cabinets from the animals’ perspective that I hadn’t been thinking about them as shared. I wasn’t thinking about all the many interspecies entanglements that must exist around the world when it comes to medicines different species, including ours, are using.
I published some of those results, and now I’m working on a new postdoctoral project. In many ways, the direction has stayed the same. I’m still studying how animals use medicine in the wild, but now I’m approaching it through the lens of these medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies. In some ways, it’s an expansion of the concept of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which is incredibly important.
At international forums, there are many conversations about the importance of medicinal plants as a primary source of healthcare for people around the world. But the more-than-human world is often absent from those discussions, even though many animals rely on some of the same medicinal resources.
We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities, though those protections are still far too weak and exploitation remains widespread. But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.
That has become my mission, both as a scientist and a science communicator: to change the way we think about medicine on this planet. Medicine isn’t something that exists only for humans. It’s something all living beings rely on to survive and flourish, especially amid the rapid changes ecosystems are facing today.
Right now, I’m working with colleagues and collaborators to draft what could become the first protections for the traditional medicinal knowledge of animals, along with safeguards for the resources themselves against exploitation, degradation, and biopiracy.
I also recognize what a privilege it is to spend time with animals in the wild, and I never take that for granted. I want to do whatever I can to bring those experiences to people who don’t have the opportunity to interact with animals on a daily basis. That’s part of why I’ve started working on films, using a handful of very small grants to help share this work with a wider audience.
This knowledge has existed for thousands of years. It’s not something we’re only discovering now. People living within these ecosystems have understood many of these relationships for generations, and science is only beginning to catch up.
I saw that firsthand while working in Uganda. I had become fascinated by a behavior called bark feeding, where chimpanzees strip and consume the bark of certain trees. In primatology, this had often been dismissed as a kind of “fallback food” behavior, something animals do when there are no better options available. But the more evidence I collected, the less that explanation made sense.
When I started speaking with healers in nearby villages, I asked whether they also used bark from certain tree species medicinally, and whether they thought chimpanzees might be doing the same thing. They just laughed at me. To them, the answer was obvious. Of course humans used those barks as medicine. Of course the chimps did too.
That experience deeply shaped the way I think about science now. I’m an outsider when I enter these ecosystems. I always try to begin by listening to the people who live there and know those environments intimately. Otherwise, trying to understand these medicinal relationships is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
There’s absolutely a knowledge interchange happening between humans and other animals. Across many cultures, people have learned medicines by observing animals. And in some cases, animals may even be learning from people as well.
That perspective is shaping my current work in the central Peruvian Amazon, where I’m collaborating with an incredible team that includes Asháninka scientists. Instead of beginning solely with animal observation, we’re starting by asking which medicinal plants and resources are already culturally important within local communities, and then studying how animals interact with those same species.
It’s also changed the way I think about scientific collaboration itself. Too often, researchers parachute into ecosystems, extract knowledge, and fail to properly credit local scientists and collaborators. That has been a longstanding problem in primatology and conservation science. For me, collaborative authorship and local expertise are non-negotiable. The people who live in and understand these ecosystems are not secondary contributors to this work. They are central to it.
A lot of what I’m trying to do now is listen deeply enough to learn the right questions to ask, and help build collaborative teams that bring together many different voices and ways of knowing from around the world. Then the goal is to carry those insights back into the scientific community until science finally begins catching up with local knowledge.
Continue exploring the hidden intelligence of the more-than-human world: Read how musician Garth Stevenson uses improvisation and whale song to search for interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how neuroscientist Gül Dölen is using octopuses to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses.
The post Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication appeared first on Bioneers.
The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses
What happens when a drug designed to make humans more social is given to one of the most evolutionarily distinct forms of intelligence on Earth?
That question helped launch some of the most unexpected neuroscience research in recent years for Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work explores psychedelics, critical periods, social behavior, and the evolution of consciousness across species. While leading a lab at Johns Hopkins University, Dölen and her collaborators made headlines after giving MDMA to octopuses and discovering that the notoriously solitary animals suddenly became strikingly social and playful. For Dölen, the experiment revealed something much deeper than an unusual animal behavior study: It suggested that radically different forms of intelligence may still share ancient molecular mechanisms linked to social connection and consciousness.
Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dölen’s research spans psychedelics, neuroplasticity, evolution, and comparative neuroscience, often using highly unconventional animal models to investigate how brains learn, adapt, and relate to the world. Her work increasingly asks what humans can learn by studying minds that evolved along entirely different evolutionary paths — including octopuses, which she describes as “about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth.”
The following is an edited excerpt from Dölen’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript.
GÜL DÖLEN: I’m a neurobiologist. I grew up in Texas, and most of my experience swimming was in chlorinated pools. But when I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Turkey and went to the Mediterranean. At least, that was the plan. The moment I saw all the sea urchins covering the ocean floor, I refused to get in the water.
My grandmother, who was a zoologist, wasn’t having that for a second. She picked up a sea urchin and showed me where its mouth was, then explained how it used its spines to move food toward that mouth. Suddenly, this thing I had been terrified of transformed into this spectacular, alien creature living on the ocean floor. I think that was probably the first moment I ever considered becoming a scientist.
Fast forward many years, and I had started my own lab at Johns Hopkins University. We had made what I genuinely believed was a really big discovery about psychedelics and critical periods, something that I think could fundamentally change how we understand these drugs and how we use them as medicines.
The problem was that, in the beginning, I was having a very hard time convincing anyone else that this was earth-shattering enough to keep funding. I think I was on my sixteenth rejected grant application at the NIH. I was feeling pretty demoralized, like maybe I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lab open or keep paying people. But I still had a tiny bit of money left over, so I thought: why not do something completely wild and fun as a sort of mic drop before I moved on to becoming a UPS driver or whatever my next career was going to be.
I had already been fascinated by octopuses because of that early interest in marine biology, and I was also deeply interested in evolution. The problem is that brains are notoriously difficult to study through the fossil record because brains don’t fossilize. You can look at brain endocasts, but that only gives you the rough anatomy. It doesn’t tell you very much about how a brain actually works.
Around the same time I was struggling to get NIH funding, a paper came out in the journal Nature describing the first octopus genome. I was completely stunned. I remember thinking: This is it. This is how we’re finally going to understand brain evolution. A genome is exactly what you need to reconstruct phylogenetic trees across evolutionary history, so suddenly, there was a way to begin understanding, at least at the molecular level, how brains evolve.
I was incredibly excited about all of this, and I had already started talking with people about how to somehow break into the octopus world. I had a collaborator at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who had been helping me think through some of these ideas, and one day he called and said, “You know, we have seven octopuses available. Do you have any experiment you want to do with them?”
And I said yes.
So he packed them into a box and FedExed them from Massachusetts down to Baltimore. Then he got on a plane himself and flew down too. I sent everyone else home from the lab so we could run the experiment ourselves.
The experiment we wanted to run was to give octopuses MDMA, a psychedelic drug known for causing humans and other mammals to become much more social. It’s the classic rave drug, but it’s also now being developed by several companies as a potential treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
MDMA is a completely synthetic compound. It doesn’t really exist in nature, though there are some related compounds in sassafras trees. So unlike many psychedelics, it’s not something animals would have naturally encountered or evolved alongside, even though there are other psychedelics that animals do use.
We thought there was almost no chance this would work because octopuses and humans are separated by something like 600 million years of evolution. Our last common ancestor was basically little more than a bacterium. We’re actually more closely related to sea urchins than we are to octopuses. Their brains look nothing like ours, and despite what you may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses are viciously asocial creatures. I like to joke that they’re the psychopaths of the ocean. They seem to have an incredible capacity for cognitive empathy, but very little obvious emotional empathy.
So we assumed MDMA probably wouldn’t do much because we didn’t think octopuses shared the same kind of social brain chemistry that mammals do. But since MDMA has some similarities to amphetamines, I thought maybe we’d at least see some kind of behavioral response.
We started with a very high dose because we had no idea how to translate human dosing to an octopus. At those higher doses, the octopuses behaved a lot like humans on amphetamines. They became hypervigilant, staring around the tank and looking at me suspiciously.
But as we gradually lowered the dose and got into the range that would roughly correspond to an effective human dose, something really strange happened. The octopuses started doing what we called “the ballerina move.” Normally, when an octopus knows there’s another octopus nearby, it becomes extremely reserved. It pulls all eight arms tightly underneath its body and keeps its distance. If it interacts at all, it might cautiously extend a single arm, touch the other octopus, and immediately pull back.
On MDMA, it was completely different. Suddenly, all eight arms were floating outward in the water, almost like they were dancing. They engaged in what looked to us very much like play behavior. They were doing backflips, exploring each other freely, and spending far more time near the other octopus than with the toy we had placed in the tank.
What made this so remarkable was that octopuses don’t have brain anatomy that looks anything like ours. They don’t have a cortex, an amygdala, or a nucleus accumbens, all the structures we normally associate with social behavior in humans and other mammals. And yet they were responding to this synthetic compound with behaviors strikingly similar to our own.
To me, that suggested that the thing we truly share is happening at the molecular level. This was a very clear demonstration of how two molecules interacting with each other can radically alter consciousness, in this case specifically around social behavior. The real mechanism isn’t necessarily brain anatomy itself. It’s the molecules and the ways they interact.
This completely transformed the way I think about science. My lab spent many years focused on circuit mapping and brain anatomy, but over time I’ve become less interested in anatomy alone and much more interested in comparative studies across radically different species.
I didn’t invent this idea that the best way to understand complex behavior is not by only studying ourselves, chimpanzees, and other animals closely related to us, but by studying species that are maximally different from us, like octopuses, which are about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth. That idea really came from J. Z. Young, one of the earliest modern neuroscientists. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called A Model of the Brain arguing that octopuses were actually the ideal animals for understanding the fundamental building blocks shared across brains. His point was that if you compare species that are too similar, it becomes hard to distinguish what is truly fundamental from what is simply an accident of shared evolutionary history, like whether a brain happens to have a cortex or not.
In some ways, this can be understood as a new example of what evolutionary biologists call “deep homology.” That’s different from the kinds of examples many of us learned about in high school biology, things like convergent evolution and the distinction between compound eyes and camera eyes. What molecular biology is increasingly revealing is that this kind of deep homology at the level of genes and molecules is far more common than we once realized.
We recently finished mapping another octopus genome, this time for the zebra pygmy octopus, Octopus chierchiae. What’s extraordinary is just how different octopus genome architecture is from our own. Their genome is roughly twice the size of the human genome and packed with repetitive sequences, many of which are thought to be jumping genes, essentially virus-like elements that invade genomes over evolutionary time.
What’s fascinating is that octopuses seem remarkably tolerant of these repetitive sequences, and we’re beginning to suspect they may actually play some important regulatory role. We also found that octopuses continue growing neurons throughout their lives, so adult neurogenesis is fairly common in them. On top of that, there’s extensive RNA editing happening inside their neurons. They continue learning well into adulthood, they can regenerate lost arms, and they’re capable of adapting to wildly different environments, from the Arctic to the Caribbean.
They possess this astonishing range of learned and adaptive behaviors that makes them some of the most behaviorally flexible and cognitively complex invertebrates on Earth. And we keep discovering entirely new things they can do, these bizarre little superpowers we don’t have ourselves. They solve problems in ways completely different from humans, and honestly, that’s incredibly exciting to me as a scientist because who wouldn’t want to study superpowers?
Right now, there’s a huge cultural fascination with octopuses as cute, emotionally relatable creatures. I actually think that badly misunderstands what they are. Despite what people may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses did not evolve to cuddle middle-aged white guys going through a divorce.
Most octopus species are intensely asocial. They are extraordinarily successful predators with incredibly sophisticated learning, memory, camouflage, and problem-solving abilities, but they are not social in the way humans are social. Some species are so solitary that females may never even see the entire male. They only encounter his specialized reproductive arm, which he detaches in order to escape before being eaten.
I think it’s important to respect octopuses for what they actually are rather than trying to remake them in our own image. The truly remarkable thing is not that they are secretly humanlike. It’s that minds so radically different from ours can still reveal deep biological commonalities at the molecular level.
People are usually willing to protect what they know and love, so part of my job as a biologist is helping people understand these animals more deeply. That includes understanding just how alien they are and how fundamentally different they are from us, while still finding connection in the fact that we are part of the same biology, shaped by the same evolutionary history and built from the same basic materials.
Continue exploring consciousness, communication, and intelligence across species: Read how musician Garth Stevenson explores music as a form of interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is documenting the shared medicinal knowledge of humans and animals in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.
The post The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses appeared first on Bioneers.
Virginia senator suggests SCC judge recuse herself from NextEra-Dominion merger
The state senator also objects to the merger itself, calling it “extremely concerning” in an environment of “rising utility bills and unprecedented grid expansion costs driven largely by hyperscale data center growth.”
Samoan Community Leaders, Environmental Advocates Call on Coca-Cola’s Largest Bottler to Keep Plastic out of the Pacific and Bring Back Reusable Packaging
LONDON — Members of the Samoan and Pacific Islander community and environmental advocates protested outside Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ (CCEP) annual general meeting Thursday, calling on the company to reduce single-use plastic and bring back reusable packaging systems. CCEP is Coca-Cola’s largest bottler by revenue. Headquartered in London, it produces, sells, and distributes the company’s products across 31 global markets, including Western Europe, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
At the cultural protest, members from the London School of Hula and ‘Ori performed traditional Samoan song and dance, including "Lo ta nu’u," and presented a performance titled "O le vasa, we are the ocean," highlighting the connection between Pacific Island communities and the ocean.
Advocates delivered a symbolic "message in a bottle," which included a letter signed by Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa / Samoa Conservation Society, Samoa Recycling and Waste Management Association (SRWMA), Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), the London School of Hula and ‘Ori, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), and Oceana, placed inside a single-use plastic Coca-Cola bottle from Samoa. The letter, addressed to CCEP’s CEO Damian Gammell, highlights the company’s increased use of single-use plastic bottles, its effects on the oceans and Samoan communities, and how the company can help solve this problem.
In 2021, in Samoa, Coca-Cola stopped bottling its products in reusable glass bottles. Now CCEP imports large quantities of single-use plastic bottles from Fiji and New Zealand. The shift to imported plastic bottles has contributed to rising waste, much of which is littered, burned, or landfilled due to limited recycling capacity. Reportedly, imports of plastic bottles more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, and Coca-Cola products account for about one-third of beverage bottle waste in the country.
"We encourage Coca-Cola to be on the right side of history by moving back to reusable bottles, like glass, in Samoa and becoming a leader in the transition away from plastics. As one of the most recognizable global brands, we believe that Coca-Cola can be a game changer in the fight against plastics, should they choose to prioritize planet over profits, " said James Atherton of the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa (Samoa Conservation Society).
“Given the limited capacity for plastic recycling in Samoa, most of the waste ends up being littered, illegally dumped, incinerated, or landfilled. For those of us in Samoa, we witness the consequences of your business decisions every day. On our land, across our beaches, and in our waters,” the groups wrote in the letter.
"Plastic pollution and the climate crisis share the same fossil fuel origin, and Pacific Island communities bear a disproportionate share of both. The science is sobering: microplastics have been documented in 97% of fish species sampled across our ocean region — nearly 50% above the global average — yet CCEP's PET use in the Asia-Pacific outpaces its own global share. Reinstating refillable systems in Samoa is not a favour to the Pacific; it is the evidence-based, climate-consistent decision a company of CCEP's scale is well-positioned to make," said Rufino Varea, Director, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).
CCEP continues to sell single-use plastic in Samoa despite growing global concern over the plastic pollution crisis in the ocean and its likely impacts on human health. This trend is not unique to Samoa — according to an analysis by Oceana of CCEP’s reported data, between 2020 and 2025, the company’s global use of PET plastic packaging increased by over two-thirds from 198 to 335 thousand metric tons.
On the occasion of CCEP’s annual general meeting, the groups are calling on Coca-Cola and CCEP to transition back to reusable packaging, reduce single-use plastic, and invest in waste management solutions in affected communities.
“Performed in Sāmoa and London by members from across Pacific communities, this Sāmoan hymn and Sāsā reflects the pride we hold in our cultures and ways of life, our gratitude for the Earth and Oceans that sustain us, and the unity that binds us in protecting these things for generations to come,” said Krysten Resnick, Founder and Director of the London School of Hula and ‘Ori.
“Coca-Cola and CCEP have an opportunity in Samoa to right a wrong by bringing back reusable glass bottles and eliminating their plastic bottle waste. Reuse is the right choice for supporting healthy communities and protecting our oceans,” said Dr. Dana Miller, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives for Oceana.
“Coca-Cola has been the world's worst plastic polluter six years running, accounting for at least 11% of all branded plastic waste found in the environment. And yet, rather than scaling up the reusable glass bottle systems that reduce single-use plastic, the company is phasing them out in places like Samoa. This company has the solution and all the know-how to make it work. Instead, it is actively choosing a path that generates more pollution - to the detriment of the communities and ecosystems left to deal with its waste. Coca-Cola must bring back reusable glass, urgently and at scale,” said Emma Priestland, Global Corporate Campaigns Coordinator for #BreakFreeFromPlastic
To read the full letter to CCEP, click here.
Photos are available here.
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Additional Background:
- The protest and letter come amid growing global scrutiny of Coca-Cola’s sustainability practices. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Science found that Coca-Cola was the number one polluter of branded plastic found in the environment.
- Despite its rapidly growing plastic footprint, the company abandoned its goal to increase reusable packaging in December 2024.
- In 2025, Oceana released a report that projects The Coca-Cola Company’s plastic use will exceed 9.1 billion pounds (4.1 million metric tons) per year by 2030 if the company does not change its practices. This would be nearly a 40% increase over the company’s reported plastic use in 2018 and a 20% increase over the company’s most recently reported plastic use in 2023, which was already enough plastic to circle the Earth more than 100 times.
- The report also estimates that up to 1.3 billion pounds (602,000 metric tons) of the plastic packaging that Coca-Cola uses annually by 2030 would enter the world’s waterways and oceans if the company continues on its current course. This amount of plastic could fill the stomachs of over 18 million blue whales.
- The Oceana report also found that Coca-Cola could reduce its annual plastic use below current levels if it were to reach 26.4% reusable packaging by 2030.
- In December 2021, the Samoa Conservation Society delivered a petition to Coca-Cola South Pacific asking the company to resume glass bottling in the country.
About the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa:
Sosaiete Faasao O Samoa / The Samoa Conservation Society is a Samoan non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting the conservation of Samoa’s natural heritage and helping the public reduce their environmental impacts and develop greener lifestyles. We work collaboratively with communities, the Government and NGO partners to raise awareness on the state of, and threats to, Samoa’s environment and biodiversity. We also teach the public and youth groups about our natural heritage and the practical actions we can take to promote species and ecosystem conservation and to reduce our environmental footprint.
About PICAN:
The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) is a regional alliance of civil society organisations working on climate change in the Pacific region. Since 2013, it has brought together civil society actors across the Pacific Island countries, advocating for climate justice and environmental integrity. PICAN aims to unite civil society under a common voice to increase the influence and impact of their advocacy demands on Pacific Island governments, leading non-Pacific governments to respond with more powerful and ambitious climate change policies and action at the national and regional level.
About LSHO:
The London School of Hula and 'Ori (LSHO) is a cultural arts organisation dedicated to preserving and advancing Pacific heritage through lineage-based cultural practice, education, performance, and community engagement. LSHO provides a vital space where Pacific diaspora communities in London/UK, as well as anyone interested in Pacific cultural arts, can gather, learn, and participate, helping to create a more visible presence where Pacific arts, knowledge, and communities are valued, connected, and sustained.
About Oceana:
Oceana is the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation. Oceana is rebuilding abundant and biodiverse oceans by winning science-based policies in countries that control one-quarter of the world’s wild fish catch. With more than 350 victories that stop overfishing, habitat destruction, oil and plastic pollution, and the killing of threatened species like turtles, whales, and sharks, Oceana’s campaigns are delivering results. A restored ocean means that 1 billion people can enjoy a healthy seafood meal every day, forever. Together, we can save the oceans and help feed the world. Visit Oceana.org to learn more.
About BFFP:
#BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP) is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3500 member organizations and 11,000 individual supporters in 186 countries have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain—from extraction to disposal—focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions.
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