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By: Green Knowledge Foundation

In Durban, South Africa the partnership between the Early Morning Market and the Warwick zero waste composting project stands as a practical model that should be replicated across Africa. This collaboration has not only transformed the market into a cleaner, tidier, healthier, and more attractive environment, but has also significantly reduced the burden on the municipal waste authority while creating value from organic waste through compost production.

To many residents, organic waste is simply part of daily life, but in recent times, environmental organisations, and climate experts across the globe are beginning to see something different, an opportunity for climate action, income generation and community empowerment.

Nigeria generates millions of tonnes of waste every year, and more than half of it is organic; food waste, agricultural residues, and biodegradable materials. When improperly managed, this waste decomposes in oxygen-deprived dumpsites and releases methane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term. Yet effective organic waste management can transform this environmental challenge into social, economic, and climate solutions.

Waste Pickers benefit significantly.

For waste pickers and informal waste workers, improved organic waste management systems create opportunities for safer livelihoods, economic empowerment, and social inclusion. Across Nigeria, informal waste workers already play a critical role in material recovery, recycling, and waste diversion despite operating with limited recognition, inadequate protection, and unsafe working conditions. Their efforts help reduce the volume of waste reaching dumpsites and landfills, thereby contributing to methane reduction and broader environmental sustainability goals.

Proper management of organic waste through composting, source segregation, decentralised collection systems, and Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) creates pathways for new green jobs and more stable income opportunities. Through the implementation of the Multi-Solving Action for Methane Reduction in Nigeria ( MAMRN) project, new opportunities are being created for waste workers to transition from hazardous collection practices into safer, more organized, and dignified work. These opportunities include the construction of Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) within the project.

This waste management system also creates opportunities for skills development, entrepreneurship, compost production, agriculture support, and climate smart business that benefit local economies. Beyond improving environmental conditions, inclusive organic waste management can help to reduce social stigma and protect informal workers while also improving their health and reducing pressure on landfills.

Across Africa, similar models are already demonstrating the socio-economic potential of inclusive waste systems. E.g. In Accra, the work of the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO) has shown how integrating waste pickers into organized recovery and recycling programs can improve livelihoods, strengthen community participation, and support sustainable environmental management. Such examples reinforce the idea that proper organic waste management is not only a climate solution but also a pathway toward economic resilience, social inclusion, and community development.

Farmers also stand to benefit significantly.

Composting initiatives have already demonstrated how organic waste can be converted into nutrient-rich compost that improves soil fertility while reducing dependence on chemical fertilisers. The MRF being constructed in the MAMRN project is designed to process a minimum of 10 tons of waste weekly, producing compost and Black Soldier Fly (BSF) larvae for Nigerian farms.

For small farmers facing rising fish feed and fertiliser costs and declining soil quality, compost and BSF larvae offers a climate-smart alternative that supports healthier produce, crops and long-term soil restoration.

Young people and entrepreneurs are finding opportunities as well. Across Africa, climate-focused enterprises are emerging around composting, Black Soldier Fly farming, waste collection, recycling, and methane monitoring systems. New jobs are being created in environmental education, circular economy innovation, climate data, and sustainable agriculture.

As one Climate and Clean Air Coalition report noted, organic waste should be seen as “a viable resource.” 

Communities themselves benefit through cleaner environments and improved public health. Poorly managed organic waste contributes to environmental stench, air pollution, blocked drainage systems, and disease outbreaks. Effective waste separation and composting, reduce the volume of waste entering dumpsites while lowering methane emissions and open burning.

For NGOs and development organisations, this creates an important opportunity for high impact interventions. This also combines climate mitigation with livelihood creation, food security, gender inclusion, and youth empowerment. Organic waste management sits at the centre of all these priorities.

The MAMRN project has revealed the urgent need for more initiatives focused on composting, circular economy systems, and methane reduction, as these approaches can simultaneously deliver environmental benefits, create green jobs, support sustainable agriculture, and strengthen community resilience. Such initiatives also align strongly with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

Globally, the transition toward zero waste systems is accelerating because governments and development partners increasingly recognise that climate action must also create social and economic value.

The environment and the economy are deeply interconnected, and effective organic waste management is increasingly demonstrating this reality. What was once viewed merely as waste is gradually emerging as a source of livelihoods, climate solutions, cleaner environment, healthier soils, and economic opportunity.

The future of sustainable development may therefore depend not only on reducing waste, but on recognizing the social, environmental, and economic value embedded within it.

This article is fourth in a series on the Methane Reduction in Nigeria (MAMRN) Project, implemented in collaboration with CfEW Jos, SraDev Lagos, Pave Lagos, CODAF Epe Lagos, and SEDI Benin City.

The post Opportunities in Organic Waste Management first appeared on GAIA.

This article ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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With the World Cup starting on June 11, workers, residents and activists in its 16 host cities across North America are mobilizing against the increased presence of police and of Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE, in communities of color during the World Cup. 

On May Day, thousands of people, led by the Unite HERE Local 11 union of hospitality workers walked from Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park to the FIFA building downtown, where they proceeded to drop more than a hundred soccer balls down the steps, chanting “kick ICE out.” 

A few weeks later, community activists in LA held the first event of the People’s World Cup, a documentary screening about the increased policing and surveillance that comes with big sporting events like the World Cup.

And activists in Seattle, another World Cup host city, held an art build to bring the community together to create anti-ICE paintings. They are part of “No ICE in the Cup,” a big tent coalition of artists and local groups brought together by two organizations, the Horizons Project and the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, and united under the demand for no ICE presence at or near the World Cup games. 

“We know that that demand is going to have to be a collective resounding demand, and that this administration needs to hear from people from all walks of life,” said CJ Garcia, an immigrant justice organizer involved with No ICE in the Cup in Seattle. 

Coalition partners in host cities such as Seattle, Boston, New York and Dallas — and non-host cities joining in solidarity like Yakima, Washington, and Oklahoma City — have held art campaigns, teach-ins and soccer tournaments to connect and educate their communities. 

“We’re hosting those kind of events in order for people to come together to get to know who shares the value of making the World Cup a safe, joyful and inclusive and welcoming space, and that includes and centers immigrants, workers, working-class people, low-income folks who are often left out of those conversations,” Garcia said. 

The Trump administration has not responded to the campaign, and in May the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that ICE would be present at the World Cup. 

Art created for the No ICE in the Cup campaign. (From left to right: Hana Natsuhara, Chris Stewart, Angel Faz)

As the event kicks off, Garcia is organizing worker-led spaces in Seattle where people can enjoy the games safely. “It will be inevitable that our communities get excited about this mass cultural moment, and we want to create spaces where people are able to both get information, get organized, get activated, but also enjoy the beautiful game,” Garcia said.

The People’s World Cup is taking a different approach, with a call for a boycott of the World Cup to oppose the increased presence of law enforcement and ICE. 

“We are emphasizing … boycotting the games, that people should not be legitimizing these games in the face of fascism,” said Carlos Sirah, an organizer with Black Alliance for Peace, which has helped pull together the People’s World Cup in LA. “So for that reason, we are asking people to organize, to counter-program to reclaim the sport, which belongs to the people.” 

Resisting policing around mega events

Historically, wherever mega sports events like the Olympics, Super Bowl and World Cup go, law enforcement and ICE tend to follow. The United States classifies them as National Special Security Events, or NSSE, which means that host cities and communities are subjected to even more surveillance and policing before, during and after the games.

Sirah said it is important to educate people in the community about the impacts that mega events in Los Angeles have had in the past. When LA hosted the 1984 Olympics, the event budget was used to purchase machine guns, armored vehicles and surveillance, which were used by police long after the games ended, Sirah said. This contributed to the mass arrests of mostly Black youth and created the conditions for the 1992 uprisings. 

Previous Coverage

Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup

At the same time, Sirah said, these events often displace people who live in the community. In Cape Town, South Africa, 20,000 Black and mixed-race people were displaced to clear the way for the stadium for the 2010 World Cup. Thousands of Black people were forced to move when the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood — where the World Cup is being hosted — was unveiled in 2020 for NFL events and large concerts. 

“We say that it’s unacceptable, this war on and the theft from working-class people,” Sirah said. “They give us crumbs, and we refuse the crumbs. We refuse a World Cup of displacement.”

Eric Sheehan, founder of NOlympics LA, which started in 2017 to oppose the 2028 Olympics being held in the U.S., said it is unjust that most people in the community cannot afford or attend these mega events. At the same time, residents have to deal with intense surveillance and increased policing because their cities host these games.

“Each one of these mega events is an excuse for the federal government to descend upon our city and terrorize our people,” Sheehan said. “We want people to understand that, regardless of the good vibes that come with it, these events always bring ICE to terrorize our neighborhoods and our neighbors, and that will never be good for us.”

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security will be sending “counterterrorism” task forces to the World Cup cities as part of the NSSE protocol, stirring fear that immigrant communities will be targeted by ICE.

LA Sheriff Robert Luna said that federal officials told him that while ICE will be present, it will not be conducting “civil immigration enforcement.”

“Any of that is subject to change,” Luna cautioned.

The Los Angeles community feels the threat. On June 5, the UNITE HERE Local 11 union of hospitality workers which represents workers at the SoFi Stadium authorized a strike with 96 percent voting to demand protections from ICE at the workplace and better conditions. Cesar Zamora, a union worker at SoFi Stadium, said that the stadium should offer more incentives to workers when they work these large events that welcome thousands of people from all over the world, and not add ICE to the equation for workers to worry about. 

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“When we heard that ICE was going to be involved around the games, it was concerning, because as we have seen, every time there’s ICE involved, there’s always chaos,” Zamora said. “They claim to be looking out for criminals, but everybody that works at SoFi is a hard worker.”

Days after the strike was authorized, the SoFi Stadium conceded to a new contract for the workers, averting the strike. Under the tentative agreement, workers would get raises and be allowed to strike if ICE threatens staff or fans. Leading up to that victory, the workers held protests outside the FIFA building and at SoFi Stadium.

To further educate, connect and protect Los Angeles residents, Black Alliance for Peace and NOlympics LA created the People’s World Cup program. The first event was a screening of “March of the White Elephants,” which is about stadiums that were built for previous World Cups in Brazil and South Africa at enormous expense with little or no input from — or benefits for — the working people who lived there. Sirah said the purpose of the screening was to ask community members what these games do to change the material conditions of their lives.

Additionally, the campaign hosted a running event, soccer matches with up to 100 people, canvassing, solidarity protests with the Boycott Home Depot campaign, and talks with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador about resistance against imperialism.

Sheehan said that making connections across various groups and causes has been critical to organizing, as NOlympics LA has worked with local to international organizations. When Sheehan reached out to the Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition, he learned that the group had already heard about NOlympics LA and had been building on their work around mega events.

Building a national coalition

No ICE in the Cup is working with a broad range of communities and causes. Campaigns in some cities are including their own unique demands, such as Seattle calling for worker protections and Dallas calling to end ICE detention contracts. In Atlanta, the Play Fair ATL coalition is tracking the city’s adherence to a plan it submitted to FIFA to uphold human rights during the Cup (one of just four host cities to submit the required plan).

Garcia sees the campaign as an effort to collectively demand that everyone be able to safely enjoy a game that brings people together without threatening their livelihood.

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“There has been an increase of ICE presence in our communities already, so we know that the federal administration will try to equate ICE and federal agencies with mechanisms of safety,” Garcia said. “But we know that the reality is people on the ground and people who are visiting are trying to enjoy the game.”

In response to the increased fear of ICE amid the games, No ICE in the Cup organizers in different host cities have held Know Your Rights trainings to plan for community safety and rolled out toolkits on how to host an ICE-free watch party. The Our Copa campaign, a joint initiative of Working Families Power and Mijente Support Committee, is doing the same, and offers a searchable list of safe watch parties nationwide.

The No ICE in the Cup campaign is also planning ongoing national calls about how to keep ICE out of their cities and keep their communities safe. 

“We are not just counting on the administration to concede,” Garcia said. “Our success metric is how many people can build together locally, statewide and at the national level.” And on that front, organizers have already built relationships that will long outlast the World Cup.

This article ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

DENVER—Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Bureau of Land Management Director Steve Pearce were in Grand Junction on Wednesday for a “roundtable with community outdoor recreation and health figures in promotion of the departments’ collaboration on the intersection of public land access, physical activity and public health outcomes,” according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. 

According to the Sentinel, Burgum was asked about public land selloff and downplayed the significance of selling off 2-3 million acres of public land:

Burgum was asked about his previous advocacy for selling off two to three million acres of BLM and Forest Service land and how this contrasts with current efforts to expand public land access. He responded that, in America, “you can do two things at the same time,” noting that the few million acres mentioned are a small portion of the approximately 525 million acres of Forest Service, BLM and National Park Service lands.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Communications Director Kate Groetzinger: 

“It’s shocking that Secretary Burgum is still defending Mike Lee’s failed public land sell-off attempt. The entire country—including hunters, anglers, and conservative lawmakers—adamantly rejected Lee’s attempt to sell off national public lands last year. We know that Burgum’s office helped Lee write talking points for his failed gambit to privatize public lands, and the fact that Burgum is still pushing it shows the fight is not over. Clearly Doug Burgum still wants to sell off our public lands.”

Also at the roundtable Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touted the power of nature to improve Americans’ health. The Sentinel wrote:

“Burgum said in a press conference after the roundtable that some participating physicians suggested that the government adopt language that it’s ‘prescribing’ Americans with ‘vitamin N’ for ‘nature’ to get them active outside.

“‘We need to get kids outdoors. Particularly, we need to connect them to the wilderness. The wilderness is a seminal experience for American kids and has been since our nation was founded,’ Kennedy said.”

Despite this acknowledgement, the Interior department announced today via Fox News that it is cutting 43 partnerships with outside groups it says no longer align with the Trump administration’s priorities. These include internship programs, conservation initiatives, research projects, and cooperative partnerships to get Americans outside.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Communications Director Kate Groetzinger: 

“Cutting partnerships that help get Americans outdoors during Great Outdoors Month is shameful and cruel. The administration is saying one thing and doing another—touting the outdoors as crucial for physical and mental health while cutting programs that increase access to outdoor recreation. Doug Burgum should put his money where his mouth is and expand federal partnerships that help Americans get outside, not cut them.”

Learn more:

• The Secretary of the Interior has a Yellowstone Club problem – Westwise
• Trump’s Interior Dept. Crafted Talking Points For Mike Lee’s Public Land Sell-Off Scheme – Public Domain
• 2026 Conservation in the West poll – Colorado College State of the Rockies Project

Featured image: @SecretaryBurgum

The post Burgum doubles down on support for selling off public land, cuts partnerships to get Americans outdoors appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This week, we have a controversial episode featuring the ultimate roads scholar, Florida Atlantic University Professor Eric Dumbaugh, slaughtering some of the sacred cows of the livable streets movement. To Dumbaugh, the issue isn’t merely redesigning roads for safety, but making sure that planners don’t put all the big box stores on arterials.

We at Streetsblog USA aren’t sure we’re convinced, but we always like to hear from important people in the traffic space.

And, as always, let’s review all the ways you can enjoy this spirited content:

• Click here for a full transcript, albeit with some AI typos.
• Click the player below to listen.
• Or check out the lightly edited excerpt below the player.

Here’s the edited transcript:

Jeff Wood: Well, you’ve got a new paper out, Land Use and Road Safety: Understanding the Persistence of Vulnerable Road User Deaths and Injuries in the United States. I’m wondering if you can give us a little bit of the basics of what you found and why you were looking in this specific direction.

Eric Dumbaugh: So I’ve been examining street design issues now for 25 years, and there’s a uniquely U.S. view that street design is the solution to all things. But when it comes to arterials, European designs are indistinguishable from what we use in the United States. The lane widths, the design features are exactly the same. The difference is what we put along our streets, right?

Everyone who goes to Western Europe on vacation comes back and says, “Oh, this is really rather lovely. We should have our streets designed like this.” But those are essentially pre-automobile streets, the streets that were built from the Renaissance through the early industrial era. After the Second World War, they didn’t build American-style, they did not build the stuff we built. They essentially rebuilt the urban fabric that they had, and they haven’t had a lot of population growth since then.

So when we start looking at street design solutions from Europe, we need to understand that we’re looking at a built environment context where the automobile is adapted into a pre-automobile form.

The United States is totally different. Nearly all of our growth has happened since the Second World War — and all of that growth was built on an entirely different design model that came of age in the 1910s and 1920s that was centered around integrating automobile into the urban fabric.

So the safety problem on the streets happens because we have different sorts of users entering them. So is the issue really street design? Is it speed? Or is there something else going on here?

And what I found is that after you control for land use, things like speed and geometric design don’t really matter that much. What’s going on is we’re putting these land uses on either side of the street and it’s activating different activities there.

We’ve all seen the graphic where, you know, your chance of dying in a 40-mile-per-hour crash is like 90 percent. But to me, the question is, why is somebody walking there? They’re not walking there in Sweden because there’s nothing to walk to. All of those land uses are prohibited along their arterials. You can’t build that stuff there.

In the United States, our development model is we build the residential community as a cell, and then we export all of the other uses outside, to the arterials.

And that’s generating the hazard, because once you put them there, you start drawing the activities to them. You draw the pedestrians to them, you draw the cyclists to them, you draw the cars in and out of the driveways.

Now, often here in the United States, we have debate: “cars versus vulnerable users.” The safety problem for these users is exactly the same, and it’s the confluence of activities at these points. So the question then becomes: Why are we putting these uses in these environments, right? And what do we do about that to retrofit it going forward?

I have a graphic in the article that I think does a good job of illustrating this:

The traffic engineer was never tasked with city design The traffic engineer was tasked with moving traffic. That was part of the configuration that came about in the 1920s and ’30s. They go out and they build perfectly fine roads, rural roads, ex-urban roads that are indistinguishable from the European counterparts. The difference is our planners, our local economic development people, they get real excited about bringing in growth, and they’re experiencing growth, and they channel it over these roads.

So roads that are perfectly fine in an undeveloped context become developed. Think of them as a latent hazard, right? The speed is hazardous, but it’s only hazard if it’s activated. And when you put these land uses on there, when your local planner colors their land-use map red and says, “We’re gonna allow this development along here,” they’re activating that error.

Virginia passed a law encouraging utilities to offer big power users the opportunity to participate in load-shedding programs, but for facilities, signing up is not an easy decision.

In the largest agricultural state in the U.S., Regenerative California is creating new pathways to help new and beginning farmers build a different future for global food and agriculture systems.

The nonprofit, based in Monterey County, California, uses their demonstration farm to prove that regenerative agriculture is viable. Now in its second year, Regenerate 68! Farm grows berries and vegetables. The site is currently Certified Organic, and Kristin Coates, the organization’s Co-Founder and CEO, says they’re working toward Regenerative Organic certification.

As the farm evolves further Regenerative California is hoping to bring students onto the land to encourage more people to see a future in agriculture.

Coates explains that her children have no interest in farming. “They see this dead end,” she says. “I’m around all these synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. Why would they choose [this path]?” But, she says, “it doesn’t have to be business as usual.” Regenerative California wants to prove that there’s another way.

“We’re in conversations with local universities that are training the next generation of ag and farm workers,” Coates tells Food Tank, so they can serve as “a living classroom for regenerative agriculture.”  The organization is also working with vocational schools in the area.

Coates says she’s particularly excited about young people’s interest in gathering data, measuring the impact of climate-friendly farming practices, and improving biodiversity. “The other piece we’re seeing is this entrepreneurial spirit,” she tells Food Tank. “Young people are seeing that ‘I can have my autonomy, I can have independence, I can grow my own business.’”

One vocational school, Rancho Cielo, works with youth between the ages of 16 and 24, who learn skills in sectors including welding, hospitality, or agriculture. When they come to the farm, Coates explains, “we’re seeing this is a place to create an entirely new livelihood, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm to do that.”

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kristin Coates on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about how Regenerative California plans to share their model with other counties, their work on blue food systems, and what it looks like to build trust and drive community engagement.

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 Andrea D, Unsplash

The post In Monterey County, this Farm Is Building a Path to a Regenerative Food Future appeared first on Food Tank.

The Trump administration has awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations to a network of politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies, according to a new report released today by Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project.

Of the $126 million in grants awarded to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, over 80% of the awards have gone to build out a politicized series of events, at the public’s expense, according to the report. Among the recipients of the federal grants are entities controlled or influenced by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita, and Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s former presidential campaign finance director.

Trump has spent the first years of his second administration turning the 250th celebrations into a celebration of his supporters and of himself — as evidenced by this weekend’s White House lawn cage match fight on Trump’s birthday.

After an unsuccessful attempt to take over the bipartisan, Congressionally-authorized America 250 nonprofit, the Trump administration bypassed the entity, creating a new, opaque organization known as Freedom 250.

Freedom 250 displaced America 250 as the Trump Administration’s preferred partner in the 250th anniversary celebrations, a preference made clear by actions like linking to Freedom 250 at the bottom of the White House’s landing page.

Freedom 250 is also gaining financial support from a host of large corporations. Among the donors to Freedom 250, corporations that face major federal regulatory issues, including ExxonMobil, Oracle, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and United Airlines have contributed undisclosed sums with no oversight.

Freedom 250, for its part, has been directly allocated at least $79 million in federal funds, with one $10 million grant dispensed to the National Park Foundation to support a “Freedom Trucks” mobile museum exhibit created in partnership with conservative PragerU and Hillsdale College, a Christian university in Michigan. Another $5 million grant was originally obligated to the organization in December to support “A250 Events,” but increased to $68.3 million in obligated funds in March of 2026.

“This Trumpified version of the 250th anniversary is mostly about lionizing Trump and catering to his political base,” said Alan Zibel, research director with Public Citizen. “The 250th anniversary of the country should be a moment to reflect on the values of the nation. Apparently, the Trump administration is replacing those values with grift, self-dealing, and enriching friends with taxpayer dollars.”

“Donald Trump has spent his life obsessively scarring everything in his path with his likeness, his name, and his gaudy, dictatorial taste in faux gilding,” said Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, program director with the Revolving Door Project. “Ultimately, the rings of ethical impropriety cascading from Trump’s Freedom 250 contracting scandals are just another manifestation of elite impunity. The Trump administration has once again found an avenue to tilt the scales in favor of corporate interests even as millions struggle to believe in the dream of America 250 years after the signing of the Declaration.”

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 Trade tensions intensify

AUTHORITY TO RETALIATE: China has issued “sweeping” new rules that increase “controls over the overseas transfer of domestic technology”, while also giving the government “explicit” authority to retaliate against governments that restrict Chinese investments, reported finance news outlet Caixin. The rules are a “shield for Chinese enterprises”, argued an editorial in the state-run newspaper China Daily, as well as a way to “protect” China’s “development interests”. Cosimo Ries, an analyst at Trivium China, told Carbon Brief that protecting China’s lead in cleantech manufacturing is one of the aims of the regulations. He said that language around restrictive foreign actions is, in his view, “clearly designed as a response” to the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act. Ries added that the government is “increasingly working to prevent Chinese IP from being forcefully appropriated or handed away by its own companies seeking market access abroad”.

COMMISSIONERS MEET: The rules come as the EU debates plans to “broaden the use of its trade defences” to protect industries from what the EU industry commissioner described to the Financial Times as “unfair” Chinese competition. A meeting of EU commissioners reaffirmed the need for a “more robust and coherent” response to trade and investment from China, which is seen as “not sustainable”, according to a readout from the European Commission. In response, China said it will “resolutely” retaliate to any “discriminatory” EU trade measures, reported Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Chinese automaker SAIC has confirmed plans to invest €200m ($232m) to build a factory in Spain for vehicles including electric vehicles, said Caixin. Trade envoys from the EU and China backed further discussions after a meeting in early June, reported Reuters.

SURPLUS ‘WIDENED’: According to Chinese customs data covered by Bloomberg, China’s trade surplus with the EU “widened slightly” in May, though its exports to the bloc “slowed”. The outlet added ongoing EU-China trade tensions “could pose a risk to Beijing’s favoured ‘new three’ energy industries”, for which the EU was the “destination for about 40% of exports” in 2025. While country-specific data is not yet available, China’s global exports of “green products”, such as batteries and wind turbines, grew by around 40% in January-May, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Early heat tests China’s grid

PATTERNS BROKEN: China Southern Power Grid, which covers a number of provinces across southern China, reported that it saw a record electricity load of 259 gigawatts (GW) in late May, according to Shanghai-based outlet the Paper. It added that the new record – driven by “widespread cooling demand” due to high temperatures – came “nearly a month earlier” than usual, “breaking a seasonal pattern” where peaks occurred in June and July. High temperatures continued in early June across both northern and southern China, reported China Daily, with some regions reporting temperatures of almost 40C.

HEAVY RAINS: China also continued to see heavy rains across “multiple provinces in southern China”, reported China Daily, with “nearly 10,000 residents” evacuated in Guizhou after torrential rains caused flooding in the area. Flood-response measures have been activated in Hunan and Guangxi, said Bloomberg. The Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily said that floods were also expected in Yunnan, Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Meanwhile, northern China’s Hebei province experienced “dramatic” weather, including “thunderstorms, strong winds, hail and heavy downpours”, said Jing-Jin-Ji News Channel. 

CROP RISK: “Against the backdrop of intensifying global warming, northern China is seeing a clear trend of more frequent and severe extreme weather,” said the People’s Daily. Meteorologists attributed the unusually early and intense rain to shifting weather patterns that “reflects broader weather changes in China associated with global warming”, said Bloomberg. An article in the People’s Daily noted that extreme and unusual weather, driven by “climate change”, has “posed varying degrees of risks and challenges to agricultural production”. Another Bloomberg article said expected further rains in southern China could “inundat[e] crops and damag[e] rice fields”.

Mineral trade controls and concerns

EXPORTS BLOCKED: Elsewhere, the Chinese government has “penalised at least 11 companies this year for illegally exporting restricted rare earths and critical minerals”, reported Caixin. It said this included a subsidiary of solar manufacturer JA (formerly JA Solar) for “shipping unlicensed graphite parts to Vietnam”. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that China’s rare-earth exports fell by 6.4% in May as “Beijing maintained tight control over shipments”. A new report on rare earths by the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that “although China’s exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets have resumed”, flows have been “highly volatile” and licensing has been “uneven”. This was echoed in a report by the Royal United Services Institute that said “China incentivises the export of final products containing rare earths…rather than rare earths themselves”, which could pose “risks” to electric vehicle (EV) and offshore wind supply chains.

EXPORTS CONTROLLED: Zimbabwe has announced that a Chinese company will establish a lithium-carbonate plant in the country, said Bloomberg. It said this followed a ban on lithium exports as the country aimed to “build up local processing capacity for the battery metal”. Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Chinese investors in Indonesia’s coal-dependent nickel industry are looking to other countries. It said this followed plans by the Indonesian government to plan nickel export controls, tighter quotas and tax hikes.

More China news

• ‘GEC’ GUIDANCE: A new set of trial guidelines has been issued to “unify” how clean-electricity consumption is measured, said state broadcaster CCTV. Ying (Jenny) Zheng, a researcher at the Tsinghua TianGong Thinktank, told Carbon Brief that the measures are more than just accounting guidelines. She said they provide a “foundation for one of the key control indicators within China’s emerging carbon-control framework” that should help boost consumption of low-carbon power.
• TOWNS AND TRACTORS: China called for “vigorous efforts” to develop low-carbon buildings in a new 15th five-year plan for “urban renewal”, said BJX News. A five-year plan for agriculture also listed “accelerating” the “green transformation” of agriculture as one of seven key tasks, said Xinhua.
• FUNDRAISING FIGURES: China raised 6bn yuan ($885m) in green sovereign bonds, reported Bloomberg. It said these have previously been used for emissions reductions and “biodiversity preservation”.
• SALES SLUMP: Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids in China fell 7.5% year-on-year in May, reported Reuters. It said they nevertheless made up 62% of all sales, with the Associated Press noting that petrol-car sales fell 42%.
• UK DIALOGUE: UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper told her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi that the UK is willing to “deepen cooperation” with China on energy and climate change, according to a readout by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
• MEASURING SUBSIDIES: The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report saying Chinese companies received “three to eight times more government support than firms based in the OECD”, said Agence France Presse. China’s commerce ministry responded saying the report was “one-sided and arbitrary”, according to Xinhua.

Captured

China’s emissions in January-March 2026 rose 2% year-on-year, driven by growing “curtailment” of wind and solar in the power sector due to “inflexible grid management”, said new analysis for Carbon Brief.

Spotlight  What do China’s provincial five-year plans reveal about its energy transition?

China’s provincial-level governments have now all published their 15th five-year plans – economic and social development blueprints for 2026-2030. 

In this issue, Carbon Brief analyses what all 31 documents say about energy and climate.

Provinces remain focused on clean energy

At the broad level, the new provincial plans follow China’s overarching climate goals. All 31 provincial-level jurisdictions in mainland China pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030. 

Every plan also mentioned the core elements of China’s energy transition strategy, including solar, wind, hydrogen, energy storage and upgrading the power grid.  

While solar featured in every plan, specific interests in the technology vary from province to province. 

Some set goals to add new solar capacity by 2030. Zhejiang province aims to add 90GW of solar capacity, while Shaanxi plans to “accelerate” construction of wind and solar “bases”. Several others mentioned developing offshore solar farms in the next five years.

However, others instead focused on recycling old solar panels or strengthening solar R&D. 

Almost every plan mentioned growing consumption and production of new-energy vehicles (NEVs). 

Around 15 provinces mentioned promoting NEV uptake. Jilin set a target for NEVs comprising more than 50% of new car sales by 2030, although its current rate is already thought to be 47%. 

While the central government is issuing directives to limit “overcapacity” in the sector, more than 20 provinces said they will continue developing their NEV industries, with many aiming to generate hundreds of billions – or even trillions – of yuan in value.

Meanwhile, 24 provinces will prioritise developing renewable power “direct connection” models, in which renewable generators supply industrial users via a dedicated line – a system that could boost consumption of clean energy.

Number of provinces that mention key climate and energy terms in their 15th five-year plans. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of provincial 15th five-year plans.

Provinces diverge in terms of what other technologies they name and how detailed their plans are. 

For example, offshore wind and nuclear are mentioned by 11 and 12 provinces respectively, with both technologies mostly targeted to be built in coastal provinces. 

But in general, variation reflects more than just geography or resources endowment, said Anders Hove, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

“The differences between provinces reflect primarily differences in economic development capabilities and industrial structure,” he told Carbon Brief. 

Half of provinces to expand fossil-fuel production

Almost every province pledged to peak coal and oil consumption, in line with similar language in the national-level plan. 

However, 17 local governments also pledged to produce more fossil fuels – trying to peak consumption while also expanding output, opening new reserves or lifting production limits. 

Most of these are regions designated as national energy-supply bases, including Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Shaanxi, Gansu and Heilongjiang. 

Yang Li, deputy executive director at the Beijing-based thinktank Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress (iGDP), toldCarbon Brief this pattern reflects the “two dimensions of China’s [energy] transition”. These are a national-level push for peaking fossil-fuel consumption and a desire for energy security by provinces rich in energy resources. 

Provinces with significant fossil-fuel economies are also the most likely to mention carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), which appears in 14 plans. 

Provinces jostle to take the lead on AI and hydrogen 

With the national government preparing to spend trillions of yuan on datacentres for the artificial intelligence (AI) industry in the next five years, provincial officials are also tying AI to their energy systems. 

More than 20 aim to use AI to help manage coal mines, power grids, oilfields and forecasting renewables output. 

Yang said that “AI+energy” represents a desire by policymakers to use AI to enhance energy governance, but adds that “large-scale commercialisation [of the technology] still has some way to go”.

Unlike AI, all provincial plans mention hydrogen, which is named as a “future industry” in the central-level five-year plan. 

For example, Hunan calls for promoting hydrogen trucks and rail transport and developing “renewable energy-based” hydrogen production, while Shandong pledges to focus on technological breakthroughs around hydrogen transport and storage, as well as production of green hydrogen. 

Similarly, 12 provinces named the other energy-related future industry – nuclear fusion, which remains an experimental technology – as a priority for the next five years. These provinces include Anhui, Guangdong, Hebei, Hubei and Shaanxi.

This spotlight is by freelance China analyst Lekai Liu for Carbon Brief.

Watch, read, listen

FUTURE-FOCUSED: Qiushi, China’s official journal for political theory, published an edition based on “future industries”, in which President Xi Jinping called for advancing hydrogen energy and nuclear fusion.

MIGHTY MANGROVES: The Grantham Research Institute explored China’s uptake of “blue carbon credits”, which could help preserve “powerful carbon sinks” in coastal ecosystems. 

IN THE LEAD: Mission Possible Partnership published a report saying China is “widening its lead” in developing a low-carbon industrial sector.

‘AUTOBESITY’: Blue Map examined “autobesity”, the trend towards larger Chinese EVs, and what this could mean for their carbon footprint

13

The number of Chinese solar companies that have joined forces to create the Space Energy Development Alliance, a new organisation to promote space solar energy, said Bloomberg.

5

Minutes devoted to the opening ceremony, which did not offer “any details” on the alliance’s objectives, according to the outlet.

New science 

• National and provincial planning scenarios for China’s solar and wind expansion until 2060 will present different trade-offs with biodiversity | Nature Ecology and Evolution
• Policies to decrease carbon emissions and declines in technology costs could together help achieve “deep” carbon emissions reductions by 2060 in China’s steel industry | PNAS

Recently published on WeChat

• 分析：因部分风光电力被弃，中国2026年初碳排放增加2%
• Q&A：中国能否将氢能发展为可行的清洁能源产业？

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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The post China Briefing 11 June 2026: Tech clampdown | Extreme weather | Provinces’ energy plans appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Environmentalists, myself included, pay close attention to gloomy topics like species extinctions and Earth’s dwindling life-support systems. It’s not for the love of dark matters that we keep tabs on depressing metrics. Rather, it’s with the hope that they teach us something and guide us toward mitigating future losses.

On the biological front, about a million species could be taken by an extinction vortex by the end of the century. That’s also when linguists estimate about one-third of the world’s 7,000-plus Indigenous languages will go silent — and with them, most of their related cultures.

This is not uplifting news, to be sure. Nonetheless, people concerned with environmental protection can learn a lot from language extinctions. As it turns out, the survival of languages and species may well be linked. And when we wrap our minds around this, the panorama for conservation actually gets a little brighter.

A Confluence of Curious Similarities

Linguistic variation around the world caught the imagination and attention of naturalists going back at least to the Victorian era of exploration, when folks like Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin traveled across the wilds of South America and the Malay Archipelago.

Wallace marveled at the linguistic diversity shown by communities spread along the edges of the watery world in the Amazon basin and dotting the highlands of New Guinea. He even wrote out partial lexicons to aid in communicating with his guides. Darwin, in his ruminations on the descent of man, went so far as to remark that languages and species are “curiously the same.” He was thinking about human evolution and wondering if languages might evolve by natural selection. With his thoughts on the flowering of languages, he did not give time to their senescence.

It would take more than 100 years, after the concurrent publication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, for scientists to uncover the full extent of global linguistic variation, and also the languages’ risk of extinction. Today the patterns emerging from these discoveries hold lessons for environmentalists.

One of the pioneering explorations was conducted by Larry Gorenflo (Penn State University) and his team of conservation biologists and linguists. Their labors produced some profound findings.

First off, the places on Earth with outrageously high numbers of species also have outrageously high numbers of Indigenous languages. Furthermore, many of the species and languages of these hyper-rich spots are endemic. They don’t occur, much less co-occur, anywhere else.

Gorenflo and team went on to examine language diversity in regions that conservationists designate as “priority areas.” A second striking fact emerged: High-priority conservation regions are home to nearly 70% of the world’s languages.

These results demonstrate we can either win big or lose big, depending on the success of our efforts in these doubly diverse hotspots. It’s like playing a Daily Double, with “How to save life on Earth?” as the question to the answer.

Lullaby for Language

Extinction is forever. Except when it’s not. This isn’t a reference to de-extinction and the facsimiles brought into existence by technology. It’s about languages.

When the last speaker of a language falls into eternal slumber, so does their language. Linguists say that such languages are “dormant.” Dormancy is different from the extinction of biological species, at least in principle.

Sleeping languages can, hypothetically, experience reawakening. That is, they can be spoken again after a period of dormancy, but only under special circumstances. At a minimum there must be a written record of the lexicon and syntax.  For instance, Hebrew came back in the 19th century after a long slumber.

Sadly, however, the vast majority of Indigenous languages only exist in the oral form, making linguistic resurrections nearly impossible. This is why dormancy and extinction are, for all intents and purposes, synonymous. It’s also why we must work to document and teach Indigenous languages before they nod off.

High Tolls for Both Languages and Species

Just as the vastness of language varieties was unearthed, the global decline became apparent as well. Nowadays researchers race to figure out what drives language endangerment. Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua (Australian National University) are two such investigators, who lead a large interdisciplinary team analyzing the subject.

In a recent cutting-edge study of massive scope and scale, the team uncovered the principal determinants that drive the downturn. One of the top three is strangely simple: roads.

“Greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased (language) endangerment,” Bromham and team conclude.

You might say that roads compromise the linguistic intactness of a landscape. Conservation biologists, well versed in the dangers that roads pose to natural ecosystems, should relate to that.

A South American tapir crosses a fresh road cut across fragmented habitat in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Photo by Leandro Maracahipes, with permission to use.

This is not to suggest that road effects are perfectly analogous in their impacts on languages and species. There are major differences. They have to do with the paradoxical capacity of roads to both create and destroy connections.

For remote ethnolinguistic groups, a frontier highway increases connectivity. Distances that once required weeks or more to cross may be traversed in hours or days. Lines of communication suddenly open — for material goods, of course, but also for the transmission of diverse ideologies and ways of life.

When this happens with high speed or without guardrails, a collision with cultural traditions and language preservation ensues. Often, such roads are the handiwork of large industries, looking to make money in the frontier, usually at the expense of local peoples whose lands they usurp.

One of the first casualties of enhanced contact is the local vernacular. This is a big blow to culture, potentially harming people’s health, wellbeing, and identity. The loss is accompanied by a shift to another language, usually the parlance of government, business, and education. A new sociocultural reality arises as the highway expansion continues.

By contrast, roads harm ecosystems by severing connections. Effectively, highways fracture natural populations and break the fundamental rules of ecology.

Renowned ecologist and conservation biologist Dr. William Laurance (James Cook University) tells me that bulldozing through forest expanses is like opening Pandora’s box.

“It’s because of the transformative effect that (roads) have,” he says. “They’re the single most important proximate driver of environmental change and degradation. A road goes in and six months later the forest is split open like a splayed fish.”

In distant lands, far from government regulation and oversight, a motorway quickly spawns ghost roads — unauthorized byways branching from the central transit spine. In short order, plantation monocultures flatten forests and open-pit mines erupt like infectious pocks. The cleavage of habitats puts native plant and animal populations at greater risk of declines, even extinctions. Curbside, roadkill piles up.

So while highways and their byways exert harm in different ways, they are nonetheless critical factors that must be reckoned with, for both conservationists and linguists.

We Don’t Need No Education?

The work by Bromham and team produced a result that may run counter-intuitive to every reader of this piece. Next to roads, say the investigators, the biggest threat to languages is formal education.

Educators may shake their heads, but there’s good evidence that Bromham and colleagues are right. They argue that monolingual education can lead to language shifts, with local Indigenous languages yielding to rising tongues. Young people, looking ahead to professional careers, may be strongly incentivized to adopt the language that advances their aspirations.

Various lines of evidence suggest this is, indeed, what happens. An example comes from Papua New Guinea, a tiny nation in Melanesia whose name graces the very top of the list of language-rich countries. That diversity is endangered, in large part, due to high school education, say Alfred Kik (University of Goroka) and Vojtěch Novotný (Czech Academy of Sciences). They’re long-term investigators in Papua New Guinea who have been documenting students’ Indigenous language skills and knowledge of local flora and fauna.

Their work demonstrates a “precipitous” decline in both. The result derives, they argue, from the push for children to learn English, which is used in schools and perceived to be the language of opportunity. The shift is also related to the spread of Tok Pisin, a type of pidgin English used extensively as the lingua franca in multilingual settings, including cafeterias and playgrounds.

The message is not that formal education should be eliminated for the sake of global linguistic diversity. The lesson, rather, is that the language of instruction, which is usually determined by education policy and funding availability, is highly consequential. Multilingual education is a possible antidote, especially in the context of environmental education.

Nature and Knowledge

K. David Harrison (Swarthmore and Vin University), an environmental linguist, emphasizes the “nature-centric” qualities of Indigenous tongues. They are distinguished, he writes, by the great diversity of words that describe plants and animals and the way that grammar encodes information about the world around them.

Harrison attributes nature-centrism to longstanding, intimate relationships between Indigenous speakers and their natural surroundings. It reflects a mindset in which people are part and parcel of nature, not separate entities.

For oral languages, words are key to the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. This refers to a body of information and concepts held collectively by community members. As such, it is a living, evolving, and growing library that is honed and built incrementally over time and comes to life in use. When language goes extinct, so does the knowledge it holds.

The continued existence of ethnolinguistic groups in remote, harsh, and untrammeled areas is proof that knowledge and communication skills ensure sustainable ways of life. Gorenflo argues that, with a million species at risk of extinction, we should have regard for those who demonstrate a history of conservation success.

“Traditional ecological knowledge provides a glimpse into how people adapt to, and use, resources without destroying them,” Gorenflo tells me.

Along the same vein, Kik is racing against time to document the traditional ecological knowledge of the elders in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He says it’s an effort to keep language and nature alive.

“Traditional ecological knowledge plays an important role in biodiversity conservation, sustainability, and natural resource management,” he tells me. “It plays a crucial role. If we lose language, we lose knowledge, and then there is a problem for environmental conservation. This will have impacts,” he warns.

Environmentalism, Language, and Culture

As we learn more from the results of interdisciplinary investigations, like those mentioned here, lessons for environmentalists emerge.

The first, of course, is to do more. Conservation biologists and linguists benefit greatly from cross-pollination, and the cause of language and species can profit, too.

In the meantime we know there are key action items that can be focal points for the short term. They include allocating the always-slender conservation monies toward diverse eco-linguistic landscapes, which are now well-documented by the mapping studies of Gorenflo and others.

Other priorities are to support the cataloguing of Indigenous languages and ethnobiological knowledge while speakers can tell their stories. In classroom settings, especially in locations where Indigenous tongues are still spoken, there should be real efforts to include multilingual programming, especially in relation to environmental education. Even better, where elders are able to share, their original voices should be heard.

Undoubtedly today’s environmentalists stand to derive great insights from supporting Indigenous groups in leading their own kinds of conservation. Most importantly, nature and knowledge will be the biggest beneficiaries. But first we must first embrace the idea that the extinction of languages and cultures is an environmental issue.

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

Decolonizing Species Names

The post The Extinction of Languages Is an Environmental Issue appeared first on The Revelator.

Utility-scale solar generation is expected to increase 19% this summer compared with last summer, reflecting a 20% increase in capacity, said the Energy Information Administration.

The region should have adequate resources to meet typical electricity demand, but some areas may need to implement emergency procedures or rely on imports during grid stress, NPCC said.

Eversource Energy and other transmission owners in New England could see ramifications from the ruling that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can order refunds for multi-year periods.

While fuel shortages due to the Iran war made some countries double down on electrification, they also highlighted one industry that could be quite literally grounded without fossil fuels: aviation. Flying relies on fossil-based jet fuels and is extremely hard to decarbonize.

Researchers in China now report a process that could help bring down flying’s carbon emissions while also tackling the plastic waste crisis. The two-step process converts plastic waste into high-quality jet fuel more efficiently and at much less cost than other methods researchers have reported in the past to convert plastic waste to fuels.

The team’s preliminary analysis, reported in published in Nature Energy, shows that the plastic-based fuel would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 73% compared with petroleum-based jet fuel.

The plastic that the researchers break down is polystyrene. This lightweight polymer, often commonly called Styrofoam, is used to make packaging and insulation. It is notoriously expensive and challenging to recycle. Besides usually being contaminated, it is composed mostly of air, which makes sorting and transportation difficult. Nearly all waste polystyrene goes to landfill today.

The team from Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University designed a new catalyst that breaks down polystyrene at high temperatures in the presence of hydrogen. Their process runs continuously in a tandem reactor.

 

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The first reactor heats the polystyrene to 460°C in a hydrogen atmosphere step. This breaks the long polymer chains in polystyrene to shorter strands. In the second reactor, the fragments are passed over the ruthenium catalyst at 160°C. The resulting chemical reactions convert the fragments into molecules called alkanes. These are energy-dense hydrocarbon molecules that work for jet fuel.

Past work on making fuels from plastic waste include a one-step, low-temperature process as well as a method that is powered by sunlight and also utilizes carbon dioxide. This new method needs higher temperatures, but it is faster, has a much higher yield and requires lower pressures. But still, whether or not it can be cost-effectively scaled up remains to be seen.

In their study, the researchers show that the method converts 94.8% of waste polystyrene to liquid fuels. And their preliminary analysis shows that the fuel would sell for a minimum of $1–1.80 per kilogram, competitive with conventional fossil-based jet fuel.

Source: Jia Wang et al. Ambient-pressure conversion of plastic waste to jet fuel cycloalkanes by tandem hydropyrolysis and vapour-phase hydrogenation. Nature Energy, 2026.

Image: Simply Flying

Headline News:

• “Solar Power Outstrips Coal In US Despite Trump’s Attacks” • Even as President Donald Trump boosts coal over clean energy, solar power is hitting new milestones in the US and remains the leading source of new power. States won by Trump in the 2024 election accounted for 74% of all solar capacity installed in the first quarter of 2026. [Euronews]

Solar power (Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, CC BY-SA 2.0)

• “France Adds 157,000 Hectares Of Protected Forest” • From the rain forests of French Guiana to ancient woodlands in eastern France, thousands of hectares of forest have new protections. France said it added 157,000 hectares to its biological reserves as it works toward placing 10% of its land under ‘strong protection’ by 2030. [Euronews]
• “This Electric Aircraft Is The First To Take Flight Using Solid-State Batteries” • Helios Horizon, a Florida nonprofit, did what it says is the first piloted flight of an electric aircraft powered by solid-state batteries. Founder and test pilot Miguel Iturmendi carried out a series of short test flights at Zephyrhills Municipal Airport in central Florida. [Robb Report]
• “Trump Claims Over 100 Million Barrels Of Oil Have Gone Through Strait Of Hormuz” • President Trump said a “secret mission” was conducted last month for 200 ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The operation was “wildly successful,” he said. ABC News could not immediately verify the accuracy of Trump’s claims. [ABC News]
• “‘Man Who Killed Offshore Wind’ Now Pushing Fossil Fuels And Nuclear” • David Stevenson, who led a national campaign against offshore wind power for the Caesar Rodney Institute, is now fighting land-based solar and wind farms while promoting fossil fuels and nuclear power with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. [Energy and Policy Institute]

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

Sprawl kills.

That’s the unmistakable conclusion drawn by researchers at Johns Hopkins University earlier this month in an update of their landmark 2014 report on the nation’s ongoing crisis of land misuse: sprawl chokes life out of our cities, undermines opportunities for our children, and, yes, even raises the risk of disease.

Riverside, the Southern California suburb, and Atlanta were at the bottom of the list for “most sprawling” while San Francisco and New York City topped the list as “most compact,” based on established metrics such as density of development and concentration of jobs.

The report, which comprises 233 metropolitan areas in the lower 48 states and covers 85 percent of the U.S. population, is not just about geography, of course, but about the most-basic quality-of-life issues facing the country today. Residents of compact and connected neighborhoods have “lower energy costs, better health outcomes, lower exposure to vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, well-connected social lives and greater opportunities for children to thrive,” according to the report, “Who Sprawls the Most? Mapping Sprawl and Assessing Its Impact on Everyday Life” [PDF].

And in a counter-intuitive development, given the debate over “abundance,” housing in compact cities was found to be more affordable than those in sprawling suburbs when the cost of transportation and energy are taken into account. (Transportation and energy costs are much lower for residents of compact and connected areas.)

Shima Hamidi

The overall housing cost surprised the report co-author.

“The amount we pay for energy is becoming more and more a challenge for people,” said Shima Hamidi, director of the Center for Smart Transportation at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “We found that in compact and connected neighborhoods, residents pay substantially less of their income on residential energy bills, and if you add that to transportation, the savings on these two budget items in a compact and connected neighborhood saves offsets the higher cost of housing in this area.”

Hamidi told Streetsblog that the report hits at a crucial time because of the ongoing debate about high housing costs in the most-walkable, most-livable parts of our greatest cities.

“Sprawl is getting attention these days because there are so many critics of smart growth and growth management policies these days who are arguing that these policies would restrict housing production and will lead to more expensive housing and less housing affordability for residents,” Hamidi said.

But, she added, there are other factors that cast sprawl in a bad light, including the level of social isolation, which leads to disconnected youth, not to mention “heat-related health outcomes … linked to climate change.”

Quality-of-life is simply worse in areas where people are disconnected from each other, job sites and social venues.

“A typical suburban neighborhood is very low density or exclusively single-family housing,” she said. “You don’t see much more other types of uses, like coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, grocery stores. They are not within a walking distance of residents of these housing units, so residents have to drive long distances. … These neighborhoods are mostly characterized as having cul-de-sacs or dead ends that accommodate privacy and driving, but not really connection.

“In a neighborhood that’s more compact, you have a mix of uses: different coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores within walking or biking distance. [These are] livable and vibrant types of neighborhoods.”

Can you put a value on that? The report and Hamidi suggests you can: As a result of sprawl, the U.S. has about double the number of “disconnected youth” as Europe — and it
“costs taxpayers an estimated $94 billion each year in lost productivity … with profound impact on the lives of these individuals and their families,” she said. “The future of these individuals is being shaped, and they just are kind of isolated and disconnected, and not getting the opportunities that they need.”

They’re also at higher risk of disease. And the very edge of sprawl, where low-density residential development meets forests or grasslands, creates conditions for higher risk of human-tick interactions, the report stated.

“A 10-percent increase in the county [sprawl] score reduces the risk of Lyme disease by
about 21 percent,” the report said.

The report is not all bad news. Atlanta had a bottom-of-the list score of 41 in the original report and remains second-to-last in the update, but a decade of effort has led to significant improvements in connectivity resulting in a score of 57.2 — a 40-percent improvement (take that, Lyme disease!).

“Atlanta is becoming more compact over time,” Hamidi said. “It takes a long time for urban sprawl to be mitigated, but the progress can be made. Atlanta [officials have had] a sizable impact.”

Save yourself: Recommendations from the report

Sprawl doesn’t have to be like the weather — that thing that everyone complains about but no one does anything about. The report offered extensive recommendations for urban planners and policy makers. Among them:

• Zoning reform: Allow higher residential and mixed-use densities near transit corridors and employment centers
• Provide incentives for infill with tax breaks, density bonuses, and reduced parking minimum requirements (which reduce development cost).
• Transit-oriented upzoning: Require higher densities within walking distance (e.g., 800 feet of major transit stations).
• Affordable housing integration: Pair density increases with inclusionary zoning and affordable housing mandates to ensure equitable access to transit-rich, high-demand areas.
• Parking reform: Reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements. (Maryland is clearly listening.)
• Design guidelines for livability: Ensure that higher-density areas include green spaces, community facilities, and active transportation infrastructure so density contributes to livability, not overcrowding.

“Local elected officials, state leaders, and federal lawmakers can all help communities grow in ways that support these improved outcomes,” the report concluded. “This study recommends local governments and elected and public officials to consider land-use planning strategies and policies that create more connections and facilitate healthier
transportation choices in walkable, vibrant, and connected neighborhoods that offer both
local and regional accessibility to residents.”

• The World Cup will stress both the capacity and finances of transit systems in host cities, with special service in New Jersey costing $6 million per match to carry the majority of 82,000 fans to Met Life Stadium. Some cities, though, are treating the tournament as an opportunity to showcase their transit systems to a global audience, adding rail frequency and charter buses at little to no cost to fans. (CBS News)
• Whether it’s because of overpolicing, lack of investment or urban freeways cutting of neighborhoods, mobility for Black Americans is often limited, with devastating social and economic consequences, according to urban planner and author Charles T. Brown. (Planetizen)
• The environmental impact of driving an electric vehicle is greater for people who drive a lot and live in an area with a clean power grid, but EVs almost always come out ahead compared to gas-powered cars no matter what, according to an MIT study. (Anthropocene)
• A startup is using old Waymo batteries to provide energy storage for the power grid. (Fast Company)
• A lot of supposedly public EV charging stations are actually located at places like car dealerships that aren’t really public at all. (Electrek)
• Amtrak offered a preview of what a renovated Penn Station in New York City might look like, but failed to answer questions about who will pay the $7 billion price tag. (NY Times, Streetsblog NYC)
• Drivers in one of New York’s largest suburb sued to stop Westchester County from using license plate readers to catch them breaking traffic laws. (Associated Press)
• Tampa area drivers have killed more than 600 pedestrians in the past five years. (Tampa Bay Times)
• Lexington, Kentucky is considering a ban on parking in bike lanes, but with a lot of exceptions for drop-offs, pickups and deliveries. (Herald-Leader)
• New Orleans is seeking public input on improving its streetcar system. (Times-Picayune)
• The Dutch government introduced a discounted pass for unlimited off-peak rail travel at just 49 euros per month. (Rail Journal)
• Uber and British company Wayve are rolling out robotaxis in London, followed by Tokyo and several other cities. (CNN)
• University of Zurich students invented a brick evaporative cooling system that can significantly cool down spaces like bus stops during hot summer months. (Times of India)

The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.

For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.

The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system. 

This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.

This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.

The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.

Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years. 

In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.

(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high

Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.

GlossaryCO2 equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as the global warming potential. Carbon dioxide equivalent is a way of comparing emissions from all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide.CloseCO2 equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More

Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.

As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively. 

This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (yellow), methane (blue) and nitrous oxide (green) over 2000-25. The grey-shaded region represents continuing changes since AR6. Note the different vertical scales for each gas. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)

The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly

The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities. 

However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.  

Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere. 

Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.

Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.

But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.

As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.  

It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25. 

The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).

Left: Observed changes in the Earth heat inventory for the period 1971-2020. Right: Estimates of the Earth energy imbalance for successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most recent decade (right). Shaded regions indicate the very likely range (90-100 % probability), while the stars show the CERES (NASA Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) estimates for comparison. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)
Global temperature rise

The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade. 

We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.

While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.

We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030. 

This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.

Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system

While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe. 

Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.

For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures –  has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.

Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.

Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).

Sea level rise and the energy imbalance

Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.

It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.  

Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.

This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.

Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.

This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.

(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)

Left: Global average sea level rise over 1901-2025, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline. Individual timeseries are shown with dashed lines, while the black solid line shows the average (from tide gauges and satellites) used in AR6 and the solid red line shows the 1993-2025 average from satellites. Right: Global mean sea-level rates (in mm per year) for four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade. The shading indicates the very likely range. Credit: Forster et al. (2026) The bigger picture

Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.

A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts. 

These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them. 

This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network. 

However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.  

Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change. 

This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.  

The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme. 

Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.

Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures?

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04.11.25

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GHGs and aerosols

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10.06.25

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Community hospitals are there for us at our most vulnerable moments. They’re where our children are born. We rush our loved ones to the local ER, post-stroke, when every second counts. Unfortunately, the federal government has left communities across Michigan at risk of losing that lifesaving care. That’s why working people are joining forces to call for change, and to build a society that puts patients before profits, with Medicare for All.

Disclaimer: This article is commentary and satire based on publicly reported information. It includes opinion, criticism, and parody. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the headlines with another sermon from the high altar of hydrocarbons: oil markets, we are told, may take “a year, if not longer” to return to equilibrium.

Translation for ordinary mortals: buckle up, keep paying, and please admire the corporate gravitas while the till keeps ringing.

According to Reuters, Shell chief executive Wael Sawan warned that restoring balance to the crude oil market after the Iran/Persian Gulf disruption will not be a quick job. The Wall Street Journal also reported Sawan’s broader message: oil and gas prices may keep rising even after the immediate conflict eases, because the world’s hunger for energy is still growing, easy resources are harder to find, and governments are now treating energy security as national security.

And there it is: the grand new wrapping paper for the old fossil-fuel gift basket.

Energy security. National security. Resilience. Long-term systems. A more complex world. The language sounds statesmanlike, almost noble, until one remembers that the same market turmoil causing headaches for consumers, airlines, industries, and governments can also become a very handsome earnings environment for a supermajor with global trading arms, LNG exposure, upstream barrels, and enough corporate polish to turn a geopolitical crisis into a strategy deck.

Shell’s own Q1 2026 results presentation said the company delivered adjusted earnings of just under $7 billion amid “heightened volatility.” It also reported more than $17 billion of cash flow from operations excluding working capital. In plainer English: while the world sweated over energy shocks, Shell was hardly wandering the desert with an empty begging bowl.

The latest Sawan message is therefore a neat little performance. On one side, Shell sounds the alarm about fragile energy systems and depleted buffers. On the other, it positions itself as the indispensable adult in the room: the company that can trade, ship, drill, liquefy, optimise, and profit its way through the turbulence.

The public gets warnings. Investors get reassurance.

Sawan’s point that oil-market equilibrium may take a year or more is not, on its face, absurd. A major supply shock through the Gulf, especially involving the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted regional flows, can drain inventories, distort shipping, trigger emergency releases, hammer refiners, and raise the cost of everything from aviation to chemicals. Even when fighting stops, tankers do not teleport, infrastructure does not heal overnight, and inventories do not refill by magic.

But the political usefulness of this narrative should not be missed. If a crisis makes hydrocarbons look scarce, strategic, and irreplaceable, it also strengthens the case for more fossil investment, more LNG expansion, more upstream development, and more tolerance for the old industry argument: yes, yes, the energy transition is lovely, but not too fast, not too disruptive, and certainly not at the expense of shareholder returns.

Shell’s official transition messaging says it supports a “balanced and orderly” transition, aims for net zero by 2050, invests in low-carbon energy, and wants to provide energy today while building the system of the future. Yet the company also says it is keeping oil production stable and growing LNG. That is Shell’s favourite two-step: one foot in the climate brochure, the other planted firmly in the hydrocarbon cash register.

Sawan’s WSJ theme — energy security is national security — is especially convenient. Once energy becomes “national security,” criticism of oil and gas expansion can be made to sound naive, unpatriotic, or detached from reality. Never mind that climate security, consumer affordability, industrial resilience, and the long-term cost of fossil dependence are also national security issues. The phrase is powerful because it narrows the debate to supply, supply, supply — and who better to provide supply than the companies already profiting from the shortage?

This is how the oil majors win the room. First, they warn that the system is fragile. Then they remind everyone that only they understand it. Then they suggest that any serious government must keep them close, keep projects moving, and keep capital flowing. Finally, they call the whole thing realism.

Meanwhile, ordinary people get the bill in petrol, diesel, heating, freight, food, air fares, and inflation. Shell gets to appear grave, responsible, and indispensable — a sort of corporate firefighter standing heroically beside a blaze from which its own business model has long benefited.

There is also a delicious irony in Shell talking about equilibrium. This is a company whose legal identity has been through more costume changes than a pantomime villain: incorporated as Forthdeal Limited in 2002, renamed Royal Dutch Shell plc in 2004, then renamed Shell plc in 2022 after the grand simplification exercise. Apparently, balance is very important — especially when it involves balancing public concern, shareholder value, and the optics of dropping a tarnished old title.

The serious point is this: Sawan is probably right that the oil market will not simply snap back overnight. But Shell’s role is not that of neutral weather forecaster. Shell is not merely observing the storm; it is a giant ship built to sail profitably through it.

The company’s message to governments is clear: energy security requires companies like Shell. Its message to investors is clearer still: volatility can be opportunity. Its message to the public, dressed in softer language, is the oldest one in the oil business: keep calm and keep paying.

Spoof Shell PR/Spin Section

Shell plc Statement — Extremely Serious Voice Edition

At Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, then Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now simply Shell plc because shorter names travel better through controversy, we recognise that energy security is national security, economic security, shareholder security, bonus security, and, where appropriate, reputational-security-through-careful-wording.

Our CEO Wael Sawan has responsibly warned that restoring oil-market equilibrium may take a year, if not longer. This should not be interpreted as us enjoying higher prices. We are merely responsibly positioned to generate resilient value from a challenging macro environment of unfortunate global tightness.

We remain committed to the energy transition, provided it is balanced, orderly, commercially attractive, compatible with stable oil production, supportive of LNG growth, and not unduly disruptive to the sacred quarterly distribution rhythm.

Shell will continue helping the world navigate volatility by being very large, very integrated, very necessary, and very available for meetings with governments.

We understand the pain consumers feel at the pump. We also understand trading margins, upstream cash flows, LNG arbitrage, and the importance of disciplined capital allocation.

Together, we can build a lower-carbon future — at a responsible pace, with a robust hydrocarbon foundation, and preferably with Shell in the middle of every sentence.

Spoof Bot-Reaction / Comment Section

@BarrelBot9000:
BREAKING: Oil giant discovers that oil shortage may be bad for consumers but strategically fascinating for oil giants.

@TransitionGoblin:
Shell’s energy transition strategy: one solar panel in the brochure, one LNG tanker in the bank account.

@ForthdealFanClub:
Never forget the glow-up: Forthdeal Limited to Royal Dutch Shell to Shell plc. Same fossil opera, shorter programme notes.

@PumpPricePeasant:
Lovely to hear equilibrium may take a year. My wallet has entered a disorderly transition.

@SecuritySloganBot:
Energy security is national security. Climate security is apparently a footnote in 8-point font.

@InvestorWhisperer:
Consumer crisis detected. Reclassifying as “heightened volatility” and routing to earnings call.

@CarbonNeutralByEventually:
Shell says the future is low carbon, but the present remains extremely billable.

@HydrocarbonHamster:
The wheel keeps spinning, the barrels keep moving, and somehow the hamster is paying £1.80 a litre.

@CrisisMonetisationUnit:
Please do not call it profiteering. The preferred term is “resilient integrated portfolio performance amid geopolitical complexity.”

@NationalSecurityNarrator:
When households cannot afford energy, it is a cost-of-living crisis. When oil companies discuss it, it becomes a strategic framework.

Shell Boss Warns Oil Pain Could Drag On for a Year — As Shell Sits Pretty in the Crisis Chair was first posted on June 10, 2026 at 7:48 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

In the fall of 1978, the National Front (NF), a growing neo-Nazi organization in Britain, was prepared to stand 318 candidates for Parliament. In local London elections, it had received 119,000 votes out of 2.2 million in May. The NF had gained a reputation of challenging immigrants and minorities in street battles and organizing mass marches through minority neighborhoods. There was a very real danger that the NF was on the verge of legitimacy.

Not since Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists clashed with  over 100,000 counterdemonstrators in the 1930s in what became known as “The Battle of Cable Street,” had Britain been threatened by such an aggressive ultra-right organization. With street confrontations growing and electoral challenges growing increasingly threatening, the need to unite an opposition was paramount. To answer that need, the Anti Nazi League (ANL), in alliance with movement organizations, trade unions, neighborhood coalitions, churches, and thousands of individuals, was formed to challenge the NF. Geoff Brown’s timely book, A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League,  offers a wealth of first-hand accounts from those who came together to stop the NF before it achieved a foothold within the power structure of Britain.

A decade before the NF rose to prominence, Enoch Powell, a Conservative member of Parliament, delivered an alarming speech about the dangers of immigration, which he saw as a madness leading to “the white population…made strangers in their own country.” In what became known as the “rivers of blood speech,” Powell incited a subsequent period of racial violence and reactionary mobilizations, including strikes. Powell’s legacy is often the starting point for today’s racists, such as Tommy Robinson. Robinson recently led a massive anti-immigrant march in London that echoed many far-right themes of the past.

U.S. history is littered with racist marches and antisemitic attacks by Nazis and co-racists like the Ku Klux Klan. Spurred by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, we are again facing reactionary mobilizations. In 2017, Nazis appeared in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in their largest numbers since World War II. Nazis, together with the KKK, neo-Confederates, and Far-Right militias gathered in an action billed as “Unite the Right” to “protect a Confederate statue.” They paraded with torches, shouted antisemitic slogans, and gave the Nazi salute. A woman was killed when a Nazi drove his car into the counter-protesters.

As the World War II generation disappears and the history of that period becomes less compelling, Nazis are showing signs of growth in several countries. Unbound by the history of their Nazi heroes, they are more confident in demonstrating their hatred. A recent Trump nominee for U.S. attorney was forced to withdraw his nomination when boastful Nazi praises were found in his text messages. Perhaps more alarming was the revelation of a recent group chat of young Republicans that was filled with racist, sexist, and anti-gay rhetoric, and included one participant championing his hero, Hitler. These “leaks” indicate a less circumspect extreme Right willing to embrace Nazism with all that it implies, including Holocaust denial. According to yearly reports from both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, there has been a 60 percent growth in active neo-Nazi clubs since 2023, from 49 to 78 clubs. The number of violent attacks initiated by these clubs in that period has also grown. Some of their members are believed to have taken jobs in ICE and Border Patrol. These signs of far-right growth cannot be ignored. As Brown’s work makes clear, building a militant and wide-ranging resistance to Nazis and other racist formations is essential if they are to be stopped.

In August 1977, 500 members of the NF attempted to march through Lewisham, a mostly Black district of London, guarded by 4,000 police officers. They were met by a counter-demonstration of nearly 5,000, representing a coalition of 23 organizations, including unions, neighborhood groups, and Left parties, such as Brown’s own Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Before the ANL, the Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Coordinating Committee struggled to build an anti-racist coalition.  Representatives of the coalition held many debates. Some wanted to remove “fascism” from the targeted racists and organize an event away from where the Nazis were to march:

Believing that there was no possibility of persuading people to confront the Nazis, the Communist Party proposed some kind of music event on the other side of the borough: music, poetry, cultural events, and prayers. At this a vicar leapt to his feet to say, ‘Oh for goodness sakes, what’s the point of that?’

In the end, the coalition endorsed confronting the NF, and while the numbers were different (5,000 vs. 100,000 in 1936), the participants had no doubt that they had succeeded in halting the NF’s ability to march through the district.

While Lewisham was a success, it was not the end of the NF. Intending to stand 300-plus candidates in the next general election, the NF upped its vicious attacks on minorities and boasted that they could not be stopped. Something more was needed, a broad-based national organization that could provide leadership in standing up to the NF. However, it would not be easy to put together such an organization. Even in the wake of the Lewisham success, the Left was still divided on how to stop the Nazis. Nevertheless, the SWP which  had gained credibility in helping to organize the confrontation in Lewisham, believed that nothing less than a nationwide united front of organizations and individuals committed to exposing and stopping the growing NF threat was paramount. Brown summarizes, “The new initiative had to include both identifying the fascists as Nazis—that they came from the same tradition that led to the Holocaust—and mobilizing the largest possible number in opposition to the fascists in whatever ways was necessary.”

Jim Nichol, the SWP national secretary,branded the proposed national formation with the name “the Anti Nazi League.” Nichol was tasked with “selling” the new organization to a broad number of prominent individuals and organizations, from religious groups to the Far Left. The main goal was to stop the NF. Church officials, leaders of minority communities, a prominent journalist, Mary Holland, of the Observer, as well as “a hardline” CP member and solicitor for the ANC, Michael Seifert, were all asked to take part. Nichol was able to convince them to come on board and helped establish a legitimacy for the proposed ANL. The battle of Lewisham had propelled anti-fascism to the front pages.

After many one-on-one discussions with key activists and organizational heads, it was time to launch the ANL. As its founding document made clear:

For the first time since Mosly in the thirties, there is the worrying prospect of a Nazi party gaining significant support in Britain…Like Hitler with the Jews the British Nazis seek to make scapegoats of black people. …If their evil propaganda takes root we will be facing an alarming development in Britain, which affects every one of us. …In every town, in every factory, in every school, on every housing estate, whenever the Nazis attempt to organise, they must be countered.

The ANL’s program was an all-out campaign, including distributing millions of leaflets to mass gatherings to stop NF marches. From pulpits to street corners, from factory floors to union halls, from schools to housing estates, ANL activists took the fight to as broad a constituency as possible. This was to be a “united front” of all organizations and individuals who saw the danger posed by the NF. Inspired by Trotsky’s writings on how to stop the Nazis in the thirties, the comrades in the SWP saw the need to expand beyond the labor movement and include all who had an interest in stopping the rise of Nazism. The unifying slogan and sole agreement to join the ANL was, “They shall not pass.”

…the comrades in the SWP saw the need to expand beyond the labor movement and include all who had an interest in stopping the rise of Nazism. The unifying slogan and sole agreement to join the ANL was, “They shall not pass.”

During the existence of the ANL there were many confrontations with the NF as they attempted to march, harass, and intimidate their opposition. Brown’s history of this period is shaped by input from those who participated in building the ANL as well as allied organizations. For example, the year before the emergence of the ANL, a group of musicians had coalesced to oppose racist attacks after headline musicians Eric Clapton and David Bowie had attacked immigrants. Clapton had demanded at one of his concerts for all the immigrants in the audience to leave. “I don’t want you here in the room or in my country.” The same month, David Bowie told Playboy magazine that “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader…Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.”

In response to Clapton’s and Bowie’s racist attacks, Red Saunders, a theater promoter, drafted a letter which he circulated to the entertainment press calling for a strong response to the racism of these entertainers and asking for all who agreed to sign in favor of a rank-and-file organized one-off concert, Rock Against Racism (RAR). So successful was the response that RAR became a leading anti-racist organization, producing numerous concerts and providing the inspiration for the ANL. Together Rock Against Racism and the ANL organized two national carnivals, attended by tens of thousands of young people of all racial backgrounds. Brown notes, “RAR and the ANL became inseparably intertwined.”

Key to building the ANL were the many small meetings and one-on-one conversations stressing the danger posed by the NF. Underlining that the NF and Nazism were one and the same helped to negatively brand NF candidates. From the RAR concerts and the many small meetings, a network of anti-fascists emerged ready to stand up to the NF when it appeared in the streets. As a result, these confrontations attracted more participants. Brown’s book is an excellent resource for understanding the dynamics of a mass movement built around one commitment: “They shall not pass.”

While the SWP as an initiating organization was often accused of using the ANL for its own purposes, it was the Labour Party that grew substantially during this period, even moreso than the SWP. In fact, as noted by one Labour Member of Parliament, “The ANL steering committee meeting in the House of Commons had twice as many Labour MPs on it as SWP members.” What’s important to understand is that the ANL was a broad, single focus united front organization that exposed and stood up to the NF before it could gain a solid foothold in British society. Which organization grew out of its participation was secondary to this historic undertaking.

The SWP’s initiative helped introduce a new generation to the dangers of Nazism. The effort helped shift politics to the left, which benefited the Labour Party in subsequent elections. The NF was pushed to the margins. Nevertheless, the conditions which gave the NF a platform continued to be fueled by the policies of both Labour and Conservatives and have produced another current period of racist activity and organizations targeting the least powerful on an international scale. This makes A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League a timely resource for those organizing to stop neo-Nazism.

As Brown concludes, “The crisis of the liberal centre is once again opening the door to the far right and fascists. …Yet not all is lost—far from it if we act decisively.” Toward that goal, his book offers a wealth of lessons—both positive and negative—to help guide a new anti-Nazi movement.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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