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The federal government’s wildfire response system is lacking resources during what is on track to be one of the most destructive fire years on record. In an August 14 memo, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Center told fire managers it cannot “provide all requested resources for every fire,” and an August 11 memo warned of “no immediate relief anticipated.”

Wildfires have burned 7.3 million acres as of August 18, the most acres for this point in the year since federal tracking began in 1994, compared with a 30-year average of 4.3 million acres. Seventy-six large fires remain uncontained, and at points this season all 38 of the nation’s standby incident management teams, each requiring at least 24 people, have been committed simultaneously.

This resource strain follows roughly 3,400 firings at the Forest Service under the Trump administration’s workforce cuts. Officials say frontline firefighters were spared, but the incident management teams coordinating the response were not. “These require the most seasoned and experienced managers. And we lost a lot of them last year,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, Executive Director for Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “We are just now seeing the impact of that.”

Bulldozers move into protected Arizona desert as second border wall advances near Quitobaquito Springs

A second 30-foot border wall is being built about 100 feet north of the existing barrier in Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, with crews bulldozing a corridor roughly 2.5 miles east of Quitobaquito Springs, home to three endangered species found nowhere else on Earth. “This is the beginning of another destructive chapter for Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Quitobaquito Springs,” said Russ McSpadden, southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, who documented the construction activity.

Join us in Tucson: We’ll be discussing Arizona’s public lands and the border wall in a conversation with advocates including Russ McSpadden. RSVP to join on Friday, August 28 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre.

Quick hits Fish and Wildlife Service pauses plan to change wetlands policy

Outdoor Life | E&E News

Bulldozers move into protected Arizona desert as second border wall advances near Quitobaquito Springs

Arizona Daily Star | KGUN 9 | KJZZ | Sierra Sun Times

Poll shows Utahns oppose Trump’s monument reductions

Deseret News

Report: Public lands at risk

Outdoor Alliance

Wildland firefighting bill gains steam as smoke reaches Congress

Roll Call

Trump proposes rescinding roadless rule for 45M forest acres

Arizona Republic | E&E News | Capital Press | AZPM | Grist

Trump administration moves to kill ‘roadless rule,’ but Colorado has its own protections

CPR | Aspen Times

Land acquisition protecting ‘one of the best views of Colorado’ will add 262 acres to national forest

Aspen Times

Quote of the day

We want expertise, and the mistreatment of the federal expertise, the civil service, is going to hurt us for decades to come.”

—Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Roll Call

Picture This @zionnps

Aww, a baby condor! But who’s the other one?

The California condor shown here is baby Milagra. Milagra’s story reminds us that not all of the condors we see in Zion begin their journeys in the park: in fact, some don’t begin them in the wild at all.

All condors spend some time in captivity. Ideally, they only stay in facilities for brief visits – routine check-ups to make sure they’re healthy. Some, spend extended time in human care, as we follow means necessary to best protect this endangered species.

50% of condor mortalities are due to lead poisoning, when a condor is exposed to lead through carrion. If that carrion is the remains of an animal shot by a lead bullet, the scavenger animals that eat it (like condors) are subject to extreme illness. Other threats to condors include microtrash, fire, and other types of illness.

Milagra was rescued as an egg, after her mother was found dead of avian flu a short distance from their nesting site. Once hatched, Milagra was raised in captivity, first with puppets, and later by a pair of adopted parents. After she was released, Milagra immediately ran into her biological father: the two recognized each other and shared a meal. Her story is one of hope. With proper care and attention for these wild species, we can hopefully share this world with them for many more years to come.

Photo from the Peregrine Fund

 

Featured photo: The Woolsey Fire, California, 2018. Peter Buschmann/U.S. Forest Service

The post Firefighting resources are ‘critically low’ in record fire year appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

For Immediate Release:

August 20, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

SACRAMENTO — Today, the California State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) released the updated San Francisco Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan (“Bay-Delta Plan”), a critical policy guiding water quality, river flows, and ecosystem protections for the state’s largest and most fragile estuary. 

The updated plan was met with immediate backlash from the Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC)—consisting of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, Little Manila Rising, and Restore the Delta—for failing to make meaningful changes to address longstanding Tribal, environmental justice, and ecological concerns.

Among the coalition’s central concerns is the plan’s reliance on Voluntary Agreements (VAs), privately negotiated deals allowing powerful water districts to offer limited flow commitments and funding in exchange for exemptions from stronger, enforceable regulatory requirements. 

Tribal groups, environmental justice organizations and conservation groups say the VA approach is not scientifically sound and lacks adequate, enforceable protections needed to safeguard threatened fish species and address harmful algal blooms (HABs). The updated plan also fails to establish a comprehensive HAB standard and provides only limited provisions for HAB monitoring.

DTEC is calling on the State Water Board to prioritize strong, science-based, and enforceable protections for Delta water quality and ecosystems. 

“This final update to the Bay-Delta plan once again falls short of meeting the needs of the region,” said Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs at Restore the Delta. “We face an extinction crisis, a health crisis, and a cultural crisis that could and should have been addressed by the Water Board through a comprehensive HABs standard, and flow standards that are actually protective of environmental, cultural, and other beneficial uses of water. The Voluntary Agreements are not only an expensive drain on financial resources, but will only deepen the threats we see and experience on the ground.”

The plan also falls short in adequately recognizing Tribal sovereignty and incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In particular, DTEC is concerned about the lack of clear and enforceable standards for protecting Tribal Beneficial Uses.

The coalition is also raising concerns about the State Water Board’s process for reviewing and revising the plan. Key Tribal and environmental stakeholders have faced compressed timelines for reviewing extensive technical materials and submitting public comments. Hearings and deadlines have also repeatedly coincided with holidays and active Tribal ceremony dates, creating additional barriers to meaningful participation.

As a result, DTEC will submit a formal request for additional time to review the materials and provide input before the Board moves forward with the plan. 

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Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu

• The plan would increase UK emissions
• The plan would slow electrification
• Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable
• The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build
• Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges
• The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’
• The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’
• The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence
• Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’
• The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

In a new report, the opposition Conservatives argue that UK electricity prices are too high and that it would be better for the climate to have cheap electricity, even if that means using more gas.

The idea is that cheap power would encourage people to use more electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps, leading to higher electrification of the economy and lower emissions.

This is at the heart of a Conservative push to abandon the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target and various climate policies, which the party says are “bankrupting” the country.

Now, the party is using a report by centre-right thinktank Onward to advance this argument, claiming that the UK could save “over £320bn” by scrapping net-zero policies.

In the report foreword, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho says this approach would make electrification “more attractive”, ensuring both “prosperity and a better environment”.

However, the report fails on these terms, as its alternative scenario ends up with less electrification of heat and transport and an extra 524m tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) emissions by 2050.

Moreover, the report relies on a series of questionable assumptions to claim that gas and nuclear will be cheaper than renewables – including the idea that gas prices will be low and stable.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that with credible assumptions, the report’s conclusions would be flipped on their head, such that renewables – not gas and nuclear – would bring the “lowest total costs”.

Iain Staffell, an associate professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief that while the report “tells a good story”, the modelling underpinning it “has more holes than a Swiss cheese”.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief speaks to experts and identifies flaws in the report, explaining why they undermine the anti-net-zero rhetoric of the Conservatives and their supporters.

• The plan would increase UK emissions
• The plan would slow electrification
• Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable
• The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build
• Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges
• The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’
• The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’
• The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence
• Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’
• The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

The plan would increase UK emissions

The report by Onward is based on modelling by advisory firm Transira Energy, which compares two pathways out to 2050.

One is a “business-as-usual” scenario based on current “net-zero” policies. (Nevertheless, this only achieves a clean power system by 2045 – far short of the 2030 Labour target.)

The other is an “alternative policy pathway” (APP), developed by Onward, which assumes the UK’s 2050 economy-wide net-zero target is abandoned after the next election in 2029.

The latter says it places “greater emphasis on reducing the cost of electricity”, which includes fewer renewables, no electrification goals and more gas and nuclear power capacity.  

This mirrors the policy platform set out by the Conservatives, who argue that “net-zero” drives up energy costs and that climate change can be tackled without such targets.

In fact, the Conservatives say their “common sense” approach would make it easier to cut emissions, as shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho states in the report foreword:

“If we want those emissions to fall, then we need people to want to use electric cars and electric heating – then our priority should be to make electricity cheap.”

Yet, this argument is firmly contradicted by the report itself. 

The APP results in an extra 524MtCO2 being emitted between 2030 and 2050 – equivalent to the annual emissions of South Africa.

The Transira Energy analysts say this is “explained by an increased share of unabated gas-fired capacity”.

Finally, it is worth noting that the UK’s net-zero target is based on the fact that the planet will continue warming until global emissions reach net-zero. Without such targets, climate change – and its impacts – will get worse.

The plan would slow electrification

Contrary to Conservative claims, uptake of heat pumps and electric vehicles is actually expected to be slower in the alternative scenario, “despite lower electricity costs”.

This is due to the removal of supportive government subsidies and mandates, such as the boiler upgrade scheme and the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

Overall electricity consumption is 7% lower in the APP, compared to the current pathway. 

Daniela Quiroga, a senior associate at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, questions this reliance on lower electricity demand in the APP, telling Carbon Brief:

“While this is an interesting scenario to explore, it overlooks potentially important feedback effects – mainly, as electricity prices and the capital costs of electrification technologies fall, uptake would be expected to increase.”

A related point was made in a LinkedIn post by Tara Singh, chief executive of trade body RenewableUK, who noted:

“APP makes the electricity system cheaper partly by electrifying Britain less – while leaving the fuel costs that replace electricity outside the model.”

For example, Singh estimates that the extra petrol and diesel fuel expenditure to replace the missing electric vehicles (EVs) on the road could be around £65-95bn over two decades. These costs are not included in the APP scenario.

The only sector that sees increased power demand is data centres, due to policy support to “prioritise” new grid connections for these facilities.

Quiroga notes that the costs of accelerating data centre connections “are not mentioned at all” in the report. 

In short, the proposed pathway involves removing grants that help households buy EVs and heat pumps, while providing more policy support for the AI industry.

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Finally, Onward stresses the UK’s “high spark gap” – referring to the electricity-to-gas price ratio. This makes switching from gas boilers to heat pumps less appealing for consumers, given the relatively high price of electricity, compared to gas.

However, Matt Elliott, lead economic analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), says the analysis does not indicate this gap would substantially change in the proposed APP. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The report claims that electrification would happen even without specific policies, simply due to lower retail electricity prices driving consumer choice. However, its own modelling indicates that the gas-electricity price ratio would actually rise in the early years and end up only marginally lower than today by 2050.”

In other words, in the APP the price of electricity compared to gas would not fall sufficiently to drive consumers towards heat pumps without subsidies or other incentives.

Rather than scrapping net-zero policies, analysts have suggested shifting tax and policy levies from electricity to gas, or breaking the link between wholesale gas prices and electricity, as more effective ways to reduce the spark gap. 

Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable

The “alternative” scenario pushed by the Conservatives continues to rely heavily on gas for both electricity generation and heating.

This includes constructing new gas power plants in a bid to lower electricity prices, despite the fact that gas is the main driver of high electricity prices in the UK.

In recent years, the largest spikes in energy prices have been triggered by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which have disrupted fossil-fuel supplies and sent gas prices spiralling.

(Indeed, the report was published on the same day the Office for National Statistics announced that inflation had jumped to its highest rate in four months, due to energy costs surging because of the impact of the Iran war on global oil and gas supply chains.) 

Despite this, the scenario set out by Onward assumes that gas prices drop to pre-conflict levels and remain that way for the next two decades.

Ashutosh Padelkar, research lead at Aurora Energy Research, tells Carbon Brief that the gas price assumptions are “hard to fathom” and significantly at odds with future expectations, from both Aurora and other market analysts. 

Analysis by E3G and ECIU in 2025 concluded that four years of energy spikes caused by the post-pandemic demand surge and Russia-Ukraine war had cost the UK £183bn.

The Onward report acknowledges that the new scenario is “more exposed to a future gas price shock” than the current net-zero scenario. It suggests that a new spike could increase fuel costs in the gas-reliant scenario by another £6bn in 2040.

However, Onward argues that the impact of gas price spikes on consumers would be “significantly smaller” than the shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is owing to existing renewable energy contracts and future nuclear power construction in the APP.

In the press release accompanying the new report, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is clear that “our plan means using our own oil and gas in the North Sea”.

This mirrors rhetoric that has been widespread on the right of UK politics, stressing the importance of expanding North Sea drilling as a way to cut energy bills.

However, given the relatively small volumes remaining in the North Sea, the UK will likely remain reliant on gas imported from the US and the Middle East. 

Gas prices will still be set globally and remain subject to geopolitical turmoil, no matter where the UK sources its supplies.

Given this, Johnny Gowdy, director of the thinktank Regen, tells Carbon Brief that the scenario presented by the Conservatives is “a call to rely on imported gas, with global gas prices”.

The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build

The Conservative plan involves building new gas power plants, in order to meet part of the nation’s growing electricity demand without relying on renewables.

Onward states that the UK “has lost firm generation capacity” – such as gas and nuclear plants – and replaced it with “intermittent”, or variable, power in the form of wind and solar. 

To remedy this, its alternative pathway involves building an extra 21 gigawatts (GW) of gas power plants by 2050 – equivalent to around 20 new facilities. This is roughly a 70% increase from the UK’s current capacity.

However, the small print in the accompanying Transira Energy report explains that it assumes capital expenditure – the cost of building the power plants – is £650 per kilowatt (kW).

This is considerably lower than other recent analyses, which tend to cite capital expenditure figures that are more than double this estimate.

For example, a 2025 GridLab report notes that new US gas power plants set for completion in 2026 and 2027 had a cost range of $1,116/kW (£819/kW) to $1,427/kW (£1046kW).

However, it adds that more recent projects are “routinely reporting” costs of $2,000/kW (£1467/kW) or more. Other sources have reported up to $2,800/kW (£2054/kW).

Gas power plant costs have increased significantly in recent years – a trend that has been attributed to a tight supply of gas turbines worldwide.

This, in turn, is the result of increased demand for gas turbines to power data centres and countries transitioning from coal to gas. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says data-centre demand in the US is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges

The Onward report champions a substantial increase in nuclear power capacity. 

However, it fails to explain how this could be facilitated or why its cost assumptions are lower than the most recent nuclear projects in the UK. 

Within the report’s net-zero scenario, there is 13.3GW of nuclear power by 2050, roughly double the current capacity. It notes that this will be financed under the regulated asset base (RAB) model – a government-backed funding approach announced in 2022.   

Under the APP scenario, nuclear power capacity more than triples from current levels to 20GW by the middle of the century, all backed by the RAB model. 

The report adds: 

“Reducing nuclear construction costs and timelines becomes the core energy priority of the UK government, with measures to improve the availability of sites and grid connections.” 

The report acknowledges that the APP scenario “faces significant cost headwinds from expensive nuclear capacity”. 

However, it suggests that large-scale nuclear power stations built in the 2040s could cost £122-£138 per megawatt hour (MWh) in 2025 terms.

Hinkley Point C – which in 2018 became the first new nuclear power plant to begin construction in the UK since the 1980s – has a “strike price” of £138/MWh for 2030. (This is the fixed price for the electricity it will generate, guaranteed by the power plant’s contracts for difference agreement.)

This price is at the top end of Onward’s forecast range for “levelised cost of electricity” (LCOE) – the average total cost of building and operating an asset over its lifetime. 

Hinkley Point nuclear power station. Credit: Rory Hailes / Alamy Stock Photo

As such, the report suggests, on average, costs will fall over the course of the decade from 2030, but provides little detail as to how this would happen. 

As Richard Howard, global research director at Aurora, wrote on LinkedIn, the cost assumptions for nuclear are “optimistic”. He adds: 

“It assumes that the LCOE of nuclear will fall 10-20% below the *original* cost of Hinkley Point C, when we know that nuclear costs escalated massively since the HPC deal was struck. The UK does not have a great track record of managing down the costs of nuclear.”

In fact, Sizewell C – a replica of Hinkley Point C in the early stages of construction in Suffolk, which received a final investment decision in 2025 – has a considerably higher strike price of £150/MWh in 2039. 

Hinkley Point C is the first new nuclear power plant to be built in 30 years in the UK. It has been beset by delays and nearly doubled in cost since it was originally approved.

A footnote in the Transira Energy report adds that its calculations for the cost of nuclear include expected capital expenditure for new large-scale plants ranging from £10,000/kW to £12,500/kW.

While the 3.26GW Hinkley Point C was originally supposed to have a price tag of £18bn, which would equate to £5,521/kWh, costs have repeatedly increased. More recent estimates from developer EDF suggest a figure of £10,736/kW, closer to Onward’s figure.

However, if this is adjusted for inflation for 2026, this jumps closer to £14,724/kW. 

As such, the upfront cost of new nuclear is already around £2,500 more per kilowatt than the assumptions in the report for 10 years from now. 

The report provides limited information about how these costs would fall so substantially. 

It suggests that the recommendations from the 2025 Fingleton review should be implemented in full to cut the cost of the technology.

The Fingleton report – a full review of the UK’s nuclear sector by the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, led by John Fingleton – found an “overly complex” and “bureaucratic” system was holding back the nuclear industry. It advocated for “smarter regulation”, as an overhaul of the planning regime. 

In March 2026, the Labour government committed to full implementation of the Fingleton review by the end of 2027. Despite this, the Onward report includes the implementation of the Fingleton review in the APP scenario, but not the net-zero scenario. 

The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’

The biggest drop in costs outlined in the Onward APP scenario comes from a reduction in network costs, but experts have said that this “just doesn’t add up”.

Network costs are broadly made up of the price of building, maintaining and operating the transmission and distribution systems. 

A reduction in network spending accounts for £137bn of the £320bn in “savings”, compared to the net-zero scenario that sees significant network expansion to help facilitate more renewables on the grid. 

This drop is “thanks to a higher utilisation of firm power system with supply located closer to demand”, the report says.  

In particular, the report points to discrepancy between the “best wind resources” being located in the north of Scotland, while the major centres of demand are in the southeast of England. As such, currently grid expansion is needed to avoid constraints or the requirement to curtail generation in windy periods with low demand. 

By avoiding the connection of geographically dispersed generation assets, such as 78GW of generation, storage and interconnectors, the APP scenario can reduce total network costs by 43%, according to the report. 

Staffell tells Carbon Brief that the £137bn saving has “a convincing story to it – if we build more fossil and nuclear capacity we can utilise the system better”.

However, he adds that Onward gives “so little detail about how this works that it’s hard to comment”.

The Transira Energy report notes that the APP still includes £19bn in investment for the electricity network, covering the cost to maintain the existing system and connect new gas and nuclear generation.

However, this 86% drop in new transmission investment compared to the BAU scenario leans on “flawed logic”, according to Tara Singh from RenewableUK.

On LinkedIn, she explained that it “rests on an extraordinarily aggressive assumption about how little grid Britain will need”, adding: 

“Onward assumes £137bn of new transmission assets under BAU between 2030 and 2050, but only £19bn under their plan, even though by 2050 it still has 32m EVs/hybrids, more than 6m additional heat pumps, 45GW gas, 20GW nuclear and – particularly strikingly – 62 terawatt hour (TWh) a year of datacentre demand. Is this grid figure credible…?”

Beyond this, the report also attributes a significant portion of the proposed savings to cuts in “balancing costs”. These are the costs to the system operator of balancing electricity supply and demand. 

It claims that having more firm generation located closer to demand and existing transmission infrastructure will “save billions of expenditure on network expansion and balancing costs”. 

Onward suggests that under the APP scenario, the cost of keeping generation and demand balanced would fall by £67bn. 

However, claiming savings by both cutting network expansion and balancing costs amounts to “double counting” and “just doesn’t add up”, according to Aurora’s Padelkar.

He tells Carbon Brief that including both high capital expenditure for the electricity network and high balancing costs in the BAU scenario is “difficult to reconcile”. 

Expanding the electricity network would reduce constraints, reducing the need for constraint management. Such a move would lower balancing costs. 

As noted by the National Energy System Operator (Neso), retaining the current transmission network into 2030, with no expansion, would mean constraint costs could reach around £12.7bn a year. But building new network capacity could cut costs by as much as 75%.  

Padelkar says: 

“They’re saying ‘we continue to invest in the network’…But somehow the network [balancing] costs just don’t come down…This is basically saying ‘we’re paying both to fix the problem and to have the problem’. You can have one of the two, but you can’t have both.”

Despite the claim that the APP approach will lead to the cheapest electricity, Padelkar says that the report does not present a “consistent picture” as to how the system would operate, pointing to the approach to network and balancing costs. He adds: 

“Overall, we would expect that once these figures are correctly accounted for, that renewable energy would remain the cheapest form of a form of decarbonisation. I would even further flip the argument around, to say that decarbonisation is not a prerogative [on] its own, but because it also achieves lowest total costs.”

The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’

A central argument in the Onward report is that the costs of renewables are higher than often claimed by proponents, due to the wider system costs of having a large amount of “intermittent” generation. 

As such, it proposes pulling back support for wind and solar, and instead putting focus on “firm generation” sources, particularly gas and nuclear power. 

This relies heavily on the claim that “system integration costs” for wind and solar are much higher than is being “properly revealed” in either contracts for difference (CfD) auctions or levelised costs estimates. 

(CfD’s are power contracts between generators and the government, which work as the UK’s main method for supporting the development of renewables by providing long-term price certainty to developers.)

Therefore, when assessing the overall cost of renewable energy, the cumulative network investment, balancing and ancillary services system costs necessary to manage such variable generation must be considered, it suggests.

The existence of integration costs is not widely understood, but the scale of their impact is disputed.

The report continues that if these costs are taken into account, the “marginal system integration costs” of renewables are “much higher than their individual levelised costs”.

Onward suggests that the cost to integrate additional offshore wind, onshore wind and solar onto the electricity system is £125/MWh. This is far higher than the cost of generating electricity from these sources in the first place.

The figure has been challenged by a number of commentators, with Staffell telling Carbon Brief that this is “very far out of line with mainstream thinking”. 

Analysis published in Nature suggests that if 80% of the electricity mix comes from renewables, the system integration cost is around €30/MWh (£26/MWh). 

Elsewhere, engineering firm Afry put the total cost of electricity at around £55-75/MWh in a high-renewable system. This is “less than [Onward’s] integration cost alone”, Staffell adds.

The high price tag of the £128/MWh marginal integration “is derived by apportioning additional balancing and transmission costs solely to 60GW of new wind and solar deployed from 2030 onwards”, explains Callum MacIver, research fellow at the University of Strathclyde and the UK Energy Research Centre. 

He adds:

“[This figure] only looks at the cost side and there is not enough published detail on where the renewables are deployed and the transmission upgrades it triggers to critique the scale of the numbers presented. 

“It also excludes potential wider system benefits of further renewables deployment, including reduced wholesale prices, avoided fuel and carbon costs and reduced exposure to future external gas price shocks, which are properly examined by looking at overall system costs and testing various sensitivities including different gas price futures.”

Writing on LinkedIn, Adam Bell – a partner at consultancy Stonehaven – suggests that the £125/MWh system costs are “really egregious”. He explains: 

“The ‘system costs’ of renewables…rests on assuming that all additional network upgrades and balancing costs for a net-zero system after 2029 are attributable to additional renewables deployed in that net-zero system. 

“Many of those costs relate to existing renewables as well as nuclear, so this likely overstates system costs by an order of magnitude [roughly 10-fold].”

Furthermore, the system costs for the APP scenario are not fully accounted for in the report. Regardless of the technology mix, old network and generation assets will need replacing, adding additional costs to the system. 

The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence

The APP scenario involves stripping back all support for renewables going forward.

It calls for the CfD scheme to end in 2030. Pre-existing CfD contracts would continue under APP, but after this decade, all further support would “exclusively” be for nuclear power.

Additionally, the renewable obligation (RO) payments for existing wind and solar would end from 2033. These are legacy contracts signed ahead of the scheme closing to new applicants in 2017. Payments are expected to continue until 2037.

(Onward makes an exception for the large-scale biomass power plant owned by Drax, which already has a contract with the UK government to switch from an RO to a low-carbon “dispatchable CfD”. This switch is included under both the net-zero and APP scenarios, in recognition of the “importance of its contribution to generation and to system stability”.)

Both the CfD and RO schemes have contributed significantly to the expansion of the renewable energy sector in the UK. For example, despite coming to an end in 2017, nearly 30% of current electricity supplies are still covered by RO contracts.

It is unclear from the report what the 10GW of capacity currently expected to receive the RO would do beyond 2033. 

Writing on Bluesky, Tom Haddon, senior economist at Arup, says that if, as the APP scenario proposes, the UK “bin[s the] RO”, this could force 10GW of renewable capacity still on the system to simply shut down after 2033.  

Such a dramatic change to a longstanding support system could have an impact on investor confidence. 

Padelkar tells Carbon Brief that energy investors are often involved in numerous technologies. He adds: 

“You wouldn’t be able to say ‘yeah, not going to continue honouring this contract [for renewables], but I expect you to sign this new one for me [to build new nuclear]’. That just wouldn’t work.”

As such, there is no guarantee that investors would agree to enter into government-backed RAB contracts to develop nuclear power plants, having just seen government-backed RO contracts being reneged on four years early.

Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’

One of the large chunks of “savings” identified to bring down electricity prices in the Onward report is £94bn from “lower wholesale prices, thanks to the removal of carbon taxes”.

This refers to removing power plants from the UK emissions trading scheme (UK ETS) from 2031. 

Onward argues that this reduces the cost of gas power plants, which frequently set wholesale power prices under the marginal pricing system.

Staffell tells Carbon Brief that this is a “concern” when considering the report’s findings:

“That is £94bn no longer going into the government coffers, so it’s not saving the country any money; it’s just rearranging things on a spreadsheet. This lowers electricity bills, but does that get compensated for by higher taxes elsewhere, or do we have to take on a larger national deficit, or does it go hand-in-hand with cutting public services?”

Tom Edwards, a consultant at Cornwall Insight, wrote on Bluesky that it would be “madness” to simply remove the UK ETS and “expect things to remain stable”.

The UK currently sources around a tenth of its electricity via interconnectors that link its grid up with Ireland and parts of mainland Europe. It also exports electricity to other European countries when it has surplus supply.

These relationships would be complicated if the UK abandoned its carbon price on electricity altogether. 

The UK and EU have been negotiating over linking their carbon pricing systems, which would involve the UK navigating the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM).

Alongside ending support for renewables, the new Onward scenario also removes subsidies for new interconnectors, although it says “existing interconnectors will continue”. 

The Transira Energy analysis says there would be “new cross-border trading arrangements” from 2031. Such “arrangements” would, presumably, need to be negotiated from scratch with the EU.

Specifically, the report proposes a “carbon reference price” for electricity sold to the EU to “prevent carbon leakage and the distortion of cross-border electricity flows”.

Adam Berman, policy director at Energy UK, pointed out that the post-Brexit trade and cooperation agreement between the UK and the EU includes a legal commitment by the UK to maintain a carbon price on electricity. He wrote that the Onward proposal “would run contrary to that agreement”.

The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

The Onward report states that it would cancel support for long-duration energy storage (LDES), such as large batteries and pumped hydropower.  

This follows the government recently launching a “cap-and-floor scheme” to support the technology. In June 2026, the nation’s energy regulator Ofgem identified 16 LDES that it is “minded to” support under the new scheme. 

LDES can store power across days, weeks or even seasons, helping to boost electricity system security. Analysis by analytics company LCP Delta suggests that rolling out LDES technologies could cut energy system costs in the UK by more than £24bn between 2030 and 2050.

Onward lists support for storage systems – including LDES, as well as smaller batteries, which are only briefly mentioned in the report – as one of the “costs of an intermittent-first, low-carbon electricity system”. 

As such, alongside cuts to support for renewable energy technology, the APP scenario includes ending the cap-and-floor scheme for LDES. (See: The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence)

The report suggests that even if all 16 of the projects shortlisted by Ofgem were built, the total would only provide around five and a half hours of generation. 

It adds: “This is not enough to make it through a winter spell of low wind and sun”. 

This assertion is based on the total storage capacity of all the projects being 136GWh. 

However, the report “grossly simplifies the operation of LDES”, explains Padelkar. He adds: 

“This assumes a rate of discharge that the fleet doesn’t have. Further, this LDES capacity would play a key role in reducing the balancing and ancillary costs, even in the early 2030s, by helping absorb cheap wind generation in Scotland in constrained periods and then discharging it when the transmission from Scotland to the south of Great Britain is not constrained.”

The role of LDES is more complex than simply all projects providing the entire electricity demand for the nation in one go. The projects are designed to act together with other assets to absorb excess supply, smooth out peaks in demand and step in to provide cheaper power when prices spike. 

Related Q&A: What is ‘long-duration energy storage’ – and why does the UK need it? 19.08.2026 Electricity Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 12.08.2026 Policy Q&A: Does the world need ‘carbon capture and storage’ to reach net-zero? 03.08.2026 Technology UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo  15.07.2026 Nature

The post Factcheck: 10 flaws in the Conservative report on ‘cheap power’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Thanks to state laws, Dollar Tree is pledging to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from its shelves Monica Amarelo August 20, 2026

If you’ve ever wondered whether state chemical safety laws actually change what ends up on store shelves, Dollar Tree just answered: yes – and faster than consumers might think.

For years, the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS have turned up in personal care products, food packaging, children’s toys and household cleaners sold at dollar stores and everywhere else. Dollar Tree, which operates more than 8,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada, has now pledged to get PFAS out of its products.

Get Your FREE Copy of EWG's Guide To Avoiding PFAS Chemicals

In its chemical management policy, the retailer committed to restricting forever chemicals in its private-label food packaging, children’s products and toys, and formulated products like cleaning supplies and personal care items. By the end of 2027, Dollar Tree suppliers must be able to declare in writing that PFAS haven’t been intentionally added.

Dollar Tree didn’t just decide one day on its own to get tougher on chemicals. It made the change in part because states took decisive action. 

States led, retailers followed

Dollar Tree’s policy explicitly follows restrictions “already adopted in some states.” That’s not a coincidence. It’s exactly how state chemical safety laws are designed to work.

• 13 states now ban PFAS in food packaging, starting with Washington, in 2022.
• 9 states restrict PFAS in children’s products and toys, from California (since 2023) through Illinois (phasing in by 2032).
• 12 states restrict PFAS in cosmetics and personal care products
• 6 states restrict PFAS in household cleaners specifically

For more information on states’ regulation of PFAS as a class in consumer products, visit Safer States. The organization tracks the compliance year for each law, category by category.

Nearly every category in Dollar Tree’s new policy corresponds to one or more specific state laws. 

One retailer’s policy has a national impact

State chemical safety laws typically exert an influence that extends beyond their own borders. 

When a state bans PFAS in one product category, national retailers face a choice: Maintain two (or more) separate supply chains, one complying with a specific state’s law and one that doesn’t and is sold everywhere else, or simplify their production lines by using the safer version only.

Increasingly, companies choose to streamline. It’s cheaper to run one supply chain than two. 

And once a retailer builds the infrastructure to screen out a chemical for California, Maine or Minnesota, it’s fairly straightforward, and good business, to apply that standard nationwide. 

So a law enacted by one state can ultimately protect shoppers in every state, whether or not other states’ lawmakers act.

This is precisely the ripple effect EWG and our state group partners have been fighting for, bill by bill, state by state, targeting toxic chemicals, including PFAS.

Tackling additional chemicals

Other chemicals of concern, such as bisphenols, formaldehyde and parabens, are on Dollar Tree’s list to remove from its private-label products. The retailer’s updated policy lays out real deadlines, not just intentions:

• Formaldehyde-releasing chemicals will be phased out of private-brand formulated products by the end of 2028.
• Two parabens – propylparaben and butylparaben – are already restricted. Four more will be added by 2028, bringing the total to six restricted parabens, all linked to hormone disruption.
• Bisphenol A and bisphenol S, chemicals of concern in food-contact materials, will be restricted from food packaging by 2028.

Within two years, Dollar Tree will also cut in half – as measured against a 2026 baseline – the number of household cleaners and air fresheners containing restricted chemicals.

Starting in 2027, the company has committed to reporting publicly on its progress, including the share of its private-label formulated products that can be fully screened for chemicals of concern, and the share of the screened assortment that’s free of them. 

PFAS exposure health risks

States are targeting PFAS in particular because they don’t break down in the environment or in the human body, so even low, repeated doses build up over time – that’s why they’re called forever chemicals. 

Research links exposure to weakened vaccine response, higher risk of certain cancers, thyroid disruption and harm to the developing reproductive system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has detected PFAS in the blood of 99% of Americans, including newborn babies. The chemicals cross the placenta and have been detected in umbilical cord blood, confirming that exposure can begin before birth.

That’s the health backdrop behind the categories Dollar Tree’s policy targets first: children’s products and toys, food packaging and formulated products such as cleaning supplies and personal care items.

What this means if you shop at Dollar Tree

Dollar Tree’s intentions are clear, and states pushed the company toward them. But not every product on its shelves will be PFAS-free tomorrow. These are phased-in commitments with multi-year timelines, not an overnight transformation. 

You don’t have to wait until 2027 to shop smarter. Here’s are a few things you can do now:

• Check the Healthy Living™ app before you buy. Search a cleaning or personal care product by name, or scan its barcode in the store, for its EWG rating and the science behind the score. Then compare options side by side to choose with confidence.
• Look for the EWG Verified® mark. Products carrying it already meet strict standards to avoid intentionally added PFAS and other chemicals of concern. You don’t need to wait for retailers.
• Use Food Scores for packaged food. Check ingredients, whether or not it’s an ultra-processed food and packaging concerns where available, before it goes in your cart.

Areas of Focus Food Personal Care Products Cosmetics Household & Consumer Products Cleaning Supplies Cookware & Food Containers Family Health BPA PFAS Chemicals Your wallet and your family’s health will both benefit Authors Monica Amarelo August 20, 2026

This week, we’re chatting with Dallas developer, DART board member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, “An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts.” We discuss the tax base that highways removed from cities, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value we lost.

You know the drill: we provide three ways of enjoying the podcast: The full, AI-generated transcript; an edited excerpt at the end of this post; and the embedded audio player below.

Jeff Wood: What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, and making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

Patrick Kennedy: It was an iterative process because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I had a plan that I wanted to write a book on the history of the Interstate Highway System and how we got to this place, and a lot of it centered on Eisenhower and the person he appointed, General David Bragdon, to keep the interstate system on time and under budget.

Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. I was talking to a friend, Scott Polikov, about this, too. He was like, “Nobody cares about history. Focus on the actual data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.”

And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. I’m just going to go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it. I just focused on the real world impacts to every city. I started on every city in the Yellow Book, but I realized that was not enough. There were something like 90 cities. I expanded it to 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data. I was interested in what happened to population density since 1960 once we started building in earnest, what happened to population since 2000 to present.

I found an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. I started keeping this huge database of these things. During the pandemic, I came across a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve — their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

That was the key point where I started building these databases and said, “OK, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect population data points and my real estate data points regarding how much recent development is worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities.

I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “OK, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50 to 55 percent efficiency,” you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55 percent of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And I said, “OK, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to determine the economic development potential of removals, and how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of the development potential those cities lost by building highways.

Another book that was kind of the impetus to this was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early 1990s. It was written by a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, came across a line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10 percent of the property tax rolls right off the map. I thought, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Jeff Wood: I guess I have to disagree with Scott a little bit. I think the history is really important. I think it’s good to know.

Patrick Kennedy: No, me too. But the story was being told, you know? I was like, yeah … I’m just retelling the same story.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We talked with Megan Kimble about Bragdon and what she found in the archives from Eisenhower’s library. But I think that’s really important to think about all the places where we could have gone in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in the 1970s with the oil crisis — kind of what we’re in now with the Iran oil situation.

But there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. I feel like this is a negative way we’ve taken to building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering how the Bragdon information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. There’s a lot of little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of the way that things are going now.

Patrick Kennedy: To me, Bragdon was the most influential person. I’m drawn to those sort of Cassandras that fight the righteous battle, but then ultimately lose and are forgotten to history. But I also kind of wanted to tell that story because he was right and he fought the Bureau of Public Roads and all of the Robert Moses acolytes that worked there.

If people are this wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic. If we were to build highways to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes or more.

He said that it’s far better to use our dollars for actual high-capacity transit. And part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. It ended up going about five or six times over the original budget. I calculated that in today’s dollars: the interstate system ended up costing something like $750 billion.

He said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost ten times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city highways.

Montreal was building the first legs of its subway in the 1960s. We could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind. What if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

For years, the Akademik Lomonosov looked like one of the nuclear industry’s more eccentric experiments: two reactors mounted on a barge and towed thousands of kilometers to Pevek, a tiny Russian port above the Arctic Circle.

But next week, representatives of the nuclear and maritime industries will gather in Washington to discuss whether something resembling Russia’s experiment could become considerably more commonplace.

On August 26 and 27, the International Atomic Energy Agency will formally launch ATLAS — Atomic Technologies Licensed for Applications at Sea — an initiative aimed at developing an international bureaucratic framework for civilian nuclear technologies at sea. The project encompasses both floating nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered commercial ships, bringing together two industries whose regulatory worlds have historically not much intersected.

The event is significantly timed. After decades on the fringes of the nuclear industry, maritime reactors are attracting new interest as small modular reactor developers search for markets and the shipping industry looks for ways to decarbonize.

The United States is already preparing. In July, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Marine Minerals Administration signed an agreement establishing how the agencies would divide responsibility if developers propose nuclear projects on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf. No such commercial projects have yet been proposed, but the government is creating a regulatory pathway before they arrive. The NRC is separately developing guidance for licensing floating plants and nuclear propulsion systems.

Russia got there first

None of this is entirely theoretical. Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov has been supplying electricity from Pevek since 2019 and entered commercial operation in 2020. Its two KLT-40S reactors provide roughly 70 megawatts of generating capacity, making it the world’s only operating commercial floating nuclear power station.

Bellona has followed—and criticized—the project since construction began in 2006, raising questions about its economics, radioactive waste, spent fuel, maritime accidents and the risks inherent in moving nuclear materials through remote Arctic waters. The plant also became an illustration of nuclear megaproject delays: construction ultimately took 13 years rather than the four originally envisioned.

But Rosatom has not abandoned the concept. Quite the opposite.

The Russian state nuclear corporation is now trying to turn the Lomonosov experiment into a repeatable model. Four newer floating power units equipped with RITM-200S reactors are planned to supply the remote Baimskaya mining project in Chukotka. In May, Rosatom announced completion of the first reactor unit for the project.

That project also demonstrates why floating nuclear power may prove considerably more complicated than simply putting a small reactor on a barge.

Russian shipyards lacked the capacity to build the first two hulls on the required schedule, forcing Rosatom to outsource them to China’s Wison shipyard. The first Chinese-built hull arrived at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg this spring, where its Russian reactors and turbines are to be installed.

In other words, floating nuclear plants promise factory-style construction, but Russia’s experience suggests that they still require an elaborate international industrial supply chain.

New technology, new vulnerabilities

The renewed enthusiasm for nuclear power at sea also arrives at an unsettling moment for international nuclear security. Recent wars have challenged a longstanding assumption underlying civilian nuclear power—that reactors and other nuclear facilities remain insulated from military conflict.

Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has turned Europe’s largest nuclear station into part of an active war zone, repeatedly exposing the site to explosions, drone activity and losses of external power. In February 2025, a drone struck and badly damaged the New Safe Confinement protecting the remains of the destroyed Chernobyl reactor. And this year, projectiles struck the grounds of Iran’s operating Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant during the war there, though no reactor damage or radioactive release was reported.

None of these incidents produced a major radiological accident. But together they raise a question that becomes especially important as nuclear power moves offshore: Does mobility make a reactor safer in wartime—or simply create new ways for it to become vulnerable?

A floating plant could theoretically be moved away from a threatened area, something impossible for a conventional reactor. But a reactor moored in a harbor or supplying an isolated military, mining or industrial installation could also become a conspicuous strategic target. Its electrical connections, cooling systems, moorings and supporting infrastructure may be more exposed than those of a heavily protected land-based plant. And a nuclear-powered commercial ship introduces another problem entirely: unlike Zaporizhzhia or Bushehr, it could actually sail into or through a conflict zone.

A nuclear plant without an address

The technical problems with floating nuclear plants may be easier to solve than the legal ones. Nuclear regulation has traditionally assumed that a reactor stays put. Maritime law, by contrast, is built around vessels that cross borders and operate under different flag, coastal and port-state jurisdictions. A floating reactor forces those systems together.

Who licenses a reactor built in one country, registered in another and moored in a third? Who takes responsibility for its nuclear waste and spent fuel? Which country is responsible for safeguards if the plant moves? What happens when a nuclear-powered ship enters a foreign port—or when a floating reactor must be evacuated because of war or extreme weather?

The IAEA has identified refueling, maintenance, remote operation, safeguards, security and international regulatory harmonization among the issues that must be resolved. Meanwhile, the International Maritime Organization is revising its own 1981 safety code for nuclear merchant ships, with adoption of a new code currently envisioned for 2030.

The appeal nevertheless seems obvious. Floating plants could be assembled in specialized shipyards rather than constructed individually at remote sites, then delivered to isolated communities, mines, islands or industrial projects whose grids cannot support conventional gigawatt-scale reactors. When their work is finished, they could theoretically be removed.

That is the vision ATLAS will begin trying to turn into a workable international system next week.

Russia, meanwhile, has already spent nearly two decades discovering what happens when that idea encounters reality. Its experience suggests floating nuclear power can work—to a point. Whether it can be made economical, replicable and safe enough to operate around the world is a much larger question—and one the rest of the nuclear industry is suddenly eager to answer.

The post Floating nuclear power was a Russian curiosity. Now others want to give it a shot appeared first on Bellona.org.

Restoring cuts to two USDA programs will help more farmers adopt regenerative agriculture Anthony Lacey August 20, 2026

When federal conservation programs have adequate funding, more farmers sign up and put the money toward the most environmentally beneficial and cost-effective regenerative agriculture practices. 

But these programs are in danger of even more cuts.

House and Senate Republicans are floating farm bill proposals that would further reduce funding for the Agriculture Department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, and Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP. 

The bill as written would leave more than 56,500 valid farmer applications unfunded by EQIP over the next few fiscal years. The key states set to be hit hardest by estimated cuts and unfunded valid contracts are:

• Arkansas – $81.6 million and 2,232 contracts
• Alabama – $35.9 million and 2,171 contracts
• Kansas – $51.6 million and 1,593 contracts
• West Virginia – $17 million and 661 contracts 
• Georgia – $62.8 million and 2,411 contracts
• Colorado – $56.5 million and 822 contracts

Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover crops and riparian buffers can help increase farm resilience and profitability while also improving the environment. Although they need reform, these programs help reduce agriculture’s air and water pollution, and add to farm resilience. 

Independent analysis has found between 70% and 120% higher profitability for farms that adopt regenerative agriculture practices and a return on investment of 15% to 25% over 10 years. Restoring funding for EQIP and CSP could help more farmers adopt practices that should also help secure their future financial stability.

Preventing those cuts could provide tens of thousands of farmers with continued support for vital conservation projects. Two amendments to the draft farm bill, offered by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would restore funding to the programs.

If Congress adopts either amendment, significantly more farmers would receive EQIP and CSP support than they would under the current Republican bill. 

EQIP and CSP funding

In 2024, nearly $1.9 billion in USDA conservation support went to practices that increase regenerative agriculture. But as available funding shrank, in 2025, federal support for those regenerative practices dropped by more than $1 billion.

As money for these popular programs disappears, fewer and fewer farmers are able to receive the support they need. In contrast, when funding is available for these programs, existing participants put more funding into good practices and more farmers are able to take part.

The EQIP and CSP are two of the largest federal conservation programs. They are vital to helping farmers adopt regenerative agriculture practices. 

The White House’s own Make America Healthy Again strategy highlighted the importance of expanding the two programs: 

Empowering farmers and keeping solutions voluntary by expanding programs like the Environmental Quality Incentive Program and Conservation Stewardship Program, all while avoiding burdensome mandates; [and] keeping decision-making local and practical with solutions from the farm, not Washington, D.C.

Despite the Trump administration strategy, the House-passed farm bill and the Senate version under consideration would cut the two programs by over $2.4 billion.  

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, included billions more dollars for EQIP and CSP as an opportunity for farmers and ranchers.

Before the IRA funding, just 31% of applicants received an EQIP contract, leaving a backlog of thousands of farmers and ranchers. Following the IRA funding, 43% of farmers received EQIP funding for 2024. 

States had made progress with the IRA funding in  eliminating a backlog of applications – and the additional funding inspired more farmers to apply. 

All farmers and ranchers, regardless of what they grow or where they live, are eligible for conservation funding. That means the farmers who grow fruits and vegetables – the food that the dietary guidelines for Americans and doctors tell us to eat – are more likely to get this money than traditional subsidies. 

Farmers of color, beginning farmers and women are also much more likely to receive EQIP and CSP funds than farm subsidies. If Congress wants to support these farmers and ranchers, conservation programs have an outsized role to play. 

Regenerative agriculture funding went down in 2025

EWG found that EQIP obligations to farmers were $1.82 billion across all practices for fiscal year 2025. Of this pot of money, 43%, or $790.6 million, went to farmers for practices that were on EWG’s list of regenerative practices.

Due to the additional funding from the IRA, total EQIP obligations in fiscal year 2024 were $2.6 billion. Of this, $1.88 billion, or 45%, went to practices that were regenerative. Funding for these practices greatly decreased between 2024 and 2025. 

Through public records requests, EWG received data for USDA obligations made in 2025.  We used data from the USDA’s Financial Assistance Program Data Dashboard for 2024 obligations. 

Farm bill conservation cuts would hurt farmers

The upcoming farm bill must maintain conservation funding, especially for regenerative practices. 

Farmers and ranchers have been promised this money – Congress shouldn’t take it away. The stakes are too high. 

Restoring funding for the two USDA programs would not only reduce agriculture’s environmental and climate impact. It could also provide reliable support to tens of thousands of farmers and potentially reduce the costs of ad hoc disaster assistance and crop insurance payouts covered by American taxpayers.  

Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Conservation Authors Geoff Horsfield August 20, 2026

Dictionary (WG) * Coordinators: Carlos Tornel and Franco Augusto * Members: Franco Augusto, Matthew Burke, Ashish Kothari, Vera Kozak, Lizah Makombore, Vasna Ramasar, Carlos Tornel, Matías Vaccarezza. Description * Our short project aim: To create a collection of concepts in an online platform where we foster intercultural knowledge of radical alternativesalternatives

The TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation in California is working to scale regenerative land management to improve climate stability while promoting the health of humans, animals, and the planet. 

The Foundation’s home base is an 1,800-acre grass-fed cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area, known as TomKat Ranch. The site serves as a “learning laboratory about regenerative practice to de-risk and broadcast it,” Founder Kat Taylor tells Food Tank. Their goal is to provide an evidence base demonstrating that regenerative models are environmentally beneficial and economically viable. This work is complemented by efforts to advance good policy and build strong markets. 

“Every farm and ranch is a business first,” Taylor explains. “If we don’t sustain them that way, they become imperiled personally, the practice doesn’t scale, and they are subject to competition from the incumbent system.” 

As multiple crises, from wealth consolidation to climate change, come to a head, building regenerative models is a way to create an alternative future that is grounded in resilience. Taylor believes that the time is right to drive these efforts forward, stating, “We have this incredible moment in history to redesign civilization, to protect our values, to still harness the power of capitalism and create an economy that serves civilization, not vice versa.”

But the Foundation realizes they can’t do this alone. “Almost everything we do, we try to do in coalition,” Taylor says. “We are crowdsourcing design solutions at a time that it’s important to rethink and redesign, and we don’t have all the answers.”

This also means working alongside people they may not always agree with. “We are trying to listen deeply, empathize completely, and work with people where they are,” Taylor tells Food Tank. All people, she believes, want the same thing: thriving economies, a healthy planet, land that can be passed on to future generations. 

Listen to the full conversation with Kat Taylor on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about the ways that the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation is helping to mitigate risk for food producers, Taylor’s work to advance school meals for all, and how we return to healthy, safe, and vibrant food and farming systems. 

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 William Milliot, TomKat Ranch

The post TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation Wants to Build a Food System Grounded in Resilience appeared first on Food Tank.

Solar power is in its heyday, with installations growing rapidly around the world as costs drop. Recent studies have suggested that photovoltaics could be the dominant power source by 2050.

Those shiny sun-harnessing panels have a dark side right now though. They are slated to become a major waste problem at the end of their lives. Anywhere from 297 to 402 million tonnes of solar panels will be discarded by 2060.

But all that PV waste could deliver almost $1 trillion in economic benefits if recycled properly, according to a new study published in Nature. And with international cooperation and foresight, these benefits could be distributed globally, writes the international team from China and Sweden.

“Effectively recycling [end-of-life] PV modules is therefore not only an environmental imperative but also a strategic necessity to secure material supply chains for future PV deployment and sustain global decarbonization goals,” they write.

Right now when solar panels become ineffective or break, they typically end up in landfills. There, they can leach toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium into soils and groundwater systems.

 

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Solar modules also contain valuable materials such as silicon, silver, copper, and tellurium, which could be reused to make new panels. Silicon and silver are the most valuable metals in PV panels. But today’s commercial recycling technologies typically cannot recover either at sufficient purity to justify the cost of recycling. And there simply aren’t enough industrial-scale recycling operations in place today.

Veolia runs PV recycling facilities in France and Michigan. China, which is the world’s biggest PV producer, has a directive for manufacturers to take responsibility for collecting and treating end-of-life panels. Many Chinese solar PV manufacturers now have pilot recycling projects.

“The global landscape is far from uniform, characterized by an uneven distribution of recycling capabilities,” the authors write. High- and middle-income regions such as the EU, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea have the capacity to recycle most of the world’s solar panels. Meanwhile, low-income regions lack the expertise and capacity for recycling so they rely on outsourced recycling.

So the researchers created a computer model that examined 1,708 recycling scenarios across 32 global regions. They took into account recycling technologies, material prices, international trade and subsidy policies. They found that combining region-specific recycling technologies with outsourced recycling strategies gives the highest benefits. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. And it would generate a net benefit of around US $530 to over 935 billion by 2060.

But these benefits would concentrate in upper-middle-income regions with advanced technologies. One strategy that would help make recycling more equitable is a declining subsidy model, the researchers found. This approach gradually reduces financial support as recycling becomes commercially viable.

International cooperation mechanisms, such as the Paris Agreement, should also prioritize technology transfer and targeted funding to develop recycling capacity in low-income regions, they write.

“We suggest that regionally adapted recycling strategies and international cooperation, with a focus on technology transfer and funding for recycling capacity in low-income regions, provide effective ways to achieve equitable and scalable PV waste circularity,” the team writes.

Source: Chen Wang et al. Towards an equitable future of global photovoltaic waste recycling. Nature, 2026.

Image: AI-generated / by Magnific

 

Headline News:

• “Italian Scientists Relying On Octopuses To Get Blue Crab Populations In Check” • Italian scientists have become octopus breeders in the latest battle of a long war against invasive blue crabs. The crabs, with are estimated to have caused €200 million worth of damage to the fishing industry, thrive in waters made warmer by climate change. [Euronews]

Blue crab (WitherSweat, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)

• “Europe’s Gas Prices Have Doubled, With The Worst Yet To Come” • Europe is in another summer heatwave, part of the reason the coming winter is likely to be expensive. The heat pushes up electricity demand just as drought and heat curb hydro and nuclear generation. That forces gas power plants to use gas just when it should be stored. [Euronews]
• “Hungary Targets Tenfold Expansion in Wind Power Capacity by 2030” • The government of Hungary is targeting an increase from the country’s current roughly 330 MW of installed wind capacity, which has remained largely unchanged since 2016, to at least 4,000 MW of new grid connection capacity, an analysis by Taylor Wessing shows. [Budapest Business Journal]
• “India’s Under-Construction Renewable Pipeline Surpasses 150 GW” • Rating agency ICRA expects renewable energy, including large hydropower, to account for more than 35% of India’s total electricity generation by 2029-30, up from 22% in 2024-25. The renewable energy project pipeline remains strong, with over 150 GW under construction. [pv magazine Global]
• “Famous US Automaker Faces The Music As Million-Dollar Vote Scheme Goes South” • In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Elon Musk promised to gift $1 million each to some randomly selected voters in Pennsylvania. The selection was not so random after all, and a federal judge has decided that a lawsuit seeking damages from Musk can move forward. [CleanTechnica]

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

In “Chocolates Melting Away” — the First-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Breech Asher Harani explores how cacao growers in the Philippines are developing new techniques to protect their crops from increasingly turbulent weather. 

Read more on E360 →

For a farming community that depends on seasonal consistency, climate change creates uncertainty at every stage of production.

Rewetting and restoring wetlands, building small dams, and restoring streams create landscape-level discontinuities that interrupt how fire propagates by putting water back into the land rather than letting it run off. EcoAtivo is one organisation putting this directly into practice.

Fish are often treated as reflex-bound creatures, bodies without minds. Yet, study by study, from anatomy labs to behavioural experiments, mounting evidence to the contrary has emerged.

Perkembangan permainan online terus menghadirkan warna baru di tengah perubahan kebiasaan pengguna internet. Salah satu istilah yang belakangan sering muncul dalam percakapan komunitas adalah “Situs Slot Anti Badai”, sebuah sebutan populer yang biasanya menggambarkan platform dengan pilihan permainan slot yang dianggap menarik, tampilan modern, serta pengalaman bermain yang mudah diakses melalui perangkat digital.

Di balik istilah tersebut, ada perubahan yang cukup jelas dalam cara pemain mengenal dan memilih permainan. Jika sebelumnya perhatian lebih banyak tertuju pada jumlah judul yang tersedia, kini aspek seperti kualitas antarmuka, kecepatan akses, variasi fitur, hingga transparansi informasi ikut menjadi pertimbangan. Perubahan ini membuat persaingan antarsitus tidak lagi hanya berbicara mengenai banyaknya permainan, tetapi juga mengenai pengalaman pengguna secara keseluruhan.

Permainan Beragam Menjadi Daya Tarik

Ketika pengguna masuk ke sebuah platform permainan online, variasi pilihan menjadi salah satu hal pertama yang terlihat. Slot dengan tema petualangan, fantasi, budaya populer, hingga konsep klasik menawarkan karakter permainan yang berbeda. Setiap judul biasanya memiliki mekanisme, tingkat volatilitas, fitur bonus, dan struktur pembayaran masing-masing.

Namun, istilah seperti “anti badai” sebaiknya tidak dipahami sebagai jaminan kemenangan atau kondisi permainan yang selalu menguntungkan. Hasil setiap putaran pada permainan berbasis peluang tetap ditentukan oleh mekanisme permainan yang berlaku. Dalam standar teknis perjudian online yang diterapkan regulator tertentu, generator angka acak atau RNG harus menghasilkan keluaran yang dapat dibuktikan acak dan tidak menggunakan mekanisme kompensasi untuk mengubah hasil.

Karena itu, pengalaman pengguna seharusnya menjadi ukuran yang lebih masuk akal dibanding klaim kemenangan tanpa dasar.

Teknologi Membentuk Pengalaman Bermain

Narasi mengenai situs permainan online juga tidak bisa dilepaskan dari perkembangan teknologi. Penggunaan smartphone membuat akses ke berbagai permainan digital semakin praktis. Desain responsif memungkinkan halaman menyesuaikan diri dengan ukuran layar, sementara sistem permainan modern berusaha memberikan navigasi yang lebih sederhana.

Pada tahap ini, kepercayaan menjadi faktor penting. Platform yang beroperasi secara legal di suatu yurisdiksi biasanya perlu memenuhi ketentuan lisensi, standar teknis, serta kewajiban tertentu terkait perlindungan pengguna. Sebagai contoh, Gambling Commission Inggris mewajibkan operator berlisensi memenuhi berbagai persyaratan mengenai permainan yang adil, keamanan, verifikasi identitas, perlindungan dana pelanggan, dan tanggung jawab sosial.

Hal tersebut menunjukkan bahwa reputasi sebuah platform tidak semestinya dibangun hanya melalui promosi. Informasi mengenai lisensi, aturan permainan, kebijakan pembayaran, serta perlindungan pengguna justru menjadi indikator yang lebih relevan untuk diperiksa.

Ketika Hiburan Bertemu Tanggung Jawab

Di tengah tingginya minat terhadap permainan online, aspek tanggung jawab juga semakin mendapat perhatian. Pengguna sebaiknya memahami bahwa permainan berbasis taruhan memiliki risiko finansial dan tidak dapat dijadikan metode pasti untuk memperoleh penghasilan.

Sejumlah standar perlindungan pemain mendorong operator menyediakan fitur seperti batas setoran, pengingat waktu bermain, serta opsi pengecualian diri. Gambling Commission, misalnya, menetapkan bahwa informasi mengenai perjudian yang bertanggung jawab dan cara memperoleh bantuan harus tersedia bagi pelanggan dalam kerangka aturan yang berlaku.

Dengan demikian, istilah Situs Slot Anti Badai lebih tepat ditempatkan sebagai bagian dari bahasa pemasaran dan percakapan komunitas, bukan sebagai bukti bahwa suatu situs atau permainan mampu menjamin hasil tertentu.

Pada akhirnya, daya tarik permainan online tidak hanya ditentukan oleh sensasi yang ditawarkan. Pengguna yang lebih kritis akan memperhatikan bagaimana sebuah platform menjaga transparansi, menjelaskan aturan permainan, melindungi akun, dan menyediakan mekanisme pengendalian aktivitas. Pendekatan tersebut membuat pengalaman digital menjadi lebih terukur sekaligus membantu pembaca membedakan antara informasi faktual dan klaim promosi.

Perkembangan industri pun kemungkinan akan terus bergerak ke arah pengalaman yang semakin interaktif. Namun, semakin canggih sebuah platform, semakin penting pula pengguna memahami mekanisme permainan dan batasan finansialnya. Dalam konteks inilah, situs permainan online yang menarik bukan sekadar yang terlihat ramai, melainkan yang mampu menghadirkan informasi jelas, teknologi yang memadai, serta pendekatan yang menempatkan keamanan dan tanggung jawab sebagai bagian dari pengalaman pengguna.

NUMSA Press Statement

13 August 2026

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) rejects the comments made by Professor Anton Eberhard whom NUMSA regards through his conduct as nothing less than a hired “World Bank Inkabi” who has decided to unleash a series of attacks against the Eskom leadership, with a brazen focused attack targeting for liquidating the Eskom Board Chairperson Mr. Mteto Nyati.

The above message from his X account represents absolute levels of arrogance that we have observed over time.

We want to state publicly as NUMSA that we are dismayed and disgusted that Anton Eberhard can think he is entitled to fire the Eskom Board Chairperson through a post on X. This explains how he thinks his proximity to the Presidency and National Treasury entitles him to hire and fire Eskom board leadership.

NUMSA does not take light the fact that there seems to be a coordinated attack by the self-appointed Anton Eberhard to advance a capitalist right-wing, backward World Bank agenda to steal Eskom assets in broad daylight.

This is a joint collaborated effort by both the World Bank and President Cyril Ramaphosa. It is not a coincidence that both Anton Eberhard and Vincent Magwenya, the Presidential Spokesperson, have become partners in crime in attacking the Chairperson of Eskom, Mr. Mteto Nyati.

The mischievous and dishonest statement from the Presidential Spokesperson not only demonstrates how shallow and deceitful he is in trying to muzzle the Chairperson of Eskom, but also undermines the Chairperson’s attempts to exercise his fiduciary duties.

The Eskom board has been firmly mandated by the people of South Africa to run Eskom as a public utility that consistently acts in the public interest. This remote-controlled Spokesperson of the President attacks the Eskom Chairperson’s correct and well-articulated defence of public assets.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and the World Bank are attempting—in broad daylight and without any logical financial justification—to strip these assets from public ownership. They are throwing them like a javelin into the private hands of hyenas ready to feed their greed for maximisation of profits, stealing these assets under the guise of a so-called state-owned transmission system operator.

Our message to him and the Presidency is: Hands off our people’s assets and hands off our Eskom Board Chairperson Mteto Nyati!

Below is the attack unleashed by the Spokesperson in the Presidency, which NUMSA rejects with the contempt it deserves.

“It is unfortunate that Mr Nyati creates an impression as if there’s a process that’s underway without the inclusion of Eskom and at the detriment of Eskom,” Magwenya said. “All of Eskom’s concerns are well known and have been thoroughly discussed in government and with Eskom.”

This statement from Vincent Magwenya is a lie! It is nothing less than pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. The core argument of the Eskom Board Chairperson—which NUMSA fully supports—is a responsible and honest position: Eskom has received loans backed by its assets, and the value of those assets stands as security.

By speaking on behalf of President Cyril Ramaphosa and attempting to muzzle the Eskom Chairperson, Anton Eberhard and Magwenya are trying hard to conceal the recklessness of their decision. This is a fraudulent and illegal attempt to transfer Eskom assets into private hands for their own selfish ends.

NUMSA rejects this as we remain firm that Eskom must remain a public utility in the hands of the people to play its strategic role of continuously delivering a competitive electricity tariff to power the South African economy and our communities.

We reject their reckless attempt to loot Eskom’s assets and strip them away for no valid reason other than the selfish greed of satisfying private interests over the public good.

NUMSA is making a clarion call to everybody who cares and has a conscience to reject this tampering and attempt to move Eskom assets away from Eskom. These assets belong to Eskom and Eskom is the property of the people! They are not the private property of Eberhard, President Cyril Ramaphosa or the World Bank!

This dirty agenda and decision to steal and move Eskom assets has extremely serious consequences for Eskom’s financial future.

Firstly, it implies that Eskom may be forced to impair critical assets on its balance sheet.

Secondly, such impairments could trigger severe financial consequences for the utility, including potential credit and financing risks.

In essence, Eskom stands to lose cumulative revenue of approximately R342 billion over three years, based on the NERSA Multi-Year Price Determination for 2025-2028. In addition to this, the transfer of transmission assets would remove roughly R420 billion in regulated asset base from Eskom.

This will create enormous challenges for Eskom’s ability to meet its financial obligations and maintain long-term sustainability. On the segmentation report, transmission business generated almost R100bn in revenue for Eskom in the last financial year and made a profit of R27bn.

It is the duty and responsibility of the Eskom Board led by the Eskom Chairperson Mteto Nyati to defend Eskom assets and say NO to this open attempted coup to move Eskom assets to where they do not belong.

NUMSA will not stand on the sideline. We are calling on our members and the public at large to tell President Cyril Ramaphosa and the World Bank: Hands Off Eskom assets!

The consequences of such a decision will see the people of South Africa paying not less than R84 billion. NUMSA will do everything at our disposal to resist and fight back this open stealing of Eskom Assets.

We will deploy mass action which our members, Eskom and the public at large must lead. We will unleash legal action to protect Eskom assets from these desperate hyenas like Anton Eberhard.

Their attacks escalated last week and this week when Professor Anton Eberhard, completely unprovoked, called for the removal of the Eskom Board Chairperson. He was targeted simply for exercising his board fiduciary duty—a duty that essentially requires the accounting authority to exercise utmost care in ensuring the reasonable protection of Eskom’s assets.

This obligation is also explicitly reflected in the terms of reference for the Eskom Restructuring Task Team, which require the task team to:

“Ensure that, following the restructuring, Eskom is not worse off than its current financial position, and that the TSO is financially sustainable.”

Eskom’s vigilant leadership, led by Mteto Nyati and Dan Marokane, would have done an extensive study on the implications of transferring these transmission assets to the new transmission system operator.

This study indicates that this transfer of assets would have serious negative implications on Eskom’s financial sustainability. Furthermore, retaining these assets in the Eskom Group will further assist Eskom in seeking funding for future projects and for Eskom’s future sustainability which is an inherent duty of Eskom leadership as well as the board.

Such a task cannot be outsourced to Anton Eberhard and his cronies in furthering the aims of the World Bank, who do not want to see any success of assets that are owned and controlled by the public.

Under these circumstances, the suggestion by Anton Eberhard that Mr. Mteto is not assisting Eskom to align with the structural reforms is malicious and has no basis.

As NUMSA, we can no longer be fooled that he is advancing academic views from the University of Cape Town about the future of energy of our country.

We know these johnny-come-late individuals, such as the likes of Anton Eberhard, have become arrogant in their capitalist mission and agenda to liquidate Eskom. We have always known they have positioned themselves for their selfish interest of privatising our country’s energy provision.

Their sole interest is to hand over Eskom ownership and control to the private sector and its profit motive interest, against the peoples view that Eskom must remain a public utility and the electricity must be maintained as a public good.

NUMSA wants to remind the people of South Africa that individuals such as Professor Anton Eberhard have a dreadful, right-wing track record of consistently championing the privatisation of Eskom.

He participated in the 1998 and 2003 White Papers on Energy Policy and Renewable Energy, as well as the Electricity Regulation Act, which paved the way for the entry of Independent Power Producers (IPPs).

It is no secret that these very same pro-privatisation demagogues have been doing work for the World Bank. Therefore, we have every reason to believe that Anton Eberhard is nothing more than a rented lackey of the World Bank.

This individual has developed the guts to attack the Eskom leadership which has been doing extremely good work of moving Eskom away from loadshedding.

It was them who were the corner men of former Eskom CEO Andre De Ruyter. It is their ideas that collapsed Eskom’s quality maintenance of power stations to be below the 75% energy availability factor, which is critical for the reliability of supply to keep the lights on.

Clearly their arrogance is driven by their proximity to the presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa and National Treasury through their DG. We reject this cheap capitalist manipulation with the contempt it deserves!

Their arguments and the agenda they continue to pursue represent nothing except to manipulate public opinion as if such a decision of breaking up Eskom into three separate entities has the interest of the people at heart.

In essence it is a proxy argument to represent the interest of the private sector in the form of Independent Transmission Projects.

NUMSA wants to be on record that the Eskom board under the leadership of Mr. Mteto has successfully turned around Eskom achieving impressive operational and financial performance.

Under his tenure of leadership, we have now achieved 453 days without loadshedding compared to the disastrous era of Andre De Ruyter, supported by Anton Eberhard who subjected the country to 329 days of loadshedding within a single financial year.

Eskom recorded an after-tax profit of R16 billion for the 2025 financial year—its first full-year profit in eight years—followed by an unaudited profit of R24.3 billion in the first six months of FY2026.

Against this incredible success, why would anyone call for the Eskom board Chairperson to go?

It goes without saying that individuals such as Anton Eberhard are desperate soldiers of fortune who are deeply hurt by what has been successfully achieved by Eskom over the past two financial years.

Their mission is nothing but to act as agent provocateurs who are working 24/7 to set systems that will ensure that the Eskom that has been successful under Mteto is destroyed and its ownership and control as a business is handed over to his capitalist class, the private sector.

As NUMSA, we are clear that we reject this desperate attempt by “World Bank Inkabi” Professor Anton Eberhard to call for Mr. Mteto to go.

NUMSA, as a union that is organising workers at Eskom remains in full support of the current Eskom board led by Mr Mteto Nyathi and executive led by Mr Dan Marokane.

Hands off Eskom Leadership, Hands off!!!

Issued by:

Irvin Jim
NUMSA General Secretary
073 157 6384

For more information, please contact:

Mbali Ngwenda
NUMSA Media & Communications
mbalin@numsa.org.za
078 458 0617

For more information:

NUMSA Head Office: 011 689 1700

NUMSA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NumsaSocial

NUMSA Twitter account: @Numsa_Media

NUMSA Website: https://numsa.org.za/

PDF DOWNLOAD: NUMSA Press Statement in Defence of Eskom Board Chairperson – Mr. Mteto Nyati

For decades, cities throughout the world have based their mobility programmes on a misguided assumption: that car ownership will only keep growing. But as more cities challenge the auto-centric model and embrace “multimodality”, a new paradigm is emerging. Bringing about this alternative vision requires not only bold, innovative solutions, but also robust new planning institutions.

For many of us, having to juggle work, school, and other daily obligations, getting stuck in traffic is a daily nuisance. In order to carry out our responsibilities, we participate in the traffic system, which costs us a lot of time and money and harms our physical and mental health.

Some of these consequences, such as safety and stress, are easy to recognise. But research tells us that daily urban mobility also has a great impact on rates of obesity, diabetes, heart complaints, respiratory illnesses, dementia, and depression, amongst other health problems. These health conditions are also linked to common harmful transport emissions, such as particles resulting from the friction of tyres on asphalt, exhaust fumes, and general noise pollution created by vehicles. What’s more, traffic also causes greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly linked to the climate crisis and other related social and ecological problems.

In order to improve urban mobility and address its problems, modern cities put special care into the planning of their urban mobility systems. To this end, one of the main goals they aspire to is becoming a “multimodal” city – a place where inhabitants can choose and combine high-quality methods of mobility, and where owning and using a car is the last option, not a compulsion. This means prioritising more active forms of movement, such as walking and riding a bicycle, especially for journeys of only a few kilometres. For longer journeys around the city, the mobility system must offer a variety of complementary combinations using high-quality public transport, such as buses and trams for short journeys, and underground trains and regional train lines for longer trips and transporting large numbers of people.

In practice, however, many cities still struggle to establish effective new planning institutions to achieve this desired result due to a variety of reasons.

Firstly, following the influence of the North American urban planning paradigm, many cities in the previous century gave priority to private cars – by dedicating street space as well as setting aside large areas for car parks – instead of, say, green spaces. This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

Now, cities find themselves at a turning point between old and new paradigms of urban mobility planning. As the problems with the old system become clearer, a new paradigm is still developing and trying to find its way into practice. So far, it appears in cities that have been brave enough to leave behind old ways of thinking and create new, modern planning institutions. These cities, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, and Ljubljana, are leading by example. Although the emerging paradigm is not yet clearly defined, five main elements can often be found in their planning institutions.

This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

The pillars of good planning

The first and most fundamental consideration in planning for multimodal cities is to have a far-reaching outlook. When it comes to urban mobility, even short-term interventions should follow long-term priorities. Taking a long-term view means considering possible future scenarios at least 20 years from now, and ideally even 30 to 50 years. Moreover, innovative thinking should be an inseparable part of this exercise to ensure that expectations of the future are not just a continuation of past trends. In concrete terms, this means we shouldn’t just assume that the rate of motorisation will grow, and that the number of cars on the road will increase as the population increases. Instead, cities must imagine alternative scenarios in which most journeys are made on foot, by bicycle, and by public transport. In other words, such a vision of the future must have citizens’ wellbeing at its heart.

This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. 

In addition, a strategic planning perspective requires understanding the difference between costs and investment. Changing public transport infrastructure (and especially rail) requires millions of euros in investment, but the investment is well worth it when it is considered over 50 or even 100 years’ time – its usual length of service.

A key insight in modern planning courses entails that land use is the first and most important public policy for urban mobility. This brings us to the second pillar of multimodal city planning: the integration of spatial planning into urban mobility as part of a wider package of public policies.

As soon as you have a beginning and end point for any planned movement, you are defining a mobility system. Therefore, to realise the desired vision of the city, the spatial plan and the urban mobility system must be closely connected. This means viewing public space as a whole and considering factors like population density, planned activities, land-use diversity, and the design of all elements that make up the streetscape.

Beyond these infrastructural considerations, an integrated plan must also address economic factors, such as how public transport services, as well as educational and medical infrastructure, will be paid for. In practice, this means public policy needs to consider a package of complementary measures: those that encourage walking, cycling, and public transport, as well as measures to discourage unnecessary car use. Here, complementarity also means measures which relate to other areas of public policy, such as education, health and employment systems.

The third element crucial in successful urban planning is having quality data about mobility systems for different groups of people. The basic idea taught in traffic management courses for decades is that cities must follow a digital-numerical model of urban transport systems. This enables the modelling of a series of steps – from how the need to move around develops to how movement equates to traffic flow on this or that street or line of public transport. A computer model like this is ideal for examining the complex consequences of different intervention packages, because it not only allows us to understand the problems that exist today, but also enables us to explore different future scenarios relatively cheaply. Urban mobility models should be built based on relevant data about people’s daily travel habits as well as their characteristics and desires. This kind of analysis is usually done through questionnaires that ask residents about their current and desired travel patterns.

That said, models and surveys are not enough on their own. A modern planning institution needs to collect large amounts of automatic data, as well as data that enables deeper analysis. One example would be information collected anonymously and automatically by smartphone, through analysis of telecommunication network signals or various applications using GPS or other telephone sensors. Another useful strategy would be collecting data about reasons for travel, such as attitudes and beliefs, as well as information about the characteristics of movement for particular groups of people – data obtainable only through carrying out surveys or interviews with the relevant population sample.

Perspective is key

You may have noticed that this text does not use the traditional term “traffic planning”, but instead talks about mobility planning. This is one of the important assumptions that a modern urban planning institute should have. The aim of planning is not to enable traffic flow or prevent traffic congestion. Those are important elements to consider, but the primary concern is creating a system that enables people to move around the city and gives them access to all the various activities a city can provide within a certain timeframe. This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. Therefore – and this is the fourth pillar of good planning – evaluating different scenarios must include systemic perspectives as well as those of citizens themselves.

The city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show with a model what the cumulative effects of any mobility infrastructure will be, for example in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transport system, or the overall level of noise on one street. On the other hand, it is necessary to assess whether an alternative system can offer a functional and high-quality daily experience of mobility infrastructure. The model mentioned in the third pillar is a way to achieve this, but we can also use other methods. One of these solutions, which can be called the “person method,” evaluates mobility systems from the perspective of specific groups, such as children, older people without access to a car, or young parents with limited financial means.

It must be noted that high-quality planning focuses not solely on the content, but also on the infrastructure development process itself. The essence of a modern planning institution is a carefully considered process that develops through a series of clearly defined activities over time, with shared and clearly defined responsibilities for all participants. It is vital to include a range of experts, in addition to those who traditionally take part in urban mobility planning projects. For example, a high-quality process should include experts in regional economics, sociology, psychology, and the environment. What’s more, the city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

A planning process that explicitly includes different perspectives – the last of the five pillars – makes it possible to develop solutions that take into account citizens’ needs and experiences, rendering the various public policy measures more acceptable to them. Citizen participation itself can be organised using traditional methods, such as workshops and public hearings, as well as through modern digital tools like online questionnaires which use interactive maps. These tools provide valuable data, comments, and suggestions from citizens which can be directly linked to concrete locations in the city. Such an inclusive approach demands robust cooperation and entails constructive conflict between different values and assumptions about life in the city.

Towards a 21st-century paradigm

Cities have always changed and will continue to do so, along with humanity itself. New forms of mobility will appear in the transport system, as we have recently witnessed with the arrival of electric scooters on streets across the world. People’s habits will also change and diversify, leading to ever-increasing demands on urban mobility systems. Thanks to the rise of remote working, we are also seeing a change in people’s mobility habits.

Even though the majority of these and other aspects will remain extremely difficult to predict, one thing is certain: planning institutions need to change. They need to rise to the challenges of the 21st century in order to respect the needs of citizens as well as the environment. New institutions will also have to think carefully about how to invest in effective, applicable interventions that fulfil the desired objectives of new mobility paradigms. Only through the development of visionary and brave planning institutions can a city of wellbeing emerge.  

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop 

NUMSA Press Statement

6 August 2026

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is proud to announce that, after good-faith collective bargaining, we have concluded a new wage agreement with Wonderfontein Mine (Pty) Ltd for the period 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026. The agreement was signed on 5 August 2026 and covers all employees in the bargaining unit (Paterson grades B1 to C5).

A key economic gain for workers includes, an across-the-board wage increase. All covered employees will receive a 4.5% increase on their individual basic salary as of 31 December 2025. The increase is retroactive to 1 January 2026, and all back-pay will be paid no later than 25 August 2026. This directly improves the real incomes of our members – a recovery of value that capital has long extracted from their labour.

Another key gain is that there will be a substantial increase in all allowances. All major allowances have been raised by 4.5%, effective 1 January 2026:

• Transport allowance (within 50 km): R1,825.62 per month
• Transport allowance (outside 50 km): R2,313.63 per month
• Living-out allowance: R7,371.43 per month
• Employer medical aid contribution: R3,564.50 per month

These increases directly ease the burden of the costs of social reproduction – transport, housing, and healthcare – which are systematically inflated under the capitalist system.

Another key gain is new renumeration structure with additional allowances. From 1 August 2026, a revised salary structure introduces two new allowances for qualifying employees in Plant, Engineering, Marketing, and Logistics departments who work full continuous operations rosters:

• Hot-Seat Allowance: 2% of basic salary – compensation for the demanding shift-change handover system.
• FULCO Allowance: 13.5% of basic salary – a significant premium for workers committed to continuous operations.

What does this victory mean?

Collective bargaining remains the key tool to improve the conditions of workers in every workplace. Our strength is drawn from our collective unity and the power of our labour. As we say: united we stand, divided we fall.

Wonderfontein Mine, as a representative of capital, derives its profit solely from the surplus value created by the workers. Through collective bargaining – a vital form of class struggle – NUMSA compelled the company to concede a portion of that surplus value back to the workers in the form of higher wages, improved allowances, and a fairer remuneration structure.

NUMSA maintains that every wage agreement is merely a battle won in the broader struggle for working-class emancipation. We do not mistake a tactical gain for ultimate victory; instead, we leverage each breakthrough to strengthen our organisation and build collective working-class power for greater battles ahead.

While this agreement represents a significant step forward, it is not our final destination. Workers can never be truly free under capitalism, and total liberation requires dismantling the entire exploitative system.

NUMSA reaffirms its revolutionary commitment to organise, mobilise, and lead the working class—not only for better wages and working conditions, but for a socialist South Africa that is free of oppression and economic exploitation.

As this agreement runs through 31 December 2026, we have already begun preparations for the next round of negotiations. Every victory, no matter how incremental, serves as a crucial building block in our ongoing fight against capital.

Issued by:

Collen Mahlangu
NUMSA Mpumalanga Regional Secretary
083 253 7408

For more information, please contact:

Mbali Ngwenda
NUMSA Media & Communications
mbalin@numsa.org.za
078 458 0617

For more information:

NUMSA Head Office: 011 689 1700

NUMSA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NumsaSocial

NUMSA Twitter account: @Numsa_Media

NUMSA Website: https://numsa.org.za/

PDF DOWNLOAD: Numsa Welcomes the 2026 Wage Agreement with Ndalamo Coal at Wonderfontein Mine as a Concrete Victory for the Working Class