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Headline News:

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

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

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

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

Fight for the Future, Access Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other leading human rights organizations are demanding Meta immediately course correct and make good on promises to protect Instagram DMs with end-to-end encryption by default.

Led by Fight for the Future, 50 human rights groups are expressing outrage over Meta’s decision to discontinue “opt-in” end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages, as well as its apparent reversal of plans to protect Instagram messages with end-to-end encryption by default. The groups sent a letter to Meta calling on the company to immediately course correct and follow through on promises to ensure users’ direct messages (DMs) are safe from third-party access.

For the communities represented by the organizational endorsers of the letter, including activists, LGBTQ+ people, abortion seekers, journalists and other targeted groups around the world, privacy online is not “optional.” It’s a matter of life and death.

Meta’s removal of “opt-in end-to-end encryption” for direct messages on Instagram—a feature only available to users in certain regions—took effect on May 8, 2026. Meta has claimed the move was driven by “lack of interest from users.”

The decision and rationale represent a complete reversal of Meta’s well-established commitments to end-to-end encrypted communications, as well as its promises to make end-to-end encryption the default setting for Instagram messages.

”Meta has repeatedly articulated the importance of end-to-end encryption, sometimes mirroring the exact language our organizations have used for years to explain why online messages must be protected and private. Does Meta expect us to simply forget this history? Does the company expect us to accept the absurd justification that ‘users aren’t interested in E2EE’ when Meta knows very well we shouldn’t be forced to opt-in to life-saving privacy features?” said Leila Nashashibi, Campaigner at Fight for the Future. “Meta has defended E2EE in the past, even when it wasn’t politically convenient. Clearly the company’s political calculus has shifted. Is Meta axing its E2EE plans in order to curry favor with Trump, who wants unfettered access to our messages so his administration can spy on us and target us? Or does the company believe that the profit potential of violating our privacy and harvesting our most sensitive information—our private messages—is simply too great to pass up? We deserve to know the truth behind this total betrayal of users’ safety and privacy. We’re calling on organizations and users all over the world to reject this shameful move. If Meta wants to keep its Instagram users, it must make DMs safe NOW.”

”Secure E2EE messaging is a BASIC digital need and right. Several years ago, we joined in asking Meta to encrypt DMs. As Meta has acknowledged, privacy online is actually critical to people’s safety online AND offline. Now, Meta says they’re rolling this safety measure back after offering E2EE as a difficult to find optional setting? That’s so disingenuous and disappointing,” said Maya Morales of WA People’s Privacy. “If Meta wants people to use its platforms, it has to ensure that using them doesn’t actively endanger us. Without encryption, our personal conversations have been fed straight to government agencies or officials we might critique, to DHS/ICE, to data brokers, into AI models, you name it. This is not a trivial issue. Unsecured DMs can—and have—resulted in people’s entire lives being destroyed. E2EE should be the default setting for all apps that offer messaging, and AI should never be used in ANY messaging service without non-coerced, opt-in consent. If Meta’s not going to keep users safe, is it prepared for a mass-exodus?”

Fight for the Future and a coalition of civil society organizations strongly applauded Meta’s implementation of default end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger in December 2023. The move came after public outcry and pressure in response to Meta handing over unencrypted Messenger direct messages between a Nebraska teenager and her mother to law enforcement—messages that led to the teen’s prosecution for choosing to have an abortion.

In the months preceding the December 2023 announcement, Rob Sherman, VP and Deputy Chief Privacy Officer for Policy at Meta, sent a letter to Fight for the Future stating: “We remain committed to rolling out default end-to-end encryption for private conversations on Messenger in 2023, and shortly afterwards for Instagram.”

In the the letter, Mr. Sherman notes:

People expect technology companies to provide the best security to protect their personal information, and we believe end-to-end [encryption] is an important component of building trust with our users because it:

• Promotes a fundamental right to privacy, which allows loved ones to communicate without fear.
• Helps prevent both serious and common crimes like hacking and identity theft.
• Enables journalists, civil society, religious groups, scholars, and artists to exercise their rights to free and private speech without surveillance or retaliation.

Meta’s backtracking on its end-to-end encryption commitments comes on the heals of yet another disappointing decision: On May 5, Meta announced that the company will be “developing” a tool that can determine a user’s age based on visual, physical characteristics. Under the guise of kids safety, this will mean scanning every single picture posted on the platform to determine people’s ages, with no guardrails. Fight for the Future has been warning for years that online ID checks in all of its forms, regardless of the public relations term in use (age assurance, age verification, age estimation) is a censorship and privacy nightmare that will lead to Big Tech companies cobbling together even more information about users of all ages.

What is light fuel oil, and why does it matter?

Light fuel oil is a refined petroleum product similar to diesel, and is burned in generators to produce electricity. Island energy systems import this fuel by tanker, burn it locally, and pass the cost directly to governments and consumers. When global oil markets experience shocks like today’s crisis in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz, island energy security and costs are directly impacted.

The numbers:

• EIA Global Energy Outlooks 2025 and 2026 have stark differences, In just one year, the 2050 cost projections of light fuel oil-based power rose from $0.29 to $0.45/kWh — a ~33% increase driven by geopolitical disruption in global oil and gas flows.
• For a single 50 MW island power system, that translates to roughly $34 million more in annual fuel costs
• Meanwhile, solar + battery storage projections declined by ~46% to $0.07/kWh in 2050, wind + storage by ~40% to $0.06/kWh, and geothermal is currently at $0.09/kWh.
• The gap between fossil and clean has never been wider or more consequential.

A shared system challenge — and opportunity

The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has constrained a significant share of global oil and gas flows, sending ripple effects through fuel, electricity, and commodity markets worldwide. Clean electricity has transformed from an emerging option into a proven, scalable, and now dramatically cheaper pathway than the imported fuels it replaces.

The energy vulnerability that imported fuels create is not unique to one island. It is a shared system challenge, and the solution is the same everywhere: domestic, diversified, technology-driven clean power that doesn’t arrive by tanker.

Cost-effective solutions including peak demand reduction, virtual power plants, and new approaches to energy storage offer proven ways to grow with less risk and less capital. Those advantages compound over time, delivering both energy security and reduced fiscal pressure.

Why now?

• Fresh data from EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2026 vs. 2025 provides a rare apples-to-apples cost projection comparison that makes the fuel shock visible in real numbers.
• RMI has been tracking levelized cost of energy trajectories across more than a dozen island systems in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean.
• Continued reliance on fossil fuels risks deepening fiscal stress, price volatility, and policy trade-offs, while accelerating the clean energy transition provides a more credible path to resilience, affordability, and reduced systemic risk.

A Caribbean transition

 The Caribbean’s energy transition represents a transformational opportunity to break free from dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets and reshape the region’s development trajectory through renewable energy and energy efficiency — reducing costs, strengthening energy security, and building resilience against climate change. To guide this shift, RMI’s A Caribbean Regional Transition Scenario offers seven major categories of transition milestones that span policy frameworks, financial mechanisms, equity considerations, and public participation. Each section is broken down into supporting activities and key stakeholders to serve as a practical implementation roadmap.

The post As Islands Grapple with Spiking Fuel Costs, Renewables Offer a More Secure and Affordable Option appeared first on RMI.

The winners of the 2026 Environmental Photography Award capture both the lush beauty of the natural world and the heavy imprint left by humanity.

Read more on E360 →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Samantha Moilanen contributed to this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Next What we lost when cars won Kate Yoder

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer models that use artificial intelligence (AI) cannot forecast record-breaking weather as well as traditional climate models, according to a new study.

Economic growth does not increase our well-being. It drives environmental damage and will inevitably slow as we hit resource limits. Yet many countries, companies, and individuals remain fiercely attached to growth. This article uses systemic analysis and System Dynamics diagrams to explore why we keep pursuing more, despite what we know.

The war in the Persian Gulf has caused the biggest disruption in oil supply in world history, and is driving up costs and inflation around the world – including in Canada.

New research from the Centre for Future Work, published through the False Profits project, shows how damaging this latest oil shock will be for affordability and inflation in Canada. It also proposes policies to protect consumers and workers.

The numbers are grim: The report predicts $50 billion in additional consumer costs over a 12-month period, and inflation jumping to 4.2%, even if the conflict ended and the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow.

If the Strait remains closed for longer, the impacts on consumers will be much worse. Three months of additional closure would double the hit to Canadian consumers (to $100 billion), and push Canadian inflation to 6.9%.

The study also estimates the windfall revenue gains flowing to Canada’s petroleum industry from the war. Upstream oil revenue will soar by $65 billion over 12 months, even if the Strait reopens immediately. Under a longer closure, the industry’s revenue would increase by up to $155 billion, reaching almost $400 billion in total over the 12-month period.

The report advocates measures to stabilize oil prices within Canada (since Canada produces almost three times as much oil as it consumes, and production costs at home are unaffected by the Persian Gulf conflict), redistribute record petroleum profits back to consumers, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources.

Please see the full report, A Sequel We Don’t Want: What the 2026 Oil Price Shock Will Cost Canadians.

The post A Sequel We Don’t Want: What the 2026 Oil Price Shock Will Cost Canadians. appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE CAN DEFEND ANYONE. THEN WE READ THE FILE. was first posted on May 17, 2026 at 10:55 pm.
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The post Community commemorates 2015 oil spill; protests against offshore drilling appeared first on Last Chance Alliance.

 

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

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

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

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

BUT WAIT — DID THE ARTICLE GO FAR ENOUGH?

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAKLUYT: THE SPY FIRM IN THE SHELL CLOSET

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

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

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

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

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

THE FULL CHARGE SHEET THAT ReputationDefender WOULD FACE

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

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

THE VERDICT

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

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

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

No amount of search-result softening repairs that.

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

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

— Your Outspoken Correspondent, still counting the charge sheet

THE IMAGE

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Climate Change Impacts (10 articles)

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

Climate Science and Research (4 articles)

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

Climate Policy and Politics (3 articles)

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

Climate Education and Communication (2 articles)

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

Climate Law and Justice (2 articles)

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

Health Aspects of Climate Change (2 articles)

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

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

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

International Climate Conferences and Agreements (1 article)

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

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

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

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 article)

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

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

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

Stronger Local Food and Farming Systems Needed to Stabilize Food Prices

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

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

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

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

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

Fiji Advances Organic Ag Policy

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

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

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

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

India Released Nearly 3,000 Climate-Resilient Crop Varieties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Record High Investment to Transform School Meals

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Chrysanthi Ha, Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headline News:

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

Solar power (Michael Förtsch, Unsplash)

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

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