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Category: environment

  • Activists scale NZ building in protest against global weapons company

    By Kate Green , RNZ News reporter

    Protesters have scaled the building of an international weapons company in Rolleston, Christchurch, in resistance to it establishing a presence in Aotearoa New Zealand.

    Two people from the group Peace Action Ōtautahi were on the roof of the NIOA building on Stoneleigh Drive, shown in a photo on social media, and banners were strung across the exterior.

    Banners declared “No war profiteers in our city. NIOA supplies genocide” and “Shut NIOA down”.

    In late December, the group hung a banner across the Bridge of Remembrance in a similar protest.

    In 2023, the global munitions company acquired Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, an Australian-owned, US-based manufacturer of firearms and ammunition operating out of Tennessee.

    According to the company’s website, its products are “used by civilian sport shooters, law enforcement agencies, the United States military and more than 80 State Department approved countries across the world”.

    In a media release, Peace Action Ōtautahi said the aim was to highlight the alleged killing of innocent civilians with weapons supplied by NIOA.

    NIOA has been approached for comment.

    Police confirm action
    A police spokesperson said they were aware of the protest, and confirmed two people had climbed onto the roof, and others were surrounding the premises.

    In a later statement, police said the people on the ground had moved. However, the two protesters remained on the roof.

    “We are working to safely resolve the situation, and remove people from the roof,” they said.

    “While we respect the right to lawful protest, our responsibility is to uphold the law and ensure the safety of those involved.”

    Fire and Emergency staff were also on the scene, alongside the police Public Safety Unit and negotiation team.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Indonesia’s bullion banks, new mining policies pose threat to West Papuan sovereignty

    ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

    Last week, on 26 February 2025, President Prabowo Subianto officially launched Indonesia’s first bullion banks, marking a significant shift in the country’s approach to gold and precious metal management.

    This initiative aims to strengthen Indonesia’s control over its gold reserves, improve financial stability, and reduce reliance on foreign institutions for gold transactions.

    Bullion banks specialise in buying, selling, storing, and trading gold and other precious metals. They allow both the government and private sector to manage gold-related financial transactions, including hedging, lending, and investment in the global gold market.

    Although bullion banks focus on gold, this move signals a broader trend of Indonesia tightening control over its natural resources. This could have a significant impact on West Papua’s coal industry.

    With the government already enforcing benchmark coal prices (HBA) starting this month, the success of bullion banks could pave the way for a similar centralised system for coal and other minerals.

    Indonesia also may apply similar regulations to other strategic resources, including coal, nickel, and copper. This could mean tighter government control over mining in West Papua.

    If Indonesia expands national control over mining, it could lead to increased exploitation in resource-rich regions like West Papua, raising concerns about land rights, deforestation, and indigenous displacement.

    Indonesia joined BRICS earlier this year and is now focusing on strengthening economic ties with other BRICS countries.

    In the mining sector, Indonesia is using its membership to increase exports, particularly to key markets such as China and India. These countries are large consumers of coal and mineral resources, providing an opportunity for Indonesia to expand its export market and attract foreign direct investment in resource extraction.

    India eyes coal in West Papua
    India has shown interest in tapping into the coal reserves of the West Papua region, aiming to diversify its energy sources and secure coal supplies for its growing energy needs.

    This initiative involves potential collaboration between the Indian government and Indonesian authorities to explore and develop previously unexploited coal deposits in West Papuan Indigenous lands.

    However, the details of such projects are still under negotiation, with discussions focusing on the terms of investment and operational control.

    Notably, India has sought special privileges, including no-bid contracts, in exchange for financing geological surveys — a proposition that raises concerns about compliance with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

    The prospect of coal mining in West Papua has drawn mixed reactions. While the Indonesian government is keen to attract foreign investment to boost economic development in its easternmost provinces, local communities and environmental groups express apprehension.

    The primary concerns revolve around potential environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, and the displacement of indigenous populations.

    Moreover, there is scepticism about whether the economic benefits from such projects would trickle down to local communities or primarily serve external interests.

    Navigating ethical, legal issues
    As India seeks to secure energy resources to meet its domestic demands, it must navigate the ethical and legal implications of its investments abroad. Simultaneously, Indonesia faces the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental preservation and the rights of its indigenous populations.

    While foreign investment in Indonesia’s mining sector is welcome, there are strict regulations in place to protect national interests.

    In particular, foreign mining companies must sell at least 51 percent of their shares to Indonesian stakeholders within 10 years of starting production. This policy is designed to ensure that Indonesia retains greater control over its natural resources, while still allowing international investors to participate in the growth of the industry.

    India is reportedly interested in mining coal in West Papua to diversify its fuel sources.

    Indonesia’s energy ministry is hoping for economic benefits and a potential boost to the local steel industry. But environmentalists and social activists are sounding the alarm about the potential negative impacts of new mining operations.

    During project discussions, India has shown an interest in securing special privileges, such as no-bid contracts, which could conflict with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

    Implications for West Papua
    Indonesia, a country with a population of nearly 300 million, aims to industrialise. By joining BRICS (primarily Brasil, Russia, India, and China), it hopes to unlock new growth opportunities.

    However, this path to industrialisation comes at a significant cost. It will continue to profoundly affect people’s lives and lead to environmental degradation, destroying wildlife and natural habitats.

    These challenges echo the changes that began with the Industrial Revolution in England, where coal-powered advances drastically reshaped human life and the natural world.

    West Papua has experienced a significant decline in its indigenous population due to Indonesia’s transmigration policy. This policy involves relocating large numbers of Muslim Indonesians to areas where Christian Papuans are the majority.

    These newcomers settle on vast tracts of indigenous Papuan land. Military operations also continue.

    One of the major problems resulting from these developments is the spread of torture, abuse, disease, and death, which, if not addressed soon, will reduce the Papuans to numbers too small to fight and reclaim their land.

    Mining of any kind in West Papua is closely linked to, and in fact, is the main cause of, the dire situation in West Papua.

    Large-scale exploitation
    Since the late 1900s, the area’s rich coal and mineral resources have attracted both foreign and local investors. Large international companies, particularly from Western countries, have partnered with the Indonesian government in large-scale mining operations.

    While the exploitation of West Papua’s resources has boosted Indonesia’s economy, it has also caused significant environmental damage and disruption to indigenous Papuan communities.

    Mining has damaged local ecosystems, polluted water sources and reduced biodiversity. Indigenous Papuans have been displaced from their ancestral lands, leading to economic hardship and cultural erosion.

    Although the government has tried to promote sustainable mining practices, the benefits have largely bypassed local communities. Most of the revenue from mining goes to Jakarta and large corporations, with minimal reinvestment in local infrastructure, health and education.

    For more than 63 years, West Papua has faced exploitation and abuse similar to that which occurred when British law considered Australia to be terra nullius — “land that belongs to no one.” This legal fiction allowed the British to disregard the existence of indigenous people as the rightful owners and custodians of the land.

    Similarly, West Papua has been treated as if it were empty, with indigenous communities portrayed in degrading ways to justify taking their land and clearing it for settlers.

    Indonesia’s collective view of West Papua as a wild, uninhabited frontier has allowed settlers and colonial authorities to freely exploit the region’s rich resources.

    Plundering with impunity
    This is why almost anyone hungry for West Papua’s riches goes there and plunders with impunity. They cut down millions of trees, mine minerals, hunt rare animals and collect precious resources such as gold.

    These activities are carried out under the control of the military or by bribing and intimidating local landowners.

    The Indonesian government’s decision to grant mining licences to universities and religious groups will add more headaches for Papuans. It simply means that more entities have been given licences to exploit its resources — driving West Papuans toward extinction and destroying their ancestral homeland.

    An example is the PT Megapura Prima Industri, an Indonesian coal mining company operating in Sorong on the western tip of West Papua. According to the local news media Jubi, the company has already violated rules and regulations designed to protect local Papuans and the environment.

    Allowing India to enter West Papua, will have unprecedented and disastrous consequences for West Papua, including environmental degradation, displacement of indigenous communities, and human rights abuses.

    As the BRICS nations continue to expand their economic footprint, Indonesia’s evolving mining landscape is likely to become a focal point of international investment discourse in the coming years.

    Natural resources ultimate target
    This means that West Papua’s vast natural resources will be the ultimate target and will continue to be a geopolitical pawn between superpowers, while indigenous Papuans remain marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in their own land.

    Regardless of policy changes on resource extraction, human rights, education, health, or any other facet, “Indonesia cannot and will not save West Papua” because “Indonesia’s presence in the sovereign territory of West Papua is the primary cause of the genocide of Papuans and the destruction of their homeland”.

    As long as West Papua remains Indonesia’s frontier settler colony, backed by an intensive military presence, the entire Indonesian enterprise in West Papua effectively condemns both the Papuan people and their fragile ecosystem to a catastrophic fate, one that can only be avoided through a process of decolonisation and self-determination.

    Restoring West Papua’s sovereignty, arbitrarily taken by Indonesia, is the best solution so that indigenous Papuans can engage with their world on their own terms, using the rich resources they have, and determining their own future and development pathway.

    Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Indonesia’s bullion banks, new mining policies pose threat to West Papuan sovereignty

    ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

    Last week, on 26 February 2025, President Prabowo Subianto officially launched Indonesia’s first bullion banks, marking a significant shift in the country’s approach to gold and precious metal management.

    This initiative aims to strengthen Indonesia’s control over its gold reserves, improve financial stability, and reduce reliance on foreign institutions for gold transactions.

    Bullion banks specialise in buying, selling, storing, and trading gold and other precious metals. They allow both the government and private sector to manage gold-related financial transactions, including hedging, lending, and investment in the global gold market.

    Although bullion banks focus on gold, this move signals a broader trend of Indonesia tightening control over its natural resources. This could have a significant impact on West Papua’s coal industry.

    With the government already enforcing benchmark coal prices (HBA) starting this month, the success of bullion banks could pave the way for a similar centralised system for coal and other minerals.

    Indonesia also may apply similar regulations to other strategic resources, including coal, nickel, and copper. This could mean tighter government control over mining in West Papua.

    If Indonesia expands national control over mining, it could lead to increased exploitation in resource-rich regions like West Papua, raising concerns about land rights, deforestation, and indigenous displacement.

    Indonesia joined BRICS earlier this year and is now focusing on strengthening economic ties with other BRICS countries.

    In the mining sector, Indonesia is using its membership to increase exports, particularly to key markets such as China and India. These countries are large consumers of coal and mineral resources, providing an opportunity for Indonesia to expand its export market and attract foreign direct investment in resource extraction.

    India eyes coal in West Papua
    India has shown interest in tapping into the coal reserves of the West Papua region, aiming to diversify its energy sources and secure coal supplies for its growing energy needs.

    This initiative involves potential collaboration between the Indian government and Indonesian authorities to explore and develop previously unexploited coal deposits in West Papuan Indigenous lands.

    However, the details of such projects are still under negotiation, with discussions focusing on the terms of investment and operational control.

    Notably, India has sought special privileges, including no-bid contracts, in exchange for financing geological surveys — a proposition that raises concerns about compliance with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

    The prospect of coal mining in West Papua has drawn mixed reactions. While the Indonesian government is keen to attract foreign investment to boost economic development in its easternmost provinces, local communities and environmental groups express apprehension.

    The primary concerns revolve around potential environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, and the displacement of indigenous populations.

    Moreover, there is scepticism about whether the economic benefits from such projects would trickle down to local communities or primarily serve external interests.

    Navigating ethical, legal issues
    As India seeks to secure energy resources to meet its domestic demands, it must navigate the ethical and legal implications of its investments abroad. Simultaneously, Indonesia faces the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental preservation and the rights of its indigenous populations.

    While foreign investment in Indonesia’s mining sector is welcome, there are strict regulations in place to protect national interests.

    In particular, foreign mining companies must sell at least 51 percent of their shares to Indonesian stakeholders within 10 years of starting production. This policy is designed to ensure that Indonesia retains greater control over its natural resources, while still allowing international investors to participate in the growth of the industry.

    India is reportedly interested in mining coal in West Papua to diversify its fuel sources.

    Indonesia’s energy ministry is hoping for economic benefits and a potential boost to the local steel industry. But environmentalists and social activists are sounding the alarm about the potential negative impacts of new mining operations.

    During project discussions, India has shown an interest in securing special privileges, such as no-bid contracts, which could conflict with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

    Implications for West Papua
    Indonesia, a country with a population of nearly 300 million, aims to industrialise. By joining BRICS (primarily Brasil, Russia, India, and China), it hopes to unlock new growth opportunities.

    However, this path to industrialisation comes at a significant cost. It will continue to profoundly affect people’s lives and lead to environmental degradation, destroying wildlife and natural habitats.

    These challenges echo the changes that began with the Industrial Revolution in England, where coal-powered advances drastically reshaped human life and the natural world.

    West Papua has experienced a significant decline in its indigenous population due to Indonesia’s transmigration policy. This policy involves relocating large numbers of Muslim Indonesians to areas where Christian Papuans are the majority.

    These newcomers settle on vast tracts of indigenous Papuan land. Military operations also continue.

    One of the major problems resulting from these developments is the spread of torture, abuse, disease, and death, which, if not addressed soon, will reduce the Papuans to numbers too small to fight and reclaim their land.

    Mining of any kind in West Papua is closely linked to, and in fact, is the main cause of, the dire situation in West Papua.

    Large-scale exploitation
    Since the late 1900s, the area’s rich coal and mineral resources have attracted both foreign and local investors. Large international companies, particularly from Western countries, have partnered with the Indonesian government in large-scale mining operations.

    While the exploitation of West Papua’s resources has boosted Indonesia’s economy, it has also caused significant environmental damage and disruption to indigenous Papuan communities.

    Mining has damaged local ecosystems, polluted water sources and reduced biodiversity. Indigenous Papuans have been displaced from their ancestral lands, leading to economic hardship and cultural erosion.

    Although the government has tried to promote sustainable mining practices, the benefits have largely bypassed local communities. Most of the revenue from mining goes to Jakarta and large corporations, with minimal reinvestment in local infrastructure, health and education.

    For more than 63 years, West Papua has faced exploitation and abuse similar to that which occurred when British law considered Australia to be terra nullius — “land that belongs to no one.” This legal fiction allowed the British to disregard the existence of indigenous people as the rightful owners and custodians of the land.

    Similarly, West Papua has been treated as if it were empty, with indigenous communities portrayed in degrading ways to justify taking their land and clearing it for settlers.

    Indonesia’s collective view of West Papua as a wild, uninhabited frontier has allowed settlers and colonial authorities to freely exploit the region’s rich resources.

    Plundering with impunity
    This is why almost anyone hungry for West Papua’s riches goes there and plunders with impunity. They cut down millions of trees, mine minerals, hunt rare animals and collect precious resources such as gold.

    These activities are carried out under the control of the military or by bribing and intimidating local landowners.

    The Indonesian government’s decision to grant mining licences to universities and religious groups will add more headaches for Papuans. It simply means that more entities have been given licences to exploit its resources — driving West Papuans toward extinction and destroying their ancestral homeland.

    An example is the PT Megapura Prima Industri, an Indonesian coal mining company operating in Sorong on the western tip of West Papua. According to the local news media Jubi, the company has already violated rules and regulations designed to protect local Papuans and the environment.

    Allowing India to enter West Papua, will have unprecedented and disastrous consequences for West Papua, including environmental degradation, displacement of indigenous communities, and human rights abuses.

    As the BRICS nations continue to expand their economic footprint, Indonesia’s evolving mining landscape is likely to become a focal point of international investment discourse in the coming years.

    Natural resources ultimate target
    This means that West Papua’s vast natural resources will be the ultimate target and will continue to be a geopolitical pawn between superpowers, while indigenous Papuans remain marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in their own land.

    Regardless of policy changes on resource extraction, human rights, education, health, or any other facet, “Indonesia cannot and will not save West Papua” because “Indonesia’s presence in the sovereign territory of West Papua is the primary cause of the genocide of Papuans and the destruction of their homeland”.

    As long as West Papua remains Indonesia’s frontier settler colony, backed by an intensive military presence, the entire Indonesian enterprise in West Papua effectively condemns both the Papuan people and their fragile ecosystem to a catastrophic fate, one that can only be avoided through a process of decolonisation and self-determination.

    Restoring West Papua’s sovereignty, arbitrarily taken by Indonesia, is the best solution so that indigenous Papuans can engage with their world on their own terms, using the rich resources they have, and determining their own future and development pathway.

    Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Four decades after Rongelap evacuation, Greenpeace makes new plea for nuclear justice by US

    Asia Pacific Report

    In the year marking 40 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents and 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tested by the United States, Greenpeace is calling on Washington to comply with demands by the Marshall Islands for nuclear justice.

    “The Marshall Islands bears the deepest scars of a dark legacy — nuclear contamination, forced displacement, and premeditated human experimentation at the hands of the US government,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Shiva Gounden.

    To mark the Marshall Islands’ Remembrance Day today, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is flying the republic’s flag at halfmast in solidarity with those who lost their lives and are suffering ongoing trauma as a result of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

    On 1 March 1954, the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb was detonated on Bikini Atoll with a blast 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

    On Rongelap Atoll, 150 km away, radioactive fallout rained onto the inhabited island, with children mistaking it as snow.

    The Rainbow Warrior is sailing to the Marshall Islands where a mission led by Greenpeace will conduct independent scientific research across the country, the results of which will eventually be given to the National Nuclear Commission to support the Marshall Islands government’s ongoing legal proceedings with the US and at the UN.

    The voyage also marks 40 years since Greenpeace’s original Rainbow Warrior evacuated the people of Rongelap after toxic nuclear fallout rendered their ancestral land uninhabitable.

    Still enduring fallout
    Marshall Islands communities still endure the physical, economic, and cultural fallout of the nuclear tests — compensation from the US has fallen far short of expectations of the islanders who are yet to receive an apology.

    And the accelerating impacts of the climate crisis threaten further displacement of communities.


    Former Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony deBrum’s “nuclear justice” speech as Right Livelihood Award Winner in 2009. Video: Voices Rising

    “To this day, Marshall Islanders continue to grapple with this injustice while standing on the frontlines of the climate crisis — facing yet another wave of displacement and devastation for a catastrophe they did not create,” Gounden said.

    “But the Marshallese people and their government are not just survivors — they are warriors for justice, among the most powerful voices demanding bold action, accountability, and reparations on the global stage.

    “Those who have inflicted unimaginable harm on the Marshallese must be held to account and made to pay for the devastation they caused.

    “Greenpeace stands unwaveringly beside Marshallese communities in their fight for justice. Jimwe im Maron.”

    The Rainbow Warrior crew members hold the Marshall Islands flag
    Rainbow Warrior crew members holding the Marshall Islands flag . . . remembering the anniversary of the devastating Castle Bravo nuclear test – 1000 times more powerful than Hiroshima – on 1 March 1954. Image: Greenpeace International
    Chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission Ariana Tibon-Kilma
    Chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission Ariana Tibon-Kilma . . . “the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents.” Image: UN Human Rights Council

    Ariana Tibon Kilma, chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, said that the immediate effects of the Bravo bomb on March 1 were “harrowing”.

    “Hours after exposure, many people fell ill — skin peeling off, burning sensation in their eyes, their stomachs were churning in pain. Mothers watched as their children’s hair fell to the ground and blisters devoured their bodies overnight,” she said.

    “Without their consent, the United States government enrolled them as ‘test subjects’ in a top secret medical study on the effects of radiation on human beings — a study that continued for 40 years.

    “Today on Remembrance Day the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents — this is a legacy not only of suffering, loss, and frustration, but also of strength, unity, and unwavering commitment to justice, truth and accountability.”

    The new Rainbow Warrior will arrive in the Marshall Islands early this month.

    Alongside the government of the Marshall Islands, Greenpeace will lead an independent scientific mission into the ongoing impacts of the US weapons testing programme.

    Travelling across the country, Greenpeace will reaffirm its solidarity with the Marshallese people — now facing further harm and displacement from the climate crisis, and the emerging threat of deep sea mining in the Pacific.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Kirk Herbertson on Big Oil’s Lawsuit Against Environmentalism

     

    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    EarthRights: Greenpeace is Facing a Dangerous Legal Tactic Often Used by Wealthy Interests to Silence Free Speech

    EarthRights (2/20/25)

    This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.

    But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.

     

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • The End of Oil and Empire

    Oil refinery near Ashland, Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    In the wake of Donald Trump’s anti-environmental “Drill baby, drill” stance, now may not seem the time to champion a greener future, but we have no choice if we want the earth to remain habitable. Across the globe, the politics of oil continues causing conflict, millions of people die each year from pollution, while rising global temperatures devastate more and more communities. Perhaps we can look to Trump himself for the solution after he noted in his January 20 inaugural speech, “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world.” Yes, it is – 170 petajoules every second. More than enough to power the future.

    Much of today’s fractured geopolitics can be dated to 1960 and the formation of OPEC, when a group of oil-rich countries led by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela decided they wanted more wealth – their own wealth as they noted – which until then had mostly accrued to the so-called Seven Sisters petroleum giants. The bickering hasn’t stopped amid fake gluts and shortages. Today, the oil market is a multi-trillion-dollar business, where seven of the top 50 global companies are oil majors (Forbes), while the partially public Saudi Aramco is the third richest in the world with almost $500 billion in annual sales and a $2 trillion market value (behind JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway). Ten of the top 100 are also car companies, led by Toyota with $310 billion annual sales and $270 billion market value.

    Conflict is also the norm when it comes to oil and money: Nigeria, Ecuador, Iraq, Venezuela, and the Middle East, to name a few. In 1973, the “oil weapon” was used for the first time to restrict exports to the West after the United States sent $2.2 billion in arms to Israel, because of Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack to regain lost territory in the 1967 Six-Day War. The price of oil rose from $2.70 to $11.00 per barrel, a.k.a. the First Oil Shock. The Second Oil Shock came after the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979, further raising prices from $13 to $34. Call it “petronomics” as transactional as any Trump tariff or quid-pro-quo land deal.

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine is also about oil and natural gas, especially the control of pipelines into Europe and transit fees, while conflict with China is ratcheting up in the West partly because of the increased flow of oil from the Caspian region to Xinjiang, China’s “Gateway to Europe.” China’s financial interest in the Panama Canal is also being cited as a potential flashpoint if access to American LNG tankers or warships were to be restricted in time of strife or from increased fees (roughly $1 million per ship). South Sudan is suffering its own horrors because of restricted pipeline access to the coast, while Yemen has become a pirates’ haven in what The Economist called a “Red Sea protection racket.”

    Even Gaza can be seen as a petroleum war with trillions of dollars in play after a natural gas field was found 35 km off the coast in 2000 and another nearby in 2011, holding ten times Britain’s North Sea reserves. Split among Lebanon, Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean could become the next oil hot spot as competing nations attempt to transport their branded liquid gold to market with the added twist that Lebanon and Israel don’t have an agreed border, while an ongoing territory dispute exists between Greece and Turkey, who grudgingly share the island of Cyprus. Forget the obvious canards designed to hog the news cycle and enrage non-MAGA followers, Trump’s proposed Gaza land grab has oil written all over it. The interest in Gaza is about territorial rights, not non-existent international “Riviera” resorts. Clearly, the United States is no longer interested in being considered an honest actor on the world stage when one has to play follow the peanut without the peanut.

    The health problems associated with fossil fuels have been known since we first started burning coal. According to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, coal contributes to four of the top five causes of deaths in the US: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Ill effects include asthma, lung disease, lung cancer, arterial occlusion, infarct formation, cardiac arrhythmias, congestive heart failure, stroke, and diminished intellectual capacity, while over half a million American children a year are born “with blood mercury levels high enough to reduce IQ scores and cause lifelong loss of intelligence.”

    The World Health Organization reported in 2018 that air pollution was responsible for 6.7 million premature deaths per year, 4.2 million from outdoor air pollution. That’s more than 10,000 people per day, while a European Public Health Alliance report calculated that traffic pollution alone costs over €70 billion annually in Europe. Fracking also comes with numerous public health issues, including fugitive emissions, water contamination, and transport leaks on top of downstream pollution and increased global warming from burning methane (CH4), the simplest hydrocarbon.

    The Keystone pipeline has rarely been out of the news as the world’s leakiest pipeline nor the proposed larger KXL pipeline to transport oil sands from Alberta to Texas through environmentally sensitive lands. Expect Trump to refloat KXL despite the bafflegab about not needing anything Canadian, netting its owners $20 billion a year and Texan refineries billions more. The world’s largest oil sands deposits in Athabasca in northern Alberta holds an estimated 160 billion barrels, 10% estimated global reserves, lagging only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “Here, “Drill baby, drill” means “Suck man, suck” at great environmental cost.

    The ecological impact is incalculable, beginning at the source as particulate matter and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are deposited into the Athabasca River over a 50-km range at spring melt each year, equivalent to a 13,000-barrel spill, while heavy metals are deposited into the river, such as arsenic, thallium, and mercury at levels 30 times the permitted guidelines. In nearby Fort McMurray, forest fires raged for two months in 2016, forcing an entire city of 88,000 people to evacuate including almost 14,000 oil workers. Next-door British Columbia has suffered similar fire horrors over the past few years.

    Environmental damage is also the norm when extracting and transporting oil. Who can forget the devastation from Deepwater Horizon (200 million gallons, 11 workers dead), Exxon Valdez (11 million gallons), Lac-Mégantic (2 million gallons in 74 exploded railcars that obliterated a whole street and killed 47), or thousands more spills across the globe? A Frontier Group analysis noted that the ecological damage caused by Deepwater Horizon is still being felt 14 years on as “many of the species impacted by the spill have still not recovered,” while lessons go unheeded as more offshore drilling is proposed. The Niger Delta is still a toxic wasteland after decades of failed clean-ups and corruption (700 million gallons spilled), while the Ecuadorian Amazon remains ravaged from drilling (17 million gallons spilled).

    The destruction never stops. 3,000 tons of heavy fuel oil leaked into the Black Sea after a December 15 crash between two Russian tankers near the Crimean bridge to Anapa. Both sank and are listed in a Greenpeace report of the most dangerous tankers, “due to technical defects and dangerous ship-to-ship transfers of crude oil.” As many as 100 people died on January 18 in a gasoline tanker explosion in Nigeria after a failed transfer from the crashed tanker to another truck. Some killed were trying to collect leaked gas for personal use. Mine accidents also regularly occur as in recent fatal events in South Africa, Ghana, and the DRC.

    We all know that heat-absorbing carbon emissions (mostly CO2 and CH4) are responsible for our worsening climate, although some still pretend not to understand for political gain. Based on the work of American climate scientist Eunice Foote, Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall, and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who studied the composition of the earth’s 100-km-thick atmosphere, a 1912 Popular Mechanics article (“Remarkable Weather of 1911 – The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate: What Scientists Predict for the Future” – noted that the atmosphere contained 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and that the “combustion of coal at the present rate will double it in about 200 years.”

    Alas, Popular Mechanics couldn’t have anticipated the extraordinary growth in the fossil-fuel industry that has poured CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century, such that the doubling occurred in 40 rather than 200 years. Climate scientist James Hansen recently stated that even 2 ºC (3.6 ºF) is “dead,” never mind 1.5 ºC, while the new US energy secretary mused over reopening closed coal plants to power AI data farms. Business as usual is cooking the planet.

    According to a 2025 Nature study, one-third of the Arctic is now a source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) rather than a sink, because of increased temperatures and fires. The rapid warming of northern permafrost soils, which holds nearly half of the world’s soil organic carbon stocks, “could considerably exacerbate climate change.” Instead of providing an essential uptake of GHGs, the Arctic could spiral out of control in a fast-acting feedback loop. What’s more, the Arctic ice melt is now almost year-round.

    So-called “once-in-a-millennium” events continue to occur, increasing the likelihood of more disasters, such as another “weather whiplash” that generated a wind-fuelled firestorm in Los Angeles in January, destroying over 12,000 buildings (not caused by lasers, aliens, or fish-production regulations). Flash-flooding in eastern Spain last October killed 232 people as flood waters raged through narrow streets and swept away cars and people in minutes, three of whom still haven’t been found. Bad air days in India, China, and southern Asia are also worsening – 200 schools were closed in Bangkok in January because of pollution. A 2024 National Academy of Science study found that wildfire smoke exposure contributes to increased mortality from heart diseases, diabetes, and weakened immunity.

    Simply put, we must stop burning carbon. Easy to say, but hard to do, especially in a world built on oil and gas. If you have ever smoked, you know how hard it is to quit. One solution is to imagine yourself in the future, say 25 years from now. Are you a smoker? If you don’t see a smoking you in the future, you must have quit between then and now – why not now? When you do, each day becomes a little easier until you are free. The same goes for those addicted to social media. Remove Facebook or Instagram from your phone and see how soon you lose interest in someone else’s idea of essential viewing (and not adding to a tech billionaire’s coffers). No one wants their epitaph to read “I wish I watched more TikTok.”

    Change is not easy. It requires effort. Some of us need a push. I wonder how events changed my life, such as a movie, book, song, or speech. For me, Gallipoli, Midnight Cowboy, and If You Love This Planet changed me. I saw the horror in glorifying war, the sadness of a soulless life, and the dangers of nuclear destruction. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth, John Steinbach’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher similarly moved me as I examined the pitfalls of exceptionalism, the agony of the migrant’s plight, and the importance of fairness for all. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech still stirs me to a better future. We all have our own stories that inspire change from within.

    Of course, good habits are hard to form and bad habits hard to break, but we have to find ways to change. Little things count, more than we imagine. There are alternatives, especially for liquid fuel. Cost and security are the rate-determining steps to decarbonize liquid fuels. The cost is higher (excluding externalities) but are improving as the economies of scale are worked out, while security becomes more assured with local production as more middlemen are removed, primarily in the Middle East.

    Liquid fuels not sourced from fossil fuels are becoming more feasible. Work has begun to change natural gas networks to green hydrogen (GH2) and biomethane, similar to how dirty town gas was replaced by cleaner natural gas in the ‘70s. GH2 is made via water electrolysis using wind turbines or solar panels, while biomethane is produced from organic farm and food waste in an anaerobic digester that would otherwise seep out of an unmonitored landfill. Many countries are setting up green hydrogen and biomethane plants for transportation and home heating, while Texas aims to become a GH2 leader along with its plentiful wind power.

    GH2 is also being touted as a carbon-free way to make steel, cement, and fertilizer (e.g., Hydrogen City and HyDeal Ambition), although there are delays over the extent of financing between government and private industry, e.g., the European Union and ArcelorMittal (the world’s number-2 steel maker with 10% of global sales behind China’s state-owned Baowu). Companies typically want to make as much profit as they can, while paying as little in wages, taxes, and environmental safety. Recent US tariffs such as 25% on steel and aluminum will complicate cooperation, no doubt as intended to keep the home fires burning on coal and natural gas, cars running on gasoline/diesel, and coal-fired high-temperature manufacturing.

    There are risks to green hydrogen if electrical costs rise and demand falls. How to price the risk is still being negotiated. The European Union’s newly announced “Clean Industrial Deal” aims to offer guaranteed minimal electricity prices with subsidies to support GH2 as a high-temperature manufacturing feedstock, beginning with steel. Sweden’s Stegra will be the first commercial green steel plant, shifting the foundation of Western industrialization after three centuries of coal, from which others can follow to make affordable low-carbon steel. However, GH2 is easily controlled at the pump as with gasoline and diesel, generating usual supply issues for consumers. Although water is more accessible, water resources are also an issue.

    Development is still constrained by lack of investment, the slow pace of innovation, and higher costs ($1/kg is the goal), but hydrogen-fuelled trains are running in Germany, the UK, and Chile (where costs are lower than the global average), replacing the need for diesel, battery electric, and overhead catenary lines, although some routes in Germany have been paused for now. Over half of European railways are already electrified, but elsewhere more is needed to curb pollution in high-density areas. Growth is still tepid amid concerns over infrastructure and costs.

    Hydrogen-fuelled shipping, tugs, and solar-hydrogen hydrofoil boats are being trialled to provide sustainable water transport, further reducing pollution from dirty sulfur-laden heavy fuel oil (HFO) in the marine environment. The change will take longer to replace larger HFO diesel-engine ships, especially cruise ships that emit much more sulfur-dioxide than the automotive industry, just as HFO replaced a bulkier, more plentiful, and dirtier coal fuel after World War I. Battery-powered electric shipping is also increasing for smaller boats, such as at numerous water crossings in Norway and the iconic Maid of the Mist ferry that started in 1846 at Niagara Falls.

    Geothermal is still considered esoteric to some but is also increasing even in the unlikeliest of places. In 2022, a Montreal co-op started heating homes retrofitted with geothermal heat pumps via eight, 150-m-deep geothermal wells dug in a private backyard to connect 50 local residences. Although heat is generally a greater concern during the frigid cold of a Canadian winter, air conditioning is also available when needed. A geothermal pilot project in Alberta began extracting heat at a former drilling site in 2019, installing a 2.5-km closed loop between existing wells. The $10-million first-of-its-kind system is on a much larger scale than a standard home unit but doesn’t require any new thinking to distribute the heat (via the second law of thermodynamics) or generate electricity.

    Heat pumps are being installed in greater numbers using electricity straight from the grid rather than liquid-fuel home heating. Better insulation is also a win-win for the environment and our pocketbooks, sadly overlooked in many national energy plans. One size does not fit all, but we can heat our homes without fossil fuels. Home-grown electricity via rooftop solar panels is also on the rise and making a dent in petroleum sales across the globe as are thermal water heaters and electric vehicles (EVs), especially in China from vast solar and wind farms. The Financial Times recently called EVs “epochal” (17 million sold in 2024).

    Controlling green supply chains for a larger electric world is important, but despite unrivalled financial might the United States is falling behind China, whose photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine (WT) installations continue increasing year on year. China has one-upped the American vertically integrated corporation model by providing more funding, internalized regulations, and less bureaucracy. Centrally planned command economies generally function more efficiently if appropriately directed, hampering indecisive economies in the West. One of the goals of the new authoritarian US government is to improve delivery by cutting regulations and streamlining decisions, but doesn’t apply to a burgeoning green economy. The brown status quo maintains the favored treatment from above.

    But despite continued US backing, the oil industry pushing more carbon fuels, and the usual naysayers who delay and deny that carbon-induced global warming is an existential crisis, the transition to renewables will continue with or without American input. We are not comparing competing models of innovation – oil and gas is now more expensive, while wind, water, and solar (WWS) are cleaner, cheaper, and renewable – we are deciding who will run the future.

    The problem is not price as noted in a 2025 study on California, which produced 47.3% grid electricity demand from WWS in 2024. Led by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, the study stated “Wind-water-solar is not the cause of high California electricity prices; to the contrary, most all states with higher shares of their demand met by wind-water-solar experience lower electricity prices.” The study also showed that the transition advances where policy allows: “10 countries produced 99.5–100% and 64 countries produced 50–100% of all the electricity they generated from WWS.” Scotland and West Australia’s grid is now 70% wind or solar.

    With no moving parts, a PV cell makes no noise, emits no pollution, and requires no fuel other than the sun. PV solar is now the most efficient energy source (over half of all energy from burnt fossil fuels is wasted as heat) and the cheapest at half the cost of coal. Indeed, more sales generates more supply at lower prices, such that a PV cell today costs over one thousand times less (8 cents/watt) than 50 years ago. In 2024, the world installed more solar panels per day (roughly 2 GW) than in a single year two decades ago, generating more grid electricity than coal for the first time (10,000 TWh). Once installed, the power is free.

    Why is the United States so opposed to change, other than the obvious loss of established petroleum markets? One reason is that the vast shale oil reserves and fracked natural gas of the last two decades have made the US less reliant on others and disinclined to cooperate with the transition. The US has never had so much energy and wealth before that rather than providing more security is fuelling a new divide. As Steven Johnson noted in The Invention of Air, “radical increases in energy have led, almost without exception, to two long-term trends: and overall increase in wealth, and an increase in social stratification.” American economic policies are designed to ensure that the oil business and its managers remain the beneficiaries. Alas, the richest country in the world is fuelling its own demise.

    In fact, the US is losing out in an empirical death trap by prioritizing wealth accumulation, the downfall of all great powers as the rich benefit at the expense of a financially disadvantaged workforce. As Giovanni Arrighi noted in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, “systemic cycles of accumulation has shown that every material expansion of the capitalist world-economy has been based on a particular organizational structure, the vitality of which was progressively undermined by the expansion itself,” not least because a “growing proportion of the economic space needed to keep returns rising or high.” The US has become enamored by its own presumed economic beauty.

    Arrighi’s “crisis of accumulation” follows from Joseph Schumpeter’s conclusion that capitalism “undermines the social institutions which protect it, and ‘inevitably’ creates conditions in which it will not be able to live.” We are on the crest of that inevitability as the neoliberal cum libertarian takeover reduces the power of everyday workers. It’s not rocket science to see how money produces more money, “living off the buying and selling of others” as Carl Fox (Martin Sheen) tells his son Bud at the end of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Is there any other result to a game designed to make winners and losers, now supercharged to the extreme by instant-transaction technologies and oligarch favoritism? Trump’s MAGA smokescreen is in fact “Make Aristocracy Great Again” as workers are distracted by overblown cultural wars and petty grievances. The revolution is being won by the guys with the loudest whistles. What’s next – rechiseling Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore as the masses line up to kiss his slippers on Emperor’s Day in the year 1 AD (After Don)?

    Alas, empires come and go. The American empire is no different as inequality rises and workers are derailed – in 1979, 20% of US jobs were in manufacturing, down to 5% today. As explained by the Pareto Principle, the rich always grow richer in any competitive system left to its own devices (e.g., 20%-80%). Add in laws to rig the system and the twenty percent becomes the one percent becomes the 0.1% and 0.01%, producing even more perfect hoarders. The math doesn’t lie – in the US, three people now have more wealth ($880 billion) than HALF the population.

    The world’s great empires have turned from renaissance and enlightenment to industrialization and innovation as economic wealth reorients itself with the latest technology while ensuring it controls the levers. Despite nativist politicians trying to rally the US to produce more local manufacturing, the future is being stamped with “Made in China.” Having started with the help of fossil fuels and the tools of the previous empire, China is working towards peaking its emissions via a vast supply of clean, green renewables. The end of oil signals the end of the American empire or at least the end of an oil-based American empire. The speed of the transition may determine the survival of the planet.

    As noted by Arrighi, the four great wealth-accumulating powers in history were the Spanish, Dutch, British, and the US. Energy is one of the deciding dominoes – wind power (Spain) lost to improved wind power (the Netherlands) that lost to coal (the UK) that lost to oil (the US). The American empire is now losing to China because of renewables, rare-earth minerals, and lithium. As if full circle, the old “new world” was founded on wind when Columbus crossed the Atlantic on his famous 1492 voyage, while the new new world is being powered by the wind and sun. As if to christen the change, China unveiled the largest-ever wind turbine (26 MW) that can power a single home for a year in one turn. Ironically, Columbus was looking for China.

    China continues to remake its carbon economy on the back of green power. Its Wind Base program will reach 1 TW by 2050, generating 75% of national grid power. Nine of the top ten global solar panel makers are Chinese, led by Jinko Solar, LONGI Green Energy, and JA Solar. US manufacturing has made a comeback via the 2023 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and supplies 52 GW/year, enough to meet American needs and ahead of 2030 projections after ceding manufacturing to China in 2010. Domestic cell production has begun again, including Suniva (3 GW), QCells (3 GW), and Silfab (1 GW), although one wonders how much will be gutted if green tax credits are curtailed by an ever oil-obsessed US.

    Chinese electric vehicles supply 90% of the global market, while half of all cars in China are now EVs with some models selling for as low as $10,000. China’s BYD surpassed Tesla in overall sales last year and now produces almost 40% of the global output, including an envious fleet of EV buses, while Tesla has stalled on its goal of transitioning from selling a high-cost, luxury car to a low-cost, mass-market car as stated in CEO’s Elon Musk’s original 2006 Master Plan.

    There are still bumps in the road. The pace of EVs sales has slowed because of higher prices, albeit offset by lower fuel prices and maintenance. Tesla has seen a drop off in sales in part because of Musk’s right-wing idolatry and lack of a promised low-end car, while other carmakers have seen an uptick, especially the more affordable BYD. Despite pausing new EV models for two years, Ford CEO Jim Falon stated that Ford was committed to an EV strategy. Range is now over 400 km (260 miles) for many EVs, easily covering most daily commutes. Improved locator technologies help to optimize road-side charging, charged to 80% within half an hour although most electric refilling is done at home. Some EVs are now equipped with heat pumps, essential in colder climates and less of a battery drain.

    In a bizarre confluence of conflicting interests, the US government plans to buy $400 million in armored Teslas, likely its underperforming Cybertruck. Silent and smokeless, EVs are better in the field than noisy and dirty diesel vehicles and can be strategically important, essentially permanently powered by a solar panel add-on. More EVs will naturally lower gasoline consumption in the US military, one of the largest petroleum users in the world.

    Large chemical battery storage sites are being built alongside PV and WT farms, both new and old. Shared real-time management from nearby sites and interconnectors help to cover the inherent intermittency of wind and solar to share the load. Down sun and the dark doldrums (“Dunkelflaute”) are no longer a deal-breaker to keep the lights on. Home electrical battery storage (and dormant EVs) can also provide backup power during increased outages from climate-affected infrastructure, a.k.a. “climate resilience.” Along with home electrical needs, water and communications also need electrical backup.

    The changes are dizzying and coming faster than many can assimilate. The US can pause the transition for a while with inflationary tariffs and protectionist supply chains, but can’t stop the inevitable. A $100 trillion world GDP economy won’t allow it, especially as the US national debt grows beyond $36 trillion (over 100% of GDP). The only question is how much of US society will be remade and how much the environment will suffer as the new libertarians continue their full-throttled plans to advance the petroleum economy, gut emission standards, and dismantle environmental regulations. Can Trump’s bluster distract long enough to install an unbreakable, oil-run island economy? Or will another empire expire as the wrong future is backed? – a failed “trickle-down” oil economy rather than a self-reliant clean green world.

    No amount of aggressive MAGA rhetoric, anger-filled mocking, or scattershot reactionary nonsense – such as exploding paper straws or fake annexation fantasies – can stop the change. A proposed $44 billion Alaskan pipeline to supply Japan with LNG by 2031 will be lauded by oil executives, but is more of the same hyperbole, literally a pipe dream. A 25% tariff on steel and aluminum will harm wind-turbine and solar-panel companies as well as car manufacturers and the building trade, an American own goal that will not win voters in 2026. “Buy Canada” and expanded east-west provincial trade in Canada is replacing 150 years of cross-border trade with the US, while national barriers in Europe are being removed. Trump’s intransigence is promoting unity elsewhere and a reduced reliance on American goods.

    The pretend annexation of Greenland and Canada as well as laughable statements about occupying Panama and Gaza are about distracting from job losses, regulatory cuts, and gutted environmental protection at home. The now-standard barstool antics by Trump and his “First Buddy” wingman are intended for the news feed to sow discord, amplified by a compliant and uncritical mainstream press, sadly legitimizing the lies, pathetic trolling, and bizarre obsessions, such as fentanyl (more illegal drugs move from the US to Canada) or calling Canada the 51st state run by Governor Gretzky. Underscoring the nonsense, according to NATO’s Article 5 the US must aid Canada in the event of an attack – will the US be at war with itself? Of course, the goal may be to leave NATO when the dust settles on a new Russian American alliance.

    The real story is access as in Trump’s shameless play for Ukraine’s resources, masquerading as improved economic ties with Ukraine in exchange for American security guarantees, a.k.a. “payback” against further Russian aggression. As usual, the math doesn’t work in Trumpland with $100 billion in arms for $500 billion in proposed resources, mainly petroleum reserves, lithium, and critical minerals. Ironically, lithium is mostly needed for EVs and smoothing solar- and wind-powered electrical grids, supposedly anathema to Trump. Threats of lost internet access via SpaceX’s Starlink add to the cruel gamesmanship and worry for Ukrainians after three years of war.

    As usual, the real story lies elsewhere as the United States attempts to compete with Chinese dominance in the new green economy, including rare earth elements (REEs) via the proposed weapons sales with Ukraine in an obvious American protection racket. The rare earths (not “the rare earth” as Trump calls them) are seventeen heavy metals, including the 4f lanthanide elements in the periodic table – 57 (lanthanum) to 70 (ytterbium) – prized for their use in magnets in cell phone and headphone speakers, electric motors (300 kg of neodymium is used in a WT motor magnet, USGS). and batteries. The US is playing catchup in a global market that has been shifting eastward for decades to China, India, and Asia.

    Greenland is also rich in rare earths as well as gold, copper, and nickel, all essential for renewable energy, hence the increased international interest. Amaroq Minerals CEO Eldur Olafsson noted that Greenland “can be the supplier of all the minerals the Western world will need for decades. And that is a very unique position.” Greenland holds the eighth largest reserves of REEs. China is number 1, making Greenland’s resources strategically important to Europe and the US via its clumsy attempts to update the Monroe Doctrine.

    The new American prospectors should pay attention, however, as most Greenlanders want independence from Denmark and not union with the United States. Greenland is also one of the windiest locations on the planet, perfect for setting up a world-record wind farm with interconnectors to supply green clean energy to the highest bidder. Greenland could supply all the energy needs to a high-flying future America far from Chinese supply chains in a truly transformative great-making endeavor.

    Why are people unwilling to see renewable energy as essential to counter global warming? And why are some people so afraid of change? Is it change itself? More likely it is control of the change. The new libertarians are in charge for now, but the technological control of capital is under threat by increased self-reliance, such as rooftop solar and battery backup. The playing field has not yet been corrupted to ensure maximal financial control over the new energy sources, but the wheels are turning via disinformation, obstruction, and the usual Trump two-step.

    The end of oil does not necessarily mean the end of the United States, but it does mean American business losing out on the next energy wave to China, India, and Europe as they forge on without their cooperation. What is the point anyway? To get to the end first or travel with as many friends as possible? Soon, it may be about survival. It’s time to start counting lives and not dollars. The United States will become even more isolated as it increases oil production, limits green investments, and ditches science.

    Is the end of oil a fantasy? We will run out eventually, possibly by 2100, and have to stop at some point – why not sooner than later, before we have no choice? That means leaving much of what remains in the ground and finding an alternative such as 170 petajoules every second, i.e., 170,000,000,000,000,000 watts, from one 2-billionth of the sun’s radiated power as it converts hydrogen into helium, heat, and light becoming 4 million tons lighter every second. So easy to make America and the world great.

    We have come a long way since Bell Lab’s first 6%-efficiency solar cell in 1956 and Japanese electronics company Sharp’s first solar-powered calculator in 1976 that remained a novelty for so long, but the quest for more remains the same. As Sharp’s founder noted, “I believe the biggest issue for the future is the accumulation of solar heat and light. While all living things enjoy the blessings of the sun, we have to rely on electricity from power stations. With magnificent heat and light streaming down on us, we must think of ways of using those blessings. This is where solar cells come in.”

    The future is already here as noted by a self-proclaimed king, overlooking a failing empire on a cold January 2025 morning – “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world.”

    The post The End of Oil and Empire appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Forest Service Loses Billions Subsidizing Logging

    Clearcut on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. Photo by Vicki Anfinson

    If Trump and Musk really want to cut the Forest Service’s budget they need to go where the money is actually being wasted. That would be the Forest Service’s enormously subsidized logging projects that cost billions of federal tax dollars while inflicting significant damage on the environment, wildlife, and fisheries. All to enable the private timber industry to profit off the public resource of our national forests.

    The Forest Service’s own economic analysis shows the actual costs of recent timber sales in Region One, which includes Montana and northern Idaho.

    + Taxpayers will lose $3,184,000 on the South Plateau clearcutting project next to Yellowstone National Park in the Custer-Gallatin National Forest, which we are suing to stop.

    + Taxpayers will lose a stunning $4.2 million on the Gold Butterfly logging project in the Bitterroot National Forest, which we are also in court trying to stop.

    + The Lost Creek-Boulder Creek clear-cutting project on Idaho’s Payette National Forest would have lost nearly $22 million — but we stopped it in court.

    Photo by US Forest Service.

    A 2019 report by the Center for a Sustainable Economy found “taxpayer losses of nearly $2 billion a year associated with the federal logging program carried out on National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands.”

    But that was before Congress gave the Forest Service tens of billions from the Infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act for more logging. That’s on top of their $6 billion annual budget. When the Forest Service recently told me that they are out of money, I asked what happened to those billions. They said they spent it all.  That is what they do so they get more money next time.

    Photo by US Forest Service.

    Commercial logging increases wildfire intensity

    The Forest Service claims that logging reduces wildfire risk, but more than more than 200 independent scientists found that logged areas actually aggravate wildfire growth and intensity. How? Because logging allows more sunlight and wind to dry out the forest and makes them more flammable.

    It’s a proven fact that the best way to fireproof homes in forested areas is by clearing out nearby brush and using non-flammable building materials — not by clear-cutting forests miles from any homes.

    Logging Road, Helena- Lewis and Clark National Forest. Photo by Helena Hunters and Anglers.

    Conclusion

    If Musk really wanted to save taxpayers’ money, he should target the billions of dollars needlessly spent clear-cutting our dwindling old-growth forests for timber industry profits and they’d have plenty left to keep employees to provide real public services such as clean campgrounds, outhouses, and well-maintained trails.

    Please consdier donating to CounterPunch for running columns like this.

    The post The Forest Service Loses Billions Subsidizing Logging appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • EXPLAINED: Why research on Xayaburi dam in Laos remains opaque

    BANGKOK – The Xayaburi hydro dam that blocks the Mekong River in Laos includes a system of passages and locks intended to keep fish moving up and down Southeast Asia’s longest river.

    Six years after the dam began operating and despite research funded by Australian aid, there are still doubts this system, intended to protect freshwater fisheries that are crucial to millions of people, works.

    What is Xayaburi dam?

    The Xayaburi dam is the first of numerous major dams planned for the Mekong, mostly in Laos. Some research has predicted the Mekong fishery – a chief source of protein and livelihoods for tens of millions of people in Southeast Asia – will decline by half if all are built.

    It is well established globally that hydro dams destroy fisheries because they prevent migratory species of fish from reaching feeding, spawning and nursery habitats.

    Arguments and activism against more dams could be strengthened if it is shown the Xayaburi fish passage is ineffective.

    What is the research about?

    Since 2019, fisheries experts from New South Wales-based Charles Sturt University have received Australian government funding to study the Xayaburi fish passage. Last year, they got further funding to extend the research until 2029.

    The researchers have a confidentiality agreement with the dam operator, Xayaburi Power Company Ltd., which has a final say about what information is released and how it is portrayed.

    The experts have published some research but not responded to questions on the record because of the confidentiality agreement.

    They, in funding proposals obtained under Australia’s Freedom of Information Act, say it’s inevitable more dams will be built on the Mekong. They also point out that the economic and social case for the hydro dams is tenuous.

    Citing Xayaburi, they pointed out it is projected to generate only modest profits whereas the potential damage to Mekong fisheries, which have an annual value of US$7-$8 billion, and the economies of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam is high.

    Still, the researchers say their work could help improve the performance of fish passages and influence the design of future dams. They say they have a narrow window of opportunity this decade to mitigate damage to the Mekong.

    A general view of the future site of the Luang Prabang dam is seen on the Mekong River outskirt of Luang Prabang province, Laos, Feb. 5, 2020.
    A general view of the future site of the Luang Prabang dam is seen on the Mekong River outskirt of Luang Prabang province, Laos, Feb. 5, 2020.
    (Panu Wongcha-um/Reuters)

    How did they conduct research?

    The Australian researchers working with Lao counterparts and Xayaburi Power Company staff used electroshock fishing to stun and capture several thousand Mekong fish.

    They are implanted with a microchip encased in a glass tube and released back to the river – many in the vicinity of the Xayaburi dam. Between 2019 and April 2024, nearly 4,900 microchipped fish were released into the Mekong.

    Antennae at the entrance and exit of the 480-meter long fish passage that extends from the right of the dam detect the microchips.

    The researchers said the results are “promising” because over a three-year period more than 80% of the 1,290 fish that were detected at the entrance were also eventually detected at its exit.

    That figure is less promising in another light – only some of the microchipped fish ever find their way into the fish passage. And once at its exit there’s another step to get beyond the dam – moving through intermittently operating locks.

    RELATED STORIES

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    In September 2022, another antennae array was installed to detect microchipped fish that had moved through either of two locks and got past the dam.

    Researchers said 400 microchipped fish were detected beyond the dam over nearly two years. That appears to be only a small proportion of the fish released at the dam.

    The researchers calculated that percentage, but have not released it nor the number of fish released near the dam.

    They noted it was challenging to calculate an “unbiased estimate” of the locks’ effectiveness because their antennae were installed three years after the research program began and they also had outages.

    As the research has continued, there is now likely more comprehensive data but because of the confidentiality agreement it is not clear it will be published.

    Did the researchers face constraints?

    The Australian researchers stressed the importance of studying whether fish can get past the dam in both directions — moving up the river and down it.

    However, for the first five years of the research, they lacked a sufficient budget to do that and Xayaburi Power Company had requested they only study upstream migration. It’s unclear why the company imposed that condition.

    A major shareholder in the dam, Thailand’s CK Power, did not respond to RFA’s questions.

    The researchers suggested there were political advantages to a limited scope of research even though it would limit the applicability of their work to other dams.

    “Focusing on upstream migration, at least initially, effectively mitigates a series of risks because our team is only focusing on one aspect,” they said. “The political pressure to provide answers to all migration questions is significantly reduced by this focused scope.”

    A general view of the future site of the Luang Prabang dam is seen on the Mekong River outskirt of Luang Prabang province, Laos, Feb. 5, 2020.
    A general view of the future site of the Luang Prabang dam is seen on the Mekong River outskirt of Luang Prabang province, Laos, Feb. 5, 2020.
    (Panu Wongcha-um/Reuters)

    How do other experts view the research?

    According to a study published last year, the researchers released more than 230 microchipped fish into the Mekong River in April 2022 some 350 kilometers (217 miles) downstream of the Xayaburi dam.

    More than a year later, five of those fish were detected in the dam’s fish passage.

    The study said the results showed the importance of including fish passages like that at Xayaburi in future Mekong dams.

    Other experts said the data underlined the dangers since the fish had migrated through locations where planned dams would block the river.

    Another point critics of Mekong dams make is that they’ll have compounding negative effects on fisheries.

    Even if something like 50% or 60% of fish could get past a dam, since each successive dam would quickly whittle down the proportion that completes the entire journey to a single-digit percentage.

    Edited by Taejun Kang.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Horrific Gas Leak Prompted CO2 Pipeline Safety Rules. Trump Removed Them.

    The Trump administration has withdrawn a slate of proposed carbon dioxide safety regulations inspired by a pipeline failure that sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie”-like symptoms, and the new regulator overseeing these matters previously worked as a lobbyist for the pipeline industry. President Donald Trump’s moves could leave communities exposed to unprecedented dangers as…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Night Loading Pecker Poles

    On the Oregon Coast, awaiting the hurricane-force winds that are supposed to smack Astoria sometime today, I was awakened at 4 am from a dream of playing centerfield for the Orioles by loud metallic noises, thinking that part of the roof of the old motel had been shredded off. Well, the winds hadn’t arrived yet, but about 25 log trucks had queued up right outside my motel room door, their engines rumbling like flatulent bears in the fog, waiting to enter the log export docks, where they were being loaded up, one by one. I grabbed my Gore-Tex jacket–which is missing either the Gore or the Tex because I was quickly soaked–and my iPhone and stumbled out into the rain, and snapped a few photos of the malign art of log-loading in the dark until security chased me off the site under threat of either arrest or being loaded along with the logs and sent to a pulp mill in South Korea. Most of the logs were thin, almost emaciated-looking, another grim indication that the big trees in our temperate rainforest are mostly gone, and all that’s left are pecker poles and piss firs that log truck drivers 30 years ago–who prided themselves on driving three-loads–would have been embarrassed to haul. Perhaps that’s why they do it at night: to hide their shame.

      All photographs by Jeffrey St. Clair.

    The post Night Loading Pecker Poles appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Fall Salmon Returns to Sacramento and Klamath Rivers Much Llower Than Forecast

    The American River Parkway is the crown jewel of the Sacramento Metropolitan Area. Salmon fishing has been closed on the American, Feather and Sacramento rivers for the past two years – and may be closed again this year. Photo by Dan Bacher.

    Despite the closure of salmon fishing in California river and ocean waters in 2023 and 2024, the number of Fall Chinook Salmon returning to both the Sacramento and Klamath River Basins was well below the numbers forecasted by state and federal officials one year ago.

    Under the 2024 regulations, the projected spawning escapement in the Sacramento River Basin was 180,061 hatchery and natural area fall Chinook adults, according to the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s just-published Review of Ocean Salmon Fisheries. However, only 99,274 hatchery and natural area adult spawners were estimated to have returned to the Sacramento River Basin in 2024 .

    That number is only 55 percent of the 2024 conservation and management objective of 180,000 fish: https://www.pcouncil.org/documents/2025/02/review-of-2024-ocean-salmon-fisheries.pdf/

    The fishing closures resulted from the collapse of Sacramento and Klamath River salmon populations. Whether there could be any ocean and river salmon fisheries in California this year won’t be known until the final numbers are in and the ocean abundance estimates are released at the CDFW California Salmon Informational meeting on February 26. Then three options for ocean fishing seasons will be developed at the PFMC meeting in March and then finalized at their April meeting.

    What we do know is that fall Chinook returns to Sacramento River hatcheries in 2024 totaled 26,834 adults and 8,301 jacks (two year-old fish) while escapement to natural areas was 72,440 adults and 10,864 jacks, according to the document.

    Spawner escapement in 2024 of endangered Sacramento River Winter Chinook, an endangered species under both the state and federal Endangered Species Acts, was estimated to be only 789 adults and 578 jacks. Even after Shasta Dam was built, good numbers of winter-Chinook salmon ran up the Sacramento River to spawn below Keswick Dam. In 1969, 117,000 Winter Chinook returned to the main stem of the Sacramento.

    However, the number of Winter Chinook showing in the Sacramento had declined to around 2,000 fish by the late 1980s when a group of us, including my former boss Hal Bonslett, showed up at Fish and Game Commission meetings and wrote many articles calling for the fish to listed under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA).  Now we are back to square one with numbers lower than when we originally petitioned for the listing.

    The main cause of the winter-run Chinook’s demise was the export of big quantities of water from the Delta by the state and federal water projects to agribusiness on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, according to then California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Frank Fisher. After a brief recovery of the salmon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the population began to decline again as water diversions from the Delta pumping facilities increased with the expansion of almond tree acreage and other water-thirsty crops in the Central Valley.

    Escapement of Spring Chinook to the Sacramento River system in 2024 totaled only 2,646 fish (jacks and adults), with an estimated return of 176 to upper Sacramento River tributaries and the remaining 2,470 fish returning to the Feather River Hatchery. Most of those 176 fish returned to Butte Creek, the last stronghold for wild  Spring Chinooks.

    The estimated San Joaquin River Fall Chinook spawning escapement in 2024 totaled 31,045 fish (jacks and adults) in natural areas, and 11,789 fish (jacks and adults) to hatcheries. The majority of these fish returned to the Mokelumne River. However, the Mokelumne River is not included in the Sacramento River Index that helps determine ocean and river fishing seasons.

    Scott Artis, Executive Director of the Golden State Salmon Association (GSSA), responded to the release of what he called “grim” salmon numbers.

    “When the Governor’s water policies favor big ag over healthy rivers, sadly salmon and the fishing industry pay the price,” said Artis. “Starving salmon of cold water means fewer fish, lost jobs, and devastated communities. This is a manufactured crisis, not a mystery—without enough cold water, there’s no future for fishing families or the environment. It’s a policy failure and it needs to stop.”

    He noted that over the last week, the Governor sent a letter to the State Water Resources Control Board urging changes to water rights permits to support the Delta Conveyance Project, known as the Delta Tunnel.  It was also announced that a required Incidental Take Permit was granted to advance the project.

    “The Governor’s plan is to divert large amounts of fresh water from the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary to industrial agriculture and major cities south of the Delta, including areas outside the Bay-Delta watershed. The Bay-Delta’s health, along with its salmon and the commercial and recreational fishing industries, depend on cold water flowing into the Bay,” he observed.

    “Now I know what the Governor means when he says they are ‘preparing to use every last drop’ of water – that salmon and everyone who relies on the salmon fishery for their livelihoods and their culture are going to get the shaft,” said Artis. “There was no salmon fishing last year to have any impact on spawning adults.”

    “The low return numbers don’t lie. Fisheries and hatchery managers did their jobs to get salmon back to the rivers to spawn but our water was managed so poorly that baby fish couldn’t make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. This is the result of the Governor’s failed water policies,” Artis stated.

    The Sacramento River wasn’t the only river system seeing low numbers of the salmon return. Klamath River Fall Chinook (KRFC) numbers also returned in much lower numbers than originally estimated.

    The 2024 preliminary postseason river run size estimate for KRFC was 36,568 adults compared to the preseason-predicted ocean escapement (river run size) of 65,138 adults. The escapement to natural spawning areas was 24,032 adults, just 66 percent of the preseason prediction of 36,511 adults.

    The estimated hatchery return was 4,489 adults. Jack returns to the Klamath Basin totaled 7,085 including 5,959 that escaped to natural spawning areas.

    “Spawning escapement to the upper Klamath River tributaries (Salmon, Scott, and Shasta rivers), where spawning was only minimally affected by hatchery strays, totaled 7,317 adults,” the PFMC wrote. “The Shasta River has historically been the most important Chinook salmon spawning stream in the upper Klamath River, supporting a spawning escapement of 27,600 adults as recently as 2012 and 63,700 in 1935.”

    The escapement in 2024 to the Shasta River was 4,951 adults. Escapement to the Salmon and Scott rivers was 1,520 and 846 adults, respectively.

    The good news is that in 2024, four dams were removed from the Klamath River, allowing salmon to move upstream from the site of Iron Gate Dam for the first time in many decades.

    “Newly available mainstem and tributary habitats were occupied by salmon following dam removal,” the PFMC reported. “Substantial monitoring efforts Oregon and California provided age-specific spawner estimates for the 2024 run. The estimated run size in the Klamath mainstem and its tributaries from Iron Gate (California) to Keno Dam was 1,494 adults and 151 jacks in 2024.”

    If you want to learn more about the status of salmon populations, you can attend the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s annual Salmon Information Meeting (SIM) via webinar on Wednesday, February 26, 2025, at 10 a.m. Meeting details, informational materials, and instructions for attendance will be published in advance of the event on CDFW’s Ocean Salmon webpage.

    “The 2025 SIM will provide informational presentations on topics including last year’s spawning escapement, estimates of forecasted ocean abundance, and management objectives for 2025 ocean salmon seasons,” the CDFW reported. “The SIM also marks the beginning of a two month long public process used to develop annual sport and commercial ocean salmon fishing regulations, and also informs the development of inland salmon fishing regulations later in the spring. The annual pre-season process involves collaborative negotiations between west coast states, federal agencies, tribal co-managers, sport and commercial salmon industry representatives, and other stakeholders interested in salmon fishery management and conservation.”

    California representatives will work together to develop a range of recommended ocean fishing season alternatives at the March 5-11, Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Vancouver, Washington.

    Final season recommendations will be adopted at the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s April 9-15, meeting in San Jose, California. The range of inland salmon fishing regulation options will be discussed at the Fish and Game Commission meetings on Feb. 12-13, and April 16-17, in Sacramento, California with final inland season recommendations and adoption scheduled for the May 14, Teleconference meeting.

    Please see the Ocean Salmon webpage and the Fish and Game Commission meetings webpage(opens in new tab) for a complete calendar of events and contact information regarding the salmon preseason process, including other opportunities for public engagement.

    The post Fall Salmon Returns to Sacramento and Klamath Rivers Much Llower Than Forecast appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • One First Nation Is Taking Back Control Of Their ‘Devastated’ Lands

    Kasandra Turbide finds her footing on the dry, rocky exterior of Sinkut Mountain, one of the highest peaks in Saik’uz First Nation territory, an hour’s drive west of Prince George. The forest below looks mottled, as if it has been gouged by giant razor blades and painted in shades of yellow and green.

    “This is what we’ve been up against historically,” says Turbide. “And it’s what we’re trying to save.”

    Located in the saucer-plate indent of the Nechako Plateau, Saik’uz territory is home to one of B.C.’s few truly wide-open skies. Lumbering glaciers etched its sloping hills millions of years ago, forming fertile valleys threaded with rivers, lakes and wetlands.

    More recently, the territory became an easy-access buffet for the farming, mining and logging that gripped the region. And now, after a century of persistent development, many of its ecosystems risk collapse.

    The post One First Nation Is Taking Back Control Of Their ‘Devastated’ Lands appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Starmer’s Great British Railways SHAM finally exposed as a corporate con

    A passenger-led group has exposed that the government’s ongoing expansion of so-called Great British Railways is little more than an exercise in PR. This is because the Labour Party government is looking to drop a key component of it – meaning that the organisation will have no obligation to operate under “public interest duties”. That is, Great British Railways is abandoning key commitments for disabled and poor people – and will be little more than another corporate vessel.

    Great British Railways: already looking not-so great

    As the Association of British Commuters (ABC) wrote, Great British Railways under the Labour Party is now not all that it seems. ABC wrote:

    Last week, the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a consultation on the legislation for Great British Railways (GBR). It has since become clear that the DfT dropped GBR’s headline ‘public interest duties’ from the plan – a major setback for socioeconomic value, accessibility, and environment.

    It went on to say that:

    The headline promise of the previous government was that Great British Railways (GBR) would be ‘a guiding mind…responsible for running the railways safely and efficiently to maximise social and economic value.’ This ‘overarching’ ‘public interest duty‘ was to be set out in the GBR Licence, alongside other core duties towards accessibility and environment, all monitored and enforced by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR). It was a headline commitment from the 2021 White Paper on GBR until the Feb 2024 Plan for Rail.

    Yet now, Labour has dropped all of that. ABC noted that:

    The new GBR consultation picks up where the previous government’s Plan left off – except there is no mention that the headline public interest duties ever existed, let alone that they received such widespread support from the public. The DfT now appears to be going in the opposite direction, with the new consultation stating that “GBR will…be subject to a substantively streamlined and simplified licence” under “a guiding principle…focused on the minimum viable set of conditions that are required for safety, performance (i.e. reliability and cancellations), efficiency, and passenger experience…. substantially reducing the regulatory burden.”

    So, what does this all mean?

    Corporatised rail network

    ​The recent DfT consultation on the establishment of Great British Railways marks a significant and troubling departure from previously stated commitments to prioritise public interest, accessibility, and environmental concerns within the UK’s rail network. This shift not only undermines the foundational goals of Great British Railways but also raises serious questions about the government’s dedication to creating an inclusive and sustainable transportation system.​

    In the 2021 White Paper, Great British Railways was envisioned as a “guiding mind” for the railways, entrusted with operating them safely and efficiently to “maximize social and economic value.” This overarching public interest duty was to be enshrined in Great British Railways’ license, ensuring that socioeconomic benefits remained central to its operations. However, the current consultation conspicuously omits this critical duty, signaling a retreat from the commitment to place public welfare at the forefront of rail management.

    The absence of this duty is particularly alarming given that previous consultations revealed widespread public support for such a mandate. The DfT’s decision to exclude it not only disregards public opinion but also suggests a pivot towards prioritising efficiency and performance metrics over the broader social and economic impacts of the rail system.​

    Disabled people: thrown under the Great British Railways

    Accessibility appears to be the most adversely affected by the DfT’s revised approach. Earlier pledges included integrating the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee (DPTAC) as a statutory advisor to Great British Railways and mandating it to engage directly with disabled people and their representative organisations. These commitments aimed to embed accessibility into Great British Railways’ strategic framework, ensuring that the needs of disabled passengers were not only considered but prioritised.​

    The current consultation, however, abandons these promises. There is a conspicuous lack of clarity regarding which body will oversee accessibility—be it the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) or Transport Focus—leading to potential regulatory ambiguities and lapses in accountability. This omission is a stark regression from the goal of fostering an inclusive rail network and raises concerns about the government’s commitment to upholding the rights and dignity of disabled individuals.​

    Environmental stewardship was intended to be a cornerstone of Great British Railways’ responsibilities, with explicit duties to consider environmental principles in all operations. The current consultation’s failure to reaffirm this duty indicates a deprioritisation of environmental concerns at a time when sustainable practices are imperative. This neglect not only contradicts global efforts to combat climate change but also undermines the potential of the rail network to serve as a green alternative to more polluting modes of transport.​
    assets.publishing.service.gov.uk

    The DfT: a consultation in name only

    The truncated eight-week consultation period further exacerbates these issues, providing insufficient time for meaningful public engagement, especially from disabled communities who are disproportionately affected by these changes. The technical jargon and focus on regulatory specifics render the document inaccessible to the general public, effectively silencing the voices of those who rely on and are most impacted by the rail system.​

    This approach mirrors previous instances where the DfT has been criticised for inadequate consultation processes. Notably, the 2023 attempt to close all ticket offices in England faced widespread public backlash and was ultimately abandoned due to breaches of equality law. The current consultation’s narrow scope and opaque language suggest a continued pattern of sidelining public input in favor of industry interests.​

    The DfT’s current trajectory with Great British Railways represents a significant retreat from its foundational promises to prioritise public interest, accessibility, and environmental sustainability. By stripping away these core duties, the government risks perpetuating a rail system that serves private and industrial interests at the expense of the public good.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • New report blows open the biodiversity scandal that is biomass energy

    On the first day that international governments resume the COP16 biodiversity summit, a new report blows open the biodiversity scandal that is biomass energy.

    As parties convene, the blistering new research is a resounding call for countries to cut the greenwashing con out of renewable picture once and for all.

    Boom in biomass energy isn’t a boon for biodiversity

    Ahead of the first round of negotiations in November 2024, the Biomass Action Network called on parties to urgently phase out subsidies for biomass energy.

    Now, the network and EPN International has published a new report exposing the scale of ecological destruction that the sector has wreaked in recent years. Moreover, it highlights the destruction biomass energy will continue to foment without urgent international and government intervention.

    The new report Burning up the Biosphere: A Global Threat Map of Biomass Energy Development warns that the global biomass energy industry will triple by 2030. This will  increase woody biomass supply from monoculture plantations by 13 times and woody biomass supply overall by three times.

    As it currently stands, the sector will put natural forests on the chopping block. These will supply the wood that countries increasingly burn for energy production. As a result, it will unleash a wave of intensified logging, degradation, and plantation conversion. Of course, this will  exacerbate both the climate and biodiversity crises, and adversely affect communities throughout the global supply chains.

    Overall, bioenergy contributes 60% of the world’s renewable energy supply, dwarfing the shares of wind and solar. The industry promotes biomass as a form of renewable energy and receives large subsidies. This is despite disproven claims of carbon neutrality and flawed carbon accounting that fails to show the significant carbon emissions at the smokestack of biomass energy generation.

    Explosive increase in biomass – explosive increase in environmental and social harms

    The report analysed statistics and predictions of international agencies. It did this alongside accumulating evidence of the impacts of this controversial energy source, and found that:

    ● Woody biomass supply will triple between 2021 and 2030. This will include an incredible and dangerous increase of wood supply from monoculture plantations of 13 times current levels to meet demand.

    ● This comes on top of a previous 50% increase between 2010 and 2021. That includes a 250% increase in global wood pellet production which reached 47.5m tonnes in 2022.

    ● To secure such a large supply of biomass will necessitate countries expand monoculture tree plantations. This is already driving deforestation and conversion of Indonesia’s rainforests, among others. In Indonesia alone, implementing existing plans for large-scale bioenergy development could result in companies converting up to 10 million hectares of forest into these “energy” plantations.

    ● The logging of woody biomass for energy has numerous adverse environmental and social impacts. These include contributing to the decline of the forest carbon sink in the EU. Alongside that, it will foment the deforestation and degradation of valuable forests worldwide. That includes biodiverse old-growth and primary forests in North America, Europe and Asia. And in the process, it will trigger more human rights violations. Logging and biomass pellet production has long-lasting impacts on human health for instance.  Moreover,  it will mean more land-grabbing of Indigenous and local communities’ land in the Global South.

    Drax is biomass public enemy number 1 – thanks to the UK

    The report comes as hot off the heels of the UK Labour Party government greenlighting another round of subsidies for greenwashing biomass giant Drax. Specifically, on Monday 10 February, it extended them past 2027, into 2031.

    The report highlighted that:

    Europe remains the undisputed leader in burning wood pellets for biomass energy. In 2022, consumption of this fuel in the EU Member States and UK reached 30.4 million tonnes, equivalent to 64% of global production in that year.

    Notably, it singled out the UK as the worst offender at 7.8m tonnes in 2022 – more than a quarter of Europe’s consumption. It also underscored that the UK had imported:

    more than 95% of its fuel from overseas, primarily the United States.

    Of course, Drax’s Yorkshire power plant – as the biggest burner of woody biomass globally – has a lot to do with this.

    Unsurprisingly, the climate-wrecking corporation featured repeatedly in the report. It pointed out that pollution from Drax pellet mills in the US are having devastating impacts on nearby communities’ health. One line in the report encapsulated this stark reality for frontline communities living in the vicinity of Drax’s polluting mills:

    people living in the communities located next to these facilities are relying on oxygen tanks to
    survive.

    It’s these facilities where the UK is largely sourcing its wood pellets from. And, while US states and other countries have issued fines and violation notices to a Drax-owned pellet mills for breaching air pollution rules, as the report noted:

    Unfortunately, the fines it has received pale in significance to the amount of money Drax gets from the UK government in the form of subsidies to burn biomass, so they have done little to curb the industry.

    Crucially, these “lavish subsidies” are at the crux of the issue, and the UNFCCC “flawed emissions accounting rules” are partly to blame. This is because, as the report underscored:

    They were the basis for the introduction of policies promoting biomass energy in the UK, EU member states, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia, among others.

    Notably, this mechanism has enabled countries and companies burning biomass to consider emissions to be zero.

    Governments failing to heed the cautionary call

    Given the findings, the Biomass Action Network recommends that:

    • International governments and bodies must change the current, flawed biomass carbon accounting rules. This applies to those under UNFCCC and related IPCC reporting methodologies.
    • States should exclude large-scale biomass energy from national and international climate targets.
    • Co-firing woody biomass with coal should not be considered to be a form of abatement of fossil fuel emissions.
    • Governments must stop all support – especially financial subsidies – for biomass.

    In 2021, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) collaborated for the first time. They warned against planting bioenergy crops in monocultures over a very large share of land areas, saying:

    such crops are detrimental to ecosystems when deployed at very large scales, reducing nature’s contributions to people and impeding achievement of many of the Sustainable Development Goals.

    However, this report finds that international bodies and governments are set to ignore this cautionary call from the experts.

    Burning up the biosphere, but enough is enough

    EPN’s Biomass Action Network coordinator and co-author of the report Peg Putt said:

    We are literally burning up the biosphere as industry and governments greenwash forest destruction, increased carbon pollution, harms to human health, and land grabbing for massive plantation expansions as climate action. Far from being renewable, it’s reprehensible.

    Plans to triple large-scale biomass burning within the decade, and for an energy plantation planting spree that would increase monoculture plantations by thirteen times, are shocking. Subsidising this is pulling support away from genuine low emissions renewables, but redirecting them into positive climate action would assist with finding sorely needed financing.

    We hope this report will be a wake-up call to those international agencies promoting expansion of biomass energy; to governments that are subsidising coal-to-biomass power plant conversions; will persuade investors that financing biomass power is not sustainable; and will persuade energy analysts, retailers and consumers to distinguish forest biomass, as a high-carbon ‘renewable’ energy technology, from lower-emitting technologies like wind and solar.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Residents in Thirsk up in arms over proposal for Europe’s biggest battery storage project

    Nearly 800 people have objected to an environment-wrecking battery energy storage park on green belt land near Thirsk, North Yorkshire.

    The project forms part of the UK Labour Party’s drive to increase renewable energy storage capacity across the country.

    However, the project in Thirsk has demonstrated that corporations can run roughshod over local communities and the environment in the process.

    Thirsk battery storage: community oppose mega-project

    Renewable energy company NatPower is seeking permission from North Yorkshire Council to build a 1GW Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Thirsk. It has applied to construct the project on a 173-acre greenspace just outside the town. The project would take up 58 acres of the site. This would make it the largest BESS site of its kind in Europe.

    Notably, this would contribute to the Labour Party government’s goal to increase battery storage by a minimum of five-fold on today’s available capacity. Currently, the UK has 4.5GW of installed battery storage. In December, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) published its plans to upscale this to between 23-27GW by 2030.

    However, the local community has lodged widespread objections to it. With nearly 800 formal objections submitted, the community has made its opposition unambiguous. Residents of Thirsk and the surrounding countryside made clear that the massive industrial project is unwelcome in their rural community.

    The North Yorkshire Council planning portal displays more than 567 public comments raising objections to the project. Alongside this, local campaigners have hand-delivered more 227 objections to the council directly.

    In contrast to the overwhelming local opposition, the application received just four letters of support. Two of these came from non-local sources.

    Furthermore, the consultation event conducted by NatPower in November only managed to attract 137 local residents. This raised concerns about the level of community engagement.

    As the BBC previously reported, the North York Moors National Park Authority, the local parish council, and Thirsk Town Council have all separately made objections to the project.

    Corporate interests over the community and nature

    A local campaign group – Thirsk Against Battery Storage – sprung up to challenge the proposals. Comprised of local residents, the group has been instrumental in mobilising objections against the project.

    Crucially, it now raises overwhelming number of objections to the project as evidence for the unity of the local community’s stance. The group suggests that local people rejected the project for prioritising corporate interests over the well-being of residents, walkers, and nature lovers.

    Key concerns raised by objectors include:

    • Significant fire risk from lithium-ion batteries.
    • Damage to wildlife habitats and disruption to public footpaths.
    • The transformation of good agricultural land into an industrial site.
    • The risk of noise pollution and other environmental impacts.
    • The damage to the finest view in England from the nearby National Park.
    • The economic impact from the loss of tourism.

    Spokesperson for the group Philip Martin said:

    The numbers speak for themselves. Thirsk is a historic market town, surrounded by stunning countryside and a community that values its heritage and environment. This proposal is entirely inappropriate for our area, and we are thrilled that so many people have made their voices heard.

    The public consultation on the proposals has now closed. With the weight of public opposition now firmly on record, all eyes are on local authorities as they consider the next steps in the planning process.

    Local resident and shop owner Fiona Potter objected to the industrial-scale development bordering her community. She said:

    This is our home. Developments of this scale belong in brown field, industrial areas of which there are plenty to meet national demand, not in cherished countryside. We urge the planning committee to listen to the community and reject this proposal outright.

    Featured image supplied

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Trump Admin Is Trying to Raid “Green Banks” Meant to Fund Local Climate Projects

    Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Hong Kong’s Democratic Party plans to disband amid ‘political environment’

    Once Hong Kong’s biggest opposition party, the Democratic Party has announced plans to disband amid a political crackdown in the city under two security laws.

    “It is a decision that we made based on our understanding of the overall political environment,” Chairman Lo Kin-hei told journalists following a meeting of the party’s central committee on Thursday.

    “Developing democracy in Hong Kong is always difficult, and it’s been especially difficult in the past few years,” Lo told reporters in the party’s headquarters, adding: “This is not what we wanted to see.”

    Lo said he hoped that Hong Kong would return to the values ​​of “diversity, tolerance and democracy” that were the cornerstones of the city’s past success.

    The move is widely seen as the symbolic end of any formal political opposition in Hong Kong, where critics of the authorities can face prosecution under security legislation brought in to quell dissent in the wake of the 2019 protests.

    It follows repeated calls for the party’s dissolution in Chinese Communist Party-backed media like the Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po.

    The news came just weeks after a court in Hong Kong sentenced 45 democratic politicians and activists to jail terms of up to 10 years for “subversion” after they took part in a democratic primary in the summer of 2020.

    The ongoing political crackdown has already seen the dissolution of the Civic Party, which disbanded in May 2023 after its lawmakers were barred from running for re-election in the wake of the 2020 National Security Law.

    The pro-democracy youth activist party Demosisto disbanded in June 2020.

    ‘That light has faded’

    Lo said the disbandment couldn’t go ahead without a vote from a general meeting attended by 75% of the party’s members.

    He said he will chair a three-person working group to handle the process following what he called a “collective decision” by the Central Committee.

    Lo declined to comment on reports that party members had been harassed or threatened by people acting as messengers for the Chinese government. He said the party wasn’t in financial difficulty.

    Founding party member Fred Li said the Democratic Party had “done its duty and shone its light on Hong Kong.”

    “But we can see today that that light has faded,” Li said in comments reported by the Hong Kong Free Press.

    Office workers join pro-democracy protesters during a demonstration in Central in Hong Kong, Nov. 12, 2019 following a day of pro-democracy protests.
    Office workers join pro-democracy protesters during a demonstration in Central in Hong Kong, Nov. 12, 2019 following a day of pro-democracy protests.
    (Anthony Wallace/AFP)

    Taiwan-based bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who was detained in mainland China for selling banned political books from Hong Kong, said there was “no point in pretending” that there is still any room for political opposition under Chinese rule.

    “This is the total end of party politics in Hong Kong,” Lam told RFA Mandarin in an interview on Friday. “There’s no way the Communist Party is going to allow an opposition party to carry on existing. Under their rule, nobody else is allowed a voice.”

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    He said he worries that Beijing’s attention may now focus on moves to destroy democracy in Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China.

    “The pace could accelerate in the next few years,” he said of Chinese infiltration in Taiwan.

    Taiwan-based Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong said the party had played a hugely important role in the development of Hong Kong’s democracy before the current crackdown.

    “Its founder Martin Lee and the kind of values he ​​represented embodied the attitudes of many Hong Kong people towards freedom and democracy — they were pretty moderate,” Wong said.

    Martin Lee, known as the
    Martin Lee, known as the “father of democracy” in Hong Kong, April 26, 2021.
    (Anthony Wallace/AFP)

    He said its death would mark the end of democratic party politics in Hong Kong.

    “The Democratic Party was once the most important party when it came to gauging public opinion, so its death actually represents the ultimate death of public opinion [as a political force] in Hong Kong,” Wong said.

    ‘We must be vigilant’

    He said fears that Hong Kong would become a base for opposition to Chinese Communist Party rule had led Beijing to break its promise that the city could keep its freedoms for 50 years after the 1997 handover.

    He warned that Beijing was trying to undermine Taiwan’s democracy by placing its supporters in positions of power, much as it did in Hong Kong.

    “Taiwanese people must be vigilant and must not believe the Chinese Communist Party’s promises to Taiwan that it can keep its freedoms if it submits to Beijing’s rule,” Wong said. “We must be vigilant, and we must resist.”

    Political commentator Sang Pu said the Democratic Party would never be allowed to field candidates under the current system in Hong Kong.

    “A political party that doesn’t run for election has no way to raise funds,” Sang said. “They get rejected [by venues] even when they try to hold party events … for spurious reasons like chefs getting into a fight or broken water meters.”

    “They are being badly suppressed, so at this point it’s probably better to give up,” he said.

    Recent electoral reforms now ensure that almost nobody in the city’s once-vibrant opposition camp will stand for election again, amid the jailing of dozens of pro-democracy figures and rule changes requiring political vetting.

    The last directly elected District Council, which saw a landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates amid record turnout that was widely seen as a ringing public endorsement of the 2019 protest movement.

    The first Legislative Council election after the rule change saw plummeting turnout, while Chief Executive John Lee was given the top job after an “election” in which he was the only candidate.

    Since Beijing imposed the two national security laws banning public opposition and dissent in the city and blamed “hostile foreign forces” for the resulting protests, hundreds of thousands have voted with their feet amid plummeting human rights rankings, shrinking press freedom and widespread government propaganda in schools.

    The government has blamed several waves of pro-democracy protests in recent years on “foreign forces” trying to instigate a democratic revolution in Hong Kong.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kwong Wing for RFA Cantonese, Wang Yun and Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • COP16 biodiversity summit is bringing more of the same failed colonial conservation

    International governments are set to resume the COP16 biodiversity summit, where they will agree on key aspects of a flagship global action plan to tackle the biodiversity crisis.

    However, Indigenous rights campaign group Survival International has called out the “deeply flawed” basis of the fund underpinning its work. Crucially, this is because the framework could result in the serious violation of Indigenous peoples’ human rights.

    COP16 biodiversity summit: systemic failures all round

    Between 25 to 27 February, international parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will reconvene for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Rome.

    It follows a first round of November 2024 negotiations in Cali, Colombia. Top of the agenda will be to agree on the implementation and monitoring of the flagship Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF).

    Countries adopted this at the 2022 COP15 in Canada. In a nutshell, its a global set of goals to curb biodiversity loss. It committed parties to setting national targets to reverse ecological decline. And crucially, as the CBD itself describes:

    sets out an ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. Among the Framework’s key elements are 4 goals for 2050 and 23 targets for 2030.

    So, representatives at COP16 will now negotiate a key aspect of this – the delivery of the fund which finances action on these targets.

    Global South countries had argued for a new dedicated fund, separate from existing development aid apparatus. However, Global North countries rejected this in favour of a fund under the existing Global Environment Facility (GEF). The World Bank, UN agencies, and various governments oversee this. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) is the GEF-led financing mechanism that parties established instead.

    By February 2025, governments around the world had committed around $383m to the fund. Canada ($146m), Germany ($98m), the UK ($69m), Denmark ($14.5m), Norway ($14m) and New Zealand ($12m) have contributed the vast majority of this. However, the figure pales in comparison to scale of finance that’s needed.

    And already, the GBFF is failing in one vital aspect in particular: respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

    Red flags on Indigenous rights

    Ahead of the Cali talks, campaign group Survival International had raised a significant number of red flags with the fund.

    It rebranded the financing mechanism the ‘Grievous Biodiversity Failure Fund’ for its severe lack of protections for Indigenous people.

    In a briefing, Survival highlighted that:

    The choice of the Global Environment Facility to run the GBFF was already deeply unacceptable in terms of Indigenous rights. Crucially, the organisation does not universally require that Indigenous people have the right to Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) over any projects it funds which may affect their lives, lands and rights. Such requirement for consent is only covered by the GEF’s ‘Principles and Guidelines for Engagement with
    Indigenous Peoples’ where the recipient country has ratified ILO Convention 1698. This is only the case for 24 countries worldwide (six of which are in Europe). Even then, the GEF stipulates that for its purposes, FPIC can be demonstrated through “(i) the mutually accepted consultation process between the project proponent and affected indigenous communities and (ii) evidence of agreement between the parties as the outcome of the
    consultations” (emphasis added).

    In other words, in most countries where GEF might fund projects through the GBFF, FPIC would not be required. Even in the few where it applies, the critical concept of consent (i.e, Indigenous people having the right to decline a project that affects them), is downgraded merely to project proponents having to demonstrate that consultation has been carried out.

    In short, the fund will not require projects to show that they have consulted with Indigenous groups. It means the fund will invariably finance projects that violate Indigenous communities’ human and territorial rights.

    Notably, there are a number of issues which will only make these abuses hugely likely. Crucially, the GBFF facilitates the following:

    • Biodiversity Credits – a scheme based on the discredited carbon credit model. These pose a serious new threat to Indigenous peoples and their rights.
    • The 30×30 pledge to put 30% of the world’s land and seas under some protection for biodiversity. This will almost certainly result in evictions of Indigenous peoples from their lands, as has been the case to date through Western-backed colonial fortress conservation projects all over the planet.
    • The structure and operation of the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund is fundamentally flawed. It  promotes a top-down approach to conservation projects. What’s needed is a rights-based plan for biodiversity protection.

    The UN and WWF: colonial conservation

    Now, the group has expanded its research, and found the picture for Indigenous people under the GBFF is even worse than it originally warned.

    For a start, the GBFF is already falling woefully short of a key promise on Indigenous inclusion.

    The fund states that it is “expected to support the human rights-based” implementation of the KMGBF. And in 2023, the GEF also set an “aspirational target” that it would direct 20% of GBFF disbursements to Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPLCs). Of course, this was already a pitiful target to begin with given Indigenous communities safeguard much of the world’s biodiversity.

    That is, while they make up less than 5% of the global human population, Indigenous Peoples’ territories hold as much as 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity.

    To date, the GBFF is disgracefully failing to live up to this pledge. As Survival’s updated briefing underscores:

    Only one of the forty projects so far approved – the very first proposed, by the government of Brazil – will likely be of benefit to Indigenous people and is clearly directed to them. Following a project application template, all the projects make a ‘tick-box’ claim to have an allocation to IPLCs. If true, these would total more than thirty percent of the $201 million for approved projects and concepts (and project preparation grants) to date. But our analysis reveals that only one of the other thirty-nine programmes contains any budgetary provision for work with Indigenous people.

    Instead, it depicts a funding landscape where “top-down, colonial conservation”, such as National Parks and reserves, dominate. UN agencies and largely US-based conservation organisations have co-opted the vast majority of the project portfolio so far. This is despite a shameful history of this ‘protected area’ model fomenting violent evictions, and horrific human rights abuses.

    For instance, the Canary previously found 16 UNESCO World Heritage Site protected areas (PAs) spanning 11 countries with reports of land dispossessions and abuses. Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg – there are vast numbers more PAs where states and organisations have done the same.

    One international conservation organisation  notorious for said violations is the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Predictably then, one of its projects that the GBFF is financing has a history of doing just that. Specifically, it will fund WWF militarised PAs in Africa with a legacy of dispossession and brutality from so-called eco-guards.

    COP16: business-as-usual on biodiversity isn’t going to cut it

    So, it’s also with no small amount of irony that it happens to be one the conservation charities massively benefitting from the GBFF. As Survival noted:

    In terms of funding, the one project involving Indigenous lands in Brazil represents about 4% ($8 million) of the total so far approved or provisionally committed by the GBFF. This is less than the ‘proposer agency’ fees being paid to mostly UN agencies and international conservation organisations such as WWF simply for submitting proposals. Together, these fees alone come to more than 8% ($17 million) of the total funds currently committed

    Overall, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), WWF, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, and US-based Conservation International have captured the bulk of the funds. Together, these agencies have taken $138m – more than two-thirds – of the total funding countries have committed so far.

    Ultimately, carrying on the same model of colonial conservation that criminalises Indigenous communities in their own lands, while opening ecological areas up to extractive capitalism is doomed to fail.

    A 2024 study found that biodiversity rates were declining at a rapid rate inside PAs.

    Therefore, continuing this business-as-usual violent fortress model through the GBFF will only spell disaster for the world’s biodiversity. As ever though, its Indigenous people who’ll bear the brunt of the the Global North’s flawed solution to the planetary crisis.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Mental health crisis? The world is literally on fire – of course you’re anxious

    For four days in January, I sat – glued to my computer – as I watched the homes and neighbourhoods of the people I love burning to the ground in Los Angeles. I collated their addresses and I tracked the progress of the fires. I needed to know they were safe – and couldn’t look away. Even though the constant stream of images and videos were deeply upsetting. I was terrified for my friends.

    I cover natural disasters all the time – it’s literally my job to report on the climate crisis. But this time? It hit differently. For the first time, danger was heading directly for the people I love. 

    I was a mess – emotionally, psychologically, and physically. And if you were to ask a mental health professional? They would probably have told you I was in the midst of some sort of mental health crisis and given me a psychiatric diagnosis. The reality though? I was reacting in a pretty understandable way to an ongoing catastrophe. 

    We are only one month into 2025, but we have already seen wildfires destroy over 12,000 homes and kill 29 people in Los Angeles. We’ve also seen Storm Eowyn – a record-breaking cyclone – batter many parts of the UK, an earthquake in Tibet, and floods and landslides in Pekalongan, Indonesia. 

    Research shows that both adults and young people feel like their mental wellbeing is getting worse. In 2024, 15.5% of UK adults reported their mental health as either “bad” or “the worst it’s ever been”. In England alone, over 500 children are referred to mental health services every day for anxiety. Is it any wonder, when the world is literally burning? How could you watch the news and not be filled with anxiety for what is to come?

    Mental Health Bill

    The Mental Health Bill [2025] is making its way through the House of Lords. It is an update to the Mental Health Act [1983]. This is the legal framework for assessing and treating those with severe mental health difficulties. The updated bill aims to give individuals better rights, improve mental health outcomes, and reduce inequalities. The main focus of both pieces of legislation is people who need involuntary hospital admissions.

    Obviously, there is a place for this if someone is an immediate danger to themselves or others. However, the government is spending so much time, money, and energy on dealing with the very end result of poor policies. They are quick to institutionalise. However, they are far less ready to give someone the support and care they might need to recover and thrive. Additionally, cutting someone off from their own community is completely counterintuitive in the long run.

    There is not a single piece of scientific evidence that supports the chemical imbalance theory of mental health problems. Yet still, the crux of government policy on mental health is to wait until people reach crisis point, detain them under the Mental Health Act, and medicate them. They have the ability and the political power to prevent many people from even getting to that point. They choose not to. 

    Instead, Labour could be focusing on the circumstances and conditions that we are all forced to exist in, which are creating and exacerbating mental health problems. 

    Similarly, Calum Miller, MP for Bicester, recently called on the Prime Minister to address the delays children and young people face when trying to access mental health support. He drew attention to the waiting times for Children and Adolescent Mental Health services (CAMHS) in Oxfordshire, and the rest of the country. 

    Again, instead of focusing on reducing waiting times for mental health treatment, why are they not turning their attention to improving the toxic conditions that lead so many young people to struggle with their mental health? 

    A deeply traumatic experience

    The climate crisis is a prime example of this. Thanks to TikTok and other social media platforms, we now have the ability to watch all of these disasters as they unfold. The wildfires in the Pacific Palisades, just like the flooding in Valencia last year, were practically live streamed. How do we expect anyone to watch videos of people running from danger while their houses burn down, and then get a good night’s sleep?        

    Being alive, and paying attention to the world around us has become a deeply traumatic experience. Yet, ask any mental health charity or politician and they will tell you we are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Why are we surprised that people are struggling with their mental health? All you have to do is turn on the TV or social media and a torrent of terrifying – and very real news is there to greet you. 

    James Barnes, Psychotherapist and teaching faculty at Iron Mill College, Exeter told the Canary:

    Barnes suggested that a non medical approach to looking at suffering moves away from biomedical dysfunction, towards an intelligible response – however disabling – to social, political and interpersonal circumstances.

    As the Canary previously reported, this means changing the dominant question. From ‘what’s wrong with you’, to ‘what happened to you’ or, ‘what is happening to you’.

    Barnes Continued:

    There are concrete steps that Keir Starmer’s government could be taking to improve the nation’s mental health. A great place to start would be curbing anxiety around the climate crisis. This means rather than handing out antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, they should be protecting our planet.

    The point of no return

    Climate scientists identified that 2025 was the deadline limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Passing this threshold means an even greater risk of disastrous floods, droughts, and heatwaves. At the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement. This means they agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030. The sticking point however, is that they must have peaked before 2025 – which is here. 

    From reducing the burning of fossil fuels and switching to green energy to reducing the emissions from the financial sector, there are many things the UK government could be doing to tackle the climate crisis at the source.

    Instead, it’s tinkering around at the edges of the problem with false climate solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) while green-lighting more environmentally-destructive projects like Heathrow’s third runway and the Stansted airport expansion. 

    The climate crisis is also inextricably linked to the cost of living crisis. There is no doubt this is also driving poor mental health. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that rates of depression were higher among people who were struggling to afford housing costs and energy bills.

    Surely it’s common sense that struggling to pay their bills would make someone sad, or numb, or anxious – or suicidal. Climate disasters such as flooding and extreme temperatures directly impact energy and food costs, making the cost of living crisis worse. 

    Brainwashing

    The government also pushes cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This aims to get people to change their thoughts and behaviours. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But what happens when your thoughts are based upon facts?

    For example, being anxious about your future is completely understandable. After all, we just watched the Pacific Palisades burn down as a direct result of the climate crisis. Humans are hardwired to survive.

    In the UK, waiting lists for mental health treatment are estimated to now be over one million. So professionals are going to tell one million people that their thinking is the problem. Rather than the capitalist system that’s sidelining their wellbeing and destroying the world around them.

    Similarly, asking people to change their thoughts means they believe themselves and their thoughts are the problem, rather than the conditions they are living in. This means they are far less likely to question the status quo. Obviously, the government does not want people questioning their policies – because that creates a problem. 

    What is clear to me is that the world is becoming a harder and harder place to exist in. There is a new climate disaster every week. It is only a matter of time before the nation’s mental health plummets to even greater lows.

    Unless the government starts to think about the causes, instead of putting a plaster on a gaping wound they are adding fuel to an already raging fire – and there’s only one way it can end. 

    Feature image via Tricia Nelson

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Conservation Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Elk Habitat, Wildlife Corridors and Old Growth Forests in Montana

    Rocky Mountain Elk, Lolo National Forest, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and Council on Wildlife and Fish filed a lawsuit in federal court in Montana against a road-building and commercial logging project on public lands in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana.  The challenged Wood Duck project is located in a wildlife corridor that is critical for recovery of grizzly bears, and is highly desirable elk habitat.  Logging and road building harm elk and grizzly bears and will likely displace both species from the public lands in the area.

    The lawsuit raises challenges against the project, and also against the Forest Service’s failure to implement strong protections for public land elk habitat, grizzly bear travel corridors, and old growth forest across the Helena – Lewis and Clark National Forest.

    This area is a key travel corridor for grizzly bears to provide critical genetic exchange between the Yellowstone and Glacier National Park grizzlies to avoid inbreeding.  Additionally, the area is already experiencing an exodus of native elk herds fleeing the heavily-logged and roaded National Forest lands for refuge on private ranch lands, much to the chagrin of hunters seeking elk on public lands, as well as private land ranchers.

    While the Forest Service has masked its commercial logging agenda in recent years behind the claim that extensive logging and road-building on public lands are necessary for wildfire prevention, that is not the case here. The agency admits that “Wood Duck is not a fuels reduction project,” “there is no wildfire risk reduction component of the project purpose and need,” and “the Wood Duck project area does not overlap with wildland urban interface.”

    One of the primary problems in this project area is the fact that 90-95% of elk in this hunting district are displaced during hunting season from public lands with high road densities onto private land where no public hunting is allowed, according to data collected by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.  Yet the Forest Service failed to disclose this critical data from the State in the Project environmental assessment. And when the State proposed closing a number of roads to improve the situation for elk habitat and elk hunters, the Forest Service refused to even consider the State’s proposals in the Project environmental assessment.

    Another concern is the old growth logging authorized by the Project. Old growth-dependent wildlife species are a rare terrestrial community in Montana. Interior forest mammals, raptors, woodpeckers and songbirds need a certain level of closed canopy forest for cover as well as large dead trees for nesting or denning.  This type of forest can take hundreds of years to grow and is highly desired by commercial logging interests due to the economic value of large trees.

    The law requires widely-distributed and connected old growth throughout the National Forest, and throughout each Geographic Area in the National Forest. Yet the Forest Service refused to provide any map of existing old growth at these scales.  Thus, the public is left to wonder how much old growth is left, and whether these rare, old-growth dependent forest species will go extinct from a failure to preserve an adequate amount of their habitat.

    The government has to follow the law just like anyone else.  Now more than ever — when the government breaks the law, it is our obligation to stand up and stand in the way.

    Please help us to challenge this illegal action in court, and force the government to follow the law.

    The post Conservation Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Elk Habitat, Wildlife Corridors and Old Growth Forests in Montana appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery in the Northern Rocky Mountains

    Grizzly in Yellowstone. Photo: NPS / Jim Peaco.

    Missoula, Montana.

    Today, several conservation organizations and grizzly bear proponents released their vision that bolsters support for a unified grizzly bear population within the Northern Rockies—offering a holistic framework for recovery, management, and sustainable coexistence between bears and people.

    Titled “A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery in the Northern Rockies,” the report from nine conservation groups provides a list of actions, policies, and practices to address human conflicts, and offers recommendations for improving and protecting grizzly bear habitat. The report also promotes stewardship and protection of private lands, ways to fix inadequate governance, and adapting grizzly bear recovery efforts to climate change.

    The report identifies the following as major threats to grizzly bear survival and recovery:

    + Increases in human conflicts; people account for 85 percent of all grizzly deaths.
    + Declines in essential food sources resulting from climate change and habitat loss.
    + Lack of secure habitat for explorer bears seeking new habitat, dens, mates, and food sources.
    + Sprawling development, which has ballooned in recent years causing loss of open space and habitat connectivity.

    Endorsed by 48 organizations and individuals, the vision emphatically supports maintaining grizzly bears’ threatened status under the Endangered Species Act in the lower 48 states, and recognizes that true recovery requires protected habitats that connect isolated populations into a single population to ensure grizzlies can thrive for centuries to come. The new vision aims to fully recover the Northern Rockies population so that it can be a source population of dispersers for aiding recovery in additional suitable habitats.

    “This visionary document should transform how we treat grizzly bears and their ecosystems. Today, grizzlies are relegated to vulnerable ecological islands in the Northern Rockies in just 3 to 4 percent of their former range in the lower 48 because of excessive killing and habitat destruction,” said Louisa Wilcox, Co-Founder of Grizzly Times. “The Great Bear has long symbolized renewal and transformation and deserves the respectful approach taken here—and a real shot at flourishing in a rapidly changing world.”

    The vision emphasizes the importance of a unified Northern Rockies Recovery Area to help grizzly bears adapt to the predictable impacts of climate change, including shifting food sources and the ever increasing human footprint on the landscape.

    “At long last we have a blueprint for true grizzly bear recovery and co-existence with people based on the best available scientific information rather than political expediency,” said Mike Bader, an independent consultant in Missoula who studies grizzly bear habitat needs.

    The vision calls for managing grizzly bears as one population, including the core populations in  recovery zones the government established in 1983, and the suitable habitats on public lands and private lands with conservation easements.

    “Grizzly bears were never meant to stay within ‘official’ government boundaries, and our vision reflects the evolving science showing true recovery requires new thinking and forward-looking management,” said Adam Rissien, ReWilding Manager with WildEarth Guardians. “People broadly support grizzly bear recovery, even if that means changing decad’s-old expectations that anti-wildlife lawmakers and bureaucrats still cling to.”

    “If we take seriously the grizzly bear’s natural right to exist and flourish, we must offer a serious recovery vision that reflects those values and the scientific realities underpinning healthy, thriving grizzly populations. This new vision does just that,” said George Nickas, Executive Director of Wilderness Watch.

    “Efforts to recover grizzlies by government agencies in places like the Yaak have been failing spectacularly,” said Rick Bass, director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council. “We need something dramatically different, and this vision document is a fine start.”

    One of the vision’s key goals is reestablishing grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Ecosystem, which is vital to recovery in the Northern Rockies. “The Bitterroot Ecosystem is essential to the long term survival of grizzly bears and critical to recovery throughout the Northern Rockies. It provides core habitat and serves as an essential area of connectivity for bears migrating from other recovery areas such as the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems,” said Jim Miller, President, Friends of the Bitterroot.

    “According to a 2001 study, the Clearwater River drainage in Idaho has the largest concentration of the best grizzly habitat in the U.S. Northern-Canadian Southern Rockies,” said Jeff Juel, Friends of the Clearwater Forest Policy Director. “Our vision is the only way to ensure that the natural recovery of grizzlies, which has recently begun, will continue in the Clearwater and the rest of the Bitterroot Ecosystem.”

    The vision emphasizes the need to reduce conflicts with livestock owners, calling for non-lethal deterrents, and retiring livestock grazing authorizations on public lands. The vision recommends changes in state management practices including prohibiting the hunting of grizzly bears, changes in trapping and snaring regulations, banning the use of baits to attract bears, and the hunting of bears with hounds. It would also require users of grizzly bear habitat to carry bear spray.

    “The threats grizzlies face require firm action to protect the lands and the foods they depend on, without which we will surely see their numbers dwindle once again,” says Kristin Combs, Executive Director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates. “Wildlife managers should focus on implementing tools and providing assistance to residents that help people learn how to live alongside the great bear. The future of grizzly bears and our wide open spaces depend on it.”

    The report is available here:  A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery in the Northern Rockies,

    Contacts: 

    Adam Rissien, WildEarth Guardians, 406-370-3147, arissien@wildearthguardians.org
    Rick Bass, Yaak Valley Forest Council, 406-291-5338, rickbass27@gmail.com
    Kristin Combs, Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, 307-413-4116, kristin@wyomingwildlifeadvocates.org
    Dana Johnson, Wilderness Watch, 208-310-7003 danajohnson@wildernesswatch.org
    Mike Bader, Independent Consultant, 406-721-4835, mbader7@charter.net

    The post A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery in the Northern Rocky Mountains appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • US backing for Pacific disinformation media course casualty of Trump aid ‘freeze’

    Pacific Media Watch

    A New Zealand-based community education provider, Dark Times Academy, has had a US Embassy grant to deliver a course teaching Pacific Islands journalists about disinformation terminated after the new Trump administration took office.

    The new US administration requested a list of course participants and to review the programme material amid controversy over a “freeze” on federal aid policies.

    The course presentation team refused and the contract was terminated by “mutual agreement” — but the eight-week Pacific workshop is going ahead anyway from next week.

    Dark Times Academy's Mandy Henk
    Dark Times Academy’s co-founder Mandy Henk . . . “A Bit Sus”, an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes on disinfiormation for Pacific media. Image: Newsroom

    “As far as I can tell, the current foreign policy priorities of the US government seem to involve terrorising the people of Gaza, annexing Canada, invading Greenland, and bullying Panama,” said Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.

    “We felt confident that a review of our materials would not find them to be aligned with those priorities.”

    The course, called “A Bit Sus”, is an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes that teach key professions the skills needed to identify and counter disinformation and misinformation in their particular field.

    The classes focus on “prebunking”, lateral reading, and how technology, including generative AI, influences disinformation.

    Awarded competitive funds
    Dark Times Academy was originally awarded the funds to run the programme through a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand in 2023 under the previous US administration.

    The US Embassy grant was focused on strengthening the capacity of Pacific media to identify and counter disinformation. While funded by the US, the course was to be a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.

    Co-founder Henk was preparing to deliver the education programme to a group of Pacific Island journalists and media professionals, but received a request from the US Embassy in New Zealand to review the course materials to “ensure they are in line with US foreign policy priorities”.

    Henk said she and the other course presenters refused to allow US government officials to review the course material for this purpose.

    She said the US Embassy had also requested a “list of registered participants for the online classes,” which Dark Times Academy also declined to provide as compliance would have violated the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

    Henk said the refusal to provide the course materials for review led immediately to further discussions with the US Embassy in New Zealand that ultimately resulted in the termination of the grant “by mutual agreement”.

    However, she said Dark Times Academy would still go ahead with running the course for the Pacific Island journalists who had signed up so far, starting on February 26.

    Continuing the programme
    “The Dark Times Academy team fully intends to continue to bring the ‘A Bit Sus’ programme and other classes to the Pacific region and New Zealand, even without the support of the US government,” Henk said.

    “As noted when we first announced this course, the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology.

    “Alongside this, the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities.

    “This course will help participants from the media recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques.

    “By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies,” Henk said.

    Especially valuable for journalists
    Dark Times Academy co-founder Byron Clark said the course would be especially valuable for journalists in the Pacific region given the recent shifts in global politics and the current state of the planet.

    Dark Times Academy co-founder and author Byron C Clark
    Dark Times Academy co-founder and author Byron Clark . . . “We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa.” Image: APR

    “We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa, for example,” said Clark, author of the best-selling book Fear: New Zealand’s Underworld of Hostile Extremists.

    “With Pacific Island states bearing the brunt of climate change, as well as being caught between a geopolitical stoush between China and the West, a course like this one is timely.”

    Henk said the “A Bit Sus” programme used a “high-touch teaching model” that combined the current best evidence on how to counter disinformation with a “learner-focused pedagogy that combines discussion, activities, and a project”.

    Past classes led to the creation of the New Zealand version of the “Euphorigen Investigation” escape room, a board game, and a card game.

    These materials remain in use across New Zealand schools and community learning centres.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How to Find Climate Data and Science the Trump Administration Doesn’t Want You to See

    Government scientists at NOAA collect and provide crucial public information about coastal conditions that businesses, individuals and other scientists rely on. NOAA’s National Ocean Service

    Eric Nost, University of Guelph and Alejandro Paz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

    Information on the internet might seem like it’s there forever, but it’s only as permanent as people choose to make it.

    That’s apparent as the second Trump administration “floods the zone” with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science.

    We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public.

    In just the first three weeks of Trump’s term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase “climate change” from government websites, as well as terms like “resilience.”

    Here’s why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever.

    Why government websites and data matter

    The internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life.

    Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, what’s causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agency’s website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards — and to find out what the government is or isn’t doing to help.

    If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies.

    Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule.

    And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world.

    Bye-bye data?

    The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didn’t find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted.

    The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information.

    In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites.

    Chart shows most agencies decreased their use of the phase during the first Trump administration.
    Most federal agencies decreased their use of the phrase ‘climate change’ on websites during the first Trump administration, 2017-2020.
    Eric Nost, et al., 2021, CC BY

    As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadn’t seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data.

    Maintaining tools for understanding climate change

    We’ve seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trump’s first set of executive orders.

    Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able to recreate it.

    Preserving websites for the future

    In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesn’t exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the department’s homepage.

    Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasn’t yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed “climate change” from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages.

    A screenshot shows changes made to a website.
    During Donald Trump’s first week back in office, the Department of Transportation removed its Climate Change Center webpage.
    Internet Archive Wayback Machine

    Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008.

    If you’re looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the “changes” tool“ in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the site’s snapshots of the page before Trump’s inauguration.

    What you can do

    You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the Data.gov data portal and making them findable in other locations.

    Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science.

    If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data.

    Narrowing the knowledge sphere

    What’s unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be.

    Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling.

    We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    The post How to Find Climate Data and Science the Trump Administration Doesn’t Want You to See appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Regenerative Ag Isn’t Kind to Animals—But It Could Be. Here’s How

    Is regenerative agriculture “sustainable” or just another way to exploit animals? First, let’s dive into what the buzzword regenerative agriculture means.

    What Is Regenerative Agriculture?

    Regenerative agriculture is a method of farming aimed at restoring the health of the land. Some techniques don’t use animals, like no-till farming. This method is entirely animal-free and increases water retention in the soil retains carbon and fosters the growth of beneficial microorganisms.

    Two sets of human hands holding a bowl of tomatoes

    But some techniques, like rotational grazing, use animals like cows or goats rotated across pastures. In other words, humans have found yet another way to exploit the animals they kill for profit. This method also relies on raising animals for food, which is cruel and devastating to the planet.

    But don’t grazing animals fertilize the soil and help restore degraded land?

    Animals in nature already do that without being bred, confined, and hacked into pieces. Rotational grazing also contributes to methane emissions and land use inefficiencies.

    Vegetables in piles

    Vegan farming can build soil health—without exploitation. But while we wait for vegan farming to catch on, we can all do our part today by ditching anything made from an animal.

    Without animal poop, how would we fertilize the soil?

    Cover crops, crop rotations, and compost all regenerate the soil without turning animals into “resources.” And let’s not forget—manure only has nutrients because animals eat plants. Why cycle nutrients through animals when plants provide them directly?

    Why is going vegan more sustainable?

    Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., 80% is used to raise animals for food and grow grain to feed them. Nearly half of all the water used in the U.S. goes to raising animals for food. This is beyond wasteful. Beans, lentils, and vegetables are nutrient-dense, resource-efficient, and don’t require suffering.

    Why is going vegan the kindest way to farm?

    Pigs are as intelligent as dogs, chickens cluck to their unhatched chicks, and cows form lifelong friendships. These animals have rich emotional lives and unique personalities. Yet billions of animals suffer when they are considered mere commodities.

    Sad pig looking at camera

    On today’s farms, mother pigs are trapped in crates so small they can’t turn around. Baby calves are torn from their mothers so humans can steal their milk. And chickens are bred to grow so unnaturally fast that their legs can’t carry themselves.  

    Growing food without using animals in any way is the kindest way to farm.

    Could regenerative agriculture make flesh, dairy, and eggs more sustainable?

    Raising and killing animals for food will never be sustainable. It consumes vast resources while generating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution that devastate ecosystems and drive climate catastrophe. No tweaks in the system will change that.

    So, watch out for misleading labels. Industries seeking to “greenwash” animal-derived ingredients, like “carbon-neutral burgers,” have co-opted the term “regenerative.” These claims mislead well-meaning customers.

    Why going vegan is the only sustainable choice.

    The only real way to reduce the environmental damage of animal agriculture and protect animals from cruelty is to go vegan. Researchers at the University of Oxford found that ditching meat and dairy can reduce one’s carbon footprint by up to 73%. Plus, each vegan spares nearly 200 animals from suffering every year.

    Use vegan regenerative practices in your own garden!

    • Plant-Based Compost: Turn kitchen scraps into rich, animal-free compost—no manure needed. 
    • Cover Crops: Grow clover or beans to naturally replace soil nutrients between planting seasons. 
    • No-Till Gardening: Skip digging to protect soil microbes and retain moisture. 
    • Mulch: Use straw or wood chips to lock in water, keep weeds in check, and feed the soil.
    • Animals Welcome: Plant native flowers to attract pollinators.

    Help animals right now

    Kind consumers can take steps to end this cruelty and the “humane” lies—first, by going vegan, and second, by making sure organizations know that you won’t support them until they end all their factory farm endorsements. Please sign PETA’s petition telling Humane Word for Animals (formerly Humane Society), the ASPCA, and Compassion in World Farming to resign from the Global Animal Partnership’s board of directors immediately and end their affiliation with the partnership and all factory farming of animals.

    Take Action!

    The post Regenerative Ag Isn’t Kind to Animals—But It Could Be. Here’s How appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Animal Rights and Campaign News | PETA.

  • Palming Off Climate Disaster to the Next Generation

    Crane lowers tree surgeon into the top of an 80′ oak. Photo: Dave Lindorff.

    My house located in southeastern Pennsylvania about nine miles north of Philadelphia, in which my wife and I have lived and raised a family over the past 28 years, is a testimonial to the crisis of climate disaster.

    That looming, and already evident disaster can be clearly illustrated by three trees.Two of these are quite young. The other as of last summer, is just a very large stump.

    Let me explain.

    We moved from Hong Kong back to the US in 1997 so my harpsichordist spouse could take up her new job as a professor of early keyboard a Temple University in Philly, and our two kids could experience school in the US — high school in the case of our daughter and nursery school in the case of our son. We has purchased a unique place to live: a somewhat neglected and rundown 257-year old stone farm house and really neglected barn on 2.3 wooded acres, the rest of the original 100-acre farm having long before been sold off for a suburban housing tract.

    Over the years, I fixed up both structures, re-roofed both buildings, added missing doors to the rooms, wired in overhead lights, repaired long-neglected plumbing, etc. We had a lot of trouble, though with large trees near the house including a huge horse chestnut tree that was diseased and managed to drop a huge limb on my old Volvo station wagon, bending the frame and caving in the roof which rendered it scrap. Other trees that died or got felled by hurricanes over the years included an American elm, two beautiful old apple trees, several smaller oak trees, all the ash trees on the property in one bad year of a elm bark beetle infestation, and a mammoth silver maple tree near the house — the oldest tree on the property that had given the property its name: Maple Tree Farm.

    As the mid-1990s was when climate change began receiving a lot of attention, and I became aware that the tree die-offs we were witnessing were mostly the result of that new environmental threat, either because storms, like Hurricane Sandy, with its bizarre track that saw it make landfall in New York Harbor, then turn west instead of the typical northeastern storm track, and ran across New Jersey, into Pennsylvania and right over our house. There were also destructive insect infestations that were worsened by unusually warm winters which didn’t kill fungus-spreading beetles that managed to over-winter in bark crevasses or under fallen leaves, as well as extended summer droughts, that stressed all the trees.

    But by 2006, when I’d read James Lovelock’s alarming book The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity on It and Mark Lynas’ even more terrifying Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, I realized that our stone house, which had survived a revolutionary war, innumerable hurricanes, the widening of a former wagon trail and later wooden plank road and finally a widened and frequently re-paved main state thoroughfare with heavy traffic including large trucks, I had an epiphany. Our house, because of its durability, was destined to become reef for fish, corals and algae! Even though its elevation well above current sea level was vulnerable to polar ice melt. Chesapeake Bay, an large arm of the Atlantic Ocean, fed by the Delaware, Susquehanna and Potomac Rivers, reaches inland to a point some 20 miles to the south of our house and the Delaware River, which is at sea level upstream to a point about 18 miles to our east. Since a fully melted Greenland and Antarctica snow caps are a real possibility, eventually over a few hundred years the seas could rise globally by up to 216 feet, which would make a map of North America unrecognizable and erase much of the whole East Coast from Canada’s Maritime Provinces to Florida and the Gulf states.

    Thinking of that relatively distant yet increasingly likely future, and about the much closer and predictable chaos that willl ensue just from the current track of temperature rise and social disruption, I decided I needed to take some serious action. Having noticed palmetto palm trees growing tall on the south-facing side of houses around Williamsburg, Virginia during a trip there in around 2010, and reading more recently that that southeastern Pennsylvania could have have climate in another by 2030 similar to Virginia’s 2010 climate, I decided to purchase and plant two Windmill Palms.

    What the mail-order tree nursery sent me for an affordable $15 each were two small palm trees that the instructions promised if planted in a sheltered southern exposure setting in my climate zone, would thrive and grow, surviving our ever milder winters, and would become stately palms of a 15-20-foot height. I chose one spot about eight feet out from the south side of my house, and a second spot in a more sheltered corner or the house that would protect the palm there, where it would be closer to two warm walls, protecting the tree from both the east and the north. Both young trees were about 18” tall over their root balls at the time.

    I’m committed to becoming the first Philadelphian to be able to sip piña coladas while toasting humanity’s self-anhilation under my own prophetic palm trees but this will take a little time. So far the more sheltered of the two palms has a nearly three-foot, quite thick and sturdy-looking trunk with the trademark thatched weve of cut ogg stalks of earlier lower-down fronds. The large dark-green newer fronds reach up over 6.5 feet and reach out in all dirrections by a radius of almost six feet. The more exposed palm located farther out from the house has grown more slowly and some of its somewhat smaller fronds (which on palms last for years), have suffered frost burns at their tips, which I have had to snip away each spring. It has a shorter trunk and beautiful light green fronds that reach not yet four feet above the ground. But if not as fast growing, it is still seemingly surving the winters, and is otherwise thriving too.

    I have had a sadder climate-related task which I took care of last summer: the sacrificial murder of an ancient almost two-hundred year old Oak tree with a five-foot diameter trunk — a beautiful and perfectly healthy specimin that soared up 80-feet above the ground standing 20 feet behind the kitchen of the house.

    The problem was the the huge tree-sized limbs spreading outward and upward beginning about 20 feet above the ground were long enough that any one of them leaning towards the house, if broken off by a heavy wind, could have crushed and turned it into a pile of rubble . The frameless house with its stone walls only held together by mortar and clay, are not designed for that kind of attack. And I couldn’t have solved the problem by having the threating branches taken off because that would have unbalanced the whole tree, putting a neighbor’s house at risk should the whole giant tree be toppled in a heavy storm.

    It was a dramatic but sad day when a crane operator came with his massive truck-mounted crane able to pick up the heavy limbs as the tree surgeon cut them off from the trunk. The crane operator then carried them gently and frighteningly right over the roof of the house, setting them down on the front lawn where a crew with chain saws cut them into manageable lengths auitable for splitting and using in the fireplace.

     The ancient tree will not go to waste at least, but it was a solemn moment when I later knelt on the remaining stump as it began bleeding out its sap, and counted the rings. I ceremonially noted on it with a black marker how big the tree was when South Carolina Confederate troops fired on Ft. Sumter, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration, when the Spanish-American War was fought, when women gained the right to vote, and even when I and my wife and our two children were born between 75 and 32 years ago.

    The tree, healthy as it was, could have conceivably yet seen more milestones, most of them likely tragic, had I not cut its life short, but I consoled myself with the thought that given what had been happening with the other great trees on the property — the storms that toppled some and the insect attacks that killed others — this tree would probably not have lasted much longer anyhow, and could well have suffered a violent death, taking our ancient house (and possibly its occupants) with it.

    Meanwhile, the two palm trees, my grimly humorous effort to laugh in the face of impending climate disaster unfolding, will attest to the new global reality we are entering.

    The post Palming Off Climate Disaster to the Next Generation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Man Who Would Kill Wolf Pups

    “We must kill more wolves. When hornets get near my house, I don’t just kill the adults, I destroy the larvae.”

    – Representative Paul Fielder, Thompson Falls, Montana

    Over the past several years, we have come to know Paul Fielder (R) of Thompson Falls through the course of his tenure as state senator and now representative. We have seen him work tirelessly to eradicate wolves in Montana and he has shown no fondness for grizzly bears either.

    He attempted to have trapping made part of the state constitution. Conservationists pushed back hard, and thankfully, the effort was defeated.

    His method uses faux science to support the idea that game animal populations are falling year after year. Numbers are, in fact, at near record levels. Nonetheless, he wants wolves eradicated, and no method is too cruel for him. He repeats outdated and disproven arguments that all predators must be “managed”. Ideas based not on science, but talking points tailored to convince his fellow lawmakers Montana’s wolves must all die. People need more management, not wolves.

    Fielder calls himself a “wildlife biologist” but likely takes money from trappers and trophy hunting groups, and he’s a pay-to-play legislator. Trappers represent less than 0.24% of people using public lands, yet Fielder represents their desire to kill and torture wildlife as a majority view.

    Now, one of his new bills, HB 258, would take Montana to a new low. It allows for the killing of wolf pups in their dens. This is sick, dangerous thinking. It would be wholly unethical and unsportsmanlike. HB 258 is simply a free pass for trappers to get bounties on the pups they kill, just like in Idaho.

    This is simply welfare for trappers and must be stopped. No civilized society pays bounties except on the worst of criminals. Montana’s wolves are not “a new hybrid with giant teeth” or the “Big Bad Wolf,” as Fielder extols, and he has used such nonsense as talking points. Retired Yellowstone Wolf Biologist Doug Smith made it clear at a recent FWP hearing that wolf biologists do not subscribe to the notion that Yellowstone wolves have become their own subspecies, stating plainly, “It’s a bad argument.”

    Yet Fielder continues to demand lower wolf populations despite the state’s own statistics describing a stable situation between wolves and cattle. Last year, with over 2 million cattle in our state, only 137 cows were attacked by wolves. Far more died from disease, weather, and falls. Fielder claims to be a wildlife biologist, so he should know a year-round killing of wolves will lead to broken pack structures and more livestock depredation, not less.

    This is a full-scale assault on wolves by Republicans. Fully supported by the Governor, who gives all he can to the cattle barons to buy their help in reshaping Montana into Texas. They know what they are doing. They want more depredation to give them an excuse to eradicate wolves. Fielder, state ringleader for trappers, wants our state to sanction insane cruelty like the killing of pups, newborns, or still in the womb. All so people who live to torture animals can make money doing it.

    Idaho’s treatment of wolves is a global disgrace. Fielder and his friends at the Foundation for Wildlife Management (the group paying trappers bounties) would make Montana worse. The wolf-related legislation they’re pushing must be stopped. Democrats must stand together and fight the lies and fearmongering.

    Wolves belong in Montana and across the West, they’re driving a new and growing economy in communities around Yellowstone. If that model can be used across the state, it would bring in far more money to Montana than livestock grazing on our public lands.

    Fielder and the cruelty of trapping do not belong in Montana, we must learn to coexist with wildlife.

    The post The Man Who Would Kill Wolf Pups appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Can Upcycling Solve Our Big Food Waste Problem? Why the Trend Could Change Everything

    In a world where food waste has reached staggering levels, with about one-third of all food wasted every year, a growing movement is challenging the status quo: upcycling. Once considered a niche trend, food upcycling has the potential to transform how we view waste, turning surplus or overlooked ingredients into high-quality products. 

    Jump to the snacks

    From bruised fruits to discarded grains, upcycling not only helps reduce environmental impact but also addresses a crucial need in feeding the growing global population. Could this innovative approach be the key to solving our massive food waste problem? 

    Redesigning our food system

    The Ellen MacArthur Foundation had this question in mind when it recently challenged food and drink brands to redesign existing items or create entirely new ones using circular economy principles that help regenerate nature. From pasta made with wrinkled peas to granola that repurposes spent beer grains, the products featured through the Big Food Redesign Challenge are all about promoting upcycling and other sustainable practices.

    “By rethinking the ingredients and their production, participants demonstrated that through intentional design choices, we can produce food that helps nature to thrive—unlike today’s current food system which tends to make nature fit our needs,” Jonquil Hackenberg, Chief Executive Officer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, said. 

    VegNews.UpcyclingSustainableEating.AdobeAdobe

    A total of 57 pioneering companies responded to the call, creating products that outperform the industry average in terms of climate impact, biodiversity, and soil health. These products, now branded with a “Nature in Mind” logo, could soon be stocked in leading British supermarkets, including Waitrose, Abel & Cole, and Fortnum & Mason.

    “Now [that] we’ve shown what is possible, it’s time to take bold steps and build a new food system that is better for people, nature, and [the] climate,” Hackenberg said.

    Upcycling is key to sustainable eating

    According to ProVeg International, one of the top food trends for 2025 is the rise of sustainability, traceability, and food tech. As consumers become more eco-conscious, they’re demanding food and drink options that prioritize eco-friendly production and transparent sourcing. This shift in mindset will push for more innovative production methods like upcycling, alternative proteins, and precision fermentation, which are aligning perfectly with sustainability goals and gaining traction as more consumers look for smarter, greener choices. 

    Vegan upcycled snacks

    Ready to snack smarter and greener? A growing number of companies are turning surplus ingredients and food waste into delicious, sustainable treats. From crunchy chips to chewy bars, here’s a roundup of upcycled vegan snacks that are packed with flavor, nutrients, and eco-friendly goodness.

    VegNews.RindSnacks.RindRind

    1Rind Fruit Snacks

    Rind is on a mission to tackle food waste, one fruit snack at a time. This eco-friendly brand turns whole fruits—including their skins—into tasty treats. The best part? Those peels and rinds are bursting with extra vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber. With snacks like chewy dried kiwi, crispy coconut chips, apple chips, and more, these zero-waste goodies are totally addictive. We can’t stop munching.
    FIND IT HERE 

    VegNews.SpudsySweetPotatoPuffs.SpudsySpudsy

    2  Spudsy Sweet Potato Puffs

    Every year, a whopping 150 million pounds of sweet potatoes get tossed into landfills just because they’re “imperfect” in shape, size, or color. But not on Spudsy’s watch—they’re turning those so-called flawed taters into delicious, sustainable puffs by upcycling them into sweet potato flour. They say they don’t judge a spud by its lumps. With flavors like Cinnamon Churro and Vegan Cheezy Cheddar, these allergy-friendly snacks prove that even imperfect spuds can be perfectly tasty.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.RenewalMillCookieMix.RenewalMillRenewal Mill

    3Renewal Mill Cookie Mixes

    Renewal Mill is turning food scraps into culinary gold. From carrot pulp to vanilla bean remnants, this eco-friendly brand upcycles all kinds of product leftovers. After harvesting, they dry and mill these ingredients into fine powders that aim to satisfy your fresh-out-of-the-oven snack fix—like the Oat Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix, which features upcycled oat milk flour and pea starch. Spoiler alert: this mix makes cookies so good, you’ll be baking batch after batch.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.KazooChips.KazooKazoo

    4Kazoo Tortilla Chips

    Kazoo is crunching the numbers on water conservation, upcycling corn germ that would otherwise be sent to animal feed. By using 40 percent upcycled corn germ in each bag of tortilla chips, Kazoo helps save a whopping 20 gallons of water per bag compared to regular corn. Available in sea salt and lime zest flavors, Kazoo is on a mission to conserve one billion gallons of freshwater by this year. Go ahead and crunch away on these tasty chips knowing they’re saving the planet, one bite at a time.
    FIND IT HERE

    dried peaches from The Ugly CompanyThe Ugly Co.

    5The Ugly Company Dried Fruit

    This company is all about giving “ugly” produce a second chance, and we think they picked the perfect name for it. But here’s the twist—those so-called imperfect fruits are just as tasty and totally good to eat, scuffs and all. The Ugly Company turns these gems into chewy dried cherries, nectarines, and kiwis. Who says imperfect can’t be beautiful?
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.BlueStripesCacaoSnacks.BlueStripesBlue Stripes

    6Blue Stripes Chocolate Bars

    Did you know the chocolate industry tosses out a lot of the cacao plant? Blue Stripes is flipping the script by using every bit of the cacao fruit to make snacks, drinks, and treats. From crunchy granola to whole cacao chocolate bars, plus chocolate-covered cacao beans and trail mix, Blue Stripes is serving up nutrient-packed goodies that are as good for the planet as they are for your taste buds.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.ConfettiVeggieChips.ConfettiConfetti

    7Confetti Chips

    Confetti is turning unwanted produce into mouthwatering veggie-packed chips that are anything but undesirable. These veggies may look quirky, but they’ve got a whole lot of flavor and nutrients to offer, all seasoned with a medley of spices. From summer truffle veggie chips to green curry mushroom chips, Confetti has a flavor for every craving. Crunch away, because these imperfect beauties taste twice as good.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.ActProteinBar.ActBarAct Bar

    8Act Protein Bars

    Act Bar is serving up protein bars in irresistible flavors like pecan s’mores, peanut butter cacao nib, and cashew coconut while helping to make the world a better place. Each bar is made from spent grains from beer production, which means they’re saving three gallons of water for every bar produced. They’re transforming what would’ve been wasted into a high-protein, high-fiber superfood snack. Plus, 10 cents from every bar sold goes to Brighter Bites, which provides fresh produce to communities in need.
    FIND IT HERE

    plantain chips by BarnanaBarnana

    9Barnana Plantain Chips

    These aren’t your average plantain chips; they’re made from upcycled plantains, packed with bold flavors like Himalayan pink sea salt, Acapulco Lime, and sea salt and vinegar. Barnana, famous for their Organic Banana Bites and Banana Brittle, is now saving plantains (or “cooking bananas”) from going to waste, turning the imperfect fruits into irresistible chips. They also offer Plantain Scoops for all your dipping needs. By upcycling bananas and plantains that would otherwise be tossed, Barnana is on a mission to end food waste and make snacking both delicious and sustainable. 
    FIND IT HERE

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Chris Packham hits out at WWF lobbying the trade in polar bear fur

    Wildlife TV presenter and conservationist Chris Packham has taken to social media to express his outrage over the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) continuous lobbying for the trade in polar bear fur, whilst at the same time, the charity uses imagery of the very same animals for its fundraising:

    WWF lobbying for the trade in polar bear fur

    Chris Packham is right to be furious. As first reported by the Guardian, WWF currently backs policies which exploit a number of endangered species for economic reasons, such as trophy hunting. The investigation found that:

    WWF has helped facilitate the international commercial trade in polar bear furs as part of its support for the policy of sustainable utilisation.

    Specifically:

    WWF lobbied against granting full protection to polar bears in 2010 and 2013 at Cites meetings when the US, supported by Russia, proposed a ban on the international commercial trade of polar bear skins.

    Both times WWF recommended that parties should not vote for a full ban, arguing that polar bears had not yet met the criteria for this.

    So much for an organisation there to protect wildlife:

    At the same time, WWF routinely offers polar bear adoptions in its promotions:

    This is not WWF’s first rodeo with sketchy goings-on:

    According to Real Media:

    For decades the charity has been accused of backing or at least turning a blind eye to human rights abuses, including rape, torture and murder carried out by “conservation rangers” across several African and Asian countries.

    Back in 2019, Buzzfeed News revealed that the WWF had funded anti-poaching guards who killed and tortured people in wildlife parks across both Asia and Africa. WWF staff also tried to make the crimes disappear, and then WWF Nepal continued as if nothing had happened.

    According to Buzzfeed News:

    It was part of a pattern that persists to this day. In national parks across Asia and Africa, the beloved nonprofit with the cuddly panda logo funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents, the family told BuzzFeed News.

    Trophy hunting

    WWF has previously stated:

    Trophy hunting—where it is based on a clear scientific understanding of species population dynamics and is properly managed—has been proven to be an effective conservation tool in some countries and for certain species, including threatened species.

    Some claim that a few animals, which are often endangered – are sacrificed for the greater good of species survival and biodiversity. They also claim that communities benefit financially from protecting animal populations and get the rewards of employment from hunting operations. Similarly, the tourism and sales that go alongside them.

    However, some people dispute this:

    As the Canary previously reported, a report from Tanzania showed that less than 3% of the revenue from trophy hunting went to community development. Most of the time, it ended up in the hands of tourism or hunting operators, airlines and governments.

    Additionally, a 2016 report by the US government’s Natural Resources Committee found that:

    African trophy hunting fails to show consistent conservation benefits.

    Previously, conservation leaders linked to the WWF have been known for trophy hunting. This includes Juan Carlos, former King of Spain and ex-president of WWF Spain. Additionally, Prince Philip who was also the ex-president of WWF International was well known for trophy hunting. He shot a tiger, crocodiles, wild boar, stags and a number of smaller animals:

    WWF predictably pushed back on X against the claims over polar bears – but not many people were buying it:

    WWF: we see you – and so does Chris Packham

    The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists polar bears as vulnerable due to declining numbers in the wild.

    Loss of Artic sea ice has a direct impact on Polar Bears. A 2020 study found that groups of polar bears are struggling to complete simple yet essential tasks because of declining concentrations of sea ice.

    The Artic ice cap is a large area of frozen seawater which floats on top of the ocean. It is crucial for polar bears to travel long distances. Additionally, they use gaps in the ice to hunt for seals.

    Since 1979, concentrations of sea ice have decreased by 13% every ten years. The climate crisis is causing artic regions to increase in temperature at twice the rate of the rest of the world.

    Clearly, WWF should be doing everything in its power to protect an already vulnerable species. However, that would actually require the colonial conservation organisation to actually give a damn about endangered animals and Indigenous communities, rather than acting in the interests of the trophy hunting elites. Nothing in this latest explosive investigation and its legacy littered in wildlife and human rights harm, suggest that’s going to be the case.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Colombia and Brazil – the world’s deadliest countries for environmental activists

    Cândida Schaedler on 12 February 2025 asks whether anything can be done to protect them.

    In 2023, 196 land and environmental defenders were murdered around the world – the vast majority of them in Latin America. In fact, just four countries – Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and Mexico – accounted for over 70 percent of those killings. Colombia was by far the deadliest country, with 79 murders, followed by Brazil, with 25.

    We spoke with some of these brave activists to learn more about the threats they face, how they stay safe and how Colombia and Brazil are working to keep them alive.

    Quilombolas
    Quilombolas in the Jequitinhonha Valley in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photo: Mídia NINJA, Flickr

    “When we recognized ourselves and declared ourselves a quilombo, our peace was over”, recalls Elza,* a Brazilian Quilombola leader in her late 50s.

    In December 2008, she was shot and injured in an attack that killed her brother and sister. Since then, she hasn’t left her home alone – not even for a walk in her own territory, one of the 11 urban quilombos in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil.

    Quilombos are Afro-Brazilian communities that were originally founded by escaped slaves in colonial times.

    Today, they are officially defined as “ethno-racial groups that, by self-definition, have their own historical trajectory, maintain specific territorial relations and are presumed to have Black ancestry related to resistance against historical oppression.” Brazil has recognized quilombos in its constitution since 1988, but the process of gaining legal recognition is time-consuming and often fraught with obstacles. Elza’s community was officially designated a quilombo in 2005, but only after its residents agreed to give up half their territory. Ever since, they’ve been battling gangs and real estate speculators who want control of the same 58 hectares of land they call home.

    In 2022, they once again came under attack. Armed men showed up at their door in an attempt to take over a housing project under construction in the quilombo, which had been put on hold due to a dispute with the bank financing it….

    Elza and her daughter, Carolina,* live under the protection of the Brazilian government, which has a program to safeguard human rights defenders, environmentalists and communicators.

    Jesus Pinilla
    Jesus Pinilla leads a workshop for the Network of Young Guardians of the Atrato. Photo courtesy of Jesus Pinilla

    Jesus Pinilla is a 26-year-old Afro-Colombian activist from a small community in the Chocó Department in western Colombia. He is a member of the Network of Young Guardians of the Atrato, a group composed of 36 young people defending the Atrato River – considered the mightiest river in Colombia.

    Back in 2016, the Atrato was the first Colombian river to be given legal rights. Enforcing those rights are a group of 10 guardians, along with the Young Guardians, who are embroiled in a constant battle against mining companies exploiting the river’s waters.

    Pinilla works as an environmental educator. He first became an environmental activist at the age of 14, but he fears that the risks often drive young people away from climate and environmental movements in Colombia.

    “My community is located by the river, so we are constantly dealing with it on a daily basis,” he says. “We depend on it for our basic needs.”

    Brazil military police officer
    Policing is not enough to tackle the threats facing land and environmental defenders in Latin America. Photo: Agência Brasília, Flickr

    “When combined with the interests of communities, the internal armed conflict becomes even more dangerous,” says Leonardo González Perafán, director of the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz) in the capital, Bogotá.

    “That’s when actions against environmental defenders and communities come into play,” he explains, adding that environmental conflicts often occur in countries with abundant mineral resources.

    In most cases, communities are forced to self-organize to ensure their own safety due to the absence of the state.

    “They provide self-protection through Indigenous or campesino [farmer] guards,” he explains. 

    The communities have also developed communication strategies to share information with each other, as well as with the authorities and other organizations.

    But as long as the armed conflict persists, it will be very difficult for the government to tackle systemic threats against environmental defenders, especially in areas where it has little authority, says Franklin Castañeda, director of human rights at Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior.

    Castañeda explains that more than 15,000 people are currently protected under the National Protection Unit (UNP), which aims to ensure the safety of members of Congress, mayors, journalists, human rights defenders, community leaders and other individuals facing threats due to their work.

    The majority – around 9,000 – of these people are social leaders, including environmental defenders. The UNP provides them with security measures such as bulletproof vests, private escorts, armored vehicles or other measures as deemed necessary on a case-by-case basis.

    Still, Castañeda emphasizes that individual measures are a last resort. The government has also invested in prevention, such as ensuring that the military and police are not involved in illegal activities.

    Despite these efforts, Castañeda concedes that there is still plenty of work to be done to address the structural drivers of conflict, such as high levels of socioeconomic inequality.

    “Most of the territories where social conflicts arise are the least developed ones that the government still cannot reach.”

    He says these areas will need internet access, highways and other infrastructure to improve the government’s ability to ensure safety and the rule of law.

    Quilombo in southern Brazil
    A quilombo in southern Brazil. Photo: Cândida Schaedler

    In Brazil, the main drivers of conflict are deforestation, illegal mining, real estate speculation and the expansion of agriculture.

    In response, the government is supporting 1,304 people through the Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Communicators and Environmentalists (PPDDH), linked to the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship. 

    The program’s coordinator, Igo Martini, emphasizes the importance of listening to the communities to respond quickly to their protection needs.  Last year, it carried out 54 public consultations to devise a National Plan to address threats to these communities. But Martini also points out the need to address the root causes rather than merely deploying the police.

    “If we don’t solve the underlying causes, the program will continue for another 20 or 40 years just responding to emergencies,” he warns. “A movement from the states is also necessary, not just from the federal government.”

    “We need to strengthen agencies, monitoring systems and prevention systems, like the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), for example.”

    The PPDDH operates in three areas: state protection, justice protection and collective protection.

    While state and justice protection are offered by the police and courts respectively, collective protection involves strengthening communities and providing them with the tools to communicate with each other and report threats to the authorities to safeguard their territory.

    https://thinklandscape.globallandscapesforum.org/71968/deadliest-countries-for-environmental-activists/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • To tackle the housing, climate, and biodiversity crises, Labour must fix the rigged planning system

    More than a century of unsustainable farming practices and urban development have taken their toll on nature and resulted in alarming rates of ecological decline. The UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world – in the bottom 10% globally, and last among the G7 nations, with almost half of our biodiversity wiped out, and one in six species threatened with extinction. Although we are in an ecological and climate emergency, a radical overhaul of the planning system is underway, which prioritises economic growth over our environment, and will see the largest post-war house-building programme the country has seen.

    Thanks to the planning system, developers are unaccountable due to lack of resources

    The Tories introduced mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) as a planning requirement, advocating it as a way to help improve natural habitats, and create new ones. BNG, they said, would ensure an increase in the biodiversity of a site by at least 10%, compared to its pre-development state.

    But a year after its introduction, studies show this policy is not delivering its intended benefits, with an absence of government resources dedicated towards enforcement meaning developers are not held accountable for their negative impacts on nature.

    Malcolm Tait, Professor of planning at Sheffield University, is co-author of a report published by Wild Justice, called Lost Nature: Are Housing Developers Delivering Their Ecological Commitments? His study involved surveying more than 40 new housing estates across five Local Planning Authorities in England. Tait explained:

    We went out and counted what developers promised against what they delivered. We found only about half of what had been promised was actually there on the ground. Part of the problem is that developers just aren’t installing it in the first place. The other side is about how these places are managed. Often there is a document, that the planning permission says should be followed, about how to manage, for example, a public open space- how you mow it, protect it for wildlife, and so on. But these aren’t always being done, the mechanisms we have to deliver these features for nature on housing estates just aren’t being put into place.

    Biodiversity Net Gain used to justify increased levels of development

    The study found more than 80% of Hedgehog highways,100% of bug boxes, and 75% of both bat and bird boxes were missing from new developments, half the native hedges which were supposed to be laid did not exist, and almost 40% of trees detailed on planting plans were missing or dead.

    Evidence was also found of areas planted as wild flower meadows being regularly mowed. These findings have led Wild Justice to believe BNG is being used to justify increased levels of development, on the grounds that ecological harms can be mitigated while, in reality, nature seriously loses out. According to Tait, part of the problem is due to housing developers often passing over management of these areas to private companies, who are not set up to do this work.

    Tait said that:

    So the private companies often subcontract to landscaping companies, on a very basic level, and they run off with quite a lot of profit from it. There’s always a willingness to save money on housing developments and, because they are aware that Local Authorities have very little, if any, resources to enforce breaches of planning permission when it comes to the ecology side of things, developers know they can get away with things, and the estate management companies know they are unlikely to get called out if they don’t maintain an area properly. If this is a key part of out plan to minimize our impact on biodiversity, and try and stem species loss, it’s like a death by 1000 cuts. Every small thing that is not enforced soon adds up and before you know it what’s meant to be a net gain for nature policy is actually a net loss.

    New research has also found more than three-quarters of non-householder planning applications have somehow managed to claim exemptions from BNG requirements since the policy came into effect.

    Initially claiming nature recovery would be supported alongside growth, Labour is now backtracking on these commitments, announcing it is on the side of the builders, not the blockers. Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised:

    common sense changes to environmental rules will support the government’s commitment to build 1.5 million homes and advance 150 major infrastructure project decisions

    She said this was to allow developers to:

    focus on getting things built and stop worrying over the bats and the newts

    Impacts of some developments too great to justify

    Jim Foster, Conservation director at Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC) said that:

    It’s very interesting senior government have singled out newts, alongside bats. This is very unfortunate, and seems to be a divisive tactic. Nature and economic growth don’t need to be in opposition. It’s quite feasible to run a planning system that tries to balance all the differing needs of a society- protecting sites where they need protecting from developmental impacts, and allowing development to go ahead where appropriate. Although we are clear there will be some cases where a proposed development will be just, from a nature point of view, off the cards because the impacts will be too great.

    Although the government has committed to a brownfield-first approach to house-building – as these previously developed sites which are no longer being used, are often located in urban areas with good infrastructure and connections – many also contain ecologically important habitats rich in biodiversity.

    Foster said:

    Brownfield sites tend to be quite open, and not covered in lots of trees. This is great for amphibians and reptiles, as they like the heat. Also, the kinds of vegetation that grow up on brownfield sites- long grass, low scrub habitat- generates good food and creates the right thermal conditions for them. Things like piles of bricks and broken hard standing are also commonly found in these sites, and provide shelter and hiding places for these invertebrates.

    To best way to protect nature would be for appropriate assessments of the current wildlife value of each and every potential plot of land to occur before any development gets the go ahead, whether in urban areas or the countryside, as once planning permission has been granted it is very difficult to make changes to a development. But often, surveys do not take place at all, or only occur after a development has begun, once various species have been spotted.

    Foster explained that:

    What we need is for the system to pick up the presence of these species much earlier in the process. Ideally, even before a developer has purchased the land, they should look at the many pros and cons of each site they are interested in, among these should be the impact on wildlife, before they take the investment decision to buy a site and do all the preparations.

    Homes England plans to build 260 houses on ‘irreplaceable’ Site of Nature Conservation Interest

    Campaigners believe Brislington Meadows is a special place, where development should be prevented at all costs. This undisturbed site is irreplaceable because of its huge diversity of species and habitats, but it is one of several greenfield sites in Bristol earmarked for development. In 2014, despite being designated a Site of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI), it was allocated for housing in the Council’s Local Plan, and in 2020 was acquired for £15m by Homes England – the government’s house-building agency. Even though the council U-turned on their decision, Homes England was granted outline planning permission in 2023, for 260 houses, and parking, on the site.

    Developing the meadows will destroy important habitat, including three quarters of the hedgerows- which date back to at least 1840, and a quarter of the ancient tree and woodland area. Around 80 grassland species, and also many butterfly, bird, mammal and invertebrate species will be affected by the development. Danica Priest is one of the many people in Bristol fighting these housing plans.

    She said that:

    There’s virtually no one, including the council, supporting the development. Our local council is 100 percent behind us. The ecology surveys were carried out after the land was sold, and the council then realised the importance of the meadows for nature. They are still trying to protect the site, by taking it out of the future Local Plan, but Central government doesn’t care about this, and is fighting the Local Council’s plans. The environmental protections in this country are really lax. We don’t have anything like an Endangered Species Act, where struggling species are protected, and developers can pretty much build on any site if they can prove they have mitigated or offset something. Everything’s skewed in favour of development.

    Green spaces are vital for people too

    Green spaces are not only vital for biodiversity, but for humans too, with many studies documenting the positive effects experiencing nature has on our mental and physical health. If these meadows are developed, many of the residents from Brislington East, where most of the area is located, would struggle to find another green, nature-rich space near their home, as one in five have no access to a car.

    This would be extremely unfortunate, as almost 40% of them also have an illness or health condition which limits day-to-day activities, so would really benefit if the meadows remained.

    Priest argued that:

    These sites are really important to protect. Nature has an asset value to communities. They provide so much more than only nature. They provide leisure spaces, and are really healing. It’s important to look at communities as a whole, and put houses on spaces that don’t have nature. This particular site is a really beautiful green space, surrounded by industrial land. We don’t have an abundance of nature in central Bristol, and this is a rare, wild landscape with lots of benefit, not just nature but also people. If we can’t save these designated sites, then why designate them? You would think these sites, reserved for nature, would be the last spaces we’re developing on, but they seem to be the first.

    The Community Planning Alliance (CPA) provides support and resources for campaign groups, such as Save Brislington Meadows, and its Grassroots Map shows there are more than 700 of these fighting against environmentally damaging projects.

    CPA also lobbies for a planning system which better protects the environment and allows communities to have greater influence in the planning of local developments, while delivering truly affordable housing. More than 11,000 people have so far sent the CPA report Homes For Everyone to their MPs, demanding change to housing policies and practice.

    The planning system favours developers over nature

    Caroline Dibden, co-founder of CPA, has been involved in various aspects of planning for 30 years, and believes the system always profits the developer, while doing very little for those people living in insecure or inadequate housing or emergency accommodation, and the species struggling to survive because of habitat destruction and fragmentation.

    Dibden said:

    There are many developers with a lot of money in their pockets, who are lobbyists, trying to persuade people at government level that this is how they will solve the issue. They also have a high powered legal team, if not a KC, and they’ll have an ecologist they’ve paid to say ‘No! We can move the bats or the newts, or put that ancient woodland somewhere else! ’Local community groups are being blamed by the government for stopping development, but this is untrue. It’s really difficult to do.

    Significant changes have been made to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) – a document dictating how development should occur across England, and these changes could have serious implications for nature, and communities. With the promise of 1.5 million houses, and around 12 new towns consisting of hundreds of thousands more, the government has significantly raised the housing targets across the country, now making it mandatory for councils to meet their housing needs, and forcing them to accept development on green spaces, and also green belt land, if necessary.

    Professor of planning Malcolm Tait said that:

    The higher housing targets Local Authorities now have to deliver means that most Local Plans that have already been made are now becoming increasingly irrelevant. So for the next two or three years, developers will essentially have a chance to chose any site they want to.They can say ‘Well, there’s such an urgent need for housing, I don’t need to wait for my site to be allocated as a housing area in the Local Plan. I’m just going to chance putting this site forward.

    With deputy prime minister and housing secretary, Angela Rayner, claiming protections for endangered species are “needless barriers” to economic growth, alarm bells are ringing after the publication of the government’s Planning Reform Working Paper, in which it proposes to reduce requirements for on-site ecological assessment, amend the Habitats Regulations, and move to a new form of reporting, called the Environmental Outcomes Report.

    ARC’s conservation director Jim Foster said:

    The recent proposals suggest the government wishes to amend the legislation that provides the protections for wildlife, although they don’t explain the detail. We are concerned they will, in some way, end up diluting the protections, or even taking them away altogether.

    Nature Restoration Fund: Habitat destruction allowed, if developers contribute financially

    While these government policies are designed to strip away barriers to growth, by saving developers time and money, they will also weaken environmental protections. Individual site level assessments and mitigation measures will no longer be needed before building on a site, if developers pay into a Nature Restoration Fund (NRF), which would fund larger-scale environmental projects elsewhere. The NRF will likely allow developers to bulldoze habitats and destroy biodiversity on a development site, while paying to restoring it somewhere else. According to Foster, there is also another implication of paying into this fund:

    Our concern is that somewhere else may be a long way from where people live, and we are effectively allowing a system whereby you could create ‘wildlife ghettos’. We don’t want that connection between people and nature to be disrupted any more than it has to be, and we don’t want the ghettoization of wildlife. It’s really important for people to be connected to wildlife, and that ideally needs to involve the direct encounter, whether in gardens or the local park. Any government policies that water down that connection would be bad for people as well as wildlife. People need that access to wildlife, not only for their health but also so they grow up to value nature and take decisions to protect it.

    The government’s housing target does not result from deeper analysis of how many people need what type of homes, so will do very little to address the real housing challenges unless true affordability is put at the centre of its building plans. Although developers are required to build a certain number of ‘affordable’ homes in a new development, most of these are still too expensive to buy or rent, for the people who really need them. Developers can even avoid fulfilling their quota of affordable housing, by claiming their development will lose money.

    According to Chris Bailey, national campaigns manager at Action on Empty Homes, what is really needed is more ‘social’ housing. There are currently 200,000 less social homes than when Cameroon was in office, and one million less than when Thatcher was prime minister – and we now have more people. Most were sold off, through right to buy, and around half then became privately rented – defined by low security, and high levels of unaffordability.

    Bailey said that:

    A wealthy politician may think the sharp end of the housing crisis is your kids not being able to afford to buy a house that would be worth three times as much in 10 years time, but in reality it is the 120,000 plus families- the number is growing each year- who live in really rubbish temporary accommodation, often with no proper living conditions. To stop the housing crisis you need to help these 120,000 families, not by building large executive homes on greenfield sites, or new towns full of allegedly affordable housing, where you have to be on a household income of £65,000 to afford it, but by providing social housing. We’re spending a lot of time talking about the 1.5 million homes that don’t exist, but we should be a lot more focused on the 1.5 million that do exist- and that’s a relatively conservative estimate of vacancy, just in England.

    Retrofitting empty homes – the cheapest and most sustainable way to solve the housing crisis

    Action on Empty Homes is not only advocating for social housing through the building of social homes and re-purposing of private rentals, but also by calling for a new national Empty Homes Programme and the retrofitting of existing empty homes, to bring them back to use, which is much more sustainable than new build.

    The government’s house building targets would make it impossible to meet our net-zero targets by 2050 and, unless the right houses are built at the right price for those who really need them, they will do nothing to solve the housing crisis.

    In London, where twice as many new homes have been built compared to the number of new households, long-term vacancies have increased by over 80% in less than a decade, while house prices have doubled and rents have gone through the roof. A million people are in poverty because of housing costs, while, at the same time, a large investor-driven short-let market has emerged, with houses serving as an asset rather than a place to live. The East London borough of Newham currently has more than 6,000 homeless households, and a 40,000-person housing waiting list for a social rented home.

    The future of both housing and nature in the UK hangs in a delicate balance, with the decisions we make today shaping the landscapes and communities of tomorrow. Economic growth and housing should not come at the expense of nature, and the well-being of future generations.

    Featured image supplied

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.