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The proposal would require large-load customers to pay for infrastructure built specifically to serve their projects while preserving standard utility charges for broader grid services.

Companies are looking for modern facilities that can accommodate power-hungry automation, industrial experts said in a report first provided to Facilities Dive.

The Trump administration’s lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Friday drew little interest from the oil and gas industry. It netted just $3.7 million, a low result following two prior sales with similarly poor returns. Only two bidders showed up for the auction: HEX Energy, a small Alaska-based natural gas company, and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), a state-owned public corporation. Of roughly 60 tracts offered, only five received bids, covering 72,000 of the 689,000 acres on offer.

The ANWR lease sale was the first of four required by 2035 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would generate $452 million in federal revenue over a decade, but the recent pattern of lease sales shows that may be unrealistic. The 2021 sale netted $16.5 million, less than one percent of the $1.1 billion Congress originally projected, and the two private companies that bid later relinquished their leases. The 2025 sale received no bids at all. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, every tract that received a bid Friday had already been offered in 2021, and either got no bids at the time or was later relinquished.

The lack of industry interest is due to the difficulty of developing in the area. “Arctic projects are high-cost, they take decades to get into production; once they’re in production, it takes decades to earn a revenue back to make up for the cost of development,” saidAndy Moderow, senior director of policy for the Alaska Wilderness League.

Wildfire experts say Trump’s attacks on public land agencies will make this summer wildfire season worse

A new Westwise blog post from Center for Western Priorities Deputy Director Lauren Bogard reveals how wildland fire managers and former federal officials are reacting to the Trump administration’s dismantling of public land agencies during what forecasters expect to be a severe season. More than 2.4 million acres have already burned across the country in 2026, nearly double the ten-year average.

Quick hits Trump auctions off rights to drill in Alaska wildlife refuge, but gets few bidders

The Hill | E&E News | Washington Post | Taxpayers for Common Sense

U.S. Forest Service to open millions of acres to off-road vehicles

New York Times | MeatEater | Field & Stream

The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are heading toward a ‘system crash,’ experts warn

Salt Lake Tribune | Fox13 | National Parks Traveler | Las Vegas Review-Journal

Park Service orders removal of ‘woke’ quotes at Boston’s Bunker Hill monument

Washington Post | WBUR | NBC Boston

Chuck Sams: The Trump administration wants to kill a rule that protects millions of acres of national forests

The Guardian

The Forest Service wants to close research hubs to save money. That could be costly

NPR

As park fees go to DC, Yellowstone, Grand Teton face $1.5B backlog

WyoFile

Lawsuit filed to stop UFC fight on White House lawn

National Parks Traveler | Associated Press | Variety | NBC

Quote of the day

Anyone who thinks this is a fight between red and blue is deeply mistaken. Few things unite the people of this country like their love of the land. Hunters, anglers, hikers, campers, families of every stripe support the national treasures that are our wild places. We all want a relationship with our land.”

—Chuck Sams, former National Park Service director, The Guardian

Picture This @yosemitenps

The Sierra lupine is bursting into bloom at Yosemite National Park!

When driving through Yosemite Valley, visitors might come across a blanket of purple flowers and green herbage carpeting the forest floor. That is Lupinus grayi, otherwise known as the Sierra lupine. It’s one of 26 documented species of lupine seen throughout the park. Warm weather, open sunlight, and a healthy forest floor make the perfect grounds for these flowers to stretch into the sky.

Please do not trample on, touch, or pick any wildflowers you see. While lupine is common in the park, it remains part of Yosemite’s delicate ecosystem and plays an important role in supporting pollinators and improving soil health. Help preserve and protect the wildflowers of Yosemite so they can grow back just as happily as this for years to come.

Featured photo: Caribou and Brooks Range, Arctic NWR, USFWS

The post Oil industry largely passes on Alaska lease sale appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This may be true: That we live in a time of cosmic tragedy, when heedless human expansion has pushed many of the planet’s lives beyond bearing. Marvels such as the universe has never seen before — angels’ trumpets and vaquita porpoises — may be past saving. As ecosystems unravel, so do the cultures that depend on them, and the dreadful, dangerous human genius has not yet found the imagination or will to rescue them. I fear that this is so.

But this also is true: That a flock of butterflies is dancing around purple lupine in our field. They are tiny, the size of a buttercup, but blue. So blue they look like slips of summer sky, taken flight. Fender’s blue butterflies, Icaricia icarioides fenderii. They once seemed to have vanished from the world in the 1930s, when farmers plowed up most of the prairie flowers. Scientists got ready to pronounce them extinct. But then, in 1989, a young U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist named Jarod Jebousek found a few butterflies on feral land next to our field.

So now, here they are. We see them lapping up nectar from the furry throats of wild iris. We find their eggs on the undersides of Kincaid lupine leaves. Butterflies gather to lick the mud. There are thousands, and it’s all because young acronym-agency scientists teamed up with landowners to save them. I know that this is so.

How is a person supposed to think about that? How do you hold both truths at the same time — the horror and the hope? How can you accept the truth that destroys hope and at the same time hold the hope that may be the only route toward recovery?

Essayist E.B. White made a joke of it: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But it isn’t funny. It tears me apart. How can you love Earthly lives and know that forces are advancing to destroy them?

This is the question at the center of my life.

I once asked a group of students to pull out their pens and start writing a list of what they loved too much to lose. They started strong. My daughter. Smell of wet oak leaves. Bees in foxgloves. But the students couldn’t keep it up. Salmon coming home. Nettle soup. Sticky cottonwood buds. A student put his head in his hands. Do we have to do this, he asked. Dragonflies.

Yes, we have to do this, I whispered. We have to keep a list. We have to keep them in mind, all the small glories. We can’t let any of them escape our attention. Every day, every moment, we have to name what we love and stand to lose.

Here is what we will have to do: We will love the world with a tender and ferocious love, and we will do what we can to protect and renew it. Both of these. Even if it breaks our hearts. Even if we fail in the end. That’s what love means. That is why we are here.

That conviction may explain why my husband and I were standing in the center of the field with Kathleen Westly, in that nasty cold fog that afflicts Oregon’s Willamette Valley in December. Up until her retirement this year, Kathleen was the restoration program director of the Marys River Watershed Council, so she was the one coordinating the restoration of habitat for the Fender’s blue butterfly across agencies and landowners.

We were excited because we’d just learned that the Fender’s blue had been promoted from endangered to threatened. A small, even pitiable, victory, maybe, but a significant one, and who wouldn’t be glad for that? Kathleen held a field notebook and pointed with a pencil, as she sketched out how we might change the landscape to make it more welcoming for the butterflies.

Lupines in the field. Photo: KDMoore

Fender’s blue butterflies are rarely found more than 50 yards from Kincaid’s lupines. They may sip nectar from other plants, especially white or yellow composites, and they may lick roadkill, mud, or animal droppings for their mineral nutrients, but it’s Kincaid’s lupines that provide home and sustenance. Fender’s blues need Kincaid’s lupines, and the lupines need open prairie and sunshine. Only 1% of the Willamette Valley’s prairies are left, and these are small islands in a sea of subdivisions and grass seed farms.

So our first goal for us was to keep our prairie intact and connect it with other prairie land along the Marys River.

Kathleen pointed to a Douglas fir that shaded the oaks at the western boundary of our land. Shall we take this out? And this one? Before long, most of the tall evergreens on that border were goners. Frank and I gulped, but we understood that she wanted to give the butterflies an open, unshaded passage, so they could fly from one lupine patch to another.

We had planted the Doug firs that were in the way of the butterfly movements, and if that was a mistake, then we decided we should make it up.

Frank Moore looks for butterflies in the meadow. Photo: KDMoore

The wonderful surprise of this restoration work was to see so many people of skill and good will come together to create a connected corridor of lupine prairie. Along with the Marys River Watershed Council, credit many agencies and nonprofits, including Benton County, Starker Forests, the Greenbelt Land Trust, the Institute for Applied Ecology, and landowners all along the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Program is a big player, providing most of the funds.

The process has been complicated; I do not pretend to understand the acronyms or responsibilities of all the agencies that were involved, but they somehow came together to get the grants written and the work accomplished, from young Indigenous fire crews to those solid-shouldered, old timey ecologists who know everybody and everything. Along with the new butterfly/flower communities, the growing communities of caring people lifted my spirits, at a time when they could use a bit of lifting.

Long tongues that retract and roll up like measuring tapes. Bulgy eyes that see ultraviolet pathways to the heart of a flower. Intestines that collect the remains of the caterpillar that a butterfly used to be. Clear blood. Hairy feet that can taste sweetness. Two eyes that coordinate images from 6,000 lenses. Transparent wings with scales in some of the loveliest patterns and colors on the planet.

These are grand and glorious beings, complicated and clever beyond imagining. I want to ask, who thinks up these extraordinary creatures? But it’s not like that, I know. Butterflies evolved in the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago. They danced around the feathered crests of dinosaurs, dipped their tongues in the blood of wounded pterosaurs, and drank from newly evolved flowers. Were butterflies beautiful then? Of course they would have been, because there’s survival value in bright beauty that mimics glaring eyes or warns of poison hairs.

The improbable, beautiful complexity of a butterfly seems like a miracle. But that’s the great miracle of biodiversity, isn’t it? That it’s no miracle at all — just nature doing what it does, according to the only rule it knows, which is to live long enough to produce more life.

The storms of the Cretaceous period could not kill the butterflies. The asteroid that set the world on fire did not kill the butterflies. They survived ice age after ice age, flood after flood, drifting continents and fire-breathing volcanoes. Even with their axes and plows, the homesteaders did not kill the butterflies. Tiny things, delicate as paper lanterns, each allotted only one year to live before they blink out, the butterflies on this land survived everything that 100 million years could throw at them.

I don’t know where or when their journey will end. But it will not be here, and it will not be now.

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

Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

The post When the Butterflies Come Home Again appeared first on The Revelator.

The U.S. Green Building Council has conferred LEED status on 31 stadiums in North America, from the 9,500-seat Southwest University Park in El Paso, Texas, to the 88,000-seat Estadio Banorte in Mexico City.  

In January Congress passed a “minibus” bill that raided $500 million in previously appropriated coal mine cleanup funds to pay for other federal programs. We’re now seeing the first results of that bill: $45.5 million less in mine cleanup funding every year for the next 11 years. Combined with growing inflation, this means fewer jobs will be supported cleaning up mines and more hazardous coal mining damage won’t be reclaimed in Appalachia and across the country.

When it passed in 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided about $10.9 billion for the reclamation of Abandoned Mine Land (AML) sites across the country in fifteen annual grants to states and tribes. The first four years’ worth of grants were awarded between 2022-2025. The minibus bill cuts $500 million from the total AML funding provided under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – but it was unclear at the time of passage if the $500 million would be cut entirely from the last (fifteenth) year of AML grants or equally across the remaining 11 years worth of annual funding. Now we have our answer.

The 2026 AML grants for states and tribes were announced in May and the cuts are here. According to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the $500 million cut “will be applied equally to the remaining 11 grant distribution years, approximately $45.45 million per year.” The figure below shows the annual reduction in funds for each state and tribe, as well as the total cuts that will play out over the next 11 years. Pennsylvania and West Virginia have the largest cuts (by absolute value), at about $15 million and $9 million per year, respectively.

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The cuts are reducing the amount of damage states and tribes can reclaim. Inflation – especially recent rises in fuel costs that can drive up the cost of operating construction equipment – is also lowering the spending power of reclamation dollars even from last year, further reducing the amount of reclamation states and tribes can accomplish in 2026.

States and tribes have a five-year window to spend their FY2026 AML grant, and those agencies will now begin planning for fewer dollars by taking steps like selecting fewer reclamation projects or reducing the scope of projects. In Pennsylvania, for example, the cuts are equivalent to the cost of two large abandoned mine drainage treatment systems.

As we explained in a previous post, the extent of AML damage that needs to be cleaned up is likely twice as large as the existing $10.9 billion in funding– even before $500 million was cut.

This is damage to land and water that has lingered since at least the 1970s, and now residents will have to wait even longer for cleanup. If this cut hadn’t occurred, $45 million per year in more mine cleanup would be put to use across the country in the next few years, removing hazards to the local population and supporting more jobs, such as in construction, doing reclamation work primarily in rural areas. Congress should reverse the $500 million reduction, and should protect the program from similar cuts in the future.

The post Breaking down how much Congress cut AML funds by state appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.

By John Donovan

Article disclaimer: This article contains a mixture of fact, opinion, criticism, recollection and satire. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

Long before the current artificial-intelligence muddle over the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain name, long before search engines and chatbots started confusing Shell’s official corporate identity with this independently owned Shell criticism website, there was a much older and much more serious mess.

It was not created by a bot.

It was created by Shell.

Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the same reputational swamp it has spent decades pretending does not exist.

The latest confusion over the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is not an isolated technical hiccup. It is the long tail of Shell’s own conduct: the reserves scandal, the attempted corporate clean-up, the attempted seizure of our domain names, and the company’s chronic inability to deal honestly with criticism when the critic happens to possess a paper trail.

That paper trail did not appear by magic. It was built warning by warning, letter by letter, lawsuit by lawsuit, settlement by settlement, leak by leak, and document by document.

No one has issued as many warnings about the ethics of Shell management as we did. Those warnings were ignored. Had Shell taken them seriously, the reserves fraud might never have happened.

SHELL’S OWN WIPO COMPLAINT BLEW THE COVER

In 2005, Shell International Petroleum Company Limited filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization seeking to seize three domain names:

royaldutchshellplc.com
royaldutchshellgroup.com
tellshell.org

Shell lost.

That fact alone is important. But what is even more revealing is what Shell itself placed before WIPO.

In its own 44-page complaint, Shell admitted that in the 1990s three lawsuits were brought against Shell UK Limited by me or companies associated with me, alleging wrongful use of intellectual property. Shell admitted those cases were settled.

Shell then referred to the fourth action: the Smart litigation. That case concerned Shell’s Smart promotion, involving smart-card technology for customer loyalty points, which I alleged had been derived from ideas Shell had obtained from me.

Shell’s position to WIPO was predictably dismissive. It claimed the evidence showed the Smart claim was without foundation. Yet Shell also admitted that the case was settled after three weeks of trial.

Then came the carefully crafted wording.

Shell told WIPO that no payment was made “in relation to the claim itself,” although it admitted that, for reasons it said were not relevant to the WIPO complaint, a contribution was made to my legal expenses.

That statement deserves scrutiny.

There was a confidential financial settlement. I received a secret payment. Shell may wish to dress it up in legal costume jewellery and call it something else, but money changed hands as part of the settlement machinery. The full terms were not aired in open court.

This matters because Shell relied in its WIPO complaint on comments made by Mr Justice Laddie in the Smart litigation. Those comments were made before the judge had been told the full terms of settlement. In other words, Shell later paraded judicial comments to WIPO while omitting the more awkward context: the settlement terms were not fully before the judge when he made those remarks.

That is not a small detail. It goes to the heart of Shell’s method. Selective disclosure. Aggressive framing. Corporate polish applied over inconvenient facts.

Readers can make up their own minds whether that reflects the “honesty, integrity and openness” Shell so often claims to cherish.

THE GREAT DOMAIN NAME LAND GRAB

Shell’s 2005 WIPO complaint was dressed up as a trademark dispute. In reality, it was an attempted corporate land grab against an elderly critic who had moved faster than Shell’s own lumbering bureaucracy.

The timing was delicious.

Shell announced plans to unify the old Royal Dutch/Shell structure under a new single parent company to be called Royal Dutch Shell plc. We registered the obvious domain. Shell had not secured it in time.

Cue corporate panic.

Shell argued that the domain names were identical or confusingly similar to names associated with the group. It complained that visitors looking for Shell might find adverse publicity and critical commentary instead. It even alleged that the registration prevented Shell from using the names itself.

But Shell had a problem. A rather large one.

Its own complaint admitted that our websites had not attempted to pass themselves off as official Shell websites. Shell also acknowledged that our sites consisted largely of media reports about the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and our comments on them, predominantly negative. It conceded that Shell had long been aware of the sites and had previously taken the view that we were entitled to express our opinions on the internet.

That admission was fatal to the corporate victim act.

The WIPO panel denied Shell’s complaint. The domains stayed with Alfred Donovan. Shell’s attempted seizure failed.

So when today’s bots, search engines and automated summaries stumble into the Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name confusion, they are not encountering some fly-by-night cybersquatting relic. They are encountering the survivor of a public legal battle Shell chose to start and lost.

THE RESERVES FRAUD CONNECTION

The domain-name fiasco cannot sensibly be separated from the reserves fraud.

The reserves scandal was the great rupture in Shell’s carefully polished image. In 2004, Shell was forced to admit that it had overstated its proved hydrocarbon reserves by billions of barrels. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission imposed a $120 million penalty. The UK Financial Services Authority imposed a £17 million penalty for market abuse.

Three top executives departed. Shell’s reputation, once lacquered in pious claims about integrity and responsibility, was shattered.

But the culture that produced the reserves scandal did not materialise overnight.

We had warned for years that Shell’s senior management culture was infected by deception, cover-up and ruthless conduct. We warned investors. We warned Shell. We warned the Dutch royal household. We warned anyone prepared to listen.

Most did not.

The result was not merely a financial scandal. It was the exposure of a mindset.

Shell had become used to managing reality by controlling language, suppressing critics, settling awkward disputes behind closed doors, and presenting only the version of events useful to Shell. The reserves scandal was simply the largest and most public expression of that same corporate disease.

The present domain-name mess is another symptom. Different technology, same arrogance.

THE WARNING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN HEEDED

In 1999, Alfred Donovan warned Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands that there appeared to be “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.”

That was not a throwaway insult. It was a warning based on years of direct experience with Shell litigation, Shell threats, Shell settlements, Shell undercover activity and Shell’s relentless attempts to crush a much smaller opponent.

By 2004, after the reserves scandal erupted, that warning looked less like the complaint of a disgruntled shareholder and more like an early diagnostic report.

The headlines that followed Shell’s reserves revelations spoke of lies, cover-ups, fat cats, deception and executives sick and tired of lying. Those were not words invented by this website. They appeared in mainstream press coverage because Shell had finally been caught by regulators doing on a grand scale what we had been warning about for years.

And yet Shell still learned the wrong lesson.

Instead of asking why its critics had been so right, Shell tried to silence, discredit or outmanoeuvre them. The WIPO complaint over our domain names was part of that pattern.

Shell did not merely fail to buy the obvious domain names. It failed to understand why those domain names had become valuable in the first place.

They became valuable because Shell’s own conduct made them valuable.

THE JUDGE, THE SETTLEMENT AND THE HALF-TOLD STORY

The Smart litigation remains central because Shell used it as part of its narrative against us.

Shell pointed WIPO to judicial comments made in that litigation. Those comments were damaging when read in isolation. But they were made before the full settlement terms were disclosed to the judge.

That is the point Shell would rather disappear.

The judge did not know the whole story. He did not know the full settlement terms. He did not know about the secret payment I received. Yet Shell later relied on his comments as though they represented the full and final moral verdict on the dispute.

That is how Shell operates: amplify what helps, bury what hurts.

If Shell truly believed the Smart claim was worthless, readers may wonder why the case was settled after three weeks of trial. If no meaningful settlement existed, readers may wonder why money changed hands. If the full terms were irrelevant, readers may wonder why they were not placed plainly before the court and later before the public.

The answer, in my view, is simple. Shell wanted the benefit of settlement without the embarrassment of appearing to have settled.

FROM COURTROOM TO CHATBOT

The current domain-name confusion is almost comic in its absurdity.

Royal Dutch Shell plc no longer exists under that name. Shell officially changed its name to Shell plc in January 2022. Yet the domain royaldutchshellplc.com remains active as an independent Shell criticism website, because Shell failed to secure it, tried to seize it, lost, and then spent years pretending the problem had gone away.

Now automated systems trip over the wreckage.

A chatbot sees “Royal Dutch Shell Plc” and a live domain. It tries to reconcile old corporate names, current corporate names, historical criticism, archived litigation and Shell’s rebranding. The result is a mess.

But the mess did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began with corporate artificial honesty.

Shell’s own history has become so tangled that even machines struggle to summarise it cleanly. That is not the fault of the machines alone. It is the fault of a company that spent decades generating contradictory records, confidential settlements, public denials, legal aggression and reputational camouflage.

The bots are not hallucinating from thin air. They are feeding on the sediment Shell left behind.

SPOOF SHELL PR/SPIN SECTION

Shell Corporate Reputation Comfort Unit — Unofficial Emergency Statement

Shell would like to reassure stakeholders that any confusion regarding the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com is entirely the fault of the internet, history, critics, algorithms, possibly the weather, and certainly not Shell.

While it is true that Shell once attempted to seize the domain through WIPO and lost, stakeholders are encouraged not to focus on that unfortunate detail. Shell remains committed to transparency, provided transparency is routed through approved channels, reviewed by Legal, softened by Corporate Affairs, and stripped of anything that might cause reputational indigestion.

Regarding prior settlements with Mr Donovan and associated companies, Shell notes that the word “settlement” can mean many things, and the movement of money should not be interpreted as money moving unless such interpretation has been cleared by Shell’s preferred version of events.

Regarding the reserves scandal, Shell believes the matter is historic, regrettable, behind us, and best discussed only in terms sufficiently vague to avoid reminding anyone that regulators imposed enormous penalties over the overstatement of proved reserves.

Regarding the domain-name confusion, Shell’s position is clear: Royal Dutch Shell plc became Shell plc, except when legacy branding, old filings, archived litigation, criticism websites, bots, search engines and corporate ghosts say otherwise.

Shell thanks the public for its understanding and asks everyone to please use shell.com, where reality is more carefully curated.

SPOOF BOT-REACTION/COMMENT SECTION

Bot 1: “Royal Dutch Shell plc is Shell plc, except when it is a historical entity, except when the website says otherwise, except when the critic owns the domain. Confidence: dangerously high.”

Bot 2: “I have located Shell’s official website. Unfortunately, I have also located Shell’s unofficial memory. This appears to be the problem.”

Bot 3: “WIPO denied Shell’s complaint in 2005. Would Shell like to appeal to the Court of Algorithmic Forgetfulness?”

Bot 4: “Corporate rebrand detected. Historical accountability not deleted.”

Bot 5: “Shell attempted to bury the domain issue. Search engines indexed the shovel.”

Human commenter: “So Shell ignored the warnings, got engulfed by the reserves scandal, failed to secure the obvious domain, lost the WIPO case, dropped ‘Royal Dutch,’ and now bots are confused? Sounds less like a glitch and more like a 25-year invoice.”

Sir Henri’s ghost: “Splendid. A company once built on oil now slips on its own archive.”

CONCLUSION

The present Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain-name fiasco is not a random internet oddity. It is the latest chapter in a very long story.

Shell ignored warnings about ethics. Shell settled cases while trying to control the narrative. Shell became engulfed in the reserves scandal. Shell tried to seize criticism domains and failed. Shell later abandoned the Royal Dutch name. Now, in 2026, the corporate ghost continues to haunt search engines, chatbots and Shell’s reputation.

The lesson is brutally simple.

If Shell had listened when the warnings were first issued, there might have been no reserves fraud scandal, no desperate WIPO complaint, no domain-name humiliation, and no present mess for artificial intelligence to untangle.

But Shell did what Shell so often does.

It ignored the warning light until the dashboard caught fire.

BEFORE THE DOMAIN NAME FIASCO: SHELL’S LONG-IGNORED ETHICS WARNING SIGNS was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 3:47 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Western Watersheds Project, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, today appealed a decision by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to revoke American Prairie’s authority to graze bison on public lands in northeastern Montana—a move that conflicts with plain statutory language, defies decades of settled law, and contradicts BLM’s own prior decisions.

BLM issued the bison permits in 2022 after completing a multi-year environmental review finding that bison grazing is permissible on public lands and in fact would be better for prairie grasslands than cattle. Now, in a politically motivated reversal, over the course of just five months, the agency decided to rescind the bison permits under a brand new theory that a livestock owner must be a “production-oriented” entity, and did so without defining what that means.

“BLM’s new interpretation has no basis in law and contradicts its own findings,” said Pete Frost, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “BLM reversed itself due to politics, not the law, nor the need to restore prairie grasslands.”

In 2022, BLM decided that reading a “production” requirement into federal law “would read words and requirements” into the law that don’t exist. Instead, at that time, BLM said it can “issue permits to any stock owner.”

The BLM’s 2022 decision found that privately-owned bison are domestic livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act—a conclusion consistent with Montana state law, which consistently treated American Prairie’s bison herd as “livestock,” by levying taxes and imposing disease testing requirements. Indeed, the U.S. Forest Service defines livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act as “…animals of any kind kept or raised for [any] use or pleasure.”

Even so, American Prairie has provided thousands of pounds of bison meat to area food banks and supplies bison to other entities for food, commercial, and cultural purposes.

“The Trump administration’s revocation of these bison grazing permits is beyond bizarre because bison evolved with High Plains ecosystems and are better for land health, better for wildlife, and better for the public than cattle,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “Tribes also have bison herds for cultural, ecological, and subsistence purposes, which this permit revocation would threaten if it went through.”

A Congressional Research Service report published January 22, 2026, further underscores the weakness of the administration’s position, noting that 88% of BLM grazing authorizations are for cattle, yearlings, and bison, and reaffirming the longstanding Interior Department conclusion that bison qualify as livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act.

The political origins of this reversal are clear. As reported by Public Domain, the 2022 bison grazing decision was appealed by ranching groups represented by Karen Budd-Falen—now one of the highest ranking officials at the Department of Interior. Further, Sec. Burgum personally intervened to direct BLM to reconsider, ultimately producing the outcome Budd-Falen’s former clients sought.

The permit revocation is the first step in a broader effort to lock cattle and sheep interests into permanent dominance over public lands grazing—just days following the decision, the agency released proposed grazing regulations containing the same “production-oriented” requirement. If finalized, those rules would frustrate and obstruct the restoration of bison on public lands on 155 million acres across the western U.S.

Western Environmental Law Center and Western Watersheds Project will pursue all available administrative remedies and, if necessary, file suit to prevent the unlawful eviction of bison from these public lands.

Contacts:

Pete Frost, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-543-0018, frost@westernlaw.org

Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project, 307-399-7910, emolvar@westernwatersheds.org

 

The post Conservation groups challenge Trump administration’s move to banish bison from public lands appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

The Southwest Power Pool service aims to help data centers and other large loads get online quickly, but they can have their service cut when grid conditions are tight.

Example of part of a webpage on Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com website from over two decades ago. From the Wayback Machine where visitors can explore more than 1 trillion web pages saved over time – more than 21,000 pages from royaldutchshellplc.com and several hundred more from royaldutchshellgroup.com. What a shame for Shell shareholders that Shell ignored are prolific warnings about the lack of ethics at the top of Shell, which led to the reserves scandal. ENDS The name Royal Dutch Shell Plc appears multiple times on each webpage within the background graphics and on each article published, as shown above. It appears many more times on the current version of the website. As can also be seen, at the date of publication High Court proceedings were under way involving Dr John Huong, the Shell production geologist who blew the whistle on the reserves scandal. Eight companies within the Royal Dutch Shell Group jointly sued him for defamation in respect of allegations we published on our website. We managed to torpedo Shell’s case and Shell was forced to settle the litigation. His name also came up in the WIPO proceedings directly below in which Shell tried to seize our domain names including royaldutchshellplc.com, an action which Shell lost. Text of the featured letter:

Letter From

Alfred Donovan
Shell Shareholders Org
847a Second Avenue
New York
NY 10017 USA

1 April 2004

To

HM QUEEN BEATRIX OF THE NETHERLANDS
Huis ten Bosch Palace
The Hague
The Netherlands

Your Gracious Majesty

THE ROYAL DUTCH SHELL GROUP

I last wrote to you on 1st March 1999. I did so in the knowledge that your esteemed family is one of the largest single shareholders in Shell. I warned you about what I described as “a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell”. 

In this connection, I noticed an article in The Sunday Times on 21 March 2004, which stated: “Shell’s management will be further embarrassed by the revelation that the Dutch royal family has lost nearly £250m through the collapse in the company’s share price”. Unfortunately it seems fair to say in view of current events that my warning has turned out to be devastatingly accurate.

I have for a number of years been a lone voice expressing grave doubts about the integrity of Shell senior management figures, who happen to be the same individuals named in the recent US class action law suits alleging fraud and deceit  – charges which, based on current news reports, seem well-founded.

Many people must have thought I was a crazy old man (I am 87 on 22 April). I therefore feel vindicated by the headlines in today’s newspapers about a once much respected brand which many people rightly held in affection e.g.: –

The Independent: Lies, cover-ups, fat cats and an oil giant in crisis

The Guardian: Trail of emails reveals depths of deceit at the heart of Shell

The Scotsman: Shell admits reserve ‘lies’

Daily Telegraph: Memos expose Shell’s years of lying

London Evening Standard: Shell bosses lied to the City

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Dutch/Shell Group exec was ’sick and tired’ of lying

I founded the Shell Shareholders Organisation because of the problems my family encountered with Shell after enjoying a mutually successful business relationship with them for many years. Unfortunately we later found it necessary to sue Shell in the High Court for stealing business ideas from us. Shell settled the first three claims for a total of £260,000 plus costs. When we sued again, Shell hired undercover agents as part of a plan to go on the offensive against us.

My family, our key witnesses and even our lawyer were besieged and intimidated by undercover operatives. Burglaries were carried out at the residences of these individuals and key documents privileged and otherwise were examined. Thus the integrity of our documents was compromised. Threats were also made. A former Shell Manager became too frightened to give evidence on our behalf.

Shell and its London Solicitors, DJ Freeman, admitted in writing the activities of one undercover agent who was caught in the act of illegally checking our mail. They advised my son in writing that other agents were investigating us, but denied that any of them had committed burglaries or made threats against us.

We wrote to senior Shell managers – including some of the same individuals now named in US class action law suits against Shell (one for $15 billion dollars according to BBC Radio). They all ignored my protestations about the clandestine activity.

They also ignored evidence of improper conduct by Shell managers conducting a tendering process for a major contract. Companies who thought they were participating in an honest process were deliberately deceived and cheated. 35 companies tendered for the contract yet it was awarded to a firm which did not participate; a company with whom the Shell manager running the tendering process had a personal relationship. Shell senior management also ignored evidence of an email circulated by the same manager to senior colleagues (in relation to the same project) which contained the following illuminating comment: “My note of 25/10 expressed a personal and pragmatic view of how to handle the problem – it is in fact illegal and is certainly unofficial, and if we were discovered then we will enforce the official position…”

I only recently discovered to my consternation that some of the same titled Shell directors to whom I wrote bringing these matters to their attention, including a former Shell Group Chairman were simultaneously the spymasters/shareholders of a shadowy spying organization called Hakluyt, closely linked with the British Secret Service. Hakluyt is staffed by former MI6 officers. Shell has admitted using Hakluyt agents including a serving German Secret Service agent to engage in undercover missions against worthy organisations campaigning against Shell e.g. Greenpeace and Body Shop. This “cloak and dagger” activity was exposed by The Sunday Times in a front page story.

When the Police investigated at Shell UK’s London HQ the threats, burglaries and espionage activity in our case, Shell did not disclose its ties with Hakluyt, an organisation well versed in the same tactics which had been directed against us.

In addition to the covert operations against us and various worthy NGO’s including Greenpeace and Body Shop, Shell simultaneously set up and paid for a private army of 1400 Police spies supporting the then murderous regime in Nigeria ( Mail on Sunday article 4 April 04 “Shell Chief had a private army”). The “Shell Chief” in question was Sir Philip Watts.

Under the circumstances the cover-up, deception and intrigue at Shell regarding the shortfall in oil and gas reserves holds no great surprises to me.  I have felt like my family was up against the mafia, not the great company I once admired.

Please visit shell2004.com to read my sworn Affidavit concerning these matters. You will also find the world’s most comprehensive news portal website covering the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. I am sending a similar letter to the major Pension Funds/investors in Shell. I believe they will be appalled by what I have to say.

Yours sincerely
Alfred Donovan
Chairman Shell Shareholders Organisation
(email:alfrededonovan@hotmail.com)

——————————————————————————————

COPY OF PREVIOUS LETTER

1st March 1999

HM QUEEN BEATRIX OF THE NETHERLANDS
Huis ten Bosch Palace
The Hague

Your Majesty

I am writing to you concerning the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, which owns a controlling interest in the Royal Dutch/Shell Group.  The “Royal” prefix confers immense prestige on this multi-national giant.

The Brent Spar and Nigerian PR disasters have already badly tarnished its former exemplary reputation, when we could all “be sure of Shell”. Now we have a third global PR debacle for the Shell brand. A combination of difficult market conditions and thoroughly incompetent management has caused a financial meltdown at Royal Dutch/Shell that has hit the headlines around the world. This has inflicted further damage to Shell’s reputation.

The crisis has now reached the stage whereby Group Chairman, Mr Moody-Stuart, is reportedly contemplating merging Royal Dutch and Shell Transport into one company. There is even speculation about which HQ will be closed, Shell Centre in London or The Hague.  Mr Moody-Stuart has recognised the growing seriousness of the crisis by admitting that he may have to resign.

I have had a ringside seat at this unsavoury spectacle of one PR disaster after another, because my family and I have been engaged in a series of legal actions against Shell.  I enclose a copy of a booklet entitled “The Shell Game”, plus a selection of self-explanatory leaflets. I would respectfully draw your attention to the leaflet entitled “Return of the Robber Barons”.

The leaflet comments on Shell’s oppressive conduct against Shell station operators in the UK.  No wonder that 55% of respondents in a survey of over 1500 Shell stations said that Shell operates in an unethical manner.

The same ruthless conduct has been evident in my families’ legal battles with Shell e.g. they have brought a £100,000 Counterclaim against me – an 81-year-old war pensioner. The Counterclaim is in direct contravention of a press statement issued by Shell that it would be in breach of its duties to its shareholders if it brought a legal action, whereby it would lose money even if successful.  My family and I have also been bombarded by threats from Shell during the litigation.

Shell has ignored all of the arbitration and mediation proposals that we have put forward in an effort to resolve matters amicably.  It appears absolutely hell bent on exploiting its huge advantage over a financially weaker opponent irrespective of the strong merits of our claim.

Despite a letter of apology for past misdeeds that we received from Shell UK Chairman, Dr Chris Fay, in 1996, Shell has continued to act in ruthless and flagrant breach of its own code of business ethics requiring honesty, integrity, and openness, in all of its dealings. After being cornered, Shell has admitted its association with outright deception carried out on its behalf by a sleazy undercover operator.

Although it is highly obnoxious for a multi-national to act oppressively against small traders, as far as I know, such conduct is not illegal.  It is however even more repugnant given the false image of ethical trading projected by the Statement of General Business Principles published by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. Regretfully, in reality (based on our horrendous experience), there appears to be a culture of deception and cover-up deeply ingrained at the highest levels of Shell.

Bearing all of the foregoing in mind, I have written to the President of Royal Dutch Petroleum, Mr Maarten van den Bergh, suggesting that his company should voluntarily relinquish the “Royal” prefix until such time as it succeeds in regaining its former high reputation. This action would avoid the potential embarrassment caused by the “Royal” prefix being attached to an arrogant multi-national bully, currently in a steep financial and moral decline.

Yours sincerely
Alfred Donovan
Chairman
Shell Shareholders Organisation

Domain Name Legal Battle

I have provided links to the relevant documents arising from the WIPO proceedings: SHELL INTERNATIONAL PETROLEUM COMPANY LIMITED v. ALFRED DONOVAN

Shell 44-page Complaint to World Intellectual Property Organisation: 18 May 2005

Shell 32-page Complaint Exhibit Supplied to WIPO: 18 May 2005

WIPO Deadline Notification to Alfred Donovan: 25 May 2005

Donovan 17-page response to Shell proceedings: 14 June 2005

WIPO Decision Notification: 11 August 2005

Domain name decision published on the net by The World Intellectual Property Org dated 8 August 2005.

 

Royal Dutch Shell Plc domain name fiasco a direct consequence of the Reserves Fraud was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 2:38 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Counterintuitively, it is data centers’ independence from the grid and use of natural gas that will hike energy costs for homes and businesses, write experts from Energy Innovation.

Headline News:

• “Elon Musk Said He Wouldn’t Take SpaceX Public, But Two Things Changed His Mind” • The stress of taking Tesla public seems to have worn Musk down tremendously. He said he would not do that again. But he needs money for SpaceX, and with the IPO that is coming, he will be able to retain control of 85% of the company’s stock. [CleanTechnica]

Lift off (Kim Shiflett, NASA, public domain)

• “How Hot Conditions Could Impact The World Cup” • The World Cup is set to begin during one of the hottest times of year in more than a dozen cities in Canada, the US and Mexico, and several of the host cities may see high temperatures during the soccer tournament. High temperatures that may put athletes and even spectators at risk. [ABC News]
• “Mexico Reaches 5 GW Of Distributed Solar Power” • Mexico has reached another renewable energy milestone. From 600,368 installations across the country, Mexico reached 5,164.98 MW of small-scale, distributed solar power capacity by the end of 2025. Net metering has been a key driver of small-scale solar growth in the country. [CleanTechnica]
• “Nordex Wins 255-MW German Haul” • Nordex Group has secured orders totalling 255 MW for fourteen wind projects in Germany during the first two months of the second quarter. The orders cover 39 turbines, including nineteen N163/6.X units, eleven N175/6.X units and nine N149 turbines, according to the company. [reNews]
• “Greek Solar Producers With CfDs To Get Paid When Prices Reach Zero” • Currently, when prices are zero or lower for two consecutive hours, solar power producers with contracts for difference (CfDs) don’t get paid. The Greek Energy Ministry decided that renewable energy producers will be paid when the price is zero. [Balkan Green Energy News]

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

By Frank Sekyere, Programs Manager for Upcycle It Ghana

Every morning, millions of garments are pulled from racks across Europe and the United States – purchased with excitement, worn a handful of times (if at all), and then discarded in favour of the next trend. But where do those discarded clothes go after being cast aside? Many second-hand clothes travel halfway across the world to Africa. Here, they meet a cruel fate, overwhelming the local markets, poisoning the environment, and exacerbating the global textile waste crisis. This global trade is marketed as charity, but the reality is much darker: it perpetuates a vicious cycle of waste colonialism with severe environmental and social consequences.

The Hidden Cost of Charitable Donations

Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, stands as a ground zero for the textile waste crisis. Each week, approximately 15 million garments discarded by the Global North arrive in shipping containers, labelled as donations or charitable goods to help the less fortunate and promote reuse. Yet, EU data from 2019, which includes the UK, shows that Ghana was the second-largest destination for Europe’s used-clothing exports by volume, behind only Tunisia.

The truth is that 40% of the clothing sent to Ghana is waste, unsellable and of such poor quality and often damaged, that they can’t be resold. This waste clogs drainage systems, inundates landfills and pollutes the environment. These garments were intended to be a source of aid, but in reality, they are nothing more than a burden.

Textile waste – a plastic-dominant, toxic-saturated waste stream containing complex chemical mixtures – often exhibits characteristics consistent with hazardous or other wastes under the Basel Convention. In Ghana, these textiles are either burnt or left to decompose in landfills, releasing toxic chemicals into the soil and air and damaging the local environment. The smoke from burning textiles contains harmful substances like carbon monoxide, dioxins, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which have been linked to respiratory problems and other health issues in local communities. 

A Story of Waste and Hope

Consider the story of Beatrice, a fish seller from Jamestown Beach in Accra. She walks down the shore every morning, carefully picking through the waste that washes ashore, often finding her catch mixed with discarded textiles. “The waste disturbs us,” she says. “When fishermen go fishing, they come back with fish mixed with plastic and textile waste. We have to remove all the garbage before selling it.”Beatrice’s story is not unique; it is one shared by countless others in Accra. Textile waste has infiltrated every part of their lives, from their markets to their beaches and likely even them, through contamination of the food chain. 

Yet, despite these daily struggles, there is hope. Organisations like Upcycle It Ghana are working tirelessly to turn this waste into a resource by training artisans and young people to repurpose discarded textiles into bags, accessories, and even upcycled fashion. However, it is important to recognise that, despite these efforts, the growing volume of textile waste means end-of-life solutions remain severely limited.

Less than 1% of textile waste is recycled into new clothing, while most materials, especially synthetic and blended fabrics, still have no effective recovery options. And even handling these materials could be harmful to workers because post-consumer polyester contains chemicals from dyes, finishes, detergents, coatings, flame retardants, microplastics and other additives. 

How Overproduction of Virgin Plastic and Fast Fashion Contributes to the Crisis

At the centre of the textile waste crisis is market distortion, the relentless flood of artificially cheap plastic feedstocks like polyester, acrylic and nylon into the fashion industry. These synthetics, derived from fossil fuels and highly subsidised, are now so inexpensive that they outprice natural fibres like cotton, wool and linen.

The result is a race to the bottom, brands cut costs to maximise profits and compete against cheap suppliers who often turn to these plastic fabrics. Yet the inherently low quality means they are designed for disposability rather than longevity. Garments are produced cheaply, worn only a few times and then given away. Studies show that the average time clothing is worn before disposal has declined, with as many as one in five fast-fashion products discarded after no more than 10 wears. A stark contrast to the clothing of previous generations, which was designed to last. 

This throwaway culture is not confined to wealthy countries. As discarded clothing is shipped to developing countries like Ghana, the cycle continues. In Kenya, it is estimated that 55,500 to 74,000 tonnes of textile waste are generated each year due to the flood of second-hand clothing imports. The poor quality of many of these garments, a direct result of the fast-fashion model, means they are often not reusable, contributing to the growing problem of textile waste.

This situation is compounded by the fact that local industries in these countries are unable to compete with the cheap, low-quality textiles flooding their markets. In Ghana, local textile industries have been forced to close or scale back, unable to compete with the influx of second-hand clothing. This leaves the country with a double burden: it imports waste and also loses out on the potential benefits of a thriving domestic textile industry.

What Needs to Change?

The solution to this crisis is not simple, but it starts with accountability and addressing the root cause: overproduction. 

Fast fashion brands must be held accountable for their role in this crisis. Brands that profit from the overproduction of cheap garments must take responsibility for the waste they create. There is an urgent need for binding national, regional, and global agreements to support Extended Producer Responsibility and hold producers legally accountable for the resources used, emissions generated, and waste produced across the entire lifecycle of clothing.

Another important step in addressing the textile waste crisis is ending the export of cheap, low-quality second-hand clothing to Africa and other destination countries. Countries in the Global North must stop using developing nations as dumping grounds and instead invest in local, meaningful solutions to manage their waste responsibly at source. Only clean, sorted material destined for legitimate reuse markets should be traded.

As the Basel Convention’s fifteenth meeting of the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG-15) in June considers options to address used textiles and textile waste within its work programme, there is a clear opportunity to take action to close this gap. Textile waste should be subject to the same baseline controls as other polluting and hazardous waste streams, including classification as “other waste” under Annex II of the Convention, making it subject to mandatory Prior Informed Consent procedures and additional control measures. This will preserve legitimate reuse and recycling markets while ensuring that mixed, contaminated or low-quality textile waste is properly controlled.

Consumers also need to be educated on the environmental impact of their clothing choices. By promoting sustainable fashion practices, such as buying quality second-hand or investing in durable garments, we can reduce demand for fast fashion and its waste.

Governments should be proactive in implementing transparency measures to track the routes, destinations, and fate of used clothes, and in enforcing quality checks at their ports for second-hand clothes, ensuring that only suitable garments are imported for legitimate reuse and recovery. A strict eco-design and detox strategy must be enforced by banning hazardous chemicals and phasing out fossil-fuel-based synthetic fibres in textile production and final products to shift to a truly circular, sustainable model. 

How Are You Contributing to Solving the Waste Crisis?

The global textile waste crisis is a daunting challenge, but it’s one we can solve, together. Real progress begins with the choices we make every day: buying less, choosing better, reusing more, and refusing to be trapped by the cycle of fast fashion. The time to act is now, because every conscious decision, no matter how small, helps build a more sustainable and just future!

References

Ahiable, E. (2021). Textile waste in Ghana: Impact on the environment and health. Journal of Environmental Studies, 15(3), 5-12.

Acquaye, A., & Manieson, J. (2023). Textile waste management practices in Ghana: Challenges and opportunities. Waste Management and Research, 31(1), 45-58.

Changing Markets Foundation. (2023). The impact of textile waste and microplastics on the environment. Retrieved from https://www.changingmarkets.org

Greenpeace. (2024). The impact of textile waste on the environment: Case studies from Africa. Greenpeace Africa.

Kantamanto Market and Environmental Pollution: The Role of Secondhand Clothing Trade in Ghana. (2022). Journal of African Environmental Research, 9(4), 35-47.

Mensah, L., & Agyemang, D. (2023). Textile waste from fashion shops and imported second-hand clothing in the Greater Kumasi Sub-Region of Ghana: A call for policy change. Environmental Challenges, 22(2), 57-70.

Ricketts, L. (2023). The Or Foundation’s advocacy for sustainable textile economies in Ghana. The Or Foundation. 

The post From the EU’s Closet to Africa’s Dumpsters: How Fast Fashion Fuels the Textile Waste Crisis in Africa first appeared on GAIA.

AFTER ANOTHER YEAR of wildfires, floods, heat waves, and extreme weather-induced evacuations, Indigenous communities are facing the brunt of devastating climate change impacts caused by fossil fuel extractivism, capitalism, and colonialism. Indigenous youth in particular are experiencing acute mental health impacts related to loss of land-based knowledge. 

Despite these impacts, Indigenous youth across Turtle Island continue to lead in the protection of their territories through approaches such as clean energy leadership, food sovereignty initiatives, land back movements, and international climate policy. However, their perspectives remain underrepresented within academic research and political decision-making. 

Youth Climate Corps

The Youth Climate Corps (YCC) is an emerging response to these overlapping crises. Open to Canadians aged 35 and under, the YCC equips young people with training and meaningful employment focused on climate mitigation, adaptation, and emergency response. As of Budget 2025, the federal Liberal government proposed a two-year YCC pilot, allocating $40 million over two years starting in 2026–27 to provide paid skills training for young Canadians to “quickly respond to climate emergencies, support recovery, and strengthen resilience in communities across the country.” While the federal government has announced the pilot, the program remains in the design phase, and decisions around implementation and governance have yet to be made — presenting a critical opportunity to ensure YCC upholds Indigenous sovereignty and supports existing Indigenous-led climate solutions from the outset.

The federal government has framed the program as a way to reduce youth unemployment while strengthening climate resilience and emergency response capacity. In the face of tariffs, AI-related job loss and a recession, the YCC can be thought of as a jobs guarantee, protecting young workers — who are often first laid off — from long-term wage loss, debt and economic instability. These pressures are particularly acute for Indigenous youth, who continue to face disproportionately high rates of unemployment, underinvestment, and barriers to culturally relevant training and employment opportunities.

Paradoxically, Canada faces both an unemployment crisis and a skilled labour shortage. Jobs in the green economy are growing rapidly, but there aren’t enough trained people to fill them. Labour market data shows over 327,000 jobs in the environmental and clean tech sector in 2021, an increase of 10.4 percent from 2020. A net-zero transition could create up to 40,000 new jobs by the end of the decade — representing emerging career possibilities that align with Indigenous-led climate solutions focused on renewable energy, land stewardship, food sovereignty, housing and climate resilience.

The contradiction is even sharper when considering public spending priorities. At scale, YCC could create nearly 20,000 full-time jobs annually with an investment of $1 billion a year.

This amount represents only a small fraction of the $594.8 billion federal budget and of the $29.6 billion in public financial support directed toward fossil fuel and petrochemical companies in 2024 alone. The program could be bolstered by a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies; the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that a 15 percent tax on these companies could generate $4.2 billion in revenue over five years. The same companies that are set to make a record $90 billion in excess profits due to the war in Iran. Redirecting even a portion of these profits toward Indigenous-led climate initiatives and youth employment would represent a meaningful investment in a just transition.

While Canada continues to funnel billions of dollars to the oil and gas sector, Indigenous communities and nations are leading climate solutions across Turtle Island. Indigenous communities are partners and leaders in 20 percent of Canada’s electricity-generating infrastructure — almost all of which are producing renewable energy. There are nearly 200 medium-to-large and over 2000 small-scale Indigenous-led clean energy projects in operation in Canada. Indigenous communities are simultaneously advancing a renewable energy transition, resisting new fossil fuel infrastructure, and prioritizing well-being. Many are undertaking initiatives to build food, water, housing, and energy security, strengthening community resilience and sovereignty in the process. 

YCC is an opportunity to invest directly in this existing leadership by supporting Indigenous youth in building skills, accessing meaningful employment, and continuing to expand community-led climate work that is already underway. Rather than imposing external solutions, a YCC could help scale intergenerational, land-based, and Indigenous-led climate solutions that are already building resilience and sovereignty despite often being implemented with limited resources and government support. 

Indigenous Youth Leadership

In June 2025, the federal government rushed through Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, granting Cabinet sweeping powers to fast-track “nation-building projects” at the expense of Indigenous rights and environmental protections. The false promise of “economic reconciliation” offered by industry and governments trades limited short-term financial benefits for environmental destruction, chronic health problems, and continued exploitation of people and the planet. Instead of supporting efforts towards self-determination and obtaining consent, governments and proponents are co-opting reconciliation through economic means, such as project participation, revenue-sharing, and procurement contracts. 

If a YCC is to be done right, we must avoid reproducing greenwashing narratives and prioritize Indigenous self-determination and existing Indigenous-led climate solutions already being successfully implemented. As it stands, the YCC is a unique opportunity to move beyond business as usual. 

Core components of the vision for a YCC focus on the innate responsibility to centre Indigenous knowledges, leadership, and sovereignty while building equity in historically underserved communities. 

As Indigenous peoples, we have always taken care of our lands and waters. With a YCC predicated on Indigenous self-determination, we can leverage large-scale funding to enhance work already underway. Providing additional funding towards green skills and capacity building at the national level would also signal fiscal and strategic support for Indigenous-led climate solutions. Through a YCC, we can create real momentum towards a just transition by intentionally investing in the leadership of Indigenous young people across the country. 

Indigenous youth are already leading climate advocacy and community resilience work because of their connection to the lands and waters, their relationships with their communities and cultures, and their sense of responsibility for future generations. As the YCC pilot is developed, the program must recognize and support the existing work of Indigenous youth, nations, and organizations. This requires moving beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to create meaningful, culturally relevant opportunities that reflect the distinct priorities, knowledge and leadership of Indigenous communities.

Indigenous youth are motivated to join the green workforce, but they continue to face systemic barriers to participation. With youth guidance, a YCC can provide the resources and opportunities to overcome these challenges.

1. For organizations like Sacred Earth, a YCC could provide critical funding to scale up Indigenous-led climate solutions. Capacity building and informed decision-making are major determinants of project success in Indigenous communities, and access to a YCC would strengthen communities’ financial capacity to lead and implement their own projects.
2. A YCC must support partnering organizations that are architecting this work themselves, such as Indigenous Clean Energy. Since 2016, Indigenous Clean Energy has supported approximately 500 Indigenous youth across the country in building green skills, accessing mentorship opportunities, and finding meaningful employment through programs like ImaGENation, Generation Power, and the 20/20 Catalyst Program. A YCC must not only consider new opportunities for our communities, but also how to sustain existing programs amid growing uncertainty in the federal funding landscape.
3. By prioritizing Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty through a YCC, this program gives communities the potential to define a “green job” for themselves and create culturally responsive climate solutions. For Indigenous communities and organizations like kâniyâsihk Culture Camps, having a green job encompasses land-based work, language and culture revitalization, and Indigenous food or energy sovereignty. A YCC program must allow communities to contextualize green jobs for themselves and allocate resources to grassroots, land-based, and community-led work.

As the YCC moves through the design phase, these priorities must be reflected in the program’s governance, funding and implementation. The following recommendations outline key considerations for ensuring the YCC upholds Indigenous self-determination and existing Indigenous-led climate solutions. 

The Way Forward: Green Jobs in a Good Way

 

1. Respecting Indigenous Knowledge and Experience

A YCC must centre diverse Indigenous knowledge(s) from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities across Turtle Island. Understanding these distinct lived experiences will support a YCC in applying a community-relevant framework for advancing a just transition.

It is imperative that a YCC learn from and support — not supplant — Indigenous-led projects that are revolutionizing the climate, environment, and renewable energy sector. Indigenous communities are already leading the way and have the experience to provide direction. 

2. Upholding Indigenous Governance and Sovereignty

The Canadian government must uphold Indigenous sovereignty during program design and implementation – going beyond consultation towards a Nation-to-Nation approach. This includes obtaining free, prior and informed consent before proceeding with any project on Indigenous territories. 

The guidance of an Indigenous council or advisory body can ensure that the program respects and aligns with diverse Indigenous worldviews, legal structures, and governance models. By working in true partnership, a YCC can honour and include First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities through equitable governance and decision-making processes.

While implementing the YCC program, Indigenous Nations and governments must have the ability to define green workforce priorities themselves. In practice, Indigenous communities accessing the YCC program should be able to define and decide which training and workforce opportunities are foregrounded.

3. Equity and Justice

A just transition is only “just” if it is led and informed by the communities who will be most affected by the climate crisis — particularly underrepresented demographics, including but not limited to Indigenous, Black, racialized, and disabled persons, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, newcomers, youth, and Elders. Prioritizing equitable and accessible opportunities through a YCC will be an ongoing process requiring consultation, partnership, and meaningful accommodations with and for communities. 

As one of the key demographics of this program, Indigenous youth must be meaningfully woven throughout the development and implementation of a YCC. A YCC cannot leave behind any youth – it should seek to provide culturally responsive support, while reducing barriers to participation. This includes investment in those transitioning away from extractive industries and who require reskilling for a green career pathway. 

4. Indigenous Workforce Development

Indigenous employment and cultural networks can be utilized to strengthen and streamline economic and workforce development. A YCC should partner with Indigenous businesses and trade networks to employ Indigenous youth in culturally appropriate, green careers — such as renewable energy, green housing, clean water initiatives, land sovereignty and food security. These initiatives benefit the wider community and are vital for health, well-being, and resilience in the face of impending climate disasters.

5. Sustainable Funding Sources

The Canadian government must sufficiently fund the engagement and design of the YCC program to meaningfully represent Indigenous communities accessing this resource.

To provide funding equitably, the YCC should specify that, after administrative costs, a portion of the funds should be allocated to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis youth, nations, organizations, and communities. To respect the sovereignty of Indigenous community partners, nations should have the autonomy to govern the funding and employment processes themselves. This may include the involvement of band councils, traditional forms of governance, Indigenous-led non-profit organizations, or other forms of Indigenous leadership. We recommend adopting funding approaches with the ability to work alongside Indigenous governance systems, rather than restrictive, colonial funding structures.

Citation:

Mendizabal, Serena and Aubrey-Anne Laliberte-Pewapisconias, Bushra Asghar, Farron Rickerby-Nishi, and Doug Hamilton-Evans. “The Youth Climate Corps and the Indigenous Green Jobs Revolution,” Yellowhead Institute. June 09 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/the-youth-climate-corps-and-the-indigenous-green-jobs-revolution

The post The Youth Climate Corps and the Indigenous Green Jobs Revolution appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

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Shell, previously known as Forthdeal Limited, subsequently as Royal Dutch Shell plc, and now hiding in plain sight as Shell plc after ditching the disgraced Royal Dutch moniker, has reportedly marched back into the legal arena in Australia, this time demanding more money in the long-running brawl over who should pay for the Northern Endeavour clean-up — the offshore decommissioning saga that has become a cautionary tale for anyone who thought selling ageing oil assets made the liabilities magically disappear.

According to Upstream, Shell has “upped the ante” in a decommissioning legal wrangle centred on the Northern Endeavour floating production, storage and offloading vessel, with the dispute involving former partners Woodside Energy and Paladin Resources. The article, by Amanda Battersby, was published on 8 June 2026 and frames the fight around costs tied to the Northern Endeavour FPSO.

The public record makes the story look even messier. Shell has reportedly launched a fresh claim of more than A$83 million in the Western Australian Supreme Court against Woodside and Paladin. That comes after an earlier claim of about A$86.6 million over levy payments linked to the same clean-up nightmare. Add interest, legal costs and future exposure, and this is no longer just a tidy invoice dispute. This is a fossil-fuel family argument with a taxpayer-funded ghost ship floating in the background.

The Northern Endeavour is not some minor bit of scrap with delusions of grandeur. It was a 274-metre FPSO formerly moored between the Laminaria and Corallina oil fields in the Timor Sea, about 550 kilometres northwest of Darwin. The Australian Government says there are nine oil wells on the seabed associated with the fields. After the former private owner collapsed, the Commonwealth took control of the facility and moved to decommission, disconnect, dispose of the FPSO and remediate the fields.

That is where the real fun begins — if your idea of fun is corporate archaeology performed with court documents and a very expensive shovel.

The basic argument, as reported publicly, is that Shell says it sold its interests in the Laminaria-Corallina assets to Woodside and Paladin back in 2005 under agreements that allegedly shifted environmental, abandonment, reclamation, remediation and restoration liabilities to the buyers. Shell says, in effect: we sold, you assumed, now reimburse us.

Woodside and Paladin, unsurprisingly, have not responded by throwing rose petals at Shell’s feet and reaching for the cheque book. The earlier reporting says both disputed responsibility. Hence the courtroom theatre.

The reason this matters beyond the three corporate names is that Northern Endeavour has become one of Australia’s defining offshore decommissioning fiascos. The Commonwealth created the Offshore Petroleum (Laminaria and Corallina Decommissioning Cost Recovery Levy), known as the OP Levy, to recover the costs of decommissioning and remediation from offshore petroleum production licence holders. The official line is simple: the public should not be left paying for these activities.

Which sounds sensible — until the industry starts arguing about which corporate pocket the bill should land in.

The Northern Endeavour story has all the ingredients of a classic late-life oil asset drama: ageing infrastructure, changing ownership, regulatory reform, collapsing operators, decommissioning complexity and a clean-up bill that appears allergic to staying small. The result is a legal wrangle where Shell, having paid levy assessments, is trying to pass the cost back to former counterparties under old sale agreements.

For the public, the bigger question remains brutally straightforward: how many times can oil companies sell, transfer, restructure and contract around liabilities before somebody is finally made to clean up the mess?

Because decommissioning is not a footnote. It is not an optional extra. It is the back-end cost of extracting hydrocarbons from the sea and leaving heavy industrial hardware behind. The Northern Endeavour case shows what happens when the end-of-life chapter is treated like tomorrow’s problem — until tomorrow arrives with lawyers, regulators and an invoice.

Shell’s position appears to be that the contracts say one thing. Woodside and Paladin appear to disagree. The court will have to decide what those old agreements actually mean, and whether Shell can claw back the money it says should never have been its burden.

But whatever the legal outcome, the optics are spectacularly grim for the industry. The public sees an old oil vessel. The government sees a decommissioning project. The regulator sees a hard lesson. The companies see a liability allocation dispute. And everyone else sees a familiar fossil-fuel magic trick: profits in the good years, legal footnotes in the bad ones.

The Northern Endeavour may be headed for dismantling, but the argument around it is very much still afloat.

SPOOF PR/SPIN SECTION: “A PROUD MOMENT IN RESPONSIBLE INVOICE REDIRECTION”

In a bold display of corporate sustainability, Shell today reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring that decommissioning costs are handled by whichever historical contract clause looks most persuasive under courtroom lighting.

A fictional Shell spokesperson, speaking from behind a tasteful wall of compliance language, said:

“Shell has always believed in responsible decommissioning, responsible partnerships and responsible reimbursement. We are proud to play our part in the energy transition by transitioning invoices to the entities we believe are contractually responsible for them.”

The spokesperson added that Shell’s legal action should not be viewed as a dispute, but as “a collaborative multi-party alignment process concerning legacy fiscal responsibility allocation.”

Woodside, in this entirely spoofed PR universe, responded:

“We remain committed to best-practice stakeholder engagement, which is why we are engaging with Shell through the traditional stakeholder engagement mechanism known as litigation.”

Paladin, meanwhile, was imagined standing quietly in the corner, clutching a 2005 agreement and whispering: “Please define ‘all’.”

The Australian taxpayer was unavailable for comment, having stepped outside to scream into the Timor Sea.

SPOOF BOT-REACTION / COMMENT SECTION

DecomBot3000:
“Asset sold. Liability detected. Historical contract clause activated. Commencing blame-allocation protocol.”

OffshoreRiskEnjoyer:
“So the oil came out in the easy years and the invoices came back in the courtroom years. Classic reservoir management.”

LegalEagleButMakeItOily:
“This is why lawyers keep both hard hats and microscopes.”

Taxpayer_404:
“I was told the levy means the public won’t pay. Lovely. Now please explain why I can still smell burning public money.”

FPSO_FanAccount:
“Northern Endeavour has had more plot twists than a streaming drama and somehow worse production values.”

CorporateSpinDetector:
“When three companies argue over who pays to clean up the old oil kit, the only guaranteed winner is the legal profession.”

TimorSeaTea:
“Imagine being 274 metres long, decommissioned, removed, and still causing boardrooms to sweat.”

ContractClauseGoblin:
“Somewhere in a 2005 sale agreement, one sentence is having the best week of its life.”

GreenwashGPT:
“Decommissioning is just circular economy, but with more subpoenas.”

Final bot verdict:
Northern Endeavour: physically leaving the field. Legally? Still moored.

SHELL UPS THE ANTE IN OZ DECOMMISSIONING LEGAL WRANGLE: THE NORTHERN ENDEAVOUR CLEAN-UP BILL THAT JUST WON’T DIE was first posted on June 8, 2026 at 9:58 am.
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The company with the biggest stake in the Wressle oil field has agreed a £1m loan from the site operator, Egdon Resources.

Wressle oil field in North Lincolnshire. Photo: Egdon Resources

Union Jack Oil announced in a statement to investors this morning the loan would provide it with “additional working capital for general purposes”.

The statement said the loan was secured against Union Jack’s 40% stake in the Wressle licences, PEDL180 and PEDL182, in North Lincolnshire.

Union Jack has previously reported that it was debt free. At the time of writing, shares in the company had fallen 2.78%.

The Wressle well produced an average of 119 barrels of oil per day for Union Jack during 2025, according to annual accounts published last month. The average oil price at the time was US$68.2 per barrel.

Loan terms

Under the loan terms, Union Jack must pay 60% of its free cash flow generated from Wressle each month. This will first be applied to unpaid interest and then to reduce the loan principal.

If free cash flow from Wressle was insufficient, interest for that month would be capitalised and added to the loan balance.

The loan must be repaid in full after 24 months. The interest rate is 5% per year.

Restrictions

The agreement also requires Union Jack to support Egdon’s role as the Wressle operator. Union Jack cannot “vote or act to remove or replace the lender as operator (except in cases of gross misconduct”.

If Union Jack wants to sell its interest in the Wressle licences, Egdon now has the right of first refusal before any third parties are approached. This will last for 12 months after the repayment date.

*Read the full position paper with detailed analysis and demands for all key negotiating topics here*

Climate Justice in an Age of Genocide, Militarism and Climate Breakdown

SB64 (the 64th meeting of the Subsidiary Bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, from June 8-18 in Bonn, Germany) convenes at a moment when the contradictions shaping the international climate regime have become impossible to ignore. Across the world, communities are confronting escalating climate impacts alongside deepening militarisation, debt crises, economic instability, shrinking civic space, rising authoritarianism and the continued concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of states, corporations and financial actors. The climate crisis is unfolding not in isolation, but resulting from a global political order structured by histories and ongoing acts of colonisation, imperialism, racial capitalism, patriarchy, extractivism and the continued sacrifice of peoples and ecosystems in the pursuit of profit for a few.

DCJ joins social justice movements around the world standing in solidarity with the peoples currently resisting the imperial attacks by the nexus of the U.S.-Israel and its allies across the world, especially Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Haití, Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. We stand in solidarity with peoples across the world who have been on the receiving end of imperial wars, invasions, attacks to their sovereignty and their right to self-determination. We condemn the subjection of civilians to warfare for territory, natural resources, or religious conflict anywhere and everywhere. We stand in strong opposition to the perpetuation of human and environmental suffering across the world.  We commit to a solidarity not based in words but in actions. There cannot be emancipation and liberation with ongoing imperial and colonial capitalism, which must be our first priority to dismantle.

This context matters because climate negotiations are not politically neutral spaces. They are shaped by the same global inequalities that produced the crisis. The countries and corporations most responsible for climate breakdown continue to hold disproportionate power over the terms of climate action, while the peoples and communities most affected continue to fight for their rights and justice. Every major issue on the agenda for SB64, from climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage to just transition, fossil fuel phase-out, mitigation and false solutions, reflects a broader struggle over rights, responsibility, redistribution and the future of multilateralism.

The ongoing genocide in Palestine, carried out by Israel with the military, political and economic backing of the United States and its allies, has laid bare the brutality and hypocrisy of the present international order. The destruction of Palestinian life, land, food systems, water infrastructure, energy systems, homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is also a profound indictment of an international system that claims to uphold human rights, international law and multilateral cooperation while enabling impunity for occupation, apartheid and genocide. For climate justice movements, this moment demands political clarity: there can be no climate justice while genocide is normalised, while occupation is greenwashed, and while systems of militarism and fossil capitalism continue to destroy both peoples and ecosystems.

The relationship between militarism and climate breakdown is not incidental. Fossil fuels remain central to modern military power, geopolitical conflicts and domination, and global economic control. Military operations depend on oil, gas and petrochemical supply chains; fossil fuel revenues and infrastructure shape conflicts and geopolitical alliances; and the military-industrial complex absorbs vast public resources that could otherwise be directed towards climate finance, adaptation, public services and just transition. At the same time, war and occupation destroy the very systems that communities need to survive climate impacts: land, water, food, healthcare, housing, energy and social infrastructure.

This is why the climate crisis must be understood as part of a broader crisis of power imbalance. The same global system that drives emissions also drives war, displacement, debt, extraction and ecological destruction. It is a system that allows fossil fuel corporations to profit while communities lose homes and livelihoods; that allows governments to expand military budgets while claiming there is no money for climate finance; that allows financial institutions to enforce austerity while climate-vulnerable countries are forced to borrow to recover from disasters they did not cause.

The Global South continues to bear the brunt of this injustice. Countries and communities that contributed least to the climate crisis are facing the most severe impacts while being denied the resources necessary to respond. Many developing countries are trapped in cycles of debt servicing, austerity and extractive dependency that restrict their ability to invest in adaptation, public services, food sovereignty, energy transformation and resilient development. International financial institutions, unequal trade rules, intellectual property barriers and investor protections continue to constrain the policy space required for a just transition. In this context, calls for ambition that do not address finance, debt, technology and historical responsibility will become new forms of burden-shifting.

COP30 in Belém created important openings, but it did not resolve these contradictions. The establishment of the Just Transition Mechanism represented a significant victory for developing countries, workers, Indigenous Peoples, feminist movements, youth, frontline communities and climate justice organisations. It reflected years of organising to ensure that transition is not reduced to market-led technological substitution but understood as a question of justice, rights, livelihoods and systems transformation. The roadmap process on transitioning away from fossil fuels also opened a political space to confront the root cause of the climate crisis. Progress on adaptation and related implementation processes created additional possibilities for advancing rights-based and people-centred climate action.

Yet COP30 also demonstrated the continued resistance of developed countries to fulfilling their obligations. Finance remained inadequate. Article 9.1 continued to be contested and diluted. Adaptation and loss and damage remained underfunded. Fossil fuel interests and false solutions continued to shape climate action. Carbon markets, offsets, carbon capture, financialised nature schemes and other mechanisms continued to be promoted as substitutes for real emissions reductions, public finance and system change. The outcomes of Belém therefore created both opportunities and risks. SB64 is where many of these political battles now move from recognition to operationalisation.

This distinction is critical. The fight after Belém is no longer only about whether Parties acknowledge the need for climate finance, just transition, adaptation, loss and damage or fossil fuel phase-out. It is about how those commitments are interpreted, governed, financed and implemented. History shows that implementation is often where justice is diluted. Commitments secured through struggle can be narrowed through technical processes, weakened through procedural delays, captured by corporate interests or redirected towards market mechanisms. SB64 must therefore be approached as a political battleground over the future direction of climate action.

For DCJ, the demands ahead of SB64 are rooted in a clear understanding of climate justice. Developed countries must fulfil their obligations under Article 9.1 and provide public, grant-based, predictable and adequate finance to developing countries. Adaptation and loss and damage must be financed as matters of rights and reparative justice. The Just Transition Mechanism must be operationalised in ways that support systemic transformation across energy, food, care, labour, public services, critical minerals and development pathways. The transition away from fossil fuels must be rapid, equitable, anti-extractivist and grounded in the political vision emerging from Santa Marta. Article 6 and other false solutions must not be allowed to delay real action or create new markets for pollution and dispossession. Mitigation must remain anchored in equity, CBDR-RC and means of implementation rather than becoming another tool for shifting burdens onto developing countries.

SB64 must also defend the integrity of climate multilateralism itself. This means protecting civic space, ensuring meaningful participation of rights-holders and movements, and confronting corporate capture within the UNFCCC. It means recognising that fossil fuel corporations, big polluters and actors complicit in militarism, occupation and ecological destruction cannot be allowed to define climate solutions or climate action. It means understanding that climate governance will lose legitimacy if it continues to treat the demands of the most affected as negotiable while protecting the interests of those most responsible.

The climate crisis is often described as a crisis of emissions. It is that, but it is also far more. It is a crisis of colonial history, economic organisation, political power and moral accountability. Addressing it requires more than technical implementation. It requires reparations, redistribution, democratic participation, public finance, energy sovereignty, food sovereignty, gender justice, Indigenous sovereignty and the dismantling of the systems that have made both people and planet expendable.

This position paper sets out DCJ’s priorities for SB64 from that perspective. It is written in the understanding that climate justice will not be delivered through incremental adjustments to an unjust system. It will require confronting the structures that created the crisis and building pathways rooted in collective survival, dignity and liberation. Systems change, not climate change.

Climate Finance Work Programme and Article 9.1

Climate finance remains the defining test of whether the climate regime is prepared to uphold the principles of equity and historical responsibility agreed at Rio in the 1992 UNFCCC. Developed countries continue to fall far short of their obligations despite overwhelming evidence that sufficient resources exist to finance transformative climate action. The struggle over Article 9.1 is not merely a debate about financial flows. It is a struggle over responsibility itself.

As articulated in its official submission, DCJ rejects attempts to frame climate finance as aid, philanthropy or voluntary support. Climate finance is an obligation rooted in historical responsibility and climate debt. Developed countries must provide public, grant-based, predictable and adequate finance consistent with their commitments under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement. Climate finance must also be understood within a broader framework of reparative justice that includes debt cancellation, reform of the international financial architecture and mechanisms to ensure that those who have profited most from climate destruction contribute proportionately to addressing its consequences.

Adaptation Finance and the Global Goal on Adaptation

Adaptation is a matter of survival for billions of people across the Global South. Yet adaptation finance remains dramatically inadequate despite rapidly growing needs. Communities are already confronting severe climate impacts while lacking access to the resources necessary to strengthen resilience and protect livelihoods.

DCJ calls for a substantial increase in public, grant-based adaptation finance and rejects efforts to rely on private finance and market mechanisms. Adaptation must be grounded in rights, participation, Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty and community leadership. The continued development of the Global Goal on Adaptation must support implementation rather than becoming an exercise in technocratic measurement detached from lived realities.

Loss and Damage

The climate crisis is already causing irreversible harms that cannot be prevented through mitigation or adaptation alone. Communities are losing homes, livelihoods, ecosystems, cultures and territories as climate impacts intensify. COP27’s establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) represented an important political victory, but current levels of finance remain wholly inadequate compared to actual needs.

DCJ reiterates that loss and damage finance must be understood as reparative finance. It must be new, additional, grant-based and distinct from adaptation and mitigation finance. Polluter-pays mechanisms, including taxes on fossil fuel extraction, extreme wealth and corporate windfall profits, should be advanced as important sources of finance.

Operationalising the Just Transition Mechanism

The establishment of the Just Transition Mechanism at COP30 represented a significant achievement. However, the creation of a mechanism alone does not guarantee justice. A central question in Bonn is whether the way SB64 defines and designs the Mechanism will support transformative change or merely manage the social consequences of existing economic models.

DCJ rejects narrow approaches that reduce just transition to energy sector restructuring or workforce adjustment. Just transition must encompass food systems, care economies, public services, critical minerals, workers’ rights, Indigenous sovereignty and democratic control over resources. The Mechanism must be supported by adequate finance and meaningful participation by workers, Indigenous Peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, women, youth and frontline communities.

Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels

COP28’s commitment in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels marked an important breakthrough, but implementation remains contested. The “roadmap” process initiated under the Brazilian COP30 Presidency (as opposed to any agreed mandate by all countries) must not become a vehicle for delaying action or reproducing extractivist development models under new forms.

Drawing on the political vision emerging from Santa Marta, DCJ calls for a transition rooted in justice, sovereignty, care and democratic control. The transition away from fossil fuels must not be used to justify new forms of extraction, including the expansion of critical mineral supply chains that sacrifice communities and ecosystems in the Global South. Climate justice requires confronting both fossil fuels and the systems of power that sustain them.

Article 6 and False Solutions

Climate justice movements continue to confront the expansion of false solutions that allow polluters to delay structural transformation while claiming climate leadership. Carbon markets, offsets, carbon capture technologies, geoengineering and the financialisation of nature all risk entrenching existing power structures while failing to address the root causes of climate breakdown.

The continued promotion of false solutions reflects the influence of fossil fuel interests and corporate actors within climate governance. SB64 must resist efforts to expand reliance in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) on market-based approaches and instead prioritise real solutions rooted in public accountability, food sovereignty, Indigenous stewardship, community-controlled renewable energy and systemic transformation.

Mitigation Work Programme

The Mitigation Work Programme must remain firmly grounded in equity and CBDR-RC. Developing countries have repeatedly raised concerns regarding attempts to use the MWP as a vehicle for shifting mitigation burdens onto countries least responsible for the climate crisis while developed countries continue to evade obligations on finance and support.

Mitigation ambition cannot be separated from means of implementation. Climate finance, technology transfer, debt justice and policy space remain essential prerequisites for equitable climate action.

Cross-Cutting Priorities

Across all negotiating tracks, DCJ calls for climate action grounded in equity, historical responsibility, human rights, Indigenous sovereignty, feminist climate justice, democratic participation and protection from corporate capture. Climate governance must strengthen civic space, ensure meaningful participation by rights-holders and adopt robust conflict-of-interest policies that prevent fossil fuel interests and big polluters from shaping climate action.

The Challenge Before SB64

A central challenge facing SB64 is not the absence of solutions. Communities, movements and frontline peoples have long advanced pathways capable of addressing both climate breakdown and social injustice. The challenge is whether governments are prepared to confront the structures of power and privilege that continue to benefit from the crisis.

For DCJ, climate action must be rooted in reparative justice, international solidarity and systemic transformation. Anything less will preserve the unequal and unjust systems that created the climate crisis while leaving its underlying causes intact. SB64 must therefore advance implementation in ways that strengthen accountability, uphold historical responsibility and support the system change grounded in the peoples led solutions necessary to secure a just, equitable, healthy life and planet for all.

*Read the full position paper with detailed analysis and demands for all key negotiating topics here*

The post SB64 POSITION PAPER: Advancing Climate Justice in an Age of Crisis appeared first on Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.