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Registered nurses at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, Calif. will hold an informational picket on Monday, Aug. 24, to condemn the layoffs of critical support staff, which will jeopardize patient care.

The Trump administration wants you to believe repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule is about wildfire safety and local control. Its own environmental review says otherwise.

On August 19, the U.S. Forest Service released a 333-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) alongside a proposed rule to strip road-building and logging protections from 44.7 million acres of national forest, nearly the size of North Dakota. Buried inside that document, written by the agency’s own scientists, is the truth about what repeal would actually do: increase the risk of wildfire starts, push hundreds of already-struggling species further into decline, degrade drinking water for millions of Americans, and cost taxpayers and rural communities money.

Wildlife will suffer

The Forest Service’s preliminary biological assessment found that its preferred alternative (rescinding the Roadless Rule entirely) is “likely to adversely affect” 327 threatened and endangered species and 71 designated critical habitats. Add in the agency’s broader sensitive-species review, and the number of species facing likely harm climbs to nearly 3,500. The northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, grizzly bear, bull trout, and multiple salmon and steelhead populations all show up on the list of species the government expects this rule to hurt.

The DEIS itself points out that new roads fragment habitat: the agency’s citations show a 42 percent decline in southern mountain caribou abundance for every one percent increase in nearby road density. One experimental study found a 25 percent drop in bird abundance when road noise was introduced to a previously roadless area.

A Northern Spotted Owl; Kyle Sullivan, BLM

Wildfire risk may not decrease

The Trump administration’s central argument for repealing the rule is that it will help fight wildfires by making it easier to build roads for fuel treatment. The DEIS undercuts that story. Its own fire analysis states that “as the density of roads increases so does the probability, number, and frequency of wildfire ignitions,” and that roadless areas currently see fewer, less frequent wildfire starts than other national forest land. The document also concedes that budget and terrain constraints would make any real gain in fuel-treatment capacity “modest.” In other words, the rule the administration is selling as a wildfire fix could actually increase wildfire risk, according to its own scientists.

Wildfire mitigation work in the Klamath National Forest; USFS photo by Kevin S. Abel

The math doesn’t add up

The DEIS undermines the economic case for repeal as well. It projects the rule could generate $5 to $11 million a year in new timber revenue nationally. Meanwhile, the Forest Service is already sitting on a $7 billion road maintenance backlog, and the agency’s own analysis admits that timber revenue “would not be sufficient to cover the costs of constructing and maintaining all new roads” the rule would enable. New road construction in the steep, remote terrain typical of roadless areas runs anywhere from $80,000 to more than $2 million per mile. Repealing the rule would also harm recreation economies in the West. The DEIS estimates $9 million or more a year in lost visitor spending in communities near affected forests, on top of degraded scenery and backcountry access across millions of acres.

Tribal values are at stake

The DEIS also documents that Tribal consultation found widespread opposition to the repeal. The government summary states that “the majority sentiment among Tribal governments consulted is opposition to the proposed rescission,” with Tribes citing threats to sacred sites, treaty-protected hunting and fishing rights, and the ecological health of ancestral homelands. The DEIS also acknowledges that road construction and logging “could potentially have long-term negative impacts” on historic and archaeological sites nationwide.

Logging in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests; USFS photo by Lance Cheung

The public opposes the repeal

A national survey of 1,200 likely voters conducted for The Pew Charitable Trusts by Susquehanna Polling and Research in December 2025 found voters support the Roadless Rule by 76 percent to 13 percent, and oppose the Forest Service’s plan to rescind it by a similar margin, with majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike favoring conservation of roadless national forest over new logging and mining access. The public expressed overwhelming opposition to the Roadless Rule repeal when the Trump administration first floated the idea in 2025. A Center for Western Priorities analysis of public comments submitted during last year’s preliminary rulemaking process found over 99 percent of commenters opposed rescinding the rule.

Analysis of public comments submitted in response to initial Roadless Rule repeal proposal; Center for Western Priorities

What happens next?

The formal comment period for the proposed rule is open now, and it’s likely the public’s last real chance to weigh in before the Trump administration acts. The agency published the proposed rule and the DEIS together in the Federal Register on August 20, opening a comment period that closes on September 21, which is an unusually short timeframe for a rule of this scale. Comments can be submitted at regulations.gov under docket FS-2025-0001. The Forest Service has not announced a timeline for issuing a final rule once the comment period closes.

The post The Forest Service’s own review finds repealing the Roadless Rule could increase wildfire risk and harm communities appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The government has unveiled its revised planning blueprint for England, with key changes to shape onshore oil and gas decisions.

The new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has:

• Removed a requirement to give “great weight” to the economic benefits of onshore oil and gas proposals
• Removed a previous requirement to “plan positively” for onshore oil and gas developments
• Introduced a new policy to refuse onshore oil and gas extraction proposals except in defined circumstances (see more below)

The previous policy on restoration and financial bonds for oil and gas sites is unchanged.

A year ago, nine environmental campaign organisations urged the government to end planning policies which they said favoured fossil fuels (details). They said the previous policies were “dangerous for the climate” and “unfair to communities”.

The government said the new NPPF policy on minerals sought to ensure a sufficient supply, “while restricting peat, coal and onshore oil and gas extraction for environmental reasons”.

The new NPPF replaces a version published in 2012 and revised between 2018 and 2024.

A public consultation on the new version ran from December 2025-March 2026.

National_Planning_Policy_Framework August 2026Download

“Great weight” gone

Previous versions of the NPPF required decisionmakers to give “great weight” to the benefits of mineral extraction to the economy.

This general policy, M3 (1), now reworded to “substantial weight”, remains. But the NPPF states specifically that it does not apply to onshore oil and gas projects. The new NPPF also no longer includes a requirement to “plan positively” for onshore oil and gas.

The government said this “represents a policy change for oil and gas”. It said:

“We are proposing this change in recognition of the need to transition away from using fossil fuels in order to reduce climate change impacts.”

In the public consultation, 45% agreed to the removal of oil and gas from policy M3, 14% disagreed and 42% neither agreed nor disagreed.

Restrictions on approval

A new policy, M5 (2), requires that proposals involving onshore oil and gas extraction or coal workings should be refused unless they are necessary.

One of the exceptions applies specifically to oil and gas:

“to facilitate the exploration, appraisal and production in an area where the North Sea Transition Authority [the industry regulator] has granted petroleum rights, including licensed areas”.

This formalises the current requirement that oil and gas development is allowed only in licensed areas.

But it does not mean that all proposals in licensed areas should necessarily be approved.

The government said:

“there was broad support for aligning national planning policy with wider government objectives on climate change and the transition to a low-carbon economy”.

In a public consultation, 36% agreed with the M5 policy. 20% disagreed and 44% neither agreed nor disagreed.

Impacts of mineral development

A new policy, M4, brings together previous requirements on impacts.

This states proposals for mineral development should:

• Not have unacceptable adverse impact on the natural and historic environment, human health or aviation safety
• Take into account the national decision-making policies in the NPPF
• Include the result of any cumulative effect of multiple impacts from individual sites and/or from a number of sites in a locality

Proposals should also ensure unavoidable noise, dust and particle emissions and any vibrations from blasting will be controlled, mitigated or removed at source and that appropriate noise limits are established for extraction near noise-sensitive properties.

Restoration and bonds

Policy M4 also requires decisionmakers to continue to use planning conditions to ensure restoration and aftercare is carried out at the earliest opportunity and to high environmental standards.

On restoration bonds, the existing policy also remains:

“Bonds or other financial guarantees to underpin planning conditions should only be sought in exceptional circumstances”.

Ottawa’s August announcement of its intention to fast-track the West Coast pipeline proposal marks the latest in a series of interventions designed to facilitate oil and gas expansion in Canada. Paired with its recent push for major pension funds to invest in new oil and gas infrastructure, the establishment of the Canada Strong Fund, and other measures, Canada’s federal government is elevating oil and gas expansion as a nation-building endeavour. More than winning residual demand for oil and gas, the country appears to be betting on demand growth in key Asian markets, encouraged by extraordinary market conditions today.

Yet, a fundamental question remains: is oil and gas expansion in the best interest of financial stakeholders? Beneath rhetoric of energy exceptionalism and oil and gas demand growth, the numbers tell a different story.

The same energy crisis that makes Canadian supply look attractive today risks accelerating a market shift away from fossil fuel imports.

Through a short-term lens, oil and gas expansion in Canada may appear lucrative. With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, producers operating outside of the Persian Gulf are reaping steep windfalls as global supply tightens. However, the fundamentals of new projects fall short in the face of long-term headwinds.

Oil and gas expansion requires significant upfront capital expenditure to be economically viable, supported by sufficient market demand and prices decades from now. The oil and gas growth narrative in Canada assumes Asian markets, in particular, will absorb long-term export growth.

The accelerating rollout of cheaper and more secure alternatives to oil and gas imports turns this assumption on its head. Asia is electrifying five times faster than the West, while ramping up renewable energy capacity faster than the rest of the world (see Figure 1)[1] – undermining demand for oil and gas in the process. Globally, a range of energy scenarios see demand for oil and gas peaking by 2030 and the mid-2030s, respectively. Reflecting this, investment in clean energy systems already roughly doubles that in fossil fuels.[2] The rise of consolidation among oil and gas majors globally suggests many companies are waking up to the immense transformation of the energy system underway.[3]

Figure 1: Asia is running ahead of the rest of the world on electrotech.

Source: Ember (2026)

Crucially, the current Middle East conflict — while increasing the relative attractiveness of Canadian producers today – may undercut the long-term market demand for Canadian hydrocarbons.

Geopolitical tensions appear to be accelerating Asia’s rapid electrification and renewables buildout, as price-sensitive consumers, businesses, and policymakers confront energy affordability and availability challenges stemming from the region’s high dependence on fossil fuel imports. Across Asia, the doubling of China’s solar PV exports in March 2026, the cancellation of certain LNG-related projects, the fast-tracking of renewable and electricity storage systems, and the restarting of nuclear reactors illustrate this shift.[4]

For LNG specifically, a wave of new projects further threatens to compress prices – compounding the energy transition risk of oil and gas demand destruction. With ~254 million tonnes of LNG expected to come online by 2030, futures markets are seeing LNG prices of $10/MMBtu and below as soon as 2028.[5] At this price, our analysis suggests under-construction and proposed LNG projects in Canada may fail to compete. Simultaneously, LNG price volatility is likely to deter importers from sinking significant capex into regasification infrastructure.

Market uncertainty in coming decades casts doubt on the value-add of potential new oil and gas projects in Canada…

Structural market uncertainty matters to companies and their investors. Investment decisions made today lock oil and gas companies – and their financiers – into projects whose economics depend largely on oil and gas prices decades into the future. Findings from CTI’s Fading Fortunes suggest the extent of this exposure varies: certain Canadian producers face relatively greater risk of value destruction from new projects than others, depending on how cost-competitive their project portfolios are.

Figure 2 summarises the impact of different investment strategies on the upstream oil and gas value of 10 of Canada’s largest producers. The analysis assesses whether investment in new projects adds or destroys value by comparing two growth investment cases against a Depletion case in which no new projects are developed. The “High” investment case (red) reflects business-as-usual “BAU” investment in new projects; the “Managed” investment case (orange) restricts new investment to lower-cost options.

The analysis tests these investment cases under a fast, moderate, and slow transition scenario. The commodity prices tied to these scenarios – while lower than the elevated prices of the 2026 energy crisis – reflect potential long-term prices in the 2030s as markets normalise and oil and gas demand substitution continues.

Figure 2: NPV impact of High and Managed investment relative to Depletion, by Canadian O&G companies under a range of commodity price scenarios.

Sources: Rystad Energy, CTI analysis

Across these 10 companies, downside risk exposure under a fast transition scenario is approximately double the upside potential under a slow transition scenario. Downside risk exposure is particularly pronounced for companies reliant on new gas projects to drive future production.

…yet, financial stakeholders are making long-duration capital bets based on market conditions today.

Canada is continuing to commit capital to assets with multi-decade lives, based on expectations of Asian demand growth for oil and gas imports – precisely as Asia expands clean and homegrown alternatives. Capital decisions are being made based on the extraordinary oil and gas market of 2026, when the financed infrastructure must withstand markets that may look very different through the 2030s and 2040s.

An examination of Canada’s banking system illustrates how this bet is being financed. Canada’s Big Five banks (comprising  Royal Bank of Canada “RBC”, Toronto-Dominion Bank “TD”, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce “CIBC”, Bank of Montreal “BMO”, and Scotiabank) remain among the top financiers globally in terms of lending and underwriting of debt and equity issuances in the oil and gas sector.[6] This financing is often well above average relative to the banks’ size,  compared to their peers. Moreover, the rollback of oil and gas financing policies and emissions targets at several of the Big Five suggests a growing appetite to continue financing oil and gas expansion well into the future.

At a high level, Canada’s Big Five banks appear to have diverged sharply in their response to transition risk exposure from oil and gas financing in recent years. RBC and Scotiabank dropped their 2030 emission reduction targets (and the latter dropped its 2050 net-zero target); simultaneously, they increased their financing of oil and gas expansion companies by  ~8% and ~2%, respectively, from 2024 to 2025. In contrast, CIBC, TD, and BMO Financial Group decreased such financing by ~9%, 7%, and 20%, respectively, over this period.

However, these headline figures do not capture more granular shifts in financing. A CTI analysis of data from the Banking on Climate Chaos Coalition shows upstream expansion financing for nine of Canada’s largest upstream producers in 2024 and 2025, broken down by bank (Figure 3).[7]

Figure 3: Big Five and other bank financing of oil and gas expansion across large oil and gas companies in Canada (2024-2025).

Sources: Banking on Climate Chaos Coalition, CTI analysis

Viewing upstream expansion-related bank financing (Figure 3) alongside the risk profile of upstream project portfolios (Figure 2), it is evident that all of the Big Five have increased upstream expansion financing for certain companies with high-risk upstream project portfolios.

Among Canadian oil and gas companies assessed by CTI, Big Five financing increased most sharply for ARC Resources. Each bank increased its upstream expansion financing for ARC by between 80% to 670%, contrasting sharply with the ~60% reduction in financing by non-Big Five banks. CTI analysis suggests a high level of downside risk exposure within ARC’s upstream project portfolio: under a fast-paced transition scenario, ARC’s potential new upstream projects risk reducing upstream value by ~60%, relative to a scenario in which the company invests in no new projects. Big Five financing also increased for Strathcona and Whitecap, despite the significant downside risk exposure of their project portfolios.

Risk from upstream oil and gas expansion exposes a broad range of stakeholders, with cascading effects.

The financial risk exposure of oil and gas expansion in Canada extends well beyond oil and gas companies and their financiers. The same commodity price assumptions that expose bank financing to risk also expose equity investments and government revenues.

Ultimately, value at risk from new upstream projects puts pressure on the credit quality of Canadian oil and gas companies, with potential implications for national financial stability and lending to the broader Canadian economy.

Risk of asset stranding within the upstream oil and gas sector also exposes midstream oil and gas assets – including pipelines – to lower-than-expected throughput volumes and revenues. This risk within midstream activities undermines the financial viability of proposed new pipelines, which may cost Canadian taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.[8]

Continued dependence on the oil and gas sector for economic growth also exposes certain provinces to fiscal risk. Findings from CTI’s Petro-Provinces at Risk suggest a moderate-paced energy transition could eliminate over 80% of Canadian provincial governments’ expected revenue from upstream oil and gas over the next decade. Export Development Canada’s potentially growing exposure to major projects puts federal tax dollars at risk as well.

What does this mean for Canadian stakeholders?

• For policymakers and regulators: Ottawa and Alberta’s push for oil and gas expansion appears disconnected from the economic reality facing the sector. Expanding the oil and gas system is very different from – and riskier than – continuing to operate existing assets alone. Consider whether the national strategy reflects a realistic set of assumptions around long-term market conditions, and what role the country could play in an emerging electrotech system. Further diversification of the economy could reduce exposure to transition risk from the oil and gas sector while offering opportunities to lead in a new energy landscape.
• For banks: As key markets rapidly transform, can lending portfolios withstand a faster-than-anticipated energy transition? Consider how to adjust financing to a future where demand for oil and gas may be significantly lower than today.
• For investors: Asset managers should assess and make investment decisions based on a realistic range of long-term demand scenarios. Pension funds are particularly exposed to transition-related financial risks from oil and gas portfolio companies, due to the decades-long time horizon of their investment portfolios.

Conclusion

The oil and gas sector has played an important economic role in Canada for many years. But the revenues and jobs it generated in the past are not guaranteed in the future. As technology changes exponentially, fossil fuel expansion in Canada leaves oil and gas companies and their financial stakeholders exposed to a growing risk of value destruction. Prime Minister Carney and financial stakeholders must decide whether they are willing to bet Canada’s fortunes on static assumptions, and what role Canada will play in an emerging energy system of the future.

 

________________________

[1] Ember, Electric Asia (June 2026) pp. 12, 15.

[2] IEA, World Energy Investment 2026 (2026), p. 202.

[3] CTI, The Quiet Retreat: Why the oil and gas industry is implementing its own decline, even as the IEA resurrects an old growth scenario (November 2025).

[4] Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), The current state of LNG in Canada (July 2026).

[5] IEEFA, The current state of LNG in Canada (July 2026).

[6] Banking on Climate Chaos Coalition, Banking on Climate Chaos 2026 (May 2026), p. 25.

[7] Analysis excludes Imperial Oil due to lack of available data on financing.

[8] Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that Canadian taxpayers may potentially cover 90% of the estimated $35.2-$43.7bn cost of a new crude oil pipeline.

 

 

The post What energy world is Canada betting on? appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

09-04 * 13:00 - GARDA Working Group meeting #8 (Bea)

If all food waste in the US found a second life as biogas and compost, this would almost completely offset its climate impact. But, it would also create a microplastic problem spread over a gigantic area.

This is the catch-22 described in a new study from Nature Food, which explores both the massive potential and the overlooked risks of tackling food waste. There is however a solution, say its authors, which is to design packaging and get much better at separating our waste.

The research, produced by the University of Vermont, was inspired by local recycling laws which require Vermont businesses and residents to keep food waste out of their bins, ensuring that landfills remain food-scrap-free. What would that look like, scaled up to the whole of the US? The researchers found out by gathering food waste recycling data from across the US, then running a detailed lifecycle analysis on anaerobic digestion to make biogas, and food waste composting measures. For each one they looked at the associated climate emissions, nitrogen and phosphorus loading on waterways, and plastic pollution. Then they compared these two recycling measures with the alternative and all its associated impacts: dumping food waste in a landfill. 

This revealed that food recycling brings some seriously big wins for climate and nutrient pollution. Firstly, it would reduce the climate burden of food waste by between 89 and 99% in the US. Converting food waste into biogas and compost cuts nitrogen pollution by between 49 and 54%, and phosphorus loading by 78 to 98%, compared to current landfill-focused measures. 

However there’s a huge polluting underbelly to this otherwise logical solution: that is the 20,000 extra tons of plastic pollution that would be tilled into the soil as compost and organic byproducts from anaerobic digestion each year. How does plastic even come into it? Because so much of our food is now coated and packaged in this material, and it is a challenge to completely remove it. 

 

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Much of our food goes bad while still encased in plastic, and people can’t always be relied upon to peel plastic off rotting food and put it into a different bin. Equipment designed to separate old food and plastic in commercial settings involves a degree of mechanical error, which could result in potentially industrial scales of plastic entering food waste streams. Ultimately, countrywide food waste recycling would increase plastic soil pollution “by an order of magnitude, even with highly effective (99% efficient) separation technologies in place,” the researchers write. 

So how to unpick this mess? A starting point would be to design better packaging, and the researchers find that encasing our food in biodegradable materials would decrease the 100-year accumulation rate of plastic in agricultural soils by up to 99%. But biodegradable materials aren’t the whole solution and they bring challenges of their own. 

Others may argue that the more effective approach lies in reducing how much single-use packaging we use, and questioning how much of it we need in the first place — a solution that requires global systems change, far beyond the US.

Porterfield et. al. “Food waste recycling in the USA can reduce climate and nutrient pollution impacts yet risks plastic accumulation in soils.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: Based on Karolina Grabowska/Unsplash

A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

For nearly a year now, Food Tank has been bringing our live storytelling series “Voices of Farmers: A Love Story” around the world.

On sold-out stages across three continents just in the past year alone—including Sundance, London Climate Action Week, SXSW, Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Climate Week NYC, and Adelaide Fringe in Australia—farmers have shared moving personal stories of deep connections to the land and to our food.

I love this storytelling style, because it accomplishes something bigger than just a one-night event. For farmers, it’s a launchpad to help audiences understand the many ways farmers power the food system, nourish their communities, and lead climate-smart innovation. And each of us listening can channel the emotion and passion we’re hearing onstage into transformative action steps in our own communities and professional worlds.

Next Tuesday, Aug. 25, we’re heading to Minneapolis for Celebrating Minnesota’s Farmers: A Love Story, in partnership with the City of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and Niman Ranch. The event starts at 6 p.m. at the gorgeous Minneapolis Central Library, and you can reserve your FREE spot by CLICKING HERE.

Our farmer storytellers include fourth-generation organic dairy farmer Emily Zweber, food systems advocate and urban farmer Sina War, regenerative farmer and on-the-ground educator Trisha Zachman, organic farmer and trailblazing Hmong entrepreneur Mhonpaj Lee, third-generation Cameroonian farmer Anita Nain Fondikum, and seventh-generation livestock farmer and advocate Maddie Hokanson. They are all amazing!

In addition, we’ll have a fireside chat with celebrity chef and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Andrew Zimmern and hear remarks from speakers including Ed Eiffler-Jaramillo, City of Minneapolis Mayor’s Office; Victor Stefanescu, Star Tribune; Zoe Hollomon, Midwest Farmers of Color; Gary Wertish, Minnesota Farmers Union; Mark Ritchie, Former Minnesota Secretary of State; Thom Petersen, Minnesota Commissioner of Agriculture; and State Representative Pam Altendorf. We’re also honored to have video remarks from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Governor Tim Walz, and Congresswoman Kelly Morrison.

The whole show is dramaturged and directed by my Food Tank co-founder Bernard Pollack! We’ll also be debuting original Food Tank shorts created by filmmaker Haven Worley to accompany the farmers’ stories. (Haven also directed Food Tank’s original documentary short “Irish Farmers: A Love Story,” which began as a farmer storytelling theater event in Dublin and is now being accepted into major festivals. You can watch it HERE with the special password Irishfarmers.)

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I know firsthand that this part of the United States is not a monolith or “flyover country”—it’s home to resilient, complex, forward-looking communities that are globally connected but deeply rooted. I’m so excited to hear these farmers’ stories and to share them with all of you!

If you live in Minnesota, I hope you’ll join us. And if you don’t live in Minnesota, this event is worth the drive—and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that we Midwesterners aren’t afraid of a good road trip! So CLICK HERE again to grab a free ticket, and I’ll see you next week.

And looking forward to the rest of the year, we hope you’ll join us for more farmer storytelling. To kick off Climate Week NYC, in partnership with Whole Foods on Sunday, September 20, we’re excited to present “Putting Farmers First: How Young Farmers are Shaping the Future of Food,” which you can find out more about HERE. And as part of the International Year of the Woman Farmer, we’re heading to Capitol Hill in partnership with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on December 7 as part of the 2nd Annual Food and Agriculture Policy Summit Week. Registration will open soon HERE.

We also bring you on-the-ground stories of family farmers as part of our regular Farmer Friday series, which you can find on FoodTank.com.

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

Photo courtesy of Frances Gunn, Unsplash

The post In Minnesota, Hear Stories from the Present and Future of Farming appeared first on Food Tank.

21 August, 2026, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Two new studies present a fuller picture of environmental and health conditions around plastic and paper waste recycling facilities in Kuala Langat, Malaysia. One study confirms significant river pollution and microplastic contamination near factory discharge points through direct water quality testing. The other reports elevated rates of self-reported symptoms among nearby residents.

Together, the studies offer some of the first community-level evidence on the potential public health and environmental footprint of Malaysia's plastic and paper waste recycling sector. Malaysia remains one of the world's leading destinations for imported plastic waste.

Key Findings include:

Study 1: This study directly tested river water near the discharge points of plastic and wastepaper recycling factories in the same region, offering evidence for some of the concerns raised by residents in the health survey, particularly related to water quality:

• Turbidity, or cloudiness, represents the suspended sediments in water. Malaysia's drinking water standards cap turbidity at 5 NTU for treated drinking water. The river water tested reached as high as 996 NTU — roughly 200 times that benchmark. High turbidity also blocks sunlight, making it easier for contaminants and pathogens to persist.

• • Conductivity and dissolved solids indicate how much salts, minerals and potentially industrial byproducts are present in the water. These were markedly elevated (38,452.33–41,676.33 μS/cm; up to 1,106 mg/L), compared with national standards of around 1,000 μS/cm for conductivity and 500–1,000 mg/L for total dissolved solids in river water. The salinity levels (21.71–23.87 ppt), were also far above the safe 0.5–2 ppt range set for rivers, indicating brackish water rather than freshwater, most likely caused by heavy industrial contamination.

• Dissolved oxygen, essential for both human and aquatic sustenance, was low (1.35–2.78 mg/L; standard: 4 mg/L), indicating severely degraded water quality.

• Microplastics were detected in every sample collected, though the specific polymer types were not confirmed.

• Most chemical pollutants tested, including phthalates, bisphenol A, and most VOCs, were below detection limits, except toluene, which was found at one sampling location (3.0 μg/L).

Study 2: A cross-sectional survey of 520 residents living near recycling facilities in Kuala Langat found notable rates of self-reported respiratory, eye and skin symptoms:

• Respondents frequently reported concerns regarding fumes, smoke, unpleasant odours, and dirty water in their residential areas.
• Many participants attributed these issues to nearby recycling facilities and waste-processing activities.
• A significant portion of respondents (66.3% regarding fumes/smoke and 73.9% regarding odours) had filed formal complaints, primarily to the Department of Environment (DOE). The DOE responded to some complaints and took some actions, yet there have been no further reports filed with the Ministry of Health, nor any resolution offered.
• Respiratory: Frequently reported symptoms included cough (33.7%), sore throat (31.0%), and runny nose (26.7%).
• Ocular: Common symptoms were itchy eyes (43.5%), watery eyes (40.4%), and red eyes (36.5%).
• Dermatological: The main reports included dry or cracked skin (35.7%) and itchiness (20.3%).
• Neurological: Reported symptoms included fatigue (34.6%), low energy (27.3%), and dizziness (26.7%).

Several symptoms were significantly associated with factors such as how long residents had lived in the area, smoking status, and second-hand smoke exposure. Most respondents also raised concerns about fumes, smoke, unpleasant odour and dirty water, which they associated with nearby factories and waste-related activity.

Read together, the two studies offer complementary evidence: a water quality study found measurable, significant degradation in river water near factory discharge points; and residents near recycling facilities widely reported health concerns since the factories were established. The authors caution that two studies should be read as complementary lines of evidence and investigation, rather than direct proof of a causal link between specific pollutants and symptoms.

 

Why is this important?

As Malaysia continues to import large quantities of plastic waste each year and recycling is concentrated in industrial areas, the researchers argue that community-level health evidence is essential for environmental health surveillance and risk management — particularly in developing-country settings where such research remains scarce.

"Our research in Kuala Langat proves a vital truth: if recycling pollutes our water with microplastics and causes respiratory illness next door, it isn't a solution—it's just outsourced pollution," said Dr Sharifah Norkhadijah Syed Ismail, University Putri Malaysia (UPM).

"Recycling shouldn't cost a community its health. When imported waste turns local rivers into microplastic hotspots, it’s clear: we need cleaner processing, not just green labels," said Dr Nurulain Mustafa Udin, University Technology Mara (UiTM).

"Imported waste doesn't just disappear when it gets recycled—it settles in our rivers and spills into the air our communities breathe. True sustainability means protecting local water and health, not just moving garbage across borders," said Dr Aida Sora Shamsuddin, University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).

The study highlights an urgent need for continuous environmental health surveillance, improved community engagement, and further research that integrates health assessments with air and water quality monitoring near such facilities.

About the Studies

Study 1: Investigating the pollution footprint of imported paper and plastic waste processing plants in Malaysia on water quality and microplastics [Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management (2026)]: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10163-026-02608-1

Study 2: Perceived health impacts among residents living near plastic and paper waste recycling facilities in Kuala Langat, Malaysia [Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (2026)]: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15741-z

For media enquiries or interviews with the study authors, please reach out to: Devayani Khare, Asia-Pacific Regional Communications Officer, Break Free From Plastic: devayani@breakfreefromplastic.org

About the Environmental & Occupational Health Society (EOHS) – a group of energetic and diverse practitioners and researchers brought together by a common interest in promoting distinction in prevention, research, and professional services across the environmental and occupational health field. https://eohsmy.wixsite.com/eohsmy

About Break Free From Plastic –  #BreakFreeFromPlastic is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3,500 organizations representing millions of individual supporters around the world, have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice, and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain—from extraction to disposal—focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions. www.breakfreefromplastic.org

• Omaha is a bit late to the streetcar trend, which started to die out when Obama-era funding did. Some, like Kansas City and Cincinnati’s, have been successful. Others, like those in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, lacked enough density or didn’t go far enough to be useful. A lot of times new streetcars are better at spurring development than actually moving people. (Nebraska Public Media)
• How did the public right-of-way become synonymous with cars? (Gary’s Substack)
• New Urbanism cofounder Andres Duany named his 25 favorite American cities or neighborhoods, and the thing almost all of them have in common is that they’re laid out on a grid. (CNU Public Square)
• Cities’ ambitious long-range plans are often disconnected from the sprawl-encouraging zoning that’s actually on the ground. (Smart Growth America)
• “Enshittification” doesn’t just apply to the internet. Cory Doctorow’s apt phrase for the worsening experience of going online can describe urban environments as well, David Levinson writes. Think about ugly bus wraps, blocked sidewalks and shared e-bikes scattered on the ground. (Transportist)
• New tire efficiency rules in California will save drivers gas and keep millions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (Grist)
• Portland is banning right turns on red at 30 particularly dangerous intersections, and could add 200 more if it works. (Oregonian)
• An overhaul of Florida property taxes could result in eliminating more than half of Pinellas County bus routes. (St. Pete Today)
• A Nevada committee appointed by state legislators did not answer the question of how to fund regional mass transit. (Current)
• Montgomery County, Maryland is upgrading its red-light cameras to catch drivers who speed up to catch a green light. (WTOP)
• Without explanation, officials in Jackson County, Missouri decided not to call for a referendum on a tax to support transit, walking and biking in Kansas City. (Star)
• The University of Pennsylvania created a digital version of Roosevelt Boulevard to test solutions for the deadly conditions on the Philadelphia road. (Penn Today)
• Minneapolis released a new interactive bike map ahead of the possible return of bikeshare. (Mpls St. Paul)
• Ride Bellevue is a service that delivers bikes to the Washington city’s downtown hotels, enabling visitors to explore without a car. (Momentum)
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a gallery of transit photos dating back to the 1960s.

Not to alarm, but everything in America - our economy, military, education, environment, health, moral fiber - is being decimated by a petty, fragile, flailing child in a fact-free bubble who just turned our foreign policy over to North Korea because its dictator "has always been nice to me." Otherwise, he's grifting, lying, babbling, losing wars, slathering gold, raving about his vanity projects - "If you're grass, you're very happy" - and going on AI slop sprees with George Washington, spinning in his grave.

This week, the war in Iran sank deeper into the quagmire it was always doomed to be when the 60-day negotiating period expired with little public comment. Trump shrugged off the lack of new talks because "the situation is so good," then threatened the "MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN" against Iran, which said it's working with Oman to monitor shipping through Hormuz Strait, which prompted Trump to threaten to "bomb the shit out of Oman," even though it's supposedly mediating on Iran. Having announced that after "we finish defeating Iran" he wanted to declare the Strait "a territory of the U.S," Trump went online and did just that with his magic Sharpie; Iran, in turn, vowed to "correct the delusions of this delusional individual," and who could blame them. Whiplash City.

At home, alas, America will likely continue getting dumber thanks to the moronic regime deleting or altering nearly 400 federal datasets - tracking police misconduct, violence against children, pollution - to wipe out facts they don't like. Of online data released last week from over 60 agencies - environment, education, labor, law enforcement - by far the largest slice is health information, much on substance abuse, mental health, infectious disease, queer and trans people in keeping with the surreal executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." Entirely logically, experts decry the destruction - Facts: who needs 'em? - arguing once these cretins crawl back to their caves "we are not going to have the information we need...We’re erasing our institutional memory for public health.”

Speaking of: Just in time for fall, we have "Bobby Jr's Back to School Special: Free Measles!" The folks who won't give out free lunch are instead giving us over a quarter of a million kids entering kindergarten susceptible to measles, which has hit a 36-year high along with an all-time high of vaccine exemptions after rules were loosened - a vax rate so low health experts say it cannot provide herd protection. Just to keep us on our toes, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and chickenpox vax rates are also down, good news for a regime whose only strong point is spreading preventable disease. Dems wrote a letter urging Trump to halt substituting “anti-vaccine ideology for decades of scientific evidence”; good luck to them and us on what besieged health officials deem ongoing "chaos and confusion in vaccination recommendation systems."

Meanwhile, as Americans struggle to afford food, gas, health care - 8 million have lost coverage - the mad king is insisting his "REAL Polling Numbers (are) the best they have ever been" - ie: low 20s for Independents, 13% for Black voters, down 27 points for his Latino voters as Dems flip 30 state seats, including where Mar-a-Lago is - and covering everything in gold. Like, everything. One sage: "His super power is the ability to ruin shit you didn’t even know existed." He's spent up to $900 million on vanity pr0jects and $200 million to turn the White House into a brothel-like, gimcrack-packed "Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel" - complete with gold Trump coin glued to the Oval Office door - in a lavish, tacky, Let-Them-Eat-Gold-or-at-least-Home-Depot-plastic-appliques shopping junket with (obviously) our money.

He's ordered a "golden fleet" of 15 new "Trump-class" nuclear-powered warships estimated to cost about $275 billion, though he's said he'd rather get 25 ships for $455 billion. He announced the White House was buying 250 giant new Cadillac Escalade SUVs - retail price $90,000 each, over $300,000 for armored version - because, "That’s how we look sharp in those cavalcades." Last month, he spent over $5 million to gaudily gild two 19-foot, 80,000-pound equestrian statues, Arts of War and Arts of Peace, in 23.75-karat gold leaf (though they're bronze and should have been polished), rendering them like "very, very gold" oversized children's trophies next to the austere Lincoln Memorial. "We made them the way they were plus," he moronically bragged, "and everyone’s so proud." We wonder: Is "everyone" in the room with us?

As the national debt just hit $40 trillion for the first time - it took nearly 200 years for it to reach $1 trillion in 1981- Trump remains fixated on his feckin' $600 million ballroom - oops, sorry: "military complex" - that no one asked for. After a court blocked construction, he called the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who successfully brought the suit to stop it, “TREASONISTS” who are threatening national security and exposing "top secret military features.” More weirdly, the guy supposedly worried about "national security" just imploded seven decades of careful diplomacy with South Korea - and a 1950s mutual defense treaty the State Department calls "the linchpin for security and stability in the Indo-Pacific” - to punish a longtime democratic ally for declining to join his Iran debacle and instead appease a nuclear-armed dictator.

His abrupt move Sunday night to “substantially reduce” joint exercises with South Korea, hours before 18,000 South Korean troops and thousands of Americans were set to kick off their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield drills, was widely panned as "an unforced error" and "another inane, haphazard decision (by) a chaotic administration" - one made, as usual, not jointly with Congress but unilaterally, on social media, based on wildly false, revisionist history. His "reasons": The drills are "costly" (see statues, ballroom, mountain of gold crap), they send a signal that's "inappropriate and hostile" toward a regime that's "unthreatening," and “Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect...I understand him, and he understands me." In other words, he is Sally Fields at the 1985 Oscars: "You like me!"

Never mind his "unthreatening" North Korea has weapons that reach the US; they're shipping weapons to Putin's forces in Ukraine; and Thursday they shrugged off Trump's paltry olive branch by launching a barrage of missiles, dismissing the "recent measure (of) so-called good faith," and denying Trump's claim his bestie had reached out. Sen. Tim Kaine: "North Korea tests ballistic missiles and Trump decides the problem is with...our ally, South Korea." These are also the guys who killed Otto Warmbler, a 21-year-old U.S. student on a 2016 tour charged with a "hostile act against the state" after allegedly stealing a hotel poster. He was put away after a show trial; when the U.S. got him released 17 months later, he came home blind, deaf, vegetative, howling, with catastrophic brain damage and signs of torture. He died six days later. But sure, Trump and Kim Jong Un "get along GREAT!"

Along with America’s rebuff of ally South Korea, the Pentagon just chose to relieve the beleaguered USS Lincoln with the USS Washington, the Navy’s only aircraft carrier in the Asia Pacific. The move leaves no U.S. presence there for the first time since 1944, “vaporizing” U.S. influence in the region and marking “the end of an era” - maybe just as well, given the Navy’s belated admission that last month U.S. destroyer USS Benfold lost power and ran adrift in the South China Sea for four days with no food, water, AC or toilets. Heckuva job, Pete. No wonder the rude mad king lost it Monday when CNN reporter Kristen Holmes did her job and challenged him on the wisdom of said “policies.” "What I'm doing is making things safer," he snarled. Admirably, she persisted. "Quiet! You're very disrespectful, you're a loud boisterous person," he snapped. "Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet."

The rancor didn't end there. Holmes also dared to ask about a now-viral speech by Sen. Jon Ossoff, who noted the "crook president" doesn't want "to do the job." Instead, "he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar" - a brief, incendiary reference to "weird stalker-slash-diaper-nurse" Natalie Harp, who Trump calls "sweetie." Trump brushed off Holmes' question with the always bizarre tactic of a grotesquerie tossing puerile insults at better-looking people: Ossoff is "a Pee-wee Herman look-alike." Still, the fragment of discomfiting reality - Ossoff: “Apparently, in the White House, the truth hurts” - in a 30-minute speech sparked a telling torrent of fury from MAGA cultists unaccustomed to hearing it. As a result - and 'cause they're dumb - the meltdown was laughable.

The White House declared Ossoff “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” a “feminine theater kid,” a “lightweight.” They also went for Holmes, “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment." “These scumbags are the lowest of the low,” they said. “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed.” (Cue lowest of the low.) Many others chimed in. Ossoff is “a mean-spirited jerk who traffics in slander,” “Who does this and holds their head high? This guy should be ashamed.” Hilariously, some ran with the news the quiet, studious Ossoff, known “for keeping his head down and doing the work,” spent $2,887 on make-up and prep for TV appearances. Laura Ingraham: "Beneath that pancake bronzer and rouge, we have an ambitious man, (the) most dangerous type of politician." America: "Fox ridiculing men who wear makeup is really something to behold."

Amidst the eruptions, Trump took to Truth Social, his tawdry security blanket, in a weekend spree of over 40 posts in six hours, most of it AI slopaganda. No more hiding in catering trucks: Here he is triumphant, a svelte Elvis - "President Trump ages in reverse!” - building a “WALL OF STEEL" around Iran's ports in a made-for-TV movie war where, in Nazi typeface, “We are going to win.” Also beware Elizabeth "Pocohontas" Warren, Abdul El-Sayed, and women in hijab who "are coming for your home and your belongings!" Enamored of George Washington, he saves him at Mt. Rushmore, splits a portrait with him, rides beside him on horseback (the bad guy on a black horse) and, before two huge American flags with the wrong number of stripes, consults him - shrunk shorter than Trump 'cause petty is as petty does - on his feckin' ballroom: "Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas." Consensus: "Psychotic stuff."

Dean Blundell cites the screaming dissonance of Trump’s infatuation with a leader of grace and integrity who over time “refused a crown, a palace, a third term, power itself” as he “diligently sought the public welfare.” In He’s No Washington, Blundell helpfully offers “the most humiliating side-by-side in American history.” With no fancy education, Washington had and read one key book of philosophy: A 1702 translation of Seneca’s Morals. Its chapter headings became the moral axioms Washington followed through "a lifetime of deliberate self-discipline," starting at 14 when he copied “110 Rules of Civility” into a notebook "and spent the next 50 years living them." A man who could "command a room by saying less" but naturally "most tremendous in his wrath,“ Washington's composure was "a construction project...He was a volcano that decided, every single day, not to erupt."

Blundell describes ”the moral weight of a man who asked nothing for himself.” When he took office, the Senate debated for weeks what to call him - “His Highness the President of the United States," "His High Mightiness“ - but he chose the unfussy ”Mr. President." Same with his residence; the original plan was a European-style palace four times bigger. He twice gave up power at the height of his own, for which King George called him "the greatest man in the world.” His favorite piece of writing was a play about the Roman Stoic senator Cato, who chose death over submission to Julius Caesar’s tyranny. With his army barefoot and freezing at Valley Forge, he had Cato performed for them "to remember what they were freezing for." In his farewell address, he warned of demagogues who would "ride public rage to power." He understood that in America, "the office was supposed to be bigger than the man. Power was never the prize. Character was the prize." Blundell: "Compare and weep."

Wednesday, the “visibly incoherent” current president, laser-focused on our most vital issues, led the press on a giddy tour of the work he’s ordered on the White House grounds in a scene like “a lost episode of the 1980s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” He bragged about the driveway’s “flawless granite,” autographed the ornate helipad “he insists he needs” - “It’s very strong stone, it will never break, it will never do— it’s rated million-year plus” - claimed the "military complex will have a drone-proof uh roof, and you’re gonna have on top of the roof, many drones,” and for perhaps the 10th time intoned “grass has a life like humans”: "We put brand new earth on top, so if you’re grass, you’re very happy.” America: "Hey Ma, Grandpa is in the front yard again yelling at people," "What an incredible babbling idiot," "A million years - that's how long his presidency has felt," and, "Fix the country you broke, asshole." Trump moved on to his new flagpoles. "This is a great pole," he said. "I'm very good at flagpoles."

Update: Now we're not only at war with Canada, but with the U.S. bond market. Asked how he might address volatility in the market, he offered, "The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” Comments:" "Operation Epic Interest Rates," "We will bomb the shit out of the bond market," "First, they eliminated the short-term interest rates traders, and I said nothing..." Make it stop.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

A new report from the city of Oakland shows that speed cameras are reducing speeding by 70 percent across locations where they are installed. This is consistent with results from other cities and countries.

More from Oakland DOT:

To test the efficacy of speed cameras, OakDOT conducted a before and after evaluation of vehicle speeds at camera locations in the summers of 2024, 2025 and 2026. Vehicle speeds were measured with pneumatic tube counts — an industry standard tool used to measure how fast vehicles are traveling.

Findings from that evaluation include:

• Compared to 2024 baseline data, 2026 tube counts show that drivers are slowing down at every speed camera location. The number of vehicles traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit dropped by an average of 70% across all 18 camera locations. That’s about 20,000 fewer speeding vehicles every day.
• The speed camera location with the greatest decline in speeding was 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St. In 2024, 1,700 vehicles passing the speed camera location were traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit. In 2026, that figure dropped to 150. This represents a 90% reduction.
• Traffic speeds are decreasing at all speed camera locations, as measured by the 85th percentile speed, a key traffic engineering metric. The 85th percentile speed is the speed at which 85% of vehicles are traveling at or below. Hegenberger Rd. saw the steepest decline. In 2024, 85% of vehicles were traveling at or below 57 MPH. In 2026, the 85th percentile speed dropped to 47 MPH.

A July 4, 2020 crash in West Oakland. It’s hoped speed cameras can help reduce such outcomes. Photo: Tim Courtney

The Oakland results echo similar results in San Francisco. Given the success, the East Bay Times is reporting that Oakland DOT director Josh Rowan wants to take another look at red light cameras, which were phased out in 2014.

“It is important to remember why Oakland is installing cameras, lowering speed limits, and adding speed bumps,” said Bryan Culbertson, representing the group Traffic Violence Rapid Response. “23 people were killed by drivers in Oakland last year, and 10 people have been killed so far this year.”

Despite the promising results from speed cameras in both San Francisco and Oakland, it’s clear more cameras and more safety infrastructure are still needed. An earlier report this month found that the number of serious and fatal crashes continues to climb in San Francisco and is even higher than it was in 2014, when that city first signed its pledge to reduce such crashes to zero in ten years.

Bike East Bay’s Justin Hu-Nguyen was pleased to learn of the speed reductions, but had concerns about an overreliance on cameras and funding. “We hope to see revenue and budget info included in future versions of Oakland’s speed camera program reports. For the program to be sustainable, it must be self-funded, and not detract from opportunities for proven infrastructure investments,” he said, adding that “…if the program generates a lot of revenue, this means it is writing many tickets, and therefore is not achieving its goals of adequately reducing speeding.”

The report states that “for the first six months of operation, Oakland issued 526,000 violations consisting of 194,000 citations and 332,000 warnings.” And that’s from just the 35 cameras that are part of the pilot. Readers who ride a bike should remember those numbers the next time someone says something akin to “cyclists are the real law breakers.” No, actually, it’s motorists—and with far more deadly consequences.

But advocates agreed that the most important part of cutting that down, and saving lives, isn’t speed cameras: it’s physical infrastructure. “Physical changes to streets like concrete corners on Telegraph, traffic circles on 8th, and plastic posts on International have saved lives by reducing deaths from multiple times a year down to nearly zero,” said Culbertson. “Physical changes to dangerous streets such as San Leandro, 73rd, San Pablo, etc will also be needed to stop people from being killed there too.”

“As always, speeding cars are deadly, and we need to be treating traffic violence as the public health crisis it is,’ said Hu-Nguyen. “The most effective and proven way to make our streets safer is through traffic calming, which physically prevents speeding from happening in the first place.”

Read the report here.

by David Spratt

A super El Niño could intensify heat, drought, fire and crop losses across Australia and Asia, while fertiliser shortages raise the risk of a wider food crisis.

The world is heading into a burst of global heating with a developing El Niño that is unprecedented in the observational record. Scientists were shocked when global average warming exceeded 1.5°C in 2024, but now they are estimating 2027 could be around 1.7°C, and a single month in the next year may reach 2°C.

 Figure 1: Global average warming is projected to be 1.76°C in 2027 as the full impact 
of the El Niño is experienced -The Climate Brink

This is extraordinary, with profound impacts for Australia and the region. An El Niño shifts jet streams, alters rainfall and raises global temperatures, and a ‘super’ event would sharply disrupt global weather, increasing the risk of extreme heat, droughts and flooding, and reducing crop yields. And all this is exacerbated by the ongoing war on Iran, which has cut fertiliser use and production, driving down crop yields.

Even before the full El Niño effect takes hold, food production in Europe has been battered by drought and a series of record-breaking extreme heatwaves. In the USA, the wheat acreage harvested will be the lowest in 149 years. In Korea, potatoes ‘boil’ in the ground as record heatwaves sweep across swathes of Asia. Coffee and cocoa futures have increased by up to 40 per cent as investors anticipate crop damage from Brazil to West Africa and South-East Asia.

Economists say the El Niño could cause a global food price shock lasting into 2028, and push 50 million people into acute hunger before the end of 2027. Máximo Torero, the chief economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says his big concerns are durum wheat and rice, due to the combination of El Niño and lower fertiliser usage; in Australia, a major wheat grower, and India, the world’s biggest rice producer, yields are threatened.

As well, there is a severe water crisis in Puerto Rico, the Rhine and Po rivers in Europe are at record low levels, the Colorado River is in crisis and reservoirs have shrunk to their lowest levels since they were constructed.

So what exactly is a ‘super’ El Niño? An El Niño was formally declared by US climate agencies on 11 June 2026.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular pattern of change in sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and winds over the tropical Pacific Ocean. In its warm, El Niño phase, increased westerly winds (weaker easterly trade winds) drive warmer tropical water east towards the Americas and reduce ocean upwelling of cooler deep water, and a positive feedback reinforces this weakening of the trade winds and surface warming. The central and eastern tropical Pacific experiences a marine heatwave.

An indicator of the state of the ENSO is the variation in short-term SSTs along the central-eastern Pacific equator in a zone known as Niño3.4. Negative (cooler) SST readings indicate a La Niña; positive (warmer) readings indicate a developing El Niño. The strongest recent El Niños were in 1997-8 and 2015-6, when SST Niño3.4 warming did not exceed 2.8°C.

Currently, projections based on all models show 4°C warming in Niño3.4 sea-surface temperatures between October and December 2026. It is an understatement to say this is a scientific shock, and constitutes a coming ‘super’ El Niño, far above recent events. This would be more intense than an epochal El Niño in 1877, whose devastating consequences were called a ‘Late Victorian Holocaust’ by the historian Mike Davis.

Figure 2: The red streak across the eastern Pacific shows the current hot sea-surface temperatures 
in the Niño3.4 band (ECMWF)

Climate change has already made extreme heatwaves more intense and persistent, as Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are experiencing right now, and they are likely to worsen during an El Niño, which adds a layer of heat on top of the trend global warming of 1.5°C. An El Niño brings persistent high-pressure weather systems and hotter and drier conditions to eastern Australia and South-East Asia, particularly Indonesia, and southern Africa. But it also increases rain and flooding in East Africa, parts of South America, and east China. El Niños generally peak between November and February.

A recent study concluded that ‘super’ El Niños are not just passing weather events, but drive ‘climate regime shifts’ that can push parts of the Earth system into new, hotter states, and could shift some regional patterns for decades, including unprecedented marine heatwaves.

El Niño impacts on most of Australia generally include these marine heatwaves, less rainfall and less cooling cloud cover, higher temperatures over land, and more extreme heatwaves, and all leading to higher evaporation rates and more intense bushfires. This super El Niño will likely destroy swathes of the Great Barrier Reef and produce record-breaking heatwaves and severe fire risk, drought and lower crop yields, heat stress for people, domestic livestock and nature, and damage to infrastructure.

In Southeast and South Asia, the El Niño will intensify heat conditions and may weaken or delay the monsoon, affecting staples such as rice and palm oil, pushing up food prices and threatening food security for lower-income households. In Indonesia, a tough dry season is forecast, with a high risk of drought and wildfires.

Crop yields decrease with global warming. For staple crops such as maize and wheat, yields have declined by 7.5 per cent and 6.0 per cent per 1°C of warming and are projected to decline by up to an additional 10 per cent for every 1°C of warming in the future.

An upper optimum during reproduction and crop yield formation of around 30°C is common for many important agricultural crops (e.g. maize, soy, cotton). Other major crops show damaging sensitivities at lower temperatures during their reproductive period (e.g. barley, beans, wheat and potatoes). As well, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already having a serious effect on the nutritional quality of most of the world’s major crops – grains, soya, corn and rice.

Rice is the main source of calories for half the global population and supplies 20 per cent of the global dietary energy. In India, for example, 70 per cent of the caloric intake comes from rice. Summer monsoon rainfall provides up to 80 per cent of the annual precipitation in India.

And even without accounting for all the simultaneous hazards including the fertiliser crisis, scientists say that global average 2°C of warming around 2040 will reduce per capita crop production by one-third in Southeast Asia.

In a recent report, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group offered this plausible scenario for the next year:

The confluence of the super El Niño and the fertiliser crisis [may] trigger a food crisis in Asia in particular, but also around the world. The energy crisis has increased fuel costs for farmers. Reduced yields lead to higher prices. There will be food shortages, panic buying, price shocks. Many vulnerable countries are poorly prepared for disruptions to food supplies, which can hit hardest in regional and remote areas.

The combined effect of many months of unaffordably high fuel prices and a food crisis across Asia, together with almost unliveable heatwaves, leads to social unrest and conflict in vulnerable countries, much as the global wheat crisis became a trigger of the Arab Spring. Rationing of food essentials is introduced in some countries, but poor administration and corruption lead to riots. Insurgency movements and malicious non-state actors including criminal syndicates utilise the opportunity.

Are we prepared as a nation for this hotter world with a peak El Niño?

 

Aug. 20th, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact

Nina A. S. Juntereal, PhD, RN

Pennsylvania Nurse Advocacy Coordinator

Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments

nina@enviRN.org

267-240-8913

“Statement from ANHE on Gov Shapiro PA Executive Order Data Centers”

(PA)- On Tuesday Aug. 18th, PA Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order to implement the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) standards for proposed data centers in Pennsylvania.

“Nurses understand accountability because our profession depends on it. Every order, every intervention, every outcome is tracked and documented. We need the same standard applied to data center growth: strict oversight of energy demand and supply, binding protections for ratepayers, and penalties when developers fail to commit to transparency, workforce, and environmental protection,” said Nina Juntereal, Pennsylvania Nurse Advocacy Coordinator, Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. 

Katie Huffling, Executive Director at the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments said, “This is fundamentally a health issue. Three in four Americans live with at least one chronic condition. When grid strain, propelled by data centers, drives up reliance on fossil-fuel plants, Americans living with asthma, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions will feel it first and worst. Clean energy isn’t a separate issue to public health; it is public health.”

We urge PA lawmakers to build on this executive order with legislation that prioritizes clean energy investment and puts real accountability structures in place, not just for utility costs, but for the health and safety of every Pennsylvanian breathing air near these facilities.

###

The Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments is the only national nursing organization focused solely on the intersection of health and the environment. The mission of the Alliance is to support nurses in promoting planetary health and equity globally by educating and leading the nursing profession, advancing research, incorporating planet-safe practice, and influencing policy. http://enviRN.org

The post Statement from ANHE on Gov Shapiro PA Executive Order Data Centers appeared first on ANHE.

Registered nurses with Contra Costa County Health Services voted 95 percent in favor of ratifying a new contract, winning protections to improve patient safety and nurse retention.

DENVER — The U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) own Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule, released Wednesday, documents extensive harm from the administration’s preferred plan, including increased risk of wildfire starts and only “modest” fuel reduction gains. 

According to the 333-page DEIS document released alongside the proposed rule, under Alternative 2 (USFS’s preferred option), the DEIS finds:

• The agency would strip road-building and logging protections from 44.7 million acres of national forest (p. 13, 15, 21)

• The agency’s preliminary biological assessment determined the plan is “likely to adversely affect” 327 threatened and endangered species and 71 designated critical habitats (p. 25, 161–162)

• Repeal would increase soil erosion, landslide risk, and sediment pollution (p. 108) in watersheds that supply drinking water to roughly 24 million Americans (p. 121)

• Old-growth forest that has been off-limits for 25 years would be exposed to new logging (p. 78)

• The agency assumes revenue from timber sales “would [not] be sufficient to cover the costs of constructing and maintaining all new roads related to a project” (p. 45)

• The rule opens the door to new oil, gas, and coal leasing on land currently protected by a no-surface-occupancy requirement (p. 58–59)

• USFS’s own fire scientists warn that more roadbuilding in forests could mean more human-caused wildfire ignitions (p. 101)

• The agency concedes that funding and terrain constraints would make any actual gain in fuel-treatment capacity “modest” (p. 225)

• Ignition frequency and density are currently lower in roadless areas and wilderness than on other National Forest System lands (p. 24, quantified as roughly 4x lower on p. 89)

• USFS’s own economists project the rule would cost up to $9 million a year in lost visitor spending in nearby communities (p. 223–224, combining $7 million in lost trail/dispersed-recreation spending and $2 million in lost wildlife-related-recreation spending)

• The rule would degrade scenery and backcountry access across millions of acres of primitive and semi-primitive terrain (p. 25, 192)

• The plan would add to the agency’s $6.9 billion existing road maintenance backlog (p. 43)

• Federally recognized Tribes consulted overwhelmingly oppose the repeal (p. 198), citing threats to sacred sites, treaty-protected hunting and fishing, and cultural landscapes (p. 26)

• Road construction and logging “could potentially have long-term negative impacts” on historic and archaeological sites nationwide (p. 196)

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

“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and the Trump administration are trying to spin a move to subsidize the timber industry as a wildfire mitigation strategy, but the government’s own study shows repealing the Roadless Rule could actually increase wildfire risk as well as have shocking negative impacts on Western communities.

“The government’s own scientists found that repealing the Roadless Rule could harm hundreds of species already at risk of extinction, decrease the quality of drinking water in Western communities, cost rural communities millions of tourism dollars, and grow the Forest Service’s already-massive road maintenance backlog. It also found that timber sales won’t offset the cost of building and maintaining new roads.

“Despite all of these negative implications and immense public opposition, the Trump administration seems to be dead set on moving forward with this rule. Western communities must rise up and oppose this change as loudly and forcefully as possible during this month-long comment period.”

Learn more: 

• Proposed rule – USFS
• Comment form for the rule – USFS
• Draft Environmental Impact Statement – USFS
• Comment analysis finds over 99% opposition to repealing 2001 Roadless Rule – CWP
• What is the “Roadless Rule”? – Sierra Club Oregon
• Roadless Rule Recission 2025 interactive map – Trout Unlimited

Feature image: USDA Photo by Preston Keres

The post USFS’s own analysis shows Roadless Rule repeal would harm wildlife, water, and rural communities appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Atlanta community organizer Bassey Etuk opened a community defense workshop in June with a stark observation, and heads nodded around the crowded room. “Atlanta was a sanctuary city until the governor of Georgia made it illegal in 2009. Now Atlanta is Cop City,” he said. 

From California to Kenya, whenever I say I’m based in Atlanta, people immediately bring up Cop City, the police training facility that sparked years of protest and major campaigns to prevent it from being built on public land. The training facility was ultimately built and is now in operation. But the Stop Cop City movement reduced the size and scale of the compound and, importantly, captured the imagination of people fighting on the frontlines against policing and state violence around the world.

In 2026, organizers in Atlanta have shifted from protests and mass mobilizations to applying the lessons they learned from the campaign and building the infrastructure needed to practice real community safety every day.

I am a longtime organizer and senior strategist with Project South, where I work alongside Bassey, an Atlanta-native who organizes in the 10 historically Black neighborhoods of Brownsville in southeast Atlanta. For the past two months, Bassey, I and the ATL Get Ready Team — a coalition of community organizers and organizations from across the city — launched a community preparedness plan to respond to escalating ICE enforcement, policing and National Guard deployments in cities across the United States. Together, we have been recruiting businesses, churches, bars and community centers to become “Sanctuary Zones” — sites that commit to preventing ICE and other law enforcement from entering. 

Building sanctuary and protection for all people is critical in this period. It keeps us alive through moments of immediate crisis while positioning our communities to build the power needed for deeper, fundamental change. We share the lessons we are learning on the ground so that we are moving in coordination and solidarity with other communities all over the country who are similarly experiencing the trauma of this moment — the murders, detentions, intimidation and indictments — as fascist forces attempt to consolidate power at every level of society.

Atlanta gets ready

After witnessing ICE operations in Minnesota and National Guard deployments in Memphis and Washington, D.C., 15 Atlanta-based organizations came together in February 2026 and asked each other some hard questions. If federal agents surge into, deploy across, or occupy Atlanta, are we ready? Are we ready to resist, to protect our communities and to prevent killings and kidnappings? Are we ready to put aside old tensions and disagreements? Are we ready to see ourselves as connected and act together, applying unified pressure in pursuit of our shared goals of community protection and collective defense?

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At our first coalition meeting, Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights said it clearly: “We can no longer afford to mobilize in reaction to what is happening. We have to determine a political direction and alignment towards a real vision.”

Large-scale anti-ICE protests have been powerful demonstrations of collective dissent and people power. But we understood that without greater unity across race, class, gender and geography, we could not win.

It was a vital moment for those of us who have organized in Atlanta for a long time. Organizations that did not always work together and that openly acknowledged long-standing tensions and disagreements, decided that, given the rise in state repression and violence, we need each other differently in this moment.

In the face of ICE raids in Latino, Caribbean and African immigrant neighborhoods, ongoing police violence against Black youth, sweeps of homeless encampments ahead of the World Cup in Atlanta, and the targeting of youth and trans people at the federal and state levels, we named criminalization as a shared reality and a political baseline for our alignment and collective action.

We agreed on a single commitment: to prevent and disrupt the growing criminalization of all our people. We called ourselves the ATL Get Ready Team, and we began by sharing trainings and building our collective skills with one another and with communities across Atlanta. In all, 15 Black-led, migrant-led and queer-led organizations made the decision to work together, combining our strengths instead of continuing to work alone.

Over the past six months, that commitment has become a practice. We meet weekly to check in and coordinate on the work happening on the ground. We have facilitated community trainings, hosted educational forums, organized canvassing days and launched a shared campaign to protect our people.

The assembly affirms the vision

In the aftermath of the Stop Cop City movement in 2025, organizations across Atlanta joined forces to organize People’s Movement Assemblies to define and build real community safety — despite the mayor’s assurances that training police forces in advanced urban warfare techniques would do that for us. Assemblies are community gatherings where people come together to assess the problems they face, develop shared solutions and create plans of action.

Drawing on the lessons we learned during the Stop Cop City struggle, we shifted from resisting the city’s vision of public safety to building our own. The assembly process became a form of community governance to define that vision together. It also became a space to strengthen relationships and build the movement infrastructure needed for long-term transformation.

Previous Coverage

ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready

The ATL Get Ready Team participated in the Atlanta Citywide People’s Movement Assembly in March. It was the third assembly held since early 2025 and led by the People’s Campaign. More than 500 people poured into Project South’s historic building in South Atlanta looking for connection, skills and a plan to act. Together, our organizations facilitated a large-scale, real-life scenario exercise to prepare for the upcoming World Cup season. We walked participants through the anticipated influx of federal law enforcement, drones and surveillance expected over five weeks during the summer. The gym was full of so many people — young and old, seasoned organizers and those just coming into the movement space. Naming the heightened military presence in our communities was scary, especially as we witnessed ICE murders and violence, but there was also relief that we were naming our power to prepare and act. We told the room, “Prepared people don’t panic.”  

We then moved into a full day of practical, hands-on trainings in community first response, mutual aid organizing, ICE tracking, school protection, Know Your Rights (and the risks), and porch-sit community engagement.

By the end of the assembly, participants committed to continuing to organize together, building toward May 1, International Workers’ Day, and developing community safety plans for the World Cup season. We also began to design a campaign that invited more people to participate in protections that would reduce and eliminate law enforcement entanglements.

Recruiting Sanctuary Zones

Sanctuary Zones are spaces that commit to keeping communities safe by refusing to cooperate with ICE or other law enforcement agencies that criminalize, detain and separate people from their families.

They are also a way for businesses, faith institutions, community centers and other public spaces to demonstrate a commitment to caring for their staff, patrons and neighbors. Sanctuary Zones are a practical response to the violence, hostility and fear created by the Trump administration’s escalation of ICE raids, National Guard deployments and the criminalization of protest over the past year.

The more our organizing team learned about the preparations for the World Cup — including hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for security, expanded police deployments, street closures, surveillance technology and drones — the more convinced we became that we needed a campaign with accessible entry points for more public engagement around keeping our communities safe. 

Project South organizers participate in a canvassing day to build the Sanctuary Zone network across Atlanta to protect people from ICE and police violence. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

We designed a plan to invite bars, restaurants and community centers to commit to declaring themselves as a Sanctuary Zone and to become part of a network of protection. We used the word “sanctuary” on purpose to signal that even if Georgia passes legislation to make it illegal for cities to pass sanctuary protections for migrants, independent businesses, faith centers and community spaces can declare sanctuary as autonomous spaces.

The real shift came when we named a deeper truth. We built the campaign in response to the public outrage over ICE, but we also knew we had a responsibility, and an opportunity, to make clear that ICE and the police are two arms of the same apparatus. Both function as agents of the state to control, contain, surveil and criminalize our communities. From the beginning, the ATL Get Ready Team aligned around an abolitionist position not to reinforce any part of the prison-industrial complex.

Bassey opened a Sanctuary Zone workshop at Project South’s Juneteenth gathering by naming his own experience with the police in Atlanta. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been harassed, searched, had guns put in my face,” he said. “But in 2006 when the police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, it shifted something in this city. Police had a no-knock warrant using false information and it was the wrong house. Kathryn was old-school, she reminded me of my grandma. My grandma kept a .22 and shot it every 4th of July. When police battle rammed Kathryn’s house, she let off a single warning shot, and in return the officers fired 39 shots killing her dead. There are many battles we’ve lost, but we can’t afford to lose more battles like that if we want to win in the long-term.”

So far, some 70 sites across Atlanta have publicly declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Barbershops, bookstores, independent businesses, bars, restaurants, retailers, churches and community spaces have all joined the network. We canvassed neighborhoods, inviting sites to display Sanctuary Zone posters in their windows and commit to the campaign. We also coordinated Know Your Rights and Risks trainings and other community preparedness workshops for participating sites, while connecting them with local policing alternatives and diversion programs that offer practical ways to respond to conflict and crisis without calling 911.

Multiple grassroots organizations canvassed over 500 sites across Atlanta as part of the ATL Get Ready Team. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

The campaign engaged more than 500 sites across the city. We began by concentrating on the two-mile radius surrounding the stadium as a visible show of solidarity to the thousands of visitors expected during the World Cup. As we learned that ICE was shifting its tactics and increasingly targeting people in surrounding counties, we expanded our outreach beyond the stadium corridor to neighborhoods where watch parties and community gatherings would take place, so that vulnerable people could feel safer being in public and enjoying the matches.

Many bar owners and restaurant operators expressed their commitment to refusing ICE entry but were hesitant to display a Sanctuary Zone poster or publicly join the network out of fear of retaliation. Many Black-owned businesses appreciated that we named the connection between ICE violence and police violence. As one owner told us, “We already don’t call the cops, we can sign on to this, easy.”

In a time of economic hardship, the government’s extraordinary spending on police, ICE and surveillance feels like a slap in the face, and the people we spoke with responded with outrage at this unjust siphoning of public funds. The Federal Emergency Response Agency, or FEMA, spent more than $846 million on security and policing for the FIFA spectacle instead of responding to climate disasters. During hurricane season. During the hottest summer on record. During floods and wildfires affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

At the same time, as many of us feared, ICE kidnappings and detentions escalated, reaching 43,000 in the month of June alone. Over the previous two months, four Black men were killed by federal troops and agents deployed in Memphis, while the military occupation of Washington, D.C., doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 troops. For comparison, the massive ICE operation in Minneapolis deployed 3,000 federal agents, creating immense harm. Faced with this reality, we refuse to give in to fear. To protect our people, we prepare and we build.

Sharing the vision

A local coffeehouse owner said, “Of course, we will sign on. I’m an immigrant, and when we are in solidarity with each other, we are stronger. What do we have to lose?”

She immediately offered the coffeehouse as a meeting space. We are now talking to business owners and church leaders about holding sessions that allow folks to share policies and practices that support protections for workers, patrons and community members.

The invitation to Sanctuary Zones is to join a larger vision: a coordinated network of sites that can be proactive and generative in times of crisis rather than reactive. These spaces are one step toward reducing our reliance on policing, which so often produces harm instead of safety. They create a concrete invitation for people beyond the usual movement circles to resist this regime through collective noncooperation. Sanctuary Zones prioritize safety over surveillance and solidarity over fear.

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As we move out of the heat of summer and into the fall, the ATL Get Ready Team intends to keep building. Project South will facilitate Community Responder Trainings to strengthen the capacity of community members to assess emergencies, intervene and address medical situations without calling the police. The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights will continue offering ICE tracker and legal trainings so businesses and faith institutions understand their rights and know how to prevent ICE raids.

Together, we will invite Sanctuary Zone partners to run drills and continue practicing preparedness plans that can be adapted to many kinds of crises — whether climate disasters, economic instability or state violence. Preparation is infrastructure, and in times of disaster or crisis, infrastructure is power.

Sharing the lessons

Below are a few lessons to share with groups working on similar projects: 

1. Differences are not deterrents: We can acknowledge differences and tensions but still work together towards a common vision of preventing criminalization and protecting our communities. Differences can be a strength because sharing knowledge from divergent perspectives gives us a fuller picture of the threats and opportunities to respond. 

2. Connections make our strategies stronger: We can connect ICE, policing and surveillance — an important political intervention that ensures movements to protect our immigrant neighbors are inseparable from movements to protect our Black neighbors from deadly policing. Both are connected to the growing struggles against data centers, surveillance technologies and cameras in our public spaces. We can connect daily, local police harassment to federal agents roaming our streets and to the executive orders and legislation that is targeting trans people and anyone who dissents.

3. Focused strategies are winning strategies: Collaborating around a shared strategy to name and resist the criminalization of people, poverty and protest is an important path forward. Bars, independent businesses and other community spaces want to participate in this moment, they simply need accessible ways to do so. One commitment, one poster, one campaign gives them a concrete way to say yes to noncooperation with institutions of harm, and yes to the work of creating proactive protections and solutions.

4. Local knowledge and national ripples: Rooting in local knowledge, relationships and histories is critical to building long-lasting infrastructure that engages people from diverse backgrounds. Careful reconnaissance to identify canvassing targets, direct follow-up with people with trusted relationships at neighborhood barbershops or churches, elders working with young people to engage sites from different angles, and clear recognition of local cultures and tensions make campaigns like this stronger and allow more people to participate. 

Each of our locations requires different tactics, but if we can coordinate across places and learn from one another as we have learned from Ferguson to Los Angeles, Chicago to Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. to Memphis to Atlanta, we can confront this daunting machine with greater strength, deeper solidarity and more collective power.

As Rehana Lerandeau of Critical Resistance said, “We have to make our practices and our stories fresh, radical and irresistible.” In a time of so much danger and despair, sanctuary is a practice and a vision for how we want to be together in community. This campaign invited people across a diverse range of communities in Atlanta into their own courage, and they have overwhelmingly said yes. 

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outdoor Life | E&E News

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

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

Poll shows Utahns oppose Trump’s monument reductions

Deseret News

Report: Public lands at risk

Outdoor Alliance

Wildland firefighting bill gains steam as smoke reaches Congress

Roll Call

Trump proposes rescinding roadless rule for 45M forest acres

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

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

CPR | Aspen Times

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

Aspen Times

Quote of the day

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

—Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Roll Call

Picture This @zionnps

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from the Peregrine Fund

 

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

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

For Immediate Release:

August 20, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan would increase UK emissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan would slow electrification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges

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

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

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

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

The report adds: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Padelkar says: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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