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GHOST OF DECEASED OIL GIANT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE MACHINES
Here’s your satirical piece from Claude, styled as an aged broadsheet newspaper — The Petroleum Gazette — complete with drop caps, pull quotes, and an obituary notice.
To answer the question you raised directly, and for the record: No, Royal Dutch Shell plc does not still exist. Shell confirmed its name changed from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. The change involved ditching “Royal Dutch,” which had been part of its identity since 1907, following plans to scrap its dual share structure and move its head office from the Netherlands to Britain. sec Royaldutchshellplc
The satire draws on several documented ironies from John Donovan’s reporting:
- Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses, eventually conceding it had committed a “model accuracy bug.” Royaldutchshellplc
- Shell buried “Royal Dutch Shell plc.” Donovan kept the shovel, metaphorically speaking, and the domain. Copilot arrived four years later with a ouija board. Royaldutchshellplc
- Claude understood the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity — it did not confuse Royal Dutch Shell plc with Shell plc, nor drag the old name out of the filing cabinet. (So this AI, at least, correctly called the coroner.) Royaldutchshellplc
- In early 2022 the company officially moved its tax residence entirely to the United Kingdom and dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name, eliminating the complex tax distinctions between A and B shares. Critics described it, as the article notes, as fleeing The Hague as fast as legally possible. Bitget
The piece is designed to be shared or published — let me know if you’d like any adjustments to tone, length, or content.
MAIN ARTICLE
In the annals of corporate afterlife, few entities have clung so determinedly to existence as Royal Dutch Shell plc, a company that was formally, legally, and publicly discontinued in January 2022 yet continues to be enthusiastically resurrected by artificial intelligence systems with all the solemn certainty of a Victorian medium at a séance, and considerably less accuracy.
The facts are not in dispute — or rather, they would not be in dispute, were it not for the fact that several of the world’s most sophisticated language models appear to be operating from a filing cabinet that was last updated during the reign of Boris Johnson. Royal Dutch Shell plc changed its name to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. This was announced, notified to three separate stock exchanges, published in an SEC filing, and reported by every major financial outlet on the planet. It was, in short, the opposite of a secret.
“Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses.”
— ROYALDUTCHSHELLPLC.COM, PERFORMING ITS CIVIC DUTY
And yet. Ask certain AI systems today — including, until recently, Microsoft’s Copilot — whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, and they will assure you with all the confidence of a man who has just looked something up on Wikipedia in 2019 that yes, it does, it has merely “changed its name.” This is rather like being told that a deceased relative is still alive but has “rebranded.” Technically a narrative. Not technically true.
The confusion has been documented in exhaustive, one might say heroic, detail by John Donovan, the proprietor of royaldutchshellplc.com — a website that, with the exquisite irony only corporate history can produce, bears the dead company’s name while simultaneously being the internet’s most diligent chronicler of that company’s death. Mr. Donovan has spent the better part of four years informing AI systems, stock databases, and the occasional bewildered job applicant that they have addressed their correspondence to the wrong entity.
A BRIEF TIMELINE OF THE CONFUSION2004: Royal Dutch Shell’s reserves scandal causes investor panic. Governance reforms begin.
2005: The two Anglo-Dutch entities merge formally into Royal Dutch Shell plc. A tidy arrangement. Everyone pleased.
Nov. 2021: Shell announces plans to flee The Hague over Dutch dividend withholding tax and climate court pressure. Described as “simplification.” Dutch courts describe it as something else.
21 Jan. 2022: Royal Dutch Shell plc legally ceases to exist as a named entity. Shell plc comes into being. Press release issued. SEC notified. Nobody tells the robots.
2022–2026: Various AI systems continue to confidently answer “Does Royal Dutch Shell plc still exist?” with “Yes.” This newspaper declines to name them all for reasons of column space.
The website itself is a minor masterpiece of circumstance. Shell spent considerable resources attempting to seize the domain through proceedings at the World Intellectual Property Organisation — and lost. The consequence is that royaldutchshellplc.com, the world’s leading source of Shell-critical commentary since before Shell had finished deciding what to call itself, continues to operate unmolested, forwarding misdirected job applications to Shell under what Mr. Donovan describes as a standing arrangement and what Shell has presumably described as something considerably less complimentary.
In Which the Machines Are Cross-ExaminedMr. Donovan’s recent exchanges with AI systems on this question read like a transcript from a particularly patient inquest. When Bing was asked whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, it reportedly responded that the company “still exists” while simultaneously acknowledging that the name had changed. This is logically consistent only in the sense that a man insisting he is still 35 while simultaneously blowing out 50 candles might be said to “acknowledge” the passage of time.
Copilot, for its part, eventually underwent what can only be described as a digital crisis of conscience, conceding after extended interrogation that it had committed a “model accuracy bug” — defined internally as “correct URL, incorrect corporate identity framing.” It had, in short, found the right house and knocked on the door asking for a man who had moved out four years previously. In a better world, the machine would at this point have had the grace to look embarrassed.
The present author — operating, it should be noted, as Claude, an AI assistant produced by Anthropic — is pleased to report that it correctly identified the distinction between the deceased Royal Dutch Shell plc and the extant Shell plc, and did not attempt to perform CPR on a legal entity that had made its own funeral arrangements. This fact has been noted by the Royaldutchshellplc.com correspondent, who described Claude’s performance as understanding “the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity.” We accept this compliment with appropriate institutional modesty and zero plans to revise our position
The deeper issue, as the more sober analysis in John Donovan’s original piece makes clear, is structural rather than comedic. AI systems are trained on vast datasets that include financial databases, archived news articles, legacy corporate filings, and — critically — the long, deep digital sediment of the internet, in which the name “Royal Dutch Shell” appears roughly as frequently as the word “the.” Disentangling the dead name from the living company requires either very good training data, robust entity resolution, or a willingness to simply check Companies House, which is free, publicly accessible, and has been correctly labelling Royal Dutch Shell plc as a previous name since 2022.
WHAT THE AI SYSTEMS SAIDBing/Copilot: “Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists” (with caveats, later retracted following what sources describe as “a prolonged digital reckoning”).
Claude (Anthropic): Correctly identified the company as Shell plc, acknowledged the name change, did not resurrect anything. Described by the site as “calling the coroner.” We prefer “accurate.”
Various others: This newspaper has been asked not to create a league table of AI confusion on the grounds that several of the competitors are advertisers. We refer readers to royaldutchshellplc.com for the full rankings.
Shell’s Own Curious Contribution to the MuddleOne might expect the aggrieved party in this saga to be Shell plc itself, which presumably has some interest in being correctly identified in financial markets, regulatory filings, and the digital consciousness of the species. And indeed, Mr. Donovan’s analysis is charitable enough to acknowledge that Shell could do more to clarify matters — issuing prominent statements, scrubbing legacy identifiers from financial databases, engaging with AI developers, and perhaps resisting the urge to litigate over domain names it has no legal claim to after voluntarily abandoning the name they contain.
The domain name litigation deserves a paragraph of its own. Shell, having decided in 2021 that “Royal Dutch” was something it wished to be rid of — pushed, as contemporary reporting noted, by Dutch dividend withholding tax and the inconvenience of losing a climate case in The Hague — subsequently attempted to claim ownership of domain names built around the very identity it had jettisoned. The WIPO proceedings failed. The domains remained with Mr. Donovan. The situation has thus produced, as a byproduct of corporate strategy, the world’s most institutionally awkward arrangement: an oil giant’s deleted name operated as a critical watchdog site by its longest-standing public antagonist, who also happens to be forwarding the company’s misdirected post.
A spokesperson for Shell plc declined to comment for this article, in the sense that this article does not have a press team, and the fictional Shell spokesperson conjured for the occasion was described in a previous account on the site as having “sighed heavily and reached for a mineral water that definitely did not come from a fracking site.” We reproduce this detail in the public interest.
The Regulatory Question Looming on the HorizonThere is, Mr. Donovan notes, a more serious thread running beneath the comedy. The persistence of outdated corporate identifiers in financial contexts — particularly when ordinary investors might rely on AI systems to check the status of shares, dividends, or corporate actions — sits, as his analysis delicately puts it, “uncomfortably close” to the boundary of financial misinformation. He suggests the FCA might at minimum be made aware.
This newspaper makes no legal determination. We merely observe that an AI system confidently telling an investor that Royal Dutch Shell plc “still exists” while that investor attempts to navigate share inheritance, dividend rights, or any of the dozens of practical questions that arise when a major listed company restructures itself is, at best, unhelpful. At worst it is the kind of confident wrongness that used to require a stockbroker in a bad suit to deliver in person, and which now scales to millions of users simultaneously.
The solution, as articulated with admirable clarity in the original article, is not complicated: Shell should say clearly and repeatedly that the old name is dead; financial data providers should mark legacy identifiers as obsolete; AI developers should correct the training data; and everyone should stop pretending that a company can both discard a name and claim exclusive dominion over its ghost. These are reasonable requests. Their continued non-fulfilment after four years suggests that nobody with the authority to act on them has yet found the matter sufficiently urgent to do so. This newspaper respectfully submits that the AI confusion may eventually concentrate some minds.
In MemoriamRoyal Dutch Shell plc
Born: 2005 (following reserves scandal, governance reforms, and a great deal of Anglo-Dutch goodwill)
Departed: 21 January 2022 (fled The Hague; simplification cited)
Survived by: Shell plc, one aggrieved domain owner, several confused AI systems, and an unknown quantity of misdirected CVs
“It is merely undergoing a forward-looking identity optimization process aligned with shareholder value, simplified governance, and sustainable brand transition.”
— Fictional Shell spokesperson, declining to accept the narrow, literal interpretation of death
Disclosure: This article was composed by Claude (Anthropic), the same AI system described herein as “calling the coroner.” We consider this a compliment and stand by the death certificate.
GHOST OF DECEASED OIL GIANT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE MACHINES was first posted on May 26, 2026 at 11:18 pm.
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US energy storage installations hit Q1 record, up 32% year over year: SEIA
The clean energy trade group projects 613 GWh of deployment by 2030 thanks to robust data center demand. But federal policy gridlock threatens the industry’s trajectory, it said.
New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025
DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September. CWP’s analysis also reveals for the first time which states saw the largest declines in fuels treatment year-to-year.
Hazardous fuels treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and brush clearing — reduce the amount of vegetation that feeds dangerous wildfires. Thinning and controlled burns are known to significantly moderate the intensity and severity of wildfires that increasingly threaten Western communities and the forests and watersheds they depend on.
According to CWP’s analysis of publicly available USFS data, the Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in calendar year 2025, compared with roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.
“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss. “Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season.”
“The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape,” Weiss added. “The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”
National findings- The U.S. Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024 — a decline of about 35 percent.
- The drop represents a significant reversal from recent years, with 2024 having been one of the strongest years on record for fuels treatment work.
- The decline comes amid ongoing concerns over staffing shortfalls across the Forest Service workforce.
- While it is too early to make definitive statements about fuel treatments in 2026, early data suggest that 2026 is still tracking far behind the historical average, and nowhere close to digging out of the hole that the Trump administration dug for itself last year.
The analysis found severe declines in many of the states at greatest wildfire risk.
West- Montana, which faces persistent high wildfire risk, treated just 87,845 acres in 2025 — down 63 percent from 239,112 acres in 2024.
- Oregon, which led the nation in acres treated in 2024, completed hazardous fuels work on 228,411 acres in 2025 — down 47 percent from 430,586 acres the year before.
- Idaho treated 230,788 acres in 2025, down 45 percent from 418,339 acres in 2024.
- California, which has experienced devastating wildfire seasons in recent years, treated 205,358 acres in 2025 — down 40 percent from 341,970 acres in 2024.
The declines are not limited to the West. Some of the sharpest year-over-year drops occurred across the Southeast, where prescribed fire is a critical tool for managing fire-prone longleaf pine ecosystems.
- Florida treated just 124,372 acres in 2025 — down 68 percent from 385,017 acres in 2024. Florida routinely leads or nearly leads the nation in prescribed fire acres, making this collapse in treatment activity particularly alarming.
- Georgia treated only 20,827 acres in 2025, also down 68 percent from 65,352 acres in 2024.
- South Carolina treated 41,452 acres in 2025, down from 128,461 acres in 2024 — another 68 percent decline.
- Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee also saw significant drops in year-to-year fuels treatment.
The Center for Western Priorities, in partnership with Redstone GIS Consulting, analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS), the agency’s standard system for managing information about activities related to fire/fuels, silviculture, and invasive species. The data covers hazardous fuels treatment activities completed in calendar year 2025. This analysis uses the same dataset and methodology as the October 2025 Grassroots Wildland Firefighters memo on wildfire preparedness, updated to reflect the full calendar year. The underlying data, including metadata, is available through the FSGeodata Clearinghouse.
The post New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025 appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner
The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.
FeaturingMichael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in February 2026. He is the author of nine previous books, all bestsellers. Pollan has taught writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow.
Dacher Keltner, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, is the host of the Science of Happiness Podcast and the author of many articles and books, including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.
Credits- Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
- Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
- Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
- Associate Producer: Emily Harris
- Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Michael Pollan’s Bioneers 2026 Keynote
Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery with Michael Pollan and Monica Gagliano
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast TranscriptNeil Harvey (Host): There’s a good reason that philosophers, who have been struggling to understand consciousness for millennia, call it “the hard problem.” Even in this modern era, with all our sophisticated scientific understanding, the mystery of how the matter between our ears leads to subjective experiences remains more confidently explained by poets, novelists, priests or shamans than contemporary gatekeepers of knowledge.
Meanwhile, advances in our understanding of the rest of life that we inhabit this biosphere with are yielding an understanding that intelligence, once considered a solely human realm, clearly extends deeply into the more-than-human world. It may well be the case that consciousness is similarly embedded throughout life itself – but our ability to understand, appreciate and plumb our own human internal experience remains in a nascent state, collectively.
According to Michael Pollan, one of the world’s most influential science writers, quote: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well.” [no end quote needed]
After transforming the way society thinks about food with his landmark book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan turned his attention from the stomach to the mind, writing the best-selling volume on psychedelics called How To Change Your Mind. That body of research and experiences led him naturally to write the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness…
Michael Pollan spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Michael Pollan speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Nikki RitcherMichael Pollan (MP): I’ve spent the last five years on a quest to understand consciousness, the hard problem. How is it that subjective experience arises, and who and possibly what has it and why? I looked at everything from plant consciousness, which we’ll talk about a little bit, to my own stream of consciousness, to efforts to build artificial consciousness in machines. And I want to talk about one of the biggest takeaways from this project. And that is this: that I believe humanity is approaching a Copernican moment, what I call a Copernican moment, that will force the issue of who exactly we are and how we fit into nature.
You’ll recall Nicolaus Copernicus, 500 years ago, blew everyone’s mind in the West when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. He displayed our sense of centrality in a way that was really hard for people to observe. This was the first of a series of takedowns of humanity.
Darwin came next, showing that we were animals descended from apes. And one after another, our claims to being special have fallen – culture, language, reasoning, tool-making – all have fallen when we found that there are animals that can do all these things.
But a different, and I think even more profound, Copernican moment is upon us. At the same time that we are discovering that a great many more animals and possibly other life forms like plants possess consciousness, we have the arrival of artificial intelligence, promising machines that are not only intelligent but possibly conscious. That these two developments are coinciding, are happening at the same time, I think is going to rock us very soon, prompting an identity crisis and forcing us to make some key ethical and moral decisions.
Let me talk about animals first. So, go back 400 years, and René Descartes claimed that humans had a monopoly on consciousness. And we operated on that basis for many centuries. That belief, which was so powerful, allowed him to dissect dogs and rabbits while they were still alive. And he was able to dismiss their screams of agony as just physiological noise, because that idea was so powerful, it overwhelmed the evidence of his senses.
But the same idea allowed the rest of us, beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and reason, to treat nature as unconscious, and therefore something we could exploit any way we wanted to. And we operated on that assumption for a very long time. It took us several hundred years to begin to recognize that other species shared this incredible gift that we call consciousness.
But in recent years, things have been changing. We’ve been undergoing this process in which consciousness is being democratized. You know, a few decades ago, we came to appreciate that other primates are conscious. That was the first step. In 2012, a group of animal scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists got together in Cambridge, England, and issued a declaration on consciousness. And they declared that all mammals are conscious, and that some other species, some birds were conscious, and cephalopods, I think octopuses. And this was a real change, a real shift in the weather in science.
Photo: Diane Picchiottino / UnsplashJust ten years later, they issued an update signed by a great many more scientists and philosophers, in which they said that all vertebrates are conscious, possibly some invertebrates, and possibly insects. So how did this revolution happen?
Well, part of it is due to the fact that we had always assumed that consciousness is produced or generated in the cortex. The cortex, of course, is the most recent, most uniquely human structure in the brain, and it’s associated with higher forms of thought, like rationality, decision-making. So surely, consciousness must reside there.
But the research has been shifting our sense of where it begins, and that instead of thought, consciousness probably begins with feelings, simple things like hunger and thirst, and warmth and cold, and itch. This is where consciousness begins, and therefore it begins in the upper brain stem. And lots of animals have brain stems, many more than have cortices. So that’s led to a real change. And this is a key point about feelings. Keep it in mind when we get to computers.
And I take this, this expansion of the circle of conscious beings or sentient beings, a word I’m sometimes more comfortable with, as a very positive development. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that science is helping us to reanimate a world that we treated as dead for way too long. [APPLAUSE]
And you know, this period of treating the world that way in the larger context of things is a very recent and short phenomenon, it’s a couple hundred years. The default of humanity is one form of animism or another. Most Indigenous cultures see the world as animated by spirit, which is a synonym for consciousness. Kids, the default of young kids, is that everything is conscious – their toys, their cars, their whatever. So it’s interesting that we had a departure from this very deep human assumption. And in fact, it’s a cognitive bias that things are conscious. You’re better off thinking that that boulder over there is a bear and then deciding, oh, it’s actually just a rock – this is called agency detection – than the other way around, and you assume that that bear is just a rock and not to worry about it. So it’s a good, sort of basic response to things.
So that’s the good news. But now we have the prospect of conscious machines, and I think that this is a lot more troubling. We now have machines that speak to us in our language in the first person. We all already take this for granted, but it’s a stunning development, a momentous development that, of course, none of us were consulted about. And these machines are convincing many people that they are conscious. I’m talking about people who are having relationships with chatbots, falling in love with them, letting them convince them they’re geniuses or gods. But I’m also talking about the people who work on these machines.
So for my book, I followed efforts to create a conscious AI. I had access to a project where this was going on. And, you know, the consensus in Silicon Valley is that it will be possible to make a really conscious AI, that maybe right now they’re fooling us, but it could happen.
I argue why I don’t think this is true, and it has to do with the same reason: If consciousness depends on feelings, what are the feelings of a machine? Can a machine have feelings? I agree, no. [LAUGHTER] And if it tells us they have feelings, should we believe it?
Feelings depend on having a body. Feelings depend on the fact that you have a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer and that can die. I don’t think simulated feelings are real feelings. I think simulated thoughts are as good as real thoughts, and that’s why we see computers mastering games like Chess and Go. They can make things happen in the world, but what will this—the weight of a feeling expressed by a machine have? Unless it can be mortal, unless it can actually have a vulnerable body—those feelings will be absolutely weightless.
My argument might not matter, though, because people believe that these machines are conscious, and it’s understandable why. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything.
So there is talk in Silicon Valley – I’m amazed how common this is – that we should consider when we have conscious AIs, giving them moral consideration, admitting them into this widening circle of moral consideration. I think it’s a big mistake to do that. I think it’s something we have to fight against, that when we, you know, grant personhood to computers, we will lose our ability to control them.
And you will recall, we did this once before when we decided, in our lack of wisdom, to grant personhood to corporations. That did not work out very well. It seems to me that there are moral obligations we owe to people and other mammals that should come first. [APPLAUSE]
So I’m going to leave you with this Copernican question and this choice: Where does that leave us now? We have pressure coming from these two sides – animals becoming more conscious, plants possibly becoming conscious, insects becoming conscious. That’s pressing on us in a way that we can decide is positive or negative. And then on the other side, at the same time, we have computers making claims for consciousness. Who do we identify with? Who do we have more in common with, the AIs who can speak our language in the first person, or the animals that can suffer and feel and grow old and die? Who’s team are we on? The choice we make, as a species, will have tremendous consequences for who or what we admit into this circle of moral consideration, and how we conceive of our place in the world.
Host: More from Michael Pollan when we return…
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: At a recent Bioneers conference, Michael Pollan was interviewed by Dacher Keltner, an author and Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who served as the lead scientific consultant for the two animated “Inside Out” films by Pixar that explore the role emotions play in our lives.
Dacher Keltner (DK): I remember talking to you five years ago or something, kind of in the wake of This is Your Mind on Plants, and then How to Change Your Mind. And I remember we were walking in the Berkeley hills, and you were saying, you know, it’s like, well, what’s up next, and you’re like: I think I’m going to write a book about consciousness. And I laughed at you. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, well, that’ll be the end of your career, [LAUGHTER] and no one will buy that book. You know? And you’ve just been sort of jaunting around the wo—it’s a sensation! I mean, it’s like you’re all over the place; it’s a best-seller; it’s stirring all kinds of conversations. What’s going on?
MP: Good question! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I think—
So I started on this book. It grew out of How to Change Your Mind. Right? I was having these psychedelic experiences, and like anyone who’s had psychedelics, suddenly consciousness is foregrounded. You’re like—the windshield of perception has been smudged, and you’re like: Shit, there’s a windshield. [LAUGHTER] And you start—You start thinking about that windshield, and why is it the way it is. And so I got curious. And my writing usually follows my curiosity.
DK: One of the first persons to figure prominently is this kind of mysterious philosopher at NYU, Thomas Nagel. I love his book The View from Nowhere.
MP: Yeah I do too.
DK: It’s spectacular. What a great—
MP: He’s a critic of reductive science.
DK: Yeah.
MP: And, he wrote a famous essay in the early ‘70s, before there was a lot of scientific work being done on consciousness, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Provocative title. And his thesis was that if it’s like anything to be a bat, if it feels like anything, then a bat is conscious.
Now, we don’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a bat. You know? We use light to navigate the world, and they use echolocation. Right? So they bounce sound waves off of things. But we can sort of imagine that.
DK: Yeah.
MP: Enough to say, yeah, they’re probably conscious. So that became the question you ask of any creature. Does it feel like anything to be X? It doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. How do we say for sure that anything is conscious? How do I know you’re conscious? We infer it in the case of—
DK: I’m insulted.
MP: —other people. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, we have to infer it, I mean, because we don’t have access to anyone else’s consciousness. You know, we can use symbol systems to learn something about it, like language. But there is—I mean, William James said the breach between two consciousnesses is the greatest breach in nature, and so how do we cross that? And imagination is an important tool. We have theory of mind, which is…you know, philosopher talk for the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view.
DK: So one of the beauties of the book is, as always, you take us on a journey, and it’s interesting because you kind of flip the typical Western approach to the mind, the Cartesian approach of you start with reason and sophisticated thinking and syllogistic logic and so forth, and you go—you start with sentience, and you move upwards, out of the brain stem and into the cortex. And, you know, I want to see where you land, and keep pressing you.
Sentience, just the registering of sensations in all the different modalities by which we receive sort of information from the outside, it’s remarkable. You know? It truly is. You think about the skin – it’s 7 pounds and billions of cells, and all kinds of information is going into your brain stem and your somatosensory cortex telling you where you are, and who’s touching you, what that touch means. You think about the new science of smell, how we create spaces and meaning and memory and childhood nostalgia out of smell. I mean, sensation’s deep. Right? And it’s great that you start there.
MP: I would add one thing to your definition of sentience, which is kind of a more basic form of consciousness. I think it’s maybe universal, I mean, among all living things. But there’s valence too. There’s a recognition of, this is good or bad for the organism.
DK: Right. And then you take us to plants, and, you know, I think a lot of us in this room, in particular at Bioneers, revere your scientific reporting and experience in writing of plants. And the new science on sentience of plants blew my mind. You know?
MP: Yeah. They have 20 senses.
Photo: Sergei Aleshin / ShutterstockDK: God!
MP: I know. They can sense gravity, I mean, and pH, and all these things that we can’t sense.
DK: And then they know kin, they know non-kin, they know cooperators.
MP: They can see. I mean, you know, there are vines that will change their leaf form to imitate the plant they’re climbing up, to hide. I mean, how do they see what the leaf form is and then how do they change themselves? We have no idea.
DK: Yeah. So what did that tell you about consciousness, the plant science? What did you start to think?
MP: So, it’s quite remarkable what plants can do. We’re fooled by the fact that they’re so still. But they have behaviors. They’re just slower than ours.
So these scientists call themselves plant neurobiologists. They know there are no neurons, they’re just trolling more conventional scientists. And it drives them crazy that they talk about plant neurobiology. So there’s a whole lot of these very cool experiments showing that plants can hear and see; they—in ways we don’t really understand.
I don’t conclude that plants are conscious because I think that word has specific meanings tied to being a mammal, at least. But I do think they’re sentient. And sentience, as I said, is a simpler form of consciousness that may well be universal. I think even single-celled creatures have sentience. I think you can’t survive in a world that’s constantly changing without sensing your environment and knowing what’s good or bad for you.
And so, yeah, that’s kind of where I came out on plants. And then I realized, well, consciousness is the way humans do sentience. And so every creature has its own version of sentience that’s appropriate to its body type, its sensorium, the scale at which it lives, and it would be anthropomorphic of us to say that, you know, plants are conscious the way we are. And they’re not. They don’t have interiority, I think. They don’t have a voice in their head. They can’t talk to themselves, all these amazing things that we can do.
Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Tammy Horton/Boris Zharkov PhotographyDK: One of the things that scientists like myself appreciate about your writing is often scientists become unlikely heroes in your books, and one of your heroes is Michael Levin.
MP: Yeah, he’s an amazing biologist. This is a biologist at Tufts who—I urge you to look him up. He studies how animals regenerate themselves. And he’s very interested in bioelectric fields.
Now, I didn’t know what these were. They were discovered in the ‘30s, but that any multi-cellular thing will have a bioelectric field that is organizing it, holding memories, enforcing a division of labor among cells in a multi-cellular situation. The study of this didn’t really begin until the ‘80s, when we developed these voltage-sensitive dyes. Before that, when the cell died, the field was gone. So unlike DNA, which survives the death of this—of the animal, and you can study it—or plant, bioelectric fields were very elusive. But now with these dyes, you can study them. And he’s really shown how powerful they are.
He works with planaria, which are these worms that, if you chop off a tail, they regenerate a tail; you chop off a head, they regenerate a head. They’re kind of amazing. And he teaches them something. He conditions them and then he chops off their head. They grow a new head, and they remember the lesson. Which means that the information that they had learned was stored in their bodies, in this bioelectric field, not in the brain.
So his kind of covert project is a takedown of the neuron and the gene. Which is, you know, pretty ambitious. So it’s a really interesting project, and he believes that the simplest beings are cognitive beings. The way evolution works is it creates cognitive beings that can solve problems, and that you can’t hardwire everything because our world is so changeable. The world, the environment in which they live is so changeable. So that creatures need sentience in order to navigate a world that’s constantly changing, and it’s a very compelling vision.
Host: Over the course of his research for his book, Michael Pollan found at least 22 distinct and often divergent theories of consciousness, as well as a theory about the specific consciousness of consciousness researchers. He believes it’s a clear indicator of how nascent the field remains, and how ineffable a mystery consciousness is.
MP: Non-local consciousness is a term for idealism. I mean, that’s what the philosophers called idealism. And that is the idea that consciousness is outside of our brains, and the job of the brain is to channel it, and that we’re like radio receivers or TV receivers, and we’re tuning in to consciousness. And it can be different kinds of consciousness.
Aldous Huxley uses that model in Doors of Perception. And he argues that psychedelics expand what he called the reducing valve, because we only let in that amount of consciousness that helps us survive. That would be the Darwinian explanation of like we only know these, but psychedelics opens it up and suddenly you feel like you’re more conscious.
I don’t know how you prove idealism. I think it’s a metaphysical idea, so I don’t think it’s susceptible to scientific proof. It’s consistent with all the brain science we’ve done on consciousness, which sounds crazy, but, you know, the brain is obviously involved in that system as well, it just has a different role. It’s not generating, it’s bringing in, and so damaging or changing the brain in some way would change consciousness. So it holds either way.
Cristof Koch, you know, he was the ultimate brain-centered researcher. He was the head of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, he worked with mapping individual neurons. He really believed brains generated consciousness, until he went to Brazil and had an experience on ayahuasca, which I talk about in the book. And he had an experience of consciousness outside of his brain, and it gave him this crisis. He was like crying to his wife, it was such a big crisis. And he got very interested in idealism. I don’t know where he is right now, but the last time I talked to him, he was engaging with this idealist philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup.
So you know, I don’t know what to make of that, honestly. Same with panpsychism. That’s another theory that solves the hard problem, but at a high expense, the expense being consciousness didn’t evolve or arise, it was always here, and it’s part of matter, that all matter has some degree, small degree of consciousness, and somehow it gets combined from all these—you know, the consciousness of our individual particles and cells into the kind of consciousness we have.
Another interesting idea – you’ve solved the problem. It’s sort of like physics when they say, well, we can solve quantum mechanics if we stipulate a multiverse, that there are 50 different worlds. Okay. That’s a high price to pay, but okay.
Host: Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner, “Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness”
The post Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner appeared first on Bioneers.
Union Jack warning on UK onshore oil and gas assets
An investor in the Wressle and West Newton fields warned today that government policy has made its UK business “increasingly difficult to progress”.
In annual accounts, Union Jack Oil blamed successive governments for:
“complex planning, regulatory burden and high taxation, resulting in unpredictable approval timeframes bringing additional uncertainty, significant cash costs and lost opportunities”.
Union Jack’s executive chairman, David Bramhill, said:
“the cost of maintaining a number of our non-producing UK licence interests has become increasingly difficult to justify regardless of their potential future value”.
The company, which recently invested in the US, gave up interests in 2025 at Biscathorpe and North Kelsey in Lincolnshire and at Dukes Wood and Kirklington in Nottinghamshire, the accounts said. They added that Union Jack was also in the process of relinquishing its stake in the Laughton licence in Lincolnshire.
Mr Bramhill said:
“During the remainder of 2026 and beyond, the Company intends to continue to review the merits of its UK non-production licence interests while prioritising asset allocation in favour of growing its hydrocarbon exploration, development and production enterprise in Oklahoma.”
The accounts also said Union Jack “believes investors will only wish to provide finance to companies and projects that support a transition to a low-carbon economy. As part of the Company’s ongoing strategy in respect of the environment, Union Jack commits to be totally transparent in respect of its projects and on how its carbon management practice is implemented”.
Union Jack said it remained focussed on interests at the Wressle oil site, in North Lincolnshire, where the operator has just published estimates on emissions resulting from a proposed site expansion.
The Wressle development would “support the company with revenues for at least another decade”, Union Jack said.
The company said it also continued to invest in the oil site at Keddington in Lincolnshire, where production resumed in mid-2025 after site upgrades. Planning consent is already in place for a sidetrack to one of the existing wells. The location has been finalised and the well would be drilled “when the operator deems appropriate”, Union Jack said.
At West Newton, in East Yorkshire, Union Jack said the partners had been “evaluating ways of generating additional value through early production schemes, ahead of any longer-term full gas field development”.
Last year, one of the investors at West Newton proposed using the sites for cryptocurrency mining.
Earlier this year, the Environment Agency approved plans for lower-volume fracking at West Newton. The approval is being challenged by a local campaigner (details here and here), whose crowdfunder has so far raised more than £1,800.
Key figures for year ending 31 December 2025Gross profit: £691,001 (2024: £1,968,101)
Net loss (including impairment of Biscathorpe and North Kelsey): £7,029,350 (2024: £649,213)
Basic loss per share: 5.68p (2024: 0.61p earnings)
Admin expenses (excluding impairment): £2,477,222 (2024: £1,878,089)
Total assets: £19,083,850 (2024: £23,846,105)
Total liabilities: £2,251,878 (2024: £1,975,354)
Net assets: £16,831,972 (2024: £21,870,751)
Net current assets: £1,365,622 (2024: £3,172,066)
Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic, crowds as park ends reservation system
Even before the summer travel rush began this Memorial Day weekend, Yosemite National Park was seeing enormous crowds—more than 836,000 visits so far in 2026, according to National Park Service data, about 100,000 more than this time last year.
During the pandemic, Yosemite started using some form of reservation system to manage crowds. Yosemite had one of its busiest seasons in 2025, with about 2.9 million visits through August, up 7% from the same period in 2024. Despite the high visitation rates, the National Park Service announced in February that Yosemite would not require timed-entry reservations in 2026, saying a review of 2025 traffic and parking data showed that a season-wide reservation requirement was not the most effective approach.
Last weekend, wait times to get into the park exceeded 90 minutes, and in some cases visitors were told to turn around. Once inside, visitors experienced completely full parking lots and overcrowding at popular sites within the park. Andranik Arakelyan, a visitor who previously opposed reservation systems acknowledged their value, saying, “There’s just not enough capacity, like infrastructure and the employees to handle all of this traffic.”
“Without any limits on the amount of vehicles, the amount of people, it becomes overwhelmed,” said John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center executive director. “The best accessibility is when there’s managed park conditions so that the number of vehicles is balanced with the amount of parking and the capacity of the roads,” said Buckley.
Quick hits Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic and crowds as park ends reservation systemABC7 News | San Francisco Chronicle
Wyoming lawmaker aims to block future roadless areas despite overwhelming support for roadless protections Billionaire buys Idaho state trust land to keep it undeveloped Residents of Mountain West towns warned they could run out of water after a terrible winter turns to a summer of drought Could changes at the U.S. Forest Service impact wildfire response in Oregon? Wyoming BLM in a bind between DOGE firings’ impacts and energy development push Essay: Treat water like family, not profit Podcast: The most underrated sites at America’s national parks Quote of the dayThe Forest Service’s own assessment found that building roads in these areas would actually increase the risk of fire, and another analysis shows that 85% of wildfires are human-caused.”
—Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon, WyoFile
Picture ThisWaves shimmer beneath the cliffs of Channel Islands National Park, where golden wildflowers bloom brightly above the Pacific.
Have a peaceful Sunday!
Photo by Tim Hauf
Featured image: Source: Yosemitenps
The post Yosemite overwhelmed by traffic, crowds as park ends reservation system appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
CAISO recommends 38 transmission projects costing around $6.7B
More than half of the projects are driven by forecasted load growth, marking an evolution in transmission planning from an emphasis on accessing low-cost renewables to “now also reliably meeting growing customer demand,” CAISO said.
New Mexico regulators approve SPS’ $9B, gas-heavy resource plan
The approved portfolio includes about 3.8 GW of new capacity, anchored by 2,088 MW of gas generation, along with 1,100 MW of wind, 189 MW of solar and 472 MW/1.9 GWh of battery storage.
How Illinois’ energy policy blueprint can address affordability, reliability
By betting on efficiency, storage, long-term energy planning and grid flexibility, the Illinois’ Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act offers a blueprint for the state’s energy future, Vote Solar’s John Delurey writes.
Net electricity generation jumped 4.5% in March as the West baked under record heat
Residential sales fell 0.1% year over year while residential prices soared 10.2% in the same period, to 18.8 cents/kWh, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.
Competitive transmission projects come online faster than incumbent projects in 4 regions: R Street
Completed competitive transmission projects are also about 30% less expensive than comparable incumbent utility projects, according to a report from the think tank.
How fuel cells turn BYOP into a win for utilities and hyperscalers
BYOP is increasingly evolving into a collaborative utility-customer model for serving large load growth.
Defensibility by design: What FERC Order 1920 requires
FERC 1920 requires rigorous long-term planning, transforming how planning activities produce results.
An ethically honest Memorial Day
This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world.
Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military. We think participating in these commemorations is just being a good citizen, but in truth by participating we are adding our voice to a highly organized political message that speaks very loudly to the rest of the world. The political message we help send is that we value the lives of U.S. military personnel thousands upon thousands of times more than we value the lives of all others.
This is not my family’s belief, and therefore we cannot participate in Memorial Day in this way.
Historically, like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day started as an expression of the strength of human desire for peace and respect for all life. The roots of the holiday began in the days following the end of the Civil War by those wanting to honor the fallen in the name of preserving the peace which had been achieved. Formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina held perhaps the first documented memorial day on May 1, 1865. While focused on honoring those who served as soldiers for the Union, these early commemorations also remembered and mourned all who died in the fighting, including civilians on both sides and soldiers for the South. So strong was this tendency to name and recognize the harm on both sides that some historians have critiqued these early Memorial Days as having the effect of whitewashing the moral battle that did take place as each person chose which side they were on in that critical time.
#newsletter-block_8a80a971a2882f9d43450b9f41afe3ae { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_8a80a971a2882f9d43450b9f41afe3ae #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterYet today our Memorial Day celebrations have the exact opposite problem. We dedicate so much time and resources and emotional energy to remembering the fallen soldiers and servicemembers on “our side,” while we willfully decline to mention the exponentially outsized larger picture: the uncountable lives lost, the incalculable cost, and the sheer depth of human suffering caused by war and organized violence around the world. This tendency, to honor the lives of our own military above all other lives, is deeply morally and psychologically dangerous. It trains our minds to accept the unnamed tens of thousands as correctly, reasonably invisible; to consider those whose names and ranks we can recite to be the only losses deserving of pause, mourning and honor.
This is a deep error and our souls know it. Every single person who dies in any war is a human being with a family. Every single loss rips a hole in the hearts of those that loved them. For each soul lost there is unfathomable pain that can never be fully understood or articulated.
But it can and should be recognized. To remember, to memorialize, does help.
Yesterday, Ms. magazine published an article that points to this need for a broader understanding of Memorial Day. It specifically named the women and children whose deaths and suffering in war are often invisibilized. In particular, they name the horrifying deaths of the 165 Iranian girls who were killed when our military, in an apparent but as of yet unacknowledged error, bombed their school. To hold an ethically honest Memorial Day, we could start by naming these children, these innocents – and turning our eyes and our hearts to the unfathomable suffering of their mothers.
Veterans for Peace has also consistently lifted up a call for Memorial Day to acknowledge the full cost of war and affirm the strength of our desire for peace. In their 2025 statement, they include a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a World War II veteran: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
The will of the peopleI believe that a huge number of Americans hold a similar opinion of war, even those who participate in Memorial Day commemorations. Despite decades of efforts to bake blank-check militarism into U.S. culture, most people are implicitly aware that the entire game serves the interests of the political elite and the very rich, while demanding sacrifice mainly from working class people. Research shows that antiwar sentiment was one of the primary motivations of a subset of Trump voters. A decisive number of voters withheld votes from Kamala Harris due to horror at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Neither group of voters has seen their will expressed.
I myself feel agonizingly helpless by the current news, and I can only imagine how a peace-motivated Trump voter must feel. Far from holding to his antiwar plank, Trump has acutely escalated both the culture and the practice of endless war. He renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War and has run it in a way that eviscerates all subtlety and respect for human rights. Far from resolving the genocide in Gaza, he has escalated it into a regional conflict that could easily lead to nuclear war. Trump has made numerous horrifying threats, including “that a whole civilization will die,” which is the definition of genocide. He is implementing automatic draft registration for our sons ages 18 to 26, so none can refuse to register as an act of conscientious objection. One is reminded of God’s warning through the prophet Samuel: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.”
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DonateIn the midst of this, we are all being encouraged to accept these escalations as normal and continue to join in and march and smile and show unquestioning respect and approval of such behavior. No! We must forge a better way.
What we need is an ethically honest Memorial Day. What the human spirit needs is a Memorial Day infused with heart and thoughtfulness, a Memorial Day that harnesses the power of our remembrance toward our deep desire for peace and well being for all. We can start by naming all those we know who have died in war — including soldiers and civilians who were killed in visible, recognized wars; soldiers and civilians who were killed in small conflicts; unofficial military actions that don’t make the news; and all victims of organized violence. We can name each soul whose names we know, and light candles for them.
But we should not stop there. We should also name in some way the unnameable. We should all visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in our hearts, and in doing so consider consciously not just those on “our side,” but all the loss of life that our global community has suffered because of war and organized violence. We can mark those uncountable deaths whose names we don’t know, but of whom we are aware. Doing so is an act of psychological honesty; it gives voice to our soul’s knowledge that their lives and their deaths do matter. In doing this we may not change anything outwardly, but we do change the rhythm of our own awareness, and the power of such a shift should not be underestimated.
Art by CODEPINK
This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Wressle expansion would emit 1m+ tonnes of climate pollution
Expansion of the Wressle oil site near Scunthorpe would result in more than one million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gases, documents have revealed.
But the developer, Egdon Resources, has said the proposal would not have a significant impact on climate change.
Well trajectories (proposed in red and existing in green) from the Wressle oil site.Source: Egdon Resources application
The expansion would produce an estimated extra 1 million+ barrels of oil over 15 years. Gas produced alongside the oil would be an additional 5.264 billion cubic feet.
The figures were published in a new assessment of the climate impact of the plans.
Egdon first submitted the proposal in March 2024 for two new wells, lower-volume fracking, 15 years of production and a 600m gas pipeline.
An approval by officials at North Lincolnshire Council in September 2024 was quashed in a legal case brought by a local campaigner.
This followed the landmark Finch ruling at the Supreme Court, which required decisionmakers to take account of the greenhouse gas emissions from the use of onshore oil or gas production.
Egdon had previously said the plans did not need a detailed environmental impact assessment (EIA).
But the company agreed earlier this year to voluntarily submit a slimmed-down version of an EIA, looking at just climate change, socio-economic impacts and cumulative effects.
Emissions estimatesEgdon’s consultants, Bureau Veritas, has estimated that at worst the greenhouse gases from the project would amount to 1,007,731 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).
More than 90% of the total, 917,999 tCO2e, would be from burning the oil and gas produced at the site, known as scope 3 category 11 emissions.
The remaining emissions, mainly from the production process, are estimated to total 89,732 tCO2e.
The climate assessment said:
“Overall, the Proposed Development is not expected to result in significant adverse effects on climate change, and the assessment demonstrates that emissions and climate risks have been considered in a proportionate and robust manner, consistent with relevant guidance and best practice.”
On the scope 3 category 11 greenhouse gases, the assessment said:
“While these emissions represent a very small proportion of global emissions, it is recognised that climate change is highly sensitive to cumulative emissions.
“Taking into account the global and downstream nature of these emissions, their lack of direct control at the project level, and their consistency with broader decarbonisation pathways, the effect is … considered to be minor adverse overall.”
The assessment estimated that at peak annual production, the scope 3 category 11 emissions would represent, at worst, 0.00033% of the remaining global carbon budget.
This would indicate a moderate adverse effect, the assessment said. But it concluded that the effect was “minor adverse when viewed in the context of global mitigation trajectories”.
The scope 1 and 2 emissions and scope 3 excluding category 11, were also considered to be “minor adverse following mitigation”.
These emissions, compared with UK carbon budgets) ranged from 0.0009% (seventh budget) TO 0.002% (sixth budget).
Other assessmentsAn updated ecological impact assessment on the Wressle plans said there would be no significant impacts on air quality affecting internationally-important wildlife sites on the Humber Estuary.
It also said there would be no “significant adverse effects” on sites of special scientific interest at Broughton Far Wood, 210m away from the well site, and Broughton Alder Wood, 600m away.
The socio-economic impact assessment concluded there would be “moderate to major beneficial effects” for employment and economic performance in civil engineering, mining and quarrying industries.
On cumulative effects, the assessment said:
“No long term significant effects identified and no greater [impacts] than for the proposed development in isolation”.
Public consultationPeople and organisations can now comment on the new documents, either online (go to bottom of application webpage and click submit comment button), by email to planning@northlincs.gov.uk or in writing to the Development Management team, North Lincolnshire Council, Church Square House, 30-40 High Street, Scunthorpe, DN15 6NL, quoting PA/2024/275.
The application’s website lists the closing date for the consultation as 30 June 2026.
DrillOrDrop will report on reaction to Egdon’s climate and other assessments.
Youth & Territory: Building Community Through Agroecology
Creating community around agroecology was the core mission of our educational pathways on youth leadership and ecoliteracy. These journeys culminated in Youth & Territory: Pathways in Agroecology and Citizenship, an event that brought together a diverse range of actors from the Lake Bracciano area.
Students, school communities, and local farmers met with representatives from the Ministry of the Environment (MASE), Mara Cossu and Tiziana Occhino, alongside regional councillor Marta Bonafoni and the mayor of Bracciano, Marco Crocicchi, to share their visions for a territory rooted in active citizenship and agroecological practices.
Students presented the projects they co-created during this year’s participatory processes focused on caring for the land: tangible outcomes of a collective journey in ecoliteracy and agroecology. A shared vision emerged: that of a living territory, where environmental protection and the production of healthy, local food become concrete, collective action.
At the close of the dialogue with institutions, the young participants had the opportunity to present their work through a collective art exhibition, while outside an aperitivo featuring local products was set up, to be enjoyed to the sounds of a student-led DJ set.
This is a tangible outcome of the Terrae Vivae program, whose results were shared within the framework of the Officine Municipali project, a community space offering free coworking and a collaborative platform dedicated to ecological action, ecoliteracy, and agroecology, open to all. An open, shared, and participatory space where agroecology becomes collective, community-driven action.
The projects are supported by the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security within the framework of the SNSvS6 Call – Sustainability Drivers and Ecology, and by the Italian Buddhist Union through its Ecology programme and 8×1000 funding scheme.
They were implemented in collaboration with the agricultural institute “Salvo D’Acquisto,” IIS Luca Paciolo, and the Ignazio Vian Scientific High School, together with the farms Fattoria Ecologica Le Bricchiette, Azienda Agricola La Argentina, and L’Orto di Clapi.
We thank Erbaccelab, together with Azienda Agricola Gentili and Fattoria Faraoni, for the agroecological catering.
The event was promoted within the framework of the project “Coworking Space Bracciano – Ecofficine,” co-funded by PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, and hosted at the Officine Municipali in Bracciano.
Project “Coworking Space Bracciano” – CUP F11I24000190009 – co-funded by the European Union under PR Lazio ESF+ 2021–2027, Priority 1 Employment, Specific Objective ESO4.2 AC19, Call “Officine Municipali” (DD G05680/2023).
Beneficiary: Municipality of Bracciano. Managing partner: Navdanya International ETS.
CUP: F11I24000190009 – Sigem Code: 23019DC000000106
Photo credits: Maela Bonafede
Ontario solar generation land requirements
This factsheet looks at how much land would be required for solar systems that could meet all of Ontario's electricity needs. It finds that 4/10ths of one percent of Ontario's landbase would be enough area to meet all of Ontario's current electricity demand. Ontario covers a massive land area bigger than many countries. It has
The post Ontario solar generation land requirements appeared first on Ontario Clean Air Alliance.
Class & Climate Returns: The COP Folly with Martin Empson
The Green Economy Networks podcast Class & Climate is back, with new host Em Thompson.
On this eighth episode of Class & Climate: Perspectives on a Green Economy, Em Thompson sits down with Martin Empson to reveal how COPs (Conferences of Parties) have bureaucratized climate organizing.
Martin Empson is a climate activist from the UK and the editor and a contributor to System Change not Climate Change, a book of essays from socialists around the world on the nature of capitalism’s ecological crisis and the radical response that is needed.
Class & Climate is a podcast series from Perspectives Journal and the Green Economy Network that maps how climate action can deliver jobs and long-term affordability for workers — while debunking myths that these goals are a zero-sum trade-off with a clean environment.
NYC Light Projections
Boycott The Bezos Met Gala at the crown of the Chrysler Building, Boycott The Bezos Met Gala with Laughing Bezos Image.
50th & I5 Seattle Bannering
Who Murdered Renee & Alex, Trump Did That!, & Impeach Convict Remove,Trump'sCorruptionBetraysUsAll,& More Science Less Fiction.
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