Save Right Whales Coalition Files Supreme Court Brief Challenging BOEM’s Unlawful Offshore Wind Approvals
NEW HAMPSHIRE (April 14) — The Save Right Whales Coalition (SRWC) has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the Court to review two cases challenging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) approval of the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind project. The brief argues that BOEM unlawfully reinterpreted the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) to expand its discretionary authority and bypass statutory protections for ocean users and marine ecosystems.
“Congress imposed clear, enforceable limits on BOEM’s authority,” said Lisa Linowes a spokesperson for SRWC. “Rather than following the law, BOEM reshaped it to serve policy objectives — without public input or congressional approval.”
Key Points from the Amicus Brief:
Improper Balancing of Mandatory Protections: BOEM reinterpreted OCSLA § 8(p)(4), which requires the agency to “ensure” compliance with twelve independent statutory safeguards — including protections for navigation, fishing, and the environment — by introducing a balancing framework that treats these protections as negotiable.
Textual Revision to Expand Authority: To support this reinterpretation, BOEM also modified a key provision of OCSLA (§ 8(p)(4)(I)) by repositioning a parenthetical phrase (“as determined by the Secretary”) in a way that artificially broadened the agency’s discretion over what qualifies as “reasonable uses” of the outer continental shelf and what level of interference is permissible — a subtle but powerful change that had the effect of rewriting the statute through guidance rather than legislation.
Avoidance of Formal Rulemaking: In April 2021, BOEM issued a memorandum setting forth its new interpretation of the statute, which it then applied to approve Vineyard Wind 1 and ten other offshore wind projects. Despite immediately implementing this revised framework, BOEM waited three years to begin the formal rulemaking process required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), thereby denying stakeholders the opportunity for notice-and-comment participation.
Unlawful Substitution of Compensation for Prevention: Rather than ensuring that offshore development avoids interfering with reasonable ocean uses — as the statute demands — BOEM relied on compensatory mitigation such as developer-funded payments or offsets. The brief argues that this approach replaces legal compliance with after-the-fact financial remedies, in direct conflict with Congress’s mandate to prevent interference. In a January 2025 planning document, BOEM conceded “There are no existing Federal regulations that require compensation for economic loss from displacement attributed to offshore wind energy installations.”
“This is a revealing admission,” said Linowes. “BOEM is approving projects it knows will harm fishermen and other ocean users, while relying on voluntary, developer-funded payments that have no basis in law. Compensation is not prevention — and it’s not a substitute for statutory compliance.”
Why This Case Matters
OCSLA § 8(p)(4) requires BOEM to ensure offshore wind projects comply with multiple statutory safeguards, including protecting existing ocean uses. The APA prohibits agencies from adopting binding rules or new interpretations without public rulemaking. The SRWC brief contends that BOEM’s failure to follow these legal obligations reflects a pattern of administrative overreach, enabled by improper judicial deference.
“If left unchecked BOEM’s conduct would allow agencies to bypass Congress by issuing internal memos and shifting statutory meaning without transparency or accountability,” Linowes said.
The Save Right Whales Coalition (https://saverightwhales.org/) is a broad alliance of scientists, fishermen, environmental advocates, and community groups committed to protecting endangered marine species and defending the lawful use of ocean resources.
Editor’s notes: “A Washington state city has granted part of the Snohomish River watershed legal rights that can be enforced in court. In nearly all cases, state legislatures heavily lobbied by commercial industries have preempted the laws, rendering them unenforceable. But the Everett initiative could be the first to withstand such a challenge. Democrats, typically more open to stronger environmental protections than Republicans, currently control Washington’s Legislature and governorship.”
Efforts to apply the rights of nature in Ecuador have often failed. Legal challenges can become highly politicised and there is little legal infrastructure beyond general constitutional principles.
For example, in a case brought after road builders had dumped material into the Vilcabamba River, plaintiffs claimed to represent nature in court. However, they were not genuinely advocating for the river’s rights – their main concern was protecting their downstream property.
Ultimately, defending the rights of nature in court will be a struggle if the nature in question – the river, forest or lake – is not represented by someone with an ecocentric perspective. That means prioritising the intrinsic value of nature itself, rather than focusing on how it can serve human interests.
“According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.”
Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing.
Many Indigenous peoples have long emphasised the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, the late University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone proposed what then seemed like a whimsical idea: to vest legal rights in natural objects to allow a shift from an anthropocentric to an intrinsic worldview.
Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.
By Katie Surma
April 2, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.
Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech.
At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy. That means the law views sentient species like elephants and bald eagles, as well as life-supporting ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, no differently than objects like microwaves or cars.
For the people behind the rights of nature movement, that way of thinking is deeply flawed. It’s also scientifically inaccurate.
Humans are part of nature and depend on ecosystems for survival—from the food we eat to the water we drink and air we breathe. Evolutionary biology shows that humans share a common ancestor with all other life on Earth. Forests, rivers and other biomes provide conditions for human life to thrive. And humans have always shaped the environment and have been shaped by it.
Understanding this interconnectedness is key to understanding that human flourishing ultimately depends on a healthy Earth. Rights of nature activists say most societies have forgotten that basic truth, harming their own wellbeing—and threatening their very survival—as a result.
When did this forgetting happen? Academics have traced the notion that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature back to Renaissance-era thinkers like René Descartes, who compared animals to machines. The idea is also woven into the Bible’s book of Genesis, with God giving man “dominion” over the Earth. Others point to the advent of cities, when masses of people lost regular contact with nature.
Modern legal systems have been shaped by these developments and ideas, thus institutionalizing the belief that nature is an object, or thing, beneath humans.
“Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time,” law professor Christopher Stone wrote in the seminal 1972 law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone noted that the law has always evolved to extend rights to new groups: moving from white, property-owning men to include women, people of color and children.
In 2006, a rural, conservative Pennsylvania town plagued by industrial pollution enacted the world’s first rights of nature resolution. Since then, scores of countries—including Ecuador, Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, India, the United States and Uganda—have had court rulings or enacted laws at the national or subnational level recognizing nature’s rights.
The advocates behind these laws argue that if nature’s rights are respected, humans will benefit.
How Do Rights of Nature Laws Differ From Environmental Regulations?
In the course of human history, environmental law is a relatively young field. In the United States, it largely developed in the late 1960s in response to mass pollution wrought by industrialization. Rivers caught fire, pervasive smog blanketed cities and chemicals like DDT were sprayed indiscriminately.
Policymakers enacted legislation like the Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate human activity and limit impacts of industry on human health. Those laws did curtail pollution. But rights of nature advocates argue that those conventional laws haven’t stopped the severe environmental problems we face today, like climate change, biodiversity loss and mass pollution.
Advocates say conventional environmental laws have a central flaw: They’re designed to permit pollution. They only control how much.
Rights of nature laws start from an entirely different place. Ecosystems, wildlife and Earth itself are treated as living beings with inherent rights deserving of the highest form of legal protection. The central concern of rights of nature laws is to maintain and preserve the integrity of ecosystems, requiring governments to take a preventative, rather than a reactionary, approach.
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has said this mandates government officials to respect what is known as the “precautionary principle,” or the idea that, absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems.
How Do These Laws Work in Practice?
The laws do not give nature’s rights absolute primacy over all other rights and interests.
No legal right is absolute. A right to free speech ends when that speech is defamatory or incites violence. Judges balance competing rights in the decisions they make every day. Nature’s rights are no different.
Rights of nature jurisprudence is still a young field. Most countries with such laws on the books haven’t had lawsuits attempting to enforce them. It’s also important to note that not all rights of nature laws are the same—there is wide variation in how the laws are written and what rights are recognized.
But Ecuador, which constitutionalized nature’s rights in 2008, has seen dozens of cases. There, Mother Earth, or Pachamama, has a right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”
The Ecuadorian Constitution also requires the government to prevent the “extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
Not all cases have been favorable for ecosystems. Ecuador’s economy is still largely dependent on oil revenues and other extractive industries.
But Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of mangroves, cloud forests, rivers, endangered frogs and coastal marine ecosystems, thwarting mining operations, industrial fishing and other nature-damaging activities. In some cases, courts have ordered the government to restore damaged ecosystems. Cases decided in favor of nature usually have a compelling reason for why nature’s rights ought to prevail over competing interests, like a high risk of extinction for certain species.
In the cloud forest case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explained the importance of protecting a sensitive ecosystem from mining impacts, saying: “[T]he risk in this case is not necessarily related to human beings … but to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
In deciding these cases, Ecuadorian courts have depended heavily on scientific experts and evidence. Judges have also looked holistically at the health of ecosystems, rather than at piecemeal levels of pollution—a departure from the way courts tend to evaluate conventional environmental laws.
Scientists have come to the forefront of the movement in other ways. In Panama, for instance, marine biologists were instrumental in the passage of that country’s national rights of nature law.
How Are Rights of Nature Laws Enforced?
Trees and wild animals can’t walk into a courtroom and make their case. But rights of nature laws give ecosystems and species the ability to act in their own capacity under the law with help from people, similar to other non-human entities like corporations, business partnerships, ships and nonprofits.
This is done through a longstanding concept called legal personhood. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.
Each of those nonhuman entities is represented by a human guardian. Similar arrangements are used for minors and incapacitated people in court proceedings.
Who Is Behind This Movement?
Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the movement in several ways.
The worldviews of many Indigenous cultures—that humans are part of nature and owe responsibilities to other living beings—are foundational for the movement.
Honoring and preserving those worldviews and related knowledge for centuries has been no small thing. Indigenous communities have faced a long, dark history of colonization and other attempts aimed at eradicating their culture and separating them from their territories. Today, people in many Indigenous communities are still harassed, attacked and sometimes killed for defending water and land.
Indigenous peoples have also been behind many of the laws and court rulings advancing the movement. In New Zealand, Māori people fought for a settlement with the national government, resulting in legal personhood for a river, national park and mountains.
It was Ecuador’s strong Indigenous movements that led to the country becoming the first in the world in 2008 to constitutionally recognize Mother Earth’s rights. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has also drawn on Indigenous knowledge in deciding rights of nature cases.
Bolivia’s Indigenous movements were behind that country’s 2010 and 2012 laws recognizing the rights of Mother Earth. Enforcement of nature’s rights in Bolivia has proved difficult, however.
Across North America, many Indigenous nations have passed rights of nature laws.
And in Peru, a coalition of Indigenous women won rights for the Marañón River ecosystem, a place the oil industry has heavily polluted for decades. The fight for the Marañón River came at great personal cost for Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, and other women in the organization, who were harassed and threatened for their advocacy.
What Are the Criticisms of Rights of Nature Laws?
The biggest opposition to the movement has come from industry groups—developers, the industrial agricultural sector and other polluting industries—and politicians aligned with those interests.
Those opponents argue that giving nature a higher level of protection will impede development and lead to an explosion of litigation. In practice, that hasn’t happened. Barriers to pursuing lawsuits, like the high cost of attorney fees, are substantial.
But the laws do threaten the interests of industries and businesses that have made money off extracting from and monetizing the natural world in unsustainable ways.
Some critics of the movement have questioned whether, if nature has rights, it also has duties: Can a river be sued if it floods and harms humans? Rights of nature advocates respond to this by saying that legal rights, duties and liability are always tailored to the entity they are assigned to.
Corporations, for instance, don’t have a right to family. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to act with intent and therefore should not have legal liability for harm it causes, advocates argue.
Another prevalent charge is that the rights of nature movement is an attempt to force human societies to surrender modern comforts and technology. In practice, though, advocates have sought to rebalance human interests with the health of ecosystems by placing better guardrails around human activity, ensuring the integrity and sustainability of Earth is maintained now and into the future. Advocates argue that humanity isn’t harmed by that but benefits instead.
They also say nothing so quickly forces people to surrender modern comforts as a disaster that destroys their homes and communities, and megadisasters are far more common in a warming world.
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and papal exhortation Laudate Deum, said humans have a moral duty to protect the Earth.
“For ‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum.
Ecuadorian activists say the country’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights has made their country more pluralistic by incorporating the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and is changing the way everyday people think about the Earth, their home.
“We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights,” Ecuadorian political scientist Natalia Greene told Inside Climate News. “The law has influenced peoples’ understanding of nature and that is very powerful.”
Learn More
Follow our reporting at Inside Climate News. We’re the only newsroom we know of that has a dedicated rights of nature beat. Start here and here.
Books by Indigenous authors and ecocentric thinkers:
Our system of law and government was founded in racial-divisiveness and colonization and is dominated by corporations. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) fights to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to a local self-government system and the Rights of Nature. Fight for a more just, Earth-centered tomorrow, today.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature(GARN) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”
Banner: To protect it from mining and deforestation, Los Cedros cloud forest was awarded the same rights as people.
Editor’s note: “Most people don’t realize that part of gas extraction is a liquid condensate, the origin of plastics, which is being pumped, defying Climate Chaos, via the maze of fracking pipelines to the Gulf Coast, where the US is set on cornering the world plastics market, as well as shipping the LNG gas it has forced on its European vassals.” In a bid to become a world plastics monopoly, Exxon quietly plans to erect a new $8.6 billion plastics plant. The proposal calls for a steam cracker, a facility that uses oil and natural gas to make ethylene and propylene — the chemical building blocks of plastic. “Besides ethylene and propylene, steam crackers produce climate pollution and hazardous chemicals like ammonia, benzene, toluene, and methanol.”
“Where Exxon is going to put their bloody plant is smack-dab in front of [what will be] one of the largest oyster farms in Texas,” said Wilson, who is not convinced that any plastics factory can operate without polluting. She noted that Formosa has already violated its settlement agreement nearly 800 times, racking up over $25 million in fines. “Exxon is going to be exactly like Formosa.”
“We have been cleaning the piss out of [Cox Creek], and this is the very place where Exxon is going to try to put its plastics plant,” Wilson, who lives in nearby Seadrift, said of the facility’s potential location. “You see this nightmare of another plant, trying to do the very same thing.”
A Shrimper’s Crusade Pays Big Dividends on a Remote Stretch of Texas Coastline
Five years after Diane Wilson’s landmark settlement with Formosa Plastics, money flows to “the bay and the fishermen.”
By Dylan Baddour
December 24, 2024
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
PORT LAVACA, Texas—Few men still fish for a living on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The work is hard and pay is meager. In the hearts of rundown seaside towns, dilapidated harbors barely recall the communities that thrived here generations ago.
But at the docks of Port Lavaca, one group of humble fishermen just got a staggering $20 million to bring back their timeless way of life. They’re buying out the buyer of their catch, starting the largest oyster farm in Texas and dreaming big for the first time in a long time.
“We have a lot of hope,” said Jose Lozano, 46, who docks his oyster boats in Port Lavaca. “Things will get better.”
It’s all thanks to one elder fisherwoman’s longshot crusade against the petrochemical behemoth across the bay, and her historic settlement in 2019. Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from the tiny town of Seadrift, took on a $250 billion Taiwanese chemical company, Formosa Plastics Corp., and won a $50 million trust fund, the largest sum ever awarded in a civil suit under the Clean Water Act.
Now, five years later, that money is beginning to flow into some major development projects on this mostly rural and generally overlooked stretch of Texas coastline. Through the largest of them, the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, formed in February this year, Wilson dreams of rebuilding this community’s relationship with the sea and reviving a lifestyle that flourished here before global markets cratered the seafood industry and local economies shifted to giant chemical plants.
“I refuse to believe it’s a thing of the past,” said Wilson, 76, who lives in a converted barn, down a dirt road, amid a scraggle of mossy oak trees. “We’re going to put money for the fishermen. They’re not going to be destroyed.”
The fishing cooperative has only just begun to spend its $20 million, Wilson said. It’s the largest of dozens of projects funded by her settlement agreement. Others include a marine science summer camp at the Port Lavaca YMCA, a global campaign to document plastic pollution from chemical plants, a $500,000 study of mercury pollution in Lavaca Bay and the $10 million development of a local freshwater lake for public access.
“They are doing some wonderful things,” said Gary Reese, a Calhoun County commissioner. He also received grants from the fund to build a pier and a playground pavilion at other county parks.
The fund resulted from a lawsuit Wilson filed in 2017 under the Clean Water Act, which enables citizens to petition for enforcement of environmental law where state regulators have failed to act. By gathering evidence from her kayak over years, Wilson demonstrated that Formosa had routinely discharged large amounts of plastic pellets into local waterways for decades, violating language in its permits.
These sorts of lawsuits typically result in settlements with companies that fund development projects, said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center in Boston. But seldom do they come anywhere close to the dollar amount involved in Wilson’s $50 million settlement with Formosa.
“It’s a real outlier in that aspect,” Kratka said.
For example, he said, environmental organizations in Texas sued a Shell oil refinery in Deer Park and won a $5.8 million settlement in 2008 that funded an upgrade of a local district’s school bus fleet and solar panels on local government buildings. In 2009 groups sued a Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown and won a $2 million settlement in 2009 that funded an environmental health clinic for underserved communities.
One reason for the scale of Wilson’s winning, Kratka said, was an unprecedented citizen effort to gather plastic pollution from the bays as evidence in court. While violations of permit limits are typically proven through company self-reporting, Wilson mobilized a small team of volunteers.
“This was done by everyday people in this community, that’s what built the case,” said Erin Gaines, an attorney who previously worked on the case for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “This had never been done before, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
Wilson’s settlement included much more than the initial $50 million payment. Formosa also agreed to clean up its own legacy plastic pollution and has so far spent $32 million doing so, according to case records. And the company committed to discharge no more plastic material from its Point Comfort complex—a standard which had never been applied to any plastics plants across the nation.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen. It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa consented to regular wastewater testing to verify compliance, and to penalties for violations. Now, three times a week, a specially engineered contraption analyzes the outflows at Formosa. Three times a week, it finds they are full of plastic. And three times a week, Formosa pays a $65,000 penalty into Wilson’s trust fund.
It’s small change for a company that makes about a billion dollars per year at its Point Comfort complex, or $2.7 million per day. To date, those penalty payments have totaled more than $24 million, in addition to the $50 million awarded in 2019.
The money doesn’t belong to Wilson, who has never been rich, and she never touches it. It goes into a fund called the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust, which is independently managed.
For the first $50 million, Wilson evaluated grant applications and allocated the money to government entities, registered nonprofits and public universities. Now an independent panel administers the fund.
Many locals who know her story assume that Wilson is rich now, she said. But she never got a penny of the settlement. She was never doing this for the money.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen,” she said. “It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa also writes grants for community development programs, although none of them approach the size of the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
In response to a query from Inside Climate News, the company provided a summary of its community spending over 30 years, including $2.4 million on local and regional environmental projects, $2 million for a new Memorial Medical clinic, $2 million to upgrade local water treatment systems, $2 million to an area food bank, $1.3 million for local religious organizations and $1.2 million on scholarships for high school seniors.
The company has contributed $6.3 million for regional roadway improvements, donated 19 houses to the Calhoun County Independent School District and built a classroom in restored wetlands. Its annual employee golf tournament raises $500,000 for United Way charities, and its national headquarters in New Jersey gives $1 million each year to local charities. In Point Comfort it has programs to plant trees, protect bees and restore monarch butterfly habitat.
“Formosa Plastics has always believed in giving back to the community and approximately 30 years ago established education, environmental, medical, religious and scholarship trusts,” the company said in a five-page statement.
Since the 2019 settlement, Formosa has taken steps to address environmental challenges and reduce the environmental impact at its Point Comfort complex, the company said.
Formosa has installed pollution control systems to reduce the release of plastic particles, has partnered with industry experts to develop better filtration methods and is monitoring emerging technologies for opportunities to improve environmental stewardship, it said. The Point Comfort complex has also improved stormwater drainage to reduce plastics in runoff, and is engaging with community advocates to identify sustainable solutions.
“We understand the importance of protecting the environment and the communities where we operate, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement,” the statement said.
The Fishing Way of Life
Wilson fondly recalls the bustling fishing community of her youth in Seadrift, more than 60 years ago. There were hundreds of boats at the docks, surrounded by a town full of mechanics, welders, netmakers and fish houses.
They weren’t rich, Wilson said, but they were free. They answered to no one, except maybe game wardens. They had twilight every morning, the silence of the water, the adventure of the search, the thrill of the catch and a regular intimacy with spirits of the sea, sun, wind and sky.
“You are out there on that bay, facing the elements, making decisions,” Wilson said. “That is as close to nature as you can get.”
Over her life, she watched it all fall apart. There are no fish houses in Seadrift today. Almost all the old businesses were bulldozed or boarded up. Wilson’s own brothers took jobs at the giant petrochemical plants growing onshore. But every day off they spent back on the water.
Most people called her crazy, 30 years ago, when she started complaining about water pollution from Formosa. Powerful interests denounced her and no one defended her.
But Wilson never gave up speaking out against pollution in the bay.
“That bay is alive. She is family and I will fight for her,” Wilson said. “I think everyone else would let her be destroyed.”
Over years of persistent, rambunctious protests targeting Formosa, Wilson began to get calls from employees at the plant, asking to meet secretly in fields, pastures and beer joints to talk about what they’d seen. They told her about vast amounts of plastic dust and pellets washed down drains, and about the wastewater outfalls where it all ended up.
When Wilson started visiting those places, often only accessible by kayak, she began to find the substance for her landmark lawsuit, millions and millions of plastic pellets that filled waterways and marshes.
“Felt like Huck Finn out there, all that exploring,” she said.
In 2017, Wislon filed her petition in federal court, then continued collecting evidence for years before trial. It was the first case over plastic pellet pollution brought under the Clean Water Act, according to Amy Johnson, then a contract attorney with the nonprofit RioGrande Legal Aid and lead attorney for Wilson’s case.
Gathering Nurdles
Down the coast in Port Aransas, a researcher at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute named Jace Tunnell had just launched a project in 2018 to study water pollution from plastics manufacturing plants. At that time, little was known about the scale of releases of plastic pellets, also called nurdles, into the oceans from those industrial facilities.
The Nurdle Patrol, as Tunnell called it, was beginning on a shoestring budget to methodically collect and catalog the nurdles in hopes of getting a better picture of the problem. That’s when Tunnel, a fourth generation Gulf Coast native and a second generation marine scientist, heard about a fisherwoman who was also collecting nurdles up the coast.
He contacted Wilson, who shared her data. But Tunnell didn’t believe it. Wilson claimed to have gathered 30,000 nurdles in 10 minutes. Tunnell would typically collect up to 200 in that time. He drove out to see for himself and found, to his shock, that it was true.
“The nurdles were just pluming up back there,” Tunnell said. “It really was an eye opener for me of how bad Formosa was.”
At that time, Wilson and her small team of volunteers were pulling up huge amounts of plastic from the bay system and logging it as evidence.
In 2019, the case went to trial. At one point, she parked a pickup truck full of damp, stinky plastic outside the federal courthouse and brought the judge out to see. She also cited Nurdle Patrol’s scientific method for gathering pellets as a means to estimate overall discharges in the bay.
“Diane was able to use Nurdle Patrol data in the lawsuit to seal the deal,” Tunnell said.
Later that year, the judge ruled in Wilson’s favor, finding Formosa had violated its permit limits to discharge “trace amounts” of plastics thousands of times over decades.
Formosa opted to negotiate a settlement with Wilson rather than seek a court-ordered penalty. In December 2019, the two parties signed a consent decree outlining their agreement and creating the $50 million Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
Funding Community Projects
Right away, Wilson signed over $1 million to the Nurdle Patrol, which Tunnell used over five years to build an international network with 23,000 volunteers and an online portal with the best data available on plastic nurdles in the oceans. They’ve also provided elementary and high schools with thousands of teaching kits about plastics production and water pollution.
“There’s no accountability for the industries that release this,” Tunnell said as he picked plastic pellets from the sand near his home on North Padre Island in early December. “Of course, Diane kind of changed that.”
The trust’s largest grant programs are still yet to take effect. Wilson allocated $10 million to Calhoun County to develop a 6,400 acre park around Green Lake, the second largest natural lake in Texas, currently inaccessible to the public.
The county will begin taking bids this month to build phase one of the project, which will include walking trails and birding stands, according to county commissioner Reese. Later they’ll build a parking lot and boat ramp.
The county brought this property in 2012 with hopes of making a park, but never had the money. Initially, county officials planned to build an RV park with plenty of pavement. But funding from Wilson’s trust forbade RVs and required a lighter footprint to respect the significant Native American and Civil War campsites identified on the property.
“It’ll be more of a back-to-nature thing,” Reese said. “It’s been a long time coming, we hope to be able to provide a quality facility for the public thanks to Matagorda Mitigation Trust.”
By far, the largest grant from the trust has gone to the fishermen. Wilson allocated $20 million to form a cooperative at the docks of Port Lavaca—an unlikely sum of money for seamen who struggle to feed their families well. Wilson dreamed that this money could help bring back the vanishing lifestyle that she loved.
The Fishermen
Today, most of the remaining commercial fishermen on this Gulf coast come from Mexico and have fished here for decades. It’s hard work without health insurance, retirement plans or guaranteed daily income. But it’s an ancient occupation that has always been available to enterprising people by the sea.
“It’s what we’ve done our whole life,” said Homero Muñoz, 48, a board member of the fishermen’s cooperative, who has worked the Texas coast since he was 19. “This is what we like to do.”
Lately it’s been more difficult than ever, he said. Declining vitality in the bays, widespread reef closures by Texas authorities and opposition from wealthy sportfishing organizations force the commercial fishermen to compete for shrinking oyster populations in small and distant areas. Then, the fishermen have little power to negotiate on low prices for their catch set by a few big regional buyers, who also own most of the dock space. The buyers distribute it at a markup to restaurants and markets across the county.
“There isn’t anyone who helps us,” said Cecilio Ruiz, a 58-year-old father of three who has fished the Texas coast since 1982.
To help the fishermen build a sustainable business, Wilson tapped the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization based in Atlanta originally founded to help Black farmers and landowners form cooperatives in the newly de-segregated South. For FSC, it was an unprecedented offer.
“This is an amazing project, very historic,” said Terence Courtney, director of cooperative development and strategic initiatives at FSC.
Usually, money is the biggest obstacle for producers wanting to form a collectively owned business, Courtney said. He’d never seen a case where a donor put up millions of dollars to make it happen.
“Opportunities like this don’t come around often. I can’t think of another example,” Courtney said. “We saw this as something that history was compelling us to do.”
The Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative
In 2020 Courtney started traveling regularly to Port Lavaca, meeting groups of fishermen, assessing their needs, discussing the concept of a cooperative and studying feasibility.
The men, who speak primarily Spanish, had trouble understanding Courtney’s English at first. But they knew someone who could help: Veronica Briceño, the daughter of a late local fisherman known as Captain Ralph. As a child, she translated between English and Spanish around her father’s business and the local docks and harbors.
Briceño, a 40-year-old worker at the county tax appraisal office, was excited to hear about the effort. She’d learned to fish on her grandfather’s boat. Her father left her four boats and she couldn’t bring herself to sell them. She joined FSC as a volunteer translator for the project.
“These men, all they know how to do is really just work,” she said. “They were needing support from someone.”
A year later, FSC hired Briceño as project coordinator. They leased an old bait shop with dock space at the harbor in Port Lavaca and renovated it as an office. Then in February 2024 they officially formed the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, composed of 37 boat owners with 77 boats that employ up to 230 people.
Now Briceño has a desk at the office where she helps the fishermen with paperwork, permitting and legal questions while coordinating a growing list of contracts as the cooperative begins to spend big money.
Negotiations are underway for the cooperative to purchase a major local seafood buyer, Miller’s Seafood, along with its boats, dock space, processing operations and supply contracts for about $2 million.
“I hope they help carry it on,” said Curtis Miller, 63, the owner of Miller’s Seafood, which was founded by his uncle in the 1960s. “I would like to see them be able to succeed.”
Many of the cooperative members have worked for Miller’s Seafood during the last 40 years, he said. The company handles almost entirely oysters now and provides them wholesale to restaurants on the East Coast, Florida and in Texas.
The cooperative has also leased 60 acres of bay water from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to start the largest oyster farm in Texas, a relatively new practice here. FSC is now permitting the project with the Texas General Land Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“That might be the future of the industry,” said Miller. “It might be the next big thing.”
“It Can Be Revived”
At a recent meeting of the cooperative, the members discussed options for a $2.5 million purchase of more than 7,000 oyster cages to install on the new farm. They talked about plans to visit and study a working oyster farm. The cooperative is finalizing a marketing and distribution plan for the farmed oysters.
The project would give two acres to each oysterman to farm, and would finally do away with the frantic race to harvest the few available oyster areas before other boats do. Now, they’ll have a place of their own.
“To have our own farms, liberty to go to our own piece of water,” said Miguel Fierros, 44, a bearded, third-generation fisherman and father of three. “It’s a unique opportunity I don’t think we’ll ever get again.”
Briceño, the project coordinator, hopes that the practice of oyster farming will bring a new generation into the seafood industry here. Neither of her kids plan to make a living on the water like her father or grandfather, who always encouraged the family to find jobs with health insurance and retirement. Now her 21-year-old son works at Formosa, like many of his peers, as a crane operator.
Perhaps this cooperative, with its miraculous $20 million endowment, can realize the dream of a local fishing industry with dignified pay and benefits. If it goes well, Briceño said, maybe her grandkids will be fishermen someday.
“We’re going to get a younger crowd actually interested,” she said.
This project is just getting started. Most of their money still remains to be spent, and the fishermen have many ideas. They would like to buy a boat repair business to service their fleet, as well as a net workshop, and to open more oyster farms.
For Wilson, now an internationally recognized environmental advocate, this all just proves how much can be accomplished by a stubborn country woman with volunteer helpers and non-profit lawyers. Ultimately, she hopes these projects will help rebuild a fishing community and bring back the fishermen’s way of life.
For now, the program is only getting started.
“It can be revived,” Wilson said. “There is a lot of money left.”
Editor’s note: “MMA is methyl methacrylate, a chemical compound that was banned by the FDA in the 1970s for use in nail enhancements due to its potential health hazards,” Hanna says. Celebrity manicurist Julie Kandalec adds, “It’s an ingredient commonly found in acrylic liquids, called monomer.”
One of the easiest ways to check if there is MMA in your acrylic or nail supplies is to check the ingredient list of your products. It should not be listed as an ingredient in any reputable acrylic nail product. A few additional tips include: Smelling a very harsh odor when applying and filing your acrylic nails – some people say it smells like cat urine.
“Mitsubishi Chemical Group (MCG) has concluded a license agreement with SNF Group regarding MCG’s N-vinylformamide (NVF) manufacturing technology. NVF is a raw material of functional polymers. Using the manufacturing technology licensed under this agreement, SNF will start the commercial production of NVF at its new plant in Dunkirk, France as of this June. NVF is a monomer used as a material for papermaking chemicals, water treatment agents, and oil field chemicals.”
Environmental activists claim victory as Mitsubishi scraps $1.3 billion chemical plant in ‘Cancer Alley’
by Tristan Baurick, Verite News New Orleans
Environmental groups are claiming victory after Mitsubishi Chemical Group dropped plans for a $1.3 billion plant in the heart of Louisiana’s industrial corridor.
In the works for more than a decade, the chemical manufacturing complex would have been the largest of its kind in the world, stretching across 77 acres in Geismar, a small Ascension Parish community about 60 miles west of New Orleans. Tokyo-based Mitsubishi cited only economic factors when announcing the cancellation last week, but a recent report on the plant’s feasibility noted that growing community concern about air pollution could also hamper the project’s success.
“The frontline communities are fighting back, causing delays, and that amounts to money being lost,” said Gail LeBoeuf with Inclusive Louisiana, an environmental group focused on the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley.
The nonprofit group Beyond Petrochemical declared the project’s failure a “major victory for the health and safety of Louisianans.”
According to Mitsubishi, the plant could have produced up to 350,000 tons per year of methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a colorless liquid used in the manufacture of plastics and a host of consumer products, including TVs, paint and nail polish.
The plant was expected to be a major polluter, releasing hundreds of tons per year of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and other harmful chemicals, according to its permit information.
Mitsubishi cited rising costs and waning demand for MMA as the reasons for dropping the project. In a statement, the company indicated the plant likely wouldn’t have enough MMA customers to cover “increases in capital investment stemming from inflation and other factors.”
In July, a report on the plant’s viability warned that a global oversupply of MMA and fierce local opposition made the project a “bad bet.”
Conducted by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the report said that credit agencies are paying more attention to “community sentiment” about petrochemical projects, particularly in Louisiana. In Geismar and other parts of Cancer Alley, there’s a “disproportionately heavy concentration of polluting industrial facilities” and Mitsubishi could become “entangled in a decades-long dispute involving issues of racial inequality and environmental justice,” the IEEFA report said.
Geismar residents are surrounded by about a half-dozen large chemical facilities that emit harmful levels of air pollution. Of the more than 6,000 people who live within the three miles of the planned project site, about 40% are Black or Hispanic, and 20% are considered low-income, according to federal data.
“The air here is already so dirty that the kids can’t play outside anymore,” said Pamela Ambeau, Ascension Parish resident and member of the group Rural Roots Louisiana.
The proposed plant is the latest in a string of failed industrial projects in Cancer Alley. Since 2019, local activism was instrumental in halting the development of two large plastics complexes in St. James Parish and a grain export terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish. All three projects would have been built in historically Black and rural communities.
Mitsubishi’s project had the strong backing of Louisiana political leaders. In 2020, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, praised the project as a “world-scale” chemical manufacturing facility that would create “quality jobs.”
Louisiana Economic Development predicted the plant would create 125 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 and another 669 “indirect jobs” in the region.
The state agency began courting Mitsubishi in 2016, offering the company worker recruitment and training assistance and a $4 million grant to offset construction costs.
In 2021, Mitsubishi applied for property tax abatement via the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP. The tax relief, which Louisiana has granted to several similar projects, was pending the plant’s construction and would have saved the company an estimated $17 million in its first year, according to LED.
The first of a series of project delays began in 2022 due to what Mitsubishi called “market volatilities.”
Mitsubishi appeared to be betting on generous state subsidies “while ignoring the larger financial landscape,” said Tom Sanzillo, author of the IEEFA report.
The combination of sustained market weakness and strong public opposition “erased the potential benefits they are counting on,” he said.
Editor’s note: “In recent years, the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam experienced a boom in renewable energy investments driven by generous feed-in tariffs, under which the state committed to buying electricity for 20 years at above-market prices. However, the high tariffs increased losses for Vietnam’s state-owned power utility EVN, the only buyer of the generated electricity, and led to an increase in power prices for households and factories. Authorities have repeatedly tried to reduce the high tariffs. Now they are considering a retroactive review of the criteria set for accessing the feed-in tariffs.”
“It’s really hard to build wind farms in Arizona, and if you put this into place, it’s just pretty much wiping you out,” said Troy Rule, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a published expert on renewable energy systems. “It’s like you’re trying to kill Arizona’s wind farm industry.”
United States Congressional House Republicans are seeking to prevent the use of taxpayer dollars to incentivize what they describe as “green energy boondoggles” on agricultural lands, citing subsidies that could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
They are expensive to build, just finding their footing on this side of the Atlantic, and have faced backlash from parties as varied as beachfront property owners and fishermen to coastal businesses and fossil fuel backers(most of the developers have fossil fuel ties).
The future of Humboldt County’s offshore wind industry appears increasingly uncertain following mass layoffs at RWE and Vineyard Offshore, the multinational energy companies leading efforts to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms on the North Coast. The job cuts come in response to widespread market uncertainty following President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban offshore wind development in the United States.
A critical permit for an offshore wind farm planned near the New Jersey Shore has been invalidated by an administrative appeals board.
COLOMBO — In a dramatic turn of events, Indian tycoon Gautam Adani’s Green Energy Limited (AGEL) has withdrawn from the second phase of a proposed wind power project in northern Sri Lanka. The project, which was planned to generate 250 MW through the installation of 52 wind turbines in Mannar in the island’s north, faced strong opposition since the beginning due to serious environmental implications and allegations of financial irregularities.
While renewable energy is a crucial need in the era of climate change, Sri Lankan environmentalists opposed the project, citing potential ecological damage to the sensitive Mannar region. Additionally, concerns arose over the way the contract was awarded, without a competitive bidding process.
The former government, led by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, had inked an agreement with AGEL, setting the power purchase price at $0.82 per unit for 20 years. This rate was significantly higher than rates typically offered by local companies. “This is an increase of about 70%, a scandalous deal that should be investigated,” said Rohan Pethiyagoda, a globally recognized taxonomist and former deputy chair of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.
Legal battles
Five lawsuits were filed against this project by local environmental organizations, including the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, the Centre for Environmental Justice and the Environmental Foundation Ltd. In January, the newly elected government expressed its desire to cancel the initial agreement and to renegotiate its terms and conditions, citing the high electricity tariff. Environmentalists welcomed the decision, believing the project would be scrapped entirely. However, their relief was short-lived when AGEL clarified that the project itself was not canceled, only the tariff agreement.
Government spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa later confirmed that the project would proceed after renegotiating a lower power purchase rate. However, two weeks later, AGEL announced its complete withdrawal from the project, a decision widely believed to be influenced by the government’s stance.
Wind energy potential
Sri Lanka has been exploring wind energy potential for more than two decades, with the first large-scale wind farm in Mannar named Thambapavani commissioned in 2020. This facility, comprising 30 wind turbines, currently generates 100 MW of power. With an additional 20 turbines planned, the Mannar wind sector would have surpassed 100 towers.
The Adani Group had pledged an investment totaling $442 million, and already, $5 million has been spent in predevelopment activities. On Feb. 15, the Adani Group formally announced its decision to leave the project. In a statement, the group stated: “We would respectfully withdraw from the said project. As we bow out, we wish to reaffirm that we would always be available for the Sri Lankan government to have us undertake any development opportunity.”
Environmentalists argue that Mannar, a fragile peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow land strip, cannot sustain such extensive development. “If built, this project would exceed the carrying capacity of the island,” Pethiyagoda noted.
Mannar is not only a growing tourism hub, known for its pristine beaches and archaeological sites, but also Sri Lanka’s most important bird migration corridor. As the last landmass along the Central Asian Flyway, the region hosts millions of migratory birds, including 20 globally threatened species, he added.
Sampath Seneviratne of the University of Colombo, who has conducted satellite tracking research on migratory birds, highlighted the global importance of Mannar. “Some birds that winter here have home ranges as far as the Arctic Circle,” he said. His research has shown how extensively these birds rely on the Mannar Peninsula.
Although mitigation measures such as bird monitoring radar have been proposed to reduce turbine collisions, power lines distributing electricity remain a significant threat, particularly to species like flamingos, a major attraction in Mannar. The power lines distributing electricity from the already established wind farm near the Vankalai Ramsar Wetland and are already proven to be a death trap for unsuspecting feathered kind.
Nature-based tourism
Given Mannar’s ecological significance, conservationists say the region has greater potential as a destination for ecotourism rather than large-scale industrial projects. “Mannar’s rich biodiversity and historical value make it ideal for nature-friendly tourism, which would also benefit the local community,” Pethiyagoda added.
With AGEL’s withdrawal, Sri Lanka now faces the challenge of balancing its renewable energy ambitions with environmental conservation. However, there are other sites in Sri Lanka having more wind power potential, and Sri Lankan environmentalists hope ecologically rich Mannar will be spared from unsustainable wind farms projects.
Editor’s note: “Energy is, of course, fundamental to both human existence and the functioning of capitalism. It is central to production, as well as the heating and lighting systems that most people take for granted, and the energy sector is by far the single largest producer of greenhouse emissions.” A transition to 100% electrical energy will never happen. The percentage of electrical energy is 20%, of which 3% are “renewable”. Those figures have never been higher in well over 50 years. Also everywhere in the world, the development of “renewables” has and remains propped up by government support.
From a distance, the Ivanpah solar plant looks like a shimmering lake in the Mojave Desert(a death trap for migratory). Up close, it’s a vast alien-like installation of hundreds of thousand of mirrors pointed at three towers, each taller than the Statue of Liberty. When this plant opened near the California-Nevada border in early 2014, it was pitched as the future of solar power. Just over a decade later, it’s closing. Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife.
“It was a monstrosity combining huge costs, huge subsidies, huge environmental damage, and justifications hugely spurious. It never achieved its advertised electricity production goals even remotely, even as the excuses flowed like wine, as did the taxpayer bailouts.
And now, despite all the subventions, it is shutting down about 15 years early as a monument to green fantasies financed with Other People’s Money, inflicted upon electricity ratepayers in California denied options to escape the madness engendered by climate fundamentalism.”
Instead of forcing coal and oil into obsolescence, we’re merely adding more energy to the system — filling the gap with “renewables” while still burning record amounts of fossil fuels. This is the real danger of the “energy abundance” mindset: it assumes that a limitless supply of “clean” energy will eventually render fossil fuels obsolete. In reality, “renewable” energies are not replacing fossil fuels, but supplementing them, contributing to a continued pattern of broad energy consumption.
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’
At first glance, no one is waiting for a historian to play down the idea of an energy transition. Certainly not at a time of environmental headwinds. But above all, Fressoz wants to correct historical falsehoods and reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.’
In his latest book, More and more and more, the historian of science, technology and environment explains why there has never been an energy transition, and instead describes the modern world in all its voracious reality. The term “transition” that has come into circulation has little to do with the rapid, radical upheaval of the fossil economy needed to meet climate targets.
In France, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has been provoking the energy and climate debate for some time. He denounces the obsession with technological solutions to climate change and advocates a reduction in the use of materials and energy.
The cover of the French edition of your book says ‘the energy transition is not going to happen’. Why do you so strongly oppose this narrative?
We are reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, but that is not a transition. You hear very often that we just need to organise ‘a new industrial revolution’, most recently by US climate envoy John Kerry. You cannot take this kind of historical analogy seriously, this is really stupid.
The idea of an energy transition is actually a very bizarre form of future thinking, as if we would transform from one energy system to another over a 30-year period and stop emitting CO2. If it were to come across as credible, it is because we do not understand the history of energy.
But don’t we have historic precedents? Didn’t we transform from a rural economy that ran on wood to an industrial society with coal as the big driver?
This is an example of the many misconceptions of the history of energy. In the 19th century, Britain used more wood annually just to shore up the shafts of coal mines than the British economy consumed as fuel during the 18th century.
Of course it is true that coal was very important for the new industrial economy in 1900, but you cannot imagine that as if one energy source replaced the other. Without wood, there would be no coal, and therefore no steel and no railways either. So different energy sources, materials and technologies are highly interdependent and everything expands together.
So I guess you won’t agree either with the claim that oil replaced coal in the last century?
Again, oil became very important, but this is not a transition. Because what do you use oil for? To drive a car. Look at Ford’s first car of the 1930s. While it ran on fuel, it was made of steel, requiring 7 tonnes of coal. That’s more than the car would consume in oil over its lifetime! Today it is no different: if you buy a car from China, it still requires about three tonnes of coal.
You should also take into account the infrastructure of highways and bridges, the world’s biggest consumers of steel and cement, and that is just as dependent on coal. Oil drilling rigs and pipelines also use large amounts of steel. So behind the technology of a car is both oil and a lot of coal.
You suggest looking at energy and the climate problem without the idea of ‘transition’. How?
Focus on material flows. Then you see that despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased (excluding wool and asbestos). So modernisation is not about ‘the new’ replacing ‘the old’, or competition between energy sources, but about continuous growth and interconnection. I call it ‘symbiotic expansion’.
How do you apply this idea of symbiotic expansion of all materials to the current debate about the energy transition?
The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.
Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.
Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation .
Didn’t technological innovation bring about major changes?
Numerous new technologies did appear and sometimes they rendered the previous ones obsolete, but that is not linked to the evolution of raw materials. Take lighting, for example. Petroleum lamps were in mass use around 1900, before being replaced by electric light bulbs. Yet today we use far more oil for artificial lighting than we did then: to light the headlights of the many millions of cars.
So despite impressive technological advances, the central issue for ecological problems remains: raw materials, which never became obsolete. We speak frivolously about technological solutions to climate problems, and you can see this in the reports of the IPCC’s Working Group 3.
Don’t you trust the IPCC as the highest scientific authority on climate?
Let me be clear, I certainly trust the climate scientists of groups 1 and 2 of the IPCC, but I am highly critical of the third working group that assesses options for the mitigation of the climate crisis. They are obsessed with technology. There are also good elements in their work, but in their latest report they constantly refer to new technologies that do not yet exist or are overvalued, such as hydrogen, CCS and bioenergy (BECCS).
The influence of the fossil industry is also striking. All this is problematic and goes back to the history of this institution. The US has been pushing to ‘play the technology card’ from the beginning in 1992. Essentially, this is a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use, which is not in the interest of big emitters like the US.
What mitigation scenarios do exist that do not rely excessively on technology?
As late as 2022, the IPCC’s Working Group 3 report wrote about ‘sufficiency’, the simple concept of reducing emissions by consuming less. I’m astonished that there is so little research on this. Yet it is one of the central questions we should be asking, rather than hoping for some distant technology that will solve everything in the future.
Economists tell what is acceptable to power because it is the only way to be heard and to be influential, it is as simple as that. That is why the debate in the mainstream media is limited to: ‘the energy transition is happening, but it must be speeded up’.
The transition narrative is the ideology of 21st century capitalism. It suits big companies and investors very well. It makes them part of the solution and even a beacon of hope, even though they are in part responsible for the climate crisis. Yet it is remarkable that experts and scientists go along with this greenwashing.
Do you take hope from the lawsuits against fossil giants like Shell and Exxon?
Of course Exxon has a huge responsibility and they have been clearly dishonest, but I think it is too simplistic to look at them as the only bad guys. Those companies simultaneously satisfy a demand from a lot of other industries that are dependent on oil, like the meat industry or aviation. More or less the whole economy depends on fossil fuels, but we don’t talk as much about them.
That’s why it is inevitable to become serious about an absolute reduction in material and energy use, and that is only possible with degrowth and a circular economy. That is a logical conclusion of my story, without being an expert on this topic.
Degrowth is not an easy political message. How can it become more accepted?
I do not offer ‘solutions’ in my book since I don’t believe in green utopias. It is clear that many areas of the economy won’t be fully decarbonized before 2050, such as cement, steel, plastics and also agriculture. We have to recognise this and it means that we simply won’t meet the climate targets.
Once you realise this, the main issue becomes: what to do with the CO2 that we are still going to emit? Which emissions are really necessary and what is their social utility? As soon as economists do a lot more research into this, we can have this debate and make political choices. Yet another skyscraper in New York or a water supply network in a city in the Global South?
