951
Green & indigenous News
124 readers
18 users here now
A community for Green & indigenous news!
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
952
953
6
60 years of buried lessons on conservation projects from USAID have been saved
(news.mongabay.com)
954
955
957
958
959
The world in focus | Analysis column
In his crusade to control the world and destroy the mechanisms of international governance created after World War II, Donald Trump has set his sights on Iran, with the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and three warships equipped with Tomahawk missiles stationed near its coast. In our region, he’s targeting Cuba, which he has set out to suffocate without mercy.
On Jan. 29, the U.S. president signed an executive order imposing tariffs on goods and services from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, arguing that aid to the island “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Until Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping, the oil consumed by Cuba came mainly from Mexico and Venezuela, which is essential for its electricity supply, 80% of which depends on oil.
A few days after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Trump warned on his Truth Social account that “Cuba lived for many years off large amounts of oil and money from Venezuela, in exchange for which Cuba provided ‘security services’ to the last two Venezuelan dictators, but not anymore! (…) There will be no more oil or money for Cuba! Zero!”
The U.S. government immediately increased pressure on the Mexican government, which sought to fill the void left by Venezuela in oil supplies to the island. The state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) suspended a shipment already scheduled for January. Without regular shipments from Venezuela, Mexico’s suspensions could lead to an increase in power cuts with serious consequences.
Venezuela
The radical shift in the political orientation of the government headed by Delcy Rodríguez, who governs with a gun to her head, has led to the suspension of oil shipments to Cuba. The government is moving steadily toward opening up its oil sector, as demanded by President Trump. On Jan. 29 the acting president formally signed into law the reform of the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons immediately after it was unanimously approved by the National Assembly.
Rodríguez said she was “really very excited” and that “this law bears the mark of Commander Chávez (…) and the vision of the future of President Nicolás Maduro.” Interestingly, the political figure who described the measure as “a big step” was Marco Rubio.
Washington immediately issued a general license lifting sanctions on some transactions involving Venezuelan oil. Trump ordered the release of Venezuela’s airspace, closed since he announced he would invade the country militarily, and American Airlines announced it would resume flights between the two countries after a seven-year hiatus under the sanctions.
The oil reform essentially reverses changes introduced in 2006 by then-President Hugo Chávez to increase state participation in oil revenues. At the time, it paved the way for significant social advances, such as massive housing construction projects and the so-called “missions” in health, education, among others. The new law will allow private companies to market oil, which was previously reserved for the state, and introduces the possibility that disputes be resolved “through alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, including mediation and arbitration.” In other words, it returns to the fold of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a World Bank Group institution for resolution of disputes between states and foreign investors, generally in favor of the latter.
According to experts such as Carlos Mendoza Pottellá, who spoke recently at the conference “Venezuela: Oil Booty?” held at the Center for Studies on Socialist Democracy, the reform violates Articles 150, 151, and 302 of the Constitution and the National Assembly is left without the capacity to rule in this area, as a kind of helpless witness. The country’s sovereignty is seriously undermined. Mendoza notes that the original law took into account that Venezuela could not develop its oil resources on its own and allowed for negotiations with private companies without violating the Constitution. The current changes, he states, “are turning us into a new state of the United States or a colony under the command of Emperor Donald Trump and Captain General Marco Rubio.”
Once the law was enacted, President Rodríguez confirmed talks with Trump and Rubio to deepen binational ties. The U.S. Treasury Department lifted the sanctions on some Venezuelan oil commercial transactions to immediately allow U.S. oil companies to expand operations in he country.
As if the Venezuelan government currently had the power to decide the fate of its own oil, Foreign Minister Yván Gil rejected the executive order issued by Trump announcing the imposition of tariffs on countries that supply oil to Cuba. He said that “any measure that limits or conditions the exchange of goods and services, and the freedom of states to decide their trading partners in a sovereign manner, constitutes a violation of international law and the fundamental principles governing global trade.” He also said that “considering Cuba a threat to U.S. national security is nonsense that poses serious threats to its existence as a nation.”
He is absolutely right. But the Venezuelan government’s actions support exactly what he denounces.
The U.S. Secretary of the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, has indicated that the United States will control the sale of oil from Venezuela. The oil will be transported in storage vessels directly to unloading docks in the United States for an indefinite period of time, and the money resulting from these transactions will be deposited in accounts controlled by Washington. As if that were not enough, Vice President J.D. Vance stipulated that Venezuela will only be able to sell its oil if it benefits the interests of the United States.
Mexico
Since he took office a year ago, Donald Trump’s pressure on Claudia Sheinbaum, particularly regarding the intervention of the army in Mexican territory to combat drug trafficking, has intensified. Under pressure, the Mexican government still increased oil shipments to Cuba under the mantle of the Estrada doctrine and the Mexican Constitution. This, along with hiring Cuban teachers and doctors, deeply irritated the U.S. president for months.
Bloomberg reported Jan. 26 that the PEMEX shipment of oil to Cuba planned for January had been withdrawn from the schedule without revealing the reason for the suspension. Days earlier, Reuters had reported that the Mexican government was considering whether to continue sending oil to Cuba amid growing fears of retaliation from the United States. President Claudia Sheinbaum, faced with reporters’ questions, explained that the shipment was not a cancelled donation, but rather a decision made by Pemex, an autonomous company that makes decisions without her involvement. However, she confirmed that Mexican crude oil will no longer be sent to Cuba, at least for now.
The United States has blockaded Cuba so that the island can no longer receive oil tankers from anywhere in the world, except Mexico, despite Trump’s displeasure.
One oil tanker, the “Mia Grace” left Lomé, the capital of Togo in the Gulf of Guinea in Africa on Jan. 19 bound for Havana, and was diverted from its destination. Mexican crude oil only meets 40% of Cuba’s needs. With the suspension of oil exports from Mexico to Cuba, the U.S. government has paved the way to further suffocate the Cuban people and increase unrest.
On Jan. 30, Sheinbaum warned of a far-reaching humanitarian crisis in Cuba due to the tariffs imposed by Trump on countries that sell or supply oil to Cuba and said that her government will seek different alternatives to “provide humanitarian aid to the Cuban people, who are going through a difficult time, in line with what has historically been our tradition of solidarity and international respect.” She said that the tariffs announced by President Trump could “directly affect hospitals, food, and other basic services for the Cuban people.”
Given this scenario, the Mexican president instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) to immediately contact the U.S. government to ascertain the precise scope of Trump’s order. Sheinbaum indicated that “it was also necessary to make it known that a humanitarian crisis for the Cuban people must be prevented.”
These are good intentions on the part of the Mexican president, who will have to stand up to a Donald Trump who has stated that Cuba represents an extraordinary threat to his national security and a Marco Rubio who has been obsessed for years with bringing down the Cuban government, which has been in power for six decades.
Behave yourself
Last week, the Secretary of State defended the military operation to arrest then-President Maduro before the Congressional Foreign Relations Committee. He reported that the January 3 operation had eliminated a major threat to national security in his hemisphere: “In our hemisphere, we had a regime led by an accused drug trafficker that became the base of operations for virtually all of the world’s competitors, adversaries, and enemies. For Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Venezuela was their primary place of operations in the Western Hemisphere.“
Rubio reported on the agreement reached with the Venezuelan government regarding sanctioned oil that was previously barred from export: ”We will allow them to transport it to market at market prices, not at the discount China was getting. In exchange, the funds obtained will be deposited in an account that we will supervise so that the money is spent for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.“ He justified the measure by stating that it will be a short-term mechanism through which the Venezuelans present a monthly budget of funding requirements.
”We will tell them in advance what that money cannot be used for.” He added that the Venezuelan authorities have been very cooperative in this regard and have committed to using a substantial portion of those funds to purchase medicines and equipment directly from the United States.
Rubio praised the new hydrocarbons law for removing many of the Chávez-era restrictions on private investment in the oil industry. He concluded by saying that he was “hopeful that we will be better off than we would have been if Maduro were still there.”
Following the invasion and kidnapping of Maduro, the Venezuelan government has been forced to accept that the U.S. government now defines which countries it can and cannot trade with. Donald Trump’s growing threats to the Mexican president to suspend oil supplies now place the Cuban government and people in an extremely vulnerable position. As if nations were pawns in a chess game, Trump crowed that “after Venezuela’s energy lockdown,” Cuba will be on the verge of collapse. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated, “if I were in Havana, I would be concerned, even if only a little.”
Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine aims at taking over the entire region, which he is effectively achieving with the complicit silence of the region’s governments, social organizations, and academic institutions.
“The World in Focus” is Ariela Ruiz Caro’s biweekly column for Mira: Feminisms and Democracies. Ruiz Caro is an economist with a master’s degree in economic integration processes and has worked as an international consultant on trade, integration, and natural resources with Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Latin American Economic System (SELA), and the Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL), among others. She has been an official of the Andean Community, an advisor to the Commission of Permanent Representatives of MERCOSUR, and Economic Attaché at the Embassy of Peru in Argentina.
From MIRA via This RSS Feed.
960
961
963
2
More Than 100 B.C. First Nations Leaders Rally Against Proposed Changes to Indigenous Rights Law
(icmagazine.org)
Last Updated on February 10, 2026 More than 100 First Nations leaders and Indigenous organizations from across British Columbia have united in vocal opposition to proposed changes to the provincial Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), calling on Premier David Eby to uphold the law as it was originally co-developed with Indigenous […]
From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.
965
966
This story was originally published by WyoFile.
Mike Koshmrl
WyoFile
Jason Baldes sat horseback outside his neighbor’s gate for hours in early October waiting for the highest levels of Wyoming government to help resolve what, on its surface, looked like little more than an old school good-fences-make-good-neighbors ranching dispute.
Had the matter involved cattle or sheep, it would likely have been settled in no time. But the alleged offenders that day were buffalo, a native species with a newly complicated legal status and a long history of attracting politically charged debate.
Baldes is Eastern Shoshone and the face of a high-profile, successful effort to reintroduce the culturally significant species to the Wind River Indian Reservation and, eventually, restore its status as wide-ranging wildlife.
On Oct. 1, some of the buffalo associated with his reintroduction program had broken through their fencing and wandered onto neighbor Mitch Benson’s alfalfa field. When Baldes and his horse Ceesei arrived to retrieve the errant ungulates, however, things went sideways.
“He wouldn’t let me in,” Baldes told the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee of Tribal Relations on Jan. 28 in Riverton. “It took eight hours of negotiation with the state for him to let me in on the horse, and it took me 10 minutes to get them off of his ground.”
Benson’s not-so neighborly reception apparently stemmed from what he felt was the right thing to do based on the law. The Fremont County farmer and rancher declined requests for an interview with WyoFile, but he relayed his version of that day and prior evening’s events in his own testimony to the panel of state lawmakers and in a letter addressed to Gov. Mark Gordon.
“I did everything right, and I won’t apologize for it,” Benson told the state senators and representatives. “I don’t mean to bring any disrespect to my relatives or my friends that are enrolled members.”
Benson said he wanted “clarity” over the status of escaped tribal bison and how they’re supposed to be managed before there’s “damage done to relationships.” He professed “respect” for the tribes’ plans for growing wild bison herds, though he also shared concerns for how the rewilding effort would affect tribal cattle ranchers.
After the Northern Arapaho bison landed on Benson’s property, he called the local brand inspector, who couldn’t identify ownership of the animals and pointed him toward the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Calls also went out to Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce and Wyoming Livestock Board Director Steve True, according to his testimony.
Benson also received a call from the Wyoming Livestock Board, informing him that a complaint had been filed against him for “illegally holding tribal buffalo.”
Wildlife, or not?
The complicated legal status of bison in Wyoming and on the Wind River Indian Reservation underlies the tension that led Benson to thwart Baldes’ efforts to herd bison home that October day. Although business councils for both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe tribes, which share the reservation, have declared bison to be wildlife and are working to amend the tribal game code to do the same, Wyoming law designates bison instead as livestock in the vast majority of the state (wild herd areas near Grand Teton National Park and on the east side of Yellowstone National Park are the exceptions.) Their livestock status carries over to private lands in the vicinity of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho’s herds.
“As the statute is currently written and in our agreement with the Livestock Board, these are not designated as wildlife — they’re privately owned,” Wyoming Game and Fish Department Chief Warden Dan Smith testified to the committee. “When they come off the reservation onto private land or even outside the reservation boundary, they would be considered privately owned bison, and so they do not fall under the authority of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.”
Under Wyoming law, some tribal bison within the borders of the reservation are designated as livestock even when they haven’t escaped, because they’re pastured on privately owned deeded land north of the Wind River.
Baldes explained to the committee that his plans for scaling up tribal buffalo herds — which have swelled from 10 animals on 300 acres to over 300 buffalo on almost 20,000 acres in nine years — has relied on buying up private land. Through the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, he’s raised over $10 million so far for the acquisitions.
“It was probably haphazard, and there were some things we had to do in order to make it happen, like being on [private] fee land,” Baldes testified about growing the herds. “That’s where we had to start. The goal is to roll that fee land over into trust status, but in order to do that we have to roll it back to the tribe. The tribe has to petition, and then almost every application is opposed by the state and the county. Being that it’s in the middle of Midvale Irrigation District, we can almost safely assume it’s going to be opposed.”
If the long-term vision comes to pass, and the bison come to roam land held in trust by the tribes, some of the legal complexities would unwrinkle — the state would lose jurisdiction.
In the meantime, Baldes refutes the idea that the enclosed Eastern Shoshone buffalo he’s raising are legally livestock. (The Northern Arapaho’s herd is already fenced on tribal trust land.)
“It’s not so much that Wyoming sets the rules, and we all got to live by it,” he told WyoFile. “The reservation was created before the state. The treaties supersede statehood.”
Treaty or no, it was Bruce, the Game and Fish director, who ended the October impasse, according to Benson’s legislative testimony. On speaker phone with the two neighbors at loggerheads, she told Benson that she was taking “full authority” and authorized Baldes to remove the bison from the pasture.
That ended the dispute, at least for the day. In his letter to the governor’s office, Benson alleged tribal bison breached their enclosures again in mid-October.
Toward a solution?
Benson’s calls for legal clarity didn’t fall on deaf ears. Fremont County Democrat Rep. Ivan Posey, an Eastern Shoshone member who co-chairs the committee, was receptive.
“I don’t think the buffalo are going to go away,” Posey said. “Neither are the cattle. So we’re going to have to find some kind of a solution.”
Sen. Cale Case, a Lander Republican, doesn’t anticipate any bills addressing the controversy will arrive during the Legislature’s fast-approaching session, which is focused primarily on passing the budget. But the topic would be “ripe” for study in the interim period leading up to the Legislature’s 2027 general session, he said.
Case said it’s worth discussing a bill reclassifying bison as wildlife near the Wind River Reservation. It could be a nuanced measure, he said, granting the tribes jurisdiction over the species in the vicinity and forgoing the need for state hunting licenses.
Testifying in Riverton, Northern Arapaho Business Council Chairman Keenan Groesbeck spoke to that concept.
“When is the state going to recognize tribes’ sovereignty?” Groesbeck said. “We classify them … as wildlife. But the state doesn’t.”
Baldes is leery of Wyoming lawmakers getting involved.
“We don’t want to see a bad bill come in front of the Wyoming Legislature, especially the Freedom Caucus,” he said. “We’ve seen how bad legislation can go for tribes in Montana. We’ve been fighting anti-bison, anti-tribal legislation there for decades.”
The Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative is trying to be “proactive” so that “the state doesn’t feel like they have any need to intervene,” said Baldes, who’s exploring the use of electronic ID tags to individually identify initiative animals.
There are indications that solutions are already available in Wyoming law and regulation.
Responding to Benson’s letter, Gov. Mark Gordon wrote that there’d been a “misunderstanding” on that fraught day in October. Although the brand inspector responded to the stray bison report, he lacked the legal authority to identify ownership of the animals, according to the governor.
Gordon also instructed Benson on how to handle errant bison if they end up on his pasture again: Call Tribal Fish and Game, and then the Wyoming Livestock Board if he needs further assistance.
“As a cattle rancher and owner, I have much experience with animals breaching fences,” Gordon wrote in his response letter. “I also know that Wyoming has long been a fence out state and that principle applies to bison as well.”
The Tribal Buffalo Initiative is making efforts to fortify its own fences, the governor noted.
“However, I am actively working with tribal liaisons and state agency personnel to find solutions to prevent bison from straying, address the impact on landowners, and clarify relevant state statutory language,” Gordon wrote.
For his part, Baldes says that his aim is to avoid any further division.
“Early on, we built relationships with neighbors who are farmers and ranchers — who became some of our closest allies,” he told WyoFile. “The hope is that we can continue to be collaborative in nature to help this project move forward.”
Editor’s note: Jason Baldes is married to Patti Baldes, a member ofWyoFile’s board of directors. WyoFile’s newsroom operates independently of any board input or influence.
The post Bison’s ‘livestock’ status in Wyoming inflames tensions over tribal rewilding appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
967
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
As more and more data centers crop up throughout Georgia and the Southeast, a recent study finds they may need less energy than the industry and utilities have been predicting. That could have substantial implications for energy bills and the planet.
Data centers — especially the biggest ones, known as hyperscalers, used for high-powered computing like generative AI — use a lot of energy. And major utilities like Georgia Power have started expanding power plants and building other infrastructure to fuel them. Late last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a staggering 10 gigawatt expansion for Georgia Power to meet projected demand that’s mostly from data centers, after previously greenlighting new natural gas-fired turbines for the same reason.
But the level of growth that Georgia Power and other southeastern utilities are planning for only has about a 0.2 percent chance of actually happening, according to Greenlink Analytics, a nonprofit that promotes transitioning to clean energy.
“We believe that this is a very aggressive forecast coming from the utilities,” said Etan Gumerman, Greenlink’s director of analytics who did the modeling for the report.
Because the data center industry is growing and changing so fast, it’s hard to predict accurately. The report finds data center energy use across the region could grow by anything from 2.2 to 8.7 gigawatts by 2031. Still, rapid improvements to technology that could make AI much more efficient in the coming years are likely to dampen the overall increase in energy demand.
But electric utilities across the region are planning for the extreme high end of data center growth, the report finds. That creates a risk that utilities will build more infrastructure than data centers actually need.
“Who’s going to pay for that?” asked Gumerman. “Not the data centers that never came.” Regular customers, he said, will likely end up paying those costs. “And I think that’s the problem in a nutshell.”
Protestors at the Georgia Public Service in December, at which the commission approved a 10 gigawatt expansion to meet projected demand from data centers. Jeff Amy / AP Photo
The Greenlink report is far from the first to question the projections for how much energy data centers require and how much that generation will affect individual ratepayers. Many people, from public commenters to expert consultants to the Public Service Commission’s own staff, made similar points last year during hearings over Georgia Power’s now-approved expansion. The risk of residential and small business customers paying for infrastructure built mostly for data centers was a persistent concern.
The Georgia PSC has taken several steps to protect ordinary ratepayers from data center costs. New billing terms approved last year allow Georgia Power to collect minimum payments from large power users like data centers and commit them to 15-year contracts — measures designed to ensure those customers pay for any infrastructure built to serve them and continue to pay even if they leave the state. As part of the agreement to approve the 10 gigawatt expansion last year, the utility agreed to backstop costs if the projected demand doesn’t materialize. The commission has also stressed it can still halt the recently approved projects. Clean energy and consumer advocates are skeptical these measures are enough.
In addition to the risk of rising costs for ratepayers, the sky-high demand projections for data centers are also stalling the transition away from fossil fuels as a source of electricity. Studies have found much of the coming data center demand could be met without building new infrastructure, through improving efficiency among utilities nationwide and through flexibility by the data centers themselves. Instead, utilities and data centers alike are falling back on natural gas. The U.S. now leads the world in gas-fired capacity in development, nearly tripling the total from 2024 to 2025, according to Global Energy Monitor. Much of the capacity utilities are building is to meet increased demand from data centers, and more than a third of the whopping 252 gigawatts in development is on-site power for data centers. That latter approach — where data centers are built with their own source of power, known as “behind the meter” generation — addresses the concern over rising costs but not fossil fuel emissions. While some tech companies are pursuing nuclear energy for their data centers, currently most of the power is coming from gas.
In Georgia, for instance, Georgia Power officials have said the vast majority of the projected demand driving the company’s expansion comes from data centers. The utility has already delayed plans to close coal-fired power plants and begun adding new gas-fired turbines, and the 10 gigawatt expansion approved in December will come mostly from new gas turbines, which have projected lifespans of 45 years, and natural gas-generated electricity purchased from other utilities.
“I think people would be a lot less hesitant and a lot less up in arms about these 10 gigawatts if it was sustainable, smart growth,” said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, a nonpartisan group advocating for the use of science in public policy. “The idea that we’re going to add this additional capacity with gas-fired turbines is horribly depressing and, as my high school daughter likes to remind me, so last century.”
The state legislature in Georgia is currently considering several bills to address data center concerns. One would ensure regular customers don’t pay for power generation built for data centers. Others would require more transparency from data center developers or even impose a statewide moratorium.
There are also bills to end the tax breaks that data centers currently receive in Georgia. State lawmakers already passed a bill to suspend tax exemptions for data centers in 2024, but Governor Brian Kemp vetoed it.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities in the Southeast may be overestimating the AI boom on Feb 10, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
968
970
972
974
975