This is a guest blog by Rodrigo Leitão, environmental lawyer and member of Coletivo Pororoka, and Alexandre Anderson, of Rede Ahomar — a nationwide organization representing fishermen and fishing communities in the Guanabara Bay region, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, and throughout the country. On October 7 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) is set to hold its next oil block auction — including further expansion of exploration areas in the Foz do Amazonas basin.

The confirmed discovery of oil off the coast of Oiapoque, at the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil — an area known as the Foz do Amazonas basin, puts the region on a slippery path that fishers in Guanabara Bay already know well. A path that, once travelled, leaves marks impossible to erase.

Rodrigo Leitão is an environmental Lawyer; member the Amazonian organization Pororoka and Representative of the Brazilian Institute of Environmental Law (IBDA). Photo: AHOMAR

Guanabara Bay, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, knows what it looks like when the oil industry arrives. The story began in 1954, when the Manguinhos Refinery started operating. In 1961 came the Duque de Caxias Refinery, known as REDUC. After that came the pipelines, the terminals, the petrochemical plants, the support structures for the offshore industry, the vessels and the new facilities. Decade after decade, the industry took up more of the Bay, competing for space with the people who already lived there. 

Separate licences, accumulated impacts

In Guanabara Bay, the destruction caused by oil didn’t happen all at once — it built up slowly, one project at a time. Each new project was licensed on its own, so no one ever assessed the full, combined impact. By the time the damage became visible, a great deal had already been lost. 

In January 2000, a ruptured of a pipeline spilled around 1.3 million litres of oil, roughly 340,000 gallons, into Guanabara Bay. Mangroves, beaches, fish, birds and thousands of fishers were hit. But the violence against small-scale fishing did not begin at that moment. It had  already been under way for years: in the shrinking fishing grounds, the exclusion zones, the traffic of large vessels, the dredging, the pollution and the steady transformation of the territory.

A participatory mapping carried out with small-scale fishers in Guanabara Bay showed the scale of that loss. The study by Carla Ramôa Chaves, developed at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), found that only 12% to 25% of the bay remained free of restrictions on fishing. The oil industry stood out as the largest single user of the water surface.

Territory and life

Losing a fishing territory is not simply losing an area on a map. Territory means income, food, knowledge and spirituality. Even the definition used by Brazil’s Federal Government recognizes that life in these communities is organized around the waters and their cycles. It took many generations to learn the right time to take from nature what nature offers. And for that, fishers depend on mangroves, rivers, estuaries and seas that are still alive.

So when a fishing territory disappears, what disappears is far more than an economic activity that could easily be swapped for another source of income, as many people assume. It is a form of violence, because it wipes out a way of life handed down from parent to child, built in community and in respect for nature. It is violence because it destroys what people learned to love and to value, in the name of a development that never arrived and never will.

It is impossible to look at this history and not think about the mouth of the Amazon.

Fishing industry leaders from Rio de Janeiro join forces with leaders from the Amazon against well drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River. Photo: AHOMAR

Block 59 is only the first

On August 14 2026, Petrobras confirmed that it had found oil in the main well of Block FZA-M-59 – the first confirmed discovery of oil in the mouth of the Amazon River. As soon as the news broke, several foreign oil companies applied for permission to drill in the area. The block, with four wells planned, can be presented as an isolated business venture 175 kilometres (about 109 miles) off the coast of Amapá. But we are not talking about a single project.

In 2025, contracts were signed for 19 new blocks in the Foz do Amazonas basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River. In June 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) listed another 36 blocks in the same basin for study, with a view to including them in future auctions. What these facts show is the opening of Foz do Amazonas basin as a new frontier for oil exploration.

Once production begins, what comes with it are support vessels, shuttle tankers, helicopters, subsea structures, safety zones, logistics bases, port facilities, fuel, waste, workers, storage, pipelines and terminals.

That is how the occupation of Guanabara grew, little by little, until it stopped being a set of separate projects and became a permanent dispute over territory.

Fishers in the Foz do Amazonas basin do not need to wait twenty or thirty years to find out what fishers in Guanabara learned over the course of their own lives: oil does not only occupy the seabed. It moves into living territories and destroys them.

A mangrove that wraps around the planet

Unlike the generations before us, our greatest challenge is no longer to control nature. It is to join it, if we want any chance of surviving climate change. In the delicate balance of the world, mangroves play a key role. They are important sinks for carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for global warming. At the mouth of the Amazon lies the largest mangrove belt on the planet and most of Brazil’s mangroves, stretching across the states of Amapá, Pará and Maranhão – a huge carbon sink.

Mangroves are also fundamental to local life. They are nurseries for countless marine species that provide food and income for traditional communities, something already recognized by Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment. IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, has classified the region as extremely sensitive in social and environmental terms, pointing to Indigenous Lands and protected areas that shelter Indigenous villages, threatened species and one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity known.

IBAMA has also warned that assessing a project in isolation, as in the case of Block 59, does not answer the question of whether the region is suited to receiving the entire oil production chain.

“May the wind blow strong in Guanabara Bay”

That is the motto of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea of Guanabara Bay (AHOMAR), a kind of omen that comes before a great victory. AHOMAR, founded in 2007, today brings together 11 associations and around four thousand fisherpeople who are fighting for formal recognition of their community territories and against the steady loss of fishing grounds in Guanabara Bay. The group stands up to chronic pollution, to the pressures created by REDUC’s operations and by the logistics expansion linked to COMPERJ, the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex project, in a context of serious socio-environmental conflict and threats against fishers.

The experience of Guanabara can help strengthen a wide alliance of small-scale fishing in the Foz do Amazonas basin: to map fishing territories, to record traditional fishing spots and routes, to track changes in the quantity and quality of the catch, to monitor impacts, to produce information through the communities themselves, and to fight so that these peoples have a voice before decisions are taken and not only after the damage is done. To fight so that an economy that may last a few decades does not destroy a socio-bioeconomy that has sustained generations and could sustain many more.

Alexandre Anderson de Souza is a fisherman and president of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea (AHOMAR). Photo: AHOMAR

May the wind blow strong in Guanabara Bay, and may it reach the peoples of the mouth of the Amazon.

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Adam Currie is Campaign and Movement Support Manager at 350 Aotearoa. In this piece, prompted by a photograph of the glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border, Adam reflects on grief, scale, and the difference between despair and honest reckoning — and issues a gentle challenge: one climate commitment, made and kept, this September.

Credit: Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie

Take a look at this photo. It isn’t remarkable until you look closer. It shows the aftermath of the tragic glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border. The pale stream running down the center is where the ice came away.

What made me double-take wasn’t what had fallen, but what remains.

Look closely at the glacier. Almost all of it is still there. Then think of the tens of thousands of other glaciers across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Picture yourself running away from a surging torrent caused by a collapsed glacier – as thousands in Nepal actually did. Imagine a circle widening across the globe from this one place: rivers, coastlines, towns, ecosystems and lives, all shaped by how much more warming we allow. And it’s so easy in our detached lives to not think about any of this – although perhaps less so for the increasing numbers of us struck by climate-fuelled disasters across the world.

It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the damage still ahead of us, and there is plenty to grieve; not least the 1300+ folks killed by the flash floods. Our hearts and prayers go out to everyone affected — those who lost loved ones, homes, and communities in this disaster.

But let’s resist the urge to give up before we’ve truly lost. Because the same image also tells us something hopeful: there is still so much damage we can prevent.

The climate crisis isn’t a cliff we either fall off or don’t. There’s no single line that, once crossed, seals our fate — and no single line that, if held, saves us. It’s more like a boulder rolling down a long slope: it’s already moving, and we can’t stop it outright, but we can still shape how fast it goes and how much damage it does on the way down.

A recent UN report confirmed that the world is now set to breach the 1.5°C warming threshold within the next few years. That’s real, and it’s serious. But the same report makes a crucial point: breaching 1.5°C is not the same as losing. How far the boulder rolls, and how much it flattens on the way, is still being decided — by the emissions we cut or don’t cut, starting now.

That’s why every fraction of a degree matters: each one changes what happens on the way down, a slightly worse drought, a stronger storm, another flooded town. And that’s why every tonne of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere matters too — not because any one tonne will stop the boulder, but because collectively, our tonnes decide how hard it lands.

I am writing from New Zealand, where there is a whakataukī – or saying – “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua” or “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past,” has always resonated with me, and never been more relevant toda

I remember the solidarity after the climate-fuelled destruction of Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. People flooded into the area with shovels, food, generators, boats and above all, kindness. Roads were cut off and homes were destroyed, but communities still found ways to reach one another. Hope in moments like that one was never about pretending the damage is small; but is refusing to let the damage be the only thing that defines what happens next.

As I wrote in 2020, there’s no point in a ‘climate sprint’ into the future without learning from and honouring the climate-fuelled disasters that have already happened, or forgetting the mātauranga and ways of living that communities have carried for generations. Sure, a few technological ‘advancements’ may or may not give us a bump. But the key solutions are in the past – living within our means, leaning into hard work/discomfort, sharing, living in the right relationship with others and the land.

None of us controls the whole picture. But everyone reading this has some small piece of it within reach.

So, as September and spring begin, I encourage us all to make one new climate commitment for this month. Just one thing you will actually do differently. The commitment could be anything. Write to someone dealing with a climate disaster here or overseas. Turn up to a planting day. Donate to 350.org. Ground yourself in your community. Volunteer for a climate org. Reach out to someone you’ve lost touch with and pull them a little closer into your community.

The glacier in this photograph is partly gone, but most of it is still there. It’s the same with our humanity. This government and the philosophy behind it are doing their best to undermine the bonds that tie us to each other, and make us retreat into our shells. We’ve lost a lot. But most of us are still here. Monty Python might say, “Always look on the bright side of life.” To that I would add: if we truly believe in the bright side, we have to walk towards it.

Credit to Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie for the photo, and 350.org pioneer Bill McKibben for bringing our attention to it.

The post Finding Steady Ground on a Glacier still Standing: A Letter from Aotearoa appeared first on 350.

What does the Pacific Ocean have to do with the electricity you need to charge your phone?

Quite a lot, actually.

Scientists are monitoring the development of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that begins with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific. It might seem a long way from South Africa, and it is, but changes in the Pacific can influence weather patterns thousands of kilometres away.

For Southern Africa, that can mean hotter and drier conditions, putting more pressure on water supplies and agriculture while increasing the risk of fires.

In the Western Cape, officials are already warning that the months ahead could bring higher temperatures, increased fire risk and greater pressure on water resources.

We don’t often connect what is happening with the climate to what is happening in our energy system. But we should. Our electricity system doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It operates in a world that is getting hotter, drier and more extreme. That changes things.

More extreme heat can drive up electricity demand as households and businesses try to keep cool. Fires, floods and severe storms can damage power lines, substations and other infrastructure used to distribute electricity. Water shortages can create additional challenges for parts of the electricity system that depend on reliable water supplies.

These impacts can have very real consequences. Damaged infrastructure can leave people without power. Rising demand can put an already stretched system under even more pressure. Repairs and replacements can increase costs. When the grid is under pressure, electricity becomes scarcer and more expensive.

When we connect the weather and electricity, one thing becomes clear: climate change is changing the conditions in which our electricity system has to operate.

South Africa’s electricity system isn’t exactly starting from a position of strength. We’ve spent years dealing with loadshedding, load reduction, breakdowns and expensive diesel backup, all of which have made the system unreliable, unaffordable and inaccessible.

Unpredictable weather caused by climate change adds another layer to these challenges.

At the same time, South Africa is in the middle of a major reform of its electricity system. We’re talking about electricity market reform, new generation, transmission infrastructure, electricity pricing, the future of Eskom, the role of renewable energy, and how to make electricity more affordable and accessible.

These decisions will shape our energy future. That means we can’t just ask, “Will the lights stay on?” We also need to ask, “Will the energy system we’re building be resilient to climate change?”

We may not have all the answers yet. But the current reforms give us an opportunity to think beyond simply producing more electricity and start thinking about the kind of energy future we want and need.

One that is reliable.

One that people can afford.

One that everyone can access.

One that can withstand a changing climate.

Written by: Boitumelo Masipa for 350.org

Sources:

Western Cape warns of El Niño risks as summer heat, fires and water pressure loom 

Transforming our energy system to ensure reliable and affordable electricity for all | South African Government 

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On August 26, 2026, a catastrophic flash flood swept down from the Bhote Koshi River near the Nepal-Tibet border, tearing through Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading districts in Nepal and destroying entire villages within minutes, leaving thousands missing and hundreds dead. This account is by Dikshya Subedi, a local in Kathmandu who has spent the past seven years working in climate advocacy across the Himalayan region. She is the country lead at SHE Changes Climate and founder of the youth-led organization Youth Action For Sustainable and Eco Nepal (YASEN), and writes here as someone whose own family was directly affected by the disaster.

That Wednesday morning started like any other. At around 9:30 AM, I saw the first news of a massive flood in Rasuwa, the beautiful mountainous district on the Tibet border. Lined with brightly coloured houses and where the Bhote Koshi River enters Nepal, Rasuwa is located a few hours from Kathmandu. Feeling confused and unsettled, I scrolled on, the way we sometimes do when something feels too big to look at directly. A few minutes later, my eyes landed on Facebook again, and this time the news was impossible to scroll past. The flash flood had hit  Devighat, Nuwakot, a quiet riverside town further downstream where my husband was born and grew up in, the place that held his entire childhood.

I called my aunt, who lives in Nuwakot. Her voice on the phone was shaking, terrified. “Nothing is left,” she told me. “Everything is destroyed.” Somehow, my uncle, aunt, and brother Manzil Rimal managed to evacuate from that flooded area just before the massive flood.  But that phone call broke something in me. The place where we used to visit my husband’s hometown for festivals, where we gathered as a family, where his memories live, turned into mud in ten minutes.

An aerial view shows houses covered in mud after flash floods at Devighat, Nepal’s Nuwakot district. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

I’ve worked in climate advocacy for several years. I’ve explained flood risks to government officials, helped authorities understand the danger maps for glacial lakes, and used the phrase “climate crisis” more times than I can count. But watching the impacts of the climate crisis arrive at your own doorstep, was beyond anything I could have imagined. I have spent years telling other people this could happen to them. I never imagined I would be the one making the phone call, listening to my aunt’s voice break on the other end.

There is a saying in Nepal: disaster won’t come by making noise. On that Wednesday, the people of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading learned exactly how true that is. And so did I, not as an advocate this time, but as a daughter-in-law of that soil.

What happened

A sudden, catastrophic flash flood surged in from the Bhote Koshi River near the Nepal-China border on the morning of August 26. It tore downstream through Timure, Syaphrubeshi, and Betrawati in Rasuwa district, sweeping away entire villages within an hour. The floodwaters continued down the Trishuli River corridor, devastating communities further downstream in the districts of Nuwakot and Dhading. Devighat, my husband’s village, was severely affected.

Floodwaters caused severe devastation in Devighat. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

While the exact cause is still being investigated, scientists have traced the flood back to an over 2,000-foot-wide (approx. 600 meters) chunk of glacier that sheared off high in the Himalayas and plunged 7,000 feet (over 2 kms) into the Lhende Khola a tributary of the Bhote Koshi River, sending a flood wave downstream at speeds of up to 193 km/h. This is exactly the kind of event climate change triggers. Warming shrinks glaciers and makes them more likely to break apart. 

The death toll from the devastating Bhote Koshi flood in Rasuwa has reached 939, while 3,925 people remain out of contact, according to the latest update from National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA). The highest number of bodies, 279, was recovered in Chitwan, followed by 216 in Nawalparasi Purba, 169 in Nawalparasi Paschim, 95 in Nuwakot, 65 in Gorkha, 55 in Dhading, 38 in Tanahun, and 23 in Rasuwa. Search and rescue teams, along with relief and medical response units, are still working around the clock. The government has set up dedicated teams for rescue, relief, health, communications, and infrastructure restoration, but the scale of destruction will take a long time to fully understand, let alone recover from.

The floodwaters along with mud and debris completely destroy homes, reaching levels above the rooftops. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

This is personal

For me, this is not something I am following from a distance through headlines. My husband’s home is in Devighat, Nuwakot, one of the places hit hardest. My uncle, aunt, and brother were there and saw the destruction with their own eyes: houses swept away, communities losing almost everything in a matter of minutes. Thankfully, my close relatives are safe. We have not lost anyone in our own family. But we have lost our house and factory, which is the main source of income that my parents and Uncle Aunt took many years to built on is swept away in  seconds. The place where we held countless family gatherings, where all of my husband’s childhood memories live, no longer exists.

Caption: Dikshya’s husband’s family home, buried under mud and debris from the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

The reports coming out of Devighat now are hard to read. A village once known for its bustling market and Jalpa Devi temple one of the very popular temple is buried under mud so complete that only the upper floors of houses still break the surface – uprooted trees flung onto rooftops, electric pylons snapped like twigs. Search teams there are still pulling bodies from collapsed homes, working through mud so thick that sometimes all that’s visible of a victim is a foot. Survivors who’ve come back describe standing in the wreckage of houses they spent their whole lives building, with nothing left to salvage but the clothes on their backs, unsure whether the land is even safe to rebuild on. Watching what has happened to our neighbors, to the village that shaped my husband’s childhood, is heartbreaking in a way I don’t fully have words for.

The destruction left in Devighat in the aftermath of the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

This is the part that people rarely talk about when they discuss climate advocacy: the work is never as abstract as it looks from the outside. I have spent years building the language – resilience, adaptation, loss and damage – that is supposed to help policymakers understand disasters like this one. Advocacy taught me the facts. This flood taught me what the facts actually cost.

Houses in Devighat left destroyed as mud and debris reach rooftops. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

It’s not climate change anymore; it’s a climate emergency

This disaster is a brutal reminder that climate change is not something we can keep filing away as a threat for later. We are already living its consequences here in the Himalayas. 

Global heating is melting the permafrost, the “glue” that holds our mountains together, and that’s raising the risk of glacier collapse more and more likely. A survey published within a day of this flood has now mapped over 3,600 glacial lakes across our river basins, 47 of them classified as potentially dangerous, and this one wasn’t even on the list, because the lake that burst didn’t exist the morning before. That’s how fast this hazard is moving.

Climate change makes flashfloods like the one above in Nuwakot more likely due to glacier collapse triggered by global heating. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

What makes this especially unjust is the imbalanced cruelty of who pays: Nepal is responsible for roughly 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it ranks among the 10 countries most affected by climate change on the Global Climate Risk Index. Nepal’s finance minister, Swarnim Wagle, has put the initial rebuilding cost at US$4–5 billion, nearly a tenth of the country’s entire economy. But that estimate assumes this is a one-time cost. It isn’t. With the region’s glaciers and permafrost continuing to destabilize, a disaster like this one is not a low-probability outlier, it is the shape of what is coming again.

There is still room for hope

In the middle of all this grief, something has genuinely moved me: the response of young people.Within a day, young volunteers across Nepal had organized themselves into the Rasuwa Relief Group, tracking who was missing, making sure support reached those who needed it, even volunteering for risky ground operations. 

Locals and volunteers provide support and rescue in Devighat after the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

I’ve sat in plenty of meetings where “youth engagement” was just a line on someone’s agenda, a box to check before the real decisions happened elsewhere. Watching this unfold in real time, I don’t need convincing anymore. No one assigned these young people this responsibility: they simply took it on, faster than any ministry could move, because these were their families too.

It doesn’t erase my grief. But it has given me hope.It’s proof that the years I spent showing up to advocate for the climate as it affects young people,did build something – a generation that doesn’t wait to be asked.

Things need to change now

The flood that took my husband’s hometown moved at 193 kilometers an hour. We need to move faster. And for that, we need three things:

1. Disaster preparedness and management: Climate response and preparedness cannot be the thing we get to eventually. It has to come first, before the next village disappears. We need early-warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, and locally led preparedness for the mountain communities already living with this risk.
2. Locally led adaptation: Youth and affected communities must be given real, resourced roles in local adaptation and early-warning planning, not token invitations after the mourning has begun. 
3. Real climate finance: Wealthy nations, most responsible for the climate crisis, need to stop treating funding as a favor delivered on their own timeline. Nepal needs that money now, not at the next summit. It needs to come as genuine compensation, not charity, and paid out as grants rather than loans that burden our country. It must reach impacted families directly and fast.

This isn’t a wish list; it’s the difference between a village saved in time and one that isn’t. My husband’s hometown is already gone. What we do next decides how many more we can save.

Dikshya in Devighat. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

“Yesterday, this was a climate and disaster story in the news; today, it is a story happening at my family’s doorstep. But the people of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading are still here, still fighting, still helping each other. Let’s unite to rebuild together. 

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A fifth of the world’s oil passes through a strait just 55km wide. Right now, that strait is closed, and it’s not the only one. For most of us, the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are names we half-remembered from a geography lesson. But right now, all three of these critical shipping lanes, plus the Suez Canal and the South China Sea straits, are under simultaneous strain. And the causes aren’t separate stories. War, the climate crisis and a strong El Niño are compounding each other, squeezing the narrow waterways that carry the fuel, food and goods the world runs on.

That’s the warning at the heart of a report from the climate think tank E3G, Beyond Securing Supply. It makes a case that should worry anyone who cares about a just, liveable future: the world’s energy system isn’t just fragile because of any one crisis. It’s fragile because a small number of choke points now have to absorb war, sabotage, congestion and climate breakdown, often at the same time and there’s no cushion left when several hit at once.

Three narrow waterways, one overstretched system

The Strait of Hormuz. Just 55km wide at its narrowest point, this single passage between Iran and Oman normally carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its LNG. Since the outbreak of the 2026 war between Iran, the US and Israel, the strait has been effectively shut to commercial shipping. Attacks on tankers pushed war-risk insurance premiums up as much as fourfold, and freight rates on the key Gulf-to-Asia route jumped over 300% almost overnight. Oil and gas prices spiked globally within days, even hitting countries with no direct trade link to the region at all. 

The Gulf of Oman connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/NASA/The Visible Earth

Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea, is a vital 18-mile-wide sea lane, a primary global chokepoint where roughly 10% to 12% of international trade and millions of barrels of oil pass dailyOngoing Houthi attacks since late 2023 have made it too dangerous, pushing most Western-linked shipping to go all the way around Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope. That’s not a return to normal , it’s a new, permanently more expensive normal: longer voyages, higher freight and insurance costs, and less spare tanker capacity to absorb the next shock. Egypt runs the  Suez Canal revenues and depends on its tolls, a critical piece of its economy, that have now reportedly fallen by roughly half.

The Bab al-Mandeb Strait from space, between the Horn of Africa (left) and the Arabian Peninsula (right). Photo: by Gallo Images, Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021/Getty Images

The Panama Canal. This is a channel where 5-6% of all global trade goes through, including critical food and gas supplies. Unlike the other two, this chokepoint isn’t shut by conflict , it’s impacted by drought. A strong El Niño, layered on top of long-term climate change, has driven Gatún Lake (the freshwater reservoir the canal’s locks depend on) to record lows for a second time in three years. Daily transits have been cut from the normal ~36–38 ships down toward the low 20s. Ships without a booked slot now face costly reservation auctions , where the average winning bid has reportedly jumped from around $135,000 to as much as $4 million. Scientists studying the 2023 Panama drought concluded it would have been “unlikely” without El Niño, and that climate change is making these swings between El Niño and La Niña more extreme and more frequent.

The Panama Canal is located directly between the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific Ocean Photo: GeogGlobeTales, TikTok

Why these aren’t separate problems 

It would be easy to file all this under “geopolitics” and move on but climate change isn’t a bystander here  it’s a structural multiplier of chokepoint risk.

Three things are happening at once:

1. Physical disruption: War, attacks and accidents slow-down or block the routes directly..
2. “Paper chokepoints”: , Insurance companies, sanctions and shipping contracts make it hard to reroute,  even when another path technically exists. 
3. Climate change: drought, heat and extreme weather are steadily eroding the capacity and reliability of the routes that would normally offer a way around a crisis.

Crucially, these layers stack. When Hormuz  closed ships couldn’t simply detour through the Red Sea route as an escape valve from the Hormuz crisis , because that route was already too dangerous.. When shipping gets rerouted around Africa to avoid the Red Sea, that adds pressure on tanker capacity everywhere else. And when the Panama Canal , one of the few large alternative corridors for Asia-bound US cargoes , is running at reduced capacity because of drought, there’s less slack left in the whole system to absorb the next shock, wherever it comes from.

In other words: the more the climate crisis narrows our margin for error, the harder every other kind of shock , war, sabotage, an accident, a blockage , hits.

Who pays the price

The costs of this don’t land evenly, and that’s the injustice at the centre of it.

While governments of oil-exporting countries may actually see revenues rise when prices spike; Ordinary households, especially in import-dependent countries, see the opposite: higher fuel and shipping costs pushed straight through to food and energy bills. A 10% rise in fuel prices is estimated to raise food distribution costs by 3–5% in import-dependent economies , a burden that falls hardest on the poorest households, where food can already absorb 50–70% of income.

• South Asian economies like Pakistan and Bangladesh are the most structurally exposed of all major importers, heavily dependent on Gulf LNG routed through Hormuz, with little spare capacity to cushion a shock.
• There’s also a slower-moving hit still coming: the Gulf supplies close to half the world’s sulphur and urea (both critical fertiliser inputs) and roughly 40% of global helium. E3G’s analysis (echoed elsewhere) suggests fertilizer shortages triggered by the Hormuz disruption could take 6–9 months to show up, meaning the full effect on food prices and harvests across South Asia and East Africa may still be ahead of us. 

More fossil fuels won’t fix this

The instinctive response to a supply shock is to look for more fossil fuel supply, from new suppliers, new pipelines, new terminals but more supply does not remove the exposure. Oil is priced on integrated global markets, so a shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of where your own cargo comes from. Diversifying suppliers can smooth short-term bumps, but it doesn’t touch the structural vulnerability of depending on a small number of narrow physical corridors in the first place.

The one thing that does reduce exposure, durably, is needing less oil and gas to move through these chokepoints at all. Once a wind turbine or solar panel is installed, it generates power locally for 25–30 years, immune to a closed strait or a dried-up lake, in a way that no amount of LNG diversification can match. Electrification, efficiency, grid build-out and clean power aren’t just climate policies anymore , they’re energy security policy, and arguably the only kind that actually holds up under simultaneous shocks.

That’s the throughline connecting Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Panama: three very different crises, one shared root cause , a global energy system built on continuous shipments through a handful of chokepoints, now colliding with a warming, more volatile world. The war in the Gulf will end at some point. The next El Niño will not be the last, and it won’t be gentler. Building resilience means shrinking our dependence on the fossil fuel system that keeps putting all of us at the mercy of these narrow stretches of water.

Sources:

• E3G, Beyond Securing Supply: Chokepoint Risk for Oil and Gas Importers, March 2026.
• Additional information from World Weather Attribution, Carbon Brief, and reports on the August 2026 Panama Canal restrictions.

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This is a guest post by Camilo Sánchez, a communications strategist working for Greenpeace International.

We are living through a cost of living crisis that is being treated as if it were a mysterious, purely “economic” event, when in reality it has a clear, combustible cause: our dependence on coal, oil and gas. Across the United States, Europe and far beyond, the main driver of recent price surges has not been wages or “too much money” in the system, but repeated fossil fuel shocks feeding into everything from electricity bills to food prices. When we talk about inflation today, in many countries we are mostly talking about fossilflation, a price spiral rooted in the fossil fuel system itself.

War, chokepoints and the human cost of fossilflation

The US‑Israeli war on Iran is first and foremost a human catastrophe, with thousands of lives lost, families displaced and communities facing bombing, blackouts and water cuts across Iran and the wider Middle East. Those impacts are compounded by the environmental devastation of burning refineries, major oil spills, leaking pipelines and militarised shipping lanes, whose toxic fallout will last far beyond the nightly news cycle. At the same time, the decision to wage war in a region that carried a substantial share of the world’s oil and LNG has triggered what the International Energy Agency calls the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, sending fuel, food and transport prices soaring.

The closure and repeated disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, which controls around a fifth of global oil and gas shipping, has shown again how easily a single chokepoint can turn into a global economic weapon. Another fossil fuel chokepoint, the Bab al‑Mandeb strait, has become a flashpoint in a connected war over Red Sea shipping and Yemen, against the backdrop of the same energy shock. This strategically located transit route has enabled Saudi Arabia to boost its oil revenue during the crisis, even as missile threats and blockade politics deepen a humanitarian emergency and ripple into higher bills far from the frontline. As long as our energy system relies on oil and gas flowing through war‑prone chokepoints, war anywhere becomes a crisis everywhere.

The US‑Israeli war on Iran is not an isolated episode. Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, earlier energy crises and repeated OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) supply squeezes have all followed a familiar pattern, fossil fuel prices surge, inflation jumps, whiteland households are left to absorb the shock through higher bills. Each time, governments and central banks talk about “temporary energy noise”, but the reality is that every fossil shock leaves a permanent mark on the price level, pushing people deeper into hardship even after headline inflation starts to fall again.

Governments are bailing out fossil fuels, not people

August 06 2023, Canada, Alberta. Tar Sand Processing in Alberta near Fort McMurray. © Markus Mauthe / Greenpeace

Since fossilflation is driven by oil and gas, governments must cut down their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels as a response to energy shocks. But this is not what we are seeing. An analysis of seven EU countries’ responses to the US‑Israeli war on Iran shows that most emergency packages have been designed to protect fossil fuel consumption rather than to cut dependence on it. Across Europe, roughly 86% of crisis spending by governments is encouraging more fossil fuel use through fuel tax cuts, broad VAT reductions on energy (cutting sales tax on everyone’s gas and electricity bills) and untargeted subsidies (direct payments or price supports for fossil fuel costs for all consumers rather than prioritising support for the most vulnerable households. 

Spain, Germany, and Ireland have spent the most on broad fossil fuel bailouts by cutting fuel taxes across the board. This brings prices down for now, but keeps these countries hooked on imported oil and gas.

The Spanish government’s energy relief €5 billion package is a mixed bag: it includes protection for people against rising energy costs and measures towards shifting to renewables but also a massive tax break for heavy industry, making it one of Europe’s strongest renewable energy commitments and one of its biggest fossil fuel lock-ins, at the same time.

Despite its bold climate rhetoric, Germany’s actual response to the energy price shock has been almost entirely fuel tax cuts and price caps, nothing that meaningfully reduces its fossil fuel dependence.

The Netherlands and Sweden have done better, putting more money into things like energy-efficient homes, heat pump incentives, and cheaper public transport. But even they still spend heavily on fossil fuel subsidies.

Overall, none of these seven EU countries has a plan that actually ends fossil fuel dependence, all are allocating more to fossil fuel bailouts than to structural solutions.

Such measures make fossil fuels cheaper to keep using, rather than helping people use less of them which is not only inconsistent with climate goals, it also deepens inequality. Broad tax cuts and general fuel untargeted subsidies tend to benefit higher‑income households and sectors with high fossil consumption, while leaving the poorest communities with only partial relief and no long‑term protection. Only a small share of the government spending is going towards reducing fossil fuel for good, or speeding up the transition to renewables.

Instead of using limited  public budgets to insulate buildings, expand clean public transport, support agroecology and tax windfall fossil profits, many governments are effectively writing cheques to the fossil fuel industry, hoping that temporary discounts will buy social peace.

Fossilflation, inequality and peace

Fossilflation is not just a technical issue for central bankers, it is a justice and peace issue. Every time oil and gas prices surge, it is ordinary households, especially in low‑income communities on the frontlines of climate impacts, that pay the price through rising bills and reduced public services. In the first 50 days of the US‑Israeli war on Iran, an estimated 150 billion dollars moved from households to oil and gas companies through higher energy prices alone, while governments worldwide are on track to spend around 1.1 trillion US dollars propping up the fossil fuel industry in 2026.

Meanwhile, the social and environmental costs of fossilflation are enormous too. Air pollution from burning coal, oil and gas is linked to roughly 8.7 million premature deaths a year worldwide, and climate‑driven disasters such as floods and heatwaves add hundreds of millions of euros to energy bills in countries like France and Germany on top of lives lost. When governments choose to preserve fossil fuel profits and military alliances over people’s wellbeing, they are effectively trading peace and stability for an economy built on volatile, violent energy sources.

May 01 2002, Germany, Ingolstadt. Esso Refinery. © Jens Küsters / Greenpeace

Dependence on fossil fuel chokepoints such as Hormuz and Bab al‑Mandeb also undermines peace directly. It gives armed actors leverage over global energy prices, incentivises military protection of shipping lanes, and turns entire regions into geopolitical battlegrounds where civilians pay in parts: first through war and destruction, then through the economic fallout and ultimately, through more extreme weather. Breaking this dependence is therefore imperative not only to the climate imperative but also to peace.

The way out: decentralised renewables and a fair response to fossilflation

August 16 2023, Indonesia, Jakarta. Electric Bus in Jakarta.© Jurnasyanto Sukarno / Greenpeace

The evidence from the US, Europe and conflict zones points to a clear conclusion: tackling fossilflation means ending our dependence on oil and gas. There is no shortage of sunlight or wind threatening our energy security, what keeps our societies vulnerable is the decision to stick with fuels whose price and supply can be disrupted at any moment by Trump’s mood, a pipeline explosion or a war.

A coherent response needs four pillars.

• Decentralised, price‑stable renewables. Wind and solar have become the cheapest forms of new electricity generation in history, with solar costs falling by around 87% and battery storage by more than 90% since 2010, and they do not depend on shipping through war‑prone chokepoints. Scaling up local energy communities, rooftop solar, heat pumps, smart grids and green storage can turn households and communities from passive bill‑payers into active participants in a resilient energy system.
• Demand reduction and fair transport. Instead of subsidising fossil fuels for private cars, governments can introduce affordable climate tickets for public transport, strengthen rail networks and night trains, and support remote working and speed limits to cut oil demand. Fair transport policies reduce emissions and shield people from future oil price spikes.

June 10 2015, Japan, Kanagawa-ken. Neighbors Visiting at Farmer’s Market in Japan © Kayo Sawaguchi / Greenpeace

• Resilient food system. Large‑scale renovation of homes, phasing out gas from buildings, and investing in agroecology to break dependence on fossil‑based fertilisers can turn cities and rural areas into climate‑resilient spaces, while making heating and food more affordable in the long run.
• Tax justice and ending fossil fuel bailouts. Ending fossil fuel subsidies and broad tax cuts, introducing permanent taxes on super‑profits and on the ultra‑rich, and banning fossil fuel advertising can help fund solutions that can actually protect people from energy shocks while accelerating the transition.

February 24 2025, Germany, Nauen. Wind Farm. © Paul Langrock / Greenpeace

Breaking free from fossil fuels is not just climate policy, it is an anti-inflation policy, social policy and peace policy. As long as we remain locked into oil and gas, we will remain trapped in repeated cycles of fossilflation, war‑fuelled price shocks and widening inequality. Shifting to renewables, efficiency, fair taxation and justice‑based solutions, is both the opportunity and the precondition for real energy independence, economic stability and lasting peace.

What can you do?

For us to fully tackle this situation, we have to look at both its causes and its solutions. You can start by calling it the right way: fossilflation, so that we put the light on the oil and gas addiction that is causing this crisis in the first place.

Together with that, you can also demand your government to tax those fossil fuel polluters that are reaping astronomical profits from the war. That money would fund the policies and measures that are needed to protect you and your community in this and the next crises, as well as to finance the shift towards the clean, stable and renewable energies that we so urgently need.

The post When oil sets the price: Why a conflict in Hormuz drives prices up everywhere appeared first on 350.

This is a guest blog by Rebecca Stoner, Senior US Communications Campaigner at Oil Change International, a research, communications, and advocacy organization working to expose the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitate the ongoing transition to clean energy.

Globally, over 1 billion people lack reliable access to energy they can afford. Across the US and the world, families are being squeezed by rising energy costs. In the U.S. alone, around 80 million people currently struggle with the cost of utilities.  Some even forgo food or medications to keep the lights on. 

Why gas prices are going to rise

New research from Oil Change International (OCI) finds that the Trump administration’s energy and AI dominance agenda, coupled with its attacks on renewable energy, are likely to raise households’ bills even further. It turns out that for working families, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda actually means “pay, baby, pay.” 

OCI found that the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies could cause the wholesale price of fossil* gas to double over the next decade. Households will feel the impact of rising wholesale gas prices in multiple ways. Their gas bill will rise. So will their electricity bills, since gas is now the dominant fuel used to generate power for the grid. Businesses are likely to raise prices on food and consumer goods as their electric and gas bills go up. 

A gas power plant in Trumbull County, Ohio. Photo: Credit: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2021. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.

The wholesale cost of gas is expected to balloon because the Trump administration has thrown its weight behind a massive expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG)** exports by lifting a previous pause on  approving new LNG export projects  and backing a massive buildout of AI data centers that largely run on fossil gas, pushing up demand for the fuel to unprecedented heights.  

The primary sources of gas in the US today, the Permian (spanning west Texas and southeastern New Mexico) and Appalachian Basins (centered in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, in the northeastern U.S.), won’t be able to produce enough to meet the surge in demand Trump’s policies create. To fill the gap, producers will need to turn to the Haynesville shale play in Texas and Louisiana, a large underground gas deposit in western Louisiana and eastern Texas that requires fracking: drilling deep wells and injecting a high-pressure mixture to crack open the rock and release the gas trapped inside. Production in the Haynesville shale play in western Louisiana and eastern Texas is expected to soar by over 130%. The problem is, it’s much more expensive to drill in the Haynesville, where gas is harder to extract. This higher cost of drilling will get passed down to consumers. 

A drilling rig next to a flare outside of Midland, Texas. Photo: Oil Change International

Over the past decade, the annual average wholesale price of fossil gas was $3. When gas supply from the Haynesville grows to meet surging demand, prices will rise above $5. This will escalate the energy affordability crisis in the US and the many countries that import American LNG. 

Trump’s attacks on renewables will also raise prices for households and businesses. His administration has blocked solar and wind projects and slashed clean energy tax credits, taking away renewable energy options that could save families money. While we pay, Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors profit from keeping us hooked on gas. 

The health and climate cost of gas

Reliance on fossil gas costs us in more ways than one. Extracting, processing, and transporting gas pollutes our air and water with nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and hazardous compounds, which are known to cause cancer, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and birth defects with prolonged exposure. 

Greenpeace USA and the Sierra Club estimate that air pollution from currently operating US LNG export terminals causes 60 premature deaths and $957 million in total health costs per year. If all the planned LNG terminals and expansion projects are built in the US, those numbers would increase to 149 premature deaths and $2.33 billion in health costs per year.

The oil and gas industry builds LNG facilities in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities that it treats as “sacrifice zones”, areas where the industry and decision-makers allow concentrated pollution and health risks to accumulate, on the assumption that the harm to residents there is an ‘acceptable cost of doing business elsewhere’.  Because of longstanding environmental racism, these communities are often already facing high burdens of pollution. 

Fossil gas is also a major threat to our climate. It’s primarily composed of methane, a superpotent greenhouse gas, and when more is in the atmosphere, extreme wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are more frequent and more ferocious. Fossil gas also displaces renewable energy options from the market. 

What policymakers need to do differently

There’s nothing inevitable about a future of higher energy costs, polluted communities, and climate chaos. The Trump administration and its Big Tech and fossil fuel industry backers are working to bring it into being so they can get even richer at everyone else’s expense. 

But communities across the world are rising up to demand a better future. They’re resisting attempts to build data centers and LNG projects in their communities, which would drive up energy costs and pollute the air, water, and climate. 

Community leaders march through downtown Houston to oppose oil and gas expansion. Photo: Luigi Morris, Climate Defenders

Decision-makers must listen and act. They can protect families from out-of-control energy costs by stopping the buildout of expensive gas projects and AI data centers, and investing in affordable renewable energy instead. Transitioning to a just renewable energy system will also create good green jobs, reduce toxic fossil fuel pollution, and safeguard communities from deadly climate disasters. 

Political choices are driving the energy affordability crisis, and different choices can get us out of it. 

Congress is currently considering a moratorium on new data centers but lawmakers won’t act unless they hear from constituents. Join us in telling your senators to support the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. 

*Fossil gas, which we’ll usually refer to as simply “gas” in this piece, is not the same as the gasoline that powers vehicles. Fossil gas is the gas used in stoves, for heating homes, and for generating electricity.

**LNG (liquefied natural gas) is the same fossil gas described above, just in a different form. To ship gas overseas, companies cool it down until it turns into a liquid — natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state, at about -260° Fahrenheit, for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in a liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in a gaseous state, which is why it’s called “liquefied.” That shrinking is what makes it possible to load gas onto tankers and sell it to other countries, instead of only piping it to homes and businesses nearby. 

The post Out of Pocket: The real cost of fossil fuels (and AI) on our household bills appeared first on 350.

Last week, as wildfires tore through southern Europe, TotalEnergies did something that made headlines for all the right reasons. The company announced it would cover fuel costs for French firefighters – both ground vehicles and the aircrafts dropping water on the flames. Nearly 200 employees who volunteer as firefighters were also given paid leave, no holiday days docked, to go help.

It’s the kind of story that writes itself: oil giant steps up for the heroes on the front lines. Except it isn’t a coincidence that the company setting fire to the planet is also the one paying for the water trucks.

No amount of PR pays for a life turned into ashes

TotalEnergies has spent this year positioning itself as the good guy. Back in March, as the war in Iran and Lebanon sent oil prices spiking, the company capped gasoline and diesel prices at its French stations – and kept extending that cap, month after month, through June. It even ran special discounted pricing on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day weekends. The government publicly thanked them for “doing their bit.”

Here’s what that PR campaign conveniently sidesteps: TotalEnergies wasn’t shielding the French public from an unfortunate energy crisis. It was cushioning them from a price shock that its own industry helps manufacture and profit from. And this isn’t generosity: it’s brand management.

The firefighter fuel donations follow the identical logic. At the same time TotalEnergies is filling up water bombers for free,Europe is tallying wildfire damage bills are already projected to be between €15 – 19 billion across France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Romania – and that figure is expected to climb well higher once the full toll is counted.

As someone born and raised in the South-West, who lived through this year’s Gironde fires and had to be evacuated, let me say it plainly: there is no check Total can write that will bring back my memories, or resurrect the firefighters who died defending our land, or regrow our forests, our land, and the wild animals that the flames reduced to ash.

Wildfires raging in Southern France. Photo: France 24

The real dimension of numbers

Covering firefighters’ fuel bills costs TotalEnergies nothing next to what fossil fuel-driven heat, drought and fire are costing everyone else. And also, it costs them cents if compared to what they are making out of the climate and energy crises they are fueling.

In July, TotalEnergies posted another blockbuster quarter, with adjusted net income around $6 billion for the three months from April to June – a jump of roughly two-thirds compared to a year earlier.

At 350.org, we put it plainly: this isn’t an ordinary earnings report, it’s a receipt for climate chaos. Every spike in fossil fuel prices functions as a kind of tax on ordinary people – driving up the cost of transport, electricity, and food. While governments spend billions subsidizing fossil fuel companies or responding to extreme weather disasters, companies like TotalEnergies reap the windfall from the very volatility they help sustain and pay basically nothing for the climate chaos they feed every day.

So put the numbers next to each other in the equation:

Three months with a $6 billion profit + a wildfire season with a several-billion-euro damage bill and counting = a free tank of gas for the fire trucks.

Something is wrong with this math, isn’t it? This is not “doing its bit.” This is a company spending a fraction of a fraction of its profits to make sure the story people remember is the fuel donation, not the emissions. 

A firefighter battles a wildfire in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, west of Madrid, on Sunday. (Manu Fernandez / Associated Press)

This is not new

The fuel donation and the price cap aren’t the first time TotalEnergies has shown up with a check right after helping create the disaster. The company runs the same playbook again and again: a highly visible, low-cost gesture, timed to a crisis, that gets far more attention than its price tag deserves while the operation actually driving the harm keeps growing in the background. 

Take Mozambique. In February 2026, TotalEnergies donated food and hygiene kits worth around $500,000 to communities hit by devastating floods – less than a dollar per person for the more than 700,000 people affected while leading a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project in Cabo Delgado, in that same country. This is a project which is set to produce billions of tonnes of carbon pollution over its lifetime and one that’s already displaced communities and fueled insecurity in the region. 

You see the same move in its sports sponsorships: campaigners have called out its backing of the Africa Cup of Nations and the 2023 Rugby World Cup as a way to wrap the brand in African pride and sporting joy, even as its fossil fuel expansion across the continent – including the East African Crude Oil Pipeline – drives the very climate breakdown those communities are living through. Even the company’s own rebrand fits the mold: dropping “Total” for “TotalEnergies” and plastering train stations and airports with ads about reinvention and renewables, while fossil fuels still make up the overwhelming majority of what it actually produces and invests in.

 It’s the same trick every time: something cheap enough to repeat, photogenic enough to spread, and warm enough to stick in people’s minds. More importantly, it is built to outshine a business model that keeps expanding the exact crises it shows up to look good after.

Where the real accountability lives

This is exactly why the conversation needs to move from PR gestures to policy – specifically, to strong and permanent taxation. Governments are, right now, negotiating at the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, aiming for a global tax treaty by 2027. It’s a genuine opportunity to make oil and gas majors pay not through donated fuel and capped prices, but through binding, permanent contributions that fund the transition out of these crises, for good. 

A global tax on polluters isn’t just about collecting a bigger bill from Total, Exxon or Chevron and calling it justice. Done right, it’s a funding mechanism for the way out. Revenue from a binding global tax can flow directly into scaling up renewables, into grid upgrades, into the transition infrastructure that’s currently starved of investment while fossil fuel majors funnel billions into dividends and buybacks instead. 

And there’s a second, quieter win buried in that shift: every dollar that moves from financing fossil fuel expansion to financing renewables is a dollar that makes oil and gas reserves less economically viable to extract. A global tax that funds the transition doesn’t just make polluters pay for the damage behind them; it accelerates the moment their entire business model stops making financial sense.

The planet, and the people losing their homes and their loved ones to it, don’t need another goodwill press release. They need the money to go where the damage already is but also to weed out the system behind this crisis, and where the future needs it most.

Soraya Fettih is the Global Campaigns Coordinator at 350.org. 

The post A Total Greenwash appeared first on 350.

It is a tough time to be in South Africa trying to keep the lights on. Across the country, households are feeling the squeeze as electricity costs continue to rise. That’s why we are calling on Government to expand the FBE grant to 350 kWh per month with publicly financed renewable energy. However, most of us don’t know the ups and downs of electricity pricing. In this article, we unpack the proposed changes to electricity pricing, what they could mean for ordinary South Africans, and explore how public investment in renewable energy could help lower electricity costs. 

On 29 July 2026, Cabinet approved the publication of the Revised Electricity Pricing Policy (REPP) and a draft Electricity Sector Market Transformation Position Paper for public comment. Government presents these reforms as a step toward a more transparent and competitive electricity sector. 

While officials frame this as a major step forward, there is a lot to unpack. We need to understand what is being proposed and what it could mean for energy affordability and energy justice. We are concerned with electricity prices, but we are most concerned with energy access, climate justice, and ensuring that every person in South Africa can access safe, reliable, and affordable energy.

Understanding tariff unbundling

For many years, electricity tariffs appeared as a single price, making it difficult for consumers to understand what they were actually paying for. Cabinet argues that one of the key features of the revised pricing policy is greater tariff transparency through the unbundling of electricity costs into separate components: generation, transmission, distribution and retail activities.

When you pay for electricity, the charges may include:

1. Energy charges
   • This is the cost of the electricity you use, measured in cents per kilowatt-hour (c/kWh). It covers the costs of generating electricity and operating power stations.
2. Network charges
   • These charges pay for the transmission and distribution infrastructure, including power lines, transformers, substations, maintenance, and system operations that deliver electricity to homes and businesses.
3. Capacity-related charges
   • Recent tariff reforms have introduced separate charges intended to help recover the cost of maintaining sufficient capacity to meet demand, regardless of actual energy consumption.
4. Social and public-interest support mechanisms
   • This means using electricity pricing to help people who need it most. It includes helping poorer households pay for electricity, extending access to rural communities, and supporting programmes like Free Basic Electricity. 

Eskom is also introducing “Easy Electricity” purchase options. These aren’t new prices, but voluntary “packages” designed to make budgeting easier for prepaid users. Eskom says this option will allow customers to choose electricity amounts, measured in kWh, rather than rand values when buying prepaid tokens.

What the draft pricing reforms are intended to do

The revised pricing policy forms part of broader electricity sector reforms following the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act, 2024, and Eskom’s restructuring. The proposed reforms seek to ‘modernise’ the electricity sector and create a more competitive market environment. 

Government says the reforms aim to:

• Increase transparency
  • Tariffs will be unbundled and allocated across generation, transmission, distribution, and retail activities.
• Enable greater competition
  • In simple terms, the government wants to create an electricity market where more companies can generate and sell electricity, rather than relying mainly on Eskom. The hope is that greater competition will lead to a more efficient and reliable electricity system.
• Attract investment
  • Government hopes that new regulatory rules and cost-reflective pricing will encourage private investment in new electricity generation and network infrastructure. Cost-reflective pricing means charging electricity customers a price that reflects the actual cost of supplying electricity, rather than keeping prices low through subsidies or cross-subsidies.
• Supports virtual wheeling
  • The reforms would make it easier for electricity generated in one place to be delivered to customers somewhere else using the existing electricity grid. This means people and businesses could buy electricity from a wider range of producers, even if they are not located nearby.  

The affordability crisis remains: why Free Basic Electricity needs urgent reform

The proposed changes to South Africa’s electricity system could bring benefits, but they won’t automatically guarantee affordable electricity for low-income households. In several countries, governments have found that even where competition increased and private investment flowed into the sector, low-income households continued to struggle with rising prices and energy poverty. In some cases, governments had to step in by introducing additional subsidies, social tariffs, price protections, or debt-relief measures to protect vulnerable consumers.

Many South Africans already struggle to afford electricity. Unless government provides support for low-income households, the proposed changes could leave many families behind and make energy poverty even worse.

Free Basic Electricity (FBE) is one of the main ways government helps ensure that low-income households have access to electricity. It is designed to help people who need it most, including pensioners, unemployed people, single-income households, and families surviving on very little to zero income. Experts estimate that around 10 million households qualify for the programme, yet only about 2 in every 10 eligible households actually receive it.

Many organisations, researchers, and community groups agree that South Africa’s Free Basic Electricity programme needs to be expanded.

We are calling on government to increase Free Basic Electricity from 50 kWh to 350 kWh per month. This is the minimum amount a household needs to live with dignity—to keep the lights on, safely cook and store food, heat water, and even run a small business from home to generate an income.

Today, many families spend more on electricity than they do on basic foods like maize meal or bread. Expanding Free Basic Electricity would help ease this burden and ensure more households can meet their basic needs.

These are the realities that should shape South Africa’s electricity policies. The draft pricing reforms are now open for public comment. This is an opportunity for communities, workers, faith groups, civil society organisations, and ordinary South Africans to have a say in the future of our electricity system.

Electricity is more than a service we pay for. It keeps food fresh, powers schools and clinics, creates jobs and livelihoods, and helps families live with dignity. As South Africa reshapes its electricity system, the real question is not only how the market should work, but who it should work for.

Join the #FreeBasicElectricity campaign community and work alongside organisations, community leaders, and activists to help shape, strengthen, and grow the campaign for affordable electricity.

The post Changes to Our Power appeared first on 350.

Today, government negotiators will sit down in New York for the fifth round of talks to discuss the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation. It is the sort of negotiation that might make most of our eyes glaze over.

But what actually happens in these rooms for the coming week is tied closely to our lives, our health and our cost of living. The decisions being made are simple yet consequential to our lives: will polluters profiting from the economic and climate crises that the rest of us are paying for be made to pay their share?  

The price we are already paying

Conflicts, oil shocks and rising bills

Since the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran escalated around the Strait of Hormuz — the passage that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade, plus major volumes of gas and fertilizer — disruptions to shipping have pulled millions of barrels of oil a day off global markets at various points this year, and crude oil prices have spiked sharply, at times trading well above USD$100 a barrel.

This cost doesn’t stop at shipping routes. We are seeing higher oil, gas and fertilizer prices that in turn raising transport costs, food prices, and electricity bills, for everyone, everywhere. In the US alone, people have already paid nearly USD$67 billion more at the pump since the war began, working out to over USD$500 in extra fuel costs per household. In fact, over USD$700 billion is estimated to be siphoned from households and businesses to the oil and gas industry by the end of 2026 caused by these elevated prices.

Extreme weather

There is a second shock underway too. The climate crisis, fuelled by fossil fuel companies, is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe, taking an ever-growing toll on both human lives and public budgets. This summer has brought Europe’s worst start to a wildfire season on record, with over 434,000 hectares burnt by late July — more than the same point in 2025, itself the worst year on record. France is currently seeing its most devastating wildfire outbreak in half a century, with more than 300,000 people evacuated across France and Spain, and Spain is battling its largest wildfire in modern history, with firefighting costs alone estimated at up to €3.3 billion. Countries like Algeria, Türkiye and Canada too are battling deadly wildfires and around the world, we see increasingly devastating climate impacts like floods, droughts, and heatwaves, upending millions of lives. Every year, our governments are spending more and more taxpayer money picking up the pieces — on firefighting, evacuations, emergency relief, rebuilding and more.

A firefighter battling a forest fire in Saint-Jean-d’Illac, around 30km from Bordeaux, France. Source: Getty

Every fossil fuel price shock and every climate disaster acts like an unofficial second tax on us: charged once through our everyday bills, and again through the public taxes we pay.

Where our money is actually going

This money out of our pockets isn’t disappearing either. While ordinary people struggle, oil and gas majors are posting exceptional profits, not despite these price shocks, but because of them. The volatility unleashed by the US-Israel-Iran conflict has been especially good for business, with the Big ones just having announced shockingly high earnings from second quarter of 2026 (April, May and June):

• TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas giant and France’s largest company by revenue, reported USD$6 billion in profits, more than double what it made a year ago. 

On July 22nd, 350.org activists staged an action at La Défense, the Paris business district, home of TotalEnergies headquarters, denouncing the responsibility of fossil fuel giants in the climate crisis and demanding stronger taxes on their profit – Credit: Rémy El Sibaïe/350.org

• Shell, the British oil and gas major and one of the world’s largest energy companies, posted profits of  USD$9.84 billion for the second quarter, also more than double last year’s figure, and its best quarter since 2022. CEO Wael Sawan told investors the company was built to “thrive through volatility.” BP, another UK based oil company, also just announced a net profit of over USD $5.73 billion, up $2.5bn from the quarter before. 
• US Big Oil companies Exxon and Chevron have netted over a combined USD$26 billion, with it being the largest quarterly profit ever for the latter. 

That’s over USD $48 billion taken in profits by just four large oil companie while the rest of the world is left dealing with climate and energy chaos. To put this in perspective, this is more than the entire yearly national incomes of over 100 countries,

The UN Tax Convention is an opportunity to course correct

There’s something deeply unfair about this picture: the same volatility that’s draining household budgets and straining public finances is the very thing fossil fuel companies are cashing in on. These round of talks is a real chance to change that by creating binding rules that shift the cost off households and onto the companies that are recording obscene profits. Governments are aiming to deliver a global treaty also called ‘The United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation” by 2027 to end corporate tax evasion and opacity, and establish fairer taxation rules. But they must also use it to make oil and gas majors pay for their role in the climate crisis, including funding lasting protection for affected populations.

This matters most for countries in the Global South, who are often sitting on fossil fuel reserves or living through the worst of the climate damage, with the least power to claim a fair share of profits made from either. It is also important for other countries, where public budgets are increasingly being eaten up to prop up fossil fuel companies or coping with climate disasters caused by the very same industry. Every dollar Big Oil avoids paying in tax is a dollar of our taxpayers money that governments have to cough up. That money has to come from somewhere, and usually it’s taken from budgets for health, education, transport, and other public services.

What should be on the table

As a new global treaty is taking shape, its an opportunity to help fund the future we all want. World governments need to make sure this time, the worst and the wealthiest polluters pay for the climate damage they’ve caused by ensuring two things: 

1. A strong, permanent tax on the profits fossil fuel companies are making right now

Research found that a 20% surtax on the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have raised over $1.08 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. Our leaders must write a permanent surtax on fossil fuel corporations’ global profits into the UN Tax Convention, aligned with the polluters-pay principle, so companies making billions from the climate crisis pay for it long after this year’s price spikes are forgotten..

2. Directing that revenue for climate response

The treaty should lock in that the revenue should be directed to the communities and countries hit hardest by climate disasters, energy poverty, and fossil-fuel price shocks, and to a fast, fair shift to renewable energy. Without that earmark, governments could tax the polluters and still leave the people paying the steepest price for their pollution without dedicated support.

Our leaders cannot keep proclaiming there isn’t enough money for the clean energy transition or other public priorities while vast pools of fossil-fuel profit remain largely untouched. They must tax the exceptional profits of an industry that has known for decades that its business model was driving the climate crisis, and still chose to keep extracting, keep expanding, and keep collecting record profits from it. That means taxing Big Oil’s windfalls, closing the loopholes that let those profits disappear before they’re ever assessed, and putting the proceeds where they’re needed most: with the people and countries paying for a crisis this same industry caused.

The Make Polluters Pay coalition calling on the British government for a greater taxation of the fossil fuel industry to pay for climate damage outside the UK Houses of Parliament on 3 August 2026. Photo: Andy Aitchison

What can you do

You don’t need a seat in the negotiating room to have a stake in what happens there. If oil and gas companies keep profiting from every disruption while ordinary households absorb the cost, it’s because a set of rules enables them to do so. But these rules can change.

The week’s meeting isn’t an opportunity worth letting pass. Big Oil’s Q2 profits have given us concrete numbers to hold up next to what governments could be collecting instead, right as the room decides whether to write that possibility into the treaty text.

That’s the leverage we actually have here. We are calling on all participating governments at the UN Tax Convention, to write a permanent, unavoidable surtax on fossil fuel companies’ global profits into the Convention, and to spend that revenue on climate protection and affordable clean energy for the people who need it the most. 

Make polluters pay! 

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