by Jeff Conant, senior international forests program manager

When you think of the biggest drivers of the climate crisis, soy beans probably aren’t the first thing that come to mind.

And for most people, a huge soy trading company from Missouri with the unpronounceable name of Bunge may not be among the first companies you would reckon to be a climate villain. But the massive expansion of industrial soy plantations is one of the world’s leading drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Deforestation, in turn, is one of the primary drivers of the climate crisis.

So, when a majority of shareholders voted yesterday for Bunge to explain its…

Last week, Friends of the Earth lost a deep friend and a former leader, and communities fighting against coal mining lost an undeterred champion with the passing of Louise Dunlap. On the first Earth Day in 1970, Louise responded to the call and acted to prevent Congress from funding the SST (supersonic transport). This super-fast jet was considered a threat to the earth’s ozone layer. Thanks to her work along with others at Friends of the Earth, the funding for the SST was defeated and the earth’s ozone layer was secured. …

To: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook, and Facebook climate, disinformation, and policy teams

From: Climate Disinformation Coalition

Date: March 25, 2021

Re: Stopping climate change disinformation on Facebook

Climate change disinformation is spreading rapidly across Facebook’s social media platform, threatening the ability of citizens and policymakers to fight the climate crisis. To explain how Facebook will stop climate change disinformation in the future, we would like your answers to the following questions:

1. Facebook recently announced the creation of a Climate Science Information Center to expose its users to accurate information about climate change. Since the creation of the center, have you…

In New York, beekeepers have lost more than 40 percent of their bee colonies on average nearly every year for the last decade. A relatively new class of pesticides threatens pollinators that are critical to top state crops, and emerging research suggests that early exposure to them could impact human health as well.

This type of pesticide, called neonicotinoids (neonics), can be approximately 1,000 times more acutely toxic to honeybees than the infamous pesticide DDT from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Since they were introduced in the 1990s, neonics have made U.S. agriculture nearly 48-times more toxic to insects. …

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted how deeply interconnected and fragile our food system is. Our highly concentrated meat processing infrastructure buckled early in the pandemic, and to date, more than 57,000 meatpacking workers became infected with COVID-19. Lines for food banks stretched down blocks. Diet-related chronic disease became one of the biggest risk factors for hospitalization and death from the virus. People of color bear the largest share of COVID-19 infections, deaths, and economic suffering.

As we scrutinize our food choices and the policies that influence them, we must acknowledge the impacts not only to our own health but to…

As our country faces a pandemic, an economic depression, a reckoning with racial justice, and a climate crisis, President Biden has the opportunity to use his first address to Congress to chart a new path forward. But to begin this journey, and to make meaningful progress on any of these issues, we need a fully functioning democracy.

Indeed, progress on every issue that Friends of the Earth works on — from climate change, to sustainable farming, to the clean-up of toxic waste — has been and will be hampered without fundamental reforms to our political system. …

by Jeff Conant, senior international forests program manager

Three months have passed since an “investor rebellion” by two-thirds of Procter & Gamble’s shareholders demanded that the company address its impacts on forests, and there are no signs that P&G is taking serious action. Environmental organizations, including Stand.earth, NRDC, Friends of the Earth U.S., Rainforest Action Network, and Environment America, have spent years raising the alarm about P&G’s role in enabling massive deforestation and forest degradation in the boreal forest of Canada and tropical forests of Indonesia and Malaysia. …

EXIM continues to invest in projects with severe environmental impacts, human rights abuses, and detrimental effects on local communities and public health. While EXIM claims to reduce risk in its portfolio, its consistent investment in the fossil fuel industry highlights the poor judgment of Trump-appointed Chairman Kimberly Reed and the Bank’s other decision makers.

At no other time has this been more evident than during the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of fossil fuel markets and underscored some of the worst impacts of the fossil fuel industry. Many oil and gas projects have continued to operate through…