Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Alberta Is Making It Even Harder to Develop Renewable Energy

 

at 6/20/25 8:15am

Close observers of Alberta politics might be forgiven for wondering if official announcements are actual attempts at public policy, or performative trolling on behalf of the oil patch. Case in point is the latest kneecapping of the province’s once-booming renewable energy sector by imposing what might be the most onerous reclamation requirements of any jurisdiction in the world. On June 4, the Alberta Utilities Commission released their Code of Practice for Solar and Wind Renewable Energy Operations, based on a review ordered by the Minister of Affordability and Utilities two years ago. A report by the Business Renewables Centre found that these new reclamation rules are the most burdensome requirements among any of the 27 other jurisdictions they surveyed within Canada, the U.S. and five other countries around the world. “Plentiful wind and solar power are magnets to the companies that could build Alberta’s future economy,” said BRC director Jordan Dye. “But developers can’t and won’t build clean energy in provinces or territories where the cost of doing business is prohibitive.”  Ensuring the taxpayer is not holding the bag for an expensive industrial mess is of course sensible policy. However, the stark contrast in how Alberta treats the relatively puny reclamation risks from the renewable energy sector compared to the vast unfunded liabilities from the oil patch is so brazen it almost qualifies as political performance art. Polluters pay $1 The new clean energy requirements demand the highest percentage of security upfront of any province, state or country that the BRC looked at and do not deduct any salvage value from the required reclamation bond. The Alberta government takes exactly the opposite approach to oil, gas and bitumen liabilities, where companies are only required to post reclamation bonds at the end of a project’s projected economic viability. What could possibly go wrong? The official estimate of outstanding liabilities for bitumen mines alone stands at $57.3 billion. Only 3 percent of this amount is currently covered by the Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP) meant to protect Albertans from footing the bill for mine clean-up costs that have doubled from an estimated $28 billion in 2018.  Oil sands operators have contributed only a single dollar to the MFSP since 2010 under rules that do not require them to make additional deposits until they have 15 years of profitable bitumen reserves remaining. The Alberta government recently reiterated this policy gift to the highly profitable oil patch despite ballooning risks to the taxpayer if bitumen businesses go bust due to the accelerating energy transition. Oil and gas companies are also allowed to estimate their own liabilities so the actual amounts of unsecured risks are likely much higher. An internal presentation from the Alberta Energy Regulator in 2018 suggested the true amount may exceed $260 billion, or about $160,000 per Alberta household. Winners and losers The new clean energy requirements are just the latest indignity imposed on the previously thriving renewable energy sector in Alberta. An abrupt seven-month moratorium on new wind and solar installations in 2023 was followed by land-use restrictions that excluded 70,000 square kilometers of some of the best wind generation sites in Canada. Our government will not apologize for putting Albertans ahead of corporate interests, deadpanned Alberta Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf at the time.  If the intent of these policies was to drive the wind and solar industries away from Alberta, they have been a resounding success. Alberta went from attracting three quarters of renewable investments in Canada in 2022, to seeing the cancellation of 53 wind and solar projects totaling 8.6 gigawatts of lost generating capacity just two years later. The onerous new policies will only accelerate this exodus of green investments from the province. Back in the real world, clean energy investments are on track to reach $3.3 trillion in 2025 — more than double the amount going into the waning fossil fuel industry. A new report shows that wind and solar projects are the cheapest and fastest sources of energy generation in the U.S. Likewise, long term costs of grid scale energy storage continues to decline due to improving technology and expanding battery supply. Yet Alberta appears to be trying to drive the provincial economy while looking in the rear-view mirror. Prime Minister Mark Carney should take note of Premier Danielle Smith’s demonstrable hostility towards the burgeoning clean technology sector as he prioritizes projects deemed to be in the national interest, including those “contributing to clean growth and to meeting Canadas climate objectives.” Smith claims to be a champion of the free market. So why is she using the blunt instrument of government to pick winners and losers in the energy marketplace? When it comes to attracting energy investments, the oil patch is apparently the only sector that matters to Alberta policymakers. The post Alberta Is Making It Even Harder to Develop Renewable Energy appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Rachel Reeves Promised Oil Industry ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Over Windfall Tax in Private Meeting

 

at 6/19/25 5:01am

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told a fossil fuel giant that the industry would receive a “quid pro quo” in return for higher taxes on its windfall profits, DeSmog can reveal. In a meeting with the Norwegian state energy company Equinor on 27 August last year, Reeves suggested that the government’s carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) subsidies were a payoff for oil firms being hit with a higher tax rate. Minutes of the meeting obtained by DeSmog state that Equinor CEO Anders Opedal raised concerns over the Energy Profits Levy – also known as the “windfall tax” – and “its impact on the value” of Equinor’s UK portfolio. In response, Reeves said that raising the windfall tax from 35 percent to 38 percent was a “manifesto commitment”, but stated that “Equinor should recognise the quid pro quo – the funds raised enable government investment in CCUS etc.”. This article was co-published with The Guardian. CCUS is the controversial practice of trapping the emissions produced by fossil fuel plants before they enter the atmosphere. The technology is accused of being a favourite climate “solution” of the fossil fuel industry since it allows for the continued extraction of oil and gas. Experts have also suggested that the technology is not economically viable at scale. The Labour government announced in October that it would provide £22 billion in subsidies to CCUS projects over 25 years following a surge in lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, as revealed by DeSmog. Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer MP claimed that Reeves and the Labour government had been “caught out making promises in a secret exchange deal which goes against the interests of the British people”. Denyer added: “In public they claim to be taxing fossil fuel giants more fairly by raising the windfall tax, but behind closed doors they are giving back with dodgy deals to allow the fossil fuel corporates to continue with business as usual under the guise of CCUS – an expensive distraction and largely unproven technology.” Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Equinor is one of the principal firms investing in the UK’s CCUS sector. In December, the government signed deals with Equinor, BP, and TotalEnergies to develop carbon capture facilities in Teesside. This will involve the development of the Net Zero Teesside Power plant, which will be 25 percent owned by Equinor and aims to be the world’s first gas-fired power station featuring CCUS. Earlier this year, following a DeSmog investigation, Equinor was forced to retract the claim that it stores 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project in the North Sea. Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, and only captured a tenth of that figure in 2023. The firm made an $28.7 billion (£21.2 billion) post-tax profit in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered higher oil and gas prices – a figure that stood at $8.8 billion (£6.6 billion) in 2024. Tessa Khan, executive director of the campaign group Uplift, said: “Oil companies, like Equinor, have held sway over successive UK governments, for years shaping policies to benefit their bottom line and slowing down climate action. This Labour government must stand up to them and put our needs – for affordable clean energy and a safe climate that we can pass on to our children – ahead of their insatiable need to profit.” The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) – which scrutinises government spending decisions – released a report in February describing the UK’s CCUS subsidies as “risky”. The report noted that the government has downgraded its ambitions for CCUS storage, scrapping its previous commitment of storing 20 to 30 million tonnes annually by 2030. It also highlighted that the UK’s new CCUS projects don’t allow the government to share any potential profits or for local consumers to benefit from lower energy bills. The committee also reported that producing liquid natural gas, which will be used in the UK’s CCUS projects, leaks more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought. “This could undermine the rationale for pursuing certain schemes,” the report said. After being sued by environmental consultant Andrew Boswell over the Net Zero Teesside scheme, the previous Conservative government admitted that it had not taken into account the plant’s full potential emissions, which Boswell estimated could reach more than 20.3 million tonnes during its lifetime. In summer 2024, a judge rejected Boswell’s case, which argued that officials did not fully explore the environmental impacts of the scheme before approving it. The government also won the appeal in May. Boswell, who leads the Scrap Carbon Capture campaign, called Reeves’ Equinor meeting “an outrageous spectacle”. “She begs Norway’s oil colossus to tax its huge profits, and then gifts it with far more in return – many billions over decades for climate-wrecking CCUS.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Equinor’s Northern Lights CCUS plant with Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in Bergen in December 2024. Credit: Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Equinor and Shell have formed a joint venture to become the UK’s largest North Sea fossil fuel producer. In November, the government admitted that it had unlawfully approved the development of the country’s largest untapped oilfield, Rosebank, which is operated by Equinor, by not taking into account the climate effects of burning the oil and gas extracted from the field. Equinor intends to re-apply for approval to develop the project. The Labour government has been steadfast in its support for the UK achieving net zero emissions by 2050, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer stating that “home grown clean energy” is “in the DNA” of his administration. The Climate Change Committee stated in its 2025 appraisal of the government’s net zero policies that the UK needs to scale up its CCUS capacity to 73 million tonnes a-year by 2050 to help meet its climate commitments. “Investment in carbon capture and storage is a gamble on unproven technology,” said Lily-Rose Ellis, campaigner at Greenpeace UK. “All it does is give oil and gas giants carte blanche to continue causing planet destroying emissions in the hopes that one day they might be able to capture the carbon and store it for all of eternity. Public money should be spent on renewables which guarantee to lower emissions, bring bills down, and boost the economy with new jobs.” “Equinor has been a reliable energy partner to the UK for over 40 years,” a company spokesperson said, “providing a stable supply of oil and gas, developing the UK’s offshore wind industry, and pioneering solutions to decarbonise the UK economy, including carbon capture and storage. “Using our experience of decarbonising energy production in Norway, including safely storing carbon emissions under the North Sea for over 25 years, we are supporting the UK to develop its own home grown energy transition.” A government spokesperson said: “We are delivering first of a kind carbon capture projects in the UK, supporting thousands of jobs across the country, reigniting industrial heartlands and tackling the climate crisis. “Money raised from changes to the Energy Profits Levy made at the Autumn Budget last year support the transition to clean energy, enhance energy security and independence, provide sustainable jobs for the future, and help protect electricity bills against future price shocks”. This article was co-published with The Guardian. The post Rachel Reeves Promised Oil Industry ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Over Windfall Tax in Private Meeting appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Pioneers of Europe’s Citizen-led Solar Revolution Sound Alarm Over ‘Corporate Capture’

 

at 6/19/25 1:24am

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.  For decades, advocates of renewable energy have argued that solar panels and wind turbines can be so much more than clean sources of power. By allowing communities to come together to generate their own electricity, small-scale projects can serve the twin goals of decentralising power markets and fostering democratic participation. And that’s before counting the savings for members on their monthly bills.  This vision appeared to come a step closer to reality in 2020, when the European Union allocated 750 billion euros in NextGenerationEU post-pandemic recovery funds to boost green and digital industries.  Though energy communities have a long history in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, Spanish supporters of local wind and solar farms had been frustrated by their government’s scant support — despite the countrys abundant sun and wind. So there was relief when the government announced in January 2022 that it would award the energy communities sector 100 million euros from its 160 billion euro share of the NextGenerationEU funds to cover solar panels, planning, fees, and other costs. Three years later, a DeSmog review of official data shows that almost half the 77.6 million euros in subsidies granted so far has gone either to projects managed by Repsol, a Madrid-based multi-national oil company whose portfolio is dominated by its oil refining, fuel retailing and petrochemicals businesses, as well as seven private sector energy consultancies. While these subsidies are not awarded to the companies directly, critics are concerned that by locking energy communities into long-term contracts for management, marketing, design, technical, and other services, the private sector is reaping a disproportionate benefit from the funds. “Energy communities…not only reduce dependence on fossil fuels but also keep the profits in the hands and pockets of locals, said Dirk Vansintjan, founder of REScoop.eu, the Brussels-based European federation of energy communities. “The energy transition will not succeed when profit-driven businesses skim off the profits.”   Models That Listen Of 77.6 million euros in subsidies awarded to 151 Spanish energy communities since 2022, DeSmog’s review found that 24.3 million euros — 31 percent of the total — has gone to 28 projects managed solely or in part by two Repsol subsidiaries, Ekiluz and Edinor.  Just over half of that sum — 14.4 million euros  — went to 13 projects managed by Ekiluz, a joint venture established by Repsol and the Mondragón Corporation (a federation of workers’ cooperatives in Spain’s northern Basque region) which is now wholly owned by Repsol. The remaining 9.9 million euros went to 15 projects run by Edinor in neighbouring Navarra. Private sector consultancies also benefited indirectly from the subsidies. More than 14 million euros — about 18 percent of the total — went to 23 projects managed by seven consultancies: MásInteligencia (6.1 million euros);  CEM-Comunidades Energéticas de Castilla-La Mancha (3.7 million euros); Sapiens (1.8 million euros); Senda (758,000 euros); CEL Management (737,000 euros); Valsolar (560,000 euros); and DS Consultores (549,000 euros).  In response to a detailed set of questions regarding the operations of Edinor and Ekiluz, Repsol says its support for energy communities is part of wider plans to help Spain reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, which include investments in renewable power. “Repsol views distributed generation as a key component in the energy transition,” a spokesman said. “This is why the company has developed different energy communities models in recent years.  The consultancies argue that they play a vital role in helping grass-roots groups to get energy community projects off the ground. We offer people the energy sovereignty they need,” said Pedro Antonio Fuentes, CEO and founder of MásInteligencia. Our services are like any other professional services. Were not subsidy-hunters. In fact, we dont receive the subsidies — we obtain them on behalf of energy communities.” Apart from Valsolar, which did not respond to a request for comment, the other consultancies identified in the DeSmog review also emphasised their support for citizen-led groups.  “I don’t recognise the criticism at all; quite the opposite. The success of our model lies, in part, in the fact that community members don’t need to make any initial investment, said Jorge Montes, director of CEL Management. “We create the energy community from scratch, and only then, on behalf of the community, we apply for subsidies.” But campaigners say that outsourcing of so much design and management to the private sector undermines the spirit of 2018 and 2019 EU directives backing energy communities — which aim to encourage local participation and keep profits in the hands of locals. “The beauty about energy communities is that no two are the same,” said Maria Prado, of Greenpeace Spain. “This is why top-down models don’t work. We need models that listen to local needs.” More Convenient A view of Jaurrieta. Credit: J. Marcos / Ana Muñoz Projects managed by Repsol subsidiary Edinor in Navarra are emblematic of critics concerns.  In November 2022, officials in Jaurrieta — a village about 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the regional capital Pamplona — struck a deal to lease Edinor space to install solar panels on public rooftops rent free for 15 years. The agreement was part of a wider deal to secure Edinor’s support to establish an energy community for the village’s mostly elderly 200 residents. The lack of an open call for other proposals or bids worried critics. They allege that councils are waiving mandatory public tenders for the installation of solar panels to sweeten the deal for Edinor, and allow the company to lock communities into long-term dependence on its services.  “They [energy companies] are trying to replicate this model in all regions, said Publio Galán, a legal adviser at the Spanish cooperative EnVerde, which offers nonprofit energy community advisory services. “This is where we must remain vigilant.” Repsol subsidiary Ekiluz has also faced accusations of stifling competition by requiring members of its energy communities to source back-up power from the company at times when local demand outstrips supply, such as during the night or on cloudy days when battery storage is not available. Repsol did not respond to specific questions about Edinor and Ekiluz in its statement to DeSmog. Pachi Yanguas, project manager at Navarra’s Chamber of Commerce, defended Jaurrieta’s arrangement with Edinor, saying the terms were in line with the project’s nonprofit status.  “The Chamber of Commerce, in collaboration with Edinor and with support from the Spanish government, developed a sort of turnkey solution by leveraging public buildings, Yanguas said. “After that, of course, the owner of the solar panels is the energy community.”  Other municipalities in Navarra followed Jaurrieta’s example, with 25 councils joining Jaurrieta in an Edinor-managed energy community known as Toda Navarra I, and another 37 joining a similar project, Toda Navarra II. In October 2022 and December 2023, the Spanish government approved subsidies of over four million euros for the two initiatives. But not everyone in Navarra was convinced. Long and Sometimes Tough  Edurne Bidondo (left) and Blanca Carballo, board members of Abaurrea Altas energy community, stand in front of the warehouse housing solar panels used in their project. Credit: J. Marcos / Ana Muñoz Eschewing the standard model rolled out by Edinor, about a dozen residents in Abaurrea Alta — a village of about 90 people not far from Jaurrieta — decided to design an energy community themselves. In September 2021, they teamed up with Ko-energia, a nonprofit consultancy supporting the development of citizen-driven energy communities, to build a project based on local participation.  It was long and sometimes tough, which led some people in the core group to drop out,” said Edurne Bidondo, a physiotherapist and one of the founders. Were not experts in any of this, but weve put in a lot of time and effort.”  Bidondo said that since 2023, when the project began generating energy, her annual electricity bill has dropped by between 240 and 480 euros — roughly quadruple the savings in Jaurrieta, where Mayor José Manuel Narvaiz estimates the Edinor-run energy community has reduced bills by 80-100 euros per year.  Greater community involvement may explain at least some of the difference. Jaurrieta’s energy community is overseen by the board of Toda Navarra I — which consists of two mayors from other towns and a businessman managing multiple companies, ranging from advertising to real estate services. In Abaurrea Alta, the three board members are all locals.  “Our model is much broader, which is something we value and believe is the right approach, said board member Blanca Carballo, a teacher.   In Jaurrieta, Mayor Narvaiz conceded that the Edinor-backed model values convenience above participation.   “Maybe (Abaurrea Alta’s) model feels more village-like, more community-driven. You build it yourself, and it’s yours, Narvaiz said, speaking in Jaurrieta’s council hall. “But we found this other model more convenient.”  Exponential Potential There are some 9,000 energy communities operating across the European Union, involving 1.5 million people, according to a survey published last year. Advocates say that Spain’s situation is emblematic of the many countries where greater government backing could allow towns and villages to play a much bigger role in the transition away from fossil fuels.  In common with counterparts across Europe, the 353 energy communities in Spain mostly generate solar power, according to mapping by Ecodes, a nonprofit consultancy. Ranging in size from fewer than 20 to more than 500 participants, these groups sidestep the unpredictability of price swings on international power markets, and enjoy savings of 10 to 30 percent on their annual bills, according to a 2019 Spanish government study. (SEV, an Italian energy community in South Tyrol, famously hasn’t raised tariffs in more than 20 years). The Spanish energy communities that have received direct government subsidies have an installed capacity of 67 MW, according to official data — which represented  0.26 percent of the country’s total installed capacity of 25,549 MW in 2023. That might not sound like much. But with the right mix of policies and incentives, the installed capacity of energy communities in Spain could multiply more than twenty-fold by 2030, according to research by Friends of the Earth Spain. A more decentralised energy system would also be less prone to the kind of massive power outage that hit Spain, Portugal, and parts of France on April 28, argues Esther Muñoz, co-founder of Ko-energia, the nonprofit consultancy. “Energy communities can help to decentralise the distribution network,” she said. (On June 17, the Spanish government issued an initial report blaming the blackout on a combination of factors, including poor planning). Advocates of energy communities say the Spanish government could do much more to streamline the application process for subsidies, which currently require up to 49 different kinds of document. That would be a first step towards making it easier for people to establish projects without depending on utility companies or consultancies.  Faster responses to applications for subsidies would also help: A call for proposals to access 90 million euros of subsidies for energy communities closed in October, but it will be some months before the results are announced, an official told DeSmog.   Friends of the Earth published a report in February calling on policymakers to bar major energy and utility companies from taking advantage of subsidies for energy communities, and to prioritise support for projects with strong social and environmental benefits. Public institutions say they support energy communities, but in reality, their incentives are not designed for ordinary people, but for companies with technicians and specialists, said Raquel Fernández, a member of the Spanish chapter of Friends of the Earth.  Where’s the transformative power in that?  ‘Built Not Sold’ In neighbouring Portugal, which counts only a handful of citizen-led energy communities, advocates cite similar concerns to their Spanish counterparts: red tape and the risk of corporate capture.  The application period for 30 million euros in NextGenerationEU funds that Portugal earmarked for energy communities and other citizen-managed renewables systems closed in February 2023. More than two years later, officials are still assessing proposals. “The bureaucracy is brutal,” said Ana Rita Antunes, coordinator of Coopérnico, a cooperative supporting citizen-led groups. With no official registry of energy communities in Portugal, estimates of the number of communities vary. E-Redes, a subsidiary of the utility Energias de Portugal (EDP Group) responsible for tracking energy communities, put the number of officially approved projects at about 50. Lisbon-based renewable energy company Greenvolt says it has 120 energy communities in its portfolio.  While the private sector sees the potential for profits, Antunes wants the government to provide more financial support to help local groups reach their goals of democratic participation and energy independence. At a May 2023 Lisbon workshop organised by Lisboa E-Nova, the Lisbon Agency for Energy and Environment, Antunes raised her hand to speak after panellists from Greenvolt, decentralised renewables company Cleanwatts, and EDP Group listed the number of energy communities they had sold.  “Energy communities are not sold; energy communities are built, Antunes told the room, pointing out that citizen-led communities in Portugal could be counted on one hand.  Cooperatives like hers had not been invited to present at the workshop, she said. This investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. The post Pioneers of Europes Citizen-led Solar Revolution Sound Alarm Over Corporate Capture appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Alberta’s ‘Emissions Intensity’ Hasn’t Improved, Despite Government Claim

 

at 6/18/25 12:10pm

Political spin and hard facts had another messy moment in Alberta this month. The governing United Conservative Party just released a report touting their alleged strong record on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. “The 2023 report shows our oil sands sector is producing more energy with fewer emissions per barrel — a clear sign of innovation and commitment that comes from working with producers,” said Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz. Let’s start with the breaking news about cutting emissions in the oil sands sector: there is none. Since 2016, there has essentially been no progress in reducing emissions per barrel for in situ bitumen extraction. Production is up and so are emissions in roughly the same proportions. As pointed out by the National Observer’s Max Fawcett, the emissions intensity figure for in situ bitumen extraction was exactly the same in 2016 as it was in 2023. “In other words, no improvement — and that from the largest source of oil sands production.”  The 26 percent reduction in oil sands emissions intensity the Alberta government is bragging about happened almost entirely between 2012 and 2016. Conveniently, they chose to start counting emissions in 2012 and can thus claim credit for progress made five years before the UCP even existed. Alberta’s energy-related emissions reductions were almost all in the electricity sector. Why? Because the former Alberta NDP government brought in a policy to phase out of coal generation in 2015 that reached its target six years ahead of schedule. There has also been a massive build-out of clean energy generation in Alberta since 2020.   This clean energy momentum has come to a grinding halt under the ideological interventions of Premier Danielle Smith who imposed an abrupt moratorium on new renewable installations in 2023, followed by new sweeping restrictions late last year. Clean energy investment predictably fled to less hostile jurisdictions leading to the cancellation of 53 wind and solar projects totaling 8.6 gigawatts of lost generating capacity. Flawed accounting Beyond the political spin applied to official emission figures in Alberta, important questions are being raised about the accuracy of those numbers and how they are collected. A recent research paper from McGill University measured the actual methane emissions from non-producing oil and gas wells compared to the self-reported figures from industry. They found that methane leaks were seven times higher than the apparently flawed data accepted by regulators. While researchers sampled almost 500 abandoned wells across the country, over 90 percent of the total measured methane leakage was from Alberta. But isn’t that merely because Alberta represents the majority of oil and gas activity in the country? Nope. The researchers were surprised to find the leading predictor of methane leakage for any given well was the regulatory jurisdiction. One surprising finding was just how much the drivers of emissions varied between provinces, lead scientist Mary Kang, associate professor of civil engineering told Phys.org. We thought geological differences within provinces would matter more, but the dominant factors appear to be at the provincial scale, likely due to variations in policy and operational practices.  For example, sampled wells in Alberta had almost double the leakage rate compared to the national average. Apparently public policy matters. Who knew? Smith: ‘We don’t have a single source of truth’ These troubling findings are only the latest in a series of independent scientific studies calling into question the accuracy of self-reported emissions data from the oil patch. In 2023 scientists from Environment and Climate Change Canada conducted air sampling over an area that includes 80 percent Alberta oil sands operations and found 65 percent higher emissions compared to what was reported by industry and accepted by regulators. This massive discrepancy of 31 million tonnes is nearly the equivalent of all residential emissions for the entire country in 2023. Similar results were reported in 2019 in a paper published in Nature Communications that showed oil sands emissions were over 60 percent higher than self-reported figures from companies. So has the Alberta government made any changes to emissions sampling methods or reporting requirements since this emerging science was first published six years ago? Nope. Smith instead introduced legislation earlier this year “denying federal workers access to our [bitumen production] facilities and the information they contain.” Problem solved. At the press conference for the announcement, the premier framed this brazen attack on independent peer-reviewed research in the following Orwellian terms: “We don’t have a single source of truth for emissions data…The federal government hired some outside organization to do some aerial scanning…Because the federal government has come up with different numbers at different times for their own purposes, we think that we actually need to get real data, and because were the ones on the ground will be the ones able to do that work.” The latest battle between Alberta and Ottawa is not over pipelines or policies, it is about data. If the oil patch is unwilling or unable to reduce their ballooning emissions, it seems that the Alberta government will continue to misconstrue reported figures while working to prevent better measurements from being collected. The post Alberta’s ‘Emissions Intensity’ Hasn’t Improved, Despite Government Claim appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Safety Warnings Follow Australia’s Woodside Energy to U.S. as $17 Billion LNG Project Moves Ahead

 

at 6/18/25 9:28am

As Woodside Energy investors convened for their annual meeting in Perth, Australia, on May 8, they were met by protests and heckling. Activists, angered over the fossil fuel company’s climate impacts and accidents, repeatedly disrupted speeches by company management. While management and demonstrators debated, Woodside workers about 800 miles to the north were scrambling to stop a major “unplanned discharge” from a company pipeline that was being decommissioned. Amid a devastating marine heatwave, Woodside’s May 8 spill dumped about 64,000 liters (almost 17,000 gallons) of wastewater laced with oil, chemicals, and other contaminants into the Indian Ocean northwest of the Ningaloo Reef, a World Heritage site. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Australian environmentalists are calling for Americans to pay close attention to the company’s history of accidents as Woodside makes a major expansion into the U.S. “Because we have a lot of experience with Woodside in Australia, I think its really important that folks in the U.S. understand how Woodsides operated here and what that might mean for you folks in the future, Fern Cadman, a campaigner for Australia’s Wilderness Society (no relation to the U.S. group), told DeSmog. “It just points to the need for really high regulatory scrutiny of all aspects of their operations.” But under Trump, the federal government is poised to move in the opposite direction —specifically on safety rules for LNG projects. In a little-noticed move, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) said on April 29 that it’s considering changing the rules governing LNG safety, including during construction — regulations that have been in place for decades. PHMSA announced those plans on the same day Woodside officially revealed its decision to move forward with its $17.5 billion Louisiana LNG project (previously known as Driftwood, when the project was owned by Tellurian). Given the LNG industry’s rapid expansion in the U.S., watchdog groups say that closer scrutiny for LNG safety is overdue, noting that when those rules were first issued, the U.S. was expected to be an LNG importer, not one of the world’s largest exporters. But the Federal Register entry from PHMSA suggests the agency is looking to weaken, not strengthen, its standards. “Are there current aspects of PHMSA regulations that are particularly burdensome on the ability of industry to operate LNG facilities that PHMSA should consider amending or rescinding?” the agency wrote. “How can PHMSA best design a rulemaking … for LNG facilities to be deregulatory and lead to cost savings for the industry?” Safety advocates expressed alarm. “While it’s wonderful to see PHMSA finally addressing the long-outdated LNG safety regulations, it’s hard to reconcile this effort with PHMSA’s references to this being deregulatory,” Pipeline Safety Trust Executive Director Bill Caram said in an April 29 statement. He urged regulators to focus “on strengthening safety protections for communities near LNG facilities, rather than primarily focusing on operational efficiencies.” Comments on PHMSA’s proposal are due by July 7. A History of Accidents Woodside’s May 8 spill was particularly worrisome because the incident occurred near the Ningaloo Reef, made a World Heritage site in 2011. “A toxic spill this close to the Ningaloo Reef World Heritage Area or the pristine Scott Reef has the potential to be devastating for marine wildlife, including thousands of species of whales, sharks, fish, turtles and corals,” Australian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson said after the spill was made public at the end of May. But environmental campaigners aren’t the only ones waving red flags about Australia’s largest independent oil and gas producer. In March, a worker was crushed by an improperly secured generator on a ship working in Woodside’s Stybarrow oil field, suffering “broken ribs and potentially a punctured lung,” according to Australian news site Boiling Cold. It was the latest in a series of safety incidents delaying Stybarrow field’s cleanup past a March 2025 regulatory deadline, Boiling Cold noted, including one instance where a 10-ton remotely operated underwater vehicle system plummeted from a crane to the deck of the same ship. Australian union organizers have begun talking in dire tones about their safety concerns, warning that workers face potentially deadly risks. “Safety incidents happen in a pyramid effect, where the signs of repeated near-misses, and the signs of repeated breaches of fundamental safety protocols, inevitably lead to another fatality,” Doug Heath, an organizer for Offshore Alliance, a union that represents some of Woodside workers, said earlier this month. “We hate to say that because we should never be saying that something is inevitable, but unless Woodside changes their safety culture, we can see another fatality coming on a Woodside asset.” In 2023, a contractor at a Woodside-operated offshore oil platform in Australia was killed while “carrying out a high risk task,” trade publication Upstream Online reported at the time. More recently, on October 3, 2024, a 36-year-old construction contractor died at a Beaumont, Texas, ammonia plant newly acquired by Woodside. He fell to his death while working inside a large tank, when a steel plate supporting his scaffolding caved in, OSHA records show. “We’ve put in more complaints against Woodside Safety Management than any other oil and gas company over the last 18 months.”Doug Heath, Offshore Alliance “We’ve put in more complaints against Woodside Safety Management than any other oil and gas company over the last 18 months,” Heath, the Australian union organizer, said. “We’ve had a number of incidents, a number of near-misses, a number of injuries. It’s the worst it’s been in 20 years but Woodside is turning a blind eye to it.” The company’s reported safety data shows a significant rise in its total recordable injuries, which have climbed from 11 in 2010 to 57 last year. While Woodside has also grown significantly over the same period, its “total recordable injury rate,” a standardized number reflecting the average number of injuries experienced by 100 full-time workers in a 50-week year, nearly tripled over the same time, reaching 2.44 per 100 workers last year. That’s significantly higher than the overall U.S. rate of 0.9 injuries per 100 workers for oil and gas extraction nationwide, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. “The types of recordable injuries we are experiencing are of lower severity, such as lacerations, wounds and soft tissue injuries,” a Woodside spokesperson said in response to questions from DeSmog, emphasizing that safety is a priority for the company. “We gather these insights due to a strong reporting culture that we continue to improve through various mechanisms,” the spokesperson added. “Specifically, we are working to build upon existing conditions where the people exposed to a higher risk of injury are setup correctly to do their work, and when there is a change, they feel safe and supported to make the safest choice. This takes time to embed with our staff and contractors.” Woodside’s top management has also emphasized the company’s commitment to safety. “Our strong performance in areas such as climate, safety, cultural heritage and environment is not only important to Woodside’s reputation and social license to operate,” Woodside’s board Chair Richard Goyder told investors during an April briefing. “It is also essential for securing new business opportunities, managing operational and financial risks, and delivering the strong governance that our stakeholders rightly expect.” Cadman with the Wilderness Society noted that some of Woodside’s recent incidents involved decommissioning and clean-up work, and warned that companies have greater incentives to cut corners after an oilfield has reached the end of its profitable life. But, she said, companies should still be held to the same safety and environmental standards during decommissioning as they are when a project is bringing in revenue – and there are still plenty of options to do so. If these operators want to be getting approval for new projects, they should be made to demonstrate that theyve been a good corporate actor.” Risky Business Woodside has also taken heat for continuing to invest in major new fossil fuel projects like its Louisiana LNG facility — and not just from climate watchdogs. “Woodside Energy’s final investment decision (FID) on the $17.5 billion Louisiana LNG terminal was a stunner,” trade publication RBN Energy wrote in May. Most LNG projects sign up customers for a strong majority — at least two-thirds — of what they can handle before officially greenlighting construction, RBN noted. Woodside had less than one-sixteenth of Louisiana LNG under contract when it pulled the pin on the $17.5 billion project. Credit ratings agency S&P Global took a dim view of the company’s apparent gamble, warning that its decision “introduces more inherent volatility into Woodside’s business,” and gives it less of a buffer against falling oil and gas prices or higher-than-projected construction costs. It points to the speculative nature of offshore oil and gas activities,” Cadman said. LNG projects also carry their own particular risks. The industry has been hit by over 100 significant accidents worldwide from 1944 to 2024, a December report from Greenpeace found, including a 2004 explosion in Albania that killed 27 people. Most recently, three workers were killed and two injured at Sempra’s Port Arthur, Texas, LNG project in a scaffolding collapse on April 29. When regulators allow oil and gas companies to roll the dice, Cadman noted, it’s not just workers, investors, and lenders along for the ride. The rest of us have a lot on the line as well. “The reality is, climate change is here. Its real. Its happening very fast. We are transitioning away from fossil fuels and that transition could happen along a range of scenarios,” she noted. “And one of our real concerns is that these companies like Woodside were never made to pay bonds for their cleanup and so they arent putting nearly enough money aside for cleanup.” “If some of the speculative activities, like expanding into the U.S. with Louisiana, if that doesnt pay off,” she said, “its the decommissioning here that wont happen.” “Its the environment that wears the impact.” The post Safety Warnings Follow Australia’s Woodside Energy to U.S. as $17 Billion LNG Project Moves Ahead appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Nigel Farage to Headline Tufton Street Climate Denial Event

 

at 6/18/25 6:05am

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is set to speak at an event today organised by a pro-Trump think tank and held in the home of the UK’s main climate science denial group, DeSmog can reveal. Farage, whose party campaigns to scrap the UK’s goal of achieving net zero emissions, is the star speaker at the event, described as a “ground-breaking conversation about climate policy”. The event has been convened by the UK-EU branch of the Heartland Institute, a U.S. group that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. It is being hosted in 55 Tufton Street, the home of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which claims – like Farage – that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil, and has accepted donations from foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and a leading sponsor of climate science denial. Heartland has close ties to Donald Trump’s administration, having advised several government agencies during the president’s first term. In February, the group’s UK-EU chief Lois Perry – who is speaking alongside Farage today – claimed that Heartland has “very strong affiliations” with “certain big individuals” in Trump’s team. Perry told DeSmog that today’s panel is Heartland’s “inaugural” UK-EU event, despite the branch having been launched in December. She said that the institute was “delighted” that the event was “stimulating discussion”. The event will be hosted at 55 Tufton Street, a building in Westminster that is owned by one of Reform’s top donors and which has served as a gathering place for the UK’s anti-climate, libertarian lobbying groups. 55 Tufton Street is currently home to the GWPF, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, whose advisor Gwythian Prins will be speaking at the event. In a report published last March, the GWPF – which is now led by Conservative peer Craig Mackinlay – claimed it was “naive and entirely unrealistic” to believe that CO2 is causing climate change, that record global temperatures are “normal”, and that “there is no observational evidence for any global climate crisis”. The group has previously expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than its current level. “Brexit is Farages gift that keeps on taking,” said Good Law Project executive director Jolyon Maugham. “Great for hedge funds who shorted the pound; terrible for everyone else. And today, as the Met Office issues a stark warning about what the climate crisis will mean for the very old and the very young, Farage is embarking on another project to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.” Perry told DeSmog: “The fact that Professor Prins is associated with the GWPF, and that our event is held at 55 Tufton Street, should be seen as a badge of honour – it signifies a hub of independent thought brave enough to challenge a catastrophic group think.” Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Reform – which is actively raising money from oil executives – campaigns to expand fossil fuel production and impose a “windfall” tax on clean energy companies. Farage has himself denied basic climate facts. Speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in February, while admitting that he knew little about climate science, Farage claimed it was “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant. In reality, authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”. The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.” The event will also feature Sarah Elliott, a director at the Prosperity Institute (formerly the Legatum Institute), the think tank belonging to the Legatum Group, one of the co-owners of GB News, which employs Farage as a presenter and is a leading promoter of anti-climate views. Sarah is the partner of Matthew Elliott, a Conservative peer who led the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign and was a co-founder of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which is also based in 55 Tufton Street. The Heartland Institute launched its new UK-EU arm late last year, pledging to “establish a satellite office to provide resources to conservative policymakers throughout Europe”. The launch featured a speech from Farage, who also made a keynote address to the group’s 40th anniversary fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois, in September. Heartland’s UK-EU chief Lois Perry is a PR executive who founded the CAR26 anti-climate lobby group. She has said it’s her “personal belief” that climate change “is happening” but “is not man made”. Farage and Perry, both former UKIP leaders, are close allies. As revealed by DeSmog, Heartland has been working closely with far-right politicians in Europe to undermine the bloc’s green reforms. Over the past year, the Heartland Institute’s campaigns in Europe have “quickly grown to a torrent”, according to the group. However, since the launch of the UK-EU branch, the group hasn’t registered a single meeting with a Member of European Parliament. Perry said: “Heartland is proud to be supported by private citizens who believe in intellectual freedom.” She added that net zero “is proving economically ruinous for ordinary British families, damaging to our industrial base, and a direct threat to our national energy security.” In reality, while the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024.  Reform, the GWPF, Prins, and Elliott were approached for comment. The post Nigel Farage to Headline Tufton Street Climate Denial Event appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Mental Health Professionals Join Calls For Boycott of Advertising Agencies Over Work for Polluters   

 

at 6/17/25 1:03pm

Health organisations should cut ties with advertising agencies that work for the fossil fuel industry to protest the role of greenwashing in delaying climate action, says a group of mental health advocates. In an open letter, a dozen researchers and clinicians warned of the growing toll of despair suffered by displaced families, the disorientation and grief communities face after floods, drought and wildfires, and the anxiety of children facing a worsening climate crisis.  “Advertising and public relations firms that serve both the health sector and the fossil fuel industry are working at cross purposes. On one hand, they help promote products, services, and messages that are meant to support healing. On the other hand, they help greenwash an industry that is accelerating a global health emergency,” the letter said. “We, as mental health professionals and advocates, urge you to review your relationships with PR and ad firms. Ask them where they stand. And be prepared to walk away from those who continue to work with fossil fuel clients,” the letter said. The dozen signatories included Omnia El Omrani, vice-chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, a consortium of more than 200 organisations; Britt Wray, director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry, an initiative focused on community resilience; and Professor Fiona Charlson of the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has urged governments to ban fossil fuel advertising and called on advertising and PR firms to stop working for the industry — echoing calls from various climate groups concerned about the role of the communications industry in preserving the oil industrys social license.   In 2022, Sydney banned coal, oil and gas advertising after health professionals signed an open letter. France was the first country to ban fossil fuel ads in 2022, while in 2024 the Hague in the Netherlands became the first city in the world to pass a law banning all fossil fuel advertising, including ads for services with a high carbon footprint such as airlines and SUVs. Amsterdam and Edinburgh have enacted similar restrictions. For more of DeSmog’s coverage of climate accountability in the advertising and public relations industry, please visit our series page, and our database profiling communications agencies working for major polluters. The post Mental Health Professionals Join Calls For Boycott of Advertising Agencies Over Work for Polluters    appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— OPEC Projections on Future Oil Demand Overly Optimistic, Experts Warn

 

at 6/13/25 8:35pm

Experts are urging caution after the secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) told delegates to the Global Energy Show Canada that there is no oil peak on the horizon, and that energy demand will increase by 24 percent by 2050. “The fact is that oil demand keeps rising, hitting new records year on year, is a clear example of what I’m saying,” Haitham al-Ghais said during his keynote address Tuesday, opening the convention in Calgary. “In fact, our projections are that oil demands will go and surpass 120 million barrels a day by 2050.” Al-Ghais further criticized the International Energy Agency (IEA) for what he termed “flip-flopping” on their projections for future oil demand. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Experts do not share al-Ghais’ optimistic outlook, however. “Oil producers — OPEC included — clearly have a financial incentive to make bullish claims about growing demand,” said Clark Williams-Derry, energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “OPEC’s forecasting record is mixed at best. For key trends in oil demand, such as EV adoption, OPEC’s forecasts have been consistently terrible,” said Williams-Derry in a statement to DeSmog. “Long-term oil prices are drifting down in the futures markets — a sign of supply growth outpacing demand,” he added. “The West Texas (WTI) oil price is $65 a barrel today, trending down to $59 a barrel in 2036.” Williams-Derry noted that the decline is even steeper when adjusted for inflation.  Though in his keynote address al-Ghais claimed OPEC’s projections are not ideological, and evidence-based, he also alternated between dismissing reports that oil demand is falling — particularly those of the IEA — and warning that such reports are dangerous. “The consequences of this mixed messaging are serious for a capital-intensive industry with long lead times for investments,” al-Ghais noted. “Bodies that are entrusted with guiding policy on global energy affairs should not reverse course every couple of years if they want to remain credible and relevant. OPEC has been consistent in repeatedly stating that inadequate investments in our industry is a dangerous matter.” Al-Ghais stated oil investment ambivalence was as bad for producers as much as consumers and the wider global economy. His message was well-received by conference delegates, a number of whom — including Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — referenced his statements throughout the conference to support arguments in favour of continued investment in the oil sector. However, al-Ghais’ optimistic outlook is challenged by OPEC’s own projections: OPEC cut its demand growth forecast in April, citing first quarter 2025 data indicating lower demand for 2025 and 2026 due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) also anticipates declines in U.S. production and lower oil prices as global oil supply grows. Perhaps most significantly, the IEA’s May 2025 Oil Market Report projects demand to slow considerably over the course of this year, from 990,000 barrels per day in the first quarter of 2025 to 650,000 barrels per day for the rest of the year. The IEA noted increasing EV use as a major contributing factor among others for declining oil demand. Moreover, the IEA’s report predicts global oil supply will increase by 1.6 million barrels per day to 104.6 million barrels per day on average in 2025. The organization notes demand in OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — 38 leading advanced industrial economies in North America, East Asia, Oceania, Europe, and Latin America) is projected to decline by 120,000 barrels per day in 2025, and by 240,000 barrels per day in 2026. While falling demand is encouraging for those concerned about the environment, a radical increase in the global oil supply brings its own issues. “A 1.6 million barrel per day increase (to global oil supply) is obviously a problem,” said IEEFA’s Williams-Derry in response to questions from DeSmog. “Oil supply must drop down if the world is going to avoid catastrophic climate change.” Oil Growth Now Unrelated to Economy However, Williams-Derry also notes that oil has decoupled from economic growth. “The global economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year, while oil supply is only growing by about 1.5 to 1.6 percent,” he said. “This reinforces a longer-term trend: [the economy and oil demand] no longer move upward in lock step.” Williams-Derry further notes that the mismatch between supply and demand growth will likely push oil prices down. “This helps explain why oil prices have fallen to their lowest level in years, and futures markets expect them to continue to fall,” he added.  “It doesnt do OPEC nations much good if 1.5 percent demand growth requires prices to stay in the $70 range, which is generally too low to support OPEC countries’ fiscal needs for oil revenue.” Williams-Derry believes this applies to private oil companies too.  “It doesn’t do oil companies much good if oil sales volumes are growing but oil prices are too low to support robust profits,” he said. Though at the conference, al-Ghais pointed out that OPEC “takes climate matters very seriously,” he also said the world faces an emissions challenge — but not one pertaining to energy sources. “I’m sure you have all been seeing the recent pushback against the unsustainable rush to unrealistic net-zero targets, and deadlines that were just fixated on deadlines and policy proposals really detached from reality,” al-Ghais told the audience. “We welcome the recent moves towards policies grounded in pragmatic energy realities and that recognize that we face an emissions challenge and not an energy sources challenge.” Experts have long countered al-Ghais’s ideas. The UN Climate Change organization notes most nations’ climate action plans are insufficient to meet Paris Agreement targets. Climate scientists have also long argued that the quickest way to reducing emissions is to speed up the widespread transition to renewable energy sources. Unlike al-Gais, Stephen Legault, senior manager of Alberta energy transition with Environmental Defence, doesn’t believe it’s the IEA that has flip-flopped.  He said the IEA has identified what has become the reality for the global energy market. “Starting in 2021, [the IEA was] among the first major industry forecasters to recognize that, due to the devastating impact of climate change on human life, and the global policies put in place to curtail emissions, oil consumption and, consequently, production would decline,” Legault said in a statement to DeSmog. Legault notes no credible, non-producer-generated, oil-futures forecast exists that doesn’t show oil consumption peaking around 2030, including the IEA. “OPEC has a vested interest in maintaining a high level of production for its member states, and as a result, appears to be viewing the world through rose-coloured glasses,” he said. The IEA further expects global oil supply will considerably outpace demand growth, with oil inventories expected to jump by 720,000 barrels per day in 2025, to 930,000 barrels per day in 2026. “This sets the stage for a further rebalancing of supply and demand fundamentals,” concluded the IEA’s May 2025 Oil Market Report. “The futures market is anticipating weak demand, abundant supply, and declining prices,” said IEEFA’s Williams-Derry. “That spells trouble for the oil industrys finances. But you wont hear that from OPEC. As Upton Sinclair once quipped, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’” The post OPEC Projections on Future Oil Demand Overly Optimistic, Experts Warn appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— xAI Data Center Emits Plumes of Pollution, New Video Shows

 

at 6/13/25 7:01am

This article was originally published by Gas Outlook. A massive data center at xAI’s controversial site in Memphis, Tennessee is emitting huge plumes of pollution, according to footage recorded by an environmental watchdog group. xAI quickly built an enormous data center and supercomputer at an empty factory site in Memphis last year, aimed at providing computational power for xAI’s chatbot, called Grok. Having difficulty securing enough grid power to fuel the energy-hungry data center, xAI brought in 35 portable gas turbines, and assembled them without environmental permits or pollution controls. A new video, recorded by Oil Field Witness, an environmental group, shows vast plumes of pollution coming from those gas turbines. “It’s a power plant. That’s what it is,” Sharon Wilson, director of Oil Field Witness, told Gas Outlook. Wilson has extensive experience documenting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. But the pollution coming from the xAI site, she said, was remarkable. “I have shot video all over the U.S., all over the UK, and in Japan. I’ve never seen anything that bad,” Wilson said. “The amount, the size of the plume…it’s really, just horrible.” A new video, recorded by Oil Field Witness, an environmental group, shows vast plumes of pollution coming from those gas turbines. Credit: Oil Field Witness To the naked eye the pollution is not visible. But through the lens of Wilson’s optical gas imaging camera, a scientific instrument that is used within the oil and gas industry and by regulators to detect methane emissions, the pollution becomes readily apparent. Huge, billowing plumes of pollution, including large volumes of unburned methane, rise into the atmosphere and drift off-site. The explosive growth of data centers, needed to fuel the AI boom, has taken center stage in the energy industry. AI proponents suggest that AI can offer climate solutions, such as optimizing electric grid management or improving disaster warning systems. But for the oil and gas industry, AI has taken over as one of the most important sources of demand growth for the foreseeable future, offering a temporary lifeline to an industry facing long-term decline. Electricity demand for data centers in the U.S. could triple over the next three years. Some studies suggest that the U.S. could add as much as 46 gigawatts of new gas-fired power plant capacity by 2030. Data centers could account for 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity demand by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023, according to a U.S. government report. Silicon Valley firms are moving as fast as possible to construct new data centers to build up their computing power. The AI arms race has resulted in Big Tech casting aside its climate ambitions. Between 2020 and 2023, indirect carbon emissions from the top tech giants increased by 150 percent. Given the rate of change in the world of AI, that figure is already badly out of date.  Notably, xAI’s chatbot, Grok, has downplayed the severity of climate change much more than its competitors, and at times regurgitates fringe viewpoints. The data center gold rush has put a squeeze on the availability of gas turbines, inflating equipment and labour costs. Any orders for new gas turbines will take years to fulfill. But data centers are springing up all over the country. In Texas, data center developers are building their own gas plants, not connected to the grid. In Memphis, xAI’s difficulty connecting to grid electricity didn’t stop them. While the local utility is working on upgrading grid infrastructure, xAI quietly brought in 35 temporary gas turbines and assembled them without environmental permits. “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia said in a statement in April. “These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day.” In January, many months after the site was operational, xAI applied for air permits — but only for 15 gas turbines that the company said would be permanent. But in April, SELC commissioned a flyover and captured thermal images that provided evidence that 33 of 35 gas turbines were emitting heat, suggesting they are in operation. The latest video from Oil Field Witness, which shows enormous amounts of pollution, bolsters the case that xAI’s data center is emitting methane and other damaging pollutants into Memphis neighborhoods. Gas turbines can release ozone-depleting nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide, and other pollutants that can contribute to heart disease, cancer, and respiratory illnesses. Tim Doty, a retired Texas environmental regulator who has decades of experience using optical gas imaging cameras, reviewed the video and corroborated the main conclusions. Doty worked for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for nearly 30 years. “It is extremely significant. Definitely. It’s a significant emission plume,” Doty said. “It goes way above the facility. And it appears to me to be going off property.” “If I was a regulator and saw those images, I would be contacting the company to try to figure out what’s going on,” he said. The Shelby County Health Department did not respond to questions from Gas Outlook. xAI also did not respond. Data Center’s Pollution Impact xAI’s supercomputer, named “Colossus,” has support from top local officials, who view the data center as an important source of tax revenue. The tech company did not ask for tax exemptions, as many corporations setting up data centers tend to do, which could result in the city of Memphis taking in $25 to $30 million in property tax from xAI this year. “We are living in a city right now where we have not seen growth for many years. We need investment in Memphis, we need money,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young said at a public forum in March, comments that were met with pushback from members of the community. “We got housing problems, transit problems, we have roads where everybody is sending me messages about how we are going to fill the potholes. We cannot do that unless there is more money coming into our tax base.” “When I look at this project, I’m trying to figure out how to get the most for us,” Young said, referring to the xAI data center.  The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a trade association of regional business interests, has strongly supported xAI’s presence. In March, when xAI purchased another property for its expansion in southwest Memphis, the Greater Memphis Chamber celebrated the news as evidence that the city was attracting more tech investment. “This significant expansion by xAI reinforces Memphis’s position as a premier destination for technological innovation,” said Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber. “Memphis continues to prove itself as the ideal location for companies leading the future of technology.” The Chamber refers to the greater Memphis region as the “Digital Delta,” a region home to an array of advanced manufacturing facilities.  However, much of the Memphis community is up in arms. The city and its surroundings already had poor air quality before xAI came to town, and pollution measurements exceed federal air quality standards. The American Lung Association, a public health group, gave Shelby County an “F” on its air quality report card. But the xAI supercomputer stands out as one of the largest sources of smog pollution in the region. In April, Memphis residents packed a public hearing, shouting down an xAI official and loudly demanding accountability from the municipal and county governments. “Saying that we need economic development at the cost of people’s lives is nonsensical,” Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson told Gas Outlook in an interview. Rep. Pearson lives three miles from the xAI site. “This has been the argument that we have heard for decades in our communities — ‘if you just give us your life, then businesses will want to be here.’ But we don’t want businesses who want to take our lives in exchange for their own profits.” When Rep. Pearson saw the footage from Oil Field Witness, which made visible the extensive pollution that is invisible to the naked eye, he said it was shocking. “It hurt my stomach. I had never seen anything like it,” he said. “This angered me because this is what we’re fighting about. This is what we’re trying to explain to people,” he added. “But to see it firsthand with that camera and knowing the consequences of what they are doing was really upsetting. And it just makes me more righteously indignant, that we’re doing the right thing.” The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce said in early May that the gas turbines at the xAI site are “being demobilized” as the site begins to connect to grid power. But the Oil Field Witness footage, taken on May 13th, indicates that the site continues to burn substantial volumes of gas at those temporary turbines. In late May, national civil rights group NAACP called on the Shelby County Health Department to impose an “emergency” shutdown of the xAI site. xAI has ambitious plans for expansion, aiming to more than double the use of gas in the greater Memphis region. The U.S. EPA is reviewing an air permit for 40 to 90 additional gas turbines to be used at a second site in the city, according to documents obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), a nonprofit environmental legal advocacy group. U.S. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin met with xAI in May and the agency is reviewing an air permit for the company. If the second supercomputer site moves forward with more gas turbines, the pollution and the health damage inflicted on city residents could grow significantly worse. “We have seen an uptick in the number of kids missing school and having respiratory illness like asthma,” Rep. Pearson said. “This is real and the people who are supposed to protect us are not doing their jobs.” (Writing by Nick Cunningham; editing by Sophie Davies) The post xAI Data Center Emits Plumes of Pollution, New Video Shows appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— xAI data centre emits plumes of pollution, new video shows

 

at 6/13/25 7:01am

This article was originally published by Gas Outlook. A massive data centre at xAI’s controversial site in Memphis, Tennessee is emitting huge plumes of pollution, according to footage recorded by an environmental watchdog group. xAI quickly built an enormous data centre and supercomputer at an empty factory site in Memphis last year, aimed at providing computational power for xAI’s chatbot, called Grok. Having difficulty securing enough grid power to fuel the energy-hungry data centre, xAI brought in 35 portable gas turbines, and assembled them without environmental permits or pollution controls. A new video, recorded by Oil Field Witness, an environmental group, shows vast plumes of pollution coming from those gas turbines. “It’s a power plant. That’s what it is,” Sharon Wilson, director of Oil Field Witness, told Gas Outlook. Wilson has extensive experience documenting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. But the pollution coming from the xAI site, she said, was remarkable. “I have shot video all over the U.S., all over the UK, and in Japan. I’ve never seen anything that bad,” Wilson said. “The amount, the size of the plume…it’s really, just horrible.” A new video, recorded by Oil Field Witness, an environmental group, shows vast plumes of pollution coming from those gas turbines. Credit: Oil Field Witness To the naked eye the pollution is not visible. But through the lens of Wilson’s optical gas imaging camera, a scientific instrument that is used within the oil and gas industry and by regulators to detect methane emissions, the pollution becomes readily apparent. Huge, billowing plumes of pollution, including large volumes of unburned methane, rise into the atmosphere and drift off-site. The explosive growth of data centres, needed to fuel the AI boom, has taken centre stage in the energy industry. AI proponents suggest that AI can offer climate solutions, such as optimising electric grid management or improving disaster warning systems. But for the oil and gas industry, AI has taken over as one of the most important sources of demand growth for the foreseeable future, offering a temporary lifeline to an industry facing long-term decline. Electricity demand for data centres in the U.S. could triple over the next three years. Some studies suggest that the U.S. could add as much as 46 gigawatts of new gas-fired power plant capacity by 2030. Data centres could account for 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity demand by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023, according to a U.S. government report. Silicon Valley firms are moving as fast as possible to construct new data centres to build up their computing power. The AI arms race has resulted in Big Tech casting aside its climate ambitions. Between 2020 and 2023, indirect carbon emissions from the top tech giants increased by 150 percent. Given the rate of change in the world of AI, that figure is already badly out of date.  Notably, xAI’s chatbot, Grok, has downplayed the severity of climate change much more than its competitors, and at times regurgitates fringe viewpoints. The data centre gold rush has put a squeeze on the availability of gas turbines, inflating equipment and labour costs. Any orders for new gas turbines will take years to fulfil. But data centres are springing up all over the country. In Texas, data centre developers are building their own gas plants, not connected to the grid. In Memphis, xAI’s difficulty connecting to grid electricity didn’t stop them. While the local utility is working on upgrading grid infrastructure, xAI quietly brought in 35 temporary gas turbines and assembled them without environmental permits. “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia said in a statement in April. “These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day.” In January, many months after the site was operational, xAI applied for air permits — but only for 15 gas turbines that the company said would be permanent. But in April, SELC commissioned a flyover and captured thermal images that provided evidence that 33 of 35 gas turbines were emitting heat, suggesting they are in operation. The latest video from Oil Field Witness, which shows enormous amounts of pollution, bolsters the case that xAI’s data centre is emitting methane and other damaging pollutants into Memphis neighbourhoods. Gas turbines can release ozone-depleting nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide, and other pollutants that can contribute to heart disease, cancer, and respiratory illnesses. Tim Doty, a retired Texas environmental regulator who has decades of experience using optical gas imaging cameras, reviewed the video and corroborated the main conclusions. Doty worked for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for nearly 30 years. “It is extremely significant. Definitely. It’s a significant emission plume,” Doty said. “It goes way above the facility. And it appears to me to be going off property.” “If I was a regulator and saw those images, I would be contacting the company to try to figure out what’s going on,” he said. The Shelby County Health Department did not respond to questions from Gas Outlook. xAI also did not respond. Data Centre’s Pollution Impact xAI’s supercomputer, named “Colossus,” has support from top local officials, who view the data centre as an important source of tax revenue. The tech company did not ask for tax exemptions, as many corporations setting up data centres tend to do, which could result in the city of Memphis taking in $25 to $30 million in property tax from xAI this year. “We are living in a city right now where we have not seen growth for many years. We need investment in Memphis, we need money,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young said at a public forum in March, comments that were met with pushback from members of the community. “We got housing problems, transit problems, we have roads where everybody is sending me messages about how we are going to fill the potholes. We cannot do that unless there is more money coming into our tax base.” “When I look at this project, I’m trying to figure out how to get the most for us,” Young said, referring to the xAI data centre.  The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a trade association of regional business interests, has strongly supported xAI’s presence. In March, when xAI purchased another property for its expansion in southwest Memphis, the Greater Memphis Chamber celebrated the news as evidence that the city was attracting more tech investment. “This significant expansion by xAI reinforces Memphis’s position as a premier destination for technological innovation,” said Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber. “Memphis continues to prove itself as the ideal location for companies leading the future of technology.” The Chamber refers to the greater Memphis region as the “Digital Delta,” a region home to an array of advanced manufacturing facilities.  However, much of the Memphis community is up in arms. The city and its surroundings already had poor air quality before xAI came to town, and pollution measurements exceed federal air quality standards. The American Lung Association, a public health group, gave Shelby County an “F” on its air quality report card. But the xAI supercomputer stands out as one of the largest sources of smog pollution in the region. In April, Memphis residents packed a public hearing, shouting down an xAI official and loudly demanding accountability from the municipal and county governments. “Saying that we need economic development at the cost of people’s lives is nonsensical,” Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson told Gas Outlook in an interview. Rep. Pearson lives three miles from the xAI site. “This has been the argument that we have heard for decades in our communities — ‘if you just give us your life, then businesses will want to be here.’ But we don’t want businesses who want to take our lives in exchange for their own profits.” When Rep. Pearson saw the footage from Oil Field Witness, which made visible the extensive pollution that is invisible to the naked eye, he said it was shocking. “It hurt my stomach. I had never seen anything like it,” he said. “This angered me because this is what we’re fighting about. This is what we’re trying to explain to people,” he added. “But to see it firsthand with that camera and knowing the consequences of what they are doing was really upsetting. And it just makes me more righteously indignant, that we’re doing the right thing.” The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce said in early May that the gas turbines at the xAI site are “being demobilized” as the site begins to connect to grid power. But the Oil Field Witness footage, taken on May 13th, indicates that the site continues to burn substantial volumes of gas at those temporary turbines. In late May, national civil rights group NAACP called on the Shelby County Health Department to impose an “emergency” shutdown of the xAI site. xAI has ambitious plans for expansion, aiming to more than double the use of gas in the greater Memphis region. The U.S. EPA is reviewing an air permit for 40 to 90 additional gas turbines to be used at a second site in the city, according to documents obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), a nonprofit environmental legal advocacy group. U.S. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin met with xAI in May and the agency is reviewing an air permit for the company. If the second supercomputer site moves forward with more gas turbines, the pollution and the health damage inflicted on city residents could grow significantly worse. “We have seen an uptick in the number of kids missing school and having respiratory illness like asthma,” Rep. Pearson said. “This is real and the people who are supposed to protect us are not doing their jobs.” (Writing by Nick Cunningham; editing by Sophie Davies) The post xAI data centre emits plumes of pollution, new video shows appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— In Texas, AI Gold Rush Helps Spur Demand for Over 100 New Gas Plants

 

at 6/12/25 6:25pm

In the past two decades, new demand for electricity in Texas has largely been met by wind and solar, making it by far the leader in renewable energy development among U.S. states. But the AI gold rush, combined with a new, statewide subsidy system that prioritizes fossil fuel power, threatens to upend that longstanding dynamic.  A new report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) shows a dramatic surge in permit applications for natural gas power plants in Texas —  a shift driven in part by the rise of power-hungry data centers linked to the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. And fossil fuel companies are salivating at the opportunity to sell into what amounts to a brand-new market for quick, dirty energy, even as scientists warn about the urgent need to drop carbon emissions. “Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are hungry for power, and Chevron is tapping into natural gas to help nourish that appetite,” the Houston-based multinational writes, in a post about powering data centers on its website.   In its inventory, EIP found proposals for 130 natural gas plant projects hoping to come online in the next few years, more than 100 of those entirely new facilities. Together, the facilities could emit the greenhouse gas equivalent of putting almost 27 million new gas-powered cars on the road. If approved, the slate of new methane gas plants alone could increase Texas’ carbon footprint by 13 percent, the analysis found. This fossil fuel boom comes on the heels of the hottest recorded year, the same year when a United Nations report documented over 150 “unprecedented” climate disasters. In the race to meet Texas’ growing energy demand, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) may have permitted plants unlawfully in at least some cases, essentially rubber-stamping applications that require more careful deliberation under the U.S. Clean Air Act, according to the EIP report. Though Texas’ green energy transition had long been underway, the stage was set for this kind of fossil fuel reversion after 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. The devastating extreme weather event killed 246 Texans and left 10 million residents without power. An analysis by the Union for Concerned Scientists determined that blackouts were disproportionately the result of failures at gas-powered plants, despite misinformation blaming renewables at the time. But when the state legislature established the Texas Energy Fund, a $10 billion program to incentivize new electricity generation, in Uri’s wake, it made the majority of grants and low-interest loans available to facilities that derive energy from “forces under human control.” In practice, this has excluded wind and solar providers from accessing the funds. To date, the program has almost exclusively received applications for natural gas projects, the EIP report found. Texas is already the largest electricity generator in the country, and it’s also the fastest growing state. Its population surged 1.8 percent between 2023 and 2024. But the state has also proven to be a business-friendly haven for new data center projects — home to more than 400 so far — an influx that’s contributing to the striking new emphasis on natural gas. In 2023, Texas had the second-highest electricity demand from data centers among U.S. states, according to an analysis from the Electric Power Research Institute. In a “high-growth” scenario, Texas’ data center energy demand could more than double in the near term, amounting to 10 percent of its total power use by 2030, according to the Institute. RELATED: New Wave of Oil and Gas Secrecy Hides Full View of Harms, From “Data Center Alley” to Cancer Alley EIP’s report found TCEQ has rushed to approve some of these new gas-powered plants, even apparently skirting federal environmental law to do so. Under the Clean Air Act, “major sources” of pollution — those that emit at least 250 tons per year of harmful pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter — must install control technologies, notify the public, and provide local communities opportunity to comment through public hearings before a permit is issued. But 25 of the 130 proposed projects received “standard” general permits, according to EIP, typically reserved for operations with a smaller footprint than a data center. Pollutants like these can cause dangerous respiratory harm, asthma attacks, and premature death, according to the American Lung Association, and research shows developers disproportionately build fossil fuel projects in low income and communities of color, burdening them with the health and social impacts too.   “The state is rapidly issuing the wrong kind of permit for at least a portion of this new wave of gas-fired power plants,” Griffin Bird, the EIP analyst who authored the report, wrote. Because so many of the plants are still in the early stages, it is difficult to know for sure if they’ve been pushed through using the wrong permits. But EIP found three examples of plants that it says are definitely large enough to warrant a “major sources” permit, but were unlawfully waved through with a standard permit instead. At the same time, EIP reports that these permits had been issued on a “shockingly fast” turnaround time. The two-turbine, 900 megawatt EmberGreen Energy Center plant that EmberClear Energy plans for Wharton, Texas, south of Houston, was approved by TCEQ just 24 hours after the company submitted its application. “The state is essentially rubber stamping some applications without a meaningful review to ensure compliance with the Clean Air Act,” Bird wrote. TCEQ declined to comment on the report’s findings. EmberClear Energy and the Texas Oil and Gas Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment. All this comes at a time when House Republicans are arguing that Clean Air Act provisions must be rescinded to allow for the AI sector’s rapid growth. In a Wednesday hearing of the Subcommittee on Environment, Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith spoke in support of two draft bills that would transform the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to set national air quality standards. “Overly restrictive air regulations,” he argued, could “jeopardize America’s ability to compete in the global Artificial Intelligence race.” (The Trump EPA already has used supporting AI to justify rolling back climate rules for coal plants.) But Cheryl Shadden, a Hood County, Texas resident who already lives near two gas-fired plants, said she felt the human cost of growth was unsustainable for affected residents. Now that a third plant from Constellation Energy Generation is slated for construction near her home in Granbury, reportedly the power source for a future data center, she described fearing for the future of her neighborhood.  “We see clouds of pollutants rolling across the ground towards our homes. We have respiratory distress, shortness of breath, GI disturbances, our property values have plummeted,” she said, in an EIP press conference Wednesday, discussing the findings in the report. “No community needs to go through this, not our community, nor any other community throughout Texas.” The post In Texas, AI Gold Rush Helps Spur Demand for Over 100 New Gas Plants appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— ‘Net Zero is a Killer’: Meet Reform UK’s New Chair David Bull

 

at 6/12/25 8:25am

Reform UK’s new chairman has repeatedly attacked climate targets as “madness” and “a killer”, supported fracking, and falsely dismissed the role of carbon emissions on heatwaves. David Bull, a TalkTV presenter and former doctor, was appointed as the chair of Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party this week following the resignation of its previous chair Zia Yusuf. Yusuf, a luxury lifestyle entrepreneur, said that working to achieve a Reform government was no longer a good use of his time, before returning two days later in a new role. Bull is now loyal Farage supporter, despite having called the Reform leader a “dangerous, prejudiced idiot” in 2014. He was a member of the European Parliament in 2019 for the Brexit Party, the predecessor to Reform UK, and served as Reform’s deputy leader from March 2021 to July 2024. In a series of social media posts, Bull has repeatedly attacked the UK’s target to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, which climate scientists have said is needed to limit global warming to 1.5C. On the eve of the 2024 general election, Bull posted on Elon Musk’s website X.com: “Net Zero is a killer. It’s killing British jobs, communities and the economy. Only Reform UK will scrap Net Zero.” In reality, according to risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), 50 percent could be wiped off the global economy between 2070 and 2090 if runaway temperature increases are not halted, while there could be more than 4 billion deaths. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); In January of this year, he shared a Telegraph story about a lull in wind power and claimed that it made “a complete mockery” of Labour’s net zero chief Ed Miliband and his “religious obsession” with renewable energy. As revealed by DeSmog, Reform’s constitution gives sweeping powers to its chairman, who cannot be formally sacked by the party leader. Reform wants to scrap the UK’s net zero target entirely, stop subsidies for renewable energy, impose a “windfall tax” on wind and solar companies, approve new oil and gas extraction, and open new coal mines. The party’s leaders have also repeatedly made false statements about climate change. As DeSmog has reported, Reform received £2.3 million between the 2019 and 2024 general elections from climate deniers, fossil fuel investors, and polluting interests. It is also openly seeking donations from oil executives. David Bull’s Climate Stance In May 2023, Bull hosted a TalkTV segment called “the madness of net zero”. He began by saying: “I think all of us feel that the climate is changing and that we want to go to net zero”. This is out of step with Reform’s position, and the title of his segment. But he went on to claim, of the UK’s record heatwave the previous summer, “we don’t know whether that is a result of man-made emissions”.  This contradicts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Met Office, and a study by the World Weather Attribution service, which said the 2022 heatwave was made “at least 10 times more likely” by human-caused climate change.  In the same segment, Bull suggested net zero was “subjecting people in this country to become poorer”. In reality, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy grew by 10 percent in 2024, employing almost a million people in full-time jobs with an average wage of £43,000 – £5,600 higher than the national average. In October 2021, Bull endorsed a campaign by climate denial pressure group CAR26 for a Brexit-style referendum on net zero, and shared a poll commissioned by the group, adding: “We absolutely MUST have a referendum on the Government’s net zero policy. Retweet if you agree.” CAR26 director Lois Perry now runs the UK-EU branch of the Heartland Institute, a notorious U.S. climate denial think tank. The UK-EU branch was launched in December by Reform’s leader Farage. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 40th anniversary fundraiser in September 2024. Credit: Heartland Institute / YouTube In November 2021, while the UK hosted the flagship UN COP26 climate summit, Bull attacked what he called “the hypocrisy of COP26”. He told TalkTV: “It is obscene. The hypocrisy that they [world leaders] fly in on private jets. People are sick and tired of being told what to do.”  In April 2022, Bull posted on X.com predicting that “Net Zero will be the new Brexit. It will be the most defining issue at the next general election”. Despite Reform’s best efforts, the pro-net zero Labour Party won a historically large majority. Bull has also supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas. In October 2022, when prime minister Rishi Sunak reversed the decision by his predecessor Liz Truss to lift the ban, Bull posted: “MASSIVE MISTAKE. We need cheap energy NOW. Fracking has allowed the US to have 100-200 years of cheap energy.” Aside from the pollution caused by burning shale gas, fracking is environmentally controversial due to its triggering of earth tremors, and the vast amount of water that it uses. The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee – a body of MPs that advises the government on climate matters – concluded in 2019 that fracking was incompatible with the UK’s climate goals. TalkTV was launched in 2022 by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK as a rival to GB News, but in 2024 it switched to an online streaming service. As DeSmog has reported, TalkTV presenters have frequently attacked climate action. In the COP26 segment, Bull was interviewed by fellow TalkTV host Mike Graham, who has declared on social media that “climate change is a load of old bollocks”. Bull has resigned as a TalkTV presenter, following his appointment as Reform’s chair. The post ‘Net Zero is a Killer’: Meet Reform UK’s New Chair David Bull appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Danielle Smith Pitches Tanker Ban Exception for Prince Rupert Pipeline Terminal

 

at 6/12/25 6:14am

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith appeared to suggest she would consider amending her blanket opposition to the so-called West Coast tanker ban if the federal government were to assist in the development of an oil export terminal in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. For weeks Premier Smith has been calling for a major oil pipeline project to B.C.’s northern coast and an end to the tanker ban as part of a list of demands to newly-elected Prime Minister Mark Carney. In a media scrum following her keynote at the Global Energy Show in Calgary, the premier suggested Prince Rupert’s port could be exempted from the ban. “On the issue of the tanker ban, maybe we come to an agreement that if all roads lead to the port of Prince Rupert, just carve out port of Prince Rupert so that we can continue to protect the rest of the coast,” she said. “I can live with that.” The Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, passed by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in 2019, restricts ships carrying more than 12,500 tonnes of crude oil, but does not ban oil tankers entirely. Smith repeatedly called for the legislation to be repealed during her conversation with veteran reporter and broadcaster Peter Mansbridge at the Calgary conference Tuesday. She addressed the ban in the context of Carney’s advocacy for new pipelines, arguing that as long as the tanker ban is in place, new pipelines to the Pacific are pointless. Her later comment to reporters initially sounded like a pivot or compromise. But environmentalists say Smith’s proposal to “carve out” a portion of West Coast waters doesn’t make any sense. “This would be the equivalent of the National Hockey League banning cross-checking, unless it happens in front of the net or in the corners,” said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, in a statement to DeSmog.  “It would defeat the purpose of protecting British Columbia’s coast and critical salmon habitat from oil spills from supertankers coming into the port or from the pipeline that would have to be built to get the oil there.” Sam Blackett, press secretary to Premier Danielle Smith, confirmed to DeSmog that the premier had not previously discussed the idea with Prime Minister Mark Carney, but was proposing the idea to enable the development of a new pipeline.  Alberta environment minister Rebecca Schulz also argued against the tanker ban during a panel discussion the previous day. Eliminating the tanker ban was one of several demands issued by chief executives of Canada’s oil and gas sector during Canada’s federal election campaign. The CEOs repeated their request to Carney after he won. These demands were endorsed by Smith and conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre checks off election demands listed in a letter from 14 energy CEOs. Credit: CPAC / YouTube More industry coming to Prince Rupert Prince Rupert is a coastal city and deepwater port in northern British Columbia. A floating LNG export terminal has been proposed, and the continued construction of a 900-kilometre gas pipeline was recently approved by the British Columbia government. A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) says the Ksi Lisims LNG project faces a wide variety of major risks, including regulatory, financial, and infrastructural. “Compounding these risks is an impending global LNG supply glut, weak demand growth, and inflationary trade actions,” reads an IEEFA statement. The absence of a secured pipeline to supply feed gas is a major challenge, though the IEEFA also notes domestic Canadian market dynamics are changing, and that the proposed terminal’s main competitive advantage — proximity to Asian markets — may not be enough to secure long-term competitiveness for the project. “For members of the public, potential short- to medium-term economic gains must be weighed against long-term risks to affordability, environmental quality and economic stability,” reads the report. While the tanker ban doesn’t prohibit liquid natural gas, similar risks and concerns weigh on proposed fossil fuel export development in Canada. Desire to reverse the tanker ban comes on the heels of a recent Canadian federal election and a trade war initiated by US President Donald Trump. Prime Minister Mark Carney has proposed Canada become an energy superpower in response to these threats. The ban isn’t new, as a de facto moratorium had been in place for decades. Moreover, tanker traffic is not banned elsewhere on Canada’s Pacific Coast, and the port of Vancouver has a considerable oil export terminal. Pacific Coast oil export capacity increased with the completion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which in turn led to a sevenfold increase of tanker traffic through the Juan de Fuca Strait, increasing from one per week before the pipeline opened in the spring of 2024, to one per day by last October. In May, the CBC reported that the pipeline isn’t running at full capacity. In April, Reuters reported that the pipeline had downgraded their oil export forecasts for the next three years. Some analysts suggested the problem was the high tolls oil companies were being charged by the government to use the pipeline, which cost Canadian taxpayers $34 billion, up from initial estimates of $4.5 billion. Bad deal for Canada? As recently reported by the National Observer, the federal government locked in toll rates for the pipeline at $11 per barrel, a fee that was determined before the pipeline’s final cost was established, which the Observer argues is less than half of what’s needed just to break even. Experts argue there’s no necessity for additional oil infrastructure in British Columbia, for a wide variety of reasons. “Already as of 2021, the International Energy Agency was clear: if we want a climate-safe future, the world must stop building and subsidizing new oil and gas infrastructure,” said Thomas Green, senior climate policy adviser with the David Suzuki Foundation. “Even as wildfires rage across Canada — fueled by climate change caused by burning fossil fuels — some are pushing to build more pipelines and lift the West Coast tanker ban,” said Green in a statement to DeSmog. Green notes that British Columbians overwhelmingly support the tanker ban, primarily to protect coastal ecosystems which are already under stress from ocean acidification, warming waters, plastic pollution, and increasing marine traffic. “Scrapping the ban to expand fossil fuel exports will only make future summers worse,” said Green.  “It’s also a risky bet: global markets are rapidly shifting toward electrification and cheaper renewable energy. In this smoky summer, it’s time to clear the air about the risks of buying into big oil’s agenda. Doubling down on yesterday’s dirty technologies doesn’t just threaten our environment — it undermines Canada’s economic future and the wellbeing of our communities.” The post Danielle Smith Pitches Tanker Ban Exception for Prince Rupert Pipeline Terminal appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— How MAGA Lobbying is Undermining EU Climate Rules

 

at 6/12/25 3:33am

“The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump U.S. think tank, tweeted on 31 March. The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading climate science denial groups. It has helped to draft Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies, which have seen the president pledge to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels and once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement. Over recent months – along with a host of other Trump allies – the Heartland Institute has set its sights on a new target: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). This vague acronym belies the potentially transformative impact of the new law. In its original form, the CSDDD sought to require large companies – and those in “high risk” sectors – trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their own operations and in their supply chains. High turnover companies would also have been forced to adopt a plan to align with the Paris Agreement, including setting emissions reduction targets. The Heartland Institute and its anti-climate, anti-regulation peers are vocal opponents of the law – and launched an aggressive campaign to water it down, or even to see it scrapped entirely. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); These groups, which are all part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) ecosystem, view the CSDDD as symbolic of the way in which “woke” governments are attempting to force citizens and global corporations to conform to a pro-diversity, pro-environment agenda. Following Trump’s election in November, these MAGA groups wasted no time in formulating their plans to oppose this perceived agenda. They focused in particular on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which attempt to create workplaces free from bias – and environmental, social and governance (ESG) schemes, which try to ensure that organisations are guided by responsible and sustainable practices, not just profit. In December, barely a month after Trump’s victory, the Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote the key ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the president’s second term – published a report entitled: “ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them”. In the report, the Heritage Foundation described ESG and DEI as “pernicious”, and called the CSDDD “a serious problem”. Two months later, the State Financial Officers Foundation – an influential network of Republican finance officials – wrote an open letter calling on the new administration to “investigate” the CSDDD, claiming that the EU’s directives are based on “unscientific assumptions about the nature of climate change impacts” and “will force companies to incriminate themselves”. This quickly filtered through to Trump’s Cabinet. On 12 February, Howard Lutnick, the president’s pick for commerce secretary, told a Senate committee that the CSDDD threatened to place “significant burdens” on U.S. companies, and that the Trump administration was exploring the use of “commercial tools” to mount a counter-attack against the EU’s environmental regulations. Soon this rhetoric made its way to the White House. In March, as part of the worldwide tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the president called the EU “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”. But the EU hasn’t stood firm in the face of Trump’s war of words. The EU has already announced that it will be scaling back the CSDDD and delaying its implementation. The number of companies within scope has been reduced by 80 percent. The firms in question will only be required to file due diligence reports every five years, and won’t be required to investigate the ESG operations of their indirect business partners. The implementation of the law has also been postponed until 2028. But Trump’s MAGA hardliners are still not satisfied. In April, the Heartland Institute released an open letter signed by 31 other groups, calling for Congress and the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.” This backlash is now influencing European leaders. In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for the CSDDD to be scrapped entirely. They claim it must be abandoned in order to defend the “competitiveness” of European corporations, with Macron stating that Europe must “synchronise with the U.S. and the rest of the world.” This judgement signifies the appeasement of anti-climate pressure groups that are ideologically opposed to clean energy and climate science. The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”, while the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency. If the EU waters down its climate policies in response to Trump’s pressure, it will have helped to send Project 2025 global. The ‘Climate Cartel’ It’s unclear whether these MAGA groups – and the Trump administration – will ease up on the EU if the CSDDD is ditched entirely. They may simply use it as evidence that European lawmakers will buckle under enough pressure. Indeed, MAGA’s opposition to the CSDDD is part of a multi-pronged campaign that seeks to dismantle global climate initiatives pioneered by both governments and corporations. Much of the original groundwork for this campaign was undertaken by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and its chair Jim Jordan, a leading Trump supporter. Last year, Jordan’s committee produced reports – and demanded evidence from major corporations – on a supposed “climate cartel” of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions”. The committee alleged that some of the world’s biggest asset managers – that have questionable climate commitments – are conspiring to force American companies to decarbonise against their wishes. BlackRocks New York office. Credit: Anthony Quintano / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) As part of its “investigation”, the committee demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement and pension programmes, as well as 60 U.S.-based asset managers. In November, 11 Republican-led states sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – three of the world’s biggest asset managers – over their ESG policies. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, nearly two dozen banks have been barred from public contracts for trying to divest from fossil fuels. These actions, along with the anti-climate rhetoric of Donald Trump, have had a chilling effect. In February last year, BlackRock, State Street, and JP Morgan Asset Management withdrew from Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative that works to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take action on climate change. Fast forward a year, and a growing list of major U.S. corporations are either cancelling or delaying their sustainability reports – designed to show how they are meeting their climate commitments. And a new story from the investigative outlet CORRECTIV today reports that German insurance giants and investment firms are withdrawing from climate agreements, while companies are quietly shelving their sustainability policies, amid the anti-ESG backlash orchestrated by Trump and his acolytes. As one sustainability expert at a financial firm told CORRECTIV: “We have to be careful not to harm the cause by sticking our necks out and becoming a target in the U.S.” The post How MAGA Lobbying is Undermining EU Climate Rules appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— As Trump Unwinds Federal Oversight, States Become Battlegrounds for Environmental Data

 

at 6/11/25 9:26am

Secret chemicals. A hush-hush atmosphere surrounding airborne pollution. Non-disclosure agreements preventing open discussion of industry impacts. Some of the same transparency issues that reared their heads during the early days of fracking a decade ago are making a resurgence at the state and local level across the U.S., this time with new twists under the current federal government. With the Trump administration slashing funding and staffing for programs that collect environmental data, and, in some cases, even forbidding the use of terms like “climate change,” the public’s access to this state and local information is more important than ever. The second Trump administration is silencing science even more aggressively than the first, “going after entire agencies and shuttering whole offices dedicated to addressing climate change, rather than individual people or policies,” Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law noted in April, calling that ultimately “more destructive.”   Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Take, for instance, Colorado. There, activists succeeded in convincing the state to require fracking chemical disclosures in 2022 – only to see those rules go unenforced today, with the state failing to collect an estimated $37 million in fines from violators, according to a recent report from the FracTracker Alliance, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), and Sierra Club Colorado. In Virginia’s “data center alley,” researchers have uncovered broad non-disclosure agreements signed by public officials with big tech, keeping details about planned construction under wraps — and information about AI’s energy demand out of sight. And in Louisiana, a new law is chilling community groups from sharing information about simple air pollution test results. Despite the federal government’s efforts to conceal these serious environmental impacts, state and local community groups across the U.S. are fighting for the public’s right to see this important data. “To anyone else who has thought about standing up to bad laws, do it,” said Caitlion Hunter, director of research and policy at RISE St. James Louisiana, one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to have Louisiana’s law tossed out as unconstitutional. “Your voice has incredible power.”  Colorado: The Galeton Geyser Just before 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 6, the Galeton, Colorado, fire department got an alert from the oil and gas giant Chevron. A Chevron well had blown out, sending water likely laden with oil, gas, and chemicals rocketing into the air above the company’s Bishop well pad. Hundreds of responders raced to contain the blowout and begin clean-up efforts.  Less than a mile away from the site is Galeton Elementary. The eruption forced the school to close for two weeks, with students sent to attend classes at another nearby elementary school. One of those kids, fifthgrader Cole Ranalli, started calling the tower of oily wastewater the “Galeton geyser” in a student news broadcast about the incident — and the term stuck. The well that blew out had been fracked earlier this year – meaning the water spraying from the well was likely laden with chemicals in addition to oil and gas. Chevron noted the blowout began after fracking had ended and pointed out that the company “discloses the chemicals we use on a third-party site called FracFocus.” And indeed, FracFocus reveals the company injected dozens of chemicals into the well. But there’s a glaring gap on that list. One entry simply reads “Organic surfactants: Trade Secret.” The mysteries of “trade secrets” surrounding chemicals used during drilling and fracking have a long history of stirring up an enormous amount of public concern. In 2019, then-CEO of Colorado-based fracking company Liberty Energy, Chris Wright, now U.S. secretary of energy, drank a “frac fluid” — a four-ingredient blend mixed up on camera for the stunt — to highlight how some of the chemicals used in fracking can be non-toxic. Of course, that’s hardly the full picture. Hundreds of scientific studies have shown wastewater from real-world fracked wells can be dangerous and often carries toxic and cancer-causing substances. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright (third from right) drinks frac fluid in 2019 as then-CEO of Liberty Energy with employees. Credit: Liberty Energy/Facebook And indeed, Wright’s stunt seems to have failed to quench concerns in Colorado, where community organizers successfully pushed for a state law requiring mandatory disclosures. Since 2022, a new law requires companies to disclose all of the chemicals used in oil and gas wells in Colorado — trade secrets notwithstanding. Companies don’t have to make their exact formulas public, but they need to reveal the ingredients used. That’s in part so that first responders, like the over 340 emergency workers who fought the Galeton geyser, can know what exactly to expect if people are exposed to oil and gas waste. But Colorado’s reporting law is routinely broken, according to the May report “Oil & Gas Chemicals Still Secret in Colorado,” written by three environmental groups. Across Colorado, over 30 million pounds of secret chemicals were injected underground at oil and gas sites since the 2022 law went into effect, the report found. That includes over 1,300 pounds of trade secret chemicals at the Galeton well, a FracTracker map accompanying the report shows.  “We don’t know what the local people, including schoolchildren at the nearby school, were exposed to,” said Ramesh Bhatt, chair of the Colorado Sierra Club Conservation Committee. “Unfortunately, this seems to be a pattern in this state.” State-wide, chemical disclosures were available for just 439 of the 1,114 wells covered by the 2022 law — a compliance rate of just 39 percent, the report found. Violations of Colorados 2022 Oversight Of Chemicals Used In Oil & Gas law are so widespread that companies should now owe a stunning total of $37 million in back fines. But the state hasn’t collected.– Oil & Gas Chemicals Still Secret in Colorado, 2025 Chevron, which became by far Colorado’s biggest oil and gas producer after its Noble Energy and PDC Energy acquisitions in 2020 and 2023, respectively, operated more than half of the wells that lacked chemical disclosures, the report noted. This includes the well where the Galeton geyser erupted, which is operated by Chevron’s Noble Energy.  The oil giant pointed to chemical suppliers and manufacturers, which it said are “ultimately responsible” for making chemical disclosures under the state law, in response to questions from The Guardian. Companies that violate Colorado’s law could face fines of at least $200 per day.  “As you can imagine, it was not an easy bill to pass,” Bhatt said. “The law was hailed as the first of its kind in the nation. However, implementation of the bill has been far from satisfactory.” Violations are so widespread that companies should now owe a stunning total of $37 million in back fines, the report estimates. But the state hasn’t collected. Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) is charged with enforcing the law and overseeing the state’s more than 10,000 oil and gas sites. “ECMC is communicating with regulated entities that are out of compliance with the reporting standards required by HB22-1348 [the 2022 law] and working to ensure widespread compliance,” spokesperson Kristin Kemp told DeSmog, adding that the commission was “evaluating next steps to obtain compliance, including potential enforcement action.” Kemp declined to comment specifically on the report’s findings, saying that the agency’s experts had not yet reviewed the document. At a public meeting shortly after “Oil & Gas Chemicals Still Secret in Colorado” was released, ECMC Commissioner Mike Cross “committed to reviewing the PSR report and reporting back to the Commission about the claims made in the report,” Kemp added. Cross has worked as an oil and gas industry attorney and brings “substantial oil and gas experience” to the commission, according to his ECMC bio. Louisiana: Red Flags Under Wraps In southwest Louisiana, near Cancer Alley, a community group called Micah 6:8 Mission sprang up in the aftermath of major Gulf Coast hurricanes and the COVID crisis, distributing food, cleaning supplies and other resources to those in need. In 2022, the group got a federal grant to purchase two air-quality monitors that could test for a handful of common air pollutants, and agreed to share their results with the Environmental Protection Agency. On days with poor air quality, Executive Director Cynthia Robertson also posts an alert on Facebook and hoists a red flag outside her office so her neighbors know when it might be better to stay indoors – or at least she did, until very recently. Under Louisianas 2024 CAMRA law, community groups now fear they could face fines of up to $32,500 per day – or even $1 million for intentional violations – for talking publicly about evidence of airborne pollution, except under a narrow set of circumstances. Under the Louisiana Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act (CAMRA) signed by Governor Jeff Landry last year, community groups like Micah 6:8 Mission now fear they could face fines of up to $32,500 per day – or even $1 million for “intentional” violations – for talking publicly about evidence of airborne pollution, except under a narrow set of circumstances. The LA statute mandates that you cant talk about air quality unless youre using the equipment that they want you to use,” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project.  “Unfortunately, the equipment that they want you to use costs hundreds or even thousands of times more than perfectly good equipment that people can use to monitor the air in the communities,” he added. “We know that this equipment is satisfactory because in many instances, it was loaned by the EPA to these groups.” Several other Louisiana groups have also stopped publishing air quality test results — although some continue to collect that data in the meantime. But they’re not giving up: They’re also suing. A lawsuit, filed in federal court in May by the Environmental Integrity Project and Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of Micah 6:8 Mission, RISE St. James, Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio, The Concerned Citizens of St. John, The Descendants Project, and JOIN for Clean Air, alleges Louisiana’s CAMRA statute thwarts federal environmental laws and violates the U.S. Constitution’s protections for free speech and the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. “CAMRA was written and introduced by industry groups fearing what community air monitoring would reveal,” said RISE St. James’ Caitlion Hunter. “Because there is no state monitoring for many of the most dangerous chemicals released, industrys numbers on emissions have been allowed to go on unchallenged.”  Bookbinder said that as far as he knows, no community groups have yet been fined for their air monitoring under CAMRA.  Nonetheless, the threat of steep fines has cast a pall over efforts to publicize air pollution test results from low-cost air monitors. Johns Hopkins University Professor Peter DeCarlo, who joined the groups behind the lawsuit at a press conference announcement, said the problem is that there’s too little air testing — citing a lack of official data on ethylene oxide, a powerful carcinogen, as an example. “Regulatory ethylene oxide measurements in Cancer Alley were not available when we performed spatial measurements of this chemical in February 2023,” DeCarlo said. “Our measurement data that we collected showed cancer risks that were ten times higher than the models from regulatory agencies — and this really demonstrates the need for these important measurements.” Louisiana’s not alone in lacking federal air monitors. In fact, most counties across the U.S. are “air quality monitoring deserts, lacking even a single monitoring station,” a study published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found — even as smoke from wildfires has increasingly undercut air pollution regulation. Almost half of all Americans now live in places that get failing air quality grades in the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. An Exxon plant pollutes the air in Baton Rouge, LA. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Immediately on taking office, Trump moved to cut federal air quality data collection further back, albeit in fits and starts. In March, the State Department killed off a global air-quality monitoring program that had tested air at U.S. embassies worldwide, taking down the AirNow program’s website. In May, the National Parks Service temporarily suspended air sampling at 63 national parks across the U.S. But the worst hits to air monitoring could still be on the horizon. Trump’s proposed EPA budget for 2026 would slash categorical grants for state and local air quality management from $235 million this year to $0 in 2026. “We believe in the power of neighbors helping neighbors,” Robertson said. “Because when government wont protect us, we must protect each other.” Virginia: Data Denied If you’re looking for the heart of the artificial intelligence industry, you could arguably find it just outside Washington D.C., in a stretch of northern Virginia known as “data center alley.” It’s believed to hold the biggest concentration of data centers in the U.S., drawn by the area’s internet infrastructure, which sees 70 percent of global internet IP traffic cross its fiber optic cable network, Virginia Beach’s “digital port” hub of international data cables, and the region’s relatively cheap electricity. But if you’re looking for specifics, they’re hard to find. “How many data centers currently exist in Virginia? How many proposals are in the works? These are good questions,” the Piedmont Environmental Council, which attempts to track known data center projects in the state, says in its online mapping tool. “It’s also extremely difficult to provide an answer, given there is no publicly available dataset or state-level tracking of these facilities.” One reason why data on data centers is so hard to pin down? Big tech companies, eager to keep their plans private, have struck non-disclosure agreements with public officials down to the local and county level, researchers from Virginia’s University of Mary Washington found. “We thought it would be an interesting student project to just do an accounting, lets learn about how much water is going to be used by these data centers, and how much electricity is going to be used, and how can we translate that in terms of carbon impacts,” sociology Professor Eric Bonds told DeSmog. “The students did fantastic work – but realized that this information is not available. So that shifted our research to think about, well, why isnt this information available?” Known data center projects in Virginia are tracked on the Piedmont Environmental Councils online mapping tool. Credit: Piedmont Environmental Council So Bonds’ students filed public records requests for any non-disclosure agreements between local governments and tech companies or data center developers – uncovering dozens of such agreements. The terms of many agreements caught Bonds by surprise, he wrote in a Virginia Mercury op-edin April, including language barring officials from discussing companies’ “business plans,” not just trade secrets. “Its very broad. It can cover a lot,” said Bonds. “And that can potentially prevent an interested public from knowing what is being proposed and developments that are in the works in their region.” Those NDAs might be just the tip of the iceberg. Some experts advise data center developers to limit government officials to just seeing documents during video calls or visits, to reject requests for copies from public officials, or to preemptively redact information in communications that could become public. Some of the NDAs Bonds unearthed fit those patterns, including agreements with identifying information about the tech companies redacted and others forbidding public officials from acknowledging they had confidential information without the tech company’s sign-off.  Some big tech companies work behind shells to conceal their real backers – like one agreement between Prince William County, Virginia, and Sharpless Enterprises, which is reportedly a Google shell company.  “It would be nice to know what company intends to do business in the jurisdiction so members of the public can look into, what is the environmental track record of this company? Has this company made good on its pledges for tax revenue in the past? Or has it been a good neighbor in other locations?” said Bonds. “So thats valuable information for the public to have.” One of Trump’s first moves in office was to issue an executive order promoting a build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure like data centers. But it’s far from clear how many data centers will actually be built. Experts are warning electrical utility regulators about “phantom” data center demand, which can appear when one tech company explores building a project in several potential locations – and forecasters lack enough information to sift out the duplicates. Individual data centers can demand as much electricity as a small city, amplifying the impacts from any confusion. Electrical utilities nationwide are also legal monopolies – allowed to operate free of competitors but under the watch of utility regulators. That setup means that utilities have powerful incentives to build new power plants – and particularly big fossil fuel power plants. The lack of public data also makes it harder to trace which big tech companies plan to rely on a fossil-fuel-powered electrical grid. Virginia’s Dominion Energy, for example, is drawing heat over plans to build a half-dozen new natural gas-fired power plants in the state, citing data center demand. But connecting new natural gas plants to a specific AI or other big tech project is made more difficult by the cloud of uncertainty surrounding data center development plans. A coalition launched last year, the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition, says it’s working to change that. They’ve backed Virginia bills aimed at giving the public more access to information about data centers’ water and energy demand. Those bills failed to make it to the floor this year, the Piedmont Environmental Council noted in April – but they’ve continued the fight in Virginia regulatory hearings. At least 42 activist groups in the state are working to “slow, stop, or further regulate” data center development, the boutique research firm Data Center Watch found in a report this year. At least two major data center projects with a combined $900 million price tag were withdrawn in Virginia following local opposition, the report found, and seven other projects, with a combined value of over $45 billion, were delayed over the past two years. “Data center challenges arise primarily at the local level, as most permitting decisions are made by local authorities,” the report says. “Consequently, even a supportive White House has limited control over delays arising at the local level.” The post As Trump Unwinds Federal Oversight, States Become Battlegrounds for Environmental Data appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Jordan Peterson’s ARC Project Receives $500,000 from CEO of Disgraced Pharma Firm

 

at 6/11/25 5:31am

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), the radical right-wing network fronted by Jordan Peterson, has accepted a large sum from a pharmaceutical executive whose firm was fined $47 million by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last year, DeSmog can reveal. A press release from QOL Medical on 18 April announced that its CEO Derick Cooper had given $500,000 to ARC, whose only previously known donor had been GB News and Spectator owner Paul Marshall. In November, QOL Medical and Cooper agreed to pay an eight-figure sum to the DOJ after admitting to healthcare fraud allegations.  Namely, the company distributed free breath test kits to healthcare providers, claiming the tests diagnosed Congenital Sucrase-Isomaltase Deficiency (CSID), a rare genetic disorder. QOL Medical then used these test results to sell its CSID treatment, Sucraid, to the healthcare providers. However, in reality, the breath tests only measured low sucrase activity, which does not result exclusively from CSID. The DOJ report states that Cooper “was aware of and approved the implementation and continuation of this marketing programme.“ Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Former financier Cooper has close ties to Peterson, the influential Canadian psychologist. Appearing on Peterson’s podcast in January 2024, Cooper extolled the morality of capitalism, saying: “there’s a distinct advantage in my mind of running an organisation that is for-profit, because it’s doing something that is actually good for people, so if you develop a drug that actually really helps people there’s an ethical exchange.” He added: “Yes it is costly for the patient or the insurance company to buy the product. [But] you’re actually doing something that can be transformative to that patient’s life.” The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been widely criticised for charging high prices for basic medicines, particularly in comparison to other developed nations, and for its aggressive and often misleading marketing campaigns. Cooper also lectures at the Peterson Academy, the new online school created by Jordan Peterson, on “successful mistakes in business”. ARC preaches Christian moral virtues, rallying against many of the supposed liberal vices of the modern Western world. This was reflected by ARC CEO and Conservative peer Philippa Stroud during the group’s first annual gathering in 2023, who said: “we invite you to go on the journey from darkness, fragmentation, division, polarisation and intolerance to a better story – one that is rooted in the infinite value of every human being.” She said ARC’s mission was “built on the freedoms of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and woven together with kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control by a responsible people.” Founded in June 2023, ARC organises an annual summit in London which plays host to talks and panels featuring influential right-wing and far-right figures. This year’s summit was attended by 4,000 people and featured speeches from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson, and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. ARC has also amplified anti-climate figures and their talking points. During his address, fracking executive Wright called the UK’s 2050 net zero target “sinister”, and suggested that climate action was a plot to “shrink human freedom”. In his speech, Marshall claimed that the UK’s net zero policies are “leading the way in wrecking our industrial base”, “impoverishing people”, “sacrificing our energy security”, and “sacrificing our ancient rural landscape.” In reality, the UK’s net zero sector is growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). During an interview with Peterson at the conference, Farage claimed it was “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered to be a pollutant – while admitting that he knows little about climate science. “At this pivotal moment, ARC is working to inspire citizens to take responsibility and actively contribute to the flourishing of their families, communities, and nations,” Cooper said when his donation to ARC was announced. “I am proud to support an organization that embraces optimism, fosters constructive dialogue, and seeks solutions to ensure continued growth and prosperity.” QOL Medical and Cooper did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Executives from some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies attended ARC’s conference in February, according to a leaked list of participants obtained by DeSmog. Representatives of BP, Koch Inc., Valero Energy, Energy Transfer and other fossil fuel producers attended the three-day event alongside prominent climate science denial groups and far-right politicians from across Europe. Up to now, the only known public donation to ARC had been from British financier and media mogul Paul Marshall, who gave $1 million to the group via his charity Sequoia Trust in 2023. Marshall’s media outlets have refuted basic climate facts and attacked clean energy policies in recent years. DeSmog revealed in April that GB News had provided a platform to 1,000 anti-climate attacks in the immediate run-up and aftermath of the 2024 UK general election. Marshall’s hedge fund had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels – including in oil and gas giants Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023.  ARC’s advisory board also features a number of individuals who have attacked climate action and denied climate science. This includes Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called climate change a “hoax”; former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who has said that “climate change is probably doing good”; and writer Douglas Murray, who has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Britain. ARC did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. The post Jordan Peterson’s ARC Project Receives $500,000 from CEO of Disgraced Pharma Firm appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Tories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers

 

at 6/10/25 10:01am

The Conservatives received a hefty sum from oil and gas investors and those with roles at anti-climate campaign groups during the period when the party rolled back a key climate commitment. New records released today reveal that Kemi Badenoch’s party accepted £50,000 in January from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s foremost climate science denial group. In March, Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would no longer be advocating for the UK to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 – the goal currently pursued by the government. In a speech hosted by an advertising group that works for the oil giant Shell, Badenoch suggested that we are “bankrupting ourselves” in the pursuit of the 2050 target. While the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024. Badenoch said that the country should still seek to reduce its climate impact, but shouldn’t set a date for achieving net zero. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a pressure group that received funding from BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – has claimed that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF. The GWPF regularly contradicts basic climate science, suggesting that CO2 emissions are “not pollution”. A month before her net zero announcement, Record paid for Badenoch, her family, and members of her shadow cabinet to have a week-long retreat in Gloucestershire. The Net Zero Watch chair is close to the Tory leader, having provided funding and office space to her 2024 leadership campaign. Over the past two decades, the Conservative Party has accepted £7.2 million from senior figures at the GWPF, while Badenoch’s campaign also received funding from a director at the fossil fuel major Chevron. The party accepted a further £117,600 in the first quarter of this year from Alasdair Locke, a longstanding Tory donor who made his fortune in the oil industry. Locke is currently the chair of the UK’s largest independent petrol station operator Motor Fuel Group, and the non-executive chair of Well-Safe solutions, a firm that decommissions oil and gas wells. He is the founder of Abbot Group, a major oil and gas services company in the North Sea. Badenoch’s party also received £75,000 in March from IPGL, a family investment firm belonging to Tory peer Lord Michael Spencer. A billionaire financier and former Tory treasurer, Spencer has investments worth at least £100,000 in each of the oil and gas companies Deltic Energy and Pantheon Resources. “Is it any wonder that Kemi Badenochs Tories are so vehemently against net zero? No sooner do they get a quarter of a million from fossil fuel companies, do they decide to ditch the net zero commitments that they were so evangelical about just a few years ago,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns manager at Good Law Project. “Given the existential climate threats we face, the Tories capitulation to climate change deniers perhaps sets a new low for their policy-making integrity.” The Conservatives, Neil Record, Alasdair Locke, and Michael Spencer were approached for comment. Reform’s Missing Millions The new records show that the Conservatives raised £3.3 million from donations during the first quarter, compared to £1.5 million raised by Nigel Farage’s rival right-wing party Reform UK. Despite the party claiming that it had secured over a million in pledges from businesspeople at a fundraiser in January, more than a-third of funds raised by the party in the period were pledged by Farage’s deputy Richard Tice via his company Tisun Investments. Reform campaigns to scrap the UK’s net zero commitment entirely. The party, which is attempting to raise money from oil and gas executives, supports new fossil fuel extraction and spreads doubt about the science of human-caused climate change. Farage has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant, despite admitting that he knows little about climate science, while Tice has claimed that “CO2 is not polluting; it’s plant food.”  In reality, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate science body, has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, and has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”. Climate scientists working for the IPCC have also said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”. As DeSmog previously revealed, Reform received £2.3 million from climate deniers, polluters and fossil fuel interests between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, equivalent to 92 percent of its funding during the period. Reform has been approached for comment. Additional research by Joey Grostern The post Tories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Oil and Gas Lobby Behind ‘Concerted’ Attempt to Weaken EU Methane Policy, Research Finds

 

at 6/10/25 1:01am

The fossil fuel industry is ramping up efforts to weaken a key EU policy aimed at tackling the potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a new report by research group InfluenceMap. Published today, the report highlights how oil and gas companies and lobby groups across the EU and U.S. are using a range of tactics to destabilise the EU’s methane regulation. The policy was adopted in August 2024, and includes new rules to reduce emissions in the energy, agriculture and waste sectors, and is due to be fully implemented by 2030. The surge in industry lobbying highlighted by InfluenceMap coincides with the EU’s strategy to regulate the energy market, as it weans off Russian gas by 2027 and signs deals to import gas from the United States and other countries. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Under the new rules, oil, gas and coal companies will be required to measure, report and verify emissions – a process referred to as MRV – as well as meet specific conditions for detecting leaks and repairs (LDAR). They would also be banned from routine venting and flaring, including from imported fossil fuels. The regulation could reduce methane emissions associated with oil and gas imports to the EU by at least 64 percent by 2031, according to a 2023 report by environmental organisation Clean Air Task Force (CAFT), based in Boston, Massachusetts. “Over the past six to nine months we’ve seen a concerted lobbying push,” said Georgia Oddie, an analyst at InfluenceMap. “We’re seeing a significant amount of pressure on policymakers from the [fossil fuel] industry, led by a couple of main industry associations.”   Cutting methane emissions has widely been characterised as an “emergency break” for climate action, Oddie added.  “Gas use has to be paired with emissions reduction techniques and it’s crucial for industries in hard to abate sectors that rely on gas that the supply chain is regulated. “For industry to push for a more pragmatic approach suggests leaving the door open to effectively reduce the stringency of the rule.” The ‘Simplification’ Mantra Industry’s calls to relax reporting requirements come as lobby groups seek to capitalise on the European Commission’s new mandate and strategy of “competitiveness”, “security” and “simplification”.    The Commission is in the process of amending multiple sustainability reporting laws through a collection of policy proposals known as the “omnibus package”. While the methane regulation is not yet included in this, InfluenceMap’s research suggests calls to “simplify” the policy show how industry groups are pushing to include it in order to weaken climate action. For example, in a position statement from February, the European branch of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) proposed adding the methane regulation within the scope of the omnibus “as soon as possible”. In the same month, the European managing director of IOGP told Politico that the regulation “jeopardizes” a deal to secure U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) and avoid U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, adding that they were “doing everything to reopen” the legislation.  Weeks later, industry group Eurogas raised its concerns in a position paper over the regulation’s impact on EU “competitiveness” as well as “security of supply”. In April, in a joint letter addressed to EU Commission officials, 19 U.S. and EU energy groups highlighted the “significant challenges” the regulation creates for the “security of the EU’s gas supply, particularly as the EU seeks to ensure affordability and […] replace Russian gas imports.” Signatories included a roster of oil and gas multinationals: BP, ConocoPhillips, Engie, Eni, Equinor, Naturgy, Repsol, and Uniper, as well as lobby group Eurogas. A 2025 report by energy think tank Ember described fossil-importing nations as “frogs in boiling water”. While oil and gas companies claim fossil fuels are essential for energy security, research has shown that diversifying to abundant renewables such as wind and solar, as well as using heat pumps and electric vehicles, will help provide energy independence and, in turn, strengthen security.   A number of member states have also pushed to weaken the legislation. The Polish Council Presidency is proposing to “simplify” the methane regulation, following in the footsteps of initiatives by Romania, Slovakia and Hungary, which are due to be presented when EU member state energy ministers convene on June 16 at the Energy Council. Environmental organizations and climate advocates are calling for member states to “defend” and protect the “integrity and impact” of the regulation, and to commit to the requirements, rather than push for the legislation to be reopened.  Experts say member states are most concerned about enforcement and fines for those not following the regulation’s requirements. “Many of the concerns we’ve seen leveled against the regulation are recycled arguments that we already have answers to,” Brandon Locke, senior Europe policy manager for methane pollution prevention at Clean Air Task Force, told DeSmog. “I would say the Commission seems very steadfast in trying to maintain the climate integrity of the legislation despite there being other stakeholders, even other member states, that may have an interest in weakening it,” he added. “Taking a step to reopen the legislation without any real justification for it, I think that would be an unwise move, […] it would be like destroying a bridge that they spent a lot of time building.”   The Commission did not immediately respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment. Transatlantic Pressure The push for “simplification” has also come from the U.S. amid political pressure on the EU to boost oil and gas imports, in particular liquefied natural gas (LNG). The gas, which is cooled into liquid and shrunk by a factor of 600 so it can be shipped across the world, can cause up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas, research has found, mainly due to the methane leaks associated with transportation. Methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and cutting emissions from oil, gas and coal by 75 percent by the end of this decade is vital to limit global warming to 1.5C. Industry groups in the U.S., in particular, have been lobbying at the EU level to weaken measures that would ensure fossil fuel imports are meeting Europe’s methane requirements for the sector.   In a May 2024 correspondence with EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, LNG company Cheniere Energy defined the MRV requirements for importers as “unworkable” and said that alignment between the EU and the U.S. was “critical,” the InfluenceMap research showed.  In November, Reuters reported on a letter to EU officials signed by U.S. trade groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute (API), signaling concerns that the requirements might prevent the EU from importing U.S. fossil fuels, thereby impacting the bloc’s “security of supply”. In a March 2025 letter to the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. Chamber reiterated these concerns. “Since the Trump administration officially started work in January, we have heard many [actors] from the U.S. oil and gas industry being quite vocal at the EU level, and calling to the fact that the methane requirements on imports would be a problem to conclude long-term LNG import contracts,” said Esther Bollendorff, senior gas policy coordinator at CAN. “For industry to push for a more pragmatic approach suggests leaving the door open to effectively reduce the stringency of the rule,” added InfluenceMap’s Oddie. Energy Security Concerns The report describes the industry’s lobbying efforts as a “two-pronged” approach – pushing for weakened regulation on methane on the one hand, while raising concerns around energy security on the other. Coordinated efforts by the fossil fuel industry exploit concerns around energy security in order to lock-in oil and gas expansion, according to additional InfluenceMap research shared with DeSmog.  In Europe, Eurogas, IOGP, EQT Corporation and Spanish oil company Repsol have pushed for energy security, while U.S. and Canadian entities have made use of the narrative to emphasise the importance of North American LNG imports for EU energy security.  The findings mirror a 2023 DeSmog investigation showing an increase in calls for energy security by European gas lobbies after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while pushing for new gas deals and infrastructure in the wake of the war. Experts also say that reducing methane can, in fact, improve energy security for the sector, and that the adopted regulation does not present a risk to the EUs energy security, according to an assessment by CAFT.  “The methane regulation is a very important piece of the puzzle on the climate and energy side,” said Bollendorff from environmental group Climate Action Network.  “That’s why we see working on methane and reducing methane leakages that are happening across the supply chain, but mainly at the production stage, as a very important measure.” The post Oil and Gas Lobby Behind ‘Concerted’ Attempt to Weaken EU Methane Policy, Research Finds appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Earth to Mark Carney: ‘Decarbonized Oil’ Is as Real as Vitamin Cigarettes

 

at 6/9/25 6:15am

“Decarbonized oil” is now apparently a thing. Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke glowingly about this mythical substance in the context of new bitumen pipelines after his meeting last week in Saskatoon with Canada’s premiers. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith chimed in her support for carbon-free unicorn oil as part of a new “grand bargain” where Ottawa would facilitate another bitumen pipeline to tidewater in exchange for the highly profitable companies within the Pathways Alliance finally moving forward with their carbon capture and storage (CCS) project. To be clear, decarbonized oil is as absurd as talking about vitamin cigarettes or weight-loss ice cream. Bitumen and crude oil are sold to make transportation fuels that are burned in engines and contribute to our accelerating climate emergency. These downstream emissions represent 80 percent of the carbon burden and are utterly unavoidable unless we somehow affix bags onto all the world’s tailpipes. Pretending that we can perfectly prevent the remaining 20 percent of emissions has apparently become official public policy, and the public will likely pay the lion’s share for this fool’s errand. Besides demanding that the taxpayer provide two thirds of the upfront cost of the $16.5 billion construction costs, Pathways recently called for an end to federal industrial pricing and prevailed in Alberta to freeze their price at $95 per tonne. Taxpayers holding the bag As the old cowboy saying goes, Pathways is trying to ride two horses with one ass. Freezing the price of Alberta carbon credits will save them a few pennies per barrel in production costs but vastly undermine the economics their carbon capture project. This means the Canadian taxpayer will likely end up holding the bag for billions in operational shortfalls for decades to come. In this “grand bargain,” Premier Smith audaciously claimed that further pot-sweetening was required for Pathways members to finally pony up their portion for the long-promoted CCS project. “If you want to be able to pay for the decarbonization project, which is the Pathways project, you do need to have a new source of revenue to be able to do that, and that means a new …pipeline.”  Really? The six member companies of the Pathways Alliance had combined net revenues of $35 billion in 2022. Suncor’s CEO was paid over $36 million in 2023, or about $18,000 per hour. In spite of vast profits generated from the extraction of a publicly-owned resource, Alberta oil sands operators have repeatedly stalled taking action, demanded ever more taxpayer largess, and allowed their emissions to balloon by 143 percent since 2005. The rest of the Canadian economy has done the difficult and expensive work to reduce overall carbon emissions by 8 percent in the last twenty years. Even the non-bitumen portion of oil and gas sector reduced GHG outputs 25 percent since 2005, while oil sands operations increased by almost threefold. Our significant trading partners are meanwhile kicking Canada’s ass on decarbonization. Europe is on track to reduce their emissions by 54 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2040. Canada may instead adopt the origami logic of “decarbonized oil,” where Ottawa provides another pipeline to facilitate increased bitumen production to pay for imperfect reductions on the 20 percent of non-downstream emissions. Problem solved. ‘Stepping 20 years back’ Even if the Pathways Alliance carbon capture hub finally got built, CCS technology is far from perfect with well-known safety concerns, declining economics and poor performance. Not to worry. Smith further opined about direct-air capture, modular nuclear reactors and other phantasmal decarbonization solutions.  Whether a new pipeline gets built — or is even needed — remains in doubt. However, Smith is essentially demanding that Carney guarantee an approval to British Columbia’s north coast or she will continue to extort the rest of the country through a torqued up national unity crisis. Yet even Stephen Harper learned the hard way that it is beyond the authority of the prime minister to guarantee any pipeline approval that infringes on the constitutionally protected rights of Indigenous peoples. The Northern Gateway proposal failed primarily due to botched Indigenous consultation. Will the oil patch again over-play its hand? Early indications for meaningful Indigenous accommodation are not encouraging. Carney’s Justice Minister Sean Fraser just said that First Nations don’t have veto over nation building projects. The fact that First Nations were not invited to the discussion with premiers was described as “very disrespectful” by Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak in an interview with CTV News. ”It seems like were stepping 20 years back…If we want to talk about fast tracking, lets fast track the basics like clean water, quality, housing, modern schools for our children and our First Nation communities, all season, roads and community infrastructure, basic things like access to high-speed internet.” Indigenous peoples also made up a large proportion of the 25,000 forced to evacuate due to wildfires raging across three Canadian provinces. Even oil sands operations had to be suspended due the early and extreme fire season in Western Canada. Reducing emissions is not an exercise in urban virtue signaling. it is an imperative to prevent a catastrophic future – and present. The continued goodwill enjoyed by Prime Minister Carney in transforming Canada’s economy could be fleeting if he quickly bows to uncosted demands from the oil patch at the expense of Indigenous rights, fiscal prudence, and our climate future. Even the co-chair of the federal government’s climate action advisory group slammed Carney for trotting out terms like decarbonized oil. “The government is going to embarrass itself by using such industry and marketing speak,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia.   Ouch. The post Earth to Mark Carney: ‘Decarbonized Oil’ Is as Real as Vitamin Cigarettes appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Zia Yusuf: the Butler to Billionaires Who Became Reform’s ‘DOGE’ Ringleader

 

at 6/9/25 2:00am

Zia Yusuf almost withdrew from frontline politics as soon as he entered it. Over the past year, Reform’s former chair emerged from obscurity to become the right-hand-man of Nigel Farage – the odds-on favourite to be the next prime minister. But, on 5 June, he announced his shock resignation following a series of public spats with the party’s MPs. He gave Farage just 10 minutes’ notice before tweeting out his decision. However, the decision wasn’t permanent. In fact, it barely lasted the weekend. As of 7 June, Yusuf was back – in a new role, as the head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ unit – a team dedicated to cutting local government spending, mimicking Elon Musk’s attack on federal funding in the United States. As he takes up this new role, as someone who will be spearheading Reform’s attempts to cut funding for the most vulnerable, it’s worth delving briefly into his own background. The former Reform chair has been written up in the media as the London private school kid and former banker who sold his business and forced his way into Farage’s top team through the sheer size of his wallet. This doesn’t tell the whole story. DeSmog’s deep dive into Yusuf’s business history reveals a career catering to the extravagant tastes of the super-rich – not someone steeped in local issues or the concerns of people who rely on crucial council services. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Yusuf is an orchestrator of opulence. Before Reform, he was a butler to the international elite – the “globalists” and “nomads” so often denounced by Farage. As Yusuf said in an interview in 2016: “I wanted to build something that no one else on the planet is delivering, solely focused on the international customer who is time poor and who wants the richest experiences.” A year earlier, alongside his business partner and former schoolmate Alex Macdonald, he launched Velocity Black – initially designed as an app connecting wealthy clients to the world’s best restaurants. Their ambitions soon multiplied. They expanded their offering beyond restaurants, building an app that allowed their members to browse and book all manner of experiences, travel, and hospitality. For those wanting a piece of the action, it didn’t come cheap. As of 2018, the average purchase on the app was $2,500 – on top of the annual $2,800 membership cost, and the $900 one-off initiation fee. The largest purchase ever made on the app stood at $500,000 – roughly 17 times the typical UK salary at the time. A year later, Bloomberg reported that the average net worth of those using Velocity Black was $7 million, while Yusuf claimed that their combined wealth stretched to $300 billion. As The Independent wrote in 2018: “if you’re worrying about how much it costs to join [Velocity Black], then it’s probably not for you.” So, while the Western world suffered from the long tail of the 2008 financial crisis, Yusuf had few concerns. As Bloomberg stated, Yusuf was confident that “no matter how bad it gets for everyone else, there will always be people willing to spend on the ultimate luxuries.” But what exactly did these “ultimate luxuries” include? Discounted private flights; dinner in an Egyptian pyramid; a VIP party at the Oscars; designing a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes with its head of design in Paris; a getaway to a private Italian island; swimming with Orca whales in Norway; travelling to the edge of space – Yusuf could get you any of these treats, for a hefty price tag. Velocity Black even offered its members the opportunity to book a submarine trip to the Titanic site – a risky business, as the world witnessed in June 2023. A screenshot from the Velocity Black app. Credit: Velocity Black / Vimeo Yusuf branded Velocity Black – which he sold in 2023 – as a never-ending dopamine hit. Its promotional videos were three-minute sensory overloads, full of fast cars, strobe lights, and the dimly lit interiors of private clubs. And – if you had the cash – you could access this world of eternal extravagance at the click of a button. For Yusuf, it was about introducing his super-rich clients to new experiences, bought and accessed as easily as ordering a takeaway. “We don’t just wait for you to tell us what you want,” Yusuf said in 2019. “We aspire to something greater, which is showing you things you didn’t even know you wanted.” He added: “This isn’t an expensive country club membership that they use once a year. This is something that is embedded into their day-to-day lives.” He pointed out that 40 percent of Velocity Black members opened their app every day. It was their virtual butler – an Ask Jeeves catered to the filthy rich. A Velocity Black VIP party at Coachella in 2018. Credit: Velocity Black / Vimeo But while Yusuf was spoiling the 1 percent, the rest of the world wasn’t basking in luxury. Velocity Black profited from the economic inequalities that were exacerbated during this period. Following the 2008 financial crash, wealth was increasingly hoarded by the already-wealthy – the natural target audience of Yusuf’s app – while the majority of people were squeezed. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, by 2018, about 4 million workers in the UK were in poverty, up from 3.1 million in 2010. By contrast, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, the number of UK billionaires rose from 43 in 2009 to over 150 by 2019, and their total wealth increased from around £99 billion to over £525 billion during that period. Ironically, after nearly a decade serving the needs of the elite, Yusuf found a new target audience when he joined Reform – the people on the other side of the spectrum, who have borne the brunt of rising inequality. “Working people in Britain feel betrayed; demoralised. They see the nation and the culture that we love being robbed from underneath us,” he said at Reform’s 2024 annual conference.  In these speeches, he never mentions his work at Velocity Black. Environmental Hypocrisy In his conversion to populist politician, Yusuf has also ditched his previous concern for climate change. As Reform’s chair, Yusuf was a vocal critic of climate action. Reform campaigns to scrap clean energy investment, reduce taxes on fossil fuels, and ditch the UK’s commitment to reaching net zero emissions – and Yusuf has spearheaded this agenda. He has called net zero a “catastrophe”, claiming that it represents the “foolhardy economic disarmament of this country”, and he has labelled North Sea oil and gas reserves a “gift from God”. However, this hasn’t always been his attitude. While running Velocity Black, Yusuf was a budding environmentalist. The entrepreneur regularly praised his millennial members for having an awareness “of the wellbeing of the planet and the effect of humanity on the environment and communities”. Zia Yusuf and his Velocity Black co-founder Alex Macdonald speaking at Launchpad360° in 2015. Credit: Money20/20.tv / YouTube An archived page on the Velocity Black website, titled ‘Velocity Impact’, even boasted that the app’s “global membership community” could be channelled “to help improve the lives of those less fortunate and preserve our planet”. In an interview with The Independent in 2018, Yusuf was keen to mention one member’s life-changing experience: a giraffe collaring adventure with a team of conservationists. “He came out of it a changed man,” Yusuf boasted. “His company went green overnight and he killed all single-use plastic cups. And our platform made it happen.” Now, he helps to run a party whose leader claims that carbon dioxide is not pollution. UPDATE9 June 2025 – this article was updated to reflect Yusuf’s new role running Reform’s DOGE unit The post Zia Yusuf: the Butler to Billionaires Who Became Reform’s ‘DOGE’ Ringleader appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Shoot First, Then Aim: A Look at Alberta’s Petrostate Separatists

 

at 6/6/25 9:48am

A dual American citizen, a man from Arizona, and an Ontario law professor walk into a bar — well, actually, a casino conference room in Red Deer. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but the punchline is this: they came to stage a separatist intervention in Alberta. The headliner to the event was Cameron Davies, leader of Alberta’s newest right-wing political party. During the event he told the assembled crowd that “One of my greatest regrets is pushing the PC and Wildrose parties together. Oil and water don’t mix,’ he said. DeSmog reached out to Davies and did not hear a response. The evening unfolded as a mix of political frustration, secessionist rhetoric, and a clear throughline: disillusionment with Confederation. “Alberta is in a bad marriage,” Bruce Pardy, a Queen’s University law professor and executive director of the libertarian think tank Rights Probe, told the crowd. “The inclination of some Albertans to want to go over and over again back to Canada to say, ‘Well, if you just understood us better, you wouldnt be so mean’… Alberta is behaving like a battered spouse.” More than 400 people gathered for what felt more like a revival meeting than a policy discussion, the launch event of the newly registered Alberta Republican Party. The cast included Pardy, political scientist Dr. Michael Wagner, former MLA Gordon Kesler, and political hopeful Cameron Davis, all united by their disdain for Canada’s federal structure and by their deep sympathies for the oil and gas sector. Anti-regulation Pardy Pardy wasn’t just there to compare federalism to domestic violence. He urged Albertans to “embrace the risk” of a “political revolution,” framing separation not as a matter of policy or economy but as a moral imperative. “The problem,” he said bluntly, “is Canada.” Rights Probe, Pardy’s organization, operates under the Energy Probe Research Foundation — an entity with a long history of climate change denial and fossil fuel advocacy that has at times been funded by organic fair-trade coffee. Pardy himself has spoken against climate regulation, critical race theory, and federal oversight of online speech, including in appearances on Jordan Peterson’s podcast and the Justice with John Carpay show. He opposed the now-defunct Online Harms Act (Bill C-63), which aimed to regulate non-consensual intimate imagery, hate speech, and child sexual exploitation online, calling it an overreach that threatened civil liberties. In Red Deer, Pardy continued his rhetorical offensive. “You do not negotiate first and then hold a referendum. No, no, no, no, no. Other way around. You hold a referendum first,” he said. “[Canada] has become a socialist, progressive dumpster fire.” He likened Alberta’s current position to that of pre-revolutionary America under British rule — subject to remote control, overtaxation, and illegitimate political representation. Several other speakers echoed his point about not having to have all the answers about how separation will work before the province votes to leave. Pardy has publicly advocated for the development of Canadas oil and gas resources to reduce global carbon emissions. In testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, he argued that Canadian energy could be a significant part of the solution to global emissions challenges, particularly through the export of natural gas to countries like China. DeSmog reached out to Pardy to ask about his use of domestic violence metaphors and the legal basis for a separation strategy, but did not hear a response. The new separatism Gordon Kesler, a former MLA in southern Alberta got billing as the only separatist to ever hold a seat in the province in 1982. Kesler held the seat for less than a year. He now lives in Arizona according to his Facebook page. “You are here to hear the good news: there is hope for Alberta and you’re the hope,” said Kesler. He asked for a show of hands from the 400 people in attendance to ask who was in favour of Alberta separating. A majority of the room raised their hands. Kesler referenced the 1995 movie Braveheart, about a 13th-century Scottish warrior who leads a rebellion against the English crown after suffering personal tragedy at the hands of occupying forces. He told the audience that Mark Carney was “the most destructive man who was ever in politics.” “He was installed by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and his buddies the world bankers,” said Kesler. Kesler’s social media feed is filled with pro-Trump posts and a recent racist screed against South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who he calls a “black thug” and says that “Ramaphosa is just another black butcher in a long line of butchers inhabiting the Dark Continent,” (a historically loaded term used to refer to Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and accuses him of engineering a plan to “destroy all white South Africans.” DeSmog reached out to Kesler about his comments but did not hear back. As Tyler Dawson notes in the National Post, separatist sentiment in Alberta is not new and there have often been tie-ins with Alberta’s oil and gas industry. During the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s New Energy Program, the controversial federal policy was designed to increase national ownership and control of the resource extraction industry. The program was never fully implemented but still looms large in any discussion of Western Alienation. In 2019 there was also a Wexit movement and the freedom convoy of 2022 that blockaded Ottawa in a protest against vaccine mandates which both expressed significant dissatisfaction with the federal government under Trudeau. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith brought this conversation to the forefront again when she recently proposed legislation to reduce the number of signatures that would be needed for a referendum — from 600,000 to 177,000. Smith’s government also released a list of demands for the federal government that included guaranteeing Alberta full access to oil and gas corridors, repealing Bill C-69, lifting the tanker ban off the B.C. coast, eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap, scrapping the Clean Electricity Regulations, abandoning the net-zero car mandate, returning oversight of the industrial carbon tax to the provinces and ending federal censorship of energy companies. Another speaker, Dr. Michael Wagner, who calls himself an independent researcher, holds a PhD in political science from the University of Alberta and has authored several books that argue for Albertas sovereignty. His work often highlights how federal policies, such as the National Energy Program (NEP) of the 1980s, have negatively impacted Albertas economy and its oil and gas industry. He contends that such policies have led to economic exploitation, where Alberta contributes significantly to the national economy through its natural resources but receives less in federal funding in return. The emcee for the event Nadine Wellwood spoke about how the movement would grow because people are not satisfied with Danielle Smith. She spoke about being a recent gathering of influential people in the conservative movement. “The one thing I heard loud and clear from everybody in that room was that the status quo was not acceptable. Not one person agreed that the status quo was acceptable, and yet Danielle somehow thinks that this time is different, that the 120 years of history that Alberta has since 1905 that somehow she is going to be the one to broker a better deal.” The post Shoot First, Then Aim: A Look at Alberta’s Petrostate Separatists appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

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