Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Mark Carney’s Pipeline MOU With Danielle Smith Has Been A Disaster

 

at 3/5/26 1:36pm

It has been three months since Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed their memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a new bitumen oil pipeline to the west coast. With an April 1 deadline for a final deal with the oil industry only a month away, how are negotiations for this “grand bargain” going? Private sector investors are still nowhere in sight. If a pipeline and associated Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage (CCS) project goes ahead, Canadian taxpayers will be unsurprisingly footing most of the bill. The signing deadline will almost certainly be missed, and most major stakeholders are in open conflict. In other words, not great. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is already demanding major concessions to water down industrial carbon pricing meant to finance the Pathways project. Environmental groups fault the federal government for giving up a laundry list of important climate policies including a proposed emissions cap, clean energy regulations, and the greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act. Ottawa committed to waiving the oil tanker ban on the north British Columbia coast, enraging local First Nations whose Traditional Territories would be decimated by an oil spill. The feds also caved on contentious tax credits for enhanced oil recovery from CCS and further delayed methane reduction targets. Despite such sweeping capitulations, no private pipeline proponent has come forward, and it is now obvious that none will. Former Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage said that industry still expects taxpayers to open their wallets for this latest oil patch boondoggle. Enbridge spilled the same tea on an earnings call with investors. When asked if his company would be the mythical pipeline proponent, CEO Greg Ebel said, “that’s not the type of risk that we’re looking to take on at this time. We don’t need to with all the other opportunities.” 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); Oil industry grievance has become a commodity perhaps more valuable than oil itself. Cultivating a narrative of meddlesome political interference previously netted bitumen producers the $34 billion Trans Mountain pipeline paid for by Canadian taxpayers. Threats of another contentious pipeline corralled the BC government into supporting an increase in capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline by up to 400,000 barrels per day. An industry hit list of important climate policies has finally been killed off after years of patient spin machine effort. With that stunning record of success, why would the oil patch dial down the rhetoric now? Following the Carney- Smith MOU smiling photo op on November 27, all the main stakeholders are either genuinely or performatively pissed off and the clock is ticking. The root of this impasse is an endemic sense of entitlement of Canada’s most coddled industry. The non-profit Pembina Institute points out that if Alberta gets a bespoke policy carve-out for methane reductions, it would be grossly unfair to other industrial emitters across the country putting in the hard work and investments required to lower climate destabilizing emissions. Despite the federal government being on the hook for up to half of the Pathways project and billions more in subsidies from Alberta, the largest bitumen producers still refuse to pony up any of their own money. If the MOU was intended to lower the rhetorical temperature with the Alberta government, it has so far been an utter failure. The ink was barely dry on the agreement when premier Smith reneged on Alberta’s commitment to raise provincial industrial carbon pricing to meaningful levels. The current price has been frozen at $95  per tonne and was supposed to raise to $130 when the agreement is finalized. Just one week after the much-lauded agreement, the Alberta government flooded the market with additional tradeable carbon credits crashing the actual price to below $20. “Expect Alberta to continuously test the federal government for weakness, using moves like this to inform their approach at the negotiating table,” warned Dan Woynillowicz ofPolaris Strategy. Smith conjured up additional headaches for Ottawa by enacting sweeping changes to electoral law just before Christmas, paving the way for separatists to move forward with a referendum question previously deemed unconstitutional by the courts. MAGA-aligned interests now openly conspire to assist in the breakup of Canada, while Alberta extremists brag about multiple meetings with the hostile Trump Administration. As this constitutional fire smoulders, Smith is busy igniting several others. The premier recently took to the airwaves to announce a new divisive referendum this fall demanding jurisdiction over immigration, the ability to appoint federal judges and opt out of federal education and health programs while still receiving funding from Ottawa. It should now be obvious that continuing to shovel concessions at Danielle Smith or her overlords in the oil industry will only lead to additional demands. If there is one winner in the MOU debacle, it is cagey Mark Carney. Sacrificing Indigenous relations and climate policy in favour of a pipeline without a business case or proponent seems to play well in Alberta. The Liberal Party of Canada – typically despised in the province – is now polling neck and neck with the Conservatives. A new bitumen pipeline is neither needed nor profitable, but perhaps that is not the point. In politics, popularity is the only outcome that matters. The post Mark Carney’s Pipeline MOU With Danielle Smith Has Been A Disaster appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Telegraph Bidder Daily Mail Cashing in from Oil Industry Events

 

at 3/5/26 6:31am

The Daily Mail’s parent company (DMGT), which is attempting to buy The Telegraph newspaper, makes a quarter of its money hosting events in Middle East petrostates. DMGT has made a £500 million bid to purchase the Telegraph Media Group. A previous offer backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was blocked by the UK government in 2024 over fears of foreign state influence in the British press. The sale was also opposed by Telegraph staff including former editor Charles Moore, who said it would be “unforgivable” for the paper to be “controlled by a foreign power”, calling the UAE “a country which does not have press freedom”. However, DMGT also has a significant financial stake in the UAE. The latest DMGT accounts published on 17 February show the company made £259 million in the year to September 2025 from its events and exhibition business, which has its headquarters in the UAE. Most of this revenue came from running high-profile energy and construction industry events in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, including several with ties to host governments. This amounted to 24 percent of DMGT’s total revenue – more than it makes from print and digital advertising (23 percent), or from selling newspapers (22 percent).  Geoff Dickinson, the CEO of DMG Events, is also on the advisory board of the Dubai International Chamber – a trade body representing the Emirate. Dickinson was appointed to the position by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, in 2021. 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); Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has referred DMGT’s Telegraph bid to the Competition and Markets Authority, and media regulator Ofcom, which will advise the government on whether the deal should go ahead. A DMGT spokesperson told The Guardian in December: “DMGT reiterates that the acquisition will be completely free from any prohibited foreign state influence, and that The Telegraph will remain editorially independent, while benefiting from significant investment to accelerate its international growth.” However, DMGT’s Middle East events business is growing, while its newspaper revenues are in decline. Its latest accounts state that while consumer media revenues fell by two percent in the year to September 2025, its events business “continued to grow, benefitting from increases in exhibitor demand and visitor attendance.”  DMGT’s total events revenue has increased by 59 percent since 2023, and by 160 percent since 2022. “If DMGT’s takeover bid for the Telegraph goes through, itll be like one Death Star swallowing another,” said Mic Wright, author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. “And the fact that oil and gas events are as profitable to DMGT as its entire advertising business suggests to me that it will be rather inclined to go gently on Gulf petrostates in the long term.  The Telegraph and the Daily Mail consistently publish editorials hostile to climate action and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Oil and Gas Events DMGT describes the “core business” of its events arm as the hosting of five large annual exhibitions in the Middle East. These are the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition (ADIPEC) energy show, reportedly the world’s largest energy exhibition; the EGYPES energy event in Egypt; two ‘Big 5’ construction sector events in Dubai and Riyadh; and the Saudi Food Show. Several of these events have ties to the host country governments. ADIPEC is hosted by Adnoc, the UAE’s state oil company. EGYPES is “held under the patronage” of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. And the Big 5 events are backed by the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, and the Saudi Ministry for Municipal, Rural Affairs and Housing. The new DMGT accounts note another significant earner, Gastech, an annual energy trade show that focuses on “natural gas, LNG and hydrogen”, held last year in Milan, Italy. On top of these five big events, DMGT also ran events “on behalf of third parties”, including the official Blue Zone at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in December 2023, and the Green Zone at the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan – also a petrostate – in 2024. The UAE and Saudi Arabia derive most of their wealth from oil production. Saudi Arabia is the world’s second biggest oil producer after the United States as of 2023. Oil and gas dominate Egypt’s exports and imports. The UAE doesn’t hold popular elections. There are no political parties, critics of the government are often jailed, women face unequal treatment, and its penal code allows for the arrest of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) campaigners. Daily Mail owner Jonathan Rothermere accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump on a visit to Doha, Qatar, another Gulf petrostate, in May 2025. Rothermere’s previous bid for The Telegraph in 2023 reportedly involved backers from Qatar. As DeSmog has reported, Nigel Farage’s pro-fossil fuel party Reform UK – which is leading polls at 29 percent ahead of May’s elections – is also building ties to the UAE through business deals, funded trips, and meetings with government ministers. Claudia Rothermere, wife of Jonathan Rothermere, donated £50,000 to Reform UK in September. DMGT and DCMS were approached for comment. A version of this article was published by Private Eye. The post Telegraph Bidder Daily Mail Cashing in from Oil Industry Events appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz

 

at 3/4/26 4:00am

This story is published in partnership with The Guardian. As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda. “In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration. “Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement. “The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December. “And nothing happened. There wasnt even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.” Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants. Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement. Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects. Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”  ”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.  Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy. This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January. Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regimes agenda.” At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses. Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid. Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.   In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding. Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesnt even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said. During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.”  The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe. At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years. Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes. Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.” Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a spiral of science.” What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog. For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking. “I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said. Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. Theyre not all doing it in the name of climate, but were making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.” McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But its going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.” The post Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Why the Haisla Nation Is Fine With LNG But Not Mark Carney’s New Oil Pipeline

 

at 3/3/26 7:20am

In a Prince Rupert board room in mid-January, the British Columbia-based Indigenous alliance Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative (CFN), Lax Kw’alaams and the Haisla Nation met with Prime Minister Mark Carney and reaffirmed their opposition to a new oil pipeline to the northwest coast of the province.  “It’s loud and clear. That’s a no, and our interest isn’t about money in this situation. It’s about the responsibility of looking after our territories and nurturing the sustainable economies that we currently have here,” CFN President Marilyn Slett said at the time. The alliance includes nearly all First Nations within the Great Bear Rainforest on B.C.’s central and north coast, meaning that its opposition could be a powerful obstacle to building new oil export infrastructure. Despite that, Carney only met with CFN after he had already signed a pro-pipeline Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith last November. The MOU aims to create the conditions needed to build an oil pipeline to B.C.’s northwest coast, including potentially adjusting a ban on oil tankers through the region. In late February, Premier Smith told Albertans in an address that she expects “approval from the federal government for a million barrel a day pipeline to our west coast” with no mention of Indigenous consent or rights. That could prove to be overly optimistic, given that one of the most pro-industry First Nations on the coast also opposes a new oil pipeline. 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); The Haisla Nation, no longer a CFN member but whose traditional lands encompass the Douglas Channel and the delta of the Kitimat River, have in recent years invested heavily in Liquefied Natural Gas. The Nation is currently developing the Cedar LNG project on its territory, which promises to be a major economic boost for the small coastal community. Despite this, they too have long opposed any oil transportation on the coast. Chief Councillor Nyce explained to DeSmog in an interview that projects which involve new oil tankers navigating the coastal waters represent a line that the Haisla will never cross, because the potential damage to local fishing livelihoods and access to ocean sustenance, which many in her community still rely on, is too great a risk. “We are very disappointed that the government of Canada has committed with Alberta to explore the feasibility of an oil pipeline to the north,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “Basically, they declared that this project is of national interest and without any engagement whatsoever with Indigenous people across the province or along the coast.” The logic of their opposition isn’t hard to understand. To Nyce, an LNG tanker sinking in the Douglas Channel would be terrible, but wouldn’t be an existential threat to the community. The same can’t be said of an oil tanker sinking and wiping out the Haisla Nation’s ability to fish and feed itself. That, says Nyce, “would be catastrophic for us.” Around the same time Carney was meeting with CFN, his former Chief Of Staff Marco Mendicino stated that a key goal for the federal Liberals is “to grow our oil production, as complicated as that may be when it comes to our relationship with the climate and First Nations groups.”  But as DeSmog’s interview with Nyce makes clear, the Haisla are standing firm. “We’ve Been Down This Road Before” As the sun set on the town of Kitimat in Northwest, B.C. in April 2014, dozens of people gathered outside town hall to hear the results of a plebiscite that would signal the community’s support or opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil pipeline and supertanker project along the Douglas Channel on the north coast of B.C. As the results were read out, 60-40 in opposition of the project, the crowed erupted with cheers and sighs of relief. Members of the Haisla Nation, from Kitimaat Village, just across the bay at the top of the Douglas Channel, were not included in the vote. They showed up anyway, pounding thunderous drums in support of their neighbours’ efforts to keep the channel oil free.  “Enbridge and the government really don’t understand what happened here tonight, not just here in Kitimat but the entire Northwest,” said Gerald Amos, a former Chief Councillor of the Haisla Nation. “What we witnessed was a community building exercises that should scare the shit out of them.”  More than 10 years on that sentiment hasn’t wavered.  In a call with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith the day before she signed the MOU with Mark Carney, Haisla Chief Councillor and Mayor of Kitimat Phil Germuth reiterated their determination to never support oil transportation through the Douglas Channel.  “Weve been down this road before,” Nyce said in an interview. “Well go down this road again to ensure that we are heard and understood about what we value on the coast and why we just arent ever going to accept a pipeline to our shore. We take all our food from the Douglas Channel anda spill on our waterway would be catastrophic for us.” Federal and provincial leaders appear to now be better at appreciating the Haisla’s concerns. Premier Smith announced in late January that Kitimat, part of the community home to the Haisla, is no longer an option for the proposed pipeline. The shipping route, she explained, would be “too complex.” Roots Of The Oil Tanker Ban For more than 50 years, oil export on B.C.’s North Coast has been debated ad nauseam. In the 1970s, an oil ports inquiry determined that the waters off the North and Central Coast were too unpredictable for oil transportation and too ecologically sensitive to the risks from an oil spill.  Since then, a voluntary exclusion zone has been in place, supported by every First Nation on the coast, including the Haisla. The Haisla’s opposition to oil transportation deepened during the Northern Gateway era. When Enbridge proposed twin pipelines to bring bitumen to Kitimat for shipment across the Pacific, Haisla leaders joined a broad Indigenous and environmental coalition that opposed tanker traffic and pipeline corridors through Northern B.C. The nation filed legal challenges, participated in public hearings, and mobilized local opposition.  In 2010, Coastal First Nations formally banned oil tankers through their territories, but since the late 1970s, there has been a voluntary oil tanker exclusion zone, which governments and companies have long adhered to. The Northern Gateway project was eventually abandoned, after a Federal Court of Appeal overturned the project’s approval due to the government’s failure to adequately consult with First Nations. Since then, the Haisla’s position hasn’t changed, as they have repeatedly signaled that oil-by-tanker is not acceptable in their territory. In 2019 the federal Liberal government of Justin Trudeau enacted the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which formalized the ban on oil tankers through northern waters. Why Haisla Sees Oil as a Bigger Threat Than LNG Chief Councilor Nyce, who took office in 2025, has been one of the Haisla’s most visible spokespeople during this most recent wave of proposals. In a joint statement issued with the District of Kitimat following the call with Premier Danielle Smith, she highlighted the community’s long-standing rejection of an oil pipeline and supertanker port through Haisla territory. Chief Councillor Nyce says this position reflects the lived memory of how oil and marine accidents can devastate subsistence, livelihoods, and culture that the Haisla still depend on. In 2016, for example, the Nathan E. Stewart, a tugboat, ran aground near Bella Bella on the traditional territory of the Heiltsuk, a CFN member. Over 110,000 liters of diesel were spilled, which has had a lasting impact on clam beds there that havent been harvested since. But Chief Councillor Nyce says the Haisla are not against development, citing the nation’s support for LNG Canada and the construction of its own Cedar LNG project.  “We have found that with the development of LNG facilities on our shores, we feel that is a fit that works with our values,” said Chief Nyce. “The transportation of LNG on our waterways doesnt pose a high risk to our food source so were supportive of that.” As pressure mounts on the federal government to support Alberta’s efforts to build a new oil pipeline to the west, one stipulation may throw a wrench in their plans— First Nations consent—which the Haisla, and several other First Nations say they will never give. “Theyre hoping that Indigenous people will buy into the pipeline as equity owners along the way,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “But we werent included in that conversation between the premier [of Alberta] and our prime minister at all. We were not engaged in any way shape or form. And I feel like that was a huge signal of disrespect from both of them to not include the leaders who will be affected along the coast that theyre proposing.” In early December, the Conservative Party put forward a motion in the House of Commons to force the governing Liberals to vote on building an oil pipeline to the north coast. The motion outlined part of the MOU brokered by Carney with Alberta, but excluded language regarding Alberta’s commitment to lowering methane emissions, industrial carbon pricing, and respecting Indigenous rights. However, one notable vote in support of an oil pipeline to the north coast came from Conservative MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, Ellis Ross.  Ross, a rookie MP, is also a former Haisla Chief Councillor who opposed Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project more than a decade ago, citing concerns about remediation if an oil spill occurred in Haisla territory. “There’s no real way to pick this product up out of a marine environment,” Ross said in 2013.   Although Ross voted in favor of the Conservative motion supporting the pipeline, he is still facing criticism from First Nations and constituencies about his lack of clarity on the issue.   Despite Ross’s apparent support for an oil pipeline to the North Coast, First Nations are digging in and preparing to fight a potential proposal at all costs. And after years of building consensus among First Nations and communities along the North Coast to support LNG development, Nyce points out that the notion of forcing through an oil pipeline has already damaged government relations with First Nations. This could impact future negotiations of developments that require First Nations consent.   “Theyve taken a major step back, in my opinion, in terms of the relationship with First Nations with this announcement,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “It makes no reference in the MOU to the need for Indigenous consent for the pipeline to go ahead, and that is completely unacceptable.” The post Why the Haisla Nation Is Fine With LNG But Not Mark Carney’s New Oil Pipeline appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Nigel Farage Paid £27,000 to Speak at Pro-Trump U.S. Think Tank

 

at 2/26/26 10:33am

Nigel Farage is preparing to fly more than 3,000 miles from his UK constituency to address an anti-climate U.S. think tank with close ties to Donald Trump, DeSmog can report. For an estimated 12 hours work on Saturday (7 March), the Reform UK leader will collect £27,856.88 from Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax lobby group based in Washington D.C. that has vowed “to work closely with President Trump and his team in advance of the 2026 mid-term elections”. Farage’s latest transatlantic trip, published this week in the register of financial interests, comes days after Reform goes up against Labour and the Green Party at Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election, and two months ahead of UK local elections in May.  He will be addressing a powerful U.S. group that in the 2024 election helped raise $163 million (£120 million) for Republican candidates.  Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); The Club for Growth’s president told Fox News in November that as the country looks toward the mid-terms, his group “is very aligned with President Trump, and were especially in these contested races, were going to help him win. Farage has repeatedly been criticised for spending minimal time in Clacton, Essex, where he was elected as an MP in July 2024. As DeSmog has reported, he mentioned his constituency in parliament just four times during his first year in the role. The former Brexit Party leader has also come under fire for his lucrative trips abroad — often to give speeches to right-wing groups close to Trump. DeSmog revealed last month that since his election, Farage had made at least seven trips to cheerlead for Trump or attend events associated with the U.S. president, paid for by wealthy donors. These trips are on top of Farage’s base MP salary of £93,000. He also receives £4,000 a-month for his column with the Daily Telegraph, and more than £300,000 a year as a presenter at GB News. “Farage’s world tour goes on and on,” said Charlene Pink, campaigns manager at legal advocacy group the Good Law Project. “If you really want to represent Clacton, shouldnt you actually spend some time there?” Farage and Club for Growth did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Green Party MP Siân Berry said the trip “sheds a harsh light on where Nigel Farage’s priorities truly lie”. “Not in Clacton with his constituents facing poverty and cuts, but in Washington DC with think tanks which support tax cuts for the mega rich, and will pay him the same as many people’s yearly salary for one speech.”  Farage’s Clacton constituency is one of the most deprived in England, and has one of the highest risks of flooding, which has been made worse by climate change.  Anti-Climate Views Farage’s latest U.S. host, Club for Growth, focuses its lobbying on promoting free-market policies, lower taxes and deregulation.  As Reform leader, Farage has promised to cut taxes and regulation for business if elected to government, including net zero policies. Club for Growth has previously sought to undermine climate policies, and in 2018, called on Trump to exit the Paris Climate Agreement. In a 2020 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Scott Parkinson, vice president of government affairs for the Club for Growth, argued against attempts to make the Republicans more climate-friendly.    The party should not succumb to a “Green New Deal Light”, Parkinson said, but instead “continue to work with principled conservatives who reject climate alarmism and fight for energy and environmental policies based on sound economic principles”. Last year, Club for Growth released an advert — which aired on Fox News — targeting Republican Senator Kevin Cramerafter he stated he would oppose President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” because he supported Biden era green energy subsidies.  According to analysis, Trump’s legislation would add an extra seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere between 2025 and 2030. Additional reporting by Geoff Dembicki The post Nigel Farage Paid £27,000 to Speak at Pro-Trump U.S. Think Tank appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— How Europe’s Climate and Sustainability Rules Were Shredded While Citizens Remained in the Dark

 

at 2/26/26 4:53am

The European Union’s package of major corporate environment and sustainability laws was years in the making — and has just been quietly gutted. A debate that reshaped corporate Europe unfolded almost entirely within Brussels policy circles. Millions of Europeans who believe climate action should be prioritised and favour greater corporate accountability never realized the regulations were under threat.  This should prompt serious reflection among those of us who believe that the climate and human rights focus of the regulations was deadly serious, but that support among politicians was not. The so-called Omnibus rollback — a regulatory rationalisation ascribed to competitiveness concerns amid pressure from the United States – has exempted 90 percent of Europe’s companies from climate reporting, and scrapped supply chain reporting. The overturned rules included mandatory reporting by most EU companies of their impact on climate change, and how environmental dangers could affect their business. They also forced companies selling products on the continent to report on child and forced labour issues, as well as potentially dangerous working conditions in their international supply chains. In today’s economy, corporate lobbyists seize moments of regulatory weakness to ram home anti-growth or relative competitiveness arguments that instantly gather financial and political support. Indeed, the printer ink had barely dried on the official publication of the EU Omnibus — finalised this month — before companies started attacking the EU’s 20-year-old Emissions Trading System (ETS) carbon pricing regime on similar international competition grounds. If we don’t quickly digest the lessons of the Omnibus debacle, sterner tests will come as populists challenge for power across the bloc.  Why Was the Rollback Invisible? Why was the European public largely unaware of such a huge regulatory rollback? The reason is that it took place in a legacy media vacuum. No major polling organisation measured citizen awareness. The BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel barely — if at all — covered the vote.  Further, how can we support and defend policies when we hide them behind letter jumbles like CSRD, SFDR, CSDDD — acronyms that mean nothing to the public? (The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Sustainability Finance Disclosure Regulation, and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, respectively.) Fluency in Brussels acronyms becomes a political liability when success requires public mobilisation.  Campaigns succeed with vivid phrases that citizens quickly understand. Surveys consistently show that large numbers of Europeans support corporate accountability when it’s described in plain language. Germany’s “Supply Chain Law” campaign gathered over 200,000 supporters by using a clear, native-language label. No comparable EU-wide branding effort for the sustainable finance regulations emerged. Defenders of the EU sustainability rules never attempted an equivalent translation. By contrast, industry lobbyists framed their arguments with accessible language such as “simplification” and “cutting red tape,” while pushing the convenient elements of the Draghi report on EU competitiveness.  Advocates countered with “transposition deadlines,” “ESRS requirements,” and “regulatory coherence.” The contrast was decisive. Post-defeat reflection on this communications failure has been nearly non-existent. Green Groups: Bureaucratised and Compromised?  Typically, the rallying call to voters on environmental and rights regulations comes from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In the case of the EU climate and sustainability Omnibus, more than 360 NGOs and other civil society organisations signed a coalition statement against the disastrous and dangerous deregulation. Over the decades, many European climate and human rights groups have evolved into Brussels-based policy shops that are staffed by lawyers and technical experts fluent in EU procedure, but which seem to be relatively poorly equipped for mass public and political campaigning. Their efforts produced no mass protests, no breakthrough petitions, and no broad public mobilisation.  Some NGO funding structures appear to reinforce this limitation. Major foundations often restrict grants against “political or partisan activities,” while EU funding frameworks have introduced reputational-risk benchmarks that discourage confrontational advocacy. Funders also often seek short-term results to long-term problems that require deep, structural change, not hope-for-the-best strategy thinking.  A coalition spanning 27 countries that relies on consensus decision-making could not move quickly. The NGOs deployed the only tools their structures supported: letters, technical briefings, and procedural complaints. The limitation was not a strategic choice; it was institutional.  Big-spending corporate lobbyists, meanwhile, began organising months before public announcements on the Omnibus were made. In addition, the accelerated legislative timeline of the Omnibus compressed the opposition response time from multiple years to less than one, leaving opponents flat-footed.  ExxonMobil alone is reported to have had more than 25 meetings with the European Commission to lobby against the CSDDD, and allegedly threatened to withhold $20bn in renewables spending in Europe if it was not rolled back. We hear there have been reflections by major NGOs on what went wrong. To stop mistakes from recurring, the publication of these learnings is essential. Why Doesn’t Capital Defend Itself? Institutional investors representing €6.6 trillion in assets had strong financial incentives to oppose the Omnibus. Their risk analysis was clear: Stranding of major fossil-fuel assets would likely accelerate without transition planning; weakened disclosure rules would leave investors short of necessary climate information; regulatory uncertainty would stall long-term investment; and Europe would forfeit advantages in green technology.  Citizens’ pensions and long-term savings could face potential portfolio-wide losses if systemic climate risks go unmanaged.  Investors wrote detailed letters explaining these dangers.  Then they watched the regulations collapse.  They did not mobilize beneficiaries, fund public campaigns, or coordinate with the 362 NGOs in the field. The UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, the huge investor environment, sustainability and governance (ESG) coalition, could only muster a hundred or so of its 5,000-plus investors to sign a letter warning against a serious unravelling of the regulations. Many of the heavyweight investors in its ranks weren’t there. The failure reveals a deeper structural problem: Even when capital’s interests align with regulation, financial institutions often lack the political capacity and institutional mechanisms to defend those interests against coordinated opposition. Why Didn’t Progressive Business and Labour Fight? Allies with different tools and constituencies struggled to convert shared positions into effective action. Eighty-eight companies — including Unilever, Mars, Nestlé, Ferrero, DP World, and Primark — signed letters opposing the rollback and acknowledged that customers demanded consistent sustainability standards. Why didn’t they also launch consumer campaigns, threaten relocation, withdraw from trade associations backing deregulation, or apply coordinated market pressure? Competitive dynamics discouraged unilateral action by business, and company executives feared appearing overtly political during an ESG backlash. Meanwhile, trade associations often lobbied in the opposite direction. Trades unions showed similar restraint. Despite representing tens of millions of workers, major confederations limited their involvement largely to signing coalition letters. Unions excel at domestic workplace negotiations but often struggle with international supply chain issues and EU-level regulatory processes. When industry framed the debate as “regulation kills jobs,” unions faced an apparent dilemma between global labour protections and local employment security.  Did the Regulation Work? Businesses and investors respond to clear regulatory signals. They rarely get out ahead of politics or the market without a strong policy or pricing foundation to lean on. One of the overarching responses we’ve heard from business and finance professionals to the Omnibus policy rollback is that the EU regulatory approach in its Action Plan on green and sustainable finance suffered from a first principles problem, skewing heavily towards bureaucratic solutions for policy or incentives problems.  Many told us, for example, that the EU was not prepared to put the budget stimulus alongside hard regulations to seize the future green technology opportunity. Instead, they opted for a lower cost, weaker, reporting-led investment approach (more data encourages more finance) where actual green output (business R&D, investment flows) may be slow or unclear. This risks creating a sort of Potemkin Village of climate and sustainability progress, because reporting and compliance solutions cannot replace market drivers such as incentives, infrastructure, or price signals.   Some of these issues are being addressed, but they have been long in the amendment, despite concerns being raised. To work, reporting frameworks require a clear, gradual shift in rules or pricing that can surmount competition barriers by underpinning market shifts. Without it, data collection and research are costly and lack an underlying economic materiality (policy push, pricing, time-horizon). They quickly become a comparative drag. The addition of important but complicated regulations, like supply chain reporting, then gets scapegoated as a further cost to EU companies in globally competitive markets. Bureaucratic overreach is easily lobbied against on competitiveness grounds. Policy row-back then becomes itself highly disruptive, creating a cycle of negativity. Rationalising data points for corporate reporting and focusing, for example, on the biggest corporate CO2 emitters, as the Omnibus proposes, are not in themselves problematic reforms.   But it is vital to ensure that policy is smart, joined-up, backed by developments in the real economy, competitive, and road-tested for outcome.  This will be key to embedding regulations that align with the capital spending decisions that companies are already taking (according to EU data) as a result of the EU’s green taxonomy for sustainable activities. How Should We Understand the Authoritarian-Fossil Fuel Alliance?  The Omnibus was not a result of routine corporate lobbying. It reflected a broader geopolitical alignment. Corporate actors, political movements, and transnational advocacy networks converged around shared economic and ideological interests. Months before public announcement, extensive lobbying campaigns began, leveraging substantial financial resources to coordinate messaging across institutions. This alignment shifted the terrain from a conventional policy dispute to a power asymmetry. Civil society coalitions and institutional investors faced opponents with larger budgets and stronger political backing. Investor inaction and NGO limitations become more understandable in this context: The imbalance was structural, not incidental. We need to reflect deeply on this and what it means for EU sustainability regulations.  Europe’s Own Leverage: What Can Still Work? The Omnibus outcome is not final. The EU rules can be improved and made to work with the right public and business support, political will, and technical know-how. Member states can move ahead independently, setting stronger national standards like Germany’s Supply Chain Law, which companies must meet to access their markets. The EU can lean in to sustainability initiatives via issues of global security, energy transition, and justice. The economic momentum favours transition: Renewable energy capacity continues to expand and market trends are rewarding low-carbon shifts. Practical paths forward include coordinated member-state regulation, economic-sovereignty instruments tied to market access, judicial challenges, cross-sector coalitions among cities and businesses, and clearer public narratives that link sustainability to competitiveness and security. Europe’s regulatory influence remains significant when it acts decisively. Large markets can still set de facto global standards. But to get there we need to start answering these hard questions. The post How Europe’s Climate and Sustainability Rules Were Shredded While Citizens Remained in the Dark appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Carney Allowed Gas-powered AI Data Centres After Lobbying From Alberta Energy Company

 

at 2/25/26 8:03am

The Alberta electricity company Capital Power, which is developing a large new AI data centre in the province powered by natural gas, lobbied the federal Mark Carney government dozens of times last year to eliminate clean energy regulations, DeSmog has learned. These regulations were subsequently dropped from a fossil fuel accord that the prime minister signed with the government of Alberta last November, allowing large new data centres fuelled by gas turbines to proceed. “We’ve got a new paradigm that allows us to look at growth capital” for Canadian gas-powered AI projects, Capital Power CEO Avik Dey said in reaction to the Carney government announcing it would suspend the regulations. The Edmonton-based power company communicated with the government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney close to 40 times between the time Carney was elected in April 2025, and the signing of the Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), in November 2025, according to federal lobbying records analyzed by DeSmog. The MOU is an agreement between Canada’s federal government and that of the Province of Alberta wherein the federal government agreed in principle to support a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast, as well as special treatment for the province on a range of federal government climate policies. The MOU lists increasing oil production in Alberta as its first objective, while also suspending Alberta’s Clean Electricity Regulations and eliminating the Oil and Gas Emissions Cap. The same agreement also proposed the development of AI data centres in Alberta, a potential new use for the province’s considerable gas resources. That agreement has been widely criticized by environmentalists and Indigenous communities. The term ‘data centre’ appears at least 25 times in notes from Capital Power’s interactions with the federal government, while the term ‘emissions’ appears 17 times, and ‘clean energy regulations’ and ‘net zero’ appear each at least 14 times. Records show the company has advocated specifically for the development of gas-fired power plants, policies and programs related to the development of AI data centres, and “the energy source(s) required for those data centres to be successful.” Environment and Climate Change Canada press secretary Keean Nembhard wrote in an emailed statement to DeSmog that the government’s clean energy regulations continue “to apply in all provinces and territories and will require electricity-generating units to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.” However, Nembhard added, “data centres with their own power generation, not connected to the commercial grid, would not be covered by the [regulation].”   Capital Power didn’t respond to a request for comment. 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); Capital Power’s Effective Lobbying Federal clean energy regulations, which aimed to kickstart the energy transition by mandating a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power generation by 2035, were developed under the previous Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Nembhard confirmed that Capital Power Corporation, one of Alberta’s largest energy generators, was included in that process. “Over a two-year period from 2022-2024, our government undertook extensive engagement with provincial and territorial governments, industry, such as Capital Power, utilities and others,” Nembhard explained. But Capital Power wasn’t necessarily happy with the regulations. In November 2023, the company blamed the Trudeau government’s environmental regulations for why it wasn’t pursuing any new gas-fired power plants. At the time, Capital Power’s CEO said Trudeau’s then-proposed clean electricity regulations had made investments in gas plants “unviable”. As a result, Dey later explained, Capital Power turned its attention towards expansion in the United States. Lobbying records show that Capital Power communicated twelve times on record with the federal government in the last year of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s term in office. But after Carney took office, the company’s lobbying seemed to accelerate. In total, Capital Power communicated with the Carney government 37 times from when Carney took office until the time the MOU was announced. Duff Conacher, director of Democracy Watch, a Canadian corporate responsibility watchdog group, notes that because of Canada’s lax lobbying laws, it’s possible the actual number of times Capital Power lobbied the Carney government was much higher. “Many lobbyists are not required to disclose their lobbying,” said Conacher in a statement to DeSmog. “At the federal level, disclosure is not required if a company is lobbying about the enforcement of a law or regulation, or if the lobbyist is working as an employee for a business and lobbying less than 20 percent of their work time, or if the lobbyist is not paid for the lobbying. “Other loopholes in the requirements mean that letters, emails, texts and other communications are not required to be disclosed,” he added. The company’s lobbying of the Carney government, including multiple instances of communication between Dey and Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin, focused on developing new gas-fired power plants, federal climate policies, the Clean Electricity Regulations, and the development of large data centres in Canada. In addition, Capital Power’s lobbying effort focused on the federal ministries that regulate resource development, data centres, and emissions. Environment and Climate Change Canada was lobbied nine times while Natural Resources Canada was lobbied eight times. Twelve days after Carney signed the MOU, Dey was interviewed by Bloomberg saying that because Carney relaxed environmental regulations, it was now possible to build new gas-fired power plants to support AI data centres. The next day — December 10, 2025 — the Globe and Mail reported Capital Power had signed its own binding memorandum of understanding to supply an unnamed AI data centre developer with 250 megawatts of electricity. The Canada-Alberta MOU “paved the way” to lock in long-term contracts for AI- data centre related gas-generation, the paper reported. Cashing In On An AI Gas Boom Prior to his appointment as chief executive of Capital Power, Dey worked for the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), where he served as Managing Director, Head of Energy & Resources. As previously reported by DeSmog, the CPPIB is heavily invested in the development of fossil fuels in the United States, particularly as new power sources to power new AI infrastructure. The AI boom is itself driving a massive development of gas power generation: over 1,000 gigawatts worldwide, a quarter of which is in the United States. Though AI data centres can be powered by any form of electricity, the gas industry has marketed gas power as cheap, efficient, and reliable. The environmental and public health consequences of the gas-powered AI data centre build-out are enormous, however. A recent Cornell University study reveals that, at the current rate of growth, AI will add 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the equivalent of adding between 5 and 10 million cars to U.S. roadways. Experts have been warning for some time that the AI build-out — supported by U.S. President Donald Trump as much as Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — will severely compromise climate change goals and entrench fossil fuel use for another generation. Yet Nembhard insisted that the Carney government is still committed to achieving “a net-zero electricity grid by 2050” in Alberta and across the country. Federal policymakers will only suspend the application of clean energy regulations in Alberta “Upon completion of a new carbon pricing agreement and factoring all other measures to the satisfaction of both parties, including on net zero electricity and pursuant to an equivalency agreement.” Yet this isn’t the first time that the Carney government has taken policy cues from the fossil fuel and AI sectors. Last October, the prime minister directly referenced in a speech the organization Build Canada, which is led by and associated with tech and oil and gas billionaires. “It’s great to see ideas shared by the Build Canada community get taken up by government,” a spokesperson explained to DeSmog at the time.  The post Carney Allowed Gas-powered AI Data Centres After Lobbying From Alberta Energy Company appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Supreme Court Will Hear Exxon’s Effort to Crush Climate Lawsuits

 

at 2/24/26 11:41am

For the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted oil companies’ request to weigh in on whether climate accountability lawsuits are preempted by federal law — setting the stage for a battle that could determine if dozens of similar cases are allowed to move toward trial. The decision means the court will hear arguments from ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to overturn an earlier ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which decided that a case brought by Boulder, Colorado, could move ahead in state court. You can read more about the companies’ petition in ExxonKnews and DeSmog’s previous coverage. Oil companies have previously and repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to take up issues in the lawsuits, which point to growing evidence that the companies spent decades deceiving the public about climate change and blocked the transition to renewable energy. Since a narrow procedural ruling in 2021, the companies were rejected each time. But two factors were different this time: the Trump administration urged the justices to take the oil companies’ petition in Boulder’s case, and Justice Samuel Alito participated in discussion of the case, despite recusing himself in the past. 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); Alito owns up to $15,000 in stock in ConocoPhillips and between $15,000 and $50,000 in Phillips 66. Those companies are defendants in other cities’ and states’ climate lawsuits, whose fate could be determined by a ruling in Boulder’s case. Alito clearly acknowledged his conflict of interest in the past, because he recused himself from considering several other appeals related to the climate accountability lawsuits — including a nearly identical petition in Honolulu’s case, which the Supreme Court rejected last year. He even recused himself in Boulder’s case when it was brought before the high court on a jurisdictional question in 2023. Back then, Exxon’s lawyers argued that Boulder’s case was an “ideal vehicle” for Supreme Court review because it “involves a smaller group of defendants and thus is less likely than those [other climate deception] cases to present recusal issues.” Translation: the companies that posed financial conflicts for some justices were not parties in this specific case. (Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a longtime lawyer for Shell and had a leadership role at the American Petroleum Institute). Alito has not always recused from cases that would impact companies in which he has financial investments. When oil-funded Republican attorneys general petitioned the court to shut down similar state lawsuits in which ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were defendants, he not only participated in reviewing the request, but also joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissent arguing the court should have taken it. But Alito did recuse himself from a case the Supreme Court heard in January about oil companies’ liability for coastal damage in Louisiana, even though ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were not direct defendants in that case, either. That was because ConocoPhillips is the parent company of Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Company, a defendant in the lawsuit in the lower courts, but not part of the oil companies’ arguments before the Supreme Court. According to his 2024 financial disclosure, Alito also invested up to $100,000 in a high-dividend yield that listed Exxon as its third largest holding as of January. In 2023, the Supreme Court published an unenforceable code of conduct which stated that a justice should recuse from hearing a case if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” including because that justice or their spouse has “a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.” The code qualifies that “ownership in a mutual or common investment fund that holds securities is not a ‘financial interest’ in such securities unless the judge participates in the management of the fund.” It also says that ““the rule of necessity may override the rule of disqualification” — in other words, if a tie-breaking vote is needed, a judge with conflicts of interest may be asked to participate. Lisa Graves, executive director of national investigative watchdog group True North Research, said it was “no coincidence” that the court took up Exxon’s plea. Between Alito’s financial ties to oil companies, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father’s long employment for the oil industry, Clarence Thomas’s relationship with the Koch brothers, and the influence of Leonard Leo, who helped pick many of the justices on today’s court and has worked hand in hand with Koch networks, the court is “captured with the help of carbon cash,” Graves said. Exxon and Suncor have also had help from the Trump administration and the GOP in getting their petition before the court. After an executive order from the President instructing the Department of Justice to block the cases, the DOJ submitted an unsolicited brief in support of the companies’ request. More than 100 Republican members of Congress also filed a brief on behalf of the companies, asking the justices to protect the industry from cases that “would restructure the American energy industry if not bankrupt it altogether.” Big Oil and Leonard Leo muster their forces As some climate lawsuits have inched closer to trial, the fossil fuel industry has gotten more desperate to stop them. “I have to win every case that is brought,” said Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a November panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal advocacy group funded in part by fossil fuel interests and co-chaired by Leonard Leo. “They just need to find one they can get through — and that’s why it is so important for the Supreme Court to take this case.” The U.S. oil lobby and their allies in state and federal government — along with the same Leo network that helped stack the court — have been ramping up pressure on lawmakers to pass a “liability waiver,” or a bill that would immunize the fossil fuel industry from such lawsuits. Last week, U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) said she was working to draft such a bill. At the state level, lawmakers in Utah and Oklahoma have introduced bills that would shield fossil fuel companies from climate liability; Utah’s is now awaiting the governor’s signature. Those bills appear to draw from a model bill published by Consumer Defense, a Leonard Leo-linked project, the New York Times reported. Alliance for Consumers, another Leo-tied project, has also been behind other broader state bills that would limit corporate liability. The Leo network has also pressured the Supreme Court to step into the climate accountability cases on behalf of oil companies. The DOJ has also attempted, unsuccessfully, to preemptively block Michigan and Hawaiʻi from filing climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. “It’s a bad sign for sure” for the plaintiffs that the justices took the case, said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School. But, Parenteau noted, the court may not end up ruling on the preemption question at all. In their decision to grant review, the justices said they would consider the question of whether the court has jurisdiction over the case, considering there has not yet been any final decision from a lower court on its merits. While the Trump administration has backed the industry in fighting the lawsuits, its EPA also recently repealed the Endangerment Finding, the scientific finding behind federal greenhouse gas regulation in the United States. That decision could undermine the companies’ preemption argument and open up a new front for litigation against the fossil fuel industry. Boulder’s lawsuit argues that the companies violated state laws like public nuisance, trespass and conspiracy, among others, and should help communities pay to adapt and recover from increasingly devastating and expensive climate disasters. “The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was correct in holding that these state law claims for in-state injuries can continue in state court,” said Michelle Harrison of legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International, who serves as co-counsel for Boulder. “Exxon’s ever-evolving arguments as to why they should be immunized from such claims are baseless.” Exxon is represented in the Boulder case by Paul Weiss, a law firm that has worked to defend a wide range of corporate clients from liability and, last year, cut a deal to work for Trump. The firm’s longtime chairman recently resigned after his name appeared multiple times in emails with Jeffrey Epstein. This month, the firm notified courts in Connecticut, Hawaiʻi, Maine and Washington state that they would no longer be representing Exxon in pending climate lawsuits there. The post Supreme Court Will Hear Exxon’s Effort to Crush Climate Lawsuits appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Tory-Linked Climate Denial Group Seeks Funds in Trump’s America

 

at 2/24/26 9:42am

An anti-net zero lobby group with ties to the Conservative Party held an event in the United States to raise funds for its pro-fossil fuel agenda, DeSmog can report.  Net Zero Watch (NZW), which campaigns against net zero targets and renewable energy, put on an evening panel on “Net Zero and Freedom” in New York on Thursday (February 19), where speakers attacked the UK’s climate targets and praised President Donald Trump’s energy policies.  They also appealed to the U.S. audience for “financial support”, and claimed partial credit for the Conservatives’ net zero U-turn.  This is the latest example of climate deniers working across the Atlantic. DeSmog has previously reported on how U.S. groups close to President Trump are building ties with allies in Europe to push their anti-green agenda. 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); Net Zero Watch is the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a London-based think tank founded by Tory peer Nigel Lawson, which has described CO2 emissions as a “benefit to the planet”, and campaigns for new fossil fuel extraction in the UK.  The event last week, attended by DeSmog, was held at the swanky Penn Club in midtown Manhattan, and appears to be the group’s first to take place in the United States since its rebrand in 2021.  It was hosted by the American Friends of the GWPF, a U.S. group which has received funding from oil interests, and donated large sums to its UK affiliate.   “It has been clear for many years that Net Zero Watch has been acting against the best interests of the British households and businesses by promoting climate change denial,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment at the London School of Economics.  “But this shows that is now part of a campaign to make the UK more dependent on fossil fuel markets that are controlled by the United States, the world’s biggest producer of both oil and natural gas.” The burning of fossil fuels makes up the vast majority of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions — and climate scientists warn a rapid phaseout is essential to avoid the very worst impacts of climate change.  ‘Things Are Great’ Drinks and canapés were circulated at the New York event, alongside a selection of Net Zero Watch policy papers. The group’s director Andrew Montford, GWPF advisor and former energy editor John Constable, and Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister and influential Tory backbench MP, all spoke at the event, which was attended by around 30 older men in suits.  Baker, who lost his seat in the 2024 general election, was a director of the GWPF director between July 2021 and September 2022. He also ran the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, an anti-net zero caucus made up of backbench Conservative MPs which worked closely with the GWPF.  In Montford’s remarks, he described net zero in the UK as a cautionary tale for the U.S., and praised Trump’s energy policies. Since his November 2024 re-election, Trump has slashed funding for climate research, dismantled support for wind and solar, and focused on “unleashing” oil and gas production.  “Things are great here at the moment,” Montford said. “[U.S. Energy Secretary] Chris Wright’s doing a great job, and President Trump is sort of leading you in the right direction on energy.”  Montford also appealed to the U.S. audience for funding. He said: “One of the reasons I’m here is that is to ask for if people can help us financially.” He described NZW as “a two-man team plus a lot of associates, but we punch well above our weight”.  American Friends The NZW event was hosted by Francis Menton, a New York-based retired lawyer who criticises climate policy on his blog Manhattan Contrarian.  He opened the event by welcoming Trump’s recent scrapping of the 2009 “endangerment finding” — the U.S. government’s official policy that deemed greenhouse gases damaging to health and the environment. Menton said he and “a handful of people” had pursued this reversal for ten years.  Menton is president and board member of the American Friends of GWPF, which has received significant funding from oil interests.  In 2022, The Guardian revealed that American Friends of the GWPF had channeled more than $860,000 to the UK affiliate between 2018 and 2020, amounting to 45 percent of its funding for this period.  This included money from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a U.S. oil dynasty with millions invested in ExxonMobil and Chevron, and from Donors Trust, which is funded by the Koch Industries oil family.  Menton is a member of the CO2 Coalition, a U.S. group which describes CO2 as “plant food” and denies the link between emissions and global warming. The group received $662,000 from charities funded by the Koch Industries oil dynasty between 1997 and 2017. The GWPF ended its formal ownership of NZW in 2024 after a Charity Commission review, but the groups continue to support each others’ work.  The NZW website’s “support us” page says “readers in the USA may prefer to give to the American Friends of the GWPF.”  Net Zero U-Turn The U.S. event comes as UK climate policy is under renewed attack from Trump ally Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has pledged to scrap net zero, end support for renewable energy, and back new oil, gas and coal power. Reform is currently leading the polls at around 29 percent. It is also being opposed by the Conservative Party, which under Kemi Badenoch has dropped its previous support for climate action, calling the UK’s 2050 net zero target “impossible” and pledging to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act.  At the NZW event, Baker welcomed this development. He called net zero a “policy disaster which it seems likely will be repealed by the next centre-right government”, adding: “Kemi Badenoch the Conservative leader is committed to that, and the Reform party has also made similar commitments.” During the Q&A, DeSmog asked if the panel was advising Reform UK. Baker replied that he was not, but took partial credit for Badenoch’s turn against net zero.  He said: “No, I’ve said very plainly I won’t be doing so. But I’m pleased that Kemi has adopted the policy and certainly helped her and Claire Coutinho adopt it. I’m very clear that net zero is inimical to human freedom and our prosperity.” As DeSmog has reported, Tory shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho recently endorsed three policy papers attacking climate policies, all produced by writers and organisations with ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two of the reports were by authors who have written for GWPF and NZW.  Last week Coutinho appeared in a NZW social media video criticising the UK’s clean power agenda, in which she claimed that net zero would make Brits “poorer”.  The claim, widely used by climate science deniers, is rejected by experts. In July 2025, the UK’s independent Office for Budget Responsibility concluded that reaching net zero is much more affordable than previously thought — and far less expensive than unchecked climate change.  The Conservative Party, Net Zero Watch, GWPF and Steve Baker were all contacted for comment.  The post Tory-Linked Climate Denial Group Seeks Funds in Trump’s America appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Carney Government Knew Carbon Capture Was ‘Very Limited,’ Docs Show

 

at 2/20/26 7:01am

When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced last November he would support a massive new oil sands pipeline to the west coast, he presented the deal as a win for the climate alongside the economy. As part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, his government agreed to help support construction of a $16.5 billion project designed to capture carbon emissions from the oil sands industry and then bury those emissions underground. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has a long track record of failed projects and missed targets worldwide and is considered a false climate solution by many experts and environmental advocates. But Carney claimed at the time that the CCS project, advanced by the oil industry group Pathways Alliance, would “drive down our emissions.” A federal government backgrounder on the agreement stated that the technology would assist in “making Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity-produced barrels of oil in the world.” The Carney government made this bold announcement about the climate potential of CCS while only having “very limited” data about how much the Pathways Alliance project would cost and whether it was technically feasible, according to Department of Finance briefing notes ahead of a September 2025 roundtable meeting in Edmonton that DeSmog obtained. “The [Pathways] project is at a very early stage of development, with few front end engineering (FEED) studies done and initial cost estimates based on very limited project information,” read the notes, which were released following a public records request. Despite the government’s knowledge gaps around carbon capture, Carney went ahead and made the technology central to his climate plan. And in exchange for Alberta agreeing to support carbon capture, his Liberal government signed off on a potential new west coast pipeline that could transport 1 million barrels of oil per day to Asian markets. As part of that deal, Carney also axed a proposed emissions cap on the oil sands, a rollback that his government seems to have privately previewed to oil producers months before the MOU announcement. “We welcome suggestions on how to ensure emission reductions are achieved in the oil and gas sector, and in the oil sands in particular, without imposing a cap on production,” the notes read. Asked by DeSmog about that specific discussion, a Department of Finance spokesperson explained in an emailed statement that the government “was seeking feedback from oil and gas companies who claimed that the proposed oil and gas emissions cap would cap production and be counter-productive to emissions reduction goals.”  “The goal of the roundtable was to gather more information from key stakeholders across the energy sector in Edmonton about the pressing challenges they are facing,” the spokesperson added. Pathways Alliance didn’t respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. 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); Minister Meets With Oil Executives The briefing notes obtained by DeSmog were created to provide “speaking points” and background to Liberal Minister of Finance François-Philippe Champagne as he prepared for a September 2025 meeting with top oil and gas executives in Edmonton, Alberta. The executives had been invited to provide input on the Carney government’s upcoming federal budget. “What are the most pressing challenges facing your sector?” Champagne planned to ask, along with “What top priorities would you like to see reflected in the next federal budget?” This was part of a series of 50 roundtables led by cabinet officials in 27 cities across every Canadian province and territory. “These consultations are a staple of the annual budget process and the input received helped guide Budget 2025,” the spokesperson explained.  Industry attendees at the event would include leaders from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Cenovus, Suncor, Imperial Oil, ARC Resources, Tourmaline Oil, Enbridge, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, TC Energy, Pembina Pipeline, Southbow, and TransAlta. Champagne was instructed in the briefing notes that the executives would request substantial changes to Canada’s climate regulations at the meeting. The briefing notes reference an open letter published by Canadian oil and gas CEOs in March, where they’d demanded a “rapid, dramatic regulatory restructuring to enable investment in critical oil and gas infrastructure across Canada.” The finance minister was prepared to reassure them. His Liberal government was working to “boost investor confidence, speed up project development and strengthen the economy by increasing competition and productivity,” according to his speaking points. He would assure Canada’s oil and gas industry that “the Government of Canada has taken ambitious actions to make sure the resource sector can further contribute to Canada’s economy.” Limited Knowledge About Carbon Capture The briefing notes stated that several executives set to attend the Edmonton meeting were members of the Pathways Alliance, which had launched in 2022 with a goal of achieving “net zero emissions by 2050” in Canada’s oil sands industry. Despite running national ad campaigns touting carbon capture and sending delegates to COP climate summits, Pathways seemed to have made very little actual progress over the years on moving its proposed CCS project forward. By the time the Edmonton meeting happened last fall, Pathways hadn’t yet begun “detailed engineering and design” on the project or undertaken any preliminary work including “clearing of right-of-ways and pipeline construction and commissioning.” Yet in early November, the Carney government released its Budget 2025, which extended CCS tax credits by five years, now stretching from 2031 to 2035. “Updates will be provided in due course as work advances on the project,” the spokesperson wrote. Later in November, however, despite lacking basic information about how the project would be funded and engineered, the Carney government assured the country that carbon capture would result in “some of the lowest carbon-intensity oil produced in the world.”  Why was Carney so intent on a pipeline deal that hinged on financially uncertain and largely unproven climate technology? According to the prime minister’s former Chief of Staff Marco Mendicino, climate has always been a secondary concern. A key goal for the Carney government, Mendicino explained at a Toronto conference in January, is “to increase our oil production.” The post Carney Government Knew Carbon Capture Was ‘Very Limited,’ Docs Show appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Alberta Separatism Has Always Been About Joining Trump’s America

 

at 2/19/26 8:22am

The leaders of the so-called separatist movement seem careful to assure their supporters that leaving Canada does not mean being absorbed by the increasingly hostile and unhinged government south of the border. The Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) website states, “The notion that we seek to become the 51st state is unfounded.” Really? APP legal counsel Jeffrey Rath articulated exactly the opposite opinion less than a year ago in his Substack post entitled in all caps, “ALBERTA NEEDS TO PETITION FOR AMERICAN STATEHOOD”. Rath enthused about his alleged beloved home being devoured by America, “There is no doubt that President Donald Trump would happily announce Alberta Statehood as the GREATEST REAL ESTATE DEAL SINCE THE LOUISANA PURCHASE as the culmination of the AMERICAN 250th ANIVERSARY [sic] CELEBRATION.” In March of last year, Rath was seen in a Facebook video bragging about assembling a delegation to travel to Washington to meet with the Trump administration to “apologize” for Canada’s errant conduct and for “Alberta petitioning for US statehood.” In another social media post, Rath said “We need to be an independent country before we join the US. One step at a time. #AlbertaSovereignty”. Despite extensive online evidence to the contrary, APP now maintains they are solely interested in Alberta independence. Why the flip-flop? Perhaps because it has become obvious that proposing a simple sell-out to the hostile and erratic Trump administration is unpalatable even to most hard-core Alberta separatists. Recent opinion polling showed that only 5 percent of Albertans support being absorbed by the U.S. Hence the bait and switch. While allegedly rejecting joining the U.S., the APP website still itemizes their dangerous plans for immediate and deep integration with Donald Trump’s America, including: A proposed $500 billion line of credit backstopped by Alberta’s oil resources. Nothing says independence like owing Donald Trump half a trillion dollars. “Framing Alberta’s independence as aligned with U.S. national security and energy strategy…” Adopting the U.S. dollar as Alberta currency “in the interim”. Inviting U.S. election observers “to ensure the referendum’s integrity and fairness.” Rath and other unelected extremists have apparently met with Trump administration officials in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), typically used to exchange highly classified information. White House representatives did not deny meetings have taken place but assured the media no senior officials were involved. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); Another fringe separatist group, the Republican Party of Alberta, publicly outed 18 members of Danielle Smith’s government who they say signed the independence petition. None have publicly denied doing so, though some seem snippy about being asked to divulge to voters whether they are in favour of breaking up the country. Extremists voting to take Alberta into the arms of America – including elected officials can take comfort in knowing that Alberta petition rules strictly protect their identities from being revealed to friends, family, employers or voters.    Like the APP, the Republican Party of Alberta maintains with a straight face that they have no connection to the U.S., or their namesake political party now dismantling democracy in America. Whether they publicly admit their alliance with MAGA America or not, Alberta extremists reflect many of the ugly opinions now sadly endemic south of the border. Take Back Alberta leader David Parker posted on X that “Donald Trump is the greatest President in American history. No one comes close to his aura. The new Golden Age is upon us!” In another post Parker said, “Trump is right, the absolute best thing for Canada would be to become the 51st state.” Rath’s active social media accounts question long-established climate science. Rath has posted on X that “Caucasians are over represented in Canada’s MAID Program. They can’t get rid of us fast enough!” and that the Canadian government should cut off aid to a “corrupt” Ukraine. He was also subject of a recent disciplinary hearing by the Alberta Law Society for allegedly threatening government officials with murder charges and war crimes over COVID vaccine approvals. This MAGA-aligned mindset is so at odds with core Canadian values that almost three quarters of Albertans who oppose separation say they plan move to another province if APP extremists succeed in breaking up the country. Quebec endured decades of economic doldrums after indulging their nationalist fever-dream. The exodus of capital and citizens from an extremist hijacked Alberta would be catastrophic for whatever remains of the local economy, ironically including the prospect for another bitumen pipeline. Perhaps the company town cowards leading the so-called separatist movement are their own worst enemies.  The post Alberta Separatism Has Always Been About Joining Trump’s America appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— AI vs. Net Zero: The UK’s Next Climate Battle

 

at 2/18/26 7:35am

As a data centre construction boom sweeps the UK, creating soaring electricity demands that threaten to decimate climate targets, opportunist politicians and commentators are using this new phenomenon to undermine the clean energy transition. In recent months, Conservative shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice, as well as the party’s head of policy Zia Yusuf, have all claimed that we should be using fossil fuels to power the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK. Posting on social media in January following a debate in the House of Commons, Coutinho claimed that, “The AI revolution needs cheap, reliable, 24/7 energy. The biggest blocker will be [Energy and Net Zero Secretary] Ed Miliband’s fanatical approach to UK emissions.” The UK government has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 – a target passed into law by the Conservatives in 2019.  Reform has been insisting for some time that climate targets should be abandoned in favour of AI data centre expansion. “Net Stupid Zero means we cannot benefit from AI data centers like US & nations with low energy costs. Means we get left behind,” Tice, who has a long history of questioning climate science, claimed last August. Experts have warned that this narrative is misleading and will be damaging not only to the UK’s climate ambitions, but also its economic security. “Using the AI boom to justify a new dash for gas invites a massive over-reliance on volatile fossil fuels that risk locking in emissions and leading to stranded assets if demand fails to materialise as projected,” Jenny Martos, a research analyst at Global Energy Monitor, which tracks global fossil fuel development tied to data centres, told DeSmog. A stranded asset is a piece of physical infrastructure that is underutilised or abandoned due to changing economic trends. In this case, it refers to fossil fuel infrastructure that cannot be used when the world shifts to renewable energy sources. “AI and net zero are not mutually exclusive agendas, but framing the debate as such risks tethering economic developments to highly speculative energy demand scenarios,” Martos added. 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); Powering AI with fossil fuels is also at odds with public opinion. A poll conducted by Beyond Fossil Fuels, which campaigns for clean energy, found that 78 percent of people in the UK think data centres should only be powered by renewable energy sources. “Most UK people want data centres to be regulated and powered by renewables, not jumping the queue ahead of households and public services like healthcare when it comes to access to energy and water,” Jill McCardle, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, told DeSmog. ‘Generative’ AI platforms – including chatbots such as ChatGPT – are a huge driver of increased emissions, mainly through the construction and operation of new data centres, which deliver the significant computing capacity needed to service this burgeoning technology. For example, a query in ChatGPT requires about 10 times the computing power of a standard Google search. The average data centre uses enough energy to power roughly 5,000 UK homes, and between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, the same as a town of between 30,000 and 50,000 people. There are roughly 500 data centres in the UK, with another 100 planned for the next five years. In the United States, the mass construction of AI data centres – so voracious for energy that they can demand the equivalent power of an entire city – has been a huge gift to the gas industry. A report by Global Energy Monitor found that more than a third of new gas projects in the U.S. in the last two years have been to power AI data centres. In July, President Donald Trump announced a $70 billion (£51 billion) AI energy funding package at a summit in Pennsylvania. Flanked by oil and gas executives, Trump celebrated American fossil fuel-powered data centres. Meanwhile, leaders at big tech companies including Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Nvidia have all publicly supported the idea of relying on gas as an energy source for data centres. They have also pledged to heavily invest in AI development in the UK as part of the £31 billion ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ unveiled by Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer in September. While Trump paused the deal in December, it’s unclear to what extent these investments are also on pause. Parliamentary Squabbles The Labour government has been keen to support homegrown data centre development, claiming that the UK needs to build its own tech infrastructure to cultivate domestic AI companies. It has therefore set a target of building “at least” 6GW of new data centre capacity by 2030 – trebling the country’s current capacity, which would require enough power to supply a city six times the size of Birmingham. However, in contrast to Trump’s fossil fuel-powered AI plan, the UK government has not yet announced how it intends to fulfil the energy needs of new data centres. And so, opponents of the government’s clean energy agenda have been using this dilemma as an opportunity to hammer Labour’s net zero policies. Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband recently defended Labour’s focus on renewable power development on 6 January in the House of Commons, citing a 2023 report from the previous Conservative government concluding that it costs significantly more to build new gas power plants than solar or wind power in the UK. To this, Coutinho addressed the question of data centre power demands, calling Miliband’s reasoning “nonsense on stilts”. She added: “The biggest AI company in the world has said that it will need gas power to succeed in Britain,” referring to a comment by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of U.S. tech giant Nvidia. Coutinho rounded off by saying: “If a company wants to build its own gas plant here, at no cost to the British taxpayer, the warped green ideology of [Miliband], who is obsessed with domestic emissions above everything else, will block it. Those emissions will still exist, as that company will start somewhere, just not here in Britain.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, as he attends an event in London in September 2025. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) However, Coutinho’s AI arguments are closely tied to her party’s support for new oil and gas extraction. Over the past year, the Conservatives – under pressure from Reform UK – have deserted their previous support for climate action, with party leader Kemi Badenoch calling the UK’s 2050 net zero target “impossible”. Under Badenoch, the party has received extensive donations from climate science deniers and fossil fuel interests. Coutinho has also endorsed a spate of spurious anti-climate reports this year – backing three papers authored by individuals or groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. They claimed, among other things, that cutting emissions to net zero would cost up to “£9 trillion,” and that an electricity grid run on renewable power would cause “blackouts” – claims refuted by public bodies and independent experts. She has also previously supported gas-powered AI. While serving as energy secretary in April 2024, she argued that “the rise of data centres” requires “more gas power plants where we need them”. Coutinho’s arguments appear to have roots in the work of Steve Goreham, an “environmental researcher” at the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for global warming. The group has recently been advising Reform UK. Goreham has previously erroneously claimed: “the science clearly shows that global warming is due to natural causes, despite the tidal wave of world belief in man-made climate change.” Last September, he published an article entitled, “Europe’s Impossible Choice: AI Development or Net Zero?”, where he wrote that “unless Europe abandons Net Zero and efforts to convert their power grid to wind and solar, AI will be a failure.” However, Coutinho’s recent statements and alliances are in sharp contrast to her positions on net zero while in government. She told the BBC in October 2023, for example, that “nothing will distract us from achieving net zero or driving forward renewables.” “Labour faces a choice” One recent influence on Coutinho has been the energy consultant Kathryn Porter, who wrote one of the anti-net zero reports endorsed by the shadow energy secretary in January. Porter, who has previously authored reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group, consults for oil and gas clients. In November, Porter penned a Telegraph opinion piece entitled: “Labour faces a choice: AI or Net Zero.” In it, Porter argued “it is vital we maintain our fleet of gas power stations to meet demand” for AI data centres, and that “the most efficient way to provide power and back-up support” to them “is through a mixture of smaller gas and diesel generators.” She concluded by setting up the data centre energy dilemma in stark terms, claiming the AI boom “presents a major conundrum for the Government: go all out to secure AI data centres but compromise on net zero promises, or stick to climate commitments and risk getting left behind in the global technology race.” The claim that AI is an essential technology for human advancement has its challengers. According to one survey last year, entry-level jobs have plummeted by nearly a third in the UK since the introduction of ChatGPT, while another found that 95 percent of businesses are reporting “zero return” from integrating AI into their operations. There are also concerns that the technology is enabling online harms such as the mass generation of non-consensual sexualised images on Elon Musk’s Grok, and inaccurate AI-generated medical advice. In some extreme cases, AI has advised users to commit suicide. Despite this, Labour is facing immense pressure to approve the development of new gas power to fuel UK AI. The Tony Blair Institute, a think tank which has deep ties to Trump-donating tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, said in a July report that gas power should be a “bridging measure” to fuel data centres while renewable energy networks are developed. At last year’s annual Labour conference, Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at the right-wing think tank Britain Remade, said that gas and nuclear power would be “really important” for powering data centres in the UK. Even Matt Clifford, the government’s former AI advisor, endorsed a report from October by the Centre for British Progress which advises the adoption of “gas now, grid and nuclear later” for data centres. In the report’s forward, Clifford called the reasoning “crucial and timely.” When DeSmog asked the government whether it will support gas-powered AI in the future, it remained tight-lipped. “The AI Energy Council is exploring opportunities to attract investment and support the development of clean power for data centres,” it said. “We are also working with Ofgem and network companies to reform the outdated connections process and speed up delivery of new infrastructure, freeing up grid capacity to make it easier for data centres to secure a timely connection.” The post AI vs. Net Zero: The UK’s Next Climate Battle appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Big Tech Accused of AI ‘Greenwashing’

 

at 2/17/26 4:02am

The big tech industry’s claims about the climate benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) are largely unproven and unsubstantiated, according to a new report from a coalition of climate advocacy and accountability groups. The report found that only 26 percent of the climate claims made by big tech companies cited published academic research, with 36 percent citing no evidence whatsoever. The analysis is the first of its kind to assess climate claims from major AI developers like Google and Microsoft, as well as from independent institutions like the International Energy Agency (IEA). The prevailing narrative in the tech industry has been that the benefits of AI will more than offset the massive increase in emissions expected from new data centres. Many of the claims made by big tech conflate the climate benefits of ‘traditional’ AI – machine learning tools designed to streamline specific tasks, like email spam filters, which have relatively low carbon emissions – and ‘generative’ AI chatbots. The latter – including platforms such as ChatGPT – are a huge driver of increased emissions, mainly through the construction and operation of new fossil fuel-powered data centres, which deliver the massive computing capacity needed to service generative AI. A query in ChatGPT requires about 10 times the computing power of a standard Google search. Traditional AI can help to combat climate change by processing vast, complex datasets to identify patterns and optimise systems. However, the report concluded that: “At no point did this search or analysis uncover examples in which generative systems were leading to a material, verifiable and substantial level of emissions reductions.” “By muddling these two types of AI into one umbrella term, purported climate solutions are coupled to extreme pollution and presented as a package deal,” the report stated. Ketan Joshi, an independent climate and energy analyst, who authored the report, added: “It appears tech companies are using vagueness about what happens within energy-hogging data centres to greenwash a planet-wrecking expansion”. 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); The average data centre uses enough energy to power roughly 5,000 UK homes, and between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, the same as a town of 30,000 to 50,000 people. There are 480 data centres in the UK, with another 100 planned for the next five years. In order to deliver the energy required for these data centres, the big tech industry has been extending the life of coal power plants that were otherwise scheduled for closure, as DeSmog has reported. Across the world, big tech companies are also attempting to power their data centres using gas, and in so doing throwing a lifeline to fossil fuel infrastructure. Canadian gas pipeline builder TC Energy announced in 2024 that the AI boom was pushing gas demand to a “record high”. “An environmentally destructive heavy industry has emerged in the blink of an eye,” the report said. “The rapid expansion of data centres to drive the deployment of technologies marketed as ‘artificial intelligence’ rescues prospects for fossil fuels by boosting demand and triggering panicked deployment of new fossil infrastructure. This corrosive trend is often justified on the grounds that ‘AI’ will ultimately undo these sins by serving as a net benefit to climate action.” Joshi added: “The promises of planet-saving tech remain hollow, while AI data centres breathe life into coal and gas every day. These claims of climate benefit are unjustified and overhyped, and could cover up irreversible damage being done to communities and society.” The International Energy Agency forecasts that the energy requirements of data centres will quadruple by 2030 – to nearly as much energy expenditure as Japan. The UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) says that, by 2030, data centres will guzzle 7 percent of Britain’s entire energy output.  Researchers from Loughborough University have also warned that if the same rate of AI growth continues through to 2033, data centres across the globe will demand more power than all the electricity currently generated on Earth. In addition, AI is being used in ways that actively harm the environment – including via ‘traditional’ machine learning systems. The report added that: “AI is used by fossil fuel companies to streamline exploration and increase extraction. Similarly, applications such as the generation of text are being used by climate denial groups to facilitate mass disinformation campaigns.” “There is simply no evidence that AI will help the climate more than it will harm it,” said Jill McArdle, international corporate campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels. “Rather than relying on credible and substantiated data, big tech companies are writing themselves a blank cheque to pollute on the empty promise of future salvation.” Beyond Fossil Fuels was one of the six climate accountability groups involved in the report, which also included Stand.Earth, Climate Action Against Disinformation, Friends of the Earth, the Green Screen Coalition and the Green Web Foundation. Additional reporting by Rei Takver The post Big Tech Accused of AI ‘Greenwashing’ appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Trump EPA Abandons Climate Working Group Report in Endangerment Finding Repeal

 

at 2/13/26 2:37pm

In a massive blow to the handful of scientists and academics who still dispute widely-accepted climate science, the Trump administration discarded a signature report by its own “Climate Working Group.” It comes as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially scrapped the government’s  endangerment finding — the official recognition that greenhouse gases harm human health and the environment. In an online version of the final rule, the EPA revealed late Thursday that it “is not relying on” a Department of Energy (DOE) report by the Climate Working Group, a hand-picked team composed of academics with a long history of publicly downplaying or rejecting the urgency of the climate crisis, partly “in light of concerns raised by some commenters about the draft.” Starting last year, the Climate Working Group and their Energy Department handlers had toiled to produce a report that the Trump administration could use to scientifically justify rolling back climate regulations, emails from the group made public in late January show. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive who has downplayed the threat from extreme weather, took special interest in the group’s efforts, which were kept under wraps. The endangerment finding has long been a target of fossil fuel trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute (dating back to 1999), policymakers, and industry-backed groups. The group of climate crisis deniers — Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer — took particular aim at the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which provided the legal foundation for major U.S. climate policies regulating the fossil fuel industry. The Climate Working Group’s rejection isn’t just a black mark for the climate crisis deniers. Without a clear-cut scientific basis to dispute the endangerment finding, Trump’s EPA was forced to take a less favorable legal position, environmental attorneys told DeSmog, potentially opening the door for states, counties, or cities to take significant action of their own to curb greenhouse gases — setting up a nightmare scenario for businesses, from oil companies to automakers, that fear a patchwork of regulations. DeSmog has reached out to all five members of the Climate Working Group and a Cato Institute official who organized their work for the Energy Department for comment. “The EPA decided to proceed independently and we were not involved in the rulemaking process,” Climate Working Group member Ross McKitrick told DeSmog. “Our remit was to prepare a report for the DOE, which we did.” As it announced its decision, the EPA noted that Administrator Lee Zeldin “continues to harbor concerns regarding many of the scientific inputs and analyses underlying the Endangerment Finding.” Last August, the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists sued over the Climate Working Group’s lack of transparency — and obtained, under a court order, over 100,000 pages of documents and emails revealing the process by which the report was created. Roughly 700 pages of those documents were made public by the environmental groups on January 22, with the remainder expected to be posted within the next few weeks. The Climate Working Group’s final report, released on July 29, was met with widespread condemnation from other scientists, including a devastating 435-page point-by-point critique assembled by 85 climate scientists and experts, including MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and authors of papers the Climate Working Group cited, scientists who said their studies were misrepresented. “Notably, the Climate Working Group’s membership are the cream of the crop of climate contrarians,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who helped to organize that critique, told DeSmog. “The DOE report therefore represents the best case against mainstream science. That they produced a report that is so lacking in credibility actually demonstrates how strong mainstream climate science actually is.” Dessler and his peers were hardly the first to criticize the group’s work, the emails show. Before the report was released, the Climate Working Group asked an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to review its draft scientific report for “scientific accuracy and potential bias.” The AI agent returned a cheerful mix of praise and warnings. One section was “heavy-hitting” and “packed with technical nuance” but suffered from a “misinterpretation of NOAA projections.” On “scientific accuracy,” the AI rated another section “Mixed Quality” and dubbed some of the draft’s reasoning “Flawed but Thought-Provoking.” The AI flagged issues like “cherry-picked references” to studies by Climate Working Group members McKitrick and Christy, adding that contrary studies were “omitted.” “This is amazing, far better than what we would get from ‘real’ scientists,” Curry, another member, wrote to the rest of the group. Human readers would prove to be far more damning. “Not your best work,” was the feedback from University of Sussex professor Richard Tol, Curry told the others on July 30. “I thought Tol was on ‘our side,” replied Spencer. “Was i mistaken?” [sic] Tol went on to become one of the 85 scientific commenters who joined the critique. Inexpert Testimony Members of the five-person Climate Working Group team have held a wide range of prestigious roles. Spencer is a former NASA scientist, Curry, a professor emerita from the Georgia Institute of Technology; McKitrick, a Canadian economist. Koonin was formerly the chief scientist for BP and served in the Obama administration and Christy, until recently, served as the Alabama State Climatologist.  While these academics, like much of the oil and gas industry today, acknowledge that climate change is happening, their views veer far outside the mainstream majority of practicing climate scientists. In addition, three of the group’s members have close ties to the oil and gas industry, either having directly worked with fossil fuel firms or working with think tanks that have received backing from the industry. Dating back to the 1990s, Spencer’s and Christy’s attacks on mainstream climate science were routinely cited and promoted by the Global Climate Coalition, whose members included the American Petroleum Institute (API). The coalition was created to spread public doubt about global warming and block climate regulations. In one infamous memo from 1998, API and others described an action plan where “victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” The internal emails reveal the Climate Working Group repeatedly offered itself high marks while dishing out scorn for mainstream experts, including the world’s most accomplished climate scientists. “In short the climate assessment system is really broken,” Curry wrote in June as the group discussed the National Climate Assessment, a Congressionally-mandated report to the president and Congress issued every four years, “a RFK Jr style purge is needed, IMO.” “The email records show a really deep animus, I would say, from the [Climate Working Group] members directed at the broader scientific community,” Environmental Defense Fund attorney Erin Murphy told DeSmog. “You see arrogance and flippancy about dismissing other scientists and many well-respected scientific institutions.” Many of the emails themselves apparently were never supposed to see the light of day, with the scientists and politicos largely communicating through their personal Gmail and hotmail accounts. “We should be mindful that our email communications that go to DOE addresses are subject to FOIA,” wrote Koonin in a “high priority” August 4 email with the subject: “keeping it to ourselves.”(FOIA refers to the Freedom of Information Act, which sets the rules for when federal agencies must make records public.) I cannot stress enough the importance of our silence and restraint pending completion of this process, Seth Cohen, a lawyer from the Department of Energy’s headquarters wrote to the group on June 25. The Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher, who temporarily joined the Department of Energy and organized the Climate Working Group’s efforts, sent lengthy emails to the group detailing what might help EPA make a legal case to repeal the endangerment finding. [W]e have renewed buy-in that EPA will wait for this work and include it in its rulemaking, he told the group on April 24. Since it was co-founded by now-billionaire Charles Koch in 1977, Cato has historically taken millions in funding from fossil fuel companies and Koch-related foundations. The EPA’s decision to abandon the Climate Working Group and its signature report comes shortly after a federal court ruled that the Climate Working Group had violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which sets baseline standards for advice provided to the federal government. David Pettit, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney who is leading the group’s legal challenges on the endangerment finding, told DeSmog that the EPA’s decision likely reflects doubts about whether the Climate Working Group was able to muster enough expertise for a court to allow them to offer expert testimony. “In federal court, there are ways to keep out whats commonly called ‘junk science,’ that has to meet a certain level before you can submit it into a proceeding,” Pettit said. “You have to qualify an expert as an expert. You cant just pull somebody off the street and say, oh, Mr. Pettit, youre an expert in Dodgers baseball? Well, I am a fan. That doesnt work.” “Theyve been so embarrassed by the whole FACA thing and those emails,” he added. “Until Their Limbs Stop Twitching” As they worked to prepare their trademark Department of Energy report, Climate Working Group members aired deep frustrations with the state of consensus climate science, the emails show. “The extreme weather alarmism angle has been non-stop for years,” McKitrick wrote in a May 10, 2025 email, as the Climate Working Group discussed the draft of the executive summary of their work. “At this point, I want to hold the readers’ faces in it until their limbs stop twitching and then they’ll be receptive to the rest of the material.” “Yes!” replied Koonin. The emails also suggest other frustrations and a sense of isolation. In July, Curry sent a note suggesting the group try to “depersonalize” its critique of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA-5), which offers foundational regional science tailored for decisionmakers, by relying less on references to their own prior work. “We would love to cite other authors who do these NCA-5 type analyses using the proper methods…there just aren’t that many out there,” Christy replied (ellipses in original). “About all I can hope is that what we write will provide sufficient ‘reasonable scientific doubt’ to call into question the original reasoning for the EPA Administrator’s decision that CO2 presents a threat to human health and welfare,” Spencer wrote in an April 19 email. “But if the science argument is decided upon by a vote, or by the number of published citations, we lose the science argument.” “Again, I will say, if we treat all studies the same, we lose the war because the other side will always have more publications than us,” Spencer added in a May 9 email. The Climate Working Group didn’t focus exclusively on the endangerment finding, the emails reveal. The group was also asked to criticize the NCA-5 head on. “I can already tell this is going to be a whopper of an assignment (but fun, in a dark and twisted way),” Fisher wrote on June 3. The group had already broached the topic in April, as they drafted their signature report — but the emails show some members found little to critique. “There’s very little of the foundational science in its 1834 pages (!) that’s amenable to serious scientific critique,” Koonin wrote as he circulated a link to the NCA-5 report, its review by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), and the criteria for scientific work under President Trump’s widely criticized “gold standard” executive order. “Without even reading the NASEM report I assume it’s useless,” replied McKitrick. “The problem is they draw experts from govt agencies and universities.” Earlier, members of the group expressed reservations about the wisdom of trying certain attacks on the National Climate Assessment. I still think it is a tough case to make that 5 scientists decide an assessment report authored by 500 scientists and reviewed by NASEM is scientifically inadequate, no matter how much cherry picking we identify, Curry wrote on June 2. “Everyone Involved Knows the Stakes” There are, of course, times when there are big truths that no one is willing or able to confront, when a lone voice in the wilderness turns out to be right. But not every iconoclast is iconic. History is littered with professed and self-professed brilliant minds who split from accepted wisdom — and proved over-confident. Stockton Rush, the Princeton-educated engineer, built his carbon-fiber-hulled submersible using a design so unique that U.S. regulators had never devised safety standards that would apply. Rush went to his death inside his Titan submersible, along with his four passengers, during a dive to tour the Titanic wreck — often itself cited as a symbol of the perils of hubris. One of the tools that scientists use to prevent catastrophic errors from making it into their final product is the process of peer review. Before a paper is published, experts in the field are asked to independently review it and call out any problems they spot. It’s not a perfect process, but it offers a chance to catch weaknesses large and small. The emails reveal that members of the Climate Working Group sought to shield their work from independent external reviews, debating ideas for hand-picked reviewers they might consult, while insisting on retaining final say over the draft. The group had some reason for confidence that their work would carry significant impact. The emails describe repeated meetings with top Trump cabinet members, particularly Secretary of Energy Wright. President Trump has said “stupid people” were behind the types of climate projections the Climate Working Group sought to debunk. Ultimately, the DOE sent the Climate Working Group’s draft report through a rushed internal review, the emails show, with anonymous reviewers from DOE and the national labs given two business days to assess the report. The Climate Working Group then spent a day and a half responding to those comments, the documents show. “First of all, they didnt substantively grapple with critiques of the report,” EDF’s Murphy told DeSmog. “They rejected a lot of substantive feedback from the DOE internal reviewers. You see that the DOE internal reviewers did a very impressive job in the tight time that they had to give some very thorough feedback and a number of critiques of the report. And the CWG members — theres some email traffic indicating that they appreciated the review — but then ultimately, did they make substantive changes to the analysis, which is what really matters?” “No, they didnt,” she said. That outcome seemed to be predetermined by another major issue, Murphy added. Before it was published in July, Fisher asked the group not to change the pagination from their May draft, which EPA planned to cite to. That, Murphy told DeSmog, suggests portions of the draft report that EPA wanted to cite were effectively locked in before the review was done. And then, of course, there was the AI review, which the group appears to have responded to by changing the tone of the draft to, as one group member put it, “take out the snarkiness” in the text. In response to questions from DeSmog, McKitrick pushed back on the notion that the Climate Working Group had failed to engage substantively with critical comments. “We fully responded to the internal DOE expert review comments,” McKitrick told DeSmog. “As to the public comments, the FACA lawsuit blocked us from responding to them or publishing a revised report. We have nonetheless engaged with many of our scientific critics directly. If we are able eventually to release a revised report people will see that we are prepared to deal constructively with all the criticisms.” The emails show the group approached their work playfully at times, despite the gravity of the topics involved, from heatwaves to rising seas. After McKitrick, a Canadian citizen, wrote “As a non-US citizen, I am probably not eligible to run the NCA process. Drat,” the Department of Energy’s Fisher responded, “The easy answer is to annex Canada.” “don’t underestimate the paranoia of climate alarmists :)” Curry wrote to the group on July 8. An extended back and forth shows they debated whether to call themselves “renowned” or “eminent,” after Christy objected that “‘Renowned’ sounds a little like a circus performer.” They also fretted over how the work might be received as political. The emails show Climate Working Group members insisting that the work of other scientists be held to high standards, while also demanding their own drafts be given a pass. Ultimately, the emails show, the Climate Working Group gave themselves high grades as they worked in secrecy — just before an ocean of criticism began to flood in. Diane Bernard and Ashley Braun also contributed reporting. The post Trump EPA Abandons Climate Working Group Report in Endangerment Finding Repeal appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Michigan Sues Fossil Fuel Companies While Alberta Protects Them

 

at 2/13/26 9:11am

Has the fossil fuel industry been engaged in a decades-long illicit conspiracy to kneecap the accelerating transition to clean energy? The government of Michigan thinks so. State Attorney General Dana Nessel recently filed a 126-page lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute and four of the biggest oil companies, Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell, alleging they acted as an anti-competitive cartel to limit consumer choice and protect their polluting industry from cheaper and cleaner alternatives. According to Nessel, higher energy costs imposed on residents and businesses in her state “are not the result of natural economic inflation, but due to the greed of these corporations who prioritized their own profit and marketplace dominance over competition and consumer savings.”  Rather than focusing on the environmental impacts of the fossil fuel sector, the state is alleging oil companies and their lobbying associations engaged in an anti-competitive conspiracy that limited consumer choice and drove up energy costs for taxpayers and businesses. Michigan’s lawsuit alleges that without decades of oil industry effort to repress clean technology, EVs “would be a common sight in every neighborhood – rolling off assembly lines in Flint, parked in driveways in Dearborn, charging outside grocery stores in Grand Rapids, and running quietly down Woodward Avenue” Many of these same companies such as Exxon, Shell and Chevron are significant players in the Alberta oil patch. How are we to make sense of efforts of the Alberta government to intentionally scupper the previously thriving renewable energy industry in the province, or impose decades of ignored oil industry cleanup costs onto taxpayers? While Michigan lawmakers are trying to protect taxpayers from alleged oil industry collusion, the Alberta government seems to be an active participant in limiting competing technologies and offloading industry liabilities onto the public.  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); Premier Danielle Smith dropped a surprise moratorium on the previously booming renewable energy sector in August 2023. This regulatory rug-pull was followed by onerous land use restrictions on wind and solar that drove almost 11 gigawatts of proposed renewable electricity projects out of the province. Albertans now pay the highest electricity rates of any province by a wide margin with almost eight times the emissions per kilowatt hour compared to Ontario. Smith’s government later brought in new reclamation rules for wind and solar installations that are the most burdensome out of 27 other jurisdictions in North America and around the world. “The Alberta government’s efforts to stunt the growth of the most promising renewable energy market in the country has been a deeply regrettable success,” Stephen Legault of the non-profit Environmental Defence lamented at the time. The stated rationale for weaponizing regulations to target clean energy developers was the alleged end-of-life environmental burdens of wind farms and solar installations. “Our government will not apologize for putting Albertans ahead of corporate interests,” stated Alberta Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf at the time with no apparent hint of irony.  This laudable sentiment seems laughable when looking at the comparative regulatory scrutiny directed towards the oil patch. The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) is entirely funded by the oil, gas and coal companies it is supposedly overseeing, and it is an understatement to say that these polluters are getting value for their money. Under the AER’s lax leadership, highly profitable fossil fuel companies have racked up enormous environmental deficits while contributing almost nothing towards the eventual cleanup of bitumen tailings ponds and abandoned wells. These unfunded environmental liabilities total at least $55 billion for tailing pond reclamation and another $60 billion for pipelines and abandoned and orphaned wells, of which the AER has collected only 0.5 percent in security deposits. This shocking situation grows worse every day meaning that every Alberta household is on the hook for about $70,000 in oil industry cleanup costs and counting. Oil sands operators have contributed only a single dollar to the Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP) meant to protect Albertans from footing the bill for oil sands and coal mine clean-up costs that have doubled from an estimated $28 billion in 2018. AER rules do not require companies to make additional deposits until they have 15 years of profitable bitumen reserves remaining. What could go wrong? The actual numbers could be much worse. Internal documents from 2018 obtained through freedom of information requests revealed the former AER Vice-President of Closure and Liability pegged the true liabilities as likely exceeding $260 billion. For math enthusiasts, that works out to about $160,000 per Alberta household. Even David Yager, Smith’s special advisor and AER board member recently described the province’s abandoned well problem as a “giant stinking pile of shit.” Such massive regulatory capture need not be the norm. The Michigan state government is courageously using the law to take on the most powerful oil companies in the world to lower energy costs for taxpayers and fight anti-competitive conduct. Meanwhile, the Alberta government is politicizing the legal system to the point that the Court issued a rare public warning that “The rule of law means no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally before the law, and power is not used arbitrarily.” This statement by leading Alberta Justices was an apparent response to Smith publicly musing about her desire to “direct the judges”, and later threatening to withhold funding to the courts unless Alberta is granted greater oversight of federal judicial appointments.    And what would Danielle Smith do with even more power? Likely dispense more favours to her friends in the oil patch at the expense of taxpayers and the climate. The post Michigan Sues Fossil Fuel Companies While Alberta Protects Them appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— BBC Under Fire for Airing MAGA Climate Denial

 

at 2/13/26 8:46am

The BBC has been slammed for allowing a pro-Trump figure to express climate science denial on one of its flagship programmes. This morning (13 February), the Today programme gave a platform to Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a former Trump advisor and staff member at the Heritage Foundation. On the show, which has a listenership of 5.6 million people, Furchtgott-Roth was asked to comment on the Trump administration’s decision to repeal the U.S. government’s endangerment finding, a ruling introduced in 2009 which stated that a range of greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. Furchtgott-Roth brushed off Trump’s decision, which is being described as a “gift to big polluters”, stating that “a lot of people like it a bit warmer.” She was not challenged on this statement by the Today programme’s presenter, who instead tried to steer her onto a different angle of discussion, despite her claim not being supported by the scientific evidence. The interview was preceded by a short clip from former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said that Trump’s decision was like “putting a lit match on the kindling of climate-exacerbated hurricanes, fires, droughts, that now kill people and now rig up an annual bill of $182 billion in climate disasters.” The latest research from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – a collaboration of more than 300 experts from around the world – stated that our failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge by 23 percent since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year globally. Furchtgott-Roth also claimed that “the harms of climate change are risks for the future” – a misleading statement that was not challenged by the presenter. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); Meanwhile, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the world’s foremost climate science body – has said that “heat is a growing health risk” due to more people living in cities, an “increase in high temperature extremes”, and ageing populations. This issue is set to become even more acute in low-income, high-population urban areas in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and southern Europe. “The idea that ‘a lot of people like it a bit warmer’ ignores a devastating and well‑documented reality: rising temperatures are already killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Any suggestion that warmer temperatures are something to embrace is profoundly out of step with the evidence, including in the United States,” said Dr Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown. “Climate change policy rollbacks will only extend this devastation – driving more extreme heat, and in turn more preventable deaths, more pressure on health systems, and pushing communities towards the limits of human physiological tolerance.” Scientists also predict that climate change will exacerbate a wide range of extreme weather events – including droughts, flooding, and storms – not just extreme heat. The BBC’s failure to meaningfully challenge Furchtgott-Roth is potentially a breach of the broadcaster’s editorial code, which states that “minority views or those less supported by evidence, should not necessarily be given similar prominence or weight to those with more support, to the prevailing consensus, or to those better evidenced.” It also states that “serious factual errors should normally be acknowledged and corrected quickly, clearly, and appropriately.” The BBC declined to comment on the record. Furchtgott-Roth served on Trump’s transition team following his victory in the 2016 presidential election, and was subsequently appointed as the assistant secretary of transportation for research and technology during his first term. From 2022 to 2026 she ran the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment – authoring a chapter of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term agenda. The 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. The post BBC Under Fire for Airing MAGA Climate Denial appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Reform Candidate Matthew Goodwin’s MAGA Network

 

at 2/13/26 4:06am

Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, has ties to influential groups in the orbit of U.S. President Donald Trump. Goodwin, a GB News presenter and former University of Kent professor, is standing for Parliament on 26 February, presenting himself as a champion of ordinary people against “the elites”. However, despite his rhetoric, Goodwin’s profile has been boosted by a global network of pro-MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) groups, some of which have been backed by fossil fuel money. Reform, which is leading the polls ahead of UK-wide elections in May, has echoed Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda – campaigning for new fossil fuel extraction and to scrap clean energy targets. However, Trump is deeply unpopular in the UK – even among Reform voters – and there are growing concerns about his attempts to interfere in European politics. Goodwin has ties to a number of pro-Trump groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. think tank behind the radical Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term; the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative network advised by Trump’s senior allies; and the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement, which has close ideological ties to the current U.S. regime. The Financial Times reported last week that the U.S. State Department plans to bankroll “MAGA” think tanks and charities in the UK and EU which share Trump’s agenda – a plan criticised by campaigners as an effort to “usurp European democracy”. Goodwin’s party leader Nigel Farage, one of Trump’s closest UK allies, has extensive ties to MAGA groups. Farage has been helping to import the architects of Trump’s agenda into the UK, and has received £150,000 from donors to attend pro-Trump events or cheerlead for his agenda since July 2024.  “Reform are a lobby shop for polluting industries. They get millions from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate sceptics, while their by-election candidate is a fixture at think tanks bankrolled by oil and gas,” said Ami McCarthy, head of politics at Greenpeace UK. “Like their friend Donald Trump, they want to unleash more oil drilling and fracking, undermine climate science and sabotage our cheapest, cleanest energy sources and the thousands of jobs they support. Reform’s plan to scrap net zero wont take a penny off your energy bills – it’ll just hand your wallet over to the gas giants and markets controlled by dictators like Putin. “When voters in Gorton and Denton see Farage and Goodwin necking pints down the pub, they’d do well to ask: who’s buying the rounds?” 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 his previous career as an academic, Goodwin had been affiliated with a range of mainstream institutions and had often been critical of radical right-wing politics. But, as he has moved into political activism, he has increasingly been a fixture of right-wing groups with ties to fossil fuel interests. Goodwin joined GB News as a presenter at the start of 2025, having previously been a frequent guest pundit. The loss-making broadcaster – Farage’s principal employer – is co-owned by Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund Marshall Wace had $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) invested in fossil fuel firms, including Chevron, Shell and Equinor, as of June 2023. Marshall owns GB News alongside the Legatum Group, an investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an autocratic petrostate that derives its wealth from oil and gas. Goodwin has criticised what he calls “the fanatical obsession with net zero”, which he blames for high energy prices. In reality, high wholesale gas prices are largely responsible for the billions in extra spending borne by the government and households since Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine. Between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, Reform received 92 percent of its funding from fossil fuel investors, climate science deniers, and major polluters. Carys Boughton, campaign co-ordinator at Fossil Free Parliament, said: “Reform presents itself as the party for ordinary, working people, but look just a bit closer and it becomes shockingly clear that they really represent the interests of the one percent: the individuals, organisations and companies that are exploiting people and planet for their personal gain. “Should Matthew Goodwin win this by-election, he’ll become another mouthpiece in Parliament for the fossil fuel industry and other mega-polluters, all the while scapegoating the most vulnerable in our society to distract from the ultra rich asset-stripping our collective resources.” Reform and Goodwin were approached for comment. MAGA Ties Despite his avowed nationalism, Goodwin has ties to a range of pro-Trump groups attempting to influence politics across the world. In 2023 and 2025, he spoke at conferences organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network run and funded by Marshall and the Legatum Group. Fronted by Canadian activist Jordan Peterson, speakers at ARC events have included Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (who’s also on the ARC advisory board), as well as Republican donor and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Last year’s ARC event in London was attended by a number of oil and gas executives, as well as far-right politicians from across Europe. Goodwin has also been feted by the architects of Trump’s authoritarian second term agenda. In July 2024, he gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, a document which 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. It also proposed limiting reproductive rights, including further limiting access to abortions as well as access to contraceptives. As reported by DeSmog, the Heritage Foundation gathered hardline conservative groups last year to discuss ideas for dismantling the EU. It also attempted to influence Albania’s May 2025 election in favour of the conservative candidate. In 2024, Goodwin gave a speech about Brexit at a conference in Brussels hosted by National Conservatism (NatCon), another group with ties to the Trump administration. NatCon is run by U.S. think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation, which received $250,000 in 2024 for its “general operations” from the Heritage Foundation. The NatCon movement is closely associated with U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who gave a speech to the group’s Washington D.C. conference in July 2024. The 2024 NatCon Brussels event was attended by Nigel Farage, former Conservative home secretary (and now Reform MP) Suella Braverman, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The event was sponsored by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a Hungarian think tank funded by Orbán’s government. Orbán’s Hungary As well as being associated with MAGA groups, Goodwin has extensive ties to allies of Orbán’s autocratic regime. He was previously a visiting fellow at MCC, and has spoken at its last two summer festivals. The group is primarily funded via a 10 percent stake in Hungary’s national oil company, MOL, gifted to it by Orbán’s government. At the 2025 summer event, Goodwin praised the Hungarian government as a “counterexample” to what he called the ideology of “national self-loathing” in Britain.  In a 2024 interview with Mandiner, a pro-government Hungarian outlet, he insisted that Western critics misunderstand Hungary. He claimed that it is simply resisting a “liberal agenda” imposed by a “narrow minority” of Western countries. He praised Orbán’s stance on Ukraine, despite the regime’s record of blocking EU military aid and opposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs. After MCC’s 2024 summer festival, Goodwin tweeted: “I just spent 4 days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the West. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.” Nigel Farage at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Credit: Belga News Agency / Alamy Goodwin has also recently appeared at several other events connected to the Hungarian government – including the Roger Scruton Symposium in October at the Hungarian Embassy in London alongside MCC Brussels executive director Frank Furedi. He also spoke at the Budapest Global Dialogue in June, co-hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation. The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs is funded by Orbán’s government and speakers at the event included Viktor Orbán’s political director (and MCC chair) Balázs Orbán, several Hungarian government ministers and advisors, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, as well as representatives from MCC and the Prosperity Institute, a think tank run by the Legatum Group. Goodwin was previously a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute (now the Prosperity Institute), where he wrote a briefing paper in March 2024 called Who Votes Reform?, an analysis of the party’s polling. The institute hosted a launch event for Goodwin’s book, Bad Education, in February 2025. Orbán’s regime has been condemned by international watchdogs for restricting democratic freedoms and persecuting opposition groups. According to Reporters Without Borders, the Hungarian prime minister has built a “media empire subject to his party’s orders”. Recent constitutional amendments have allowed the government to ban LGBT events, and revoke the citizenship of dual nationals if they are deemed to constitute a threat to “public order, public safety, or national security”. The government has banned pro-Palestine protests and has tightened abortion rules, making it “harder to access a legal and safe abortion” according to Amnesty International. In 2018, Hungary passed a law – later ruled to be incompatible with EU law – that made it a crime to help asylum seekers. Tessa Khan, executive director of the research and campaign group Uplift said: “The organisations Goodwin is cosying up to are the same ones that are, right now, dismantling climate action in the U.S., all to boost the bottom line of a handful of polluters. “Just like Trump, Reform wants to do everything it can to keep us hooked on expensive fossil fuels while holding back the UK’s shift to homegrown clean energy, with all that means for the climate and jobs. “Whether in Gorton and Denton or national governments around the world, we urgently need politicians that are prepared to stand up to the anti-science, anti-renewable agenda of Donald Trump and his paymasters in the oil and gas industry, not parrot their misinformation.” The post Reform Candidate Matthew Goodwin’s MAGA Network appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— The Oil Industry’s Latest Disaster: Trillions of Gallons of Buried Toxic Wastewater

 

at 2/12/26 4:30am

This story is published in partnership with Rolling Stone. A cache of government documents dating back nearly a century casts serious doubt on the safety of the oil and gas industry’s most common method for disposing of its annual trillion gallons of toxic wastewater: injecting it deep underground.  Despite knowing by the early 1970s that injection wells were at best a makeshift solution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) never followed its own determination that they should be “a temporary means of disposal,” used only until “a more environmentally acceptable means of disposal [becomes] available.”   The documents include scientific research, internal communications, and talks given at a December 1971 industry and government symposium. And they come from multiple federal agencies, including the EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).  The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry and government claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal — putting drinking water and other mineral resources in communities across the country at risk of contamination, and jeopardizing local economies and public health. The U.S. oil and gas industry produces 25.9 billion barrels of wastewater each year (or 1.0878 trillion gallons), according to the most recent data available, according to the most recent data available, a 2022 report from Groundwater Protection Council that relies on 2021 data. That’s enough to form a line of waste barrels to the moon and back 28 times.  This wastewater — variously referred to by the industry as “produced water,” “brine,” “salt water,” or simply “water” — comes to the surface naturally during extraction of oil and gas. Some 96 percent, 24.8 billion barrels, is disposed of by injecting it back underground.  In 2020, there were 181,431 injection wells (referred to in some regions as saltwater disposal wells or SWDs) in the United States, according to an EPA fact sheet — roughly 11 injection wells for every Starbucks across the country. If you drove from New York City to Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour and lined the highway with them, you would pass an oil and gas wastewater injection well every nine-tenths of a second. These injection wells dispose of a complex brew of wastewater by shooting it deep underground. According to one oil and gas industry explanation of the wastewater disposal process, liquid waste is injected underground at high pressure into an “injection layer,” a targeted layer of rock containing a considerable amount of “pore space”: gaps between the rock grains that compose it. This injection layer fills up with the wastewater, while surrounding layers of impermeable rock act as seals to prevent the waste from leaking out. But oil and gas industry wastewater can contain toxic levels of salt, carcinogenic substances, and heavy metals, and often far more than enough of the radioactive element radium to be defined by the EPA as radioactive waste. Radium has been described by researchers as a bone-seeker because it can mimic calcium and once inside the body may be incorporated into bones — it’s what killed the early 20th century factory workers known as the Radium Girls, who used a radium-based radioactive paint to make watches glow in the dark and kept their brushes firm by licking the tips. Five of the Radium Girls, photographed after settling their lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corporation, Newark, New Jersey, 1928. (Credit: Underwood Archives/Getty Images) “These contaminants pose serious threats to human health,” says Amy Mall, director of the fossil fuels team at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “Every day in the U.S., the oil and gas industry generates billions of gallons of this dangerous wastewater.” Other industries also use injection wells to dispose of dangerous waste, such as the pharmaceutical and steel industries, slaughterhouses, and pesticide manufacturers. While the USGS has linked injection wells to damaging earthquakes, both the oil and gas industry and government regulators claim they are safe to use for wastewater disposal. But these historic documents suggest that they have long known otherwise. Deep-well injection is “a technology of avoiding problems, not solving them in any real sense,” stated Stanley Greenfield, the EPA Assistant Administrator for Research and Monitoring, in a 1971 talk at the “Underground Waste Management and Environmental Implications” symposium in Houston, Texas. “We really do not know what happens to the wastes down there,” Greenfield said. “We just hope.” A Hundred Years of Alarm Bells Wastewater has plagued the petroleum industry since its earliest days in western Pennsylvania 150 years ago. For its first century, drillers directed wastewater into pits dug beside the well, or intentionally dumped it into ditches, streams, swamps, or bayous. In one instance in 1920s Mississippi, wastewater was stored in a wood-sided swimming pool for children. The first allusion to disposal by underground injection appeared in a 1929 report from the U.S. Department of the Interior: “The disposal of oil-field brines by returning them to a subsurface formation, from the information thus far obtained, appears to be feasible in isolated instances.” However, the next lines warned: “Not only is there danger that the water will migrate to fresh-water sands and pollute a potable water supply, but also there is an ever-present possibility that this water may endanger present or future oil production.” By the mid-20th century, the industry realized that injecting wastewater could be useful in another way: for pushing hard-to-reach oil lingering in some rock formations up to the surface. This technique, called waterflooding or enhanced oil recovery, generated a significant fraction of the oil produced in the U.S. from the 1950s through the early 1990s. With the passage in 1972 of the Clean Water Act, industries were forced to stop dumping their wastes into rivers, where it poisoned wildlife, fouled fresh water supplies, and caused ugly slicks that occasionally caught fire. This directly drove massive growth in underground disposal, a transition captured in the EPA documents of the era. “Little attention was given this technique until the 1960s,” stated a 1974 EPA report on injection wells, “when the diminishing capabilities of surface waters to receive effluents, without violation of standards, made disposal and storage of liquid wastes by deep well injection increasingly more attractive.” In 1950, there were just four industrial injection wells in the United States, and in 1967 there were 110. That number would increase more than 1,000-fold in the coming decades, despite the concerns of some prominent early critics. In October 1970, David Dominick, the commissioner of the Federal Water Quality Administration (which would be merged into the EPA two months later), warned that injection was a short-term fix to be used with caution and “only until better methods of disposal are developed.” Late the following year, in December 1971, some of the 50-odd speakers at the four-day “Underground Waste Management and Environmental Implications” symposium in Houston expressed optimism about injection wells. Vincent McKelvey, a USGS research director and the symposium’s keynote speaker, said he believed the subterranean earth represented “an underutilized resource with a great potential for contribution to national needs.” Many more at the event, which was organized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the USGS, were not so sure. In hindsight, the reservations they shared during the symposium are accurate predictions of injection well problems to come. One Utah geologist warned that injecting chemical-filled waste deep into the earth could affect the strength of rocks and how they interact with one another. “The result could be earthquakes,” he said, that would create fractures which could channel waste out of the injection zone. A Department of Energy researcher said the disposal of radioactive liquid wastes, even in low concentrations, posed “a particularly vexing problem.” A Wyoming law professor offered “not a cheerful” message: “If you goop up someone’s water supply with your gunk; if you render unusable a valuable resource a neighboring landowner might have recovered; or if you ‘grease’ the rocks, cause an earthquake, and shake down his house — the law will make you pay.” USGS hydrologist Robert Stallman conjectured — with some accuracy, as it has turned out — that the consequences of injecting large amounts of liquid waste underground would include pollution of groundwater and surface water, changes to the permeability of rocks, cave-ins, earthquakes, and contamination of underground oil and gas deposits. Environmental scientist Lisa Griggs looks at one of many cracks in her Guthrie, Oklahoma home, on Jan. 26, 2015, damage caused by ongoing earthquakes in the area. Researchers subsequently found that injection wells were causing the quakes. (Credit: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images) No one at the conference critiqued the practice of injection as meticulously as a USGS hydrologist named John Ferris. “The term ‘impermeable’ is never an absolute. All rocks are permeable to some degree,” Ferris told the symposium. Wastewater would inevitably escape the injection zone, he continued, and “engulf everything in its inexorable migration toward the discharge boundaries of the flow system,” such as a water well, a spring, or an old oil or gas well. While the advancing front of waste might initially cause wells and springs to surge with freshwater, the contamination “would become apparent at ever-increasing distances from the injection site,” he concluded. “Where will the waste reside 100 years from now?” asked Orlo Childs, a Texas petroleum geologist, in his closing remarks. “We may just be opening up a Pandora’s box.” “It is clear,” said Theodore Cook of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, in his forward to a roundup of the symposium’s presentations in 1972, “that this method is not the final answer to society’s waste problems.” ‘Industry Attacked the Rules’ Initially, at least, the EPA seemed to heed these warnings. In a 1974 policy proposal, the agency echoed David Dominick’s concerns, stating in an internal memo that they considered “waste disposal by [deep] well injection to be a temporary means of disposal” until “a more environmentally acceptable means of disposal” became available. In June 1980, the EPA began regulating injection wells under the Underground Injection Control (UIC) program. While this meant there would be federal oversight, the rules transformed a disposal technique once critiqued by the agency and with questionable scientific merits, into one that was now enabled by the country’s top environmental regulator. Immediately the EPA faced multiple lawsuits by industries, including oil and gas, mining, and steel, which complained underground waste injection regulations would cost them billions. “Industry attacked the rules on the grounds that they were too complex and too costly,” observed a 1981 Oil & Gas Journal article. The resulting settlement did away with some of the testing requirements related to injection wells, and reduced the number and frequency of the reports that industry must file. Industry also made a concerted and largely successful effort to wrest regulatory control of injection wells from the EPA and give it to states. The EPA has since given 33 states permission to regulate injection wells themselves, including Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma. “I think at best they had a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to the capacity of these formations to take this waste, at worst it was just a rubber stamp,” says Ted Auch, a researcher with the oil and gas watchdog Fieldnotes who has spent over a decade investigating the extent and impact of oil and gas industry waste production.  The 1980s nonetheless saw some critical government injection well research, despite eight years of generally pro-industry and anti-environmental protection policies under President Ronald Reagan.  A 1987 report from the EPA’s Kerr Environmental Research Lab in Ada, Oklahoma, found that “hazardous wastes are complex mixtures of materials” and “subsurface environments often take many years to reach chemical and biological equilibrium.” This made it “difficult to predict exactly the action or fate of wastes after their injection,” if not “nearly impossible.” Another 1987 report, prepared jointly by the EPA and the Department of Energy and published by the National Institute for Petroleum and Energy Research in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, warned of several ways waste might escape the rock layer it had been injected into and move through the earth to contaminate groundwater, which is typically held in rock formations much closer to the surface. Waste, the report stated, could fracture rocks deep in the earth, “whereby a communication channel allows the injected waste to migrate to a fresh water aquifer.” The injection well itself could corrode, enabling “waste to escape and migrate.” Further, older oil and gas wells could provide “an escape route whereby the waste can enter an overlying potable ground water aquifer.”  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); Since the early 2000s, when new technologies spurred the fracking boom, drillers have been able to tap into once-inaccessible rock formations for oil and gas, often located close to communities — and sometimes, as in the Denver-Julesburg formation in Colorado, or the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, right in the middle of them. In addition to the flood of wastewater that these wells create, with elevated levels of naturally-occurring salts, carcinogens, metals, and radioactivity, there’s a second waste stream unique to fracking: flowback, the toxic regurgitation of sand and chemicals shot down a well in the fracking process. These fracking chemicals are specifically designed to generate cracks in rock, and to lubricate and fracture formations, in order to get at the oil or gas they hold. It’s entirely unknown how these chemicals react, and interact, in the high pressure, high temperature subterranean environment of the injection zone, says Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor emeritus at Cornell University who has spent his career studying the oilfield. This ever-growing tsunami of oil and gas wastewater has to go somewhere, and most of it will continue to go to injection wells. “One might be tempted to believe that well construction designs, materials, and techniques on wells constructed decades ago were vastly different than those of today,” says Ingraffea. “This is false.” America’s top environmental regulator vigorously defends reliance on injection wells, stating on its website that they have “prove[n] to be a safe and inexpensive option for the disposal of unwanted and often hazardous byproducts.” In response to questions about the agency’s historic concerns about the long-term use of injection wells, EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch says that the agency “is committed to supporting American energy companies and industry that are seeking permits for underground injection of fluids associated with oil and natural gas production,” in order to “[advance] progress on pillars of its Powering the Great American Comeback initiative.” Early Warnings Realized After 90 years of using injection wells to bury wastewater, including the past 13 years as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, the United States has a profound pollution crisis. The oil and gas industry and its regulators are facing a long-stalled reckoning on injection wells in both the courts, and the court of public opinion. In May 2022, a rural Ohio oil and gas operator named Bob Lane filed a lawsuit in the Washington County Court of Common Pleas against area injection well operators, alleging these companies “infiltrated, flooded, contaminated, polluted” his oil and gas wells and property with waste containing hazardous materials “known or reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens,” and “harming the commercial viability” of his “oil and gas reservoirs.” Defendants in the case include Tallgrass Operations, a Colorado-based energy infrastructure company, and DeepRock Disposal Solutions, a company formerly owned by Ohio state senator Brian Chavez, who chairs the Ohio Senate Energy Committee. The case is now before the Ohio Supreme Court and being followed closely by regional attorneys.  “We want to respect the process of the ongoing litigation, so we will not comment on it at this time,” says Tallgrass spokesperson John Brown.  Brown says his company adheres to Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) rules and that its injected wastewater is contained within its permitted injection zone and does not impact drinking water. “It’s important to note that underground injection is a long-established and proven method of disposal for many U.S. industries,” says Brown, “and that it plays an essential role in supporting the low-cost, reliable energy systems that are critical to millions of Ohio families and communities across the country.” DeepRock has not replied to questions.  ODNR spokesperson Karina Cheung says the agency has suspended operations at six injection wells that present “an imminent danger to the health and safety of the public and is likely to result in immediate substantial damage to the natural resources of the state.” A 2023 ODNR report called this leakage “potentially catastrophic” and warned of “extensive environmental damage and/or aquifer contamination,” admitting that Ohio’s long history of oil and gas drilling has left “numerous penetrations that may serve as pathways for fluid to migrate.” In November, Buckeye Environmental Network, an Ohio advocacy group, filed a lawsuit in Ohio’s Tenth District Court of Appeals against ODNR for permitting a pair of injection wells operated by DeepRock that would be within two miles of a zone meant to protect the source of drinking water for Marietta, Washington County’s largest city.   “I can think of nothing more important than to protect the city’s water,” says Marietta City Council President Susan Vessels. “There is no just looking the other way, I want to help our city avoid an environmental catastrophe, which I believe is eventually going to happen if we continue down this path.” In October, the council passed a resolution urging Ohio state legislators to introduce legislation imposing a three-year moratorium on new injection wells in Washington County. An injection well pumps wastewater into the ground in Coyle, Oklahoma, Jan. 24, 2016. (Credit: J Pat Carter/Getty Images) Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a stunning expose co-published in October by ProPublica and the Oklahoma-based newsroom Frontier documented a “growing number of purges,” where oil field wastewater has been injected at “excessively high pressure” and cracked rock deep underground, freeing it to travel uncontrolled for miles, sometimes returning to the surface via abandoned wells. In one instance, a spew of brine from a defunct well contaminated a watering hole for livestock, killing at least 28 cows.  The story features Danny Ray, a whistle-blowing former state regulator and long-time petroleum engineer, who is worried that given Oklahoma’s vast number of unplugged oil and gas wells, the state is ripe for more of these sorts of disasters. However, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the states oil and gas regulator, discounted Rays concerns, saying in a statement that it remains “committed to protecting Oklahoma and supporting the state’s largest industry to perform its role in a safe and economic manner.”  “These goals are not mutually exclusive,” according to the agency. In West Texas, Bloomberg reported in September, a growing number of the state’s over 2,000 defunct oil and gas wells — locals call them “zombie wells” — are spouting unpredictable geysers of fracking waste. One blowout in Crane County shot wastewater 100 feet high into the air in 2022, releasing around 24 million gallons of toxic fluids before it was capped about two weeks later. A spokesperson with the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, told Bloomberg that it had instituted a set of protective new rules regarding oil and gas wastewater injection wells, but recognized “the physical limitations of the disposal reservoirs” as well as the risks to oil production and fresh water.   Just last month, Inside Climate News reported on a new lawsuit filed by a Crane County landowner claiming “catastrophic impacts” from injection well blowouts. The impacts of injection well leakage and blowouts have become visible from space. In a 2024 study using satellite observations, a team of Southern Methodist University scientists found that so much wastewater has been injected underground that it has raised land in one area of the Permian Basin by 16 inches in just two years, and created a high-pressurized underground lake that will lead to more sky-high wastewater gushers. “We have established a significant link between wastewater injection and oil well blowouts in the Permian Basin,” the authors wrote in the academic journal, Geophysical Research Letters. Once “a little cottage industry of mom and pops,” injection wells have become “a much bigger business,” says Kurt Knewitz, a consultant who runs an injection well information site called BuySWD.com. A case in point, says Knewitz, is Pilot Water Solutions, which operates injection wells in Texas and is a division of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Pilot Travel Centers, the multinational energy and logistics company owned by Warren Buffet. “You look at the Permian Basin and you think it’s a huge oil play, but it produces three to four times as much produced water as oil,” says Knewitz. “So the Permian is really a produced water play that on the side produces some oil and gas.” Still, the industry has not acknowledged the toxic reality on the ground, and continues to defend its favorite waste disposal practice. A recent report from the American Petroleum Institute (API), the nation’s largest oil and gas lobby, states that injection wells are “safe and environmentally reliable” and “serve a vital role by supporting the responsible and sustainable development of O&G resources.” The API did not respond to specific questions regarding the merits of early critiques of injection wells, or whether they remain valid today. “Our industry is committed to the responsible management of produced water,” spokesperson Charlotte Law said in the group’s response. “Operators continuously invest in advanced treatment technologies, recycling, and reuse practices to minimize freshwater use, protect ecosystems, and ensure safe operations.” The USGS and DOE did not respond to questions for this story. Advocacy groups that have spent decades tracking the EPA’s oil and gas waste rules point out that the business model of the U.S. fracking industry depends on operators being able to get rid of waste cheaply. “The inadequate regulation and enforcement of waste disposal wells across the country represents a financial giveaway to the oil and gas industry,” says the NRDC’s Mall, with NRDC. “Experts have known for generations this method threatens the environment.” For queries about republishing this story, please contact editor@desmog.com. The post The Oil Industry’s Latest Disaster: Trillions of Gallons of Buried Toxic Wastewater appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Industry Pushes Back on UK Ad Bans

 

at 2/11/26 4:22am

In a speech to UK advertising executives last week, Lord Ed Vaizey had nothing good to say about a new ban on junk food ads aimed at children. Nor did the Conservative peer mention a petition signed by more than 110,000 people calling on parliament to impose a tobacco-style ban on ads for fossil fuels.   Instead, Vaizey used his keynote at the annual Advertising Association conference to call for as little regulation as possible. “I see a political class that is tempted to ban what it doesnt like rather than use the power of advertising to change behaviour,” Lord Vaizey told the crowd at the start of the one-day event. The ad industry is facing scrutiny for its role in the climate crisis — from bombarding the public with ads for unsustainable products such as frequent flying and fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles, to protecting the reputations of the world’s biggest polluters. With cities such as Edinburgh and Sheffield imposing some restrictions on fossil fuel ads, and Amsterdam enshrining a blanket ban, campaigners want to persuade more towns and cities to follow suit in the hope of winning national bans as well. Yet talks at the conference — which took place in London on February 5 — barely touched on the climate crisis. Discussions centred instead on the rise of artificial intelligence and rebuilding public trust in advertising, eroded by concerns over online scam ads and misinformation. Vaizeys speech focused on advertisings role in powering the economy and included a swipe at the junk food ad ban, which came into effect on January 5 following years of cross-party support. The new rules stop high sugar, fat and salt foods being advertised online or on television before 9pm. Vaizey told the conference that such bans did not have “really any clear effect” on health. However, a February 2022 peer-reviewed study published in PLoS medicine found that London households reduced the amount of calories consumed from high fat, salt and sugar foods by almost 7 percent after a ban on junk food ads on public transport, with calorie intake from chocolate and sweets falling almost 20 percent. “There is clear academic evidence that ad bans are highly effective at reducing consumption of harmful products such as unhealthy foods,” said Victoria Harvey, an academic researcher on the advertising industry. “Vaizey’s speechfits with the Advertising Association’s opposition to junk food advertising legislation as well as their continued opposition to banning ads for fossil fuels,” Harvey added. An Advertising Association spokesperson said that Lord Vaizey was speaking in a personal capacity and the views he expressed on junk food advertising were his own. The spokesperson referred DeSmog to a review by consultancy SLG Economics — funded by the Advertising Association and other trade groups — that contended that the February 2022 research contained “clear and obvious discrepancies.”  Industry Lobbies Against Bans Vaizey, who served as culture minister under former Conservative prime minister David Cameron, has pushed back against a junk food ad ban for years.  The peer led a call in 2022 to delay the ban by a year, according to reporting by the Grocer. Vaizey also proposed a “sunset clause” that would have scrapped the law after five years if it was not shown to be effective. The Advertising Association and Food and Drink Federation backed Vaizey’s calls — reflecting a wider pattern of industry lobbying to defeat or dilute proposed ad bans.  Paris-based JCDecaux, the world’s largest outdoor advertising operator, attempted to block passage of Amsterdam’s fossil fuel ad ban by emailing city councillors directly the day before the vote. JCDecaux, which controls ad space on bus shelters, billboards, and street furniture, claimed that the ban would have “far-reaching financial and legal consequences”, and warned officials against creating restrictions based on “incorrect and incomplete information.”  Amsterdam adopted the ban on January 22, becoming the first capital city to ban fossil fuel ads. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who introduced the ban on junk food ads on the city’s public transport in 2019, has stopped short of slapping a similar ban on fossil fuel ads — saying more guidance from the government is needed before he can make a decision.   Hundreds of advertising campaigns by oil and gas companies have run on London’s public transport network TfL in recent years, a DeSmog investigation found. A week before the Advertising Association conference, a group of 15 senior ad executives sought to foreground their industry’s role in the climate crisis and other harms by publishing an anonymous memo accusing the sector of “funding hate, legitimising environmentally destructive companies” and “paying little more than lip service” to addressing critical issues. In the memo, which was coordinated by the UK group Inside Track, the executives said the industry was “helping polluting industries such as oil and gas rebuff public scrutiny.” The Advertising Association spokesperson said that in response “We contacted them on the day the memo was published and said we would be open to a meeting to hear more about the findings. We have since been offered a meeting date in March.” Lord Vaizey did not respond to a request for comment.  The post Industry Pushes Back on UK Ad Bans appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Trump Accused of Trying to ‘Divide and Destabilise’ Europe Through New MAGA Fund

 

at 2/10/26 7:25am

Plans by the Donald Trump administration to fund right-wing groups in Europe have been slammed by policymakers and campaigners as an effort to “usurp European democracy”. According to the Financial Times, the U.S. State Department plans to bankroll think tanks and charities in the UK and Europe which share President Trump’s agenda, with particular focus on blocking attempts to regulate U.S. social media platforms. Daniel Freund, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Greens, told DeSmog that the funding had “one clear aim: to divide and destabilise Europe.” “We must clearly name, criticise, and reject such foreign interference,” he added. Sarah Rogers, U.S. under secretary of state for public diplomacy, is leading this effort, having visited the UK, France, and Italy in early December. Her visit coincided with the publication of a new U.S. national security strategy, which called for “cultivating resistance” in Europe to liberal, democratic politics. “The U.S. has a long history of covert manipulation of politics across the globe. But to see it happen in Europe is new, and we should be worried,” said Kenneth Haar of the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory. “Big Tech regulation is set to be the first testing ground of the new American way of imposing their will on Europe.” 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); The new U.S. fund would be the latest attempt by Trump and his allies to thwart EU regulations. DeSmog last week reported on a gathering of pro-Trump groups in the European Parliament, during which they turned their fire on the EU’s Digital Safety Act, which aims to tackle the harms caused by social media. Trump was re-elected in November 2024 following a $270 million donation from the owner of social media platform X Elon Musk, and received $1 million each from the heads of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for his inauguration fund. The event in Brussels was attended by the Heritage Foundation, the radical right-wing think tank which drafted Project 2025 – the authoritarian, anti-climate blueprint for Trump’s second term. The Heritage Foundation has been one of the key MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) groups attempting to influence European politics since Trump’s re-election. As reported by DeSmog, the group gathered hardline conservative groups last year to discuss ideas for dismantling the EU. It also attempted to influence Albania’s election in favour of its conservative candidate in May 2025. The group has been joined by the Heartland Institute, which has been leading the campaign to spread climate science denial across the UK and EU. The group claims to be advising Nigel Farage’s anti-climate party Reform UK, while it has been forging alliances with far-right parties and campaigners in an attempt to gain a foothold in Europe. Both groups lobbied aggressively – and successfully – for the dilution of EU laws designed to hold large companies, including U.S. firms, to account for their environmental impacts. They also forcefully oppose the EU’s digital safety laws. Raphael Kergueno, senior policy officer at Transparency International, said that the new pro-Trump fund adds to growing concern about MAGA’s influence over EU laws.  “Transparency loopholes are allowing the MAGA movement’s illiberal organisations to usurp European democracy from the inside,” he said. “As a matter of urgency, the rules must be changed to compel them to register on the EU’s lobby register and declare their funding, so that their blatant attempts to bring authoritarianism to Europe can be scrutinised, and thwarted.” Patrick ten Brink, secretary-general of the European Environmental Bureau, added: “The reporting in the Financial Times confirms what many civil society organisations have been warning about for some time: there is a coordinated effort to import US-style culture-war politics into Europe, using funding, think-tanks and so-called ‘charitable’ fronts to weaken democratic safeguards. “Europe’s response should be clear-eyed and proportionate. Defending transparency, independent NGOs and evidence-based policymaking is essential to the EU’s democratic resilience and its ability to govern in the public interest. EU policymakers should take care not to weaken environmental and social protections or undermine public well-being in ways that ultimately serve external deregulation agendas.” MAGA UK MAGA’s influence is also being felt in the UK, where climate and digital safety regulations are likewise under fire. Farage is a close Trump ally, stating repeatedly that he is the “bravest man”. The Reform leader has also been helping to import the architects of Trump’s agenda into the UK, having urged the Heartland Institute to set up a branch in the UK and Europe. As revealed by DeSmog, Farage has received £150,000 from his donors to attend pro-Trump events or cheerlead for his agenda since he was elected to Parliament in July 2024. A new Reform-linked think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, was launched last year by James Orr, a close friend of U.S. vice president J.D. Vance and now a senior Reform advisor. The Centre for a Better Britain, set up by Reform donors, is reportedly seeking to raise millions from Trump backers. Jordan Peterson speaks with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at ARC. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson During her visit to the UK in December, head of the new U.S. fund, Sarah Rogers, was hosted at an event by the Prosperity Institute (formerly Legatum Institute). The conservative think tank is run by UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns right-wing broadcaster GB News, Farage’s principal employer. The event related to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires U.S. social media companies to remove illegal content such as child pornography. Along with the EU’s DSA, the OSA has been attacked by the Trump administration for what it calls the “censorship” of Americans’ free speech. Rogers spoke at the event alongside Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, and Conservative peer Toby Young, who runs the Free Speech Union, a conservative pressure group. It is not clear which groups Rogers met with in France or Italy. In Washington D.C. in December she hosted Markus Frohnmaier, a Member of the German Parliament for the far-right Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) party, according to a post she shared on social media platform X. The Legatum Group also helps to run the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network group led by Canadian activist Jordan Peterson. ARC has been a key platform for MAGA figures and far-right European politicians, with its latest London conference planned for this summer.  Speakers at ARC events have included U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, and Republican donor and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Last year’s ARC event in London was also attended by several oil and gas executives. “It is time to consider what can be done legally,” Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory said. “When it comes to China or Russia, there are measures in place to defend the public from undue influence. We really need to figure out quickly how the American threat can be handled effectively.  Dieter Plehwe, an academic at the Berlin Social Science Center likewise called for stronger transparency laws, stating: “It would be wise to increase the opportunities for investigative journalists, academic researchers and the public at large to understand who is behind think tank and media campaigns.” The post Trump Accused of Trying to ‘Divide and Destabilise’ Europe Through New MAGA Fund appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Trump’s EPA Just Used the Clean Air Act to Prop up Coal Power

 

at 2/9/26 1:58pm

The Trump administration just employed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act to discourage coal plant closures in Colorado — repurposing measures initially intended to safeguard public health and prevent pollution to reboot the dirtiest, deadliest fossil fuel.  Michael Hiatt, deputy managing attorney at the environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice, told DeSmog that the EPA’s action was not what the Clean Air Act intended. “In our view, it’s plainly illegal,” he said.  Furthermore, Hiatt said the EPA’s move may have implications beyond Colorado, indicating that the agency could take similar actions that affect coal and gas plants elsewhere. “It’s clearly EPA indicating a policy preference,” he said. “They are communicating that they’re not going to look favorably on future state plans that include coal or gas plant closures.” As aging, inefficient coal plants barrel toward obsolescence across the U.S., the Trump administration seems dead-set on coming to their rescue. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy issued orders to keep five coal plants online past their planned retirement dates. The orders often came against their operators’ wishes and cost customers millions in the process. Federal officials, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, frequently cited increasing energy demands, including for artificial intelligence. Now, the EPA has stepped in. 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 late January, the EPA issued its final published rule rejecting Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, filed as part of longstanding Clean Air Act rules intended to increase visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. As part of the plan, Colorado had outlined its goal of closing its six remaining coal plants by 2031. Coal plants release multiple smog-forming pollutants that threaten the state’s outdoor recreation industry and harm human health. The utilities involved had voluntarily agreed to this target over the past decade.  It could have been a routine approval. But at some point in 2025,  Colorado Springs’ city-owned utility told the EPA it no longer wanted to shut down the lone coal-fired generator at the Ray D. Nixon Power Plant, as initially proposed. The EPA used that development to justify throwing out the entire plan, jeopardizing pollution controls and retirement timelines for industrial sites across the state — from fossil fuel plants and the state’s only oil refinery to the Denver International Airport. In its final rule, the EPA argued the single “forced closure” of a coal-fired unit showed Colorado hadn’t been careful to make sure its plan respected the constitutionally enshrined private property rights of energy providers. “The state did not properly consider and explain whether the nonconsensual closure of Colorado Springs Utilities’ Nixon Unit 1 power plant would be an act of taking private property without compensation,” the agency wrote in a press release explaining its decision. “EPA legally cannot approve Colorado’s [plan]. Critics took issue with that assessment. “Colorado had done such a very thorough job working with utilities, and those retirements were voluntarily proposed,” said Ulla Britt-Reeves, clean air program director at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. “So for EPA to come in and essentially say that Colorado was forcing those retirements is simply not true.” Earthjustice’s Hiatt told DeSmog that the EPA’s decision was “unreasonable, irrational, and illegal under the Clean Air Act.” He added that, “What this EPA action shows is this Trump administration taking an ideologically motivated stance that it is not going to do anything that might prove or even allow a coal plant to retire under its watch.” RELATED: These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump. Hiatt hopes the EPA’s broad disapproval in Colorado won’t impact the many other agreed-upon plant closures and pollution controls covered by the plan. But he expressed worry that the EPA’s action gives the state’s utilities and industrial operators an opportunity to “backtrack” on environmental commitments in the coming years.   In a proposed rule issued in July, the EPA initially emphasized a different rationale for its pending decision: that closing the coal-fired unit at Nixon would threaten grid reliability — in large part due to a supposed surge in electricity demand, including from artificial intelligence. The agency accused Colorado of not taking grid reliability seriously. Under President Trump, the EPA has listed artificial intelligence (AI) development as one of the top priorities guiding its strategy, as well as restoring “American Energy Dominance,” which Trump has tied specifically to oil, coal, and natural gas. “This Administration has found as a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy that power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand,” it wrote. Throughout 2025, Trump administration officials, including DOE Secretary Wright, used a purported rise in energy demand driven by AI to justify fossil fuel expansion, and prevent scheduled coal plant retirements. A December 2025 analysis by DeSmog found that at least 15 coal plants pushed back their retirement dates since Trump took office — with plants often remaining open voluntarily due to projected data center demands, but sometimes due to DOE executive orders. After DeSmog’s story published, the DOE issued a flurry of new executive orders forcing additional coal generators to remain online, including plants in Indiana and Washington that were targeted for the first time. RELATED: Q&A: Tech Billionaires’ AI Space Empire Fantasies Are ‘An Insidious Form of Climate Denial’ In its public comments, the State of Colorado argued it had in fact assessed reliability, in conjunction with utilities statewide, and that planned closures weren’t projected to contribute to an energy shortfall.  “EPA cites nothing in the record regarding this alleged ‘rise in electricity demand’ or ‘resurgence of domestic manufacturing’ or even the ‘construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers,” the state’s Air Pollution Control Division wrote.“ The record before EPA provides no basis to conclude that these issues materially affect Colorado or are impacted by the specific units with Closure Dates.”  The EPA backtracked slightly in its final rule in January, insisting that grid reliability was not part of its legal determination — only private property considerations. And yet it seemed to warn Colorado against including power plant closures in any future plan, citing the rise in domestic manufacturing and “the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.” “Power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand and a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy,” it wrote. “The EPA does not encourage electric generating facilities to close in the face of this energy demand.” It added that “the EPA does not expect any state to encourage or force an electric generating facility to close in order to comply with the [Clean Air Act’s] regional haze second planning period requirements.”  Earthjustice’s Hiatt said that statement shows EPA going beyond its disapproval of Colorado’s regional haze plan. “It’s difficult to say how this will play out,” he said, “but it does clearly indicate EPA’s policy preference —  they do not want to see coal or gas closures in regional haze plans.” “There are a lot of still outstanding haze plans that this EPA needs to act on,” Britt-Reeves, of the National Parks Conservation Association, said. “Are they going to let good plans that actually reduce pollution be approved? That would a great place to go from here — but I dont expect that thats where this administration is heading.” She said the language in the final rule indicates that EPA may have “its sights on deregulating the rule itself, which is extremely concerning.” An EPA spokesperson declined to provide comment or arrange an interview for this story. In a press release announcing its decision on Colorado’s haze plan, EPA cited “turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world” as part of its rationale. But though EPA spoke of a “forced closure” of the Nixon plant, Colorado Springs Utilities had in fact voted to retire the plant voluntarily by December 31, 2029 — which Colorado had simply noted in its plan. In comments to DeSmog, Danielle Nieves, a spokesperson for Colorado Springs Utilities, confirmed that the utility had reversed course and asked EPA for “non-enforcement” at some point in 2025, years after the plan had been filed. Matt Gerhart, a Sierra Club attorney, questioned whether it was appropriate for the EPA to disapprove an entire state plan based solely on an 11th-hour change of heart — a precedent that he said could give EPA an excuse to sit on plans it doesn’t like until it found some grounds for dismissal.   “Theres nothing in EPA guidance that says what the state was supposed to do to guard against the hypothetical possibility that, five years later, a source might change its mind about a retirement,” he said. “I think EPA is really faulting the state for following the agencys own guidelines here.”  Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern that the EPA’s actions would set a troubling precedent, undercutting the legality of environmental regulation itself.  “What’s next? Is any kind of clean air regulation going to be deemed to infringe upon a private property right by virtue of making it more costly and potentially forcing a company to have to shut down?” he said. “I mean, its a very dangerous and scary slippery slope.” In a statement to DeSmog, Colorado’s Senior Director of Air Quality Programs Michael Ogletree said the EPA’s ruling would damage environmental protections in Colorado, which already has some of the worst air quality problems in the nation, and that the state was exploring next steps.  “Coal plant retirement dates remain in state regulation, and many facilities have already closed or are on track to retire voluntarily because cleaner energy is more affordable and makes economic sense for consumers,” he wrote. “Colorado has demonstrated that it is possible to protect public health, reduce pollution, and maintain a reliable energy system at the same time.”  The post Trump’s EPA Just Used the Clean Air Act to Prop up Coal Power appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

As of 3/12/26 7:14pm. Last new 3/6/26 2:30pm.