Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Report: Proposed EPA Cuts Further Imperil Environmental Protections in Cash-Strapped States

 

at 12/12/25 1:55pm

Massive cuts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have hampered state-level regulators’ ability to rein in pollution, according to a new report. And now, with the Trump administration pushing for even deeper cuts at the agency in 2026, many states across the country may be in a dire position. “If EPAs capacity to do its job is further diminished, how prepared are our states to shoulder more responsibility for protecting us from these threats? Unfortunately, not well,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), the nonprofit behind the report, said in a Wednesday press conference on the findings. The report found that 27 state governments have cut environmental agency funding over the past 15 years, including seven states — Texas, Wyoming, Iowa, Alabama, Connecticut, South Dakota, and Mississippi —  that have cut budgets by a third or more. And 31 states cut staff totals at their environmental agencies, collectively eliminating 3,725 roles in that same period. That leaves them vulnerable to Trump administration changes at the EPA, which has already seen its budget cut 40 percent between 2010 and 2025. In 2025 alone, EPA staffers have left in droves, thanks to mass firings, layoffs, and resignations —  as much as 33 percent of its total staff, according to some estimates. Meanwhile, the White House has proposed cutting the agency’s budget by 55 percent in 2026 to $4.2 billion, its lowest level of funding in four decades. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that states will be able to pick up the slack, describing a vision for the agency that involves giving “power back to states to make their own decisions.” In a March press conference announcing a major deregulation initiative —  what he called “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” —  Zeldin fundamentally recast EPA’s mission, outlining a new mandate to “unleash American energy” and “revitalize the American auto industry.” Protecting Americans from the impacts of industry pollution, he suggested, would instead fall to state agencies, which are “best positioned to work with unique communities and implement laws.” “In too many instances and across too many administrations, EPA has retained control of implementing many laws from its perch in the nation’s capital,” he said, in an address to the Environmental Council of the States, a national nonprofit organization representing environmental agency leaders, later that month. “It’s this kind of common sense reform I want to partner with states to achieve.” In its report, EIP argues that this stance ignores EPA’s statutorily defined mission to protect the health and well-being of Americans, while downplaying the crucial role it plays in outlining national standards and coordinating efforts related to complex, multi-state problems. Even more significantly, though, according to the report, many states are simply not equipped to address their challenges without a strong federal partner. “This kind of handoff — from federal to state —  can only work if the teammate receiving the baton has not been hobbled, as many state environmental agencies have been, by budget cuts,” the report’s authors write. Twenty three states have in fact worked to increase environmental funding since 2010 — with  California (364 percent increase), Colorado (111 percent increase), and Vermont (109 percent increase) leading the way. Which means future cuts to the EPA would likely have a disproportionate impact on states like Mississippi and South Dakota, which have cut agency funding by 71 percent and 61 percent, respectively. In the Wednesday press conference convened by EIP, environmental advocates painted a broad picture of state-level regulatory dysfunction that would only be made worse by further federal cuts. The proposed cuts are “a recipe for disaster in states like ours, where the state agency is already stretched thin,” Drew Ball, southeast campaigns director for the National Resources Defense Council of North Carolina, where environmental agency funding had already declined 32 percent since 2010, said at EIP’s news conference. “Its like dismantling the fire department while the house is already burning.” Credit: “State of Decline: Cuts to state pollution control agencies compound damage from the dismantling of EPA,” Environmental Integrity Project States depend on a variety of EPA grants to help fund their compliance efforts, ensuring that standards under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other laws are met. The Trump administration has proposed cutting EPA “categorical grants” by approximately $1 billion, eliminating nearly all federal funding for a range of issues, from air quality management and pollution control to brownfield management and lead abatement. That recommendation would “devastate economic development, critical infrastructure, and environmental protections across the nation,” representatives from the Environmental Council of the States wrote in an open letter to Zeldin in May. In the Wednesday press conference, Kathryn Guerra of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, said her state of Texas already suffers from widespread regulatory noncompliance. According to its own enforcement reports, she said, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) never investigates many of the environmental complaints it receives, while its backlog of unresolved enforcement cases has grown to over 1,400. “The funding cuts to TCEQ described in this report render the agency largely ineffective, and cuts to the EPA will worsen that ineffectiveness,” she said. Meanwhile, both houses of Congress are recommending much less severe EPA cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has recommended cutting the agency’s budget by 23 percent in 2026, while its counterpart in the Senate has voted for just a 5 percent reduction. But the advocates convened by EIP argued that current levels of funding are already critically low. “This report is a warning,” said Jennifer Walling, chief executive officer for the Illinois Environmental Council. “If both lines of defense, our state agencies and the U.S. EPA are weakened at the same time, pollution enforcement will falter, emergencies will happen, and public health will suffer. We cannot pretend that states are prepared to shoulder this burden alone.” The post Report: Proposed EPA Cuts Further Imperil Environmental Protections in Cash-Strapped States appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump.

 

at 12/12/25 3:00am

A version of this story also appeared on Inside EPA. Since the second Trump administration took power in January, at least 15 coal plants have had planned retirements pushed back or delayed indefinitely, a DeSmog analysis found.  That’s mostly due to an expected rise in electricity demand, a surge largely driven by the rise of high-powered data centers needed to train and run artificial intelligence (AI) models. But some of the plants have been ordered to stay open by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), despite significant environmental and financial costs. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, has frequently cited “winning the AI race” as a rationale for re-investing in coal.  The fossil fuel facilities are located in regions across the country, from Maryland to Michigan and Georgia to Wyoming. Together, their two dozen coal-fired generators emitted more than 68 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2024. That’s more than the total emissions of Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. combined. Nearly 75 percent of the coal plants were on track to shutter in the next two years. The delays buck the overall trend in the U.S., where coal’s importance as an energy source has diminished rapidly over the past two decades. Coal’s critics say this broad-based phaseout is an urgent matter of public and environmental health. Often called the “dirtiest fossil fuel,” coal creates more climate emissions per gigawatt-hour of electricity than any other power source. And the human impacts of its pollution have been profound: A 2023 study in Science attributed 460,000 extra U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2020 to sulfur dioxide particulate pollution belched out by coal plants. Cara Fogler, managing senior analyst for the Sierra Club, called the recent spate of delayed closures “unacceptable.”  “We know these coal plants are dirty, theyre uneconomic, they’re costing customers so much money, and theyre polluting the air,” said Fogler, who co-authored a report showing many utilities have backtracked on climate commitments, including coal phaseouts, often citing data centers as a cause. “They need to be planned for retirement, and its really concerning to see utilities becoming so much more hesitant to take those steps.”  DeSmog identified the 15 plants by examining changes to the planned retirement dates listed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a DOE agency that compiles data on energy providers, as well as public statements from utilities and the Trump administration. Some of the voluntary delays appear to directly contradict previous net-zero pledges made by several companies.  Neither the Department of Energy nor American Power, a trade association representing the U.S. coal fleet, responded to requests for comment.  What Led to Coal’s Decline? Not long ago, coal really did keep the lights on. In 2005, it provided roughly half of America’s electricity, making it by far the dominant power source nationwide. But in the past two decades, coal’s market share has rapidly waned. No new coal plants have come online since 2013. These days, its footprint has dwindled, with just 16 percent of the overall energy mix.  In March 2017,  President Trump appeared to blame environmental regulations for coal’s poor fortunes — a trend he promised to reverse.  “The miners told me about the attacks on their jobs and their livelihoods,” Trump said at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters. “I made them this promise My administration is putting an end to the war on coal.”  America is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance, including more than 250 years worth of beautiful clean coal. We have ended the war on coal, and will continue to work to promote American energy dominance!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018 But environmental regulations didn’t kill coal. Instead, its demise became inevitable mostly thanks to the rise of a competing fossil fuel: natural gas.  Gas has both economic and technological advantages over coal, said David Lindequist, an economist at Miami University who co-authored a recent paper on the environmental impacts of the shale gas boom.   As new fracking technologies helped to flood the U.S. market with cheap gas in the mid-2000s, utilities began a broad coal-to-gas pivot that’s still underway today. Abundant, often less expensive gas flowed into power plants that operate more efficiently and nimbly than coal plants. This combination of price, efficiency, and flexibility made ditching coal an easy calculation for many utilities.  “The fact that we were able to so successfully phase out coal in the U.S. would never have happened without the fracking boom,” Lindequist said.  Today, coal is at an even greater disadvantage, as renewable energies continue to make economic and technological inroads. The International Renewable Energy Agency found that, in 2024, solar and wind routinely delivered electricity more cheaply than fossil sources of energy. That dynamic has helped solar in particular become the fastest-growing source of power in the U.S.  Meanwhile, America’s newest coal plant — the Sandy Creek plant near Waco, Texas, built way back in 2013 — is currently sitting idle after another catastrophic failure. It isn’t set to resume operations until 2027. The average U.S. coal plant is more than 40 years old, a factor that’s contributed to their decreasing reliability. “These [coal] plants are so old that at this point theres very little that could really revive the fleet,” said Michelle Solomon, manager in the electricity program at the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation. “I’ve been using the analogy of an old car: Nothing is going to bring my car that has 200,000 miles on it back to being a brand new, efficient car.”  During the Biden years, as technological advancements and historic subsidies made renewables even more attractive, observers broadly believed that coal’s days were numbered. The “writing was on the wall” for coal, Lindequist said.  “Coal may retain a grip in U.S. politics, but its actual role in the generation system is shrinking annually,” researchers for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis wrote in a 2024 report. “It is a trend we believe is irreversible.”  Yet even before Biden left office, a new dynamic began emerging: As tech companies started proposing billions in data center build-outs to feed the AI frenzy, utilities started to take a fresh look at their coal plants.   Data Centers Changed Coal’s Trajectory  In 2020, Dominion Energy, a utility that provides electricity to millions of customers across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, announced non-binding plans to retire the Clover Power Station by 2025. Running the plant — an 877 megawatt (MW) coal-fired facility near Randolph, Virginia — would be uneconomical under any future scenario, the company found. It just didn’t make financial sense to keep it going.  It reversed course just three years later. Under its 2023 plan, Dominion projected that its energy demand from data centers would nearly quadruple by 2038. That’s an astonishing rise, considering that Virginia already leads the U.S. in data center development by a wide margin. Known as Data Center Alley, the state is home to more than one-third of the world’s largest-scale data centers. Today, Dominion says it doesn’t anticipate retiring any of its existing coal plants — including Clover — until at least 2045, the year that Virginia law stipulates its economy must be carbon-free.  Dominion wasn’t the only utility to cite data center growth as it backtracked on coal. In an August 2024 earnings call, executives of the Wisconsin-based utility Alliant Energy said that the company was “proactively working to attract” data center projects. A few months later, Alliant announced it would delay retiring the Columbia Energy Center, a coal-fired plant near Madison, from 2026 to 2029. The plant’s retirement had already been pushed back once.  Utilities have delayed the retirements of at least 15 U.S. coal plants since President Trump took office in January 2025. Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. Click to enlarge image. Credit: Joe Fassler/DeSmog The trend became notable enough to attract the attention of analysts at Frontier Group, an environmental think tank. In January 2025, Frontier analyst Quentin Good published a white paper showing that utilities had already cited data center growth as a rationale for delaying the phaseout of seven fossil fuel power plants across the U.S.  “We were concerned about the potential for all of this new electricity demand from data centers to slow down the transition to clean energy,” he told DeSmog. “In that report, we discovered it was basically happening already.”  But two other dynamics also began playing out in January: AI hype started to reach new levels of intensity, and power changed hands in Washington.  AI Hype Highs, New Coal Lows  Data centers aren’t the only reason for the recent upswing in electricity demand. Building electrification, industrial growth, and increased electric vehicle ownership all play roles, too. But nothing has quite caught utilities’ attention like data center projects, which are cropping up with highly localized impacts across the U.S. at a historic rate. Filled with stacks of high-powered computing equipment, the facilities are projected to account for about half of new electricity growth between 2025 and 2030.   On January 21, 2025 — one day after President Trump’s second inauguration — he revealed a new AI infrastructure joint venture involving ChatGPT parent company OpenAI called the Stargate Project, which would spend up to $500 billion on data center build-outs in the next four years. Tech executives announced the initiative’s details alongside Trump during the unveiling at a White House event.  Days later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he planned to spend $65 billion on data center build-outs in 2025 alone, including one project “so large it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.” These announcements followed a similar one from Microsoft in January: a pledge to spend $80 billion on data centers this calendar year.  As the world’s largest tech companies raced to outdo each other, a wave of delayed coal plant retirements followed.  Were going to extend coal plants as long as we can because we need those resources on the grid.Southern Company CEO Chris Womack On January 31, Southern Company, a utility serving over 9 million customers across 15 states, announced plans to delay the retirement of generators at two of the largest coal plants in the U.S., both in Georgia. The massive, coal-fired units — two at the Bowen Steam Plant outside Euharlee, and one at the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant in Juliette — had been scheduled to go offline between 2028 and 2035. Under its revised plan, the company pushed retirement back to as late as January 1, 2039(though both plants would be 40 percent co-fired with natural gas by 2030 in that scenario).  In legal documents and public statements, company spokespeople point to data centers as a key rationale for the delays. Last month, at an industry conference in Las Vegas, Southern Company CEO Chris Womack cited data center growth as a key factor keeping fossil energy online, according to the trade publication Data Center Dynamics.  “Were going to extend coal plants as long as we can because we need those resources on the grid,” he reportedly said.  Next door in Mississippi, Southern Company also delayed the closure of a 500 MW generator at the Victor J. Daniel coal plant in Jackson County. It pushed the retirement back from 2028 until “the mid 2030s.” In documents filed with Mississippi’s Public Service Commission, the state’s utility regulator, Southern appeared to cite a 500 MW Compass Datacenters project as a reason for the change. Southern has pledged to be net-zero by 2050. As the months passed, the same dynamic unfolded in other states. Alarmed, Good, the Frontier Group analyst, started to track the delays. By October, he published an update to Frontier’s report that found data centers had pushed back at least 12 coal plant closures in the past few years.  “The data center boom has shown no signs of abating,” he wrote. “Even more fossil fuel plants that had been scheduled to retire have been given a new lease on life.”  In its own analysis, DeSmog found that at least 15 coal plant retirements have been delayed since January 2025 alone. Together, those plants emitted nearly 1.5 percent of America’s total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from 2024.  This comes at a time when the worlds nations need to cut their climate emissions roughly in half to avoid the worst impacts of global heating, according to a recent United Nations report. But not all the delays can be attributed directly to data center growth. Some have stayed open for a different reason: top-down orders from the Trump administration.  The Department of Energy Steps in  The J.H. Campbell Generating Plant, a 1.5 gigawatt coal plant in Ottawa County, Michigan, was scheduled to close May 31. The plant even held public tours to give a rare, behind-the-scenes look at aging fossil infrastructure, before it shut its doors for good.  “Now we know cleaner, renewable ways to generate electricity,” a Campbell employee told members of the public on a September 2024 tour.  But just eight days before scheduled to shutter, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered Campbell to stay open another 90 days, citing an “emergency” shortage of energy in the Midwest.  Keeping the plant open cost its owner, Consumers Energy, almost $30 million in just five weeks, the company said. Though the plant’s closure was projected to save ratepayers more than $650 million by 2050, Campbell was costing more than $615,000 a day as of September. Yet Wright has since extended his order twice. Campbell now is scheduled to stay open until at least February 2026.  “The costs to operate the Campbell plant will be shared by customers across the Midwest electric grid region, including customers serviced by other utilities, Matt Johnson, a Consumers Energy spokesperson told DeSmog by email. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is challenging DOE’s order to keep Campbell open, calling the orders “arbitrary.”  “DOE is using outdated information to fabricate an emergency, despite the fact that the truth is publicly available for everyone to see,” Nessel said in a November 20 press release. “DOE must end its unlawful tactics to keep this coal plant running when it has already cost millions upon millions of dollars.” Meanwhile, DOE is telling a very different story.  “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said in September, as the Department of Energy announced $350 million in funding for coal plant upgrades, along with other incentives. Energy Innovation’s Solomon called the funding “a waste of taxpayer dollars.”  “We’ve been calling it a ‘cash for clunkers’ program where you don’t trade in the clunker,” she said. “Trying to build a modern electricity system using the most expensive and least reliable source of power is really not the answer.”  However, the Trump administration said in September that it plans to feed the AI boom — with an estimated 100 gigawatts of capacity in the next five years — by keeping more old coal plants open. “I would say the majority of that coal capacity will stay online, Wright said.  Executives from Colorado’s Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association confirmed to DeSmog that they also expect an order to keep a 421 MW coal-fired generator at Craig Station open past its December 2025 decommissioning date. The Comanche Generating Station, located just east of Pueblo, Colorado. Credit: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 3.0 In late October, Colorado Congressman Jeff Hurd sent a letter to the Trump administration, urging it to extend the life of a 400 MW coal generator at the Comanche Power Station near Pueblo as the owner, Xcel Energy, works to repair the plant’s chronically troubled main reactor. The smaller unit was slated to go offline in December — but, in its case, the administration never needed to act. Last month, Xcel, with the help of Colorado Governor Jared Polis, began to lobby to keep it open at least another 12 months. The state utility regulator appears to have granted that request, according to an agreement with Xcel and other stakeholders.  This delay wasn’t just due to data centers, though their numbers are growing in Colorado. Xcel spokesperson Michelle Aguayo said the delay was “due to a convergence of issues,” including rising electricity demand, “supply chain challenges,” and the continued outage at the main generator. “We continue to make significant progress towards our emission reduction goals approved by the state which would require us to retire our coal units by 2030,” she said. Delaying the Inevitable Whether the data center boom will play out as projected is still a matter of speculation.  Last month, power consulting firm Grid Strategies reported that utilities may be overestimating electricity demand from data centers by as much as 40 percent. That’s due in part to the many hypothetical projects, and a widespread practice of double- and triple-counting. Tech companies tend to pitch utilities in multiple regions as they shop around for incentives, creating the appearance of demand from many more data hubs than actually will be built.  Experts have a name for this growing phenomenon: “phantom data centers.”  At the same time, a growing chorus of critics are warning of an AI bubble, arguing that runaway costs can’t justify the kinds of investment being floated. Even the head of Google’s parent company has acknowledged the “irrationality” of the boom. Critics also says contradictory actions taken by the Trump administration — citing an “energy emergency” while canceling billions in funding for renewable projects — are making the problem worse.  Yet even with all the unknowns, one thing’s certain: Coal’s role in America’s power push can be extended, but it can’t last forever.   Seth Feaster, an IEEFA analyst, says even AI hasn’t changed the big picture: Eventually, coal will die, and it will be killed by other, cheaper forms of energy.  He called the current phenomenon a “period of pause and delay.” In his view, the technological and economic rationales for quitting coal remain undeniable.  “The policy changes here may have a delaying effect on the decline of coal, but they are certainly not changing the direction of coals future,” he told DeSmog.  The questions for now are, how long the delays will continue — and at what cost. The post These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump. appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show

 

at 12/11/25 9:50am

A political group created by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch earlier this year wrote to a branch of the U.S. government making requests about artificial intelligence. “To seize the moment and ensure that AI can meet its true promise and potential,” it argued in March to the National Coordination Office, a federal body tasked by Donald Trump at the time with developing an AI Action Plan, the administration should “clear the red tape” preventing “energy innovators” from supplying the massive amounts of electricity required to power new AI data centers across the country. The comments were written by analysts with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a Koch-bankrolled activist organization that supports right-wing causes and political candidates and spent more than $157 million to sway voters during the 2024 elections. Strategy plans, policy documents, corporate communications and comments to the federal government reviewed by DeSmog show that Koch’s political operation is attempting to shape and help implement a U.S. AI technology agenda, which could ultimately profit Koch’s traditional oil and gas business. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); Despite the Koch network’s ongoing disagreements with Trump on issues including tariffs, the vast political operation appears to have found common cause with the administration on ensuring that fossil fuels, and not renewable energy sources, are central to AI development, even as wind and solar remain cheaper and faster to build. “Practical solutions can be identified that move our nation forward,” Americans for Prosperity wrote to the government’s AI and Energy Working Group in May. “We look forward to working with you and the Congress to assist in the identification of those solutions.” Neither AFP nor Koch, Inc. responded to a request for comment. ‘Couched in Fear’ Charles Koch became one of America’s richest people through owning and overseeing an industrial empire with his late brother, David, that includes oil refineries, pipelines, petrochemicals and natural gas. Koch, Inc., formerly known as Koch Industries, is now embracing AI across its vast operations, which it has predicted will create “substantial economic value” for the company. Koch, Inc., in 2020 announced a partnership with the AI software provider C3 AI, with the goal of improving “operating performance” across its products “ranging from refined oil, chemicals, and biofuels to polymers, automotive components, and forest products.” Also around that time, the company led a $125 million investment in the San Francisco cloud computing startup Mesosphere, alongside the likes of Microsoft and Khosla Ventures. Other backers included Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm whose founders became prominent Trump supporters during the 2024 election. Koch, Inc., said in October that its real estate arm has been getting into the business of building data centers in cities like Chicago, Kansas City, and Atlanta. The company argued in a news release that it “can provide the expertise and capabilities that major tech companies either don’t have or don’t think would be worth the time or effort to build on their own from the ground up.” As Koch’s industrial empire invests in AI and partners with Big Tech, AFP is pushing the Trump administration to remove regulatory barriers on the technology. Last March, AFP analysts Faith Burns and James Czerniawski disapprovingly noted there were over 800 state-level proposals to regulate AI. These efforts “are couched in fear of the technology,” they argued in comments to the National Coordination Office, and said the correct approach for government is “keeping itself out of the way to drive innovation.” This is part of a larger political project that would also be beneficial to the Koch companies involved with producing, transporting and selling fossil fuels. AFP argued in its March comments that the administration and Congress could make progress on accelerating AI by deregulating the power sector “to get abundant and affordable energy to Americans and leading AI companies.”  ‘Radical Climate Dogma’  The quickest and most economic way to power all the data centers now being built is through renewable sources, industry data shows. That’s in part because nearly 80 percent of planned electricity projects in the U.S. are currently tied to solar and wind farms. But Americans for Prosperity has thrown its political weight behind legislation that hobbles renewables in favor of oil, gas and coal. It cited as a major victory the passage this summer of the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill, a massive tax cut bill predominately benefiting America’s wealthiest citizens that included deep cuts to clean energy tax credits brought in under President Joe Biden. The Koch political group ran a $20 million advertising and political campaign that it claimed “helped make this win possible through over 1,500 meetings with lawmakers, nearly 500,000 doors knocked, more than 475,000 phone calls, 725+ community events [and] over 100,000 letters sent to Congress.” AFP presented the bill as a victory for fossil fuels. “It provides for a minimum of 30 offshore oil and gas lease sales,” its analyst Burns said in an advertisement posted on the group’s Facebook page. “And it makes available for lease four million acres of recoverable coal resources on federal land.” As it worked to help pass the Big Beautiful Bill, Americans for Prosperity was supporting the administration’s efforts on AI. In late July, the Trump administration unveiled an AI Action Plan, which promised “to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape” to ensure that the U.S. can “build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it.” In a statement that was posted on the White House website, Americans for Prosperity’s Brent Gardner said the plan “will ensure America leads the world” on AI. That statement was included along with praise from the likes of Chevron, Palantir, Meta, IBM and the Heritage Foundation.  The plan itself had input from Dean Ball, who was recently an AI advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and earlier a fellow at the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank that’s received millions of dollars in funding from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Ball was “intimately involved in the drafting” of the plan, according to a recent webinar on AI policy hosted by National Journal. Ball said during the event that the build-out of data centers will likely mean that there’s “more gas, natural gas in particular, used in the United States than there otherwise might have been.” Ball is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a national non-profit whose supporters include the Koch-backed Stand Together Trust. The Next AI Battle The fallout of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is already being felt across the renewables industry. Power “developers have canceled 1,891 power projects this year with a combined capacity of 266 GW, with clean energy accounting for 93% of cancellations,” according to analysis by the climate newsletter Distilled. That’s not necessarily good news for AI, given that new natural gas and nuclear facilities can  take much longer to build than renewables. And there is now a growing backlash to the technology, with a coalition of over 200 environmental groups this month demanding a halt to new U.S. data centers, arguing they are “rapidly increasing demand for energy, driving more fossil fuel pollution, straining water resources and raising electricity prices across the country.” But Americans for Prosperity has now made one of its political priorities getting federal “permitting reform” legislation passed, which would streamline or eliminate many environmental and other reviews on new energy projects such as data centers. In a recent petition form sent out to its members, AFP claimed that permitting reform can help “ensure 24/7 reliable power as demand increases, particularly in regions experiencing surging data center growth and electrification trends.” It envisions such legislation as hastening “new pipelines, export terminals and delivery systems” along with expanding “LNG and crude oil exports.” The Koch network is joined by a coalition of fossil fuel industry groups including the American Petroleum Institute and the American Gas Association, which in early December released a letter calling for passage of “a broader permitting package” around new energy infrastructure projects. And the effort is also attracting interest from Big Tech. Sponsors for a mid-December conference in Washington, D.C., that includes U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and features panels on “permitting reform,” “energy for AI,” and “American energy dominance” include the Koch nonprofit organization Stand Together. Also listed as a sponsor: the tech giant Amazon. The post The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— The Institute of Economic Affairs Banked £640,000 from Oil Giants and Murdoch

 

at 12/10/25 9:00pm

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group – received more than £640,000 from fossil fuel companies and Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate between 1957 and 2005, DeSmog can reveal. Archive records seen by DeSmog show that the group, which has campaigned for more fossil fuel extraction and against government climate action, received more than £150,000 from BP, £124,000 from Esso (owned by ExxonMobil), and £106,000 from Shell. In total, the IEA accepted £479,992 from oil and gas firms, with the majority (£357,063) coming from 1991 onwards. These fossil fuel giants were among the biggest corporate contributors to the IEA during the period, according to DeSmog’s analysis. Greenpeace’s investigative outlet Unearthed previously revealed that the IEA had received funding from BP every year from 1967 to 2018, while the IEA also received a £21,000 grant from ExxonMobil in 2005. However, the IEA does not publicly disclose its donors and this is the first time that its historic funding sources have been revealed in detail – exposing the financial interests that helped the group to become an influential force in British politics. “This investigation confirms one of the worst-kept secrets in Westminster,” said Ami McCarthy, Greenpeace UK’s head of politics. “This self-styled economic think tank is really a lobbying shop for the harmful and polluting industries that fund it, with fossil fuel giants chief among them.” McCarthy added that the IEA “spent years downplaying the climate crisis while taking loads of cash from some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies and one of its most influential climate sceptics, Rupert Murdoch.” The IEA is part of the Tufton Street network – an orchestrated alliance of radical right-wing groups based in Westminster that lobby to dismantle state services and privatise public bodies. These groups share an opposition to climate action, and have spent decades undermining the scientific consensus behind policies to reduce emissions. The IEA has also been a prominent advocate for increased fossil fuel extraction. It has called for the ban to be lifted on fracking for shale gas, labelling it the “moral and economic choice”, has lambasted the government for banning new North Sea oil and gas licences, and has celebrated the Conservative Party’s pledge to scrap the 2008 Climate Change Act, which forms the legal basis of the UK’s 2050 net zero target. DeSmog can also reveal that the IEA received £164,667 in donations from News International – Murdoch’s UK media stable – between 1991 and 2000. This is the first time that one of Murdoch’s companies has been found to have donated to a UK pressure group. Donate to DeSmog According to David McKnight in Murdoch’s Politics, News International was “deeply involved” with the IEA during this period, with its co-founder Lord Harris of High Cross (Ralph Harris) acting as a director of Murdoch’s Times Newspapers Holdings from 1988 to 2001, and the Sunday Times co-publishing several pamphlets with the IEA. News International was rebranded in 2013 to News UK and currently owns The Times, Sunday Times, Times Radio, The Sun, TalkTV, talkSport, and Virgin Radio UK. Murdoch has described himself as a climate change “sceptic”, has given a prominent platform to fossil fuel advocates and narratives, and has been described by leading scientists as a “climate villain”. His media outlets have also favourably covered IEA findings and narratives, including those calling on the government to ditch climate targets and ramp up fossil fuel extraction, and have given a regular platform to the group’s senior staff members. “This revelation confirms what many of us suspected: the fossil fuel industry has weaponised its profits to exert undue influence over the policy agenda, through organisations like the IEA,” said Labour MP Clive Lewis. “Without checks on corporate power, the health of our democracy is undermined – and this is one such example.” Robert Palmer, deputy director of the campaign and research group Uplift, said: “These historic payments give us a window into the enormous fossil fuel lobby that has spent decades trying to shape our politics and media to increase their profits and strip back regulation, regardless of the harm to ordinary people and the natural world. “Today, the costs to the rest of us are obvious: we have an energy system that impoverishes people through unaffordable bills, as well as mounting climate costs, whether that’s flooded homes, rising food prices or extreme heat and wildfires. “Thankfully, the influence of the oil and gas companies and their proxies is starting to wane in this country as we shift to renewable energy. People increasingly realise that the oil and gas giants want us – our resources and money – a lot more than we need them.” The IEA and BP declined to comment. Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond on the record. The IEA’s Political Influence The IEA and its Tufton Street counterparts have been effective in shaping political debate and persuading politicians to adopt their causes. The group is close to former UK prime minister Liz Truss, with former IEA director-general Mark Littlewood claiming in 2022 that Truss had spoken at IEA events more than “any other politician over the past 12 years”. Despite the economic turmoil caused by Truss’ policies – which former Downing Street advisor Tim Montgomerie claimed had been “incubated” by the IEA – its spokespeople are still regularly given a platform by the BBC and other mainstream media channels. The IEA claimed it was featured in the media over 5,000 times in the year to March 2024 – equivalent to 14 times a day. In its 2022 annual accounts, the group stated that “the diversification of the UK broadcast landscape, notably the launch of GB News and TalkTV, has increased opportunities for IEA commentary”. GB News and Murdoch-owned TalkTV launched in 2021 and 2022 respectively, and have regularly promoted climate science denial. The IEA also remains influential within the Conservative Party. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s head of policy, Victoria Hewson, is the former head of regulatory affairs at the IEA – a position she held from 2018 to 2022. In July 2022, Hewson wrote an article for the IEA’s website in which she called the UK’s net zero target a “huge own goal”. Since Hewson’s appointment, Badenoch has ditched the Conservative Party’s commitment to the 2050 target. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery); Former Brexit minister Lord David Frost was announced as the IEA’s new director-general in November. Frost, who resigned the Conservative whip on accepting the position, is a former director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group, based in 55 Tufton Street – and is currently a director of its campaign arm, Net Zero Watch. A number of IEA donors are connected to both the Conservative Party and the GWPF. Tory donors Nigel Vinson, Lord Michael Hintze, and Lord Jon Moynihan have all donated to both the IEA and the GWPF. Neil Record, one of Badenoch’s closest allies and donors, is the chair of Net Zero Watch, and the life vice president of the IEA. The Charity Commission, which regulates the sector, concluded an investigation into the IEA in November – calling on the group to be more transparent and less politically biased. The IEA is registered as a charity, and the regulator states that “political activity must not become the reason for the charity’s existence.” Guy Shrubsole, environmental campaigner and author of The Lie of the Land, said: “British politics is infested with well-paid lobbyists like the IEA, who incessantly shriek for deregulation, clamour to keep us hooked on fossil fuels and desperately want to frack Britain. They hardly ever disclose their funders, and claim to be impartial. “But this groundbreaking investigation reveals that the IEA has been paid nearly half a million pounds by fossil fuel corporations. Astonishingly, the IEA is a registered charity, but it’s clear that the rules around charities disclosing their funders aren’t tough enough. Nor do broadcasters do enough to point out whose interests these lobbyists parrot.” The Murdoch Media Rupert Murdoch’s media titles – including those in the UK – have a long history of publishing climate science denial. The Sun, Murdoch’s UK tabloid newspaper, has regularly given a platform to radical anti-climate opinions. TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson claimed in his Sun column in November 2024 that the new Labour government planned to “carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms”. Writing in The Sun, right-wing commentator Rod Liddle has referred to Extinction Rebellion climate protestors as “narcissists and bedwetters”. According to an analysis by campaign group Stop Funding Heat, Murdoch’s TalkTV spread climate misinformation 190 times in July this year – an average of six times a day – with interviews and call-ins peppered with science denial. Murdoch has himself commented on climate issues in recent years. In 2024, the media mogul said in an interview with Sky News Australia – a platform he owns – that the Global North is “absolutely on the wrong track” in trying to reach net zero emissions by 2050. “You’re going to have blackouts, the cost of living will go up all over the world,” he predicted. In reality, scientific studies have suggested that runaway climate change could reduce global GDP by 24 percent by the end of this century. Rupert Murdoch interviewed by Sky News Australia in 2024. Credit: Sky News Australia / YouTube IEA staff members and fellows are also regular guests on TalkTV. Interviewed by climate science denier Julia Hartley-Brewer in July, IEA chief operating officer Andy Mayer called the government’s net zero policies an “obsession”, while Hartley-Brewer said they were a “cult”. Back in 2023, Mayer appeared on TalkTV to defend the record profits made by BP and Shell, saying that “we should celebrate the fact that when these companies do well, we all benefit and – when they do poorly – their shareholders are the ones taking the hit.” He was also quoted in The Times the same year slamming the windfall tax imposed by the Conservatives on these profits, saying that the policy “will continue to make Britain less competitive and destroy investment”, and slamming the government for what he called an “assault on the North Sea”. A year earlier, in 2022, Mayer was quoted in The Sun criticising Labour’s plan to set up the public energy investment company Great British Energy, which is focused on stoking investment in renewable power, predicting it would be “a disaster”. “This is both shocking and yet somehow unsurprising,” said Mic Wright, author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesnt and Why it Matters. “Think tanks and the right-wing press have been in a codependent relationship for decades, cooperating to present a skewed vision of the country and the wider world. “The fact that Rupert Murdoch’s company bankrolled the IEA is just further evidence that his media properties aren’t just observers and commentators on events but players in them.” Anti-climate narratives have also been a feature of the Murdoch media empire’s output across the globe. According to an analysis by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, climate denial claims “dominated” 86 percent of climate change segments on Fox News – Murdoch’s U.S. broadcaster – in 2019. As far back as 2013, Fox News was accused of being a “driving force behind global warming denial”, with Fox claiming that CO2 “literally” cannot cause warming because it doesn’t “mix well in the atmosphere”. In 2023, Dr Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist at Australian National University, said of Murdoch: “It’s hard to think of another person who has single-handedly done more to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change.” News UK told DeSmog: “News UK and News Corp have made significant progress in reducing their own emissions and environmental impact, reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 65 percent by 2023, significantly ahead of target.” It did not address its donations to the IEA, nor its platforming of anti-climate narratives. The IEA’s History Founded by Antony Fisher and Lord Harris in 1955, the IEA became influential in the UK during the 1980s, with the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman claiming that “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him [Fisher] than any other individual.” Thatcher, who served as Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, carried out the privatisation of several key public utilities and industries, accompanied by tax cuts and the curbing of trade union power. The IEA is a member of Atlas Network, a Washington-based umbrella organisation that supports hundreds of anti-government groups around the world, including several that spread climate science denial. Atlas has been accused of spearheading global efforts to brand climate activists as “extremists”, while DeSmog revealed that the group was paid tens of thousands of dollars by oil major ExxonMobil to stoke doubt about climate change among developing nations during critical early moments of climate diplomacy. Both the IEA and Atlas were founded by Fisher while his daughter, Linda Whetstone, was chair of Atlas Network and a director of the IEA until her death in December 2021. The IEA has also fostered the development of likeminded groups worldwide. The IEA claims that it has “played an active role in developing similar institutions across the globe. Today there exists a world-wide network of over 100 institutions in nearly 80 countries. All are independent but share in the IEA’s mission.” Katrina McDonnell, campaigns manager at Good Law Project told DeSmog: “Time and again, we see the same pattern: fossil fuel giants quietly funding organisations that shape our political debates. These new records show that the IEA’s ‘independence’ was bankrolled by the very companies driving the climate crisis. “The public deserves transparency about who is influencing policy in this country – and whose interests they really serve.” Additional research by Rei Takver The post The Institute of Economic Affairs Banked £640,000 from Oil Giants and Murdoch appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Mapped: Pro-Trump Heartland Institute’s European Network

 

at 12/10/25 4:09am

A year ago, as the world convulsed from Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, his allies were already identifying their next frontier. In December, the Heartland Institute hosted a private event in Mayfair, one of London’s wealthiest areas, to announce the launch of its new UK-Europe branch. The launch was attended by former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss and current shadow trade and business secretary Andrew Griffith, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as the star speaker. The Heartland Institute is proudly one of the world’s foremost climate science denial groups, with extensive ties to the Trump administration. It contributed to Project 2025 – the blueprint for Trump’s second term, drafted by the Heritage Foundation. Heartland’s new wing would be led by one of Farage’s old friends – Lois Perry, herself a former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), like Farage – and a familiar presence on the right-wing media circuit. On social media, she still calls Farage her “boss”. A press release for the event said Perry would “leverage Heartland’s science-based work pushing back at climate alarmism and schemes such as net zero from London where she can communicate directly with policymakers in the UK and the continent”. DeSmog has been tracking Perry and the Heartland Institute’s activities over the past year, compiling a new map to show how the group has been attempting to exert its influence in the UK and Europe. Hover and click to navigate the interactive map. The Farage Alliance Perry has used Farage and his insurgent political project as an important UK bridgehead. Reform echoes Heartland’s anti-climate politics. The party campaigns to scrap net zero targets, end subsidies for renewable energy, lift the fracking ban, and open new coal power plants. Farage has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant, despite admitting: “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not”. The Reform leader has spoken at three Heartland Institute events in the last 18 months: a fundraising dinner in Chicago in September 2024, the launch of its UK-EU wing in London that December, and an event on energy policy in London in June 2025. The latter was hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group, which has claimed that “carbon dioxide has been mercilessly demonised” when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. At the benefit in Chicago, Farage called for more fossil fuel extraction and for Heartland to “set up in Britain and Europe”. He got his wish with the founding of Heartland UK-Europe that December. 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); Farage also returned the favour, by inviting Heartland to speak at Reform’s annual conference this year, where the group hosted a panel entitled “Is Climate Realism Inevitable?”. The event featured Lois Perry, Heartland president James Taylor, representatives of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and Taxpayers’ Alliance – two anti-climate think tanks – and former UKIP politician Christopher Monckton, who has called climate change “bullshit”. On the panel, Taylor reportedly said: “The reality is this: we’re not facing a climate crisis”, while Perry claimed that policies to cut emissions are designed “to control us to tax us. to take our money and to take our liberty.” During the conference, Heartland confirmed to Politico that it had “held conversations with policymakers within Reform” and was advising the party. As DeSmog revealed, 92 percent of Reform’s donations between the 2019 and 2024 general elections came from climate science deniers, fossil fuel interests, or major polluters – a total of £2.3 million.  The party’s treasurer, Nick Candy, has claimed he’s attempting to raise funds from oil executives. European Lobbying Heartland has also been working with far-right parties across Europe in an attempt to undermine the continent’s climate policies. The group has been engaged in this task for some time – even before the launch of its European branch last December. As DeSmog and The Guardian revealed, Heartland has bragged on its website about working with Austrian politicians Harald Vilimsky and Roman Haider of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) to spread its message across the continent. This included encouraging Hungarian lawmakers to pull their support for the Nature Restoration Law, which set targets for restoring Europe’s degraded ecosystems, habitats and species. Despite Heartland’s lobbying, the legislation eventually passed in June 2024. Vilimsky was also a speaker at Heartland’s fundraising event in Chicago with Nigel Farage. The Austrian used the platform to call on a future Trump administration to form closer ties with autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Heartland claims that, in October 2024, it met with former Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo of the right-wing Law and Justice Party, along with the Polish trade union Solidarity, to attack the EU’s green policies and promote continued coal power. Taylor reportedly gave a presentation during the visit arguing that “climate activists are defying sound science and imposing devastating impacts on affordable energy, agriculture, the environment, and individual freedom in Poland and throughout the world.” In brief: Lois Perry Perry founded CAR26 – a climate science denial lobby group that has questioned whether carbon dioxide is a “significant factor in global warming”. In August 2022, during a record heatwave in the UK, Perry declared: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is a thing.” At the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, she was filmed outside the conference shouting that the climate crisis is a “con” designed by “elites” to make people poor and hungry. From May to June 2024, Perry was the leader of UKIP, an anti-immigration party previously led by Nigel Farage. Heartland Institute UK-Europe director Lois Perry. Credit: Quews News / YouTube This lobbying campaign has accelerated throughout 2025 with the launch of Heartland UK-EU. In particular, the group has targeted the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a new law designed to require companies operating in the bloc – including foreign firms – to protect human rights and the environment across their supply chains. As DeSmog reported, Heartland and its allies in Trump’s political ecosystem set out to water down the law or – even better – destroy it, declaring: “The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union.”  In April, the Heartland published an open letter signed by 31 groups, calling for the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”  As revealed by the research group SOMO, U.S. fossil fuel companies have also lobbied aggressively against this legislation. This pressure appears to have been successful, with the EU deciding to limit the scope and delay the implementation of the CSDDD and the accompanying Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Heartland and its allies have also racked up the air miles in their attempts to influence European politics. In May, Taylor and Perry attended CPAC events in Hungary and Poland alongside key Trump supporters – including his own head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem.  Taylor claimed that he “met with some very influential people at the top of the Law and Justice party” during CPAC Poland, while Perry said they “made some extraordinary progress in Poland and Hungary and some massive connections”. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 40th anniversary fundraiser in September 2024. Credit: Heartland Institute / YouTube In September, the FPÖ’s Vilimsky and Markus Buchheit, a Member of European Parliament (MEP) from Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), flew to Tampa, Florida, for a meeting with Taylor. This was Vilimsky’s sixth meeting with Heartland since 2024’s European Parliament elections, and his eighth since 2019, according to the Integrity Watch EU lobbying register. However, Heartland’s UK-EU branch has been far from a resounding success. Not a single meeting with Perry has been logged by an MEP this year, while she promised to host a “big big big event” in Poland in November “to really challenge the whole net zero concept in terms of specifically for agriculture” – an event that seemingly did not materialise.  Vilimsky also said that he was planning on hosting a Heartland conference in spring 2025. There is no evidence of it taking place. And, in the UK, Heartland allowed its Reform conference event to be sponsored by a small British-Pakistani outlet, Quews News, on which Perry has a show. The founder of Quews News, Sohail Qureshi, stated in a YouTube video on 8 July that Reform leader Nigel Farage is spreading “a very far-right, very anti-immigrant, anti-[Islam], anti-Pakistan rhetoric”. Perry has not made another appearance on the platform since DeSmog published this story in October. In brief: The Heartland Institute Founded in 1984, Heartland has described itself as “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism about man-made climate change”. The group originally worked with tobacco giant Philip Morris to deny the harms caused by smoking.  Heartland received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil, while it received $50,000 between 1997 and 2014 from foundations linked to Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and leading sponsor of climate science denial.  The Heartland Institute previously told DeSmog that it ”stands resolute in its mission to advance sound science, economic prosperity, and individual liberty”. It added that “our support comes from a diverse array of individuals and organisations who share our vision for a freer, more prosperous world.” On Heartland’s podcast in February, Perry claimed the group has “very strong affiliations” with “certain big individuals” in Trump’s team. “Heartland has been extremely influential in helping to shape policy at the highest level… under Trump’s administration, and in other Republican administrations,” she said.  This article was produced with the support of the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF). The sole responsibility for any content supported by the EMIF lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute. The post Mapped: Pro-Trump Heartland Institute’s European Network appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Mark Carney Took Speech Ideas From Billionaire-Founded ‘Build Canada’

 

at 12/8/25 5:00am

A speech this fall by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney directly referenced the pro-AI and fossil fuel group Build Canada, DeSmog can reveal. The Canadian group was founded in part by Canada’s leading tech billionaire Tobias Lütke, who is CEO of the Ottawa-based e-commerce company Shopify. It is also associated with oil and gas investor and billionaire Adam Waterous. Build Canada confirmed that it’s been in contact with Carney’s Liberal government.   “The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has reached out to Build Canada on occasion to ask about our memos,” Build Canada co-founder and CEO Lucy Hargreaves wrote in a statement to DeSmog. “It’s great to see ideas shared by the Build Canada community get taken up by government.” 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); Carney’s Oct. 22 speech at the University of Ottawa was directly influenced by the organization. During the event, which was considered something of a prebudget preview, the prime minister stated that as a country “we have had to go further, build faster, and dream bigger.” An earlier social media post from Build Canada contributor Eliot Pence had described Canada as being “a country that ventures farther, builds faster, and dreams bigger than anyone expects.” The similarities are more than a coincidence. Carney’s speech included a footnote indicating the section “Long before Confederation, our country was forged by Indigenous peoples, coureurs des bois, and voyageurs who mapped the continent and built vast trading networks from coast to coast to coast before the Americans had even left St. Louis,” can be attributed to Pence. Build Canada was thrilled by Carney’s recognition. “Many of the general themes and specific theses often seemed drawn straight from Build Canada memos or principles, and we were delighted to see friend and memo author of Build Canada, Eliot Pence, quoted directly and footnoted in the speech,” the organization stated several days later in a post on its Substack. DeSmog reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) for comment but did not receive a response. Well Connected to Ottawa Build Canada was launched in February 2025, just before the writ was dropped before Canada’s most recent federal election. It publishes “Build Canada Memos,” which are written by industry leaders and often advocate for fewer government regulations and less government oversight. These memos have advocated for policies including unfettered development of fossil fuel resources and AI infrastructure. The organization is well connected to Canada’s political establishment. DeSmog previously reported on Build Canada’s numerous ties to Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre. Its current CEO, Lucy Hargreaves, was previously “vice chair of the board” of the Ottawa Centre Federal Liberal Association from 2018 to 2023. On Oct. 6, Build Canada contributor Pence wrote a post on X defining Canada as “restless, ambitious, commercial” and arguing that in this current global era of upheaval “caution and incrementalism will not suffice.” Pence is a partner with the venture capital firm Tofino Capital and previously worked for Anduril Industries, an American developer of autonomous defence technology. In mid-October 2025, Pence launched Dominion Dynamics, an “Arctic-focused defence technology company.”  Carney didn’t mention Pence by name in his speech, but a transcript of the speech published on the prime minister’s government website includes a footnote referring back to Pence’s social media post. Even though Build Canada was “excited” to hear Carney’s references to Pence’s post and their memos, it still had some constructive criticism for the Prime Minister. “It wasn’t a bad speech as these things go, though we wish he would have given it in the proper forum, namely the House of Commons, where the opposition would have the right of reply,” a Build Canada Substack post reads.   Applauds New Oil Pipelines Though Carney campaigned on his environmental credentials in Canada’s federal election earlier this year, his time in office so far has been marked by considerable retreats on climate policy, as well as renewed interest in fossil fuel development. Carney recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the oil and gas-rich province of Alberta that calls for increasing production of oil and gas. The MOU further seeks to develop electrical generation in Alberta for the use of AI data centres. The availability of large quantities of natural gas in the province have been identified as a potential source of cheap energy for AI infrastructure. The province of Alberta introduced a new bill that would allow AI data centres to generate their own electricity, just two days before the MOU was signed. Though Build Canada’s Hargreaves told DeSmog the group wasn’t directly consulted by the PMO on the MOU, she said it welcomed the news by “re-amplifying” an earlier “energy-focused policy memo” on its social media account. That memo, which argues that “Expanding our energy infrastructure will allow us to transport our oil domestically and sell to new markets outside of the U.S.,” was written by Adam Waterous, a billionaire oil investor and the owner of Strathcona Resources Ltd. During the recent federal election Waterous contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada and was also one of the signatories of a “Build Canada Now” open letter published on the websites of major Canadian oil companies in March. “We want to be a green economy and have unlimited time for consultations and stakeholder analysis. These are good things, but they come at a cost,” Build Canada co-founder Daniel Debow later said in an April interview with Maclean’s. Debow mentioned in the interview that he was reading two books by Matt Ridley, a UK journalist and author who is also an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organization that for years has disputed whether human-caused climate change is real. The post Mark Carney Took Speech Ideas From Billionaire-Founded ‘Build Canada’ appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Exxon’s Next Supreme Court Play

 

at 12/7/25 11:04am

This piece is copublished by DeSmog and ExxonKnews. ExxonKnews is a reporting project of the Center for Climate Integrity. Facing a growing number of lawsuits that could hold them liable for billions of dollars in climate damages, oil companies for the fifth time in three years are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the cases before they can reach trial. This time, ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy want the justices to overturn a decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled that a lawsuit brought against the two companies by the city and county of Boulder could move forward earlier this year. The Colorado Supreme Court found that the state law claims against the companies were not preempted by federal law. The potential stakes of the case were brought into sharp focus in 2021, when the Marshall Fire — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado state history — killed two people, burned down more than a thousand homes in Boulder County, and caused at least $2 billion in damages. The companies have previously expressed to the Supreme Court their fear that the cases could result in “massive monetary liability.” Now, stopping them as soon as possible is “a big priority not just for ExxonMobil, but for the entire industry,” said Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a November panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal advocacy group funded in part by fossil fuel interests.  “We’re seeing a lot more courage from people and groups and industry that’s recognizing that we have a problem, and we’re not going to wait another decade” to do something about it, he said. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); Exxon’s latest request asks the Supreme Court to resolve what the oil giant calls “one of the most important questions currently pending in the lower courts”: whether the cases against Big Oil are preempted by federal law. It’s the same question the justices already declined to review in January, in a virtually identical petition in a case brought by Honolulu that is now proceeding toward trial. The climate deception lawsuits filed by dozens of state, local, and tribal governments argue that Exxon and other oil and gas companies deceived the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and should be held accountable under state laws, including public nuisance and consumer protection. Many of the cases at stake, including Boulder’s, aim to recover the local costs of more frequent and severe climate disasters, like heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms.  But the fossil fuel industry has characterized the cases as attempts to regulate interstate and even global greenhouse gas emissions through the courts, instead of through Congress under the Clean Air Act.  The oil companies’ latest Supreme Court request comes alongside an escalating fossil fuel industry offensive against the cases, which has included lobbying Congress for immunity from lawsuits entirely. Its supporters in government have also taken up the cause on several fronts, and the Trump administration is backing its Supreme Court effort.  “The only thing that has changed [since this question was last before the court] is the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania — the facts and the law havent changed,” Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School, said in an interview. The Question Before the Court Boulder argues that the energy companies’ petition comes too soon, and that there would need to be a final decision on the merits of a case to warrant Supreme Court review. Like the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court’s ruling the Supreme Court declined to review, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling only allows the case to move forward in state court.  “As much as defendants might not like that outcome [that Boulder’s lawsuit is allowed to proceed], their displeasure is simply not a reason to federalize a state law case,” Richard Herz, chief litigation attorney of EarthRights International, a nonprofit legal advocacy group helping to represent Boulder, said in an e-mailed statement.  But Exxon and Suncor argue that the Colorado decision “deepens a clear conflict” on the preemption question, which only the Supreme Court can resolve. “Our constitution does not allow one state or a municipality within that state to export its terrible public policy and impose that on everyone else in the country,” Anderson said at the Federalist Society panel. “That’s the clarity that we need from the Supreme Court.”  The public nuisance violations alleged by Boulder are “not because anything that’s going on in Guyana drifted over there,” Anderson later added, referencing Exxon’s operations in South America. “And if it was, Boulder wouldn’t have any right to tell Guyana not to [produce oil].” Some lower court judges have been persuaded by Big Oil’s preemption arguments. Those rulings are mostly being appealed, but the two state Supreme Courts to review the issue have sided with the governments bringing the lawsuits. The preemption argument was rejected last week by a Connecticut state court judge, who denied Exxon’s motions to dismiss in Connecticut’s consumer protection lawsuit against the oil giant. In his ruling, Judge John B. Farley wrote that the case is not preempted by federal law because it “seeks to regulate only the defendant’s marketing conduct” that allegedly deceived the public about fossil fuels, not to limit emissions.  The oil companies have relied heavily on a 2021 ruling from the Second Circuit in an early climate lawsuit brought by New York City, which affirmed the lawsuit’s dismissal on the grounds that it was preempted under federal law. But that ruling was “an outlier,” Victor Flatt, an environmental law professor and associate director at Case Western University School of Law, told ExxonKnews. Unlike its successors, the case was filed in federal court and did not center deceptive marketing claims as the cause of injury. State Supreme Court judges said that decision had “limited application” and that reliance on the ruling is “misplaced.”  “There may be unanimity on this panel that it makes very little sense to try to tackle the problem of climate change through dozens of lawsuits in dozens of jurisdictions around the country,” William & Mary Law School professor Jonathan Adler said during the Federalist Society event. “But the policy arguments can’t compensate for the lack of a legal basis to preempt these suits.” Exxon and Suncor’s latest petition now claims that the lawsuits are precluded by “the structure of our constitutional system” itself — a completely new legal theory, said Vermont Law School’s Parenteau.  “The Supreme Court has never issued a decision saying, in this area of the law, the states have no authority or jurisdiction whatsoever,” he said. “Theyre swinging for the fences on that one because they know that the argument that the Clean Air Act preempts is, shall we say, sketchy.” ‘A Big Priority’ for Big Oil — and Now Trump Exxon’s Anderson made clear that he is prioritizing shutting down legal efforts by its “absolutely relentless” adversaries. “I didn’t just move my family to Texas from the East Coast to have a bunch of activists and ambitious politicians bankrupt the company,” he said during the Federalist Society panel. “I have to win every case that is brought,” Anderson added. “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.”  Oil companies “are pushing extraordinarily hard — they’re going to use every possible theory they can, they’re going to use every possible case they can” to prevent the lawsuits from going to trial, said Flatt. “They potentially face an enormous amount of damages, but it’s also about the dam bursting — if one of these [cases] goes through, it shows that it’s feasible.” Robert Percival, a law professor and director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program, told ExxonKnews the industry is likely concerned about the disclosure of evidence supporting the plaintiffs’ deception claims. The companies “know win or lose, the stuff that will come out of trial will make them look so bad in the public’s mind,” Percival said. Oil companies are not alone in pushing for an end to the lawsuits — they have also solicited help from government allies. After Trump issued an executive order for the Department of Justice to oppose the cases, the DOJ submitted an unsolicited brief in Exxon and Suncor’s petition, urging the Supreme Court to throw the cases out. More than 100 Republican members of Congress also filed a brief with the court, asking the justices to shield oil companies from potential liability that “would restructure the American energy industry if not bankrupt it altogether.” At the same time, the Trump administration is working to repeal the Endangerment Finding — the scientific basis for greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. Doing so could undercut the industry’s core argument that the cases are preempted by federal law. After the companies reportedly began lobbying Congress for an immunity waiver themselves, 16 Republican state attorneys general urged the DOJ to recommend legislation that would reinforce federal preemption and create a liability shield for fossil fuel companies, similar to the one gun manufacturers obtained from Congress in 2005. “If these cases are as frivolous as the oil companies’ briefs pretend, then why in the world are you busting your butt to get a declaration of immunity from Congress?” asked Parenteau. A Numbers Game When Exxon last petitioned the Supreme Court to review Boulder’s lawsuit, on a jurisdictional question in 2023, its lawyers called the case an “ideal vehicle” for the justices to review because it “involves a smaller group of defendants and thus is less likely than those [other climate deception] cases to present recusal issues ” — meaning justices with financial ties to oil companies named in the other cases might not recuse themselves from this one. Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett both have connections to defendants in other cases that could be implicated by a decision in Boulder’s, raising ethical questions of whether they should recuse themselves from considering the case. While Alito has a mixed history of recusing himself from climate deception lawsuits, Coney Barrett has never recused herself from one since sitting on the Supreme Court — although she regularly recused herself from cases involving Shell as a circuit court judge. To grant a writ of certiorari, the type of petition oil companies have filed, four out of nine justices will need to agree to take the case. “If cities and counties and states are not allowed to even sue the oil companies for the damage that unquestionably their products are doing, then that means simply the public will have to pay 100 percent for all of that damage, all of the adaptation, all of the resilience,” said Parenteau. “These are not necessarily going to be easy cases for the plaintiffs,” said Percival. “They really have to dig deep into the science of climate attribution, which has been advancing by leaps and bounds. But there’s no reason not to let them try on the merits.” ExxonKnews is a project of the Center for Climate Integrity, which has filed amicus briefs in support of state and local governments in their lawsuits against Exxon and other fossil fuel majors, including before the Colorado Supreme Court. Emily Sanders, the author of ExxonKnews, had no involvement in the creation or filing of those briefs. The post Exxon’s Next Supreme Court Play appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Exclusive: Shell Subsidiary Paid Queensland Museum More Than $10m to Shape Children’s Climate Education

 

at 12/7/25 7:01am

Shell QGC, one of Australia’s largest gas and coal companies, has paid the Queensland Museum in Brisbane 10.25 million Australian dollars (US$6.94 million) since 2015 to fund educational programmes — aimed at school children as young as nine years old — that fail to clearly identify fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change. Materials created for the programme, which include lesson plans, learning activities, and design challenges “give a one-sided view of the energy future by downplaying the role of fossil fuels in driving climate change,” said Belinda Noble, founder of Comms Declare, an Australian climate advocacy group. Comms Declare has released a new analysis highlighting dozens of instances where the materials are misleading, such as promoting “false climate solutions such as carbon capture,” Noble said. “They also falsely position gas companies as part of the solution to climate change and tell kids that fossil fuels are compatible with a safe climate, which is simply untrue.” The materials have been downloaded more than 400,000 times over the past decade according to the museum. The partnership may breach the Queensland Museum Act, which requires the museum to provide “leadership and excellence” in communicating the state’s natural heritage, according to a legal analysis commissioned by Comms Declare from Environmental Defenders Office, Australia’s largest environmental legal centre. The extent of the funding came to light in correspondence between Queensland Museum and Comms Declare and seen by DeSmog. Michael Berkman, Green MP for Maiwar in the state of Queensland, said the partnership amounts to marketing for a polluter. “The Queensland Museum is basically running a marketing campaign for a fossil fuel company whose operations are directly responsible for wrecking the Great Barrier Reef and destroying cultural heritage in the Torres Strait,” said Berkman. In response to the legal analysis, released in September by Comms Declare, the Greens have called call on Queensland Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek to intervene and end the Queensland Museum’s partnership with Shell QGC. During questioning at a September session of Parliament, Langbroek told Berkman he hadnt read the Environmental Defenders Office’s legal advice, despite confirmation from his office that it had been received. Langbroek called the link between Shell QGC’s emissions and the partnership’s legality “a specious line”. Queensland Museum and Arts Minister Langbroek did not respond to requests for comment. Shell QGC declined to comment. ‘Learning Resource’ According to the Environmental Defenders Office the partnership may have put the Queensland Museum in direct contravention of its guiding principle under the state’s 1970 Museums Act, which states that “leadership and excellence should be provided in the preservation, research and communication of Queenslands cultural and natural heritage.” The group told Comms Declare that the partnership is “inconsistent with the objectives of the Queensland Museum” because greenhouse gas emissions from Shell QGC’s operations “are having direct impacts on Queenslands natural heritage” through climate change, and on Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage due to sea level rise. Some of Shell QGC’s funding has gone to a “Future Makers” programme that aims to “increase students’ uptake of and performance in STEM-related subjects and careers, and inspire teachers with curriculum-aligned learning resources and strategies to increase confidence delivering STEM activities in the classroom”, according to the museum’s website. The programme’s offerings have ranged from science festivals and other events for children, to professional development for teachers. Shell QGC sponsors the World Science Festival Queensland, an annual event for local students between 10 and 16 years old. The festival features mini-exhibitions of childrens’ inventions, which are submitted via the Future Makers STEM Inventor Challenge, also sponsored by Shell QGC. The “Future Makers” programme offers free professional development workshops for teachers as well as self-taught online courses, and provides Shell QGC-branded teaching materials based on the museum’s collections and linking back to the curriculum taught in Australian schools. Shell QGC sponsors the Queensland Museums Future Makers Challenge. (Credit: Queensland Museum/YouTube) These materials, which are targeted at educators as well as parents and carers, according to the museum’s website, are available for download from the “Learning Resource” section of the museum’s website. Shell QGC’s logo appears on the front page of every resource, alongside the Queensland Museum and Queensland Government logos, with a description of the partnership repeated throughout: “Future Makers is an innovative partnership between Queensland Museum Network and Shells QGC project aiming to increase awareness and understanding of the value of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education and skills in Queensland.” Young Minds Comms Declare found that the branded materials present a biased and incomplete picture of climate science. In one learning module called “Changing Climates, Changing Waters,” rising seas and extreme temperatures are presented as something to adapt to, with no mention of transitioning away from fossil fuels. Another module “Introduction to Ocean Acidification,” aimed at 14 to 16-year-olds, teaches students about the chemistry of CO2 absorption in the ocean and the impacts of ocean acidification on marine life. Although the materials never explain the role of fossil fuels in ocean acidification, children are tasked with designing carbon capture and storage devices. In the “States of Matter: Our Warming World,” module pamphlet for children aged eight to 13, the sole mention of fossil fuels is buried in a teacher’s note: “It is recommended that you conclude this activity with a discussion about how individuals, the local community, Australia and the international community are reducing their reliance on fossil fuels and combatting climate change. This can demonstrate that we are working together to address climate change, thus mitigating future warming.” Queensland Museum CEO Jim Thompson defended the sponsorship in an October letter to Comms Declare. “[The programmes] are designed to foster critical thinking, evidence-based learning, and engagement with Queensland’s natural history,” Thompson wrote. “Partnerships are structured to support these objectives without influencing scientific content, priorities, or public messaging.” Thompson told Comms Declare that the museum receives 70 per cent of its approximately AUD 62 million annual budget from the Queensland Government — more than AUD 43 million per year, according to the museum’s most recent annual report — and that it needs corporate sponsorship to “supplement this funding.” He said the museum’s board did “comprehensive due diligence and risk assessment” before approving the Shell QGC partnership, and concluded that “the benefits significantly outweigh any risks.” Thompson highlighted that the Shell QGC-sponsored learning materials have been downloaded over 400,000 times, while 1,700 teachers have received professional development, and 10,000 students have participated in events through partnership. The exercises in the Queensland Museums Changing Climates, Changing Waters learning resource, sponsored by Shell QGC, guide schoolchildren from 7-10 years old on adapting to impacts of rising global temperatures, such as increased rainfall and flooding. While students are told these changes are expected to continue and intensify in the future if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, the use of fossil fuels — the main source of this pollution — is never mentioned. (Source: Queensland Museum) Shaping Opinion The Queensland Museum’s partnership with Shell QGC fits a documented pattern of fossil fuel companies using cultural and educational sponsorships to influence public perception while lobbying against climate policies. Internal documents subpoenaed by a 2024 U.S. Congressional investigation into climate disinformation from Shell, BP, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute revealed how oil giants have used sponsorships to cultivate “nontraditional local allies,” ward off climate regulations, and build networks of “third-party advocates,” DeSmog reported in May this year. Green MP Berkman is concerned that political donations from fossil fuel companies could be influencing government decision-making on fossil fuel funding and donations to public institutions. “The Queensland Museums Act should ensure that this kind of partnership with fossil fuel companies doesnt happen, and it’s incumbent on any government — LNP or Labor — to make sure the Act is followed,” he said. “Yet with the LNP and Labor both taking millions of dollars in fossil fuel donations, its no surprise that the Queensland Government is unwilling to act.” Noble placed the the Queensland Museum-Shell QGC partnership within a broader pattern of fossil fuel influence in Queensland. “Queenslands media and politics are largely awash in fossil fuel influence,” she said. “We were outraged that a trusted government and educational institution was also subject to influence from polluting companies.” Tobacco-style Ban? In 2023, The Guardian Australia identified 535 similar deals between fossil fuel companies and Australian cultural institutions. Australian oil giant Woodside alone had 56 sponsorships, ranging from the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra and Western Australia Ballet, to the Surf Life Saving WA “Nippers” programme, where children as young as five years old sport the company logo on their T-shirts. Australian oil and gas company Santos sponsored a school science roadshow, while the oil giant Chevron held naming rights for the Perth City to Surf fun run. A growing number of Australian organisations are rejecting fossil fuel money. In 2023, Australian Cricket ended its partnership with the gas company Alinta Energy. In 2022, Australian Tennis ended its partnership with Santos, and in the same year the Darwin Festival and Perth Festival dropped their partnerships with Santos and Chevron respectively. Polling from the Australia Institute found 53 percent of Australians support a ban on fossil fuel sponsorships of national sporting teams, while 60 per cent liken such sponsorships to tobacco advertising. The post Exclusive: Shell Subsidiary Paid Queensland Museum More Than $10m to Shape Children’s Climate Education appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— ‘Divide and Conquer’: Inside the Oil and Gas Strategy to Thwart EU Green Laws

 

at 12/4/25 12:48pm

A public relations firm for major U.S. polluters worked to dismantle EU laws that require large corporations to make plans for cutting emissions. The PR company Teneo undertook this work on behalf of the Competitiveness Roundtable — a coalition of companies including ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Koch Inc. – according to documents uncovered by the research group SOMO and seen by DeSmog. Teneo planned to persuade leading European decision makers to side with radical right-wing groups in overturning key elements of the regulations known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).  The CSDDD, which was signed into law in May 2024, obliges large companies trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their operations and supply chains. It currently applies to 6,000 EU companies and 900 non-European companies trading inside the bloc, including U.S. firms. “Teneo’s divide and conquer strategy is nothing less than an attack on the integrity of our democratic process,” said Daniel Freund, a Member of European Parliament (MEP) for the Green group. The CSDDD has faced growing backlash over the last year from corporate lobbyists and political campaign groups. Lawmakers are expected to reach an agreement next week on whether to slash requirements from the law, including cutting the number of companies covered by the rules and watering down obligations for them to reduce emissions in line with international climate goals. SOMO’s report reveals that efforts to influence this decision have involved the Competitiveness Roundtable — a group with “close ties” to the Trump administration. As previously revealed by DeSmog, pressure groups closely associated with Trump’s ‘MAGA’ movement have worked hard to undermine the CSDDD in recent months — describing it as “the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union”.  Advised by Teneo, the Roundtable coalition includes U.S. oil and gas firms alongside chemical giant Dow and investment firm JP Morgan — the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels. In over 150 pages of documents, including strategy outlines and monthly activity updates, Teneo provided plans for the group to ensure that decision makers adopt “the most extreme position” on the reworking of the law, including deleting company requirements on “combating climate change”. The group also aimed to remove provisions that ensure companies can be sued in European courts if they break the regulations. 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); Industry efforts already appear to have borne fruit: earlier this month, lawmakers from the Parliament’s largest bloc, the European People’s Party (EPP), allied with far-right groups in calls to scrap the CSDDD’s requirement for companies to make climate transition plans. They also voted to radically cut the number of companies required to report on their environmental footprint in a move widely criticised by left-wing parties.  “We cannot allow fossil fuel lobbyists to turn the European Parliament into a playground for manufactured extremism,” Freund said. “Europeans should be alarmed that oil and gas giants are effectively outsourcing their political strategy to a firm whose business model depends on driving wedges between political groups.” Teneo and all the companies in the Competitiveness Roundtable that were named in this article were approached for comment by both SOMO and DeSmog. In a statement to SOMO, TotalEnergies said: “Our participation in the ‘Roundtable’ (…) was organized by Teneo to promote competitiveness, propose solutions to EU policymakers, and foster collaboration among stakeholders. The company’s views expressed in this forum are fully aligned with those publicly stated.” Right-Wing Alliance The CSDDD has been subject to intense corporate lobbying since it was first announced. Between 2020 and its approval in April 2024, almost 90 companies and industry bodies, including 10 energy companies, lobbied on the legislation, achieving major concessions, including the exclusion of around 80 percent of firms originally covered by the draft law. The most recent wave of lobbying — led by the Competitiveness Roundtable — followed an announcement by the European Commission in February that it would reopen discussions on the legislation as part of an ‘omnibus’ package to “simplify” multiple EU laws. Following the Commission’s announcement, the Competitiveness Roundtable met weekly to discuss its strategy. It held at least 18 meetings with policymakers, hatched plans to “engage” with media outlets such as the Financial Times and Germany’s Handelsblatt, and pushed trade associations both within and outside the EU to “take a more public stance” on the negotiations. The Roundtable’s efforts focused on convincing politicians to support weakening the legislation. In a strategy document dated July 2025, Teneo shared plans to “encourage collaboration” between two key right-wing European groups – the European People’s Party (EPP), and the more radical European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Teneo said that it would “Push the rapporteur” – EPP politician Jörgen Warborn, who is leading Parliament’s work on the file, including liaising with lawmakers and drafting amendments – “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible and for the ECR to take an active role in the compromise amendment negotiations.” ECR, which is led by Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, describes itself as centre-right but is largely comprised of far-right and ultra-nationalist parties, including those that have denied climate science. Until recently, the EPP and other centre and left-wing parties maintained a cordon sanitaire, refusing to negotiate with radical right-groups including ECR. However, the EPP has increasingly collaborated with ECR and the far-right Patriots for Europe since the parties made major gains in the EU elections in 2024 — resulting in significant wins for big polluters, including the weakening of climate laws. “The worrying thing is: we already see an increased collaboration between the conservative EPP and the right-wing extremist factions,” Freund said. “Teneo isn’t inventing that trend, it is actively exploiting and accelerating it.” This was echoed by Dieter Plehwe, a senior fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. “Corporations can now rely on the growing power of far-right representatives in the European Parliament and the Council to drive a wedge between the parties of the pro-European centre, and to undermine European regulatory power at large,” he said. “Rather than promoting competition, European deregulation appears designed to bolster the power of the largest firms across policy areas – a form of state capture dressed up as competitiveness.” Decisions on the CSDDD are expected to come to a head next week (8 December), as the EU’s three decision-making powers — the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament — conclude negotiations on the omnibus simplification package. Leveraging Trade Tensions The Competitiveness Roundtable also aimed to leverage geopolitical tensions, the documents show, particularly through its “close ties” to the Trump administration. In June 2025, Teneo shared plans to “Ramp up pressure from the U.S.”, framing the CSDDD “as a key barrier” to a free trade agreement between the U.S. and EU. It stated that it hoped “to have the EU use CS3D as a concession in negotiations on tariffs”. At the time, Trump was threatening to increase his 20 percent tariffs on most EU imports to 50 percent. The Teneo document suggested a plan to convince the EU to dilute the CSDDD in exchange for lower tariffs. In July, Teneo outlined further plans to “Keep close ties with the U.S. Mission [to the EU] to ensure that the CS3D is on top of the .. agenda” for the U.S. Trade Representative — the body responsible for the United States’ international trade agreements. Just one month later, in August 2025, the U.S. secured major concessions on the CSDDD, as part of a deal on trade and tariffs. The EU agreed to propose changes to the CSDDD, including on requirements for companies to introduce climate transition plans, in return for Trump’s commitment to freeze tariffs on the bloc. These efforts appear to have been part of the Roundtable’s strategy to “divide and conquer” EU member states, which have played a key role in the negotiations expected to end next week. Roundtable members, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, planned to “establish rapporteurships” with countries including France, Denmark, and Germany. Politico reported in June that French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz “all but kill[ed]” the CSDDD after they insisted on a major scale-back of the law. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron. DeSmog collage. Credit: Faces of the World / Flickr (Macron), Steffen Prößdorf (Merz), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Trump) At the same time, the Competitiveness Roundtable also worked to recruit other countries to its cause. It hatched plans to “engage trade attachés and embassies” in Brazil, India, and Japan among others, and “activate national governments” during key moments such as the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit, which was held in Brazil last month. The new documents offer rare insight into the tactics of the PR industry – a sector that is worth over €14 billion in the EU alone. The U.S.-based PR firm Teneo has previously represented multiple fossil fuel companies and petrostates, including Shell, Engie, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and Saudi Arabia. In 2024, DeSmog revealed that the PR firm had signed a $5 million contract with COP29 host Azerbaijan to promote it as a climate champion in the run-up to the summit, despite oil and gas contributing to more than 90 percent of the country’s exports. Two Teneo employees also sit on advisory councils for think tanks and advocacy groups in the powerful Atlas Network, a shadowy group of think tanks and corporations that has successfully pushed against climate regulation in Europe and North America.  Lack of Transparency SOMO’s findings have raised concerns about a lack of transparency among EU policymakers. The research group identified at least 18 meetings between Teneo, companies in the Competitiveness Roundtable, and MEPs or their assistants between May and September. MEPs are obliged to record all meetings with lobbyists in the EU Transparency Register – however, SOMO found that at least three meetings referenced in the internal industry documents did not appear on the register. Transparency records also show eight meetings between Teneo and MEPs that did not list lobbyists from companies including ExxonMobil, Koch Inc., and TotalEnergies, who may have been present. Oil giant Koch Inc. is the second-largest private company in the U.S. whose co-founders Charles Koch and his late brother David have piled millions of dollars into causes promoting climate disinformation across the globe. This is likely to represent only a small proportion of the total meetings held by Teneo and the Roundtable in recent months: politicians in member states (who will also get a say on whether to amend the law next week) do not have to record their meetings with lobbyists in the EU database. Teneo told SOMO it is “fully committed to transparency and adheres to the EU Code of Conduct”. The firm’s requests for meetings with politicians “clearly identified the company or companies seeking the discussion”, it said. “As noted on the Parliament’s own Transparency Register guidance, the responsibility for recording and publishing meeting information rests with MEP offices, not with external participants.” TotalEnergies also stated that it “conducts its advocacy in Brussels and in European capitals in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including EU Transparency Register obligations”. Olivier Hoedeman from lobbying watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory told DeSmog that the failure of any MEP to properly record the meetings “would be in violation with the Code of Conduct for MEPs.” He called for an investigation by the Parliament’s ethics advisory committee, adding: ”This might be part of a wider practice of hiding meetings with fossil fuel lobbyists by only mentioning the name of the lobby consultancy hired by these companies to assist them.” The post ‘Divide and Conquer’: Inside the Oil and Gas Strategy to Thwart EU Green Laws appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— ‘Utterly Abusive’: First Nations United Against Mark Carney’s Alberta Pipeline Plans

 

at 12/2/25 8:48am

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s once-vaunted climate credibility appears to be in free-fall. After eliminating the carbon tax and rolling back vehicle emissions standards, his government announced fast-track support for two liquified natural gas projects and exactly zero renewable energy developments. Carney’s latest fossil fuel photo op was with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith concerning a contentious pipeline to the British Columbia northern coast to transport what he calls “low emission” bitumen. Facilitating a vast increase in heavy oil extraction is somehow a climate win in the tortured logic of the political spin machine. If this is all political theatre to placate Alberta, the price of admission makes a Taylor Swift concert look like a bargain. Carney’s government abandoned a proposed industrial emissions cap despite oil and gas extraction accounting for 28 percent of Canada’s total emissions.  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); Major trading partners like the European Union are on track to cut their carbon output by more than 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2040. Meanwhile, Canada continues to kick the can down the road, now trotting out talking points about net-zero by 2050. Alberta is now exempt from federal clean electricity requirements, a concession demanded by Smith after her government kneecapped their once-thriving renewable energy sector. The oil tanker ban in place for decades on the perilous BC northern coast was also made expendable at the stroke of a pen, 1,500 km from Indigenous communities directly impacted by this decision made without their consultation or consent. Carney’s disrespect to coastal First Nations is particularly galling. Despite his practiced word salad about Indigenous rights and economic reconciliation, First Nations that would be devastated by a bitumen spill are united in enraged opposition to yet another oil pipeline proposal through unceded lands and waters. Some legal observers feel that Carney may be cynically setting up First Nations to take the blame (and pay the enormous legal bills) when this so-called “project without a proponent” dies in the courts. By signing this memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta for the pipeline, Carney is forcing the hand of First Nations on the BC coast who need to promptly challenge any infringement of their constitutional rights. “If I were their lawyer, Id be saying, ‘I know this is a pain in the ass. I know you dont want to spend the money on it, but my advice to you is go ahead and sue now,’” Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa told Desmog. According to Attaran, an Indigenous government would limit their  legal options if it waited to challenge specifics like potential pipeline routes. “You could sue on those things, but youll have missed the opportunity to fight the high-level decision of the MOU,” he said, “You would be limited to challenging the details, not the big picture.” Attaran believes that if First Nations are forced to kill the latest pipeline proposal in the courts that could be a political win for Carney since his government would avoid taking the fall for blocking what the oil patch wants. “I think what Carney is doing from a Liberal perspective is excellent politics, and from an Indigenous perspective, it is utterly abusive,” he said. Indigenous Equity Partner Needed Carney also assures taxpayers that this project will only proceed with a private proponent. So that means no public money will be thrown at this? Not quite. He also stresses that a bitumen pipeline would need an Indigenous equity partner to move forward. And where would First Nations borrow billions in required capital? The federal government has set aside $10 billion in loan guarantees. “I think that what we’re seeing now is the federal government and the provincial governments to a smaller degree … laundering money through indigenous people to provide fossil fuel subsidies,” Tara Marsden, Gitanyow Wilp sustainability director previously told DeSmog. The long- delayed Pathways Alliance carbon capture scheme is apparently now moving forward, with taxpayers on the hook for the lions share of the $16.5 billion price tag. This yet-to-be-built boondoggle is already impacting Indigenous rights in western Alberta where vast amounts of oil sands carbon dioxide are planned to be injected underground. Kelsey Jacko, chief of Cold Lake First Nations told the National Observer that industry and government are ploughing ahead over the objections of his community. “They’re pushing it through, ramming [it] down our throats, harder than they did before. ”  The political and reputational costs of caving to Alberta’s political blackmail are only beginning to unfold. Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault resigned in protest from Carney’s cabinet, signaling how this capitulation to the oil lobby will undermine Liberal caucus unity. BC Premier David Eby was furious to learn Ottawa was secretly negotiating with Alberta and Saskatchewan, even though his province will bear the brunt of the risks from pipeline construction across multiple mountain ranges, or the very real threat of a tanker spill in the treacherous waters of Hecate Strait. Team Canada is taking a big hit from Carney’s top-down tactics. Legal Fight Unnecessary and Expensive Quebec separatists and the ascendant Parti Québécois will delight in making hay of how the federal government bulldozed BC’s concerns in favour of pleasing the oil patch. In seeking to quell separatist sentiments in Alberta, is Ottawa creating other complications elsewhere? Carney’s stated top priority of building global trade relationships will also be undermined by an unnecessary and expensive legal fight foisted on First Nations to block a multibillion-dollar development. Canada already has a reputation as a litigious jurisdiction to build big things. Is this the best way to tell the world that Canada is open for business? Another casualty of Carney’s capitulation is evidence-based decision-making. At the earliest, pipeline construction would start in 2029 — the same year the International Energy Agency predicted global peak oil demand. Oil prices are already below $60 per barrel and are expected to plunge in coming years due to global oil glut and the accelerating energy transition in the global south. Carbon Tracker projects that oil-dependent provinces like Alberta could see bitumen revenues drop by 80 percent in 10 years. Despite years of arm twisting in the oil patch, Danielle Smith has produced no proponent willing to even suggest they are interested in bankrolling the pipeline. This pipeline will almost certainly never be built, but that’s not the point. By weaponizing grievance, Alberta and the oil patch get the emissions cap eliminated. Clean energy requirements also go away. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith gets to throw some red meat to her party’s political base. Carney rehabilitates the Liberal brand in Alberta. Everyone is a winner, except of course for aggrieved First Nations, the province of British Columbia, Canada’s reputation on emissions and investment, the stability of the climate and the virtue of rational thought.  Other than that, well done Mr. Carney. The post ‘Utterly Abusive’: First Nations United Against Mark Carney’s Alberta Pipeline Plans appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Labour Group Slams Lord Glasman Over Climate Denial Lecture

 

at 11/28/25 4:02am

An influential Labour peer has been criticised for being the star speaker at the UK’s main climate science denial group, which says carbon emissions are a “benefit to the planet”. Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of the conservative ‘Blue Labour’ faction of the Labour Party, delivered the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s (GWPF) annual lecture on Monday, a speech typically given by conservative figures and climate science deniers. Glasman has in recent weeks advised Morgan McSweeney, chief of staff to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In his GWPF lecture, Glasman reportedly called for the national grid, the UK’s electricity distribution network, to be taken over by the Ministry of Defence, called the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target a “fantasy”, and advocated new fossil fuel extraction including coal power. “It is important to remember that the UK is not America,” Paul McNamee, director of the Labour Climate and Environment Forum (LCEF), told DeSmog. “The Labour government continues to benefit from majority support for ambitious climate action. British people know that this ambition brings energy security, lower bills, a future for their grand-kids, and investment into some of the fastest growing areas of the UK economy.” McNamee added: “Lord Glasman would know this if he spent less time at Trump inaugurations and with right-wing campaign groups, and more time in the British communities he claims to speak on behalf of.” 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); According to GB News, which interviewed Glasman ahead of the lecture, the Labour peer said: “The national grid needs complete restoration and net zero is a fantasy. We need clean, abundant, cheap energy We need to intensify our nuclear and put coal back on the table as well as fossil fuels and North Sea gas.” Coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and is responsible for a third of global temperature increases. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy grew by 10 percent in 2024, employing almost a million people in full-time jobs.  Glasman was the only Labour politician to attend U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January and the peer has praised Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon as “one of the greatest politicians of our age” – appearing on his podcast. As DeSmog reported, on 16 November Glasman was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Together Declaration, an anti-Labour campaign group which has spread conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines, climate policies, and “globalist” plots for a tyrannical world government. The GWPF has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised” when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than current levels. Previous GWPF lecturers have delivered by former Conservative Brexit minister Lord David Frost – currently a director of the GWPF’s campaign arm Net Zero Watch – GWPF advisor and former Tory peer Matt Ridley, former Australian prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, and climate crisis deniers Steve Koonin and Richard Lindzen. The group is run by Conservative peer Lord Craig Mackinlay. GB News, the right-wing broadcaster that trailed Glasman’s speech, frequently attacks climate action and featured GWPF spokespeople as guests 35 times in the first half of 2024. Lord Glasman, Labour, and the GWPF have been approached for comment. The GWPF said a recording of the event was being edited ahead of being made public. ‘Blue Labour’ Peer Glasman founded ‘Blue Labour’ in 2010, a faction which urges the Labour Party to be more socially conservative on issues including immigration. Lord Glasman has received considerable media attention as a critic of the Labour government. However, he is close to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief advisor Morgan McSweeney, telling The Telegraph this week: “He’s an important figure and a patriot, and I love him.” He is also close to the new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who in the same interview he likened to Queen Elizabeth I. Despite his media footprint, Blue Labour reportedly only has around 10 MPs, out of a total of 405, amounting to two percent of the parliamentary party. Glasman has many allies on the populist right. He was the only Labour figure invited to Trump’s second inauguration, claims he is in regular touch with Vice President JD Vance, has met with radical right-wing tech founder Peter Thiel to discuss AI, and has defended Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as a buffer against the racist far-right. McNamee of LCEF said: “Lord Glasman needs to remember that his ‘beloved working class’, as he referred to in The Telegraph recently, are already seeing the impacts of being on the front line of climate change. “From more expensive food due to impacted farming harvests, evacuated care homes during extreme heat events, to the flooding in communities up and down the country affecting homes, high streets and local sports clubs, it is the poorest who feel climate impacts first and most deeply.” The post Labour Group Slams Lord Glasman Over Climate Denial Lecture appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Lessons for Climate Advocates From the Bill Gates ‘Climate Hack’

 

at 11/27/25 7:38am

Many were frustrated, justifiably, by Bill Gates’ ability to steal headlines ahead of this year’s just-concluded round of U.N. climate talks, COP30. Gates did so by telling the climate community, on his blog, what he believes is a ‘hard truth’: that we are ‘diverting resources from the most effective things that should be done to to improve life in a warming world,’ notably fighting poverty and disease, including by boosting economic growth. By focusing on limiting the rise in average global temperatures as the sole metric of success, climate advocates are missing opportunities to ‘prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.’ Gates’ October 28 post triggered a media storm over the subsequent three weeks, including throughout the two weeks of negotiations at COP30 in Brazil, which concluded on Saturday. The Guardian, Financial Times, and Time led early coverage; the Atlantic and the Nation kept it alive mid-summit; and by the final week, Foreign Policy and Le Monde were still running pieces.  But must we simply accept that a blogging billionaire can so easily steal airtime from true experts? Thankfully not.  We might even say that Gates skillfully hacked the international climate conversation, exploiting specific, correctable vulnerabilities. These stem from climate advocates hesitance to directly discuss threats posed by the crisis such as unprecedented famines and a ‘hothouse earth’ scenario, wherein runaway warming heats the planet by 4-5° C or higher, making life as we know it impossible. More open discussion of these and other threats can prevent further hacks, and does not have to overwhelm the public. As I discuss in a new report for the Climate Majority Project, candour can be combined with hopefulness by consciously building a sense of collective potential and mutual support.   To learn from the Gates incident, we must first examine his full message, briefly paraphrased below. The text in bold shows the key rhetorical strategies that Gates employed in his hack: The climate movement must get past its doomsday mindset. The truth is this — climate change is bad but with the aid of technology we will contain it to reasonable levels (less than 3° C) and adjust to its consequences. That’s our only realistic option. We need to focus on lives, not tenths of a degree. Put another way, the ‘hard truth’ that Gates wants to break to us is that our only option is the one corporations wanted all along: We can burn fossils until it stops making dollars and cents because technological breakthroughs will soon make green business profitable — and we can largely adapt to whatever damage we do.  But how was Gates able to make so much news? Here, I’ll examine the specific tendencies that Gates exploited, and how to prevent further narrative capture: What Allowed the Hack: The Use of Degrees as a Euphemism for Lives Gates was right: Climate advocates do talk about degrees of heating more than lives. The reason for this isn’t an obsession with irrelevant metrics but fear that directly talking about potential deaths will overwhelm audiences. To protect them, advocates focus on temperature targets. Thus Gates can say “Why not worry about lives instead?” and sound reasonable. The response: Discuss the human impacts of temperature rise directly, while creating the sense that rising concern will make action possible. This will allow direct communication to fuel motivation to act rather than overwhelm. Tiptoeing Around Collapse Many scientists say that even a 2° C rise could be enough to trigger a hothouse earth. A 3°C-rise may have a quite high chance of doing so. Few scientists want to guess, publicly, at the number of deaths that would result for fear of sounding ‘doomy’. The statements that researchers do venture (always in interviews, never in print) are frightening. This, by Johan Rockström, an esteemed earth scientist, is typical: “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that.” Such comments on ‘reduced carrying capacity’ — a euphemism for death and suffering on a staggering scale — still require the reader to do the final alarming calculation. Without this reticence to speak plainly about whats really at stake, anyone who suggests we should calmly accept 2-3° C of warming would sound absurd.  The response: As a 2022 paper stated, the possibility for climate-induced “worldwide societal collapse…is a dangerously underexplored topic”. An intelligent debate clearly requires open discussion of direct and indirect deaths from worst-case scenarios given 2-3° C warming. Scientists and advocates can say, immediately, that such numbers are hard to find because they’re so alarming to talk about. Gates’ hack shows they are too important not to talk about. Avoiding Adaptation Climate advocates don’t talk enough about climate adaptation, which left another opening for Gates, who publicly “explained” to the climate community that dealing with inevitable chaos must be a focus. Of course this has been known for years. The adaptation era began as soon as it became impossible to stay below 1.5° C over-heating, the point when chaotic dangerous weather begins. But most climate advocates still haven’t clearly said this. So when Gates did assert that the adaptation era is here, he could pose as a truthteller. The response: We can talk about adaptation in a way that addresses the other vulnerabilities as well. Preparing for climate chaos necessarily involves speaking in terms of lives and damage rather than degrees. Nevertheless, at the same time that we talk about climate threats, we can also consider what people can do in their communities in there and now. Recognising that we have agency to act makes discussions of the terrible harms the climate crisis will cause psychologically easier. It may even be that when more citizens (non-billionaires) consider what adapting to a 2.9° C temperature rise would actually entail, they may have a similar reaction to the Indigenous people who stormed COP30 to demand delegates took the devastation of their homelands into account. Such high heating would almost certainly mean the breakdown of the Atlantic currents that gently warm Europe, potentially plunging swathes of the continent into a semi-Siberian future. How many people want to adapt to that? Decarbonisation remains essential. The Doomsday Dismissal Gates attributed the depth of international climate concern to doomsday mindsets. Establishment messengers have often used the label doomsayers to place pessimistic opinions outside the bounds of respectability. Gates is now using this tactic on the established climate community itself. It’s easy to dismiss millions of highly concerned people by comparing them to medieval hordes who, supposedly, were frequently swept up in apocalyptic fervour. But, as I wrote last week, history shows no clear examples of this. It’s basically a myth. Humanity’s current levels of alarm about the future are anything but historically normal — or irrational.  While the doomist label has often been applied to those who warned that entrenched power was influencing political action (making it less potent) and scientific consensus (making it less concerning). their past predictions don’t sound so crazy today. Who saw the breaking of the 1.5 °C target enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement coming as early as it has? The Response: Climate advocates should recognise that doomsday dismissal is just a socially acceptable form of ‘argument by name-calling’ (ad hominem). It is actually irrational and has no place in sober discussion. A Final Lesson Its time for an open conversation about deaths and damage, especially if we take the need to provide emotional support to people who are waking up to the severity of the climate crisis seriously.  Such a frank conversation would actually give voice to the largely silent majority of people who share profound and rational concerns about the future of our climate system. This could make it clear that other options, besides what Gates proposes, are possible. In fact as the new report points out, successful responses to great threats (such as invasions) start when majorities intentionally accept ugly truth and the disturbing emotions that go with it. In doing so, they feel their power. Strategic (and deep) adaptation will only be able to save lives if we openly name the worst-case scenarios that we may have to face. Increased public understanding of these scenarios would help raise ambition by governments, companies and other actors. People can handle knowledge of threats if they feel that a credible response is possible. That — not avoidance of truth — is the best way to protect the public’s mindset. The post Lessons for Climate Advocates From the Bill Gates ‘Climate Hack’ appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— MEPs Call for Urgent Review of €1.5 Billion EU Food Scheme Pushing ‘Misleading’ Claims

 

at 11/25/25 11:00pm

EU taxpayers are funding a multi-year campaign blitz which frequently overstates the environmental benefits of eating meat and dairy while featuring bizarre and misleading claims. Since 2017, the European Commission’s Enjoy, it’s from Europe! programme has spent €1.5 billion on campaigns and events to “raise awareness of the efforts made by European farmers to produce quality products”.  Promoting everything from olive oil to prosciutto to export markets around the world, these campaigns claim to reach millions of consumers, often targeting younger generations through online advertising and social media. The scheme – which is 80 percent funded by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) scheme, with the remainder supported by industry groups – emphasises the “authenticity, safety, sustainability and quality” of EU-farmed food and drinks.  A new DeSmog investigation, however, finds that the sustainability claims of the advertised produce are often misleading or false – prompting politicians in Brussels to call for an urgent review of the scheme.  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); Nearly a third (187) of the 622 campaigns listed on the programme’s website have exclusively promoted meat and dairy products — receiving €384 million in EU funding so far. An additional 104 schemes worth more than €232 million featured meat and dairy alongside other produce.  Eighty-four of these meat and dairy campaigns, worth over €58 million, relied heavily on ‘sustainability’ to promote their produce. These explicitly cited positive environmental benefits of the products in their funding bids, but failed to clarify whether polluting intensive farming or more sustainable methods were used.  They also featured a number of outlandish claims, including those which undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus on the role intensive agriculture plays in global heating.  Let’s Talk About Pork – a social media campaign running across Spain, France and Portugal – described emissions from pork production as “absolutely fake”, while another falsely claimed that European poultry “helps preserve biodiversity”. Meanwhile a video-based campaign – which launched in October to promote European beef across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok – dubbed scientific claims about the environmental impact of livestock as “fake news”. Food systems account for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock is responsible for between 12 and 20 percent of polluting gases. Agriculture generates more than 10 percent of the EU’s entire greenhouse gas emissions.  With the programme’s budget for 2026 due to be announced in the coming weeks, politicians and experts have warned that the scheme stands in the way of the EU’s own climate policies – which include cutting agricultural emissions in line with its 2050 net zero target. Delara Burkhardt, a German member of the European Parliament with the centre-left Socialists and Democrats party, called for the Commission to “thoroughly review this program and stop the funding and promotion of misleading environmental claims”. “This is a gross mishandling of taxpayers money and actively contributes to misleading consumers,” she told DeSmog. A spokesperson for the European Research Executive Agency (REA), the body responsible for the programme, said the scheme “enables those sectors or producer groups who are investing in improving their environmental footprint to inform consumers about these actions with the overall aim to increase their competitiveness”.  “This is a driver for increased investment in environmental and, more broadly, sustainable practices,” they added.  However, Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of advocacy group International Panel of Experts on Food (IPES-Food), says the programme is in fact helping boost intensive agriculture. “The EU certainly needs to be promoting sustainably produced and healthier foods to its citizens, and supporting family farms and local food markets,” he said. “Instead it is promoting meat and dairy exports – sometimes resorting to misleading claims – in yet another bung to industrial livestock production.” Los cerdos producen muchos gases de efecto invernadero, por lo que su producción en Europa tiene un gran impacto sobre el cambio climático. Fake or real? Absolutamente FAKE. Descubre toda la verdad en https://t.co/iXn6KiqQ9G #letstalkabouteupork pic.twitter.com/jejAZz82xH— Let ́s Talk About EU Pork (@TalkAboutEuPork) September 27, 2020 A social media post from the ‘Let’s talk about pork’ campaign, which describes claims that pork production generates high volumes of greenhouse gases as ‘absolutely fake’. Credit: Let’s Talk about EU Pork / X. ‘Absolutely Fake’ The “sustainability” of European meat and dairy produce is heavily emphasised in dozens of the campaigns reviewed. Since 2021, Enjoy, it’s from Europe has ramped up its promotion of ‘greener’ produce, spending €155 million on schemes with a dedicated budget line for “sustainability promotion”. However, DeSmog found that 22 of the 84 meat and dairy campaigns citing sustainability were vague or misleading in how they referred to the sector’s environmental and climate impacts. Europe’s intensive pork sector, for example, received funding for at least 19 campaigns over the period reviewed, over half of which contained misleading environmental claims.  These included the Let’s talk about pork campaign, which claimed on videos and images shared on Facebook, X, Youtube and Instagram, as well as its campaign website, that it was “absolutely fake” to say pork generates significant greenhouse gas emissions or has a major impact on climate change.  However, the data used by Interporc, Spain’s primary pork industry lobby group running the campaign, only accounted for on-farm emissions and excluded other sources such as feed production – the primary source of emissions in the industry, making up to 60 percent of the total.The campaign also claimed that pork’s emissions per kilo had declined in Spain between 1990 and 2016. In fact, total methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the sector in Spain have increased since 2012, even when excluding emissions related to feed production. Pork accounts for 14 percent of global livestock emissions when factoring in the impact of feed. A spokesperson for Inteporc defended its use of figures, saying they were based on “official and publicly available data”. “These measurements and data evolve over time, as the pork sector is highly committed to continuous improvement in its environmental sustainability practices,” they told DeSmog, “but the source of the data remains constant.” Screenshots from a document produced for the ‘Sustainable dairy in Europe’ campaign. Credit: EMF, DCNI, VLAM, CNIEL, NDC, DDB, NZO. ‘Preserving Biodiversity’ Campaigns frequently stressed the benefits of dairy without drawing attention to any of the issues related to intensive farming, or the latest scientific advice on dietary requirements. Dairy production has steadily increased in Europe in recent decades. Around 80 percent of Europe’s milk is now produced through intensive farming, which has been linked to loss of wildlife, soil and water pollution, and poor animal welfare. “Every time you consume three dairy products a day, you are contributing to making the world a more sustainable place,” reads the campaign website run by Spain’s main dairy industry group InLac, which between 2022 and 2028 won €3.5 million to promote “sustainability friendly” dairy in Spain and Belgium. The website also claims that the dairy sector “contributes to preserving biodiversity”. The landmark EAT-Lancet report, published last month by over 70 leading scientists, recommends a plant-rich, flexible diet with an average of just one serving of milk, yoghurt or cheese portions a day. The report also notes that the diets of the richest 30 percent of the global population contributes to more than 70 percent of the environmental pressures from food systems. Climate impacts from dairy farming are also considerable. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas released during livestock digestion, mostly from dairy cows, accounts for nearly half of all agricultural emissions.  Despite these concerns, more than 20 campaigns for non-organic dairy products reviewed by DeSmog presented the sector as environmentally friendly. At least five specifically claimed that the industry protects biodiversity or fights climate change, often by highlighting the role of grazing in storing carbon dioxide in the soil, a process known as carbon sequestration. The effectiveness of this practice has been heavily disputed. A 2023 paper in Nature Communications concluded that soil carbon gains are time-limited and that relying on grassland sequestration to offset the warming from current cattle systems is “not feasible”. Moreover, studies show grazing land in Europe has shrunk by up to 20 percent over the past decade, especially in Central Europe. A screenshot from the campaign website Cuenta con los lácteos europeos (‘Count on European dairy products’.) Credit: InLac. Industry-dominated Trade organisations and industry groups from a handful of EU countries dominated successful funding bids, DeSmog found. In Italy, these groups have secured more than €175 million for 75 campaigns promoting meat and dairy, followed closely by France with 73 worth €173 million, and Spain with €114 million for 47 campaigns, mostly for pork marketing.  The organisations applying to the programme vary in scope: some represent a single region or product, while others cover entire sectors such as dairy across Europe.  “A lot of companies will have memberships within these lobby groups,” said Caitlin Smith, senior campaigner at advocacy group Changing Markets Foundation. “They claim that theyre representative of farmers in the EU. And actually, when you ask smaller farmers and some younger farmers, they don’t feel represented.”  Several trade groups appear repeatedly across multiple funding bids. These include the European Milk Forum (EMF), a France-based umbrella group for the dairy sector, which has received funding for at least four campaigns to promote the sustainability of dairy, in partnership with members in Ireland, Belgium and Denmark.  Sustainable dairy in Europe, a 2020 campaign to promote the sector across six member states, claimed that the industry had taken action to tackle climate change, by cutting its emissions by 11 percent over the past decade.  However, the FAO report from which that figure was drawn tells a different story: while greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of milk fell by nearly 11 percent between 2005 and 2015, total emissions rose by 18 percent as milk production increased by about 30 percent. In the meat sector, a prominent funding recipient is Italy’s Organizzazione di Produttori Allevatori di Suini (Opas Coop – Pig Breeders Product Organization) and its Eat and Think Pink campaign.  Since 2020, the group has secured four rounds of EU funding worth nearly €8 million to promote pork products in Japan, South Korea, China, Canada and the UK. Among its claims, the group says it has eliminated 2,737 tonnes of CO2 emissions by installing a high-efficiency gas cogeneration plant and offsetting additional emissions through the planting of more than 500 trees, in agreement with the municipality of Carpi.  According to DeSmog’s calculations, that would offset the emissions from roughly 5,000 pigs – a fraction of the 22,000 pigs processed by Opas every week. Opas did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Credit: ‘Think Milk, Taste Europe, Be Smart’ campaign website. Limited Protection A number of the campaigns reviewed by DeSmog explicitly set out to influence the dietary choices of young consumers and to buck the trend in decreased consumption of meat and dairy. For example, the €2 million Think Milk, Taste Europe, Be Smart campaign across Italy and Germany intended “to involve communicators, influencers, and food bloggers”, as well as targeting “the consumer, who is above all younger (millennials and gen x), with the aim of changing his perception of dairy products”. “The meat and dairy industry is scared of this kind of more knowledgeable younger generation, who really care about not only the climate, but also their health,” says Caitlin Smith of Changing Markets. “That’s really clear in the tactics that they use.” Currently, consumers have limited protection against the marketing practices used in campaigns funded by the programme. The EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) defines a misleading action as a commercial practice that “contains false information and is therefore untruthful or in any way, including overall presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer, even if the information is factually correct.”  Yet this directive applies only to traders — those directly involved in the commercial exchange, such as companies or consumers — and not to industry lobbies that promote their own products. The same limitation applies to the more recent Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition.  The European Commission proposed the Green Claims Directive in 2023 to address misleading sustainability claims. This legislation aims to ensure that green claims are reliable, comparable, and verifiable across the EU, thereby protecting consumers against greenwashing.  The proposal explicitly cites intensive agriculture as a potential example of misleading marketing: “For example, a claim on positive impacts from efficient use of resources in intensive agricultural practices may mislead consumers due to trade-offs linked to impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems or animal welfare,” the directive warns.  Negotiations on the law stalled last June, after the European Commission warned it would withdraw the proposal due to insufficient support from member states. For MEP Delara Burkhardt, the campaigns in Enjoy, It’s from Europe run counter to the aims laid out in the directive. “By supporting these campaigns, the Commission does not live up to its own standards,” Burkhardt, a rapporteur on the directive, told DeSmog.“In its proposal, the Commission itself stressed that in order to make a green claim, a product’s entire life cycle and trade-offs with other environmental objectives on biodiversity, ecosystems and animal welfare need to be considered.” A screenshot from The special mission of beef, a video produced as part of a multimedia campaign to promote beef in Europe. Credit: Sustainable Beef. ‘Sustainable’ Exports A central goal of Enjoy, it’s from Europe is to boost exports of EU agricultural products, with the majority of campaigns boasting of the superiority of European produce.  In the latest round of funding for campaigns starting in 2026, €63.4 million is earmarked for promotions in non-EU countries, compared to €58.6 million for the EU market. Priority markets include China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and North America, while the UK remains the EU’s largest single agri-food export market.  Most of the campaigns aimed at export markets highlight food safety and traceability as the main assets of the European production model, though many also weave in sustainability claims.  These include two launched in 2022 by Irish food board Bord Bia, worth a combined €8 million, which promoted “Ireland’s capability as a supplier of high-quality, sustainably produced beef, lamb and dairy” in markets across Japan and Southeast Asia. As part of this, a ministerial-led trade mission featured an Irish ‘beef taste test project’ where “Japanese consumer[s] uncover perception and enjoyment of grass fed Irish beef”. Climate modelling finds that pastured beef production using fertiliser and feed inputs, as is typical of Irish suckler farming, is the least climate efficient beef system even compared to Brazilian pastured beef. In 2025, the European Commission funded the campaigns European Pork for a Greener World and Sustainable Beef — the latter launched on World Environment Day — both designed to showcase livestock farming as a solution to climate and environmental challenges. Marco Springmann, senior researcher on environment and health at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, says farms in Europe are typically intensive. This can reduce their [carbon] footprint because land-use change is lower, he says, “but that doesnt suddenly make them sustainable”. “Even if emissions were halved (compared to production in other countries), it is still significantly higher than any plant-based food,” he told DeSmog. “And if suddenly everybody ate European beef or pork or dairy, there wouldn’t be enough for it to make a meaningful and holistic solution to the health and environmental challenges we have regarding the food system.” In response to DeSmog’s investigation, Anja Hazekamp, who represents the Dutch Party for the Animals in the European Parliament, has submitted a written question to the Commission, asking why the EU is funding the marketing of red and processed meat when these products have been “scientifically classified as carcinogenic”.  “In this era where we are constantly told to eat unhealthy things by private marketing campaigns, we need the EU to focus its publicly-funded campaigns on educating people to make better choices,” Hazekamp told DeSmog. “The food environment is already very negative in Europe and the European Commission should take its responsibility to protect citizens, animals and our environment seriously.” A version of this article also appeared on EUObserver. The post MEPs Call for Urgent Review of €1.5 Billion EU Food Scheme Pushing Misleading Claims appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— As Mark Carney Fast-tracks Canadian LNG Projects, First Nations Face Hidden Financial Traps

 

at 11/24/25 10:00am

A 2015 report by the Canadian pro-development group Resource Works cynically telegraphed the growing recognition by industry a decade ago that major projects like liquified natural gas (LNG) need First Nations partners to accelerate regulatory approvals in British Columbia. “The value the band will bring to the table by getting them to support you will save you millions in the regulatory process, both in the beginning and on the ongoing operation, because you’re always needing a permit to do something,” Roger Harris, the former British Columbia Minister of Forests, stated in the report about the advantage to extractive industries to have Indigenous partners to apparently ward off regulatory oversight. “Having these guys as partners makes the government just go away.” Fast forward 10 years and numerous LNG projects now have prominent Indigenous partners, at least on paper, who are also potentially on the hook for financial losses should those projects fail. A recent report from the Yellowhead Institute highlights the economic risks to First Nations equity investors from cost overruns, limitations of government loan guarantees, and shifting LNG economics. A recent example is the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal and the associated 900 kilometer Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline that will be fast-tracked by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, justified in part by the equity participation by the First Nation Nisga’a Lisims Government. 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 truth behind the public pronouncements of Indigenous LNG ownership is considerably less clear. Specific First Nations equity stakes in these projects are not typically publicly available information, and the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal portion of the project is currently wholly owned by Texas-based Western LNG. “I think this is all word play,” Tara Marsden, Gitanyow Wilp sustainability director told DeSmog. “You know, they use the term equity… but what it really is is debt. And it’s taking on debt for nations who are already extremely economically vulnerable.” Marsden questions the current enthusiasm of provincial and federal governments for First Nations to invest in LNG projects. “It really appears like some form of predatory lending, where you have nations who are not experienced in this industry, who may have some advisors, but what is their interest in this?” The Majority Agreed The Nisga’a Lisims Government unsurprisingly has a different perspective. Their CEO Andy Robinson recently questioned the motives of some opposed to the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal, telling the audience at an annual conference founded by Resource Works, “I want to work for an NGO one day and be paid to walk around on the roads waving the flag and getting $80,000 a year from some American.” Robinson highlighted a process of local meetings within the Nisga’a Nation as a rationale for moving forward with the LNG project, while conceding that not everyone was supportive. “Who approved this? All 8,000 people. Not all of them agreed with it, but the majority did,” he said. The federal government has been encouraging First Nations investment in fossil fuel projects through a $10 billion Indigenous loan program, which concerns Marsden. “What Ive noticed with the Indigenous loan guarantee program is that it is geared more towards more controversial projects in the energy sector, more fossil fuel-type projects and where there is opposition [from other First Nations],” she told DeSmog.  She sees this “a way of cementing Indigenous consent” of some First Nations while ignoring opposition of others. For example, the Ksi Lisims project has been challenged in court by the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, as well as the Lax Kw’alaams, Metlakatla ,and Haida Nations.  “I think if government wants to go and have big press conferences and say that theyre nation building, they need to be transparent about what those partnerships actually are and who has been involved on behalf of their nations,” said Marsden, citing the lack of clarity on specific Indigenous ownership of LNG projects like Ksi Lisims.  “How much of this is being disclosed? If its not being transparently transacted, then how safe does the federal government feel in backstopping this with taxpayer dollars?”  Indigenous Nations Have Equity Ownership Risks Despite this lack of transparency, Indigenous equity partners on LNG projects may be exposed to financial risks from debt-servicing payments, cashflow required for investor dividends, or dealing with default if the project is abandoned.  A worrying sign flagged by the Yellowhead report is the lack of long-term shipping agreements for BC LNG developments such as Ksi Lisims, meaning many of these projects rely instead on volatile spot pricing. Creditors typically demand higher interest rates in these cases due to increased economic risks.  Other unknowns include long-term global demand, regulatory changes in Canada or of overseas customers, and the potential need to refinance given that LNG megaprojects often vastly exceed their original estimates. The PRGT was originally budgeted at $5 billion in 2014 has since ballooned to $12 billion. The associated Ksi Lisims LNG marine terminal is estimated to cost an additional $10 billion; however, some observers believe it will ultimately cost much more. The mid-range estimate from the International Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis for the terminal is $26 billion, meaning the entire project could cost an eye-watering $38 billion. TC Energy’s Coastal Gaslink pipeline in British Columbia likewise exceeded original estimates by 130 percent. Cost overruns result in higher pipeline tolls to cover capital expenses, further undermining long-term economics. Nations Could Be Responsible for Billions How exposed are First Nations to financial risks from declining LNG economics? The Yellowhead report assumed a scenario where the Nisga’a Lisims Government and Western LNG each share 50 percent ownership of the PRGT project.  If cost overruns are comparable to the Trans Mountain pipeline project, PRGT could cost up to $30 billion. With 80 percent typically budgeted in repayable loans, the Nisga’a Lisims government would need to provide $3 billion in equity financing. If the PRGT failed due to a global LNG glut or pipeline tolls unable to cover capital costs, the stranded Nisga’a Lisims equity stake could wipe out 30 percent of the $10 billion federal Indigenous loan guarantee program. According to the Yellowhead Institute report, “depending on the risk protections in the partnership agreement, Nisga’a Nation could be left with lost revenue, stranded infrastructure, and land remediation costs.” These economic risks are real according to a recent analysis by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warning of a looming global glut of LNG. “An oversupply of LNG is widely expected, potentially as early as next year, with a massive wave of new projects coming online around the world, especially in the U.S. and Qatar,” IISD policy advisor Steven Haig told DeSmog. “Meanwhile, many importing countries are shifting away from expensive, imported LNG and towards cheaper, more reliable renewables,” he said. “So when it comes to the economic benefits of LNG, Canada is late to the party, and the party’s almost over.” The Carney government is touting the billions in taxpayer dollars it’s making available for First Nations to borrow for LNG investments as economic reconciliation. Marsden has a different view. “I think that what were seeing now is the federal government and the provincial governments to a smaller degree … laundering money through indigenous people to provide fossil fuel subsidies.” Governments and industrial projects come and go. The Yellowhead report notes that certain things seem to stay the same. “Colonialism has always been about the exploitation of lands and extraction of their resources,” the report states. “Indigenous dispossession is required for colonial wealth generation expansion, though the strategies may change through time.”  Drew Harris of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en suggests it is “the same old colonization tactics.” The post As Mark Carney Fast-tracks Canadian LNG Projects, First Nations Face Hidden Financial Traps appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Toby Young to Address Orbán-Backed Group on UK ‘Censorship’

 

at 11/24/25 8:38am

Conservative peer and right-wing commentator Toby Young is due to deliver a talk tomorrow (25 November) at the in-house think tank of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. Young is being interviewed by Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s “Center for Journalism” in Budapest, Hungary, about censorship in the UK. Entitled “when a tweet can land you in jail”, the event will discuss how people have been arrested in Britain for posting on social media. Young is covering this topic despite Orbán’s record of censorship and repression. Since he returned to power in 2010, the Hungarian prime minister has rewritten the country’s constitution, seized control of its media and judiciary, and imposed sweeping laws designed to crack down on the rights of LGBT people, women and girls, asylum seekers, and civil society groups. Orbán’s regime has also not been opposed to arresting people for their social media posts. In 2020, a new law passed by Orbán and his Fidesz government resulted in dozens of people being investigated and detained for allegedly scaremongering on social media about the Covid-19 pandemic. “Toby Young’s decision to speak at MCC’s ‘Center for Journalism’ about censorship in the UK is deeply misguided and irresponsible,” said Olivier Hoedeman of the anti-corruption campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory. “MCC is a propaganda mouthpiece of Viktor Orbáns authoritarian regime, which has for almost 15 years been cracking down on the free press, exercising censorship towards journalists that report critically on the regime. “The timing of Youngs appearance at MCC couldnt be worse – Orbán’s party is currently pushing through a new Putin-inspired foreign agents law that would deal a final blow to freedom of expression, independent journalism and civil society.” 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); MCC is bankrolled by the Hungarian government and is seen as an instrument of Orbán’s regime. The group received more than $1.3 billion in Hungarian state funding in 2020, largely via a 10 percent stake in the country’s national oil company MOL. MCC, which has a Brussels arm, also received a 10 percent stake in the pharmaceutical firm Gedeon Richter, plus $462 million (€402 million) in cash, and $9 million (€7.8 million) in property. In 2023, MCC earned €50 million in dividends from MOL, a firm that has in recent years received 65 percent of its oil from Russia, according to an investigation by German broadcaster ZDF. MCC Brussels has called on the EU to “ditch the net zero madness” and stated that one of its key campaigning objectives in 2025 has been to help create “a Europe unshackled from environmentalism”. MCC has been working with the Heritage Foundation, the radical right-wing U.S. group that authored the Project 2025 blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term, to disseminate its proposals for how to dismantle the European Union. Viktor Orbán’s political director Balázs Orbán is the chair of MCC. Young, who became a Member of the House of Lords in January, is a prominent opponent of climate action, and has regularly promoted the idea that carbon dioxide does not contribute to climate change but instead is a benefit to the planet. GB News presenter Charlie Peters previously spoke at an MCC Center for Journalism event on 24 September. Young and MCC were approached for comment. Reform and Hungary The British right – in particular those associated with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – are developing ever-closer ties to MCC and Orbán’s regime. Leading this mission has been anti-migration commentator Matthew Goodwin, the newly-appointed honorary president of Reform’s student wing. Goodwin was until recently an MCC “visiting fellow” and has spoken at its last two summer festivals. He’s also due to speak at MCC Brussels’ “Battle for the Soul of Europe” conference in early December. Goodwin, who’s a GB News presenter and a visiting professor at the private University of Buckingham, is a vocal admirer of Orbán’s government. In an interview with Mandiner – a pro-Orbán publication – in August 2024, Goodwin claimed that “The British elite often portrays Hungary as a country in violation of EU laws, regulations and standards. But I think their country is just resisting the pressure to impose a liberal agenda represented by a narrow minority of Western countries.” He went on to praise Orbán’s regime for “fighting” the supposed liberal elite on issues such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. Hungary’s approach to the war has seen it attempt to systematically block and delay EU military aid packages, and 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.” GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin. Credit: GB News / YouTube Goodwin has also recently appeared at numerous other events connected to the Hungarian government – including speaking at the Roger Scruton Symposium at the Hungarian Embassy in London alongside MCC Brussels executive director Frank Furedi in October, and at the Budapest Global Dialogue co-hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation in June. The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs is funded by the government and speakers included Balázs Orbán, several Hungarian government ministers and advisors, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, as well as representatives from MCC, the Danube Institute, and the Prosperity Institute (formerly known as the Legatum Institute). The University of Buckingham runs a partnership with MCC whereby students attending MCC training programmes are allowed to study at the British university. Goodwin’s sympathy for Hungary also reflects the views of new Reform senior advisor James Orr, who has praised Orbán’s approach to the Ukraine war. At this year’s MCC summer festival, Orr lauded Hungary’s government – describing it as a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage”. He has also claimed that “a lot more people have got into trouble for free speech offences in the UK than in Putin’s Russia” – a statement not supported by credible evidence. In addition, during last year’s general election campaign, Reform employed the editor of a publication that has received funding from Orbán’s regime. Official records show that Reform paid £5,100 to Mick Hume for 17 days of “communications work” from 13 June to 4 July 2024. Hume is the editor-in-chief of the European Conservative, which has received funding from the Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLA), a non-profit group that channels money from the Hungarian government. Hume is also an MCC visiting fellow. Goodwin, Hume, and the European Conservative were approached for comment. Orbán’s Repression 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”. Fidesz now controls 80 percent of the country’s media, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports that “independent and investigative journalists face major obstacles in their work, including surveillance, threats, limited or no access to decision makers and public information and smear campaigns against them in pro-government media.” After winning the country’s 2010 election, Fidesz fired more than 1,600 staff at the public broadcaster MTVA, replacing them with “government talking heads”, according to HRW. A version of this article was published by The New World Orbán’s administration has also attacked the rights of minority groups. 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 also 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. Orbán has also been accused of packing the legal system with judges favourable to the regime after rewriting the constitution, after appointing a family friend to oversee the judiciary. This article was produced with the support of the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF). The sole responsibility for any content supported by the EMIF lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute. The post Toby Young to Address Orbán-Backed Group on UK ‘Censorship’ appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Pesticide Industry ‘Hijacked’ Climate Stage at COP30, Campaigners Say

 

at 11/21/25 5:13pm

Syngenta and other pesticide companies used the COP30 climate conference in Brazil to promote programmes to recover damaged pastureland that campaigners fear will drive increased use of toxic chemicals. Trade groups hosted multiple events to promote a technique known as ‘degraded pasture recovery’, in which land that has been damaged by overgrazing or other forms of poor management is converted to grow soy, sugarcane, corn, or other crops.  Brazil says the approach will help reduce pressure on forests by opening up fresh tracts of arable land. The country has set a target to convert 40 million hectares of damaged pasture into production zones for food crops and biofuels over the next decade — an area almost twice the size of the UK. But small-scale farmers and environmental groups warned that expanding intensive agriculture in the programme areas would lead to a surge in chemical use, which is already causing severe  pollution in Brazil, the world’s largest pesticide market.  “In rural communities, especially peasant, Indigenous, quilombola, and riverine communities, the effects [of pesticides] are devastating,” Gerson Barbossa, a Brazilian grower and representative of small-holder farm union La Via Campesina, told DeSmog. “There is a clear attempt to hijack the climate debate to expand input markets.” Pesticide use is global driver of biodiversity destruction, including bird and bee deaths, and Barbossa cited these and other impacts, including links to cancer and neurological problems. Studies have linked pesticides used in expanding soy production — one of the crops commonly included in degraded pasture recovery programmes — to increases in childhood leukemia in Brazil. Syngenta’s Plan Swiss multinational Syngenta, the world’s largest pesticide company, was among the most vocal proponents of degraded pasture recovery at COP30 through its flagship Reverte programme, which the company says has so far enlisted 400 farms in Brazil. Branding Reverte as its largest “sustainability initiative” worldwide, Syngenta aims to apply the programme to an area equivalent to the size of Jamaica by 2030 and in July announced plans to expand into Paraguay. Under the initiative, Brazilian farmers can apply for low-interest loans from Itaú Unibanco, Brazil’s largest bank, in return for adopting a range of farming practices designed to convert pastureland, including the use of Syngenta’s digital technologies and pesticides. Farmers are supposed to refrain from clearing trees under the programme’s “zero deforestation” goal.  Itaú Unibanco said the programme could promote “more efficient and responsible” farming practices. Environmental campaigners and smallholder farmers at COP30, however, remained sceptical — warning that linking cheap finance to programmes run by the pesticide sector will give the industry leverage over farmers.  “There are plenty of ways to manage pests, weeds and diseases on a farm, but any advice from a pesticide company is going to propose using more pesticides,” said Devlin Kuyek from Grain, a non-profit that works with farmers and campaigners worldwide. “Credit is being used to expand markets for seed, pesticide and fertiliser companies and locking farmers into use of their products.” Big Promises  Syngenta promoted its Reverte programme as a climate solution at multiple panels across official COP venues, including the Blue Zone where official negotiations took place.   “We’re increasing carbon in the soil, and we’re improving rural prosperity,” Gabriel Moura, Syngenta’s sustainability coordinator, told a November 13 panel in the COP30 Agrizone, an area dedicated to farming at the summit, which is co-sponsored by companies including pesticide maker Bayer. While soils can capture significant amounts of carbon, studies have shown that pesticide use poses a major threat to organisms critical to healthy soil and soil carbon sequestration. Speaking on a later panel alongside Itaú Unibanco about the Reverte programme on November 15, Claudia Veiga Jardim, senior sustainability manager for Syngenta, said that pesticide use was part of the solution. “The best yield can come from using inputs correctly,” she said.  Gabriel Moura (L), Syngentas sustainability coordinator, speaks on a panel at the Agrizone at COP30. (Credit: Clare Carlile) In response to questions from DeSmog, a Syngenta spokesperson said that approved practices under the programme could include the use of fertilizers, crop rotation, no-till farming and “crop protection technologies” — an industry euphemism for pesticides. “When using [our] company’s technologies, a unique protocol is created to restore the land and keep the soil healthy,” the spokesperson said. “The farmer makes the decisions — including which seeds, inputs, and farming practices to adopt.” Eliseo Rusol Jr, a researcher from Philippines-based sustainable farming network the Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development, or MASIPAG, said it was a “great irony” for Syngenta to position itself as a champion of sustainability.  “They are part of a very harmful system that accelerates climate crisis, because their type of ‘sustainable agriculture’ is still dependent on chemical inputs and harmful herbicides,” he said.  Nearly all chemical pesticides are made from fossil fuels.  Brazilian Approach As the pesticide sector pushed to expand the market for its products at COP30, Brazil was also promoting its own Caminho Verde pasture recovery programme. The government raised an estimated 30 billion reals ($5.6 billion) in an August auction to fund the recovery of 1.4 million hectares of degraded pastureland under the scheme. The government says that projects must meet strict environmental standards, including soil recovery, and says they could allow the country to nearly double its food production area without further deforestation. But some activists warn the programme — like its corporate-led cousins — could lead to further expansion of polluting agribusiness. The government acknowledges that Caminho Verde is projected to increase agrochemical use, with Jose Carlos Polidoro, advisor to the Executive Secretariat of the Ministry of Agriculture telling a public hearing on domestic fertilizer production held in Brazil’s congress in October: “This programme could increase fertilizer demand by 10 million tonnes by 2035.”  Almost three-quarters of the areas analyzed in a previous Brazilian scheme to rehabilitate damaged pastures remained unchanged four years after receiving support, according to a 2024 study by the Climate Policy Initiative non-profit.  Additional reporting by Hazel Healy The post Pesticide Industry Hijacked Climate Stage at COP30, Campaigners Say appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Exclusive: COP30 PR Agency Edelman Lobbied Presidency to Favour Fossil Fuel Client

 

at 11/21/25 6:00am

This story was co-published with Intercept Brasil. Public relations giant Edelman lobbied the Brazilian hosts of the COP30 climate summit to choose one of its oil and gas clients to help power the conference, even as it was gearing up to serve as an adviser at the talks aimed at curbing the use of fossil fuels, documents show. The New York-based firm worked to set up meetings with the COP30 team about “participation opportunities” for Brazilian fuel distributor Vibra Energia over a period of at least 12 months before the talks, according to notes and emails retrieved via freedom of information requests filed by Unearthed and shared with DeSmog. During this time, Edelman also successfully lobbied the Brazilian hosts to award it the contract to provide public relations support for COP30, and began preparatory work on the project, according to the documents. The findings have sparked fresh concerns over possible conflicts of interest at Edelman, the world’s largest PR company by revenue, between its role in supporting climate diplomacy and its lobbying on behalf of fossil fuel clients. A fuel tanker from Vibra Energias Belém depot parked by diesel power generators for the COP30 climate summit venue. (Credit: TJ Jordan) “These emails show that Edelmans real purpose at COP30 is to promote fossil fuels, not climate action,” said Duncan Meisel, head of campaign group Clean Creatives. “This is an agency that is far behind the times on the energy transition and seems willing to pull the global climate agenda backwards to suit them.” Environmental organisations, climate scientists, and Indigenous groups had already been urging Brazil to drop Edelman from its role handling media relations at COP30, taking place in the Amazonian city of Belém, due to the firms decades-long history of representing major greenhouse gas polluters such as Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. Negotiators at the annual conference — scheduled to conclude on Friday — are attempting to agree on steps to slow climate breakdown, which is primarily driven by burning fossil fuels. More than 80 countries are pushing for an agreement to begin work on a roadmap to transition the world away from oil, gas, and coal as a key outcome of the summit, but they are facing opposition from major fossil fuel-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia. Based in Rio de Janeiro, and a former subsidiary of Brazil’s national oil and gas company Petrobras, Vibra Energia is Brazil’s largest oil and gas distributor. Its network of 8,000 gas stations and fuel processing operations generated net revenues of $1.2 billion in 2024. Communication Services Edelman’s $835,000 contract with the COP30 team began on July 14, according to a standard disclosure document filed with the United States Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, and first reported by Climate Home News. However, Edelman had informed the Brazilian finance ministry four months earlier — in a meeting on March 12 — that it had already been hired to support the government on COP30. Edelman “reported that they had been hired to provide communication services to the COP30 Presidency and sought input from the Ministry of Finance,” according to a summary of the meeting shared by the ministry in response to a freedom of information request. This suggests Edelman had been working on COP30 in some capacity for at least a month when its Brasilia-based oil and gas specialist, Janaína Arteaga, attended a meeting on April 16 between Vibra Energia and officials from Brazil’s Special Secretariat for COP30 (SECOP) — created to help stage the two-week negotiations — as recorded in emails and public ministry records. When asked about the contents of the March 12 meeting with the Brazilian finance ministry, Edelman said the meeting “was not requested to discuss COP30 but to learn about the Ecological Transformation Plan, as indicated in the meeting request.” In response to detailed questions about its lobbying on behalf of Vibra Energia, Edelman said only that its contract with the company ended in May 2025 and its contract with COP30 started in July 2025. Former Edelman employees said it is common practice for agencies to begin working on prestigious, time-sensitive projects before all the paperwork is finalised. “I’ve often worked on projects before scopes [of work] have been formally signed,” said one former Edelman executive, who declined to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “That’s due to the quick-paced nature of our projects and with, what I assume to be, verbal confirmation and existing client relationships securing the project despite the delay in pen hitting the paper.” Fuel tankers at Vibra Energias depot in Belém, Brazil. (Credit: TJ Jordan) When New York-based public relations agency Teneo supported COP29, held in Azerbaijan last year, the contract included backdated payments for work done several months before the agreement was officially signed, according to records the company filed with the U.S. government. Members of Edelman’s COP30 team have experience working on reputation management projects for oil companies including Shell, Chevron, and Brazil’s national oil and gas company Petrobras, according to an analysis of official Edelman filings with the U.S. government, as well as Edelman employee profiles on both LinkedIn and the firm’s website. One team member worked on a lobbying campaign for a soy trade group trying to quash laws protecting the Amazon from deforestation. Vibra Energia — whose contract with Edelman ended in May — said it “has no commercial relationship with Edelman and participated in meetings with SECOP, as did other industry players present at COP30.” A spokesperson for the COP30 Presidency said: “The contract with Edelman began in July 2025 and therefore does not overlap with the meeting solicitations mentioned. Edelman was selected through a rigorous and transparent international bidding process in full compliance with U.N. procurement rules, based solely on the strength of its technical and financial proposal.” The United Nations Development Programme, which handled the selection process, said that its “procurement processes were strictly followed and no assurances were given to applicants during the process.” Months of Lobbying Edelman’s Arteaga first contacted SECOP on behalf of Vibra Energia in April 2024, writing that “Vibra is interested in participating in the discussions and realization of COP30” and “would like to understand the best way to do so,” according to the emails. Arteaga, who works for Edelman’s Brazilian branch, managed to arrange two meetings between Vibra Energia and SECOP in the subsequent year, according to emails and meeting notes. Meanwhile, Edelman pressed ahead with its campaign to win the contract to help stage COP30, touting its previous experience as an adviser to COP28, held in Dubai in 2023. Edelman executives twice met with SECOP in July 2024 “to present [Edelman’s] expertise in major international events, such as COP,” with attendees including three of Arteaga’s colleagues at Edelman Brazil, emails and government transparency records show. 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); By the time Arteaga helped Vibra Energia set up a second meeting with SECOP in April 2025, Edelman had already told the Brazilian finance ministry a month earlier — on March 12 — that it had been hired to provide communications services to COP30. In an agenda for the April 2025 meeting between Vibra Energia and SECOP, published by the Brazilian government under transparency laws, Arteaga is described as: “Consultant specializing in O&G [oil and gas] — Edelman, representing Vibra Energia.” Seven Vibra Energia executives subsequently met with the COP30 team on July 22 to discuss “fuel at COP30,” this time without Arteaga, according to meeting agendas published by the Brazilian government. Attempts to contact Arteaga via LinkedIn were routed to Edelman’s press office. Although Edelman said its contract with Vibra Energia ended in May, public records show that Arteaga also attended a meeting unrelated to COP30 with Vibra Energia and Brazil’s oil, gas, and biofuels agency on June 2. Edelman did not respond to questions about this meeting. Vibra Energia in Belém The impact of Edelman’s efforts to win Vibra Energia a share of the work supplying fuel to the COP30 venue — where diesel generators have been powering the air conditioning units blasting cold air in a constant battle with the sweltering Amazonian heat — was unclear. The spokesperson for the COP30 Presidency said Petrobras is the sole official fuel supplier at COP30, and that the Presidency does not have any contractual relationship with Vibra Energia. However, workers at Vibra Energia’s depot in Belém — located about three miles from the COP30 conference centre — and staff operating the venue’s diesel generators said that Vibra Energia was transporting and handling fuel for the event on behalf of Petrobras. Petrobras said it is “cooperating by providing diesel with renewable content for COP30,” but did not respond to questions about whether it had any contractual relationship with Vibra Energia for COP30. Diesel fuel-powered electricity generators at the COP30 venue in Belém, Brazil. (Credit: TJ Jordan) Vibra Energia has dozens of live contracts with Petrobras, including a long-term contract to handle the “S10” diesel Petrobras says it is providing for the event, according to information published under Brazil’s transparency laws for state-owned companies. The Brazilian government invited an executive from Vibra Energia’s renewables division Comerc Energia to the conference as a guest, according to the U.N.’s official COP30 delegates list. COP30 Executive Director Ana Toni is a former advisor to Vibra Energia. Vibra Energia, meanwhile, has invested in making itself visible at COP30. The company is sponsoring an event space near the Belém docks called Casa Brasil, where it is promoting its campaign to prevent sexual violence. Vibra Energia has also sponsored individual events in other spaces on topics such as “low-carbon solutions” alongside fossil majors such as ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Equinor. The company sells a line of petrol it describes as the world’s “first carbon neutral gasoline,” claiming that the emissions created by burning the fuel are offset by the company’s investments in forest preservation programmes. Two Vibra Energia executives are part of the COP30 delegation from the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development, a lobby group whose members include major fossil fuel and agribusiness companies, according to the delegates list. Profit and Access Addressing world leaders gathered at a pre-COP30 plenary in Belém on November 6, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “corporations are making record profits from climate devastation — with billions spent on lobbying, deceiving the public and obstructing progress.” The remarks echoed comments Guterres made in June 2024, when he said advertising and PR agencies should drop their fossil fuel clients, and characterised ad executives working on oil and gas briefs as “Mad Men fuelling the madness.” Dozens of influencers, scientists, and researchers signed an open letter last week demanding the Brazilian hosts drop Edelman, saying the firm delays climate action by greenwashing polluting clients while also lobbying against strong climate policies. That followed a call in October by over 200 climate and environmental groups demanding the Brazilian government remove fossil fuel influence from COP30, including by banning oil and gas lobbyists and ending its partnership with Edelman. A report by campaign group Kick Big Polluters Out found that if the fossil fuel lobbyists at COP30 were a country delegation, it would be the second biggest behind hosts Brazil. Edelman’s website says the company believes “climate change is the biggest crisis we face as a society,” and that it “partners with diverse clients committed to helping drive the transition to a net-zero future, helping them act and communicate in more meaningful ways.” The firm has also created an “Independent Council of Climate Experts” that includes Marina Grossi, COP30’s Special Envoy for Business. “In my experience, Edelman’s leadership looks at work with heavily polluting clients — especially oil and gas — mostly through the lens of profit and access,” said a former Edelman employee who has worked on oil and gas projects for the firm, and who declined to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “The attitude is basically: Stay in the room and keep a seat at the table, even if the table is hell-bent on destroying humanity.” This story is being co-published with Intercept Brasil. The post Exclusive: COP30 PR Agency Edelman Lobbied Presidency to Favour Fossil Fuel Client appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Backed by Industry, Brazilian Hosts Seek COP30’s Blessing for Biofuels

 

at 11/20/25 5:02pm

With the clock running down at the COP30 climate talks, the Brazilian hosts are working hand-in-hand with industry groups to secure backing for biofuels in the final text – despite fears that scaling production will drive deforestation and violate Indigenous rights. National delegations are at loggerheads over a proposal to include language backing the use of “transitional fuels” – which could be read as an open door for biofuels – in a draft Just Transition Work Plan to guide a fair and equitable transition away from fossil fuels.  The UK, Colombia and some other countries are concerned that including any language that appears to back biofuels will encourage plans to clear huge tracts of land, harm communities, wipe out wildlife, and poison ecosystems with pesticides.  “Bioenergy is a false solution,” said Ruairi Brogan, senior policy officer on bioenergy at bird and wildlife charity the RSPB. “We risk transitioning away from fossil fuels to a new ‘sustainable’ fuel thats going to wreak havoc not only on the climate but on land rights, human rights, and nature.” 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); Brazil is the world’s second largest exporter of biofuels – mostly ethanol derived from sugarcane or corn. When the talks opened last week, Brazil’s COP presidency won plaudits from the industry by launching its ‘Belém 4x’ initiative to quadruple global production of “sustainable fuels” – which includes biofuels. Major biofuel players Canada and India, as well as Italy and Japan, were among 23 countries to back the plan.  Brazil’s pro-biofuels stance at COP30 builds on months of lobbying by Brazilian and international trade groups, who met with Brazilian government ministers, joined steering groups for the summit, and presented the organisers with their demands in order to pave the way for a favourable deal at the talks, according to industry documents reviewed by DeSmog. The agribusiness Industry has since sought to shape the agenda at COP30 by deploying more than 300 lobbyists to the talks, including representatives from industrial farming, livestock, soy and grain producers. The number of representatives from bioenergy trade groups more than doubled to 38 compared to last year. That figure does not include representatives of companies in the aviation, car and energy sectors with a vested interest in biofuels, nor their broader trade groups.  DeSmog identified a total of nearly 60 events on the benefits of biofuels led by industry groups and related companies at COP30.  Biofuels have been comprehensively debunked as a climate solution, but the presence of hundreds of Big Agribusiness representatives at COP30 has likely been a factor in the resurrection of this forest-chomping climate zombie, which refuses to die,” said Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice at ActionAid. Brazil’s biofuels market is estimated to be worth almost $10 billion, a figure expected to nearly double by 2032, and the country’s government and industry is keen to counteract growing awareness of associated harms.  Environmental non-profit Transport and Energy found last month that biofuels are responsible for 16 percent more CO2 emissions globally than the fossil fuels they replace due to impacts from their vast land requirements.  Demand for biofuels for transport alone would require an area of 52 million hectares of agricultural land by 2030 – similar to the size of France, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental consultancy Cerulogy.  ‘Transitional Fuel’ While the term ‘transitional fuel’ has no officially agreed definition, many states within the COP negotiations deem it to include bioenergy as well as hydrogen and natural gas.  Countries sceptical of biofuels have called for the phrase to be removed from the draft Just Transition Work Programme, which was initiated at the COP28 round of climate talks held in Dubai two years ago and is now under discussion at COP30.  But campaigners fear that similar phrasing could also make it into Brazil’s much-lauded proposal to create a roadmap to guide the world’s transition away from fossil fuels. On Tuesday the Brazilian presidency published a draft text called the ‘Mutirao Decision’ — a Portuguese word of Indigenous origin meaning collective effort – that included the roadmap proposal.  “There is an increasing risk that the decision from COP30 on Just Transition and other points of the agenda will include the alarming promotion of so-called ‘sustainable’ or ‘transitional fuels’, opening up a dangerous opportunity for the expansion of types of biofuels,” said a source close to the negotiations.  Industry Demands Brazil’s position at COP30 maps closely onto industry demands.  In a January 2025 newsletter, the World Biogas Association – which counts PepsiCo, Shell and BP among its members – said that it was “collaborating with Brazil’s COP30 team to ensure that its climate leadership benefits both the global and Brazilian biogas sectors. The COP presidency and World Biogas Association did not reply to questions about the nature of the “collaboration”.  “Our challenge now is to communicate to the world that Brazil, in addition to producing clean energy, offers a replicable path to decarbonisation based on innovation, scale and sustainability,” Evandro Gussi, president of the Brazilian sugarcane association UNICA, stated in a press release published in May. Lobby groups including Bioenergia Brasil and UNICA launched the ‘Belem Charter’ – a document of industry demands for the climate summit – during a meeting attended by government officials in early October. Speakers at the event included Marlon Arraes Jardim Leal, director of biofuels at the country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy, and congressman Arnaldo Jardim – who has been a vocal supporter of biofuels at COP30.  The groups called for the inclusion of biofuels in Nationally Determined Contributions  – official plans submitted to the UN by a given country on how it will reach international climate goals – a proposal echoed by Brazil in its Belém 4x initiative to boost biofuel production. The biofuel sector has also sought to make its presence felt in Belém, where billboards advertise their benefits across the city. Two biofuel-powered 4X4s dominate the entrance to the Agrizone, the official venue for food and farming at the summit, which is sponsored by major agribusiness companies. Even the free buses deployed by the Presidency to ferry delegates  around Belém feature biofuel advertisements from state oil company Petrobras. Roberto Rodrigues, Brazil’s special envoy for agriculture at the summit, echoed the biofuel industry narrative when he spoke on a panel on Saturday, hosted by the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry.  “Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, they need to improve their efficiency, their energy — and Brazil has a model for this [in its rollout of biofuels],” Rodrigues said. Trade associations named in this article were contacted for comment, as well as Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy and the COP30 presidency.  Brogan from RSPB suspects that industry is only going to intensify its presence at future summits. “As countries begin to scramble to transition away from fossil fuels, if not now then in the next COP, theyre going to start to look desperately for other alternatives,” he said.  Nonetheless, Brogan believes that broader adoption of biofuels is by no means inevitable, pointing out that just 23 out of 197 countries in the COP30 discussions signed the commitment to vastly scale biofuels. “Wealthy countries need to stop fossil fuels, but they also need to move away from harmful bioenergy, and just move full-tilt to renewables,” Brogan said. The post Backed by Industry, Brazilian Hosts Seek COP30’s Blessing for Biofuels appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Meet 5 PR Agencies Making Big Polluters Look ‘Ag-tastic’

 

at 11/20/25 3:54am

Did you know that food companies routinely make bacon look pinker and more wholesome by adding a chemical — nitrates — that increases cancer risk? In a similar way, the global agribusiness industry pays advertising and public relations agencies to mask its role as a major emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gases with a rosy glow. That aura is especially bright right now in Belém, Brazil, site of the United Nations climate summit, called COP30. During the conference, food lobbyists have been hosting slick trade booths and events at the Agrizone — “a whole other tented, air conditioned parallel event space” steps away from the main conference venue, as DeSmog’s Hazel Healy told the Guardian. These advertising and PR campaigns aim to reassure the public that agribusiness corporations are all in on fighting the climate crisis. All the while, the agencies creating them know that behind the scenes, these same companies are lobbying hard to avert rules and mandates to slash their greenhouse gas pollution, phase out pesticides and fossil fuels, and halt destruction of forests for cropland and pastures. Over the past few years, DeSmog has assembled an extensive database featuring in-depth profiles of advertising and PR agencies working on behalf of polluting industries. These include the following five firms, that have each strived to apply a green sheen to the public images of their agribusiness clients: G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group Headquarters: New York City Size: More than 165 employees in its U.S. offices, plus industry partnerships across 50 countries. Income: Over $33 million in annual revenue. Fun Fact: Ranked as 2025s top agricultural PR firm in the United States by O’Dwyers, an industry listing of public relations agencies. Its name may be a mouthful, but G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group is clearly to the taste of the agribusiness industry, raking in $17.4 million in net fees for public relations services to farming companies in 2024, according to O’Dwyer’s, more than four times the $3.8 million taken by its closest rival, Edelman.   G&S IMCG’s client list is a smorgasbord of corporations and lobby groups from across the sector, including Cargill, McDonald’s, Syngenta, and CropLife International, which are all present at COP30. During the summit, Syngenta and CropLife International are hosting numerous events in the Agrizone. For a full profile of G&S IMCG, click here. MorganMyers Agency, part of G&S IMCG, posted video messages from MM ag enthusiasts sharing ag-tastic fun facts about agriculture on U.S. National Agriculture Day. (Credit: Morgan Myers Instagram account) MHP Group Headquarters: London Size: More than 200 staff based between offices in London and San Francisco.  Income: Unclear; MHP Groups parent company, Next 15 Group, reported UK net revenue of nearly $339 million for the year ending January 31, 2025. Fun Fact: Has worked for Sime Derby Plantation Berhad (now SD Guthrie), a palm oil company whose products were banned in the United States in 2020 following reports of forced labour.   MHP has worked for a meaty list of agribusiness clients, such as Hybu Cig Cymru (Meat Promotion Wales), Müller, AB Agri, and Syngenta. A DeSmog investigation revealed that from 2020 to 2023, MHP worked with the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, a trade group with members like McDonalds and JBS (the world’s largest meat-packer), to create and promote a “new narrative” for beef in response to growing consumer concerns about meat’s health and environmental impacts. For a full profile of MHP Group, click here. Part of a PR plan that MHP Group pitched to the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef in 2021, revealed in a Desmog investigation, to persuade consumers to “feel better” about eating beef, despite the sector’s massive output of climate-heating pollution. Next 15 Group Headquarters: London Size: Nearly 4,000 employees across around 30 subsidiary companies in 16 countries. Income: About $733 million in net revenue for the year ending January 31, 2025. Fun Fact: House 337, a Next 15 agency, produced a 2023 Christmas video for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) starring a singing turkey that gets bundled into a van by a worker in a Santa suit, taken to an abattoir, and slaughtered.  Next 15 Group says its “intention is to work with clients who have sustainable business models and are committed to the low-carbon transition,” and that “we’re not afraid to turn away profitable work that has a negative impact.”  However, Next 15 Group agencies have worked for at least 11 companies that profit from the sale of fossil fuels, plus major meat and dairy industry players such as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, Lactalis, Danone, and Arla Retail, according to DeSmog research. For a full profile of Next 15 Group, click here. (Credit: PETA via THALIHITA YouTube account) Emerging Ag Headquarters: Calgary, Canada Size: Boutique firm with about 30 employees around the world. Income: Undisclosed. Fun Fact: Before founding Emerging Ag, Robynne Anderson was communications director at CropLife International, which lobbies on behalf of biotech, seed, and pesticide industries. On November 3 — a week before the official start of COP30 — Emerging Ag CEO Robynne Anderson made a public plea for “climate resilience” to be a priority topic at the summit. “The entire biome of our planet is affected by climate change,” said Anderson in a video message. “Whether were talking about our beautiful trees and forests or whether were talking about soil health or the state of our oceans, understanding the biodiversity of the planet and how it ties into climate is going to be essential to advancing our resilience.”  This vaguely pro-eco language masks Emerging Ag’s main mission, which is to fend off any demands that would require its clients in the livestock, fertilizer, and genetic technology industries to meaningfully reduce their destructive impacts on the climate. Since 2017, Emerging Ag has coordinated an annual World Milk Day for the Global Dairy Platform, a trade group. The celebration pushes a misleading narrative across continents and languages that a dairy-rich diet makes the world a healthier and more sustainable place. Emerging Ag has also helped livestock interests prepare for various COPs through its work with the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.  For a full profile of Emerging Ag, click here. A graphic for World Milk Day 2023. (Credit: Sakure Shokusou Instagram account/World Milk Day) Ketchum Headquarters: New York City Size: 76 offices in 70 countries Income: Pulled in $600 million in fees in 2022. Fun Fact: In 1991, Greenpeace obtained a Ketchum-designed crisis management plan for the Clorox Company that involved labeling environmental advocates as “terrorists” and suing unflattering journalists. Ketchum, part of the Omnicom Group, has a long track record of helping clients in the pesticide, pharmaceutical, and chemical manufacturing sectors push for food safety and environmental deregulation. Its meat and dairy clients have included prominent trade groups like the National Cattlemens Beef Association, the California Milk Advisory Board, and U.S. Farmers & Ranchers in Action, as well as food multinationals such as Danone and Wendy’s. It has also worked for the Council for Biotechnology Information, which is linked to major agrichemical firms. In 2023, amid data that younger American adults were drinking less milk than the national average, Ketchum developed a campaign for trade group Dairy Management Inc. that used video games as a way to pitch dairy to Gen Z gamers. For a full profile of Ketchums parent company Omnicom Group, click here. Ketchum logo and motto: We are Ketchum. Progress at work. Click here to read more of DeSmogs climate accountability coverage of the advertising and public relations industry, and here to visit our database of agencies working for polluting industries. The post Meet 5 PR Agencies Making Big Polluters Look Ag-tastic appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Pathways Alliance Sponsored a ‘Summer School’ Program in Saskatchewan

 

at 11/19/25 12:10pm

Pathways Alliance, a lobby group most recently known for pro-pipeline billboards, also sponsored what they termed a carbon capture summer school in July. Environmental groups have called out the pro-industry event attended by university students and young professionals from 32 countries. “The fossil fuel industry has no place shaping education opportunities in the middle of the climate crisis,” said Emilia Belliveau, an energy transition program manager with Environmental Defence. Pathways Alliance is a consortium of six major Canadian tar sands oil producers. Formed in 2022, the alliance has proposed a massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for Northern Alberta that would include a 400-kilometre network of carbon dioxide pipelines and a storage facility proposed for the region of Cold Lake, Alberta. The Alliance has in the past claimed that their CCS project would help them achieve net zero emissions by 2050, though these claims do not reflect downstream emissions from consumption or transportation. DeSmog previously reported that Pathways, as well as its member organizations, scrubbed their websites of nearly all content in June of 2024 in advance of amendments to Canada’s Competition Act designed to counter greenwashing. Pathways Alliance boasted about sponsoring the 2025 edition of International CCS Summer School in partnership with the International Energy Agency’s Greenhouse Gas (IEAGHG) research and development program in September. The event was hosted by the International CCS Knowledge Centre, located on the campus of the University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan. The IEAGHG is a technology collaboration program of the IEA. Its board of directors include representatives from international mining giant BHP Group, provincial electrical utility SaskPower, and the Canadian Heavy Oil Association. The International CCS Knowledge Centre is an industry-led non-profit organization that often comes up in relation to news announcements concerning either the Pathways project or carbon capture in general. They have also participated in the Carbon Capture Canada expo held annually in Edmonton, Alberta. According to lobby disclosure information, the organization’s mandate is to “secure funding for our organization or assist others in securing funding for specific initiatives related to the advancement and implementation of carbon capture and storage.” The government of the province of Alberta — where the entirety of the Pathways project is to be located — gave the centre $3 million in 2023. It was founded by BHP Group and SaskPower in 2016 to advance large-scale carbon capture, utilization and sequestration projects with an aim to managing emissions and achieving climate goals. According to the Pathways website, the “summer school” welcomed 50 students from around the world for a week-long curriculum. “CCS is a proven technology used around the world, where capture technologies are fitted to a large emission source, making it possible to capture CO2 emissions so they don’t end up in the atmosphere,” reads a Pathways introduction. Unproven Tech Belliveau says the Pathways strategy sounds familiar. “We wouldnt let Big Tobacco sponsor medical schools for good reason — they used their influence block progress on public health because it threatened their profits,” she said in a statement to DeSmog. “It’s the exact same playbook with Big Oil, which is why exposing these tactics is so critical.” Carbon capture is anything but proven. Numerous studies by leading international authorities have questioned carbon capture’s efficacy and efficiency as a climate change mitigation technology. Moreover, the Pathways net-zero plan has been criticized for “selective disclosure and omission, misalignment of claim and action, non-credible claims, specious comparisons, and inadequate reporting,” as well as reliance on government subsidies, and for greenwashing fossil fuel expansion. These concerns have been echoed by a variety of international experts, including the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). DeSmog previously reported that IEEFA has concluded Pathways isn’t financially viable and that they haven’t addressed any of the major concerns about its ability to safely and securely sequester carbon dioxide emissions. IEEFA has determined that two other vaunted Canadian CCS projects — Shell Canada’s Quest project and the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) — have both failed to keep up with projected capture rates. A 2020 report issued by Global Witness found that the Quest project, which creates hydrogen from fossil fuel sources and uses carbon capture — had actually emitted more carbon dioxide than it captured. “The Pathways Alliance has been credibly accused of greenwashing by academics, so this strategy also gives them a direct opportunity to disseminate misleading information about the fossil fuel industry, despite its damage to the climate and environment.” Belliveau said.  Despite this, Canadian politicians routinely advocate for carbon capture technology as though it had a flawless track record and was actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson was recently quoted by the CBC as advocating for carbon capture as a means to deliver low-carbon energy. He also suggested the use of artificial intelligence to help make energy systems “smarter, faster and more resilient.” Artificial Intelligence is generally considered to be an exacerbating factor in climate change, as it requires exceptional amounts of energy. AI advocates are looking to Canada’s large natural gas fields as a potential supplier of low-cost fossil fuel energy for AI data centres. As recently reported by DeSmog, fossil fuel companies are looking to pivot onto the AI bandwagon by positioning themselves as sources of cheap energy. The impact on the climate will undoubtedly be disastrous. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has also demonstrated his own inability to distinguish between the reality of climate change and industry talking points. In an official statement concerning new infrastructure projects, Carney referred to both liquid natural gas (LNG) and the Pathways project as potential suppliers of “low-carbon energy.” Experts decry statements such a these as pure fantasy, saying there is no such thing as low-carbon fossil fuel energy.  And at the recent Carbon Capture Canada expo held in Edmonton, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also made several misleading statements concerning carbon capture. Referring to the Quest and ACTL projects, Smith said that they have “safely and permanently stored millions of tons of carbon dioxide,” and that “theyve shown the world that carbon capture works.” Faulty Math Global Witness determined that, between 2015 and 2019, while Shell claimed Quest captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, it had also emitted 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 in the same period of time. Danielle Smith did not mention this at the carbon capture expo. In 2024 Greenpeace revealed that the Quest project had reported millions of carbon credits for carbon that was never captured. Under an agreement with the government of Alberta dating back to 2015, Shell was awarded two tonnes’ worth carbon capture credits for every tonne it successfully captured. And according to IEEFA, both Quest and the ACTL’s costs have increased without a commensurate increase in the amount of carbon being captured, demonstrating neither project, nor Pathways, are financially viable. Moreover, even if the Pathways project were completed, the amount of carbon dioxide it could capture is still a fraction of the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of the six constituent tar sands oil producers. A January report issued by Environmental Defence revealed that Pathways’ 13 tar sands facilities emitted about 40 megatons of CO2 per annum, though their carbon capture project is only expected to capture 10-12 megatonnes each year.  Participants at Pathways’ carbon capture summer school were brought to another underperforming carbon capture facility, SaskPower’s Boundary Dam CCS project. According to a 2024 IEEFA report on the Boundary Dam facility, it’s average capture rate over nine years of operation was just 57 percent, far lower than the advertised 90 percent capture rate. Smith also said the emissions intensity of Alberta oil had been reduced by 26 percent between 2013 and 2023, though a September 2025 statement from the Alberta-based Pembina Institute indicated instead that the provinces’ emissions have actually increased 150 percent since 2005, driven by the fossil fuel sector. The considerable discrepancies between what politicians routinely promise carbon capture is capable of, and what independent expert analysis reveals, suggests that there is considerable misinformation about the controversial technology. DeSmog has previously reported that Pathways has become involved in sponsoring high school science fairs as much as the annual carbon capture expo in Edmonton. “The Pathways Alliance has spent millions misleading Canadians about their harmful climate impacts,” said Dr. Melissa Lem, President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). “They shouldnt be anywhere near science education. We need the brightest minds working on how we transition away from fossil fuels, not chasing false solutions that delay meaningful action. Sponsoring these events is how fossil fuel companies try to gain the social license they need to keep polluting.”DeSmog reached out to Pathways Alliance, but they did not reply. DeSmog also reached out Breanne OReilly, the International CCS Knowledge Centre’s chief operating officer. O’Reilly provided a statement about the program’s “science-based” programming, but did not answer DeSmog’s questions about downstream emissions. The post Pathways Alliance Sponsored a ‘Summer School’ Program in Saskatchewan appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

— Corporate Giant KPMG Accused of ‘Sneaking’ into COP30

 

at 11/19/25 8:43am

Multinational consulting firm KPMG has been accused of using underhand methods to gain access to this year’s COP30 climate summit. Critics allege that the firm has been using seemingly unaffiliated advocacy groups to gain entry to the flagship conference in Belém, Brazil, with senior staff failing to disclose their affiliation to KPMG. KPMG, which has a turnover of almost $40 billion (£30.5 billion), has sent 30 lobbyists to the summit in the Brazilian Amazon. One of the firm’s core agendas during the fortnight has been to downplay the climate threat posed by the ever-growing energy demands of artificial intelligence (AI) – instead claiming that AI will be able to help solve the climate crisis. A report from campaign group Kick Big Polluters Out last week revealed that this year’s COP is packed with a higher proportion of fossil fuel lobbyists than ever before – over 1,600, or nearly one in every 25 conference attendees.  Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner at anti-corruption watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, told DeSmog: “If KPMG is going to be at COP30, it should be there under its own name, not hiding behind youth groups or government delegations.” Sabido also expressed concern that KPMG is only one of many companies engaging in this practice. “Unfortunately this is an all-too-common phenomenon whereby companies sneak their way into the talks while those most impacted, such as Brazilian Indigenous communities, are shut outside”. Subscribe to our newsletter Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts Name -- Email Address What content do you want to subscribe to? (check all that apply) All International UK Sign Up (function($){ $('.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); KPMG or Not? In the run-up to the summit, KPMG published a COP30 programme advertising 14 events set to be hosted by the firm. “Our core focus is to help our clients navigate the many challenges on the transition to net zero with a focus on innovation, policy and accelerating the mobilization of capital to where it is most needed,” the programme stated. KPMG also published its official “global” and “One Americas” delegation lists, which made it appear as if the company had arrived at COP30 under its own flag. However, this is not the case. KPMG representatives have instead attended under the auspices of a variety of unaffiliated advocacy groups and national delegations, including those from the Global South. The firm’s executives have gained entry via “overflow” badges from six national delegations – Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Turkey – which grant access to all areas of the conference except the negotiating rooms. A screenshot of KPMG’s COP30 programme. Credit: KPMG A wide variety of advocacy and youth groups from around the world have also listed KPMG employees among their delegations – despite not having any obvious connection to the firm. For example, KPMG’s ESG and Clean Energy director Ruba Amarin, and UK head of ESG Richard Andrews were nominated to attend the summit by the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation, a Nigerian environmental education group. The list of COP30 delegates released by the United Nations states that Amarin and Andrews are attending as representatives of the African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative (ACCARD) – another Nigerian advocacy group. KPMG Australia partner Julia Bilyanski also gained access to the summit via ACCARD, although her “home organisation” – unlike Amarin or Andrews – is listed as KPMG. Five KPMG staff – all listed in the firm’s COP30 programme – appear to have been granted badges without disclosing that they work for the company. ACCARD has a record of facilitating corporate access to COP summits. DeSmog revealed that Chris O’Shea, who runs British Gas’ parent company Centrica, gained access to COP29 under the auspices of ACCARD, without declaring his real employer. It’s unclear what work is conducted by ACCARD, and whether it has any other connections to KPMG or Centrica, given the “news” section of its website hasn’t been updated since COP28 in 2023. Eleven KPMG representatives entered this year’s COP via the Indian charity India Youth For Society. None appear to be based in India. According to their LinkedIn accounts, they are based in London, Leicester, and Berkhamsted in the UK, as well as France, Australia, Canada, and Japan. Poliana Menezes, who is an ESG senior manager at KPMG Brazil and is listed as part of its One Americas delegation, appears to have entered COP30 via Youth Initiative for Land in Africa – a charity that operates on a totally different continent. KPMG staff have also accessed the summit via several business associations of which KPMG is a member, including Spain’s Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales (Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations), the International Chamber of Commerce, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). The entrance to COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Credit: Clare Carlile / DeSmog “Lobbyists should not be allowed to enter climate conferences at their convenience. COP30 is a convention to address the most pressing public emergency of our time, and must serve the public’s interest first, not the priorities of polluting businesses,” said Raphaël Kergueno of the anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International EU. Rachel Rose Jackson, a coordinator of Kick Big Polluters Out, places the blame on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which organises the COP event. “At present, the UNFCCC has essentially zero checks and balances in place to make sure that all attending the talks have people and the planet as their sole priority. Until protections are put in place to guard against polluting interests, COP30 and every COP thereafter will fail.” A KPMG International spokesperson told DeSmog that it had maintained “an open and fully transparent presence at the annual COP summit for many years,” although did not explain its specific ties to the Global South advocacy groups, nor why several of its staff members failed to declare their relationship to KPMG when applying to attend COP30. It added: “Businesses have a critical role to play at COP and the participation of KPMG is valued and welcomed by governments and multilateral institutions. As a global network of member firms, we take an active, collaborative approach to working with a variety of organisations leading debate, dialogue and action at COP to ensure the highest impact possible in our shared mission to tackle climate change and wider sustainability issues.  “We offer a strong presence by leveraging our extensive sustainability expertise, gained from collaborating with organisations worldwide – many of whom are unable to attend COP in person. This allows KPMG to share meaningful insights that contribute to the discussions at COP. “Our climate and nature teams support clients on all aspects of the transition, from target setting, transition planning and independent assurance, helping deploy new emerging energy and transition technologies, understanding the climate and nature policies and incentives environment, to enabling clients to achieve their climate and decarbonisation goals and drive progress towards the Paris Agreement commitments.” The UNFCCC, ACCARD, India Youth for Society, and Youth Initiative for Land in Africa were approached for comment. ‘Overselling’ AI One of KPMG’s core objectives at COP30 has been to advocate for the role of AI in fixing the climate crisis.“We believe AI will bring unbelievable benefits to the climate agenda, which needs to be embraced immediately, and that all of the criticism about data centres is unfair and does not reflect the full picture,” KPMG International’s Global Head of Renewable Energy Michael Hayes, who is attending COP30 as part of Ireland’s delegation, posted on LinkedIn in the week before the summit. KPMG has been making this case forcefully at COP30. In the week leading up to the conference, the firm released a report, co-authored by Hayes, that argued – citing a single study as evidence – that “AI is not a threat to climate progress; it is likely the greatest accelerator of it.” The report has the backing of major tech companies. Yina Arenas, an AI executive at Microsoft, which recently rolled back its climate commitments in the face of its AI energy demands, is quoted in the report claiming that AI shouldn’t just be considered to be a “consumer of energy”. This matches the overall narrative of the tech industry. Microsoft’s founder, the public health philanthropist and multi-billionaire Bill Gates, made headlines in the run-up to COP30 for making what he called a “strategic pivot” on climate change, claiming that it “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future”. However, the current evidence doesn’t entirely back up his claims. The energy demands of the AI boom are projected to be enormous. The International Energy Agency forecasts that the energy requirements of AI data centres will quadruple by 2030 – to nearly as much energy expenditure as Japan. Despite these projections, KPMG hosted two AI-related events at COP30 last week, including a talk on AI’s ability to “fast-track decarbonisation”, and on AI as a “positive catalyst to drive climate action and the energy transition”. The latter was hosted in collaboration with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which publicly commended the Trump administration’s ‘AI Action Plan’ that includes billions of dollars in investment for fossil-fuel-powered AI data centres. A promotional image for an AI-focused event at COP30 co-hosted by KPMG and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Credit: Michael Hayes / LinkedIn “Like much of the tech industry, KPMG has been overselling AI as a panacea to problems from the healthcare crisis to climate change,” said Bram Vranken, a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory. “This is not only unproven, but also highly misleading, diverting attention away from the significant environmental and climate impact of the current AI hype cycle.” Vranken suggested that KPMG’s presence at COP30 signalled it was attending “less out of concern for the climate and more to drum up business”. Ireland’s decision to include Hayes as part of its delegation has also caused consternation among climate campaigners, given the country has recently announced that it is not meeting its climate targets in part due to the enormous energy consumption of its massive data centre industry.  Rosi Leonard, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth Ireland, told DeSmog: “Given that data centres in Ireland are literally plugging into the gas network as we speak it’s unbelievable that the Irish government invited along a lobbyist to COP30 who has promoted untested theories about how clean AI can be.” A KPMG International spokesperson said that “AI has the potential to reduce emissions and enable progress in other areas of the climate agenda, including adaptation and resilience, nature and biodiversity, and circularity. While not a cure for decarbonisation, it can have a meaningful positive impact if directed accordingly, with many examples and reports to back this up.” A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment said: “As part of our annual participation at COP, Ireland distributes overflow badges to a range of organisations and people including NGOs, academics and Irish businesses. This is a normal and expected aspect of our participation at COP, as it is for all national delegations. It is important that we facilitate a cross section of Irish society that wants to have their voice heard at these vital climate negotiations. “While the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment and the Irish government welcome the diverse views of Irish people and organisations, everyone who applies for an Irish overflow badge must make it clear that they do not represent or speak on behalf of the official Irish delegation at COP.” The post Corporate Giant KPMG Accused of ‘Sneaking’ into COP30 appeared first on DeSmog.

[Category: Energy]

As of 12/16/25 9:22pm. Last new 12/14/25 10:29pm.