Prime Minister Theresa May has the dubious honour of being the first foreign leader to meet the new President of the United States today.
Trump and May are meant to be talking trade. But...
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - 12:14 • Steve Horn
The investigative journalism outlet Public Herald documented that ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy has been the subject of 176 citizen complaints in Pennsylvania, many of them drinking water-related. The state is home to the Marcellus Shale basin, the most prolific field for obtaining natural gas via hydraulic fracturing ('fracking”) in the U.S. and an early hotbed of debate on fracking's potential threats.
In its investigation, the Pennsylvania-based publication spent three years digging up complaints submitted by the state's citizens to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). With documents spanning from 2004–2016, the complaints previously have been concealed from the public, and Public Herald says they show “evidence of widespread and systemic impacts” of fracking on water in the state.
A DeSmog review of files housed on the investigation's document-hosting website, PublicFiles.org, shows dozens upon dozens of these wells were owned by XTO. The finding comes as President Donald Trump's nominees for U.S. Secretary of State, recently retired ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General and EPA antagonist Scott Pruitt, await full U.S. Senate floor hearings and eventual confirmation votes.
Comments
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - 14:05 • Ben Jervey
As senators get set to vote Wednesday on the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the EPA, the man who was charged with leading the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team gave some clues as to how it might be run.
Myron Ebell is one of the country’s most prominent climate science deniers, is the Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and until inauguration day was leading the EPA transition team at the behest of the then president-elect.
Monday, January 30, 2017 - 10:56 • Larry Buhl
Earlier this month China halted more than 100 coal-fired power projects. Scrapping these projects, with combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts, may have more to do with China’s current overcapacity in coal production than its commitment to mitigating climate change. Nevertheless, Chinese leaders are likely happy that the move is framing their nation as a green energy leader, according to experts in Chinese and environmental policy.
That’s because, they say, the Chinese government is now eager to fill the vacuum in climate change leadership that is being left by the U.S. And, they say, China is poised to eat America’s lunch in the renewable energy sector.
Monday, January 30, 2017 - 08:01 • Mat Hope
Myron Ebell, the man at the vanguard of President Trump’s efforts to dismantle US climate policy, today told a London audience that Trump's election and the rejection of scientific experise was “not an isolated phenomenon”.
The press conference, hosted by UK climate science denying think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and the Foreign Press Association, is the latest demonstration of how Trump’s newly-empowered network of climate science deniers is using its platform to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry around the globe.
Ebell said Brexit offered an “opportunity” for the UK, allowing it to shed European environmental regulations and follow President Trump's example in aiming to attain “dominance as an energy producer” in the oil, gas and coal markets.
The event was attended by around 60 journalists and some faces familiar to regular watchers of GWPF events including James Delingpole from far-right website, Breitbart London, and the director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, Jeremy Nicholson. Delingpole, a well-known climate science denier, was even namechecked by Ebell when talking about the influence of Steve Bannon , Breitbart's founder and Donald Trump's chief strategist, on the administration's climate policy.
The Trump administration tasked Ebell with leading his transition team on environmental issues, producing a secretive 'Agency Action Plan' for the Environmental Protection Agency. The puropose of the “confidential” plan, according to Ebell, was to advise Trump on how to deliver his campaign promises.
Ebell is the director of energy and environment at the libertarian US think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). He is also chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of organizations “that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies.”
Sunday, January 29, 2017 - 03:58 • Graham Readfearn
In July 1988, on page 11 of Sports Illustrated magazine, one story caught the eye of Fred Palmer.
Under the headline “The Foul, Hot Summer,” the article lamented that year’s scorching heat and drought.
“We have only ourselves to blame for this midsummer's nightmare. Burning fossil fuels has created many of these environmental ills,” the story read.
Palmer was worried. As the boss of Western Fuels Association (WFA), a co-op of coal power generators and haulers, this self-confessed “prairie populist” could see the writing on the wall for his industry.
Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 15:14 • Steve Horn
On January 25, President Donald Trump acted on his campaign promise to get the ball rolling on building what he often called a “big, beautiful, powerful wall” situated along the U.S.-Mexico border.
At his speech announcing the executive order at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Trump cited drugs pouring across the border, increasing crime, and other national security concerns as the rationale for its construction. The main questions center around who will fund it and if Trump can deliver on his promise to have Mexico pay for it, given Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto canceling a planned trip to the U.S. to meet with Trump in the aftermath of the announcement. Peña Nieto has said Mexico will not foot the bill.
Answering the question about funding, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer has revealed that U.S. taxpayers will fork over the money at first, with Mexico paying for it over time through a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports. At least some of those fees, it turns out, could be generated by offering tax incentives to increase U.S. oil exports to Mexico and beyond.
Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 11:10 • Itai Vardi
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved the construction of a new gas pipeline project, despite an ongoing inquiry by two U.S. senators into a possible conflict of interest in its environmental review.
Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 10:35 • Sharon Kelly
If President Donald Trump expected to hear roars of approval from the pipeline industry after this week's executive orders pushing the Keystone XL pipeline and Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) forward, he might have been hugely disappointed.
Reaction at the Marcellus-Utica Midstream Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh on Wednesday was remarkably muted.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 09:21 • Steve Horn
On January 24, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders calling for the approval of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, owned by Energy Transfer Partners and TransCanada, respectively. He also signed an order calling for expedited environmental reviews of domestic infrastructure projects, such as pipelines.
Fights against both pipelines have ignited nationwide grassroots movements for over the past five years and will almost assuredly sit at the epicenter of similar backlash moving forward. As DeSmog has reported, Donald Trump's top presidential campaign energy aide Harold Hamm stands to profit if both pipelines go through.
Hamm, the founder and CEO of Continental Resources who sat in the VIP box at Trump's inauguration and was a major Trump campaign donor, would see his company's oil obtained from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the Bakken Shale flow through both lines. Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, was also a major Trump donor.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:36 • Emma Gilchrist
Governments love buzzwords — probably because they roll off the tongue so nicely that people often overlook the fact they’re meaningless.
Take one of the B.C. government’s favourite expressions of late: “world leading” oil spill response.
It’s included not once, but twice, in B.C.’s five conditions for approval of oil pipelines — used to give the green light to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.
But what does “world leading” oil spill response actually mean?
“I see a lot of gaps in this wording of ‘world class’ response,” says Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist who was working as a commercial fisher in Cordova, Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in March 1989, spilling more than 41 million litres of oil into Prince William Sound.
