Campaigners are celebrating after an oil and gas exploration company was forced to scale back a “draconian” injunction against protesters.
Activists have posed a series of legal challenges...
Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 14:35 • Sharon Kelly
On the evening of January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former coal mining executive Don Blankenship, who ran against Donald Trump as a third-party candidate in the 2020 election, began an all-caps Twitter thread.
“Why is it that American politicians and the American media support citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising against a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?” @DonBlankenship posted on Twitter.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - 12:32 • Guest
Read time: 3 mins
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams
Texas oil refineries released hundreds of thousands of pounds of pollutants including benzene, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide into the air as they scrambled to shut down during last week's deadly winter storm, Reuters reported Sunday.
Winter storm Uri, which killed dozens of people and cut off power to over four million Texans at its peak, also disrupted supplies needed to keep the state's refineries and petrochemical plants operating. As they shut down, refineries flared—or burned off—gases in order to prevent damage to their processing units.
Saturday, February 20, 2021 - 00:01 • Guest
Read time: 7 mins
By Morgan Bazilian, Colorado School of Mines; Deb Niemeier, University of Maryland; Edward R. Carr, Clark University; Kristie Ebi, University of Washington, and Walt Meier, NASA
The United States is formally back in the Paris climate agreement as of February 19, 2021, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump announced it would pull out.
We asked five scholars what the U.S. rejoining the international agreement means for the nation and the rest of the world, including for food security, safety and the changing climate. Nearly every country has ratified the 2015 agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius. The U.S. was the only one to withdraw.
Thursday, February 18, 2021 - 13:09 • Justin Nobel
Read time: 12 mins
On the evening of February 1, a fire erupted at a West Virginia facility that processes radioactive oilfield waste generated from nearby fracking operations, injuring two workers. A video of the fire captured by local news station WTRF shows a raging nighttime inferno billowing out of the collapsed building.
Initial news reports described the facility — located in Dallas Pike, 50 miles southwest of Pittsburgh — as a truck stop cleaning station. However, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) confirmed to DeSmog that the facility, which the agency says is owned and operated by Ohio-based company Petta Enterprises, does a lot more than clean trucks: It processes oil and gas waste. And the agency confirmed that it was the volatile nature of this waste — transported inside trucks arriving at the site — that helped cause the blaze.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - 12:43 • Nick Cunningham
Read time: 6 mins
An 18-month inquiry led by the province of Alberta into environmental groups opposed to Canadian tar sands is nearing completion, but a Canadian NGO wants the CA$3.5 million inquiry disbanded, alleging that it was improperly established to intimidate opponents of the fossil fuel industry.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - 08:00 • Justin Mikulka
Read time: 10 mins
Fossil fuel industry supporters and climate deniers are pushing a new climate falsehood when it comes to renewable energy: that natural gas offers a more affordable future. And they’re focusing their misinformation campaign on New Jersey.
Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 13:42 • Julie Dermansky
Read time: 8 mins
“It took courage for Senator Cassidy to vote against Trump,” Sharon Lavigne, the founder of the faith-based grassroots organization RISE St. James, said about the Louisiana Republican after the impeachment hearing of the former president. “He voted with his conscience, not his party. Now he has to find the courage to honor his oath as a doctor and stop more petrochemical plants from being built in fenceline communities.”
But Senator Bill Cassidy voting with the Democrats to convict Trump doesn’t represent a change in his patrician support of the fossil fuel industry.
Thursday, February 11, 2021 - 11:48 • Nick Cunningham
Read time: 7 mins
The decade-long fracking boom in Appalachia has not led to significant job growth, and despite the region’s extraordinary levels of natural gas production, the industry’s promise of prosperity has “turned into almost nothing,” according to a new report.
Thursday, February 11, 2021 - 01:10 • Phoebe Cooke
Read time: 4 mins
Shell’s new net zero strategy is “grotesque” and includes an “impossible” reliance on tree-planting, campaigners have claimed.
The oil major today revealed an “accelerated” strategy to reduce oil production and decarbonise its products by 2050.
Tuesday, February 9, 2021 - 00:01 • Nick Cunningham
Read time: 5 mins
Fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for roughly one in five deaths worldwide, a much higher death toll than previously thought, according to a new study published Tuesday.
Poor air quality from burning fossil fuels such as coal and diesel was responsible for more than 8 million deaths in 2018, according to research published February 9 in the journal Environmental Research by Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London.
