The Red Tape Initiative, dubbed the “other Brexit department” by Politico, has so far only met with one government...
Sunday, September 24, 2017 - 06:03 • Simon Davis-Cohen
Three years in a row, communities in Ohio have attempted to vote on initiatives that would grant them greater say over oil and gas development in their jurisdictions, but over and over again, appointed officials, some with direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, have put up roadblocks preventing these initiatives from reaching the ballot.
“We’re losing our ability to legislate and be a check and balance on the government,” Tish O’Dell of the Ohio Community Rights Network told DeSmog on September 15.
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Friday, September 22, 2017 - 09:26 • Guest
Reposted with permission from EcoWatch.
By Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch
Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—the five biggest investor-owned fossil fuel producers in the world—over the costs of climate change.
The two Californian cities join the counties of Marin, San Mateo and San Diego and the city of Imperial Beach that have taken similar legal action in recent months, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Thursday, September 21, 2017 - 12:46 • Guest
By Scott Gabriel Knowles, Drexel University
It’s not easy to hold the nation’s attention for long, but three solid weeks of record-smashing hurricanes directly affecting multiple states and at least 20 million people will do it.
Clustered disasters hold our attention in ways that singular events cannot — they open our minds to the possibility that these aren’t just accidents or natural phenomena to be painfully endured. As such, they can provoke debates over the larger “disaster lessons” we should be learning. And I would argue the combination of Harvey and Irma has triggered such a moment.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 08:29 • Itai Vardi
President Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has, as a corporate attorney, personally represented a host of energy and utility companies, many of which do business that is directly impacted by FERC’s decisionmaking. According to Kevin McIntyre’s financial disclosure — obtained by DeSmog and published here for the first time — these include major utilities, fracking companies, pipeline builders, and international energy corporations.
McIntyre is a lawyer who co-leads the global energy practice for the legal and lobbying firm Jones Day, and is currently awaiting final Senate confirmation of his appointment to the nation’s top energy regulatory body. That confirmation may come as soon as this week.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 04:47 • Graham Readfearn
For the first few weeks after publishing, all was going pretty well.
Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was “deeply important” and a “feat of American intellectual and political history,” said a review in Publishers Weekly.
The New York Times said the book joined an emerging corpus of important work of scholars and journalists that was “documenting the systematic, organized effort to undermine democracy and change the rules.”
But it didn’t take long for the apparatus of the “radical right” to swing into action, with attacks coming from many of the same individuals and institutions that the Duke University history professor documents in her book.
Monday, September 18, 2017 - 09:22 • Farron Cousins
The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to protect its bases and operations from rising seas and other impacts of climate change, despite an order by President Trump to halt climate planning.
On March 28th, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order that rescinded all climate change actions within federal agencies. These actions had been mandated by a rule from the former Obama administration that required federal agencies to take the necessary steps to protect their respective agencies from climate threats. The original Obama order required military bases to factor climate change into their planning operations for expansions, existing structures, and future developments.
Thursday, September 14, 2017 - 22:16 • Itai Vardi
A contractor hired by the state of Michigan to independently review an aging oil pipeline running under the Great Lakes was simultaneously working for the pipeline company, documents obtained by DeSmog suggest. The documents contradict the contractor’s earlier claim that it had effectively stopped working for Enbridge once hired by Michigan.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - 19:08 • Farron Cousins
In the last 30 days, the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean have played host to four hurricanes, three of which reached category 3 or higher, with Hurricane Irma claiming the title as the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - 11:52 • James Wilt
The race is on for electric vehicle supremacy.
Last week, China — the world’s second largest economy and consumer of about one-third of new cars — announced it will set a deadline for automakers to end sales of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, in a move that is expected to accelerate the global push into the electric car market.
China joins Norway, France and the U.K. in announcing plans to phase out vehicles with internal combustion engines.
Goldman Sachs recently estimated that electric vehicles will make up 32 per cent of global auto sales by 2040.
So, as the world moves toward the rapid adoption of electric vehicles, where is Canada in all of this?
Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - 10:30 • Guest
By Kert Davies, crossposted from Climate Investigations Center
Q: What does spending tens of millions of dollars supporting climate denial organizations over a twenty year period buy you?
A: Donald Trump, abdication of U.S. leadership on climate and increased risk of damage from climate change.
The Washington Post’s Bob O’Harrow just penned the most complete treatment to date on what has happened over the past year and the past twenty years starting in 1997, resulting in the June 2017 Rose Garden party to ditch the Paris Climate Agreement. This story contains a sequence of key events and history, ending in the Trump White House.
