If the Budget means one thing above all else for the road transport lobby, it’s fuel duty. And recent years have shown it knows exactly which pressure points to push to get its way, with the...
Wednesday, March 3, 2021 - 16:27 • Julie Dermansky
Human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a statement on March 2 raising concerns about the further industrialization of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” This largely Black-populated stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is lined with more than a hundred refineries and petrochemical plants. The experts said additional petrochemical development in this region, which U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data shows has some of the country’s highest cancer risks from air pollution, constitutes “environmental racism” that “must end.”
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Friday, March 5, 2021 - 09:00 • Justin Mikulka
Read time: 10 mins
Energy companies are increasingly having to face the unprofitable reality of fracking, and some executives are now starting to admit that publicly. But the question is whether the industry will listen — or continue to gamble with shale gas and oil.
Wednesday, March 3, 2021 - 15:32 • Sharon Kelly
Read time: 13 mins
A groundbreaking four-part report by Environmental Health News (EHN) offers new scientific evidence that living near oil and gas development can expose people to a wide array of hazardous and carcinogenic chemicals — not just those living near shale drilling and fracking, but also those living near older conventional oil and gas wells.
Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - 14:22 • Guest
Read time: 3 mins
By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams
Following warnings that the coronavirus-triggered drop in planet-warming emissions would be short-lived without structural changes, the International Energy Agency released data Tuesday showing that global CO2 emissions from the energy sector were 2 percent higher in December 2020 compared to the same month the previous year.
Friday, February 26, 2021 - 16:00 • Justin Mikulka
Read time: 8 mins
Last August, ExxonMobil warned that it may need to remove 20 percent of its oil and gas proved reserves from its books. While that was a shocking number from the oil major, reality proved to be even more of a shock to the company. On February 24, Exxon reported that it would actually remove over 30 percent of its proved reserves from its books — essentially wiping out the value of its Canadian tar sands holdings from its books.
Friday, February 26, 2021 - 15:37 • Sharon Kelly
Read time: 16 mins
As temperatures across Texas plunged in mid-February, memes showing frozen wind turbines — some including misleading photos from Europe in 2015 — spread rapidly on social media.
Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 13:38 • Ian Urbina
Read time: 7 mins
As the Biden administration turns to environmental concerns, one of its top priorities will be how to better protect the world’s oceans. With more than 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks at or near collapse, some marine conservationists suggest that aquaculture might help counter the problem of overfishing.
Now that the new administration is in office and rapidly attempting to reverse many of the policy priorities of its predecessor, marine advocates are watching to see what their posture will be toward aquaculture. But the push to expand fish farms is spurring a fiery debate, prompting calls from the U.S.-based commercial fishing industry for more support while drawing skepticism and critique from many marine biologist and environmentalists.
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.
