Environment

DeSmog recently revealed the latest troubling chapter in the story of Israel’s nascent oil and gas boom – a saga of revolving doors, multinational fossil fuel intrigue, and significant American political intervention. But there’s another interesting tale to tell, one that has gone unnoticed by many observers.

Earlier this year the Association of American Railroads (AAR), the industry’s top lobbying group, produced a new report on rail safety. While the report ignored serious safety improvements such as requiring modernized braking systems on trains carrying hazardous materials, it did address one area of concern for oil-by-rail activists — rail bridge safety.

A port commission vote against a proposed $1.2 billion oil refinery in a Washington town proves that the people still have a voice.

The principle that polluters should pay for the waste they create has led many experts to urge governments to put a price on carbon emissions. One method is the sometimes controversial cap-and-trade. Quebec, California and the European Union have already adopted cap-and-trade, and Ontario will join Quebec and California’s system in January 2017. But is it a good way to address climate change?

A new study of the recent methane leak in Aliso Canyon, California confirms that it was the largest methane leak in US history. According to the study, the disaster’s impact on the climate will be equivalent to the effect of annual greenhouse gas emissions from over half a million cars.

“For the first time, in my memory, we are actually seeing oil and gas majors talk about climate change as an existential threat. Today for example the minister for oil and gas for Saudi Arabia, Ali Al-Naimi, actually got up on stage in front of this entire group and said that climate change is more of an existential threat to the industry than any down cycle.”

There are solar battles blazing all across the west right now, as utilities anchored to fossil fuel power plants strain to avoid the inevitable spread of solar across their areas of operation. Not a month goes by without a story of some assault on solar-friendly policies by utilities, or by the Utility Commissions that are often in their pocket.

If 2015 was the hottest year globally on record, what did that mean for your city? The New York Times, using weather data from AccuWeather, has given us an easy to use tool to find out (well as long as you live in one of 3,116 cities data is available). So how did we do in Columbia, SC? In 2015 we were 4.0 degrees above average. Charleston, SC, was 3.4 degrees above normal as was Greenville, SC.

Ford Motor Company confirmed to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that it is cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that has drawn heavy criticism for promoting climate change denial and for opposing the development of renewable energy sources.

On February 9, just days before the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay freezing President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP). While many articles have speculated on what Scalia's death means as it relates to the future of the CPP — and the Court's voting balance tipping from a 5-4 conservative majority to a potential 5-4 liberal majority — there's been less attention paid to the corporate-funded network that launched a slew of lawsuits against the government to add legal muscle to the state Attorneys General attacks on the CPP.