Environment

The speed and scale with which the oil and rail industries created the North American oil-by-rail infrastructure was impressive. And amazingly under the radar for the most part — until the trains started derailing and blowing up — leading to articles with titles like “The Invisible Bomb Trains.”

This is the second part of DeSmog UK’s series mapping Exxon’s ties to EU think tanks and lobby groups. Here we explore what happened to Exxon’s EU think tank ties after it pledged to stop funding climate denial. Pressure is mounting on ExxonMobil to explain why the oil giant funded climate denial around the world years after its own scientists established global warming was real.

According to water investors, the West’s millions of acres of farmland account for less than 2 percent of the region’s economic output, and moving just 10 percent of the water off farms would likely resolve the region’s current water shortfalls.
ProPublica

Oil and gas wastewater disposal has been tied to a series of earthquakes in California for the first time, in a peer-reviewed study published last Thursday. A string of quakes ending on Sept. 22, 2005 struck in Kern County near the southern end of California's Central Valley – and the new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that the odds that those quakes might have occurred by chance were just 3 percent.

As the US Senate haggles over a comprehensive energy bill, climate activist groups have identified the global fossil fuel reserves that must be kept in the ground if we’re to limit global warming to the critical 2-degree-Celsius threshold. This week saw the Senate debating the hotly contested energy bill, which has been criticized by environmentalists for including a number of fossil fuel industry giveaways, including expedited permitting for liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and subsidies for coal technology, among other troublesome provisions.

his article is the second of two posts examining Charles Koch's campus investments, as reported in Jane Mayer's Dark Money. The first post examined the history, long-term strategy, and true intent of the university “philanthropy” coordinated by Charles Koch. This post examines how Koch's academic network is openly dishonest about their work, lobbying for Koch's interests and recruiting students into his network. From 2005-2014, Koch spent $109.7 million on 361 distinct campuses, according to Greenpeace's updated analysis of IRS filings from Koch's nonprofit foundations.

Democratic U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Ed Markey (MA) and Brian Schatz (HI) introduced an amendment into the energy bill yesterday intended to express Congress’s disapproval of the use of industry-funded think tanks and misinformation tactics aimed at sowing doubt about climate change science. The amendment evokes the history of notorious anti-science efforts by the tobacco and lead industries to avoid accountability for the damage caused by their products, focusing similar ire on the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate cover-up.

As the February 1 Iowa Caucuses loom, the Hawkeye State sits as the proverbial last man standing in the decision whether to grant pipeline giant Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) a permit for its Dakota Access pipeline. Slated to carry upwards of 570,000 barrels per day of oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from North Dakota's Bakken Shale basin, the pipeline would cut diagonally across Iowa. In recent weeks, ETP has obtained necessary permits from North Dakota, South Dakota and Illinois.

Though he retired as Chesapeake Energy's CEO back in 2013 in the aftermath of a shareholder revolt, McClendon wasted little time in creating a new company called American Energy Partners (AEP). AEP, like Chesapeake, has found itself mired since its onset in legal snafus over its treatment of landowners. With AEP not getting a red carpet roll-out in the U.S., McClendon has looked southward for other lucrative business adventures.

Last week, on the day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record, the energy industry’s chief lobbyists gathered in a downtown Washington ballroom to tell each other that the real problem was not global warming, but rather efforts by the Obama Administration — and Pope Francis — to contain global warming.