D.C. Court Rules Against Environmental Transparency, Threatening Public Health and Democracy

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that trade deals can be exempted from federal disclosure laws. The case revolved around a classified document related to an FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) that contained information about environmental and public health and safety concerns. The suit was filed […]

Frackademia: University of Tennessee Set to Lease Forest For Fracking, Enriching Governor's Family

8,600 acres of the Cumberland Forest owned by University of Tennessee-Knoxville will be leased off to the oil and gas industry this August in a new form of “frackademia” – and one of the top financial beneficiaries will be the family of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, who sits on UT-Knoxville’s Board of Trustees.  “Frackademia” is usually […]

New Documents in West Virginia Coal Lawsuit Shine Light on Judicial Corruption Allegations

“Extreme by any measure.” Those four words were used by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark 2009 decision to describe judicial corruption and corporate influence in the West Virginia courts. That opinion by the nation’s highest court famously reversed the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals justices who had thrown out a lawsuit against a […]

The Epic Rise and Fall of Don Blankenship, former Massey Energy CEO

Three years ago, 29 miners died at the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch mine. It was the worst mining disaster in decades, caused by a methane-fueled blast that was so strong it killed miners more than a mile away and left steel rail lines tangled. Appalachia has seen its share of these sorts of accidents over […]

The Campaigns That Tried To Break The Climate Science Consensus

So just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000 scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause. Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based founder of Skeptical Science, confirms the […]

Could This Be the 21st Century’s Most Powerful Idea?

This is a guest post by Chris Wood, adapted from his brand new book, Down the Drain: How We Are Failing to Protect Our Water Resources. What we have here is a system failure.  It’s not just that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is winding up the planet’s thermostat. Nor that our rampant over-consumption of goods […]

FOIA Facts 5 – Finds Friends Of GWPF

People try to paint climate scientists as members of a cabal or conspiracy to hide the truth, but this idea is often promoted by thinktanks, politicians, bloggers, journalists and some economists, members of a tight social network themselves. Their emails are not usually subject to FOIAs, but the FOIA Facts research fortuitously found unexpected data. Email to […]

Google Promotes Involvement in Coal Industry Campaign to Block EPA Mercury Emission Regulations

Google, the search giant with the famous motto: “Don’t be evil,” is boasting about its involvement in a 2012 coal industry lobbying effort to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to protect the public from dangerous and potentially lethal coal plant emissions, according to a recently discovered Google case study. In February 2012, long time […]

Dirty Details: Dents, Faulty Welds Found Along Keystone XL Southern Half in Texas

If an ecologically hazardous accident happens to TransCanada’s Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline, we can’t say we weren’t forewarned. That’s the latest from a press release and YouTube video recently disseminated by the good government group, Public Citizen.  Public Citizen‘s Texas office explained, “Dozens of anomalies, including dents and welds, reportedly have been identified along a 60-mile […]

Radioactive Waste From the Marcellus Shale Continues to Draw Concern

Amid all the pushback to fracking, most of the attention has focused on what drillers put into the ground. The amount of water used. The chemicals that make up energy companies’ secret mix. Whether these dangerous chemicals will contaminate our drinking water. But one of the biggest problems of fracking, indeed, the Achilles heel of […]