FOIA Facts 1 – More Misdeeds By Ed Wegman, Yasmin Said, George Mason University
05/20/15: The full report is now posted, as side-effect of $2M lawsuiit by Ed Wegman, Yasmin Said, Milton Johns. New Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) replies have exposed more misdeeds by Professor Edward Wegman and Yasmin Said at George Mason University (GMU), closely involved with the Kochs, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and many others […]
Friday Trash Dump: Obama DOE Approves 2nd Fracked Gas LNG Export Terminal
Friday is the proverbial “take out the trash day” for the release of bad news among public relations practitioners and this Friday was no different. In that vein, yesterday the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) announced a conditional approval of the second-ever LNG (liquefied natural gas) export terminal. LNG is the super-chilled final product of gas obtained – predominantly in today’s context – […]
Climate Denial's Death Knell: 97 Percent of Peer-Reviewed Science Confirms Manmade Global Warming, Consensus Overwhelming
A new survey conducted by a team of volunteers at Skeptical Science has definitively confirmed the scientific consensus in climate science literature – 97 percent of peer-reviewed papers agree that global warming is happening and human activities are responsible. It does not get any clearer than this. It should finally put to rest the […]
10 Reasons Canada Needs to Rethink the Tar Sands
As a Canadian it blows my mind that we can have the second largest deposits of oil in the world, but our government remains billions in debt and one in seven Canadian children live in poverty. I feel like we are being played for fools here in Canada, because foreign owned oil companies like ExxonMobil, British […]
Faulkner County: ExxonMobil's "Sacrifice Zone" for Tar Sands Pipelines, Fracking
There are few better examples of a “sacrifice zone” for ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel industry at-large than Faulkner County, Arkansas and the counties surrounding it. Six weeks have passed since a 22-foot gash in ExxonMobil’s Pegasus tar sands Pipeline spilled over 500,000 gallons of heavy crude into the quaint neighborhood of Mayflower, AR, a township with a population of […]
Pegasus Pipeline Spill: Mayflower Residents Find Conflicting Advice from Arkansas Agencies
It’s been over five weeks since ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst beneath a Mayflower, Arkansas subdivision, spilling diluted bitumen born of tar sands throughout the neighborhood. Five weeks later, and still the air carries noxious fumes. Residents complain of headaches, nausea, and worse. Meanwhile, these residents of Mayflower are getting mixed signals from various state agencies, as […]
Could NAFTA Force Keystone XL On United States?
As the public anxiously awaits the U.S. State Department’s final decision on the fate of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the discussion has largely ignored the elephant in the room: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.) Thanks to NAFTA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, the State Department will likely be able […]
America's First Climate Refugees
The Guardian news outlet is running a series this week on the small Alaskan town of Newtok that is slowly being wiped off the map as the waters rise around it. The Army Corp of Engineers predicts that the highest point in Newtok could be under water by as early as 2017. This is irrefutable evidence […]
Obama, Biden Parroting Bogus Gas Industry Talking Points
For several years, both President Obama and Vice President Biden have been singing the praises of natural gas and hydraulic fracturing, claiming that the upcoming “cheap energy boom” would bring hundreds of thousands of jobs to work-hungry Americans. The claim, which reached the most ears during the President’s 2012 State of the Union Address and was […]
Will Future Generations Call Obama The ‘Environmental President’ Or An Abject Failure?
This is a guest post by Joe Romm, cross-posted from ClimateProgress with permission. It’s tempting to grade the President on a curve, but future generations won’t – if we destroy the livable climate they’ll need to feed 9 billion people. “History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our […]