Andrew Nikiforuk: Canada's Petrostate Has "Dramatically Diminished Our International Reputation"
“Alberta is very much a petrostate,” says journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk. “It gets about 30 per cent of its income from the oil and gas industry. So as a consequence, the government over time has tended more to represent this resource and the industry that produces it, than its citizens. This is very typical […]
Maryland Residents Fight Cove Point LNG Export Plans That Threaten To Turn Area Into “Industrial Site”
When Jean Marie Neal and her husband moved to Calvert County, Maryland, she knew natural gas was imported nearby at the Dominion Cove LNG plant. “We did not object,” Neal says, “because we knew at that point the United States needed to import gas.” But now, with Dominion’s proposal to build a liquefied natural gas export […]
Familiar Think Tanks Fight For E-cigarettes
Anti-science think tanks learned tactics from the tobacco industry and got paid for their help by tobacco companies, who fostered the Tea Party with the Koch brothers. When the Kochs needed better PR, they knew who to hire, Steve Lombardo, an experienced tobacco operative. People rarely get strong nicotine addiction after their teen years,* but teen smoking […]
Mont Pelerin Society A Window Into Ideological Heart Of Kochtopus Climate Denial
It’s known as the Kochtopus – the extensive network of think tanks, institutes, university departments, political funding arms and “grassroots” activist groups funded by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch. The multi-tentacled network has pumped tens of millions of dollars into groups that deny the risks of human-caused climate change. But if it is Koch cash that […]
Why It's Not Enough To Be Right About Climate Change
A couple weeks back, I found myself enmeshed briefly in a local debate here in Calgary regarding the validity of the argument that a continent-wide spell of frigid weather raised a serious challenge to the scientific foundations of anthropogenic climate change. In the depths of the cold snap, a rookie city councillor, Sean Chu, tweeted: I replied: […]
Oil on the Tracks: More Oil Spills from Railcars in 2013 than in Previous Four Decades [Updated]
As a direct result of the Bakken shale oil boom, more crude oil was spilled from rail cars last year than in the previous four decades combined. That’s according to a McClatchy analysis of federal data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which governs rail transport of liquid fuels like crude. The analysis revealed more than […]
Citing DeSmogBlog Series, "FrackNation" Screening Cancelled by MN Film Festival
“FrackNation,” the documentary film about hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) with close conservative movement ties, recently had its showing cancelled at Winona, Minnesota’s annual Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF). Citing DeSmogBlog‘s two-part investigative series published in May 2013 on “FrackNation,” FRFF Director Mike Kennedy told the Winona Post his rationale for cancelling the film is that it was, “pretty apparent they […]
Dirty Energy Job Numbers Don't Add Up
A foolproof way to sell an idea to the American public is to link that idea to jobs. If you are able to convince them that your proposal will either preserve jobs already in place, or even better, create new jobs, it makes it much more difficult to ignore. This is why the promise of […]
Keystone XL Could Boost Global Oil Consumption By 500K Barrels A Day
A new study from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) focuses on a greenhouse gas impact of the Keystone XL pipeline that hasn’t received much attention: how the pipeline could affect the global oil market by increasing supply, decreasing prices and therefore driving up global oil consumption. Even if those effects are small in global terms, they […]
Tricks of the Trade: How Big Polluters Hide Climate Lobbying Behind Trade Groups
What do large companies do when they want to lobby against climate change and carbon mitigation measures without looking publicly like they’re pro-pollution? According to a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they hide behind trade groups. Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have essentially become puppets […]