Is A Climate Sceptic Behind The Latest Anti-Renewables Report?
A new study claiming renewable energy is the “most expensive policy disaster in modern British history” was written by climate sceptic Rupert Darwall and published by UK conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Darwall, an economist and CPS-listed expert, is best known for his book The Age of Global Warming, which has […]
The Moment Environmentalists Forced A 'Sea Change' At Oil Giant Shell
In this DeSmog UK epic history article we tell the inside story of how the rising tide of environmentalism in the 1990s caused a “sea change” at oil behometh Shell. The environment movement in 1997 appeared at its most confident and confrontational. In Britain, Greenpeace launched an audacious and effective international media campaign against Shell after the […]
The Keystone XL Distraction: Industry Has Built 11,600 Miles of Oil Pipeline With Little Public Resistance
Every good magician knows that the key to success is misdirecting the audience. You have to draw everyone’s attention away from your ultimate goal in order to perform the trick. Politics is no different, and one of the greatest misdirections in recent memory has been pulled off by the fossil fuel industry. While most of the […]
DeSmogCAST 12: Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill, Who it Targets and How it Helps Kinder Morgan
This weekend thousands of Canadians marched against the Conservative government’s proposed anti-terrorism bill C-51. In this episode of DeSmogCAST we take a close look at the proposed legislation and discuss how it relates to the recently-leaked RCMP intelligence report that names pipeline opponents and First Nations “violent anti-petroleum extremists.” Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner […]
The Global Coal Boom Is Going Bust: Report
A new report by CoalSwarm and the Sierra Club provides compelling evidence that the death knell for the global coal boom might very well have rung some time between 2010 and 2012. Based on data CoalSwarm compiled of every coal plant proposed worldwide for the past five years as part of its Global Coal Plant […]
Ridley's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Fixates on the Past and Ignores the Present to Try and Predict the Future
This is a guest post by US-based environmental communications group, Climate Nexus. Longtime climate contrarian and “coal baron” Matt Ridley returns to the Wall Street Journal to try to argue against data that show clean energy rapidly scaling up, and the science of climate change that links last year’s record heat and widespread extreme weather with carbon pollution. […]
You’ll Never Guess How This UKIP Candidate Came to Believe Climate Change Is A Hoax…
Scientists have spent years in Antarctica drilling ice cores to measure the levels of carbon dioxide in the air over millennia. They have travelled to northern Siberia to count tree rings as a proxy measure of historic temperatures. They have devised some of the most complex computer models in existence to see how rising emissions will impact […]
Rail Industry Lobbied Against New Oil-by-Rail Safety Regulations The Day After Rail Accident
With the recent run of exploding oil train accidents, it isn’t surprising that the rail industry has publicly expressed concern about hauling highly flammable oils like Bakken light crude and diluted tar sands. But that’s all the industry has done: express concern. It certainly hasn’t done anything to act on its concerns. For instance, Hunter […]
Can You Guess What Climate Deniers Said of the IPCC 20 Years Ago?
The DeSmog UK epic history series recalls how the war between the climate sceptics and the IPCC heated up as they tried to cast doubt over the science. The climate sceptics were ever ready to attack the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its second report, released in 1995. They well understood the political […]
Tobacco Gun for Hire James Enstrom, Willie Soon and the Climate Deniers Attack on Merchants of Doubt
This article was co-written by Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, the legal siege on the tobacco industry. A leaked email chain reported earlier this week on DeSmog shines a harsh light on the behind-the-scenes coordination between well-known climate deniers and fossil fuel funded spindoctors. But it turns out that there is much more to this story than just […]