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      Trump’s $1bn pitch to oil bosses ‘the definition of corruption’, top Democrat says

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      Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.“It certainly meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club.Whitehouse added: “The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.”Whitehouse and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.The two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil leaders.Amplifying those concerns, former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble said that Trump’s unusually aggressive money pitch “violates the letter and spirit” of campaign-finance laws, and a veteran Republican consultant called it “blatant pay to play”.In a separate fossil-fuel inquiry, Raskin and Whitehouse released a joint report in April into long-running big-oil disinformation campaigns to undercut the enormous threats posed by global warming, which Trump has falsely labelled a “hoax”, and last week urged the justice department to investigate big-oil tactics to deceive the public.Trump boasts a lengthy record of rejecting scientific evidence about the links between fossil-fuel usage and climate change: he has pushed a litany of bogus climate claims, including that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are “bad” for the environment, while promising to end tax breaks for EVs if he wins this fall.Further, in a major rebuke to environmental advocates and international efforts to curb global warming, Trump in 2017 announced the US was pulling out of the Paris agreement to limit climate change, a much-criticized move that Joe Biden reversed.Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra and his deep animosity toward alternative energy sources have been part of his fundraising pitches to oil and gas moguls, triggering alarm about the dangers of another Trump presidency.“The totality of … Trump, the fossil-fuel industry and a [conservative thinktank] Heritage Foundation blueprint advocate will put a dagger through efforts to avoid catastrophic warming,” said Joe Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.“Trump promises to undo every constraint on global warming. Trump has pushed more lies and disinformation about climate change than anyone ever has.”Other climate scholars say Trump’s climate denialism is the culmination of years of fossil-fuel propaganda.“Trump is an apotheosis of decades of denial, not only on the part of the fossil-fuel industry, but also by other industry allies, including now-certain billionaires, to deny the reality of the harms of unregulated, or very poorly regulated, capitalism,” said Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard historian of science. “Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of this rewriting of history, culminating in the big lie that he won the 2020 election.”Trump’s strong embrace of climate-change denialism and his pro-big-oil policies were underscored by his aggressive $1bn pitch at Mar-a-Lago, which drew CEOs from giants such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, and the fracking multibillionaire Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources, as the Washington Post first reported.Hamm, an early Trump backer in 2016 and 2020 who took months before helping Trump’s current presidential bid, joined with two other industry CEOs to host a Super Pac bash in Houston that reportedly raised $40m on 22 May from attendees who paid at least $250,000 each to hear Trump promise more fracking and more pipelines if he wins.Trump’s full-court press for fossil-fuel funds and political backing was palpable at an industry conference in North Dakota earlier in May, where Hamm surprised attendees by announcing Trump would join them via a video which featured bogus claims about the health of energy companies and the economy.“Under ‘Crooked Joe Biden’, the American energy industry is under siege, it’s under crisis. [Biden] has made clear that he wants to abolish your industry and, with it, destroy our economy and send us into a new dark age of blackouts, poverty and de-industrialization,” said Trump.View image in fullscreenThe spotlight on Trump’s ardent pursuit of oil and gas donations comes after Biden championed major new regulatory, tax and spending measures to reduce global warming in a sharp break with Trump policies past and present.Ironically, even as Biden succeeded in accelerating spending for green energy, and imposed new regulations on fracking on US lands and a moratorium on natural gas exports, oil and gas production in the US reached new highs in 2023 and major companies notched healthy profits.Still, the oil and gas industry has been ponying up funds for Trump’s campaign faster than it did in 2020, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets group, which tracks money in politics.The oil and gas industry has donated $7.3m to Trump’s campaign thus far, or more than three times the amount it gave at this point in 2020, OpenSecrets data shows.Further, some industry titans have donated six- and seven-figure checks to a Trump Super Pac. Texas oilman and multibillionaire Tim Dunn gave $5m to Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac this year, and Hamm kicked in at least $200,000 last fall.Campaign-finance watchdogs and some Republican veterans are dismayed by Trump’s fundraising tactics.“Trump views everything as a transaction, so I’m not surprised,” said ex-GOP representative Dave Trott. “Any other politician who made these statements would be deemed dead on arrival because they’d be viewed as corrupt.”Campaign-finance experts see other dangers in Trump’s heavy-handed fundraising appeals, which he links to favors.“When wealthy special interests, like the oil and gas industry, have special access to candidates, and mechanisms to give them enough money to control their policy choices, everyday voters suffer,” said Shanna Ports, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior legal counsel for campaign finance.“Trump’s request to oil executives is a troubling illustration of the quid pro quo corruption and pay-to-play-style politics that federal campaign laws are meant to prevent. Federal law includes strict contribution limits and bans corporate contributions precisely so candidates do not trade policy favors for campaign cash.”Ports stressed that “candidates are forbidden from soliciting contributions that would break these laws – a prohibition that Trump may have violated”.Likewise, Noble, the former Federal Election Commission general counsel, said Trump’s appeals for massive donations from oil and gas bigwigs [are] “pretty blatantly offering policy favors in exchange for large contributions”.Little wonder, then, that top Senate and House Democrats are inquiring into whether Trump’s bald $1bn ask of big oil moguls broke campaign finance laws, as well as big oil’s long track record of spreading disinformation about global warming.In Whitehouse and Raskin’s joint letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, urging the DoJ to investigate big oil’s history of climate change disinformation, they drew parallels with the tobacco industry’s years of disinformation about the dangers smoking poses to human health.“The DoJ is well situated to pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries,” they wrote.Looking ahead to the November election, climate change experts predict another Trump presidency would decimate efforts to curb global warming.“If Trump is elected and does what he has been saying and the fossil fuel industry wants, that would be the ruin of the United States and the world,” Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania, warned.“Trump wants to roll back” the ambitious climate change steps and spending that the Biden administration has initiated, Romm added, saying: “We have dawdled a very long time on climate change. We need very sharp reductions. We can’t afford four years focused on raising emissions.” More

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      Trump promised to scrap climate laws if US oil bosses donated $1bn – report

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      Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1bn for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional”, at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.“You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the Post, citing an unnamed dinner attendee.Trump’s exhortation to the oil executives that they were wealthy enough to pour $1bn into his campaign war-chest, at the same time pledging a U-turn on Biden’s efforts to combat the climate crisis, was immediately denounced on Wednesday by environmental groups.“$1bn for Trump, a devastating climate future for the rest of us,” said Pete Maysmith of the League of Conservation Voters (LCV).Christina Polizzi of Climate Power told the Guardian that Trump was “putting the future of the planet up for sale”.“He is in the pocket of big oil – he gave them $25bn in tax breaks in his first term – and now it’s clear he is willing to do whatever big oil wants in a potential second term.”The former president’s exchange with fossil fuel giants also engaged the concern of groups monitoring the influence of money in politics. Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (Crew), a non-partisan government watchdog, said the conversation, as reported by the Post, “certainly looks a lot like quid pro quo”.Libowitz said the encounter was “about as blatant as I’ve ever seen. Politicians often give a nudge and a wink, they don’t say raise a billion dollars for me and I’ll get rid of the regulations that you want.”He added that Crew’s legal team were looking into whether this rises to the high legal standard of bribery.Trump’s close relations to the oil industry, and his hostility to federal regulations designed to reduce emissions that exacerbate the climate crisis, are well-known and longstanding. With six months to go until the presidential election, however, he is stepping up his efforts to attract campaign donations from the sector.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is also performing strongly in the polls. Having all but certainly secured the Republican nomination, Trump is often narrowly ahead of Joe Biden in surveys of the presidential race, including performing strongly in the key swing states that are vital to any candidate’s chances of victory. Trump’s solid performance comes despite a swath of legal woes, including currently being on trial in New York over an alleged hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.For their part, executives in big oil companies have been preparing for a possible Trump second term by drafting executive orders designed to be ready to sign as soon as he returns to office. Politico reported this week that the executives have clubbed together to produce off-the-shelf policies on increasing natural gas exports, supercharging drilling and extending offshore oil leases.The interplay between Trump and the oil giants as the election approaches underlines the vast gulf between the former president and the current occupant of the White House. According to an analysis by a group of environmental groups including the Sierra Club and LCV, the Biden administration has taken more than 300 actions towards greater public health and clean energy, more than any other administration in US history.Those measures included the first major climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has propelled record investment in clean energy including solar and wind and increased sales of electric vehicles. US energy emissions are slowly declining, by some 3% this year.Even so, the US is extracting more oil and gas than ever, reaching almost 13m barrels of crude oil a day – more than double the production levels a decade ago. More

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      Biden administration moves to restrict oil and gas leases on 13m acres in Alaska

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      The Biden administration said on Friday it will restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13m acres (5.3m hectares) of a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska to help protect wildlife such as caribou and polar bears as the Arctic continues to warm.The decision – part of an ongoing, years-long fight over whether and how to develop the vast oil resources in the state – finalizes protections first proposed last year as the Biden administration prepared to approve the controversial Willow oil project.The approval of Willow drew fury from environmentalists, who said the large oil project violated Biden’s pledge to combat the climate crisis. Friday’s decision also cements an earlier plan that called for closing nearly half the reserve to oil and gas leasing.The rules announced on Friday would place restrictions on future leasing and industrial development in areas designated as special for their wildlife, subsistence or other values and call for the Bureau of Land Management to evaluate regularly whether to designate new special areas or bolster protections in those areas. The agency cited as a rationale the rapidly changing conditions in the Arctic due to the climate crisis, including melting permafrost and changes in plant life and wildlife corridors.Environmentalists were pleased. “This huge, wild place will be able to remain wild,” Ellen Montgomery of Environment America Research & Policy Center said.Jeremy Lieb, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the administration had taken an important step to protect the climate with the latest decision. Earthjustice is involved in litigation currently before a federal appeals court that seeks to overturn the Willow project’s approval. A decision in that case is pending.Earlier this week the Biden administration also finalized a new rule for public land management that is meant to put conservation on more equal footing with oil drilling, grazing and other extractive industries on vast government-owned properties.A group of Republican lawmakers, led by Alaska’s junior senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, commented ahead of Friday’s announcements about drilling limitations in the national petroleum reserve in Alaska even before it was publicly announced. Sullivan called it an “illegal” attack on the state’s economic lifeblood, and predicted lawsuits.“It’s more than a one-two punch to Alaska, because when you take off access to our resources, when you say you cannot drill, you cannot produce, you cannot explore, you cannot move it – this is the energy insecurity that we’re talking about,” Alaska’s senior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, said.The decision by the Department of the Interior does not change the terms of existing leases in the reserve or affect currently authorized operations, including the Willow project.The Biden administration also on Friday recommended the rejection of a state corporation’s application related to a proposed 210-mile (338km) road in the north-west part of the state to allow mining of critical mineral deposits, including copper, cobalt, zinc, silver and gold. There are no mining proposals or current mines in the area, however, and the proposed funding model for the Ambler Road project is speculative, the interior department said in a statement.Alaska’s political leaders have long accused the Biden administration of harming the state with decisions limiting the development of oil and gas, minerals and timber.“Joe Biden is fine with our adversaries producing energy and dominating the world’s critical minerals while shutting down our own in America, as long as the far-left radicals he feels are key to his re-election are satisfied,” Sullivan said on Thursday at a Capitol news conference with 10 other Republican senators.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden defended his decision regarding the petroleum reserve.Alaska’s “majestic and rugged lands and waters are among the most remarkable and healthy landscapes in the world”, are critical to Alaska Native communities and “demand our protection”, he said in a statement.Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a group whose members include leaders from across much of Alaska’s North Slope region, has been critical of the administration’s approach. The group’s board of directors previously passed a resolution opposing the administration’s plans for the reserve.The petroleum reserve – about 100 miles (161km) west of the Arctic national wildlife refuge – is home to caribou and polar bears and provides habitat for millions of migrating birds. It was set aside about a century ago as an emergency oil source for the US navy, but since the 1970s has been overseen by the interior department. There has been ongoing, longstanding debate over where development should occur.Most existing leases in the petroleum reserve are clustered in an area that is considered to have high development potential, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which falls under the interior department. The development potential in other parts of the reserve is lower, the agency said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Biden administration to award $7bn in grants to create US ‘hydrogen hubs’

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      The Department of Energy has selected seven projects for a $7bn program to launch the development and production of hydrogen fuel, the White House announced on Friday.The Biden administration says the program will constitute a major boost to the country’s nascent clean hydrogen industry, helping it achieve its climate goals. But many climate advocates are skeptical that it will actually help reduce emissions.Unlike coal, oil, and gas, when burned, hydrogen does not produce greenhouse gas emissions. It can be produced using carbon-free energy, but roughly 96% of it is currently derived from planet-heating fossil fuels – something the Biden administration hopes to change.“With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Jennifer Granholm, secretary of energy, in a statement.The money will be awarded to proposed hydrogen projects on the Gulf Coast, the mid-Atlantic, Appalachia, the midwest, the upper midwest, the Pacific north-west and California. Dozens of regions competed for funds from the $7b pot, set aside in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. On Friday, Joe Biden will travel to Philadelphia to promote the mid-Atlantic hub.The Department of Energy says it expects the funding to help cut 25m metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, the equivalent of removing 5.5m gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year.But some experts say the new initiative could amount to little more than greenwashing. Though researchers agree that truly clean hydrogen, produced without fossil fuels, can fulfill certain crucial roles in hard-to-decarbonize sectors, including in the production of synthetic fertilizers and steel, studies have found it to be much less efficient for home heating and transportation than technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles.“Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly,” Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, told the Guardian this year.Despite this, fossil fuel companies have spent years promotinghydrogen production as a catch-all climate solution. Some have used the hope of clean hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that they can be used to transport the climate-friendly fuel in the future.Climate advocates also note that hydrogen production, even when powered by renewable energy, can be highly water intensive. And since hydrogen is also a highly flammable and corrosive element, it can create risk for workers.Oil companies often say fossil fuels can power hydrogen production, so long any emissions produced are trapped with carbon capture and kept out of the atmosphere.But carbon capture technology is not currently available at commercial scale, and a 2021 paper co-authored by Haworth found that using methane gas paired with carbon capture to produce so-called “blue” hydrogen for home heating, could produce more climate-warming pollution burning gas, coal or diesel oil.“At face value – and according to the Biden playbook – the hydrogen hub grants aim to help transition the United States to clean energy,” said Marion Gee, co-executive director at the Climate Justice Alliance, a national coalition of grassroots environmental justice groups. “In reality, they amount to another corporate scam, one that preserves and extends the life of the extractive economy and prevents the frontline communities most impacted by climate disaster from having input.”Julie McNamara, deputy policy director of the science and climate advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, said the administration should impose stricter regulations on the hydrogen hubs to boost community input and ensure only completely fossil-free projects receive funding.“Concerningly, today’s H2Hubs announcement advances multiple projects premised on fossil fuel-based hydrogen production and risky hydrogen end uses,” she said. “Billions of taxpayer dollars are at risk of perpetuating fossil fuel industry injustices and harms while subsidizing fossil fuel greenwashing.” More

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      Trump falsely claims wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them ‘batty’

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      Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.”“They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and reality TV host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”Trump has a history of making false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little to support Trump’s foray into whale science.“He displays an astonishing lack of knowledge of whales and whale strandings,” said Andrew Read, a whale researcher and commissioner of the Marine Mammal Commission, of Trump. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”The US has been slow, compared with other countries, to develop offshore wind farms but several projects are now under way off the east coast, enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden as a way to boost clean energy supply and combat the climate crisis.Critics of this push, including some environmentalists, have warned that whales are being imperiled by work to install these new offshore turbines, but scientists have largely dismissed these claims. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted.Read said that there are some “broad concerns” about the overall industrialization of the oceans, but that the main threats to whales come from their being hit by boats and becoming entangled in fishing gear, and from warming oceans due to the climate change.“The population of humpback whales, in particular, is recovering from being hunted and they are coming closer to the coast to feed on prey, which means they are being hit as they come into shipping lanes, or being caught up in nets,” said Read.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spate of dead whales that washed up along New York and New Jersey’s coasts earlier this year has fueled opposition to wind turbines, however, with Republicans in New Jersey attempting to halt construction of turbines.This opposition has been embraced not only as another culture war battle but also as a way to help businesses keen to stymie clean energy, with several rightwing groups funded by fossil fuel interests linked to seemingly organic community protests against wind farms.“It’s particularly sad to see well-meaning people who care about whales being persuaded that wind turbines are a risk to them,” said Read. “They are being manipulated by fossil fuel interests who see wind energy as a threat to those interests.” More

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      Climate activists block Federal Reserve bank, calling for end to fossil fuel funding

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      One day after the largest climate march since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of climate activists blockaded the Federal Reserve Bank in New York to call for an end to funding for coal, oil and gas, with police making scores of arrests.“Fossil fuel companies … wouldn’t be able to operate without money, and that money is coming primarily from Wall Street,” Alicé Nascimento, environmental campaigns director at New York Communities for Change, said hours before she was arrested.The action came as world leaders began arriving in New York for the United National general assembly (UNGA) gathering and followed Sunday’s 75,000-person March to End Fossil Fuels, which focused on pushing Biden to urgently phase out fossil fuels. Monday’s civil disobedience had a different but compatible goal, said Renata Pumarol, an organizer with the campaign group Climate Defenders.“Today we want to make sure people know banks, big banks, are responsible for climate change, too,” she said. “And while marches are important, we think civil disobedience is, too, because it shows we’re willing to do whatever it takes to end fossil fuels, including putting ourselves on the line.”Monday’s action was organized by a coalition of local organizations including New York Communities for Change and Extinction Rebellion NYC, alongside national groups such as Climate Organizing Hub and 350.org. Demonstrators first gathered in New York’s Zuccotti Park, in the financial district in lower Manhattan, which is partially owned by fossil fuel investor Goldman Sachs.The small concrete urban space was the base for the original Occupy Wall Street protests 12 years ago.On Monday, demonstrators then marched in the rain to the nearby New York Federal Reserve building, the largest of the network of 12 federal banks dotted around the country that make up the central bank of the United States.Protesters blockaded multiple entrances into the bank while singing, beating drums and holding up signs. Over 100 people were arrested, according to the New York City Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, with organizers estimating that roughly 150 arrests were made.“If you arrest one of us, one hundred more will come,” activists chanted.The protesters called attention to both public and private fossil fuel financing. Globally, government subsidies for coal, oil and gas reached a record high of $13m per minute in 2022 last year – equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education – according to the International Monetary Fund.Last year, the US also ranked 16th among the G20 countries on a scorecard by the independent economic research group Green Central Banking, which the researchers say indicates US financial regulators are falling behind their international peers on climate risk mitigation.Meanwhile, since the signing of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, major private banks have provided some $3.2tn to the fossil fuel industry to expand operations, far outstripping the amount that global north governments have collectively spent on international climate finance, an analysis from ActionAid, the Washington DC-based non-profit, found this month. Another recent analysis from the Sierra Club environmental group found that major global banks have announced climate pledges but nonetheless financed coal energy across the US.Monday’s action came after a slew of global protests last week, some of which targeted financial institutions. In New York, dozens rallied outside of the headquarters for asset manager BlackRock and Citibank on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, to call attention to both firms’ investments in fossil fuels. And on Friday, protesters targeted the Museum of Modern Art over its relationship to fossil fuel investor KKR.Another protest is planned for Tuesday at New York City’s Bank of America offices, with additional actions throughout the week as the United Nations hosts its Climate Ambition Summit as part of the UNGA. More

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      Alarm at rightwing push to reverse clean-energy success in Texas and beyond

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      In the scramble before the end of Texas’s legislative session last week, a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy. This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.But the conservative lawmakers had help.Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (or TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires – to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas”, as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization substantially funded by fossil fuel interests and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, which now produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.The group’s agenda is now extending far beyond Texas, bankrolling efforts to halt offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts and to prop up coal power on native American land in Arizona while spearheading efforts to crack down on sustainable finance in energy-producing states like West Virginia.“We are very influential, we are meeting with policymakers to share recommendations and we’re having success around the country,” said Jason Isaac, a former state representative and now director of TPPF’s energy initiatives. Isaac said that TPFF regularly helped craft “certain aspects” of bills in Texas related to the state’s electricity grid or environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) issues.“I think conservatives are slowly but surely moving away from variable generation and towards reliable generation,” he said of the group’s quest against renewables. Isaac claimed renewables have been unfairly propped up by a “cult-like fascination” among politicians who have pursued what he called a “dangerous and deadly” agenda to reduce planet-heating emissions.The aggressive push against renewables in Texas has alarmed environmentalists who fret it will undermine the state’s nation-leading wind industry and threaten the revenues solar and wind generates for local communities and farmers. More broadly, the template used by TPPF in Texas could hobble efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to tackle the climate crisis.“We are seeing a rush of these bills attempting to wind the clock back on renewables and TPPF really are at the point of the spear on this,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “They are transparent advocates for the fossil fuel industry and I think they pose an incredible threat to renewables. TPPF have gained incredible traction, they really are shifting the narrative in Texas.“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical if the US going to get to net zero emissions, so we should take this threat seriously.”TPPF’s impact can now be found thousands of miles from its base in Austin, Texas, with the group filing a lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of six east coast fishing businesses – collectively called Nantucket Residents Against Turbines – targeting a major windfarm currently under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. Slated to come online by the end of the year, Vineyard Wind will be the first major offshore wind project to be built off the US east coast.The lawsuit claimed federal agencies did not sufficiently analyze how the project, which is set to deliver enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, would affect wildlife – specifically the endangered North Atlantic right whale – and thereby violated the Endangered Species Act and slew of other environmental policies.Meghan Lapp, a seafood dealer and longtime offshore wind critic who was a plaintiff in the suit, told Reuters in 2021 that TPPF got involved in the suit at her request. As it announced its involvement in the case, the thinktank also took the unusual step of releasing a trailer called “A Heavy Wind”.The case was ultimately unsuccessful after a federal judge dismissed it last month, but the idea that wind turbines kill whales has been seized upon by conservatives, especially since December, when dozens of whales began washing up on the Atlantic coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) calls an “unusual mortality event”.Noaa has said there is no evidence that offshore wind power is killing off whales, with fishing practices, boat strikes and the climate crisis among the primary dangers to marine mammals, but congressional Republicans have called on the White House to pause offshore wind development, while Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, aired a critical series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction”.The assault on renewables by TPPF and its Republican allies has stunned conservatives who remain supportive of the longstanding bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy.The reversal has been particularly stark for Texas which, blessed with the capacious, flat terrain and amenable climate for abundant wind and solar energy, was championed as a bastion for renewables by previous Republican governors George W Bush and Rick Perry, even as they embraced the ubiquitous oil industry.More than 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources last year, with the state now producing more wind and solar than the next three states – California, Iowa and Oklahoma – combined. This imperious status now seems uncertain.“I don’t recognize the state sometimes any more from our elected leaders. It’s like we are in a twilight zone where up is down and day is night,” said Matt Welch, state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation.“I fear we’re losing our lead in the nation and the world as the source for clean energy advancement. It’s just amazing we’ve rolled up the welcome mat and told wind and solar operators they’re just not welcome here any more.”The Texas Public Policy Foundation was founded in 1989 by James R Leininger, a San Antonio-based physician who made his fortune selling hospital beds, and initially focused on the issue of charter schools before branching out into other topics such as energy. The thinktank is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of far-right non-profits across the country that fight climate-focused legislation.In 2021, the most recent year for which records are available, donations for the thinktank totaled $25.6m. Publicly available data shows that – like many State Policy Network affiliates – its largest known funder is Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who made his fortune from fossil fuels. Entities tied to Koch have contributed at least $8.8m to the group since 2012, according to an analysis by researcher Connor Gibson.Tax filings show that the group has received donations from fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, but, as a non-profit, the full extent of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding is unknown.Issac said, however, it has been “many years” since large oil firms such as Exxon have donated to TPPF as these companies now ostensibly support decarbonization and environmentally responsible corporate governance, which conflicts with the foundation. He insisted that the foundation is committed to “free enterprise and individual liberty” and the eradication of “market distorting” subsidies, not just for renewables but also fossil fuels.But Welch said that Republican lawmakers, backed by TPPF, have ditched any ideological consistency by heaping onerous restrictions on renewable energy development on private property, in some cases attempting to impose requirements absent from oil and gas drilling, and trying to slash subsidies for the industry at the same time as offering state support for the buildout of new gas plants.One proposed bill that didn’t get sufficient backing in the latest Texas legislative session would have placed stringent new rules for wind and solar projects, including written permissions from neighboring property owners and setbacks of up to half a mile from the edge of a property for wind turbines. Another would have cut all subsidies for renewable energy.“On a Tuesday these lawmakers will be adamantly for private property rights, but on a Thursday they will want to stop the growth of renewable energy even though it’s on somebody’s private land,” Welch said, adding that TPPF was once full of “mini Milton Friedmans for years until recently, and now all of a sudden they throw that out the window.“It’s been a shocker. It’s so hypocritical,” he said. “I used to be an acolyte of TPPF but they are now driven by oil and gas billionaires who want to stop alternative forms of energy to benefit their own bottom line. They’ve sold their soul to the almighty dollar.”Renewable energy remains broadly popular with the Texas public for delivering cheap, clean power along with an injection of cash for entities such as school districts, but affection has somewhat curdled among some of the state’s Republican leadership. A devastating winter storm in 2021, which left millions of Texans without power and led to several hundred deaths, was a major accelerant of this trend.In the days following the crippling event, known as winter storm Uri, Abbott and other leading Republicans pushed the blame for the power blackouts upon renewable energy, with misleading pictures of frozen wind turbines from Europe quickly circulating social media as the supposed cause of the grid’s breakdown.Subsequent studies have made clear the primary cause of the blackouts were frozen gas pipelines and a lack of infrastructure resiliency to extreme weather, rather than renewables per se, but the perception of faulty wind and solar has stuck, eagerly fanned by TPPF.“I still believe [renewables] deserve a lot of the blame,” said Isaac. “The storm was helpful in educating people who just assumed when they flip a switch the lights come on that there are issues with grid reliability, that solar panels covered in snow don’t produce electricity.”Isaac said the foundation accepts that the climate is changing but disputes that this is harmful to people, claiming that the benefits of burning of fossil fuels “far outweighs” any negatives, including deadly air pollution, which he asserts isn’t an issue for the US and its “near natural” air quality. Scientists have, in fact, found that the climate crisis poses huge and growing risks to humanity, with airborne pollutants from burning coal, oil and gas linked to an array of different health problems.While the most severe of the anti-renewables bills pushed forward in Texas didn’t pass the legislature this year, Isaac said that TPPF remains undaunted and will continue to agitate against what he called “the false panacea of variable power”. Supporters of clean energy said they expect further battles ahead to prevent Texas’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound.“With the growth trajectory of renewable energy, TPPF can either get on the train or lay down in front of the tracks,” said Welch. “I suspect they won’t rest on their laurels. They’re going to come for renewables again and again and again.” More

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      ‘Stop the dirty deal’: activists decry Schumer and Manchin over pipeline plan

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      Climate activists have stepped up protests over the inclusion of a provision to speed up a controversial gas pipeline’s completion in the deal to raise the debt ceiling as Congress prepares to vote on Wednesday, aiming criticism at Democrats Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin.The pipeline project has long been championed by Manchin, the West Virginia senator who was the top recipient of fossil fuel industry contributions during the 2022 election cycle.Activists, led by the advocacy group Climate Defiance and supported by Food and Water Watch, Climate Families NYC, Center for Popular Democracy, Sunrise Movement NYC and others, rallied outside the Senate majority leader home in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood on Tuesday evening, chanting “Schumer, stop the dirty deal” and demanding the $6.6bn Mountain Valley Pipeline be stripped from the legislation.Schumer has also received donations from one of the companies behind the pipeline.The protests came hours after nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Schumer and members of Congress remove the pipeline from the deal.“The unscrupulous brinkmanship on display in Washington is endangering our very future,” Eric Weltman, senior New York organizer at the environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said in a statement. “Our climate and communities are not for sale – any deal that holds the economy and climate hostage for the profit of dirty energy donors is a betrayal.”Last year, Manchin failed to make the approval of the pipeline part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But in exchange for his crucial vote for the legislation, he secured a commitment from Schumer to pass a separate bill to expedite the pipeline’s construction and help fast-track the construction of other energy infrastructure. The permitting legislation failed at the hands of Senate Republicans who were unhappy with the compromise.NextEra Energy, one company behind the Mountain Valley pipeline, is a major contributor to Manchin and Schumer. In the 2022 cycle, the company’s employees and political action committees gave $60,000 to Manchin and a stunning $302,000 to Schumer, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.Food and Water Watch is also doing daily phone banks and has set up a dedicated hotline to Schumer’s office. Meanwhile, Appalachian Voices is holding three rallies at Senator Mark Warner’s Virginia office pushing for a debt deal that does not include the pipeline.“President Biden made a colossal error in negotiating a deal that sacrifices the climate and working families,” said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the national environmental organization Center for Biological Diversity.House and Senate lawmakers from both parties have also filed amendments to strip the Mountain Valley pipeline from the debt ceiling deal. A group of House Democrats from Virginia have led the push to cut the provision.Democratic senator Tim Kaine plans to file a similar Senate amendment.“Senator Kaine is extremely disappointed by the provision of the bill to greenlight the controversial Mountain Valley pipeline in Virginia, bypassing the normal judicial and administrative review process every other energy project has to go through,” a Kaine spokesperson said in a statement. “This provision is completely unrelated to the debt ceiling matter.”Environmentalists have spent a decade fighting the construction of the $6.6bn Mountain Valley pipeline, which is intended to carry natural gas 300 miles from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia to Virginia, crossing nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands. A report from Oil Change International last year found the project would result in the emission of 89m metric tons of planet-heating pollution annually, or the equivalent of building 26 new coal power plants.The pipeline has long faced scrutiny in courts. Since construction began in 2018, the Mountain Valley pipeline has been cited for hundreds of violations in West Virginia and Virginia. Last month, a US court of appeals struck down certain permits for the project on the grounds they would violate the Clean Water Act.The Biden administration has in recent months signed off on several necessary federal permits for the Mountain Valley pipeline. But the debt ceiling legislation would go even further by shielding the project from future litigation.“Singling out the Mountain Valley pipeline for approval in a vote about our nation’s credit limit is an egregious act,” said Peter Anderson, Virginia policy director with Appalachian Voices, an activist group which has fought the project for years.“By attempting to suspend the rules for a pipeline company that has repeatedly polluted communities’ water and flouted the conditions in its permits, the president and Congress would deny basic legal protections, procedural fairness and environmental justice to communities along the pipeline’s path.”Climate groups, led by the Virginia and West Virginia organization Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights are also planning to rally in front of the White House next week. More