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    Environmental activists urge Kamala Harris to go big on climate: ‘She’s got to seize the moment’

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    As Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of waging “war on American energy”, some advocates are pressing the vice-president to embrace a bold climate message at the Democratic national convention this week.Harris will have a major opportunity to lay out her key platform as she accepts the Democratic party’s presidential nomination on Thursday evening. Some are hoping climate features heavily in her speech.“There’s a moment here and we think she’s got to seize it,” said Saul Levin, legislative and political director of the progressive advocacy group Green New Deal Network.Harris’s candidacy has excited much of the climate movement, with scores of green groups, including Levin’s, endorsing her presidential run. At a Wednesday meeting, influential climate hawks such as Ed Markey, the Massachusetts senator; Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator; and Robert Bullard, the esteemed environmental justice scholar and advocate encouraged climate voters to stand behind Harris.But Harris has yet to release an official plan to take on the climate crisis. Unlike Joe Biden, who placed climate at the heart of his 2020 presidential run, Harris has so far only mentioned the issue in passing on the campaign trail. And though the issue has been woven into Democratic national convention events, it has not yet been a central focus of the convention.“It’s a bit of a bummer that it hasn’t gotten more time,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay Campaign, which focuses on climate accountability.Harris may find it difficult to make bold climate promises amid Trump’s attacks. At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania this week, the former president called Harris a “non-fracker”, though she has distanced herself from past support for a fracking ban, disappointing climate advocates.Trump has also repeatedly claimed Harris wants to ban red meat and “get rid of all cows”. In response, she said she enjoys eating the occasional cheeseburger but added that Americans should be incentivized to eat a lower-carbon, healthier diet.Amid this pressure from the right, some climate advocates have said they will stand behind Harris no matter how much she mentions climate.“Regardless of whether this issue is in the speech or not tomorrow night, we know Vice-President Harris is an environmental champion,” said Michelle Deatrick, who chairs the Democratic National Committee’ Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis. She said Harris’s record speaks for itself.Recent polling from progressive group Data for Progress and environmental organization Climate Power shows that a strong majority of US voters prefer Harris’s approach to climate.It’s an indicator that focusing on climate is “good politics”, said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.“Climate is one of the issues where voters trust Harris the most over Trump,” she said. “To capitalize on that, she needs to talk about it.”An ‘existential threat’The 2024 Democratic party platform approved on Monday refers to the climate crisis as an “existential threat” and “a consequence of delay and destruction by people like Donald Trump and his friends in Big Oil”.It also includes a commitment to “making polluters pay”. It’s something DiPaola said she was “stoked” to see, though she added that she’d eventually like to see “less vague language about how they’re going to make climate accountability real”.Additionally, the platform underlines the creation of hundreds of thousands of clean-energy jobs and highlights the historic green investments spurred by the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).But Levin says he hopes Harris lays out plans to go beyond the IRA and increase investments in green jobs, public transit and renewable power. Though the bill constitutes the largest downpayment on climate policy in US history with hundreds of billions of dollars in green funding, experts say that is a fraction of what the US must ultimately spend.“We can’t just say, oh, we did the IRA, so we did climate and now let’s move to another issue,” said Levin. “The IRA made tremendous progress, but it was just a start.”He said some aspects of the platform, including pledges to double funding for public transit and cut down public subsidies for oil companies, inspired hope that a bolder climate platform will emerge.That platform and Harris’ rhetoric, said DiPaola, should lean “populist,” said DiPaola.“Voters are frustrated with corporate power and influence,” she said. “She can ultimately appeal to both climate-motivated voters as well as economically motivated voters … by highlighting the need to clamp down on big oil’s greed.”‘Big oil’s hold on our economy’Though the Democratic party platform rails against “big oil’s hold on our economy”, the Democratic convention itself has not been unfriendly to the industry. The American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest fossil fuel lobby group, participated in several events this week.Oil major ExxonMobil sponsored two Wednesday panel discussions hosted by Punchbowl News on the sidelines of the convention, one of which featured the firm’s senior director of climate strategy and technology and a representative from gas lobby group the American Gas Association.Activists with environmental non-profits including Friends of the Earth, Oil Change International, and Climate Hawks Vote disrupted the event.“I am here because Exxon lied and people died,” chanted RL Miller, the Climate Hawks Vote founder and a former Democratic National Committee member, before being escorted from the room.Federal data shows Exxon has poured $111,500 into Republican congressional campaign committees. Collin Rees of Oil Change International, who took part in the protest, said if the party is looking to take on big oil, the company “should have no platform at the DNC”.War in GazaGaza solidarity protesters interrupted a meeting of the environment and climate crisis council at the convention on Wednesday, chanting “free, free Palestine”.“If you want to show some political courage, go and interrupt one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” responded Jamie Raskin, the Maryland representative, who had been speaking. “Anybody who interferes with that is objectively helping Donald Trump … so cut it out.”Some climate groups, however, are pushing for the Harris campaign to stop supporting Israel’s deadly war in Gaza by issuing an arms embargo. Among them is the Sunrise Movement.“Young people want a livable world for our generation and generations. We want everyone to have clean air and water and safe homes,” said O’Hanlon. “Everyone must have those rights and freedoms, including Palestinians.” More

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      James Inhofe, former Republican senator who called climate change a ‘hoax’, dies aged 89

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      Republican former senator James Inhofe, a climate denier who once brought a snowball to the chamber floor in a stunt attempting to disprove global warming, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.Inhofe resigned as senator for Oklahoma in January 2023, suffering long-term effects of Covid-19. Elected in 1994, his time as the state’s longest-serving senator was notable for his ultra-conservative positions on numerous issues, including calling the climate emergency “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.His death was announced on Tuesday in a family statement, which stated the cause was a stroke.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican ally during Inhofe’s chairing of the Senate’s armed forces and environment committees, was among the first to pay tribute.“The people he served, a group much larger than the proud residents of the Sooner state, were better for it,” a statement from McConnell’s office said.“Jim’s diligent stewardship of massive infrastructure projects transformed life across the heartland. His relentless advocacy for American energy dominance unlocked new prosperity across the country. And his laser focus on growing and modernizing the US military strengthened the security of the entire free world.”As perhaps the most vocal Senate Republican climate denier, he called the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a “Gestapo bureaucracy”, opposed efforts by Democrats to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and pursued lucrative tax incentives for domestic oil and gas producers.His widely ridiculed snowball stunt came in 2015, during a rambling speech during which he claimed climate conditions on Earth were the work of a supreme being, and attempted to discredit a Nasa report that found that 2014 was the hottest year recorded globally to date.“My point is, God’s still up there,” Inhofe said during a 2012 interview during promotion for his book focusing on global warming as “a conspiracy”.“The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”According to Open Secrets, between 1989 and 2022, Inhofe received campaign donations worth almost $4m from energy producers.As chair of the Senate armed services committee, Inhofe was an advocate for a large US military presence on the world stage, and supported sizable defense spending budgets to pay for it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing the scandal over US service members photographed abusing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, Inhofe said he “was more outraged at the outrage” than the torture of the inmates.Inhofe was born on 17 November 1934 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city he served as mayor from 1978 to 1984.He was elected to the state house in 1966, aged 31, and state senate three years later.His career in Washington DC began in 1986 as a US congressman for Oklahoma’s first district, and he won re-election three times before stepping up to the Senate in 1994 when Republican incumbent David Boren became president of the University of Oklahoma.A keen aviator, Inhofe married his wife, Kay, in 1959, and they had four children. A son, Perry, died in a solo airplane crash in 2013.Reuters contributed reporting More

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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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      Corporations are forcing Americans to pay more for less – in their own words | Matt Stoller

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      In 2022, the Biden administration and the oil industry were in a brutal fight over oil prices. The president was demanding that domestic oil producers invest and drill more to address spiking costs, but Texas frackers were recalcitrant. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” the Pioneer CEO, Scott Sheffield, said, echoing comments from other leaders at different domestic firms. Profits would go to investors, not to more rigs to address pain at the pump.The oil barons won the fight. Profits in the oil industry jumped from virtually nothing in 2020 to the hundreds of billions in 2021, and then doubled again in 2022. And yet, economists did not see any sort of plot at work. “Don’t blame the oil companies for their high profits,” said the economist Olivier Blanchard. “It is not price gouging, just how markets work.”Three weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission released information showing how naive such statements really were. Sheffield, it turns out, allegedly helped engineer a price-fixing scheme to reduce oil production and increase prices for Americans at the pump. His goal was to end fierce competition in the industry, which had, as he put it, “lowered the price by $20 to $30 per barrel over the past 10 years”. The FTC banned Sheffield from his corporation’s board and has reportedly referred allegations against Sheffield to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation.The magnitude of this alleged plot is stunning. Oil prices are controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), a cartel composed of nations with known oil reserves. Because Opec is made up of governments, price-fixing law doesn’t apply. But these laws do apply to domestic US firms engaged in shale oil production, who competed fiercely with Opec from 2014 to 2016 for market share, bringing down prices in the interim.In 2017, tired of this price war, Texas oilmen and Opec officials began sitting down to dinners, and by 2021, Texas had de facto joined Opec. Companies like Pioneer, Devon Energy and Continental Resources publicly pledged to hold back production. As the FTC found, Sheffield was also privately sending hundreds of text and WhatsApp messages to Opec officials, seeking to align US producers with the global cartel.Class-action lawyers are on top of the scandal, but there’s also increasing political interest. At a hearing last week, the US representatives Rosa DeLauro and Matt Cartwright began criticizing “big oil” for this scheme, and Representative Mark Pocan even called for jail time for the oil executives allegedly involved. The top Democrat on the powerful energy and commerce committee, Frank Pallone, just launched a wide-ranging investigation across the industry.The US consumes 7bn barrels of oil a year, meaning that if the dollar amount went up by $20-30, as Sheffield calculated, that’s roughly $400-700 a person in America, a transfer from consumers to oil men and their private equity backers. That’s a not small amount of what inflation wrought in 2021, which was about $4,700 per capita in increased prices. (I suspect the amount is actually more than $20-30 a barrel, since price spikes tend to be larger than the average over long periods of time. But we’ll leave it at what Sheffield calculated.)What is perhaps most shocking about this scandal is not that it happened, but that it happened in plain sight. Oil CEOs weren’t hiding. In 2021, as prices rose on the end of Covid lockdowns, Sheffield publicly threatened rivals who might increase production, saying “all the shareholders that I’ve talked to said that if anybody goes back to growth, they will punish those companies”.For years, there has been a debate between macro-economists like Blanchard about the source of post-Covid inflation. Many economists chalked up price hikes to workers demanding more money and saw the way to address it as scaring workers into accepting less money by throwing a bunch of them out of work. “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation,” said Larry Summers. That’s what their models told them.By contrast, 85% of Americans, along with a few iconoclastic scholars and writers, said “corporations being greedy and raising prices to make record profits” was the cause of inflation. Why? Well it might have been because they noticed that CEOs were routinely telling investors that they were raising prices to increase margins, not to meet wage demands. Or it might have been because they experienced large and unexplained price increases in meat, rent, hotels, groceries and restaurants. Indeed, when the CEO of Wendy’s recently said Wendy’s was considering using AI to engage in dynamic pricing, the public outrage was palpable.It’s time to declare the debate over. In 2021, the total corporate profit increase was $730bn, or a little over $2,100 a person. That’s a large chunk of the inflationary increase in costs. Moreover, the price-fixing in the oil industry, which contributed roughly $200bn of that, isn’t an anomaly.Take post-Covid rent hikes. One software and consulting pricing firm for landlords, RealPage, specialized in telling its clients to hike rents more than they otherwise might. As of December of 2020, RealPage had nearly 32,000 clients, including “10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States”. There are multiple antitrust suits accusing the private equity-owned firm of organizing a massive price-fixing conspiracy to inflate rents across the board.Beyond rent, the Biden administration or private plaintiffs now have credible antitrust claims against firms engaged in price-fixing in meat, hotels and large online sellers like Amazon. Corporations in a range of industries have made comments similar to those of Sheffield.Alex Cisneros, an executive for Red Roof Inn, told a trade outlet that Red Roof Inn was using a software package called STR from CoStar to systematically hike prices across the hotel industry. “Red Roof’s franchisees for the most part are making more money with less occupancy,” Hotel News Now explained. “Red Roof is now providing more data to franchisees to educate and get them comfortable commanding higher rates.”According to a lawsuit, an unnamed executive at Smithfield, a pork processor, summarized the advice he got from Agri Stats, a consulting firm that coordinates production in the industry, as: “Just raise your price.”Rent, meat, oil and hotels are big sectors, so criminal activity in the form of price-fixing to boost profits should bust through the illusions economists have about how our markets really work. There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.The third is to reform the Federal Reserve so policymakers there stop using macro-economic models that avoid considerations of profits and price-fixing.And the fourth is, frankly, political. One key reason there is action on these schemes is because Biden has prioritized antitrust enforcement. He hasn’t put enough into antitrust, and he doesn’t talk about it very often. But he should, or else Americans are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that what is good for big business is good for their pocketbooks, when the opposite is so often the case.
      Matt Stoller is a writer and former policymaker who focuses on the politics of market power and antitrust More

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      Alleged ‘deal’ offer from Trump to big oil could save industry $110bn, study finds

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      A “deal” allegedly offered by Donald Trump to big-oil executives as he sought $1bn in campaign donations could save the industry $110bn in tax breaks if he returns to the White House, an analysis suggests.The fundraising dinner held last month at Mar-a-Lago with more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, reportedly involved Trump asking for large campaign contributions and promising, if elected, to remove barriers to drilling, scrap a pause on gas exports, and reverse new rules aimed at cutting car pollution.Congressional Democrats have launched an investigation into the “ethical, campaign finance and legal issues” raised by what one Democratic senator called an “offer of a blatant quid pro quo”, while a prominent watchdog group is exploring whether the meeting warrants legal action.But the analysis shared with the Guardian shows that the biggest motivation for oil and gas companies to back Trump appears to be in the tax system, with about $110bn in tax breaks for the industry at stake should Joe Biden be re-elected in November’s election.Biden wants to eliminate the tax breaks, which include long-standing incentives to help drill for oil and gas, with a recent White House budget proposal targeting $35bn in domestic subsidies and $75bn in overseas fossil fuel income.“Big oil executivess are sweating in their seats at the thought of losing $110bn in special tax loopholes under Biden in 2025,” said Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis.Ross said the tax breaks are worth nearly 11,000% more than the amount Trump allegedly asked the executives for in donations. “If Trump promises to protect polluter handouts during tax negotiations, then his $1bn shakedown is a cheap insurance policy for the industry,” he said.View image in fullscreenSome of the tax breaks have been around for decades, and are a global issue, but the US oil and gas industry benefited disproportionately from tax cuts passed by Trump when he was president in 2017.Next year, regardless of who is president, a raft of individual tax cuts included in that bill will expire, prompting a round of Washington deal-making over which industries, if any, will help fund an extension.Lobbying records show that Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Cheniere and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have all met lawmakers this year to discuss this tax situation, likely encouraging them to ignore Biden’s plan to target the fossil fuel industry’s own carve-outs.Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the analysis shows, lobbied on a deduction for intangible drilling costs, the largest federal subsidy for US oil and gas companies, which is worth $10bn, according to federal figures.View image in fullscreenOther lobbying centered on more generalized tax breaks that the oil and gas industry has taken advantage of. ExxonMobil lobbied for a little-known bill that would restore a bonus depreciation deduction to its full value, which, according to Moody’s, would allow big oil to avoid Biden’s newly established corporate minimum tax.“Unlike previous administrations, I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to big oil,” Biden said following his inauguration in 2021. But Congress and the president will have to agree to any new tax arrangements next year, and the fossil-fuel industry continues to have staunch support from Republicans and some Democrats.The API insisted its industry gets no favorable treatment in the tax system. “America’s energy industry proudly invests in communities, pays local, state and federal taxes and receives no special tax treatment from the federal government,” an API spokesperson said.“This nonsense report is another attempt to distract from the importance of all energy sources – including oil and natural gas – to meet America’s growing energy needs.”Who was at Mar-a-Lago?The high stakes for the fossil-fuel industry, as well as for the climate crisis, have placed scrutiny upon those who attended Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Although representatives of large oil companies were present, the majority of known attendees were executives of smaller firms focused on specific subsections of the fossil-fuel industry, such as fracking or gas exporting.Those companies are not often held to account in international forums such as the UN climate talks or the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which means they are less likely to make buzzy climate pledges. They may also be more threatened by regulations on individual parts of the US fossil fuel economy, such as auto-emissions standards aiming to quell gas-car usage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The oil majors … see their future in plastic [production]. That doesn’t apply to the smaller companies who don’t work across the industry,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity. “They’ve got nothing to shift to.”Among other reported attendees were the head of the company Venture Global, which rivals Qatar as one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas exporters. This year, the company came under fire after it was revealed to have been using millions of gallons of water to construct a Louisiana LNG terminal while a nearby community faced extreme shortages. The firm was also accused late last year of reneging on its contracts by Shell and BP.Another attendee: Nick Dell’Osso, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which after years of court fights had to pay $5.3m to Pennsylvania landowners who say they were cheated out of gas royalties. The company’s earlier CEO, John McClendon, was indicted in 2016 on charges of conspiring to rig bids on oil and gas leases in Oklahoma.Billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who founded fossil fuel exploration company Continental Resources, was also present. He helped raise money for Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was under consideration to be Trump’s energy secretary, and was reportedly one of the seven top donors who had special seats at Trump’s inauguration. Though he eschewed the former president after his 2020 loss, he donated to his primary campaign in August.View image in fullscreenAsked about the meeting, API spokesperson Andrea Woods said the organization “meets with policymakers and candidates from across the political spectrum on topics important to our industry”. She said the premise of Democrats’ investigation into the meeting is “patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future – one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas”.Amid the scrutiny of last month’s Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump is continuing to court oil-tied funders. On Tuesday evening, he held a Manhattan fundraising dinner that cost a minimum of $100,000 to attend.Among the event’s hosts, advocacy group Climate Power noted, was John Catsimatidis, the chief executive of the much-scrutinized gas refiner United Refining Company and owner of two grocery chains, a radio station and holding company Red Apple Group.Between 2017 and 2023, United Refining Company’s small refinery in western Pennsylvania was the most dangerous refinery in the country, with federal data showing it reported 10 times the average number of injuries for a refinery – 63% higher than the next-most dangerous facility.The company also reportedly sought to dodge environmental regulations using a process championed by Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.Catsimatidis has also been criticized for neglecting vacant gas-station properties and for blaming gas prices on “open” borders, corporate taxes and worker benefits. The Pennsylvania town home to United Refining pays some of the highest gas prices in the state, despite the presence of the refinery, raising suspicions among some residents about the company’s practices.Trump this week also held a fundraiser hosted by the US senator JD Vance, who is one of the largest recipients of big-oil funding in Congress, and another with Joe Craft, a major Trump donor who owns massive coal producer Alliance Resource Partners. In 2016, Craft reportedly gifted Pruitt courtside basketball tickets after the agency crafted pro-coal regulations. More

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      US sanctions Myanmar’s junta-controlled state oil and gas enterprise

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      The United States imposed sanctions on Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (Moge) on Tuesday, the first time it has directly targeted the entity that is Myanmar’s ruling junta’s main source of foreign revenue.The action, first reported by Reuters, prohibits certain financial services by Americans to the state oil and gas enterprise starting on 15 December, the treasury department said in a statement. Financial services include loans, accounts, insurance, investments and other services, according to treasury guidance.The move represents the US’s first direct action against the state-owned enterprise. Washington has previously targeted its leadership.The oil and gas industry is the biggest source of foreign-currency revenue to Myanmar’s murderous junta, bringing in $1.72bn in the six months to 31 March 2022 alone, according to the junta’s figures. Junta-controlled Moge acts as the primary gatekeeper to the country’s oil and gas assets.Since the coup in February 2021 more than 4,162 people have been killed by the junta and pro-military groups and 25,363 have been arrested, according to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar has said the regime is “committing war crimes and crimes against humanity daily”.Some of the world’s biggest oil and gas service companies have continued to make millions of dollars from operations that have helped prop up the military regime, according to a joint investigation of documents obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets and analysed by the Guardian, the Myanmar activist group Justice for Myanmar and the investigative journalism organisation Finance Uncovered.While the new sanctions will complicate business dealings with Moge, Washington held back from adding the enterprise to the specially designated nationals list, which would effectively kick it out of the US banking system, ban its trade with Americans and freeze its US assets.“The US financial services directive against Moge is a welcome step to disrupt the significant flow of funds to the junta from the oil and gas sector,” said Yadanar Maung, a Justice for Myanmar spokesperson.“The US should continue to target the junta’s sources of revenue and arms, including through full sanctions on Moge that would also target the US corporations that have been supporting the maintenance and expansion of the very gas fields that finance atrocities.”Washington also slapped sanctions on three entities and five people who the US treasury department said were connected to Myanmar’s military, according to the statement, in action coordinated with the United Kingdom and Canada.“Today’s designations close avenues for sanctions evasion and strengthen our efforts to impose costs and promote accountability for the regime’s atrocities. We continue to encourage all countries to take tangible measures to halt the flow of arms, aviation fuel and revenue to the military regime,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a separate statement.Myanmar’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters was unable to reach Moge for comment.Myanmar has been in crisis since a 2021 military coup and a deadly crackdown that gave rise to a nationwide resistance movement that won the backing of several ethnic minority armies.Rights groups and United Nations experts have accused the military of committing atrocities against civilians in its efforts to crush the resistance. The junta says it is fighting “terrorists” and has ignored international calls to cease hostilities.“Today’s action … maintains our collective pressure on Burma’s military and denies the regime access to arms and supplies necessary to commit its violent acts,” the treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Brian Nelson, said in the statement, using the south-east Asian nation’s former name.“We remain committed to degrading the regime’s evasion tactics and continuing to hold the regime accountable for its violence.”The UN human rights expert for Myanmar in September called on the United States to further tighten sanctions on the country’s military rulers to include the state oil and gas enterprise.Human rights advocates have repeatedly called for sanctions on Moge, but Washington had so far held back.Washington in June issued sanctions against the state-owned Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank (MFTB) and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank (MICB), which allowed the junta to use foreign currency to buy jet fuel, parts for small arms production and other supplies.Myanmar military officials have played down the impact of sanctions.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Senate examines role of ‘dark money’ in delaying climate action

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      The Senate budget committee held a hearing on Wednesday morning to scrutinize the role of oil- and gas-linked “dark money” in delaying climate action – and tearing through local and federal budgets.The hearing was led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has held 10 climate crisis-focused hearings since he took the helm of the budget committee this past February.It follows an inquiry launched by House Democrats in 2021, which focused on big oil’s alleged efforts to mislead the public about the climate crisis.“I am shining a light on the massive, well-documented economic risks of climate change,” said Whitehouse, who has also given nearly 300 speeches about the climate crisis on the Senate floor. “These are risks that have the potential to cascade across our entire economy and trigger widespread financial hardship and calamity.”In his opening remarks, Whitehouse described the well-documented misinformation campaign that fossil fuel interests have waged on the American public.“Beginning as early as the 1950s, industry scientists became aware of climate change, measuring and predicting it decades before it became a public issue,” he said. “But industry management and CEOs spent decades promoting climate misinformation.”Ranking member Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, said the hearing was a “missed opportunity to work together on a responsible budget”. He also claimed Democrats obtain “much more secret or dark money than Republicans”.Committee Democrats invited three witnesses. First to the stand was the Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes. “Climate change is a market failure, and market failures require government action to address,” she testified.Fossil fuel interests’ efforts to disrupt climate policy had come at great expense to the US, including not only financial costs, but also human suffering and lives lost, said Oreskes, who has written several books on oil industry misinformation.Christine Arena, former public relations executive at the firm Edelman who now works in social impact film-making, and who was also invited by Senate Democrats, drew comparisons between the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long misinformation campaign and how the tobacco industry tried to cover up the harms of smoking.“Just like the tobacco executives before them, [fossil fuel executives] characterize peer-reviewed science and investigative journalism that illustrates the extent of their deceptions as biased or inconclusive,” said Arena, who is now the founder of Generous Films.Richard Painter, professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School who was chief White House ethics lawyer under George W Bush, was third to testify. A political independent, Painter said Americans should get on board with the push to end climate misinformation no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.“This is not a partisan issue,” said Painter, who was also invited by Whitehouse. “This is about caring, and doing something about a grave threat to the human race.”The last two witnesses were invited by Republican senators. First up was Dr Roger Pielke Jr, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who said he believed climate change was real, human-caused and dangerous, but that the Democrats’ concerns were overblown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast to testify was Scott Walker, president of the conservative non-profit Capital Research Center who served in the George W Bush administration as special assistant to the president for domestic policy. “To say that a group uses dark money is like saying the group uses telephones. It’s a universal technology,” he said.He insisted that dark money was not a major problem in American politics. Insofar as it was a problem, he said, the political left took more money than the right.In an interview after the hearing, Oreskes said she suspected the evidence that Democrats take more dark money than Republicans may be based on “cherry-picked” data. “Cherry-picking is a tactic we know climate deniers and skeptics have used for decades,” she said.While being questioned by Whitehouse, Oreskes explained that in the mid-2000s, she and others who wrote about the scientific consensus on the human-caused climate crisis received hate mail and were the targets of official complaints and other attacks.“That experience of being attacked led me to try to understand what these attacks were, who was funding them, who was behind them, and why they were doing it,” she said.Later, Grassley asked Pielke to talk more about the influence dark money has on Democrats. “I can’t explain exactly why your colleagues aren’t willing to look at the dark money ties of their own witnesses,” said Pielke.Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, addressed these allegations, offering a solution for his Republican colleagues who are concerned about dark money’s influence on Democrats. The Disclose Act, introduced by Whitehouse in the Senate this year, would expose the sources of these clandestine funds for Democrats and Republicans alike, he said. “I would invite my colleagues across the aisle to join us in ending dark money on both sides,” said Merkley. 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

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      Biden just betrayed the planet – and his own campaign vows | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Willow project is an act of terrorism against the climate, and the Biden administration has just approved it. This massive oil-drilling project in the wilderness of northern Alaska goes against science and the administration’s many assurances that it cares about climate and agrees that we must make a swift transition away from fossil fuel. Like the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden seems to think that if we do some good things for the climate we can also do some very bad things and somehow it will all even out.To make that magical thinking more obvious and to try to smooth over broad opposition, the US federal government also just coughed up some protections against drilling in the Arctic Ocean and elsewhere in the National Petroleum Reserve (and only approved three of the five drilling sites for ConocoPhillips’ invasion of this wilderness). Of course, this is like saying, “We’re going to kill your mother but we’re sending guards to protect your grandmother.” It doesn’t make your mom less dead. With climate you’re dealing with physics and math before you’re dealing with morality. All the carbon and methane emissions count, and they need to decrease rapidly in this decade. As Bill McKibben likes to say, you can’t bargain with physics.You can try to bargain with the public, but the motivation behind this decision is hard to figure out. The deal was inherited from the Trump administration, and rejecting it would have been a break with convention, but convention dooms us, and we need the break.Biden was elected in no small part by the participation of young voters who supported his strong climate platform. As a candidate he promised: “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” Six million letters and 2.3m comments opposed to the project were sent to the White House, many from young people galvanized by social media. The American public, Republican minority aside, is strongly engaged with the reality of climate crisis now and the urgency of doing something about it.I call it an act of terrorism, because this drilling project in Alaska produces petroleum, which will be burned, which will send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will contribute to climate chaos that will affect people in the South Pacific, the tropics, the circumpolar Arctic, will affect the melting of the Greenland ice shield (this month reaching a shocking 50F warmer than normal). It doesn’t just produce petroleum; it produces huge quantities of it, resulting in an estimated 278m metric tons of carbon emissions.This makes it, like the Permian Basin oil extraction in the US south-west and the tar sands in Alberta, a carbon bomb. Former vice-president Al Gore recently put it this way: “The proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling in Alaska is recklessly irresponsible … The pollution it would generate will not only put Alaska Native and other local communities at risk, it is incompatible with the ambition we need to achieve a net zero future.”Earlier, the New York Times reported, “The administration says the country must pivot away from fossil fuels but backed a project set to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil each day for 30 years.” In 30 years it will be 2053, three years after we are supposed to have achieved a fully fossil-free future.There is actual bargaining in the government’s record of decision, stating that “Permittee shall offset 50% of the projected net [greenhouse gas emissions] … in accordance with US commitments under the Paris Agreement. GHGs shall be offset through reforestation of land …” Pretending that trees are our atmospheric janitorial service belies both the ways that forests across the globe are devastated by climate crisis – burgeoning pests, drought, fire, ecosystems changing faster than trees can adapt – and that planting trees does not necessarily result in a healthy long-lasting forest.Each tree, according to this document, can sequester 48lbs of carbon dioxide a year. Except that tiny saplings will not be doing that, and it will be too late to help our current climate goals by the time the trees, if they survive, are full-grown. I asked a friend with a talent for math to crunch the data; he concluded that “12.8bn trees could sequester the produced carbon in one year; or, 1/100th of that – 128m trees – could sequester the produced carbon in 100 years”. That’s not a solution to emitting those 278m metric tons of carbon dioxide in the next few years.Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, an Indigenous Alaskan organization, pointed out in a letter to Biden that this project means devastation: “Approval of a project the size of Willow would be climate suicide. Coastal villages in Alaska are losing land to erosion at breakneck speed, permafrost thaw is causing dramatic changes to the ecosystem and the destruction of oil and other infrastructure, and Alaska Natives are at risk of losing their jobs, homes, and lives in a place which is warming at four times faster than the rest of the world.”We are already failing to stop runaway climate change. Adding this carbon bomb to the total makes it worse – both for the actual damage to the climate and for the signal the US is sending to the world. The Biden administration has made a colossal mistake.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More