Activists Target Public Relations Groups For Greenwashing Fossil Fuels

Duncan Meisel used to help climate activists tell their stories, as a communications adviser to environmentalists trying to convince the public that oil and gas companies must change to avert a climate crisis. Now he is putting pressure on consultants shaping those industries’ own messages.

Clean Creatives, the group Meisel helped found, is at the vanguard of a new tactic in the environmental movement: to target advisers who, activists claim, help fossil fuel companies continue polluting and slow government action by distorting climate debates.

Last September, Clean Creatives published an “F-List” of advertising and public relations groups it accused of spreading “climate misinformation” on their clients’ behalf.

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Divestment Campaigns And Reinvestment Efforts Gain Strength

With over 80 percent of the world’s population experiencing extreme weather linked to climate change, university endowments have become a focal point for students, faculty, and community members eager to snuff out their schools’ support for the fossil fuel companies most responsible for fueling the climate crisis.

Major universities, including Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and Harvard University — which boasts the largest endowment of any school in the world — are among the latest to commit to pull billions from fossil fuel funds. In their wake, others are following suit. In July, Maine became the first U.S. state to legally require divestment of public funds from fossil fuel assets.

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Activists To Delaware Legislators: Sign Green New Year’s Resolutions

Dover, DE – A coalition of progressives and environmental groups are challenging lawmakers to sign on to a set of green New Year’s resolutions to kick off the 2022 session. Says participant Phillip Bannowsky, “this is a way to separate the committed from the compromised.”

The activists claim in their text that confronting the climate crisis “has been impeded by the short-sighted interests of powerful economic players.” Specifically, they call for a Green Amendment to the Delaware Constitution and support current legislation in the pipeline, including HB 259, requiring an emergency alert system to inform citizens when disasters like Croda’s November 25, 2018, toxic leak erupted, which injured workers at their Atlas Point plant as well as neighbors and motorists on the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

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Occupy Biden Demonstrates How To Hold Politicians Accountable

During the 2020 presidential campaigns, it was common for people who planned to vote for Joe Biden to say that they recognized he was a corporate-friendly candidate but that we just needed to elect him and then he could be pressured to act in the interests of the people. Well, unlike the marches after President Trump was elected, that mass pressure on Biden has not materialized. Now, a coalition of smaller climate justice groups (not the Big Greens) has just completed a weeklong occupation of land close to the President’s home with two demands: that he declare a climate emergency and that he stop any new fossil fuel projects. Clearing the FOG speaks with one of the organizers, Karen Igou, about the action and next steps in the campaign to pressure Biden. Igou also speaks about actions we need to be taking outside of the political arena to address the climate crisis.

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Wet’suwet’en Resistance And Solidarity: Evicting The Colonizers

One month ago today, the RCMP violently raided unceded Gidimt’en territory (November 18-19, 2021), removing Indigenous people from their land at gunpoint on behalf of TC Energy’s proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline. The Wet’suwet’en enforced our standing eviction of CGL by closing roads into the territory November 14-17. Following the raids, arrestees received cruel and violent treatment in prison. The conditions set forth by the court are human rights violations to Indigenous peoples. We’re still here. We’re still throwing down. We are more determined than ever to protect our traditional territories for future generations.

In September 2021, Gidimt’en Checkpoint reoccupied Lhudis Bin territory, building a clan cabin on the drill pad site where Coastal GasLink pipeline wants to drill underneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa.

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ALEC Is Pushing A Bill That Punishes Banks For Divesting From Fossil Fuels

As climate change accelerates and environmental disasters proliferate around the world, a Big Oil-funded business lobbying group has decided to attack financial firms that are taking their money out of fossil fuel companies, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.

This month at the annual States and Nation Policy Summit of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play organization that brings together corporate lobbyists and mostly Republican state lawmakers to author model legislation, members of the group’s energy task force voted unanimously to approve a new model policy that would prevent financial companies that end investments in oil, gas, and coal companies from receiving state government contracts or managing state funds.

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Governor Orders Operations Of Navy’s Massive Jet Fuel Tanks Suspended

On December 6, after all hell broke loose at each of the five town hall meetings held over several days by the U.S. Navy to try to calm military families who have been drinking and bathing in fuel contaminated water, the Governor of the State of Hawai’i issued an order to the Navy to suspend the operation of the massive jet fuel tanks and within 30 days “defuel” or remove the fuel out of the tanks!  Governor Ige said the public had lost confidence in the Navy. For the past week, rather than providing accurate information about the drinking water contamination, senior military leadership were caught in their own webs of inaccurate information given to the military families affected by fuel in the water…and given to the State of Hawai’i. 

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Biden Drilling Report Blasted: ‘Shocking Capitulation To The Corporate Polluters’

Climate campaigners and other progressive critics on Friday called out the Biden administration for a new U.S. Interior Department report about leasing public lands and waters to oil and gas companies, slamming its proposals as far too weak given the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

The report—prepared in response to President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14008—recommends adjusting royalty and bonding rates, prioritizing leasing in areas with known resource potential, and avoiding regions where drilling conflicts with conservation, historical and cultural resources, recreation, and wildlife habitat.

“Releasing this completely inadequate report over a long holiday weekend is a shameful attempt to hide the fact that President Biden has no intention of fulfilling his promise to stop oil and gas drilling on our public lands,” said Food & Water Watch policy director Mitch Jones in a statement.

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A Stain On The George Washington University Name

Our newest report, “The Regulatory Studies Center: A Stain on the George Washington University Name,” delves into the Koch and ExxonMobil funded RSC, which has repeatedly acted as a front for fossil fuel interests with a history of using GW’s name to provide credibility to climate deniers, fossil fuel cronies, and other discredited backers of pseudoscience. The report, written by UnKoch My Campus Student Organizer and GW student Jake Lowe, highlights a number of instances of climate disinformation and details how the RSC has played a role in promoting a deregulation agenda that benefits its donors. 

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Big Oil Pays $192 Million To Extract Fossil Fuels From The Gulf

The Biden administration went through with the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history Wednesday. In the controversial sale, major fossil-fuel companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP bid a total of $192 million for the rights to drill a stretch of the Gulf of Mexico that is about double the size of Florida, The AP reported. The amount offered is the second-highest total since bidding resumed in the Gulf of Mexico in 2017. The Biden administration has been widely criticized for allowing the sale to proceed even after President Joe Biden promised U.S. climate action during the COP26 talks in Glasgow.

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Judge Keeps Oil Pipeline Case In Federal Court

A federal judge retained jurisdiction Tuesday in a dispute over a Canadian oil pipeline that runs through a section of the Great Lakes, rejecting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s contention that the case belongs in state court.

The clash over whether Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 should continue operating raises issues “under consideration at the highest levels of this country’s government” involving a U.S.-Canada treaty and federal pipeline safety regulation, U.S. District Judge Janet Neff ruled.

The matter “is properly in federal court,” she wrote in a 15-page opinion that drew praise from Enbridge. Whitmer’s office expressed disappointment and environmentalists ramped up pressure on President Joe Biden to intervene.

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Shell Is Tricking Drivers With Its Carbon Neutral Campaign

The advertisements are for Shell Canada’s Drive Carbon Neutral program, which launched in November 2020. A company press release said from Dec. 31, 2020 onwards, customers at its pumps can contribute two cents per litre to various carbon offset projects. That program and its claims of carbon neutrality will be challenged Wednesday when environmental group Greenpeace is set to file a complaint to the Competition Bureau of Canada. The group argues the Drive Carbon Neutral program is greenwashing and is therefore tricking customers into participating in an initiative with false claims, which it says goes against the Competition Act: a federal law governing the majority of business conduct in the country.

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Rally Calls For ISO To Fix The Grid In New England

Dozens of people gathered in Holyoke, Massachusetts to protest the New England electric system operator, known as ISO-NE, for ignoring public concerns and hampering the transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean solar and wind power. One speaker, Nathan Phillips, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, summed up the prevailing spirit, “It’s time for ISO to declare independence from our fossil fueled energy system and operate differently, with the urgency our climate crisis demands.”

Mirelle Bejjani of Community Action Works said, “We’re having this rally because the electric system in the Northeast needs to be powered by renewable energy and the steps decision-makers are proposing are too little too late.”

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Researchers Urge World Leaders At COP26 To Act On Science

Glasgow, Scotland – As COP26 delegates went into overtime Friday night, shaping the language of their final climate communiques into something all 197 countries could agree on, scientists from around the world issued their latest, and perhaps starkest warning. 

“We, climate scientists, stress that immediate, strong, rapid, sustained and large-scale actions are necessary to hold global warming to well below 2°C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C,” they wrote in a Nov. 11 letter to the conference.

More than 200 scientists from every continent signed the letter to remind delegates at the conference that there’s no negotiating with science, said Sonia Seniveratne, a climate researcher with ETH Zürich and lead author of the latest climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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After COP26, Biden Under Fire For ‘Failing To Act On Fossil Fuels’

As climate campaigners worldwide on Saturday slammed the United Nations summit in Scotland and its resulting Glasgow Climate Pact as betrayals of the Global South by rich countries that have polluted the planet, U.S. President Joe Biden faced growing pressure to improve both his national and global policies.

The fresh demands built on previous comments and calls throughout COP26—such as a Friday statement Food & Water Watch, whose policy director Mitch Jones said that “this White House should fulfill its campaign promise to stop oil and gas drilling on public lands, put an end to oil and gas exports, and stop approving new dirty energy power plants and pipelines.”

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