Category: Fossil_Gas_MN Fossil_Oil_MN JUDICIAL_MN LOUISIANA_MN NEWS_ARCHIVE

A judge ruled that the Interior Department must consider the climate impacts of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico before awarding leases.

The Biden administration is facing a major test for its climate agenda in the Alaskan Arctic, where an oil company is proposing a 30-year development that would pump more than half-a-billion barrels of petroleum from a fragile and rapidly-warming ecosystem.

A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found. Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has broadened its investigation into the role of fossil fuel companies in misleading the public about climate change, asking members of the boards of directors of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell Oil to testify before Congress next month about their firms’ commitments to curbing global warming.

NEW ENGLAND POWER plants are burning a lot more oil to generate electricity, apparently because the cost of natural gas is so high. In January last year, oil accounted for just 0.2 percent of the fuel mix used to generate power across the region. This month, starting around January 7, oil began accounting for 20 to 25 percent of power generation, behind only natural gas and nuclear. Coal even popped up in the fuel mix, at about 3 percent.

ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

Nearly two years ago the world’s oil producers slammed on the brakes and drastically cut production as the pandemic gripped the world’s economies. The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.

Goldman Sachs expects average global oil demand to hit record levels in the next two years on the back of rising demand for aviation and transport, as well as infrastructure construction.

Three months after Hurricane Ida made landfall in the parish adjacent to Albert Naquin’s home in southern Louisiana, the 75-year-old chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw is thankful that the tribe is still holding its head above water, “at least from the nose up.” Ida wiped out all but one of the 25 homes of tribal members still living on the Isle de Jean Charles, he says, and their friends in the neighboring Pointe-au-Chien Tribe were hit just as hard.

Just last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods assured lawmakers his company neither disputed the scientific consensus on climate change nor lobbied against efforts to cut carbon pollution. But a lobbyist for the oil giant struck a different tone less than two weeks later, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post, suggesting global warming might not be so dire.