COP30 didn't get much done

Though it wasn’t all failure, and it was probably a pipe dream to expect major breakthroughs to begin with.

The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the outset of negotiations in the Amazonian city of Belém were meant to set the stage for a new chapter in international climate diplomacy. On the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the time had come, according to Lula, to stop arguing about what the historic agreement requires and instead focus on implementation — actually taking the steps required to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect countries against the coming economic and public health consequences wrought by climate change…

But the Brazilian delegation, which was responsible for overseeing COP30 negotiations and ultimately brokering a new deal, was confronted by a different truth than the president envisioned. The viability of the planet may come down to a few degrees Celsius of warming, but in Belém’s fluorescently-lit negotiating rooms, everything ultimately came down to dollars and cents…

The most substantial new agreement negotiated at the conference reflected this realism. The delegations agreed that, by 2035, the world would triple international funding provided to help developing nations adapt to the consequences of a warmer world. - Grist

Big Filthy Fossil Fuels often gets paid no matter what

This is part of an in-depth sries.

Before the sun set on his inauguration day, Joe Biden reversed a raft of his predecessor’s deregulation policies with the stroke of a pen. Among them was an order revoking the permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Canceling the project was a campaign pledge to address the climate crisis. But looming over that decision was the risk that an obscure but powerful international legal system could force the United States to pay billions of dollars to Keystone XL’s Canadian developer, TC Energy.

That system—embedded in thousands of trade and investment treaties—allows corporations to drag governments before panels of arbitrators, usually behind closed doors. Governments have been ordered to pay billions of dollars in damages to oil and mining companies for violating those treaties. While the system was intended to protect foreign investors from unfair treatment or asset seizure, many environmental advocates, lawyers and politicians say it is now being used to win awards from governments that enact new environmental regulations or raise taxes on polluting industries.

Increasingly, these critics warn the system threatens climate action by punishing governments that phase out fossil fuels. - Inside Climate News

The "Atlas Network" needs to be exposed, far and wide

The referendum in Australia, referenced in the article, didn't pass.

A campaign to deny Indigenous peoples a voice in Australia’s national Parliament is using tactics similar to an earlier conservative legal battle against First Nations communities in Canada, a new research paper argues.

That’s no coincidence, according to the paper’s author Jeremy Walker, because think tanks linked to these efforts in Canada and Australia belong to a secretive U.S. organization called the Atlas Network that’s received support from oil, gas and coal companies and operates in nearly 100 countries.

“The coordinated opposition to Indigenous constitutional recognition by the Australian arm of the Atlas Network we can assume is motivated by the same intentions underlying the permanent Atlas campaign against climate policy [globally],” writes Walker, a senior lecturer in social and political sciences at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

“That is, to minimise the possibility of democratic government challenging the ever-expanding frontier of fossil fuel extraction,” he argues, a charge one conservative Australian advocacy group strongly denies. - DeSmog

Beating the crap out of Big Oil

The link is to an interview, which covers a lot of aspects of what it will take.

Since the United States is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, this uncertainty about the future market matters. If U.S. producers bet on having a strong export market even as the Inflation Reduction Act and the recent EPA guidance diminish domestic gasoline consumption, then they could be disappointed if other countries move away quickly from fossil fuels. In our research we show that, indeed, big importers in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world have every incentive to quickly jettison fossil fuels. As my co-authors and I calculate in our research, producing energy from domestic renewable sources not only creates energy security, but today and in the future, often a cost advantage. That’s so because the money paid for imported fossil fuels goes abroad and depletes foreign currency reserves...

Between people, the biggest worry is that policies penalizing emission-intensive activities disproportionately hurt the poor. The “yellow vest” movement in France is pointed to as an example that interpersonal inequality even in rich countries would be exacerbated and made unbearable by carbon taxes. For instance, if you can’t afford to rent in a city and you move to the lower-rent countryside, you are more reliant on a greenhouse gas emitting car, and so would be harder hit by a tax. That was the case in France for many people. However, it is entirely feasible to design policies that make them less unequal or even progressive. For instance, if affordable electric transport was provided alongside taxes that increase fossil fuel prices, then it would be easier to switch by swapping your old car for a new electric one at a subsidized price + availability of charging infrastructure. And my colleague Jim Boyce has shown that when combined with progressive (i.e., income inequality-reducing) rebates financed by at least part of the money accruing to the government, carbon taxes or auctioned-off emissions permits can contribute to progressive redistribution. Key is that richer people will pay much more for consuming carbon in absolute terms, which is money that can be redistributed, it just amounts to a lower share of their income. Examples, such as the carbon tax in British Columbia, show that it can be done, and that people come to accept the carbon tax. - Truthout

Beating down SLAPP lawsuits

Minnesota is a state that still needs anti-SLAPP legislation that can survive court challenges.

(Krystal) Two Bulls is just one of many victims of the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation — to silence and intimidate its critics. A report released last month by legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International identified 152 instances of legal and judicial harassment by fossil fuel corporations to suppress dissent in the United States over the past 10 years, including 93 SLAPP lawsuits.

Just (two weeks ago), a California oil industry trade association paid nearly $650,000 in fees to the city of Los Angeles and several environmental advocacy groups the company had targeted in court for years following the city’s implementation of new environmental safety requirements for drilling applicants. After declaring bankruptcy, the California Independent Petroleum Association was allowed to pay only a fraction of a judgment initially awarded to the city and groups by a trial court that ruled the lawsuit was a SLAPP.

“With the strengthening of our movements, the revelation of how long the fossil fuel industry has been aware of how their practices impact and contribute to climate change, and the rise of legal cases against oil and gas corporations, these companies are becoming more desperate to silence the voices of their critics,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel at Greenpeace USA. - DeSmog

A real effort to deal with orphaned oil and gas wells

If Big Filthy Fossil Fuels had any measure of responsibility or integrity, they'd pick up the tab. But, yeah, that's a laugh.

The Biden administration has awarded $560 million to plug orphaned oil and gas wells across 24 states, the largest single investment in oil field cleanup in history, officials said (August 25).

The funding is part of a $4.7 billion orphaned well program greenlighted by last year’s Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. The bipartisan program offers grant dollars to qualifying states to pay for finding abandoned wells, tracking their methane releases, plugging them to stem polluting gases and restoring the land at the surface...

All told, states have flagged more than 10,000 high priority wells for cleanup, the first in line of a nearly 130,000 backlog of unreclaimed known well sites, Interior reported...That number is expected to rise as federal funds bolster state efforts to identify hidden or lost orphans. - E&E News

Fracking is an enemy of humanity

For example:

Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called "unconventional" drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.

The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia...

The new study adds to a growing body of literature documenting the deleterious health and environmental consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction. - Common Dreams

Expect a boom in ever-more-flagrant greenwashing

A particularly odious example.

A major exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas is “seeking to greenwash” its operations in order to portray gas exports as a climate solution and clear the way for further expansion, according to a new report...

In recent months, Cheniere Energy, the largest LNG exporter in the United States, has begun providing emissions data, which it calls “carbon emissions tags,” or CE tags, for its gas.

The tags quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of a given LNG cargo, with the aim of easing buyers’ concerns. The CE tags include emissions from where the gas is drilled upstream, all the way down to the point of export on the coast. The logic is to offer transparency to buyers overseas by disclosing the emissions of each shipment, which would help to clean up the supply chain over time.

But a new report from Oil Change International and Greenpeace USA says the program is riddled with flaws and is broadly aimed at portraying LNG as a clean fuel, rather than actually cleaning up the supply chain, at a time when gas developers are hoping to take advantage of the war in Ukraine to expand operations. - DeSmog

Keystone XL starts construction - Update

Update: Construction has been righteously blocked again.

Original story: Bad news. Specifically, at a site on the Montana/Canada border. Also, I hadn’t been aware that the government of Alberta, Canada, ended up funding it because private lenders wanted no part.

Alberta's recent announcement that it was investing more than $1 billion to build the Keystone XL pipeline gave a boost to a project that has faced more than a decade of delays and uncertainty.

But by dedicating government money to a pipeline the private sector has been reluctant to fund, the decision highlights how vulnerable Canada's oil sands industry has become, even before the coronavirus pandemic crashed global oil demand.

Last week, Alberta announced it would invest $1.1 billion in the pipeline and provide an additional $4.2 billion in loan guarantees to help developer TC Energy start construction immediately. Premier Jason Kenney said his government had been negotiating with the company for months, and that no private sector bidders were ready to finance the project. - Inside Climate News

On the same general subject, though this one is righteous:

Globally, renewable energy sectors including wind, solar, and hydropower are booming. The world is using more renewable energy than ever before. Over one third of the world’s electricity comes from renewable sources, according to data released by the International Renewable Energy Agency, or Irena, on Monday.

From 2018 to 2019, new renewable energy capacity construction slowed down slightly. But since the world also built less new fossil fuel infrastructure, renewables share in energy expansion grew. A record-breaking 72 percent of all the new electricity sources the world installed in 2019 were renewable. - Earther

Prognostications as to what the Trump Crash will mean for renewables are all over the place, from what I’ve seen.

Good luck dealing with the latest Keystone oil spill

You've probably seen some mention of this. This article has key details which have generally not been noted in other, namely corporate media, coverage I've seen.

When the Keystone Pipeline burst last week, half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool’s worth of a particularly dirty fossil fuel spilled into wetlands in North Dakota. And the thick liquid, known as tar sands oil, will be nearly impossible to clean up.

The pipeline project started pumping back in 2010, despite opposition from farmers, indigenous groups, and environmental organizations. It carries oily sludge from the enormous tar sands fields in Alberta, Canada, across more than 2,000 miles of pristine wetlands in the Dakotas, through Nebraska to Patoka, Illinois. And now with this latest spill, some of the worst fears about it have been realized.

The company, TC Energy, formerly TransCanada, projected that the pipeline would spill just 11 times over the course of 50 years, or about once every seven years. Since it started pumping, it’s already spilled large amounts of oil four times. - Vice

Greedheads foiled in effort to mess with electric vehicles in Minnesota

For now, anyway. I don't know what kind of court challenges might be available. Where do these assholes from Big Filthy Fossil Fuels get off?

Minnesota regulators on (October 7) stamped out manufacturing and petroleum groups' attempt to reverse approval of Xcel Energy's $25 million electric vehicle pilot program.

The state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved the program in July, and five large industrial groups, including oil groups Marathon Petroleum and Flint Hills Resources, filed a petition with the commission on Aug. 6 asking regulators to reconsider the decision.

Those groups argued the commission did not have authority to regulate Xcel for behind-the-meter charging and raised general ratepayer concerns. EV and clean energy stakeholders were skeptical of the groups' involvement, noting that it may be the beginning of a longer fight between oil and electric power interests as EV adoption grows. - Utility Dive

Seriously, Line 3 might really not happen

Which would be so great.

Enbridge's proposed Line 3 oil pipeline replacement likely could see more delays, after two state agencies involved in the project said (June 18) that the permitting schedule for the pipeline needs to be revised.

Just how long those delays could last remains unclear. But in a joint statement from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, officials said that a recent state Court of Appeals ruling that the pipeline's environmental review was inadequate will have implications for their permitting process. - MPR

Enbridge makes a great deal of money pumping filthy fossil fuels around, and they will very likely keep pushing to the desperate end if it comes to that. There’s also sunk-cost bias involved.

To be clear, when in this context people reference Enbridge Line 3 we’re generally talking about the proposed replacement for the existing Line 3. And when I and many others talk about stopping Line 3, what we really mean is keeping the replacement from being built and shutting down the existing line for good. Because we don't need tar sands oil.