Favorite Chemours has offered a novel argument in defense of one of its toxic PFAS chemicals, known as GenX: that the compound, which causes cancer and other health effects in lab animals and was released by the company into the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people, is necessary for the fight against climate…
Favorite The Environmental Protection Agency released a letter to Denka Performance Elastomer last week refusing the chemical company’s request to change its assessment of a chemical called chloroprene. Denka, which owns and operates a chloroprene-emitting plant in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, had asked the EPA to revise its 2010 assessment of the chemical, arguing that…
Favorite As part of its efforts to build and operate pipelines, the oil transport company Enbridge used a tracking system that identified Indigenous-led groups as key threats. Internal documents reviewed by The Intercept describe how Enbridge launched an initiative known as Opposition Driven Operational Threats, or ODOT, to focus the company’s attention on Indigenous opposition…
Favorite Last week, a North Dakota court ruled against a bid by the oil company Energy Transfer to keep documents about its security contractor’s operations against anti-pipeline activism secret. The court thwarted the pipeline giant’s attempt to narrow the definition of a public record and withhold thousands of documents from the press. Judge Cynthia Feland…
Favorite If you’re wondering whether we’ll do anything about global warming before it destroys civilization, think about this ominous fact: It occupies barely any space in popular culture. This contrasts with the gusher of movies and books in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s about nuclear war. Anyone old will remember “The Day After,” “War Games,”…
Favorite The House Oversight Committee hearing on the oil industry Thursday was advertised as a mirror image of the iconic 1994 hearing that many believe turned the tides in the tobacco wars. That year, a group of older, white, and male chief executives hailing from Philip Morris, Lorillard Tobacco, U.S. Tobacco, Liggett Group, Brown and…
Favorite Last spring, Texas legislators came closer than ever to passing a bill that would protect people incarcerated in state prisons from summer temperatures that routinely breach 100 degrees and are due to keep rising with the climate crisis. “It’s like being in a walk-in closet in one of the hottest days of the year…
Favorite The head of security for the oil transport company Enbridge built his résumé managing Exxon Mobil’s response to community protests in Nigeria and helping oversee Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center, a division that has monitored environmental groups and union organizers. Now, at Enbridge, Troy Kirby oversees efforts to combat a protest movement aimed at…
Favorite As Hurricane Ida wrought destruction throughout Louisiana and Mississippi this week, the companies that own the oil rigs and refineries in the storm’s path — and helped fuel this and the other natural disasters now upending life in every region of the world — said very little. While a highway collapsed, people died, homes…
Favorite Indigenous communities in Brazil organized the largest-ever native protests to block what they described as “a declaration of extermination” from lawmakers representing agribusiness, mining, and logging interests aligned with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The umbrella group Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, or APIB, put together the protests as part of the weeklong “Struggle…
