Climate Trial Against Oil Giant Eni Opens in Italy

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Original article by Stella Levantesi republished from DeSmog

Greenpeace Italy released a new report that shows oil major Eni is using climate denier technical consultants as a defense strategy in its climate warming lawsuit. Flickr via PRP Channel (CC BY-2.0)

The case coincides with a new Greenpeace Italy and ReCommon report showing Eni’s technical consultants have wide links to climate denier groups.

Italy’s first climate change lawsuit brought by Greenpeace Italy and climate advocacy group ReCommon against Italian oil giant Eni opened with its first hearing on February 16, alleging the company contributed to global warming. 

The hearing comes alongside a new report by Greenpeace Italy and ReCommon, which describes how Eni’s technical consultants in the case have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and climate deniers. 

The lawsuit “aims to build on a similar case targeting Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands to force Eni to slash its carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030,” as DeSmog has previously reported.

At issue in the case is whether or not Eni knowingly contributed to climate change and if it’s responsible for past and future damages. The case is also assessing if the oil giant violated human rights that are protected by the Italian Constitution and international agreements. 

The cache of documentary evidence in the lawsuit includes two “technical reports” produced for Eni’s defense by consultants who Greenpeace Italy’s new report describes as climate deniers.

Last week, the two environmental organizations pushed to have the judge hear their witnesses, which include 12 Italian citizens who have been impacted by climate change, the groups’ lawyer Alessandro Gariglio told DeSmog.

“Now it will be up to the judge to assess whether he considers the documentary evidence presented to be sufficient or, instead, whether he thinks it might be appropriate to hear witnesses and, above all, to order a court-appointed expert opinion,” Gariglio noted. He added that he and his parties are in favor of such a move, “and the counterparties [Eni included] are not.” 

In a statement to DeSmog, an Eni spokesperson said the company “will prove the groundlessness of Greenpeace and ReCommon’s claims, both legally and factually, in the legal proceedings.” Documentation related to the current lawsuit is available for review on Eni’s website.

Eni’s Technical Reports

The technical reports are addendums to one of Eni’s statements of defense and are authored by Carlo Stagnaro, director of research and studies at the think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni (IBL), and Stefano Consonni, professor of Energy and Environmental Systems at the Department of Energy of the Politecnico University in Milan.

According to Greenpeace Italy, the two consultants are “anything but independent,” and “have expressed climate denial positions” on more than one occasion. 

Consonni’s resume states that since 1993 he has been “lead investigator” for research financed by multiple oil and gas companies, including Eni, ExxonMobil, and BP Alternative Energy, and the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Stagnaro’s technical report, Greenpeace says, includes references to Eni’s key climate delay tactics, such as “whataboutism” to obscure the Italian oil giant’s true contribution to global warming. For example, it mentions China’s lack of responsibility in controlling emissions and also the tactic of  diverting accountability towards consumers –  a reference that is repeated 19 times throughout the text.

Ties to the U.S. Climate Denial Machine

According to Greenpeace’s report, the think tank IBL has denied man-made anthropogenic climate change in the past and, in the early 2000s, Stagnaro was “among the most active figures” within the institution to import U.S. climate denial theories into Italy.

In 2006, for example, Stagnaro wrote a briefing called “Climate. We want to be Amerikans,” which includes delayer phrasing such as “climate alarmists.” The briefing states, “Unfortunately, the Kyoto Protocol presupposes a ‘choice of field’ in science: it rests, that is, on the assumption that humans are the root cause,” which is “an assumption that is justified neither by the uncertainty of actual scientific knowledge nor by the complexity of the atmospheric dynamics.”

To support this, the briefing cites retired astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, who is associated with many climate denier organizations, including the George C. Marshall Institute. In 2002, in a hearing in the U.S. Senate, Baliunas declared that “since no warming trend in the lower layers of the troposphere was observed, most of the surface warming in recent decades cannot be attributed to a greenhouse effect enhanced by human causes.”

Stagnaro’s briefing also cites climate denier Bjorn Lomborg and was co-authored by Mario Sechi, current editor-in-chief of far-right Italian newspaper Libero, who is the former director of Eni-owned news agency, AGI, and a former spokesperson for current right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

At a summit in Rome at the end of January, Meloni unveiled the “Mattei Plan,” named after Enrico Mattei, founder of Eni. The program aims to transform Italy into “an energy hub” distributing fossil fuels extracted from Africa that creates “a bridge between Europe and Africa.” Campaigners in Italy and across Africa have criticized the plan, saying it will promote fossil fuel exploitation and “false solutions.”  Before the initiative was announced, over 50 African groups signed a letter to the Italian government calling for an “end of neo-colonial approaches” and “a more consultative approach.” “This ‘dash for gas’ in Africa is dangerous and short-sighted,” the letter states.

Eni has also recently come under fire in some Italian media for sponsoring the week-long music and entertainment TV show, Sanremo, which was seen by 70 percent of Italian viewers this year during one of its broadcasts. According to Greenpeace, this sponsorship is “yet another greenwashing operation.”

Greenpeace’s report underscores the fact that IBL, under Stagnaro’s direction, is part of the Atlas Network, a group of more than 500 “free market” organizations in nearly 100 countries that have supported climate science denial positions and  lobbied against legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

According to previous DeSmog reports, the Atlas Network is also behind efforts to “brand climate activists as extremists” and “pass anti-protest legislation.”

Greenpeace’s report reveals that in 2004, IBL also joined the Cooler Heads Coalition (CHC), a U.S.-based pressure group that has worked to promote climate denialism. After calling climate science a hoax for two decades, CHC played an important role in President Donald Trump’s 2017 decision to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.

Eni’s technical consultants with the Istituto Bruno Leoni (IBL) have ties to U.S. climate denial organizations like the Heartland Institute. Credit: Wikipedia

According to the Climate Investigations Center, from 1997 to 2015, members of CHC received “upwards of $98 million dollars in donations from Exxon Mobil, conservative foundations, and dark money organizations.”

According to another report by Italian news outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, in 2010, Exxon contributed $30,000 to IBL and Eni gave the group 12,000 euros.

In 2008, IBL also co-sponsored the event “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis” with the Heartland Institute, which has been at “the forefront” of denying scientific evidence for climate change.

IBL’s position seems to have softened over the years, Greenpeace’s report mentions, with Stagnaro tweeting in November 2019 that, “The position of the @istbrunoleoni on #climate is that: 1. climate change exists and is also due to humans 2. Emissions must be reduced 3. Not all policies that aim to reduce emissions work or are efficient.”

However, in 2018, IBL promoted the launch of “In Defense of Fossil Fuels,” a book by Alex Epstein who, according to investigative group Documented, “influences oil policy directly as a member of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission,” which is “a powerful quasi-regulatory body that lobbies for oil and gas interests.”

“Can the report of someone who has often personally embraced and disseminated climate change denialist positions be considered reliable in the context of climate litigation?” asks Greenpeace Italy and ReCommon, who have named their campaign for the lawsuit “The Just Cause.” Can it “be considered free of judgment if that same expert has received funding from that same company in the past?” the plaintiffs ask.

In response, Eni’s website reads, “There is little that is ‘just’ about this action. “The plaintiffs are in fact asking the court to declare Eni “responsible” for damages suffered and future damages resulting from climate change, to which the company has allegedly contributed with its conduct over the past decades.” 

This “false narrative,” Eni continues, is based on an “obvious instrumental approach” aimed at “demonizing” the business.

Greenpeace Italy and ReCommon stated that they hope the judge will “reject the numerous and specious objections made by Eni” to allow “a radical change in the company’s industrial strategies.”

Original article by Stella Levantesi republished from DeSmog

Continue ReadingClimate Trial Against Oil Giant Eni Opens in Italy

UK Government’s New Low Pay Advisor Heads Climate Denial Network

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Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

Philippa Stroud, chair of the government’s Low Pay Commission, and CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Credit: ARC (CC0 1.0 DEED)

Tory peer Philippa Stroud, who has close ties to the funders of GB News, has been elevated to a senior advisory role by the government.

A new government advisor on the minimum wage is the head of an international network of climate crisis deniers funded by the owners of GB News, DeSmog can reveal.

Philippa Stroud was appointed chair of the Low Pay Commission, a body reporting to Kemi Badenoch’s Department of Business and Trade, on 30 January. The government-appointed role pays £530 per day for three days of work per month (£19,114 per year).

The Conservative peer is the CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new pressure group that shares its funders with GB News and is linked to some of the world’s most prominent climate crisis deniers, including psychologist Jordan Peterson. Stroud has been described by The Telegraph as “the most powerful right-winger you’ve never heard of”.

The appointment comes as senior Conservative Party figures continue to embrace anti-climate politics. On 6 February, former prime minister Liz Truss attacked “net zero zealots” at the launch of her new Popular Conservatism faction. 

Last month, Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Clare Coutinho met with and praised fuel pricing lobbyist Howard Cox, a Reform UK candidate who wants to “scrap net zero” and claims that “man is not responsible for global warming”.

The government is also pushing ahead with legislation that would require the awarding of annual North Sea oil and gas licences. The Climate Change Committee, the independent body that advises the government on its net zero policies, warned on 30 January that mixed messages, including new fossil fuel projects, have damaged the UK’s international climate standing.

Last year was the first on record to see consistent global warming of 1.5C, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. 

DeSmog has previously revealed that the Conservative Party received £3.5 million in donations from fossil fuel interests and climate science deniers in 2022.

Stroud’s appointment also cements the relationship between the Conservative Party and GB News. On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took part in an hour-long town hall event on GB News, following the example of several Conservative MPs who are regular guests and presenters on the right-wing broadcaster. 

Stroud’s ARC project is run by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and the UAE-based Legatum Group, GB News’s principal backers. The Legatum Institute, a think tank funded by the Legatum Group, gave £50,000 to a faction of the Conservative Party in December. Before taking up her post at ARC, Stroud was CEO of the Legatum Institute. 

“Anti-science climate change denialism has become the secret handshake that ushers in the faithful and bars the door to unbelievers,” Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project, told DeSmog. “This is an appalling betrayal of the principles of sound government – and of our children who need us to be led by science and not by the financial interests of wealthy Tory donors.”

ARC, Stroud, the Legatum Group, and the Low Pay Commission were approached for comment. 

ARC and Legatum

Philippa Stroud was made a life peer by then prime minister David Cameron (now foreign secretary) in 2015, after failing to win a parliamentary seat in 2010. 

The Legatum Group, which has employed Stroud both directly and indirectly since 2016, is one of the largest shareholders in GB News, which frequently attacks climate science and policies. A DeSmog investigation found that one in three GB News hosts spread climate denial on air in 2022. 

GB News’s other major owner is British billionaire Paul Marshall, chairman and chief investment officer of the hedge fund Marshall Wace. DeSmog revealed that, as of June 2023, Marshall Wace owned shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms. This included a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies. 

In her statement announcing the launch of ARC, Stroud took aim at climate policies, writing that “we risk driving policy interventions to address environmental concerns without having an honest conversation about the trade-offs for the poor at home or in developing and emerging nations”.

Poor and indigenous groups in developing countries will be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change, while those suffering from poverty at home have seen their energy bills soar as successive governments have failed to implement green reforms. 

ARC is fronted by Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who regularly posts about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. Peterson has promoted fringe climate crisis deniers on his YouTube channel and, as revealed by DeSmog, plans to open a new online school also featuring several climate crisis deniers. 

ARC’s advisory board includes writers Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, both of whom have written books downplaying the threats posed by climate change, as well as Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia and a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s principal climate science denial group. 

Late last year, speaking on the outskirts of ARC’s launch conference in London, Abbott claimed climate change has “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”. ARC advisor Vivek Ramaswamy, who also spoke at the conference, has called climate change a “hoax” and has said that “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten US prosperity.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, states it is “unequivocal” that human influence has caused “unprecedented” global warming. 

Kemi Badenoch, whose department appointed Stroud to her new advisory role, also spoke at the ARC conference alongside Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove. The pair were joined by a number of Conservative MPs. 

Stroud’s appointment to the government’s Low Pay Commission was first trailed by The Telegraph in December. A “Whitehall source” told the paper that Stroud was selected for the three-year post to block a possible left-wing appointment by a Labour government.

Carla Denyer, Green Party co-leader and its parliamentary candidate for Bristol Central said that Stroud’s appointment was “hardly the most appropriate” and that “the Conservatives seem set on placing their people across the quango world before the general election.”

Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
Continue ReadingUK Government’s New Low Pay Advisor Heads Climate Denial Network

Pro-Coal MP Appointed to Lead Influential Cross-Party Environment Group

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Original article by Phoebe Cooke and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Conservative MP Trudy Harrison. Credit: Justin Goff/UK Government (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Conservatives accused of a “stitch up” as Trudy Harrison replaces Green Tory Chris Skidmore.

A Tory MP who backed the UK’s first new coal mine in over 30 years has been elected to chair the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on environment.

Desk-banging and jeering were heard in the House of Commons committee room on Wednesday night as lawmakers voted in Trudy Harrison, who represents Copeland in West Cumbria – where the proposed mine in Whitehaven is located. 

Harrison replaces former Conservative MP Chris Skidmore, who resigned from the Commons in January in protest at the government’s move to issue new North Sea Oil and gas licences.

The Copeland MP’s selection was welcomed on social media by the all-party group, which tweeted: “We look forward to working with Trudy as we continue to provide an ambitious, cross-party voice for climate and nature in Parliament.”

Around 40 MPs and peers elected Harrison in the raucous voting session, which was open to all members of the Commons and Lords. 

DeSmog understands that a large number of Conservatives turned out to sway the vote in Harrison’s favour, with several people in the room reporting a frenetic atmosphere. “Hordes of Tories” were said to outnumber Labour MPs, many of whom were running late and barred from entry.

“They clearly felt it a point of principle that they keep control of the chair, regardless who the candidate was – the whole thing was a stitch-up,” a source said, adding: “I think if the public saw how things really work here they would be horrified.”

All-party parliamentary groups have no formal role in Parliament but can often act as an influential forum for debate, and also produce reports, and make policy recommendations. The chair is a pivotal role, tasked with providing direction to the secretariat – the body that formally runs the APPG – as well as leading on the execution of its agenda. 

The appointment of a pro-coal MP in this role comes after a week of shattered climate pledges from both main Westminster parties. On Thursday, the Labour Party announced it would scrap its commitment to spend £28 billion a year on green investments, days after it was reported the Conservatives are poised to ditch a mechanism that could slash emissions from domestic heating.

In January, DeSmog revealed energy secretary Claire Coutinho had accepted thousands of pounds from Michael Hintze, one of the early backers of the UK’s main climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. A member of the group’s board was also appointed to a parliamentary committee on climate change.

“Slowly, slowly, fossil fuel interests are taking over our institutions,” Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project told DeSmog. 

Alice Harrison, head of fossil fuels campaigning at Global Witness, said: “it seems the new chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Environment is also a big fan of coal. The Conservatives want to take us back to the 19th century.”

Coal mine controversy

Harrison, who served as an environment minister until November last year, advocated passionately for the proposed mine in Whitehaven as it became a political flashpoint in discussions over the UK’s commitment to net zero. 

At the 2021 planning inquiry she described the coal as an “environmentally friendly” domestic source for steel. She characterised opposition to the mine as “simply gesture politics”, adding that the coal would help “build the technologies powering us to net zero”.

Levelling up Secretary Michael Gove finally approved plans for the mine in 2022, but it remains deeply controversial. 

Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel, releasing more carbon dioxide than oil or gas when burnt. It also produces toxic elements like mercury, arsenic and soot, which contribute to air pollution. If it went ahead, the mine would emit nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 15,000 tonnes of methane a year.

Despite the green light, the mine still only has four percent of the funding required to operate, according to campaigners. A number of legal challenges are also pending.

Scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make it clear that global coal use has to collapse to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees and avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. This week, it was reported that global heating had for the first time  averaged more than this temperature over a 12-month period.

Harrison, like other supporters of the mine in Whitehaven, has argued that the “coking” coal from this mine is suitable for use by the UK steel industry. But industry bosses have said that the Cumbrian coal is too high in sulphur, which rules it out for use  in British and European steelworks. 

West Cumbria Mining, the company behind the project, claims the project will create around 500 jobs. However, Westmorland and Lonsdale Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron said the government was giving the false hope of jobs for political reasons. The jobs, he said, would be short term because the mine’s business case “didn’t stack up”.

Anne Harris from Coal Action Network told DeSmog: “This appointment makes a mockery of the Environment APPG and shows that this government can never be trusted with this enormous crisis facing humanity.

“In supporting a new coal mine in Cumbria, Harrison is in a minority, and out of touch with the full impacts of climate change and how fossil fuels cause it. It’s a lie to say the proposed coal mine in West Cumbria would be anything other than a climate disaster.”

The all-party parliamentary group exists to “strengthen the influence of parliamentarians on public policy and public debate on the environment, and to assist parliamentarians by improving their access to specialist information.”

Prior to its latest meeting, the Environment APPG had 25 officers (MPs and peers) who participated in its work. These included Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Shadow Minister for Energy Security Alan Whitehead, Liberal Democrat energy and climate spokesperson Wera Hobhouse, and former Labour environment minister Barry Gardiner. 

Harrison, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not respond to requests for comment. The APPG for Environment declined to comment.

Original article by Phoebe Cooke and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Rishi Sunak offers huge fossil fuel subsidies to develop fossil fuel extraction in UK.
Rishi Sunak offers huge fossil fuel subsidies to develop fossil fuel extraction in UK.
Continue ReadingPro-Coal MP Appointed to Lead Influential Cross-Party Environment Group

Fossil Fuel Companies Made Bold Promises to Capture Carbon. Here’s What Actually Happened.

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Original article by Michael Buchsbaum and Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog.

A DeSmog review of 12 large-scale projects reveals a litany of cost-overruns and missed targets, with a net increase in emissions.

Most of the 12 largest carbon capture and storage projects around the world are in the United States. Credit: Sabrina Bedford.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) was high on the agenda at New York Climate Week last week, where critics of the technology raised concerns it would be used to extend the life of the fossil fuel industry.

For years, experts have pointed out that CCS has been primarily used to pump more oil out of the earth, using a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Burning that oil emits far more carbon dioxide (CO2) than what is captured, and therefore CCS doesn’t represent a viable solution to tackle climate change, critics argue. 

At a news conference after the one-day UN Climate Ambition Summit on September 20, Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “The oil companies acknowledged this year that they will not meet their bogus net zero commitments. The data showed us that their carbon capture plans are not working at scale.”

Below is a DeSmog review of the climate impact of 12 large-scale CCS projects around the world; what the fossil fuel industry promised, and what actually happened. Findings include a litany of missed carbon capture targets; cost-overruns, and billions of dollars of costs to taxpayers in the form of subsidies.

The data is drawn from various sources, including the Global CCS Institute; the International Energy Agency; the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis; the Geoengineering Monitor, and DeSmog research. Data on subsidies was provided by Oil Change International, which plans to launch a database of government support for CCS in 2024. Currency conversions were made in respect to exchange rates when subsidies were first announced or given. 

For more on the climate implications of CCS, see DeSmog’s accompanying news analysis: How Carbon Capture And Storage Projects Are Driving New Oil and Gas Extraction Globally.

What CCS Projects Promise. And What They Deliver.

1. Terrell Natural Gas Processing Plant (“Val Verde”)

Operator: Occidental Petroleum, 1972-present 

Location: Southeast of Ft. Stockton, Texas, USA

Stated maximum capacity: 0.5 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin

Public subsidies:  None

What they said would happen: More crude oil would be extracted using injected CO2.

What actually happened: It worked. Val Verde’s success served as a replicable model enabling the oil industry to pump more oil while claiming to be helping the climate. 

BackgroundThe world’s first industrial carbon capture facility began siphoning CO2 from a complex of West Texas gas processing plants in 1972. The gas was then piped across the region to boost the productivity of oil wellsNow owned by Occidental Petroleum and re-named the Terrell Natural Gas Processing Plant, the facility has aided in the production of millions of additional barrels of crude. 

Val Verde’s success helped the oil and gas sector develop a business model enabling them to profit long into the future. It simultaneously acted as a potential solution to the worsening greenhouse gas crisis, while still remaining the biggest source of that pollution.

The first dedicated facility to use injected CO2 to produce more oil, Val Verde was instrumental in pioneering enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The technique proved so successful that within a decade drillers had built thousands of miles of dedicated pipelines sending naturally occurring CO2 into oil fields in Texas, elsewhere in the U.S., and eventually other nations. 

Based upon Val Verde, since the 1970s, U.S. oil firms have led in the development of ever more efficient EOR-CCS technologies. Though now practiced globally, Texas’ Permian has the largest concentration of EOR operations. 

As awareness grew that burning fossil fuels was increasingly harmful to the environment, petroleum scientists began looking for industry-friendly solutions. Given that a fraction of the CO2 injected during EOR remains underground, as early as 1977 proponents suggested rebranding EOR into climate-friendlier carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Envisioning installing capture units on fossil fuel-burning generation plants, particularly coal-fired power stations, backers saw this as an elegant response to growing concerns over carbon emissions. 

Fifty years later, Val Verde still serves as the industry’s model for “beneficial” CO2 usage, and EOR remains the main driver and successful business model for CCS.

2. Shute Creek Treating Facility

Operator: ExxonMobil1986-present 

Location: East of Kemmerer, Wyoming, USA

Stated maximum capacity: 7 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage methods: Enhanced oil recovery in Wyoming and neighboring states, limited geologic storage.

Public subsidies: None

What they said would happen: ExxonMobil points to Shute Creek to demonstrate its commitment to capturing ever more carbon.

What actually happened: Almost half the captured CO2 has been used to pump more oil; the rest has simply been vented into the atmosphere, in part because the plant failed to meet about a third of its capture targets.

Background: Owner ExxonMobil claims to have “cumulatively captured more anthropogenic CO2 than any other company” and estimates that its Shute Creek plant is responsible for 20 percent of the world’s yearly sequestered carbon. However, the plant — at Wyoming’s LaBarge gas field — wasn’t designed with climate targets in mind, but rather to produce gas, oil, and a fifth of the world’s helium supply. 

Most of the C02 captured in CCS plants are used to pump more oil. Credit: Buchsbaum Media.

Wyoming’s LaBarge gas field remained unexploited for decades due to its very high levels of CO2, making it a less than ideal source for natural gas production. Nonetheless, in the 1980s Exxon found that capturing carbon during gas processing and selling it for enhanced oil recovery in the surrounding region would make the Shute Creek operation profitable. As global oil prices fluctuated over the following years, carbon capture was paused at the plant during periods when CO2 demand for oil extraction dropped. 

According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEFFA), a nonprofit think tank, 47 percent of all CO2 captured by the plant has been sold for enhanced oil recovery over its lifetime, with only three percent of CO2 sequestered. The remaining 50 percent of CO2 produced by the plant — 120 million tonnes — has simply been vented to the atmosphere, making it a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. While some of this venting was planned, the plant has failed to meet about a third of its total carbon capture targets throughout its history, according to IEEFA. 

3. Sleipner and Snøhvit Projects 

Operator: Equinor (Statoil), 1996-present; Snøhvit since 2008

Location: Offshore (North Sea Sleipner West field), Norway

Stated maximum capacity: Sleipner 1 million tonnes of CO2/year

Stated maximum capacity: Snøhvit 0.7 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage methods: Geologic storage in the North Sea

Public subsidies: $175,000 

What they said would happen: Often cited as evidence that the oil industry has already perfected carbon capture and storage techniques.

What actually happened: Studies suggest the projects’ CO2 storage modeling is faulty, underscoring concerns that CO2 behavior remains highly unpredictable. 

BackgroundThe world’s first industrial-scale CCS project constructed for supposed carbon emissions abatement, Sleipner went into operation in 1996 after Norway’s pioneering carbon taxes came into effect.  

Given the relatively high CO2 volume contained within raw gas from the Sleipner West field, to ensure profitability under the new carbon taxes it became necessary to bury the gas. Storing this waste product underground continues to save Equinor hundreds of millions in annual taxes.

In near continuous operation since the mid-90s, and the largest CCS project yet conceived in the North Sea and Europe, Sleipner has a capacity to sequester almost a million tonnes of CO2 annually. 

However, stripping out and pumping all this CO2 back underground doesn’t render the refined gas as carbon neutral. Just the opposite: By some estimates, burning it has created roughly 25 times more CO2 than all that Equinor has sequestered.

Envisioned as a model enabling long-term oil and gas exploration despite emissions, since conception Sleipner has served as an international center of learning and a laboratory for generations of petroleum engineers. The knowledge gained continues to help Equinor and partners such as ExxonMobil expand and implement more CCS and EOR projects worldwide. 

However, though Sleipner was used as a guide for the 2009 EU directive on geological storage of carbon dioxide — now being reviewed to enable expanded CO2 storage and usage, IEEFA studies based on Norwegian reporting reveals evidence that both Sleipner and Snøhvit’s CO2 storage modeling is faulty, showcasing how CO2 behavior remains highly unpredictable, with potentially disastrous consequences. 

4. Kemper Project

Operator: Mississippi Power (Southern Energy Company), 2010-2021 (closed; renamed Plant Ratcliffe) 

Location: North of Meridian, Mississippi, USA

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 3 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the Gulf of Mexico

Public subsidies: $407 million

What they said would happen: Coal would be burned “cleanly” to produce power.

What actually happened: Costs more than doubled from initial estimates to $7.5 billion; leaks were found during testing and the carbon capture plant was eventually mothballed, then demolished.

Background: As climate policies began to call for a coal power phase-out in the early 2000s, carbon capture became a means to keep the coal industry alive in a “cleaner” form. Building upon a Bush Administration program, in 2008, the Kemper CCS facility was proposed as the flagship project of the U.S. government’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, receiving $407 million in federal subsidies. The plant, operated by Southern Energy company, was designed to gasify lignite (brown coal) and capture the carbon before combustion. 

The Kemper Project was shut down and is being rebuilt as Plant Ratcliff. Credit: Wikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 3.0

However, the plant never reached its target of capturing 65 percent of its carbon emissions, which would have amounted to 3.0 million tonnes of CO2 per year. First, construction was delayed, and the initially estimated cost of $3 billion ballooned to $7.5 billion. Despite this massive increase in investment, the project’s coal gasification process did not operate reliably during testing as leaks were discovered.

In 2017, carbon capture operations were suspended as ongoing problems made the venture unprofitable. In 2021, the mothballed carbon capture unit was demolished. Today, the remaining Kemper power plant simply burns fossil gas, and “clean coal” remains an expensive and unproven emissions-reduction measure worldwide.  

5. Century Gas Processing Plant

Operator: Occidental Petroleum, 2010-present 

Location: East of Fort Stockton, Texas, USA

Stated maximum capacity: 8.4 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Note: The industry-backed Global CCS Institute says five million tonnes of CO2/ year, which was the plant’s actual operating capacity in 2022.

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery 

Public subsidies: None

What they said would happen: The project will help usher in a new era of “net-zero oil.”

What’s actually happening: The plant could enable the development of approximately 500 million barrels of oil reserves more cheaply.

Background: With 25,000 miles of CO2 pipelines; 6,000 carbon injection wells spread over 1.4 million acres; and over 50 years of experience, Occidental Petroleum is perhaps the global leader in enhanced oil recovery. 

Boasting a capacity of over eight million tonnes of CO2 per year following a 2012 expansion, the $1.1 billion Century Gas Processing Plant in West Texas has the most storage potential in the U.S., though only about 60 percent of this was used last year, according to the Global CCS Institute. 

Despite its ambitions to expand its oil operations — Occidental Petroleum claims that its CO2-enhanced oil recovery could release the energy equivalent of two billion barrels of oil – the company is billing itself as a climate leader. Citing its “vast legacy” and core competency of CO2-enhanced oil recovery operations, the company says that using new technologies to capture carbon capture could be a “game changer” for the climate. Last year, Occidental started selling its first “Net Zero” oil to a Singapore-based commodities trader, based on direct air capture capacity yet to be installed, and earlier this year it began pre-selling carbon credits based on its eventual “low carbon” jet fuel to Airbus. 

The legacy of EOR-linked facilities, including the Century Gas Processing Plant, has so far been a net increase in global emissions. Various sources show that the oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin, where the plant is located, is the largest “climate bomb” in North America, and one of the world’s leading contributors to climate change. 

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research entry on the Century Gas Processing Plant, it allows Occidental Petroleum to “develop approximately 500 million barrels of reserves from currently owned assets at an attractive cost.” 

6. Petra Nova 

Operator: Previously NRG Energy in partnership with JX Nippon Oil, 2017-2020; shut down in 2020 and now wholly only owned by JX Nippon, restarted September 2023

Location: Attached to one unit at the WA Parish Power Plant, Richmond, Texas, USA 

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 1.4 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the West Ranch oil field

Public subsidies: $190 million 

What they said would happen: Game-changing solution to fossil emissions.

What actually happened: Failed to meet capture targets; barely reduced overall carbon pollution.

Background: Petra Nova restarted just this September, two years after it was shut down in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the price of West Texas crude oil crashed. The only ​​CCS unit attached to a coal-fired power plant in the United States, during its first short operating period it proved adept at EOR. However, independent analyses reveal that it both failed to meet its capture targets and, when taking lifecycle emissions into consideration, it barely reduced any overall carbon pollution. 

Hailed as a game-changing solution to rising greenhouse emissions from the fossil fuel industry, co-owners NRG Energy and Japan’s JX Nippon promised at the time that Petra Nova would revolutionize the sector and rescue the future of fossil fuel electricity generation. 

The $1 billion project (including a $190 million U.S. Department of Energy grant under the Clean Coal Initiative and a $250 million loan from the Japanese government) is attached to one 654 megawatt coal-unit of the monster NRG-owned W.A. Parish power facility near Houston, Texas. 

Ranked in 2019 as the ninth most carbon-emitting power plant in the U.S., Parish’s combined eight coal and fossil gas units annually belch over 15.1 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

After capture and compression, CO2 is piped over 80 miles away to the West Ranch oil field for EOR. Before Petra Nova came online, only a measly 300 barrels a day were oozing from the field. But during Petra Nova’s first year of operations, that figure jumped to 4,000 a day. As pressure built, production soared by a factor of 50 to over 15,000 barrels per day.  

But when West Texas oil prices crashed at the end of March 2020, capturing and sequestering CO2 for EOR stopped making economic sense, and its owners mothballed the plant until oil markets improved.  

As to whether Petra Nova itself was actually capturing at 90 percent as project-backers claim, IEEFA’s research shows it rarely captured as much as 75 percent of passing CO2. Officially the U.S. Department of Energy states it captured only approximately 3.9 million short tons of CO2 during its first three years, shy of the 4.6 million tons developers had expected.

The Petra Nova CCS plant just restarted in September. Credit: NDLACC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sole owner JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp., Japan’s largest oil producer, proudly states that the restarted project will simultaneously achieve a dramatic increase in production from aging oil fields as well as cut atmospheric CO2 emissions in Texas. 

Continuing to masquerade as a climate-benefitting project, with oil prices currently inching towards $100 per barrel, the finances of running Petra Nova once again make sense. Going forward, EOR operations will again pay for CCS system operations while extending another chance to demonstrate how the technology can be viable at scale in what many see as a major test of efforts to sequester CO2 and store it permanently underground. 

That Petra Nova did virtually nothing previously to actually reduce overall CO2 emissions — more likely increasing them, is not seen as a bug, but a feature given that its sole purpose is to capture a portion of the plant’s pollution in order to produce more oil — a task it has demonstrably excelled in doing.

7. Gorgon Project

Operator: Chevron (47.3 percent), ExxonMobil (25 percent), Shell (25 percent), 2017-present  

Location: Barrow Island, Western Australia, Australia

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 4 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Public subsidies: $60 million Australian ($47 million U.S.)

What they said would happen: A flagship plant to store CO2 produced by drilling for offshore gas.

What actually happened: Project started years after drilling began; plagued by technical problems that meant it captured less than a quarter of what was promised.

Background: Chevron and its partners were allowed to build the $5.5 billion Gorgon LNG plant on the Barrow Island nature reserve for one reason only: to bury millions of tonnes of produced CO2 from offshore gas reservoirs into a formation deep under the island.

Theoretically capable of storing up to 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year and legally bound to capture 80 percent of its emissions, Gorgon has by all accounts failed spectacularly.

Although Gorgon’s gas plant produced its first LNG cargo in March 2016, the first CO2 injection didn’t begin until August 2019 — three and a half years behind schedule. And since then it’s only sequestered, on average, less than 1 million tonnes per year.

With barely a day going by when all elements of Gorgon’s CO2 injection system worked at the same time, a 2022 report by IEEFA found that Gorgon had missed its storage and emissions targets by some 50 percent during its first five years of operation. 

With CO2 leaking out of Gorgon’s assigned CO2 storage reservoir, in December 2020, regulators cut the permitted injection rate to 30 percent of maximum capacity until Chevron could fix its pressure management system without fracturing the rock around the injection wells and permanently damaging the system’s performance.

According to Australian and other publications: Gorgon failed to bury 9.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in its first five years of operations. In response to the shortfall, in 2021 Chevron announced it would buy 5.23 million tonnes of carbon offsets (many of which have subsequently proven to be junk). 

By all accounts Chevron continues to fall even further behind on its CO2 capture and storage targets, but the fossil fuel behemoth is being less than open about by how much.

What is certain is that Chevron’s gas refining has produced tremendous volumes of CO2 — little if any of which have been “sequestered”. 

Nevertheless, the Australian government has since approved two new massive offshore greenhouse gas storage areas, saying CCS “has a vital role to play” to help the country meet its net zero targets.

8. Abu Dhabi Steel CCS (Al Reyadah Project) 

Operators: ADNOC, Masdar, Emirates Steel, (2016 – present) 

Location: Mussafah, United Arab Emirates

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 0.8 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery 

Public subsidies: N/A

What they said would happen: A steel plant would be made climate-friendly.

What actually happened: The captured CO2 was used to pump more oil.

Background: The world’s only large-scale facility to capture emissions from steel production, the project promises to store up to 90 percent of all CO2 originating from the Emirates Steel plant near Abu Dhabi. From there, a pipeline carries the compressed gas to onshore oil fields, where it is used for enhanced oil recovery. The plant follows a trend of focusing carbon capture technology on “hard-to-abate” emissions from industrial sectors such as steel, cement and chemical production. 

“The success of this project will definitely be a catalyst for similar projects in the UAE and across the region,” said ADNOC head Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, during a video interview promoting the project in 2014. Since the construction of the Al Reyadah Project, the UAE has announced new projects which would increase the country’s carbon capture capacity by over five times. ADNOC states that it will invest $15 billion in “low-carbon solutions,” with a heavy focus on CO2-enhanced oil recovery.  

ADNOC’s plans are helping to drive a CO2-enhanced oil recovery boom on the Arabian Peninsula. In 2019, Qatar announced a large-scale project to capture CO2 from liquified natural gas refining and storing it in geologic formations, but which has also been linked to eventual use for oil extraction. Neighboring Saudi Arabia built its first carbon capture plant in 2015 to extract oil from declining oil wells, and declared last year that a new carbon capture facility planned to start operations in 2027 would become the world’s largest, eventually aiming to capture 44 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2035. 

9. Boundary Dam 

Operator: Saskatchewan Power, 2014-present

Location: Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 1 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the Weyburn oil field (90 percent), geologic storage (10 percent)

Public subsidies: $240 million Canadian ($217 million U.S.)

What they said would happen: A world-leading “clean coal” facility.

What actually happened: Consistent failure to hit capture targets; captured CO2 used to pump more oil.

Background: When a carbon capture unit was attached to an aging section of a lignite-burning power station in Canada, expectations were high that the plant would become a world-leading “clean coal facility.” To fund the construction, the Canadian government gave $240 million CAD for the carbon capture venture. The plant would also solve the problem posed by a Canadian law passed in 2012, which mandated that all 50-year and older coal power stations be shut down unless they had a carbon capture retrofit. In the case of the targeted Boundary Dam unit, its operating life would have expired by 2019. 

Boundary Dam Power Station in Estevan, Saskatchewan. Credit: Flickr/Saskatchewan Power.

Rather than meeting its yearly target of one million tonnes of CO2 captured per year, the plant has consistently underperformed. By the company’s own accounting, the plant is on track to capture 750,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2023, matching similar results from 2022. In 2021, the carbon capture facility stored only about 442,000 tonnes, less than half of its intended annual capacity. 

This follows a similar trend of underperformance since Boundary Dam started running in 2016, according to an analysis from IEEFA. The report authors identified the project as “struggling” and found that it had barely reached its targeted 90 percent storage target on “any single day.” Most CO2 that was captured was sent to the nearby Weyburn oil field for enhanced oil recovery. 

10. Quest CCS 

Operator: Shell PLC, 2015 – present 

Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 1.3 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery 

Public subsidies: $745 million Canadian ($654 million U.S.) 

What they said would happen: Touted as a “thriving example” of oil industry success in reducing emissions.

What actually happened: Less than 50 percent of emissions captured, relative to 90 percent target; overall emissions offset the carbon captured. 

Background: Designed to capture carbon emissions from Canadian Tar Sands operations and store them underground, Shell’s Quest plant is the world’s first to commercially produce so-called “blue hydrogen.” Blue hydrogen is the industry’s term for hydrogen produced by burning fossil gas through steam methane reformation. The process itself produces tremendous volumes of CO2 — hence the need to turn the hydrogen “blue” by burying the produced pollution underground.

With $654 million of the $1 billion cost of Quest coming from Canadian government subsidies, the plant’s operator, Shell, claimed it would help them reach its “net zero” target by 2050 while heralding the “exciting work” there to reduce emissions from industrial sources. 

Though touted as a “thriving example” of how CCS is working to significantly reduce carbon emissions, a 2022 investigation by Global Witness showed that despite 5 million tonnes of CO2 capture from 2015 to 2021, Quest released a further 7.5 million tonnes of GHG over the same period, and that just 48 percent of the plant’s carbon emissions were being captured, far short of the 90 percent carbon capture rate promised. 

Global Witness’ study found that the capture rate drops to only 39 percent when including other greenhouse gas emissions from Shell’s project.

11. Great Plains Synfuels Plant 

Operator: (Basin Electric), 2000 -to present 

Location: Near Beulah, North Dakota, USA

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 3 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the Weyburn and Midvale oil fields

Public subsidies: $1.5 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy

What they said would happen: World’s biggest project to capture carbon produced by burning coal. 

What actually happened: The captured CO2 is being used to extend the life of oilfields in Canada by 25 years.

Background: Dakota Gasification Company’s Great Plains Synfuels Plant boasts that it captures more CO2 from coal conversion than any facility in the world.

Starting with 18,000 tonnes of regionally mined lignite, the dirtiest of all coals, the Great Plains Synfuels Plant cooks and converts the lignite into methane gas, which it then transforms into ammonia for fertilizer, as well as other chemical products, while stripping out produced CO2 for eventual use in enhanced oil recovery. 

Since 2000, Great Plains Synfuels Plant remains the only CCS project to sell its CO2 cross border, compressing CO2 into a liquid and transporting it via a 320-kilometer pipeline to the Weyburn and Midale oil fields in Alberta. Each ton of injected CO2 increases oil production in Weyburn by almost three barrels.

CO2 enhanced oil recovery operation will enable an additional 130 million barrels of oil to be produced, extending the field’s commercial life by around 25 years.

Inside the Great Plains Synfuel Plant in 2009. Credit: Buchsbaum

One of the most Republican-leaning states in the U.S., where many consider climate change a hoax, North Dakota’s state government has been more than happy to take advantage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, given its tax credits for capturing and storing CO2 emissions.

Seeking to take advantage of those credits to increase revenue, North Dakota’s Industrial Commission recently unanimously approved a 32-square-mile expansion of the subterranean storage area for carbon from the synfuels plant.

Even though Great Plains sends 2 million tonnes of CO2 a year into the Weyburn Field for EOR, “there’s another 1.5 million potential of CO2 that’s produced at that plant today that’s not being captured, so they have the opportunity to capture that extra 1.5 million right there and get paid,” North Dakota Governor and State Industrial Commission Chair Doug Burgam has argued

State Department of Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms also said that more CO2 will be needed to sustain regional oil production for the long term. Calling for more CCS or CO2 pipelines, Helms lamented that current CO2 production only meets about 10 percent of what is needed for enhanced oil recovery.

“We’ve got to find a way for carbon capture and utilization to become a part of North Dakota’s economy or we will leave billions of barrels of oil in the ground,” Helms said in August. 

12. Santos Basin Pre-Salt Oil Field CCS

Operator: Petrobras, 2012-present 

Location: Atlantic Ocean (300 km west of Rio de Janeiro state), Brazil 

Stated maximum capacity during operations: 10.6 million tonnes of CO2/year 

Storage method: Enhanced oil recovery in the offshore Santos Basin

Public subsidies: N/A

What they said would happen: World’s biggest offshore CCS project would slash industry’s carbon footprint. 

What actually happened: Successful use of captured CO2 to dramatically expand offshore oil production is triggering a new oil boom.

Background: Operating at over a hundred wells in Brazil’s vast ultra-deep water oil fields, Petrobras boasted the highest amount of CO2 stored in 2022, about a quarter of total human-built carbon sequestration capacity The first project of its kind globally, the company claims that offshore carbon capture has reduced the lifecycle carbon footprint of a barrel of oil by 39 percent. The CO2 used to extract oil in the Santos Basin comes from the natural gas also produced by the field, which is separated on  specialized floating platforms, and repurposed for additional profit. 

Petrobras’ experiment has paid off handsomely. CO2 injection has boosted productivity in the Santos Basin, even though it once was deemed a difficult area to extract oil due to hard-to-drill salt formations on the ocean floor. In 2022, Petrobras reinjected a world-leading 10.6 Mt of CO2 directing the gas to extract more oil, which will be refined, transported, and burned to emit more CO2 into the atmosphere. Recently, the company announced its new target of approximately 80 million metric tonnes of CO2 reinjection by 2025 in CCS projects.

Other major oil companies operating in the deep sea region might be taking notes, leading to an offshore oil boom in Brazil. These international firms include Norway’s Equinor, which aims to boost its Brazil-based oil production by more than fivefold over the next 10 years. 

Additional reporting by Dana Drugmand in New York.

Original article by Michael Buchsbaum and Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog.

Synopsis by dizzy: Enhanced Oil Recovery rebranded as Carbon Capture and Storage as a public relations exercise.

As awareness grew that burning fossil fuels was increasingly harmful to the environment, petroleum scientists began looking for industry-friendly solutions. Given that a fraction of the CO2 injected during EOR remains underground, as early as 1977 proponents suggested rebranding EOR into climate-friendlier carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Envisioning installing capture units on fossil fuel-burning generation plants, particularly coal-fired power stations, backers saw this as an elegant response to growing concerns over carbon emissions. 

Why the Belief That Carbon Capture Technologies Can Work at Gigaton-Scale Is a Gigantic Gamble

Big Oil’s Been Secretly Validating Critics’ Concerns about Carbon Capture

‘Inoculate From Criticism’: A Closer Look at the Public Relations Companies Active at COP28

Report: Canada and U.S. Are Top Public Funders for CCS with Nations Prepared to Inject $200 Million More

Continue ReadingFossil Fuel Companies Made Bold Promises to Capture Carbon. Here’s What Actually Happened.

Venture Fund Set to ‘Take Control’ of Telegraph Has Fossil Fuel Investments

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Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

The group, which reportedly has UAE state backing, is leading the race to buy the British newspaper.

The Daily Telegraph front page. Credit: Steven May / Alamy

The investment fund that has reportedly reached an agreement to buy the Telegraph Media Group has stakes in several oil and gas companies, DeSmog can report. 

U.S.-based RedBird Capital has entered into a joint venture to take control of The Telegraph alongside International Media Investments (IMI) of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). 

The two groups have reportedly agreed to provide loans to The Telegraph’s existing owners, the Barclay family, to allow them to pay off their £1.16 billion debt to Lloyds Banking Group. The family lost control of The Telegraph and the Spectator magazine, which is also part of the media group, earlier this year due to this outstanding debt. 

News reports suggest that the deal is being backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who serves as the deputy prime minister of the UAE, the head of its state-owned investment company, and the owner of Manchester City football club.

Conservative MPs have voiced concerns over the potential purchase and the danger of foreign influence, asking the UK government to use national security laws to investigate the agreement. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has echoed these concerns, warning that the deal could undermine “free expression of opinion” and prevent the “accurate presentation of the news”.

The UAE is a petrostate that has the world’s largest oil expansion plans. The state-owned energy company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), intends to increase its oil production by more than any other fossil fuel firm in the world, according to data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (Gogel). Adnoc said that Gogel’s data and assumptions were “incorrect and misleading” but has not provided its own figures.

RedBird-IMI has said that, under its proposal, The Telegraph and Spectator will be managed by RedBird Capital “alone” and IMI would be a “passive investor”.

RedBird Capital trades in a number of core investment sectors, including energy. The firm’s website states that it holds investments in at least six fossil fuel firms: Aethon United, CapturePoint, FireBird Energy, Four Corners Petroleum, Lambda Energy Resources, and Tally Energy Services.

All of these companies are based in the U.S., with a majority operating in Texas.

Aethon United was listed by Enverus Intelligence Research as one of the most prolific private oil and gas producers in the U.S. in 2023. It was reported in 2022 that the firm was considering a public listing that would value it at more than $10 billion.

CapturePoint specialises in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), a favoured technology of the fossil fuel industry that it claims will help to limit global warming. The RedBird website claims that CapturePoint is “building out a carbon capture network on the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest”.

There is limited evidence of the efficacy of CCUS at scale. DeSmog recently analysed 12 large-scale CCUS projects around the world and found countless missed carbon capture targets, as well as cost overruns, with taxpayers picking up the tab via billions of dollars in subsidies. Meanwhile, captured carbon is often merely used to extract more oil. 

“If this deal goes through, it will pollute our press and the UK’s fight against climate breakdown,” Alexander Kirk, fossil fuels campaigner at Global Witness, told DeSmog.

RedBird Capital also holds an investment in Majority Strategies, a political strategy firm that claims to have worked for every official Republican presidential nominee since 2000. Majority Strategies received more than $27 million during the 2022 election cycle, including $9.2 million from the Republican Senate Leadership Fund. 

Responding to media speculation about The Telegraph’s future ownership, the paper’s editor Chris Evans sent an internal memo earlier this week. Seen by Politico Playbook, the memo read: “You’ve been asking me how we can be confident that editorial independence would be protected. At the moment I know no more than you will have read.”

Polly Truscott, a foreign policy adviser at Amnesty International UK, told The Times that: “Any Emirati state ownership of the Telegraph may have serious implications for press freedom in the UK and should be carefully scrutinised by the government. In the UAE, anyone who dares to speak out against the Emirati authorities is likely to be at serious risk.”

The UAE ranks 145 out of 180 in the 2023 Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders.

Other sources claim that the bidding process for The Telegraph and the Spectator is still ongoing and that no deal has been finalised. Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, is also reportedly interested in buying the titles. DeSmog revealed in October that Marshall’s hedge fund has $2 billion in fossil fuel investments. 

RedBird Capital and the Telegraph Media Group did not respond to our request for comment. 

Climate Attacks

A new DeSmog analysis has found that eight in 10 opinion pieces from The Telegraph on environmental issues downplay the climate crisis. 

Our analysis, for the six months ending 16 October, found that of the 171 articles covering environmental issues, 85 percent were identified as “anti-green” – attacking climate policy, downplaying climate science and ridiculing environmental groups.

Of the 1,930 opinion pieces published by the paper during this period, nearly one in five (17.6 percent) featured an attack on climate science, policy or environmental groups. Ten writers linked to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, wrote a total of 144 opinion pieces for The Telegraph during the period. 

The Telegraph’s print circulation at the end of 2019, when it last released the data, was over 300,000. It had an online audience of 13.5 million in September this year. 

World leaders next week gather in Dubai, UAE, to negotiate how to reduce emissions and limit global warming. The COP28 summit is being led by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of Adnoc, which is the world’s 11th largest oil and gas producer. Al Jaber has claimed that fossil fuels should “continue to play a role in the foreseeable future” – a statement labelled as “very dangerous” by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.

The UAE has also attempted to emphasise the importance of CCUS in capturing emissions. However, according to an analysis by Global Witness, based on Adnoc’s carbon capture plans, it would take 343 years for the firm to capture all the CO2 emissions it will produce in just the next six years. This week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition also revealed that at least 7,200 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN-led climate over the last 20 years.

Total trade between the UK and UAE exceeded £25 billion in the year ending Q2 2023, an increase of 47.3 percent compared to the year before. The Gulf state has also pledged to invest £10 billion in “priority” UK industries. 

In the year following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the UK imported £2.5 billion in fossil fuels from the UAE. The average monthly value of fossil fuel imports from the UAE increased from £84.4 million in the year to February 2022, to £195 million the year after. 

In total, UK fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates surged to £19.3 billion in the year following the invasion – an increase of more than 60 percent. 

Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingVenture Fund Set to ‘Take Control’ of Telegraph Has Fossil Fuel Investments

Five Key Narratives to Watch For at COP28

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Original article republished from DeSmog.

Here’s DeSmog’s take on what to expect at this year’s climate summit, from Big Oil’s influence, to a new Big Ag agenda, to promotion of sketchy solutions that would keep oil and gas burning for decades to come.

The United Arab Emirates’ pavilion at COP27. Credit: Adam Barnett

The annual United Nations climate negotiations are just a week away. Known as COP28 — since it’s the 28th year of the “conference of the parties” to the United Nations climate agreement — it will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai from November 30 through December 12. 

COP28 will be especially significant, as it will feature the first-ever “global stocktake,” of how much progress — or lack thereof — countries and other stakeholders have made toward meeting the goal established in 2015’s Paris Agreement of limiting warming to “well below” 2º degrees Celsius. 

Negotiators at COP28 will also aim to make progress on key climate issues including loss and damage finance, a just energy transition, and closing the emissions gap.

As the climate crisis accelerates, so, too, do efforts by the fossil fuel industry to derail steep reductions in carbon pollution by mid-century, in part by promoting false solutions. Below, we’ve rounded up recent coverage to help you make sense of the key denial and greenwashing narratives that will be front and center during the event.

A Big Presence from Big Oil

After all, this is the first annual climate conference with a Big Oil exec at the top: COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber

Al Jaber, the person leading these global climate negotiations, is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). He has openly called for fossil fuel companies’ “help to drive the solutions,” and advocated overcoming “the hurdles to scale up and commercialize hydrogen and carbon capture technologies” — two so-far unproven climate solutions being heavily promoted by the fossil fuel industry. A big presence from Big Oil would be in line with trends at the past two summits: 636 fossil fuel lobbyists registered to attend last year’s conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, while 503 registered for 2021’s gathering in Glasgow.

Dive deeper with our Climate Disinformation Database profile of Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, our coverage of his appointment as COP28 president, and our reporting last year on fossil fuel lobbyists at COP27.

An Industry Push for CCS

The fossil fuel industry will paint carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a climate solution during this year’s conference. Critics argue it is anything but. 

Of the 32 commercial CCS facilities operating worldwide, 22 use most, or all, of their captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to pump more oil out of depleted wells. Burning that oil creates far more CO2 than what is captured. 

DeSmog recently analyzed 12 large-scale CCS projects around the world and found countless missed carbon capture targets, as well as cost overruns, with taxpayers picking up the tab via billions of dollars in subsidies. Despite these failures, Big Oil publicly champions CCS and pushes projects over communities’ objections. Privately, the industry shares critics’ concerns.

With the Biden administration channeling billions of dollars into investments and tax credits for CCS, the United States is likely to be a key CCS supporter at the conference.

Dive deeper with our explainer on how CCS is used for “enhanced oil recovery,” our investigation into CCS’s biggest fails, hear what Big Oil is saying about CCS in private.

Greenwashing by Big Agriculture

This year’s climate conference is coming on the heels of the world’s hottest year, with devastating floods around the world affecting the global food supply, and more than 330 million people worldwide facing famine. So COP28 leaders have released a four-point “food and agriculture” agenda for the summit that calls for governments and industry to collaborate on finding new solutions to climate change–driven food insecurity. 

However, some of the biggest companies in agribusiness, are using greenwashing to shift the debate away from meaningful action. DeSmog has debunked six concepts that the world’s largest food and farming companies will be co-opting in hopes of swaying debates and discussions in  Dubai — including “regenerative agriculture,” “nature-based solutions,” and “climate neutrality.” Stay tuned for DeSmog’s coverage from Dubai — our team will be keeping a close eye on Big Ag.

Dive deeper with our coverage of how food systems are linked to fossil fuel consumption, investigations into the meat and dairy groups downplaying their industries’ climate impacts, and the ties between Big Ag and right-wing politicians in the EU.

PR Spin That Promotes Denial and Delay

Ever wonder how a top oil-producing nation like the United Arab Emirates earned hosting duties for this year’s climate summit, or why the chief of UAE’s state oil company ADNOC, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, has ascended to one of the top roles in global climate negotiations? Reporting by DeSmog revealed that from 2007 to 2009, Edelman, the largest public relations firm in the world, ran a campaign to bolster the UAE and Al Jaber’s green images. 

Advertising and PR agencies like Edelman have long burnished the public’s perceptions of fossil fuel interests, and are still creating advertising campaigns for big polluters that distract from and delay climate action — such as sponsored-content for a pesticides giant or leading climate communications while catering to Big Oil. Still, within the ad industry, pressure is mounting to stop working with fossil fuel clients. Some companies and organizations are even dropping ad and PR firms for taking on new fossil fuel industry accounts

Follow DeSmog’s coverage as we highlight the PR spin at COP28.

Dive deeper with our Climate Disinformation Database profiles of PR and ad firms EdelmanOgilvy, and FleishmanHillard, our investigation into Edelman’s campaign to burnish Al Jaber and the UAE’s green creds, and our coverage of the backlash to Havas winning Shell’s business.

Anticipate Disinformation 

Disinformation strategies and narratives will be on display throughout the summit — much as we reported during COP27, where fossil fuel-linked groups spent around $4 million on social media ads that spread false climate claims. 

The disinformation may flow thicker and faster than ever during COP28. As DeSmog has reported, over the past five years climate greenwashing has “gone through the roof,” as major polluters turn to greenwashing to avoid accountability for the climate crisis. In part, this may be a response to the increasing number of climate lawsuits and legal complaints against misleading climate claims. Attorneys general across the U.S. have charged fossil fuel companies with defrauding consumers by lying about the impacts of burning coal, oil, and gas — while activists and campaigners in Europe seek to hold Big Oil accountable under regulations against misleading advertising.

To understand disinformation tactics and where they come from, dig into DeSmog’s reporting about past greenwashing campaigns. We recently shone a light on the way the gas industry borrowed Big Tobacco’s tactics to promote doubt over the health effects of gas stoves. Or read our investigation into how corporate polluters and their political allies have been using the same rhetoric of delay for the past six decades when faced with the prospect of regulation.

Dive deeper with our column on why greenwashing works and how to fight it, our Q&A with Climate Investigations Center researcher Rebecca John, and our investigation into Shell’s knowledge of climate change.

Original article republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingFive Key Narratives to Watch For at COP28

Why the Belief That Carbon Capture Technologies Can Work at Gigaton-Scale Is a Gigantic Gamble

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Original article by Dana Drugmand republished from DeSmog.

Despite CCS’s track record of failure and glaring feasibility issues, petrostates are expected to use it as cover to dismiss fossil fuel phaseout at COP28.

A new report reveals that to mitigate expected fossil fuel growth, the use of CCS and CDR technologies would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible. Credit: Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
A new report reveals that to mitigate expected fossil fuel growth, the use of CCS and CDR technologies would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible. Credit: Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

With the start of the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, COP28, just two weeks away, a battle is brewing over the role of fossil fuels as nations try to stem the tide of climate change. 

A “high ambition” coalition of nations such as France, Tuvalu, Ethiopia, and Ireland backed by climate scientists, climate and civil society organizations, and the UN Secretary General, are calling for commitments to phase out coal, oil, and gas. On the other hand, many oil and gas producing countries, supported by the politically potent fossil fuel lobby, are urging an approach that allows continued fossil fuel extraction – and even expansion – under the assumption that emissions mitigation technologies can largely eliminate the climate pollution of business-as-usual, emissions-intensive activities.

Now, a new report shows that fossil fuel production by 2030 is set to exceed the level that would be compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C by more than 110 percent. A second just-released report reveals that to mitigate that growth, the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible. 

“That idea that we can build more fossil fuels but it’s ok because we can mitigate the emissions, or we’ll be able to pull carbon out of the air or out of the smokestacks, I think is incredibly dangerous,” Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, said during a November 14 media briefing sponsored by a coalition called Gas Exports Today, which was convened by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and held in advance of COP28.

 In remarks delivered at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber said that a “phase down,” not a “phase out,” of fossil fuels is what’s needed to combat climate change. He also referenced building “an energy system free of all unabated fossil fuels.” The term “unabated” has become a major reference in the climate diplomacy conversation in recent years, starting with COP26 in Glasgow where governments agreed to accelerate efforts “towards the phasedown of unabated coal power.” This language serves as a qualifier to suggest that fossil fuels can be rendered ‘clean’ through carbon capture and storage and engineered carbon dioxide removal, collectively termed “carbon management.”

While these technologies may seem promising in theory, in practice they face substantial constraints and challenges. The two new reports further underscore these limitations.  

COP28 President Al Jaber speaks at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September. Credit: Dana Drugmand.
COP28 President Al Jaber speaks at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September. Credit: Dana Drugmand.

Governments around the world are planning to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C, which is the more stringent objective of the Paris Agreement, according to the new Production Gap Report (PGR) 2023, produced by the UN Environment Program and the Stockholm Environment Institute, along with several other climate think tanks. 

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we need to phase out all fossil fuels as rapidly as possible,” Ploy Achakulwisut, research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the Production Gap Report, said during the report’s virtual launch event on November 8. The report takes into account the significant risks and uncertainties around CCS and CDR, warning that the potential failure of these technologies to reach a climate-relevant scale necessitates an even more urgent phaseout of all fossil fuels. Given the feasibility concerns around scaling up carbon management technologies, the report urges governments to strive to phase out coal by 2040 and slash oil and gas production and use by three-quarters (from 2020 levels) by 2050 at a minimum.

Achakulwisut noted that even though the majority of modeled climate mitigation scenarios from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report assume that large amounts of CCS and CDR facilities can be deployed successfully, there is little evidence to back this assumption. In fact, annual capacity from operating CCS projects resulting in dedicated storage currently amounts to less than 0.1 percent of global annual CO2 emissions, Achakulwisut said. When it comes to reducing overall global carbon emissions, she noted, CCS is not making a dent.

This is likely to be the case in 2030 too, with CCS deployment at that point expected to still not move the needle on lowering emissions. “Even if all CCS facilities planned and under development worldwide become operational,” the Production Gap report explains, “only around 0.25 [gigatons] of CO2 would be captured in 2030, less than 1% of 2022 global CO2 emissions.” The report refers to an International Energy Agency dataset which projects, as of March 2023, less than 350 million metric tons of CO2 capture capacity from all of the global CCS projects planned, under construction, and operational in 2030. 

The International Energy Agency’s updated Net Zero roadmap report released in September references a slightly higher figure, saying that around 400 million metric tons of CO2 could be captured by 2030 if all planned CCS projects get built, which, the agency said, is still only 40 percent of the 1 gigaton-per-year capture capacity needed by 2030 in its net zero emissions scenario.  

“There’s a huge range of evidence which is very clear that CCS and CDR will not be able to scale fast enough to make a meaningful contribution to cutting emissions this decade,” Neil Grant, climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics, said during the report’s launch event. “And that means in this decade, the solution has to be reducing fossil fuel production and use.”

Carbon dioxide removal technologies, he added, “are very nascent.” Most existing direct air capture (DAC) operations are small-scale pilot projects. The world’s first commercial-scale DAC plant, called Orca and based in Iceland, has a capacity to capture up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to the annual emissions of about 800 cars worldwide, or approximately three seconds worth of global CO2 emissions. 

Is DAC Feasible?

Yet, significant government subsidies and investment are flowing into direct air capture, and plans to develop at least 130 DAC facilities are now underway. But according to a new briefing paper from the Center for International Environmental Law, even if all the planned DAC projects in the world get built and operate at full capacity, they would be capable of removing just 4.7 million metric tons of CO2 in 2030, equivalent to a mere 0.01 percent of current global energy sector emissions. Even assuming that DAC could eventually reach a massive scale, the enormous quantities of chemicals and energy inputs required to operate the machinery raises further feasibility and sustainability questions.

Essentially, the math just doesn’t add up in terms of the projected scale up of the carbon management sector in what experts say is the critical decade to curb planet-warming emissions by at least 50 percent. Experts say CCS and CDR would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, and there is no assurance that it will get there in time.

A new report from the Global CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank and advocacy group, actually affirms this. Although there has been momentum in policies, financing, and proposed projects in the carbon management sector, there is still a big, glaring question as to whether scaling up to the gigaton level by 2030 is even feasible, according to the Institute’s Global Status of CCS 2023 report released last week.

“The math also indicates that this past year’s impressive step-up still has us near the bottom of the staircase, so to speak, and that CCS must reach gigatonne per annum (Gtpa) scale in order to reach our emission goals,” Global CCS Institute CEO Jarad Daniels said in a media release accompanying the report.

Only a few dozen CCS facilities are currently operational at the global level, 14 of which are in the U.S., with a total capacity to capture and store 49 million metric tons of CO2, the report states. However, the total capacity is not the same as the amount actually captured and sequestered, as CCS facilities often do not operate at their maximum potential. When considering the additional energy required to power CCS operations, and given that the vast majority of existing projects use the captured CO2 to extract more oil and gas – a process called enhanced oil recovery – the net result is generally more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions.

As far as CCS projects that are proposed or “in the pipeline” as the report calls it, that number is 392 as of July this year. But as Daniels noted in the Institute’s report launch event on November 9, most of the facilities in development would be aiming to begin operating starting in 2030, at the earliest. There are many hurdles, such as permitting and securing financing, that projects have to overcome before they start capturing any carbon molecules. The lag time between when projects are announced and when they become operational is typically around seven years or more, the report says, acknowledging that “relatively few [new CCS projects] have yet advanced to operation.”

These delays have in the past been due, at least in part, to local opposition and unsuccessful community engagement, which have resulted in some project cancellations, according to the report. “Lack of community support, coupled with permitting challenges, has become a barrier for some early development stage CCS projects in the U.S.,” the report states.

Local opposition to CCS projects have delayed their construction. Credit: Matt Hrkac/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)
Local opposition to CCS projects have delayed their construction. Credit: Matt Hrkac/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Community opposition and public pushback to CCS projects, as DeSmog recently reported, appears to be growing across the U.S., and it demonstrates that “meaningful” community engagement rhetoric from CCS proponents does not often match the reality on the ground. One major proposed CCS infrastructure project in the U.S. – a 1,300-mile-long CO2 pipeline traversing five Midwestern states that was planned by a developer called Navigator CO2 Ventures – was canceled last month in the face of overwhelming grassroots opposition along with permitting challenges.

“Unmet Expectations” 

The barriers and significant questions around the feasibility of CCS technologies to even scale up at any climate-relevant level are on top of an existing track record that, at best, is not very promising and at worst could be viewed as largely a failure. Analyses from DeSmog and from IEEFA, among others, show that most large-scale CCS projects underperform or fail to meet their capture targets. As the new Production Gap Report points out, “the track record for CCS has been very poor to date, with around 80% of pilot projects over the last 30 years ending in failure.”

“The U.S. has been publicly subsidizing carbon capture projects since the early 1980s,” Rees of Oil Change International said during the November 14 Gas Exports Today media briefing. “We have over 40 years of evidence that it doesn’t work.”

The IEA and IPCC both recognize that carbon capture technologies have underperformed or made slower-than-expected progress. In its updated Net Zero roadmap report for example, the IEA states that “the history of [carbon capture] has largely been one of unmet expectations.” And in its Working Group III report on climate mitigation issued last year as part of the Sixth Assessment cycle, the IPCC cautions that CCS “currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental, and socio-cultural barriers” and notes that global deployment rates are “far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.”

Given this context, it is reasonable to doubt the promises made by carbon capture proponents. The numbers make it clear, as Climate Analytics’ Grant explained during the Production Gap Report launch event, that CCS and CDR technologies “are not going to be the solutions for cutting emissions in this critical decade.”

A new Global Witness analysis further substantiates this point. The organization calculated, based on petroleum production data from Rystad, that it would take the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) 340 years to capture the carbon it had produced from the company’s planned ramp up of oil and gas extraction between now and 2030. ADNOC is headed by Al Jaber, the controversial COP28 president, and new data shows the oil major’s planned output would result in the largest overshoot of the 1.5° C goal out of any fossil fuel company in the world. The Global Witness analysis also finds that even if ADNOC reaches the 10 million metric tons per year of CO2 capture by 2030, as it promises, that would result in mitigation of just two percent of the company’s projected 492 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2030. 

“If Al Jaber is serious – if we are serious – we must immediately reject the CCS false solution and tackle the existential oil and gas problem head on,” Global Witness’s Jonathan Noronha Gant said in a statement     

“CCS Is Not the Answer”

CCS critics also point to environmental, health, and safety risks that the technologies pose to communities where projects are targeted, which are often communities already overburdened by industrial pollution. Residents from these areas, such as the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, are voicing their opposition to the buildout of carbon capture in their communities.

“CCS is not the answer,” Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project and resident of southwest Louisiana, said at the November 14 briefing. “We don’t need any more false solutions. We need real solutions with community voices and community input.”

Ozane will be taking this message to COP28 in Dubai, where she will join other advocates on the frontlines of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries’ expansion in calling for an end to this buildout and a phase out of fossil fuels. Competing with this call, however, is the narrative that emissions – not fossil fuels themselves – are the problem, and that it can be fixed through so-called “abatement” technologies – which provides cover for the continued production of coal, oil, and gas that is so clearly at odds with the rules of physics that govern the climate system.

During the Production Gap Report launch event, Grant emphasized that carbon capture technologies “do not replace the need for rapid and permanent reduction of fossil fuels.”

“And they therefore really can’t be used as a justification for continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction,” he added, “which is a narrative we’re seeing being pushed around the world, particularly as we come towards COP28.”

Original article by Dana Drugmand republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingWhy the Belief That Carbon Capture Technologies Can Work at Gigaton-Scale Is a Gigantic Gamble

Top Tory Think Tank’s North Sea Oil and Gas ‘Vested Interests’

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Original article republished from DeSmog.

‘Shocking’ findings show how board members at the Tufton Street think tank are tied to fossil fuel firms.

North Sea oil rigs in Cromarty Firth, Scotland. Credit: joiseyshowaa (CC BY-SA 2.0)
North Sea oil rigs in Cromarty Firth, Scotland. Credit: joiseyshowaa (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The influential Conservative-linked Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) has been pushing for further North Sea oil and gas drilling while several of its board members hold financial interests in the industry, a DeSmog investigation has found.

The news follows the government’s approval of the major Rosebank oilfield and the issuing of new North Sea licences, which the government intends to turn into a mandatory annual process, as announced in this week’s King’s Speech.

Five of the think tank’s board have financial interests in North Sea oil and gas, including its chair Lord Spencer, a major Conservative Party donor whose exploration company is bidding for licences in the current round.

The think tank, which is based at 57 Tufton Street in Westminster, meets regularly with ministers. It has called for new oil and gas projects to be accelerated, labelled the windfall tax on energy companies a “terrible idea”, and argued for a more generous fiscal environment for the UK’s fossil fuel producers.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is quoted on the organisation’s website as saying that “Lots of exciting ideas are being generated at the CPS… many of which are finding their way into government.”

Tessa Khan, executive director of climate group Uplift, said the findings were an example of how some think tanks have “long been little more than lobbying vehicles for private interests, including oil and gas”. The CPS denies that it is a lobbying group.

Khan added that organisations like the CPS “amplify the voices” of the oil and gas industry.

“This maybe goes some way to explaining why this government is set on subsidising new oil and gas fields when they represent such a bad deal for the public, in that they won’t lower bills, won’t increase energy security but will make the climate crisis worse,” she said.

Nature broadcaster Chris Packham, who is threatening to take the government to court over its recent watering down of climate measures, said: “Just weeks after we learn that not a single new offshore wind project will be going ahead this year due to the government’s intransigence – and as Rishi Sunak tears up vital climate policies – these findings are shocking.

“They provide further evidence that Number 10’s fossil fuel agenda is far from accidental. There are powerful vested interests at work and the Centre for Policy Studies seems to be at the heart of it. The government’s plan to hand out more than a hundred new North Sea drilling licences in the coming months is looking grubbier than ever.”

DeSmog previously revealed that the Conservative Party received £3.5 million from fossil fuel interests in 2022, including from the North Sea industry. This week, DeSmog also revealed that the government watered down its windfall tax on the excess profits of energy firms after a lobbying blitz by the oil and gas industry.

When asked about its board members’ business interests, a CPS spokesperson said that the think tank is “grateful for all our supporters, especially the support of our board members, but the investments of other boards on which they sit have no bearing on their relationship with the CPS”.

They claimed that DeSmog was “cherry-picking in order to manufacture an incorrect picture of the CPS’s position” and that it was “misleading and below journalistic standards.”

They added that “the Centre for Policy Studies has been one of the most prominent champions of free-market environmentalism, with a dedicated workstream on net zero” and that “Where our work is sponsored, this is made clear in the report acknowledgments, in press releases, and in event invitations.”

The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator in charge of issuing drilling licences, said that oil and gas were “forecast to play an important role in the energy mix for decades to come”. A spokesperson said the NSTA was “pleased” with the number of applications received in the current oil and gas licensing round and that the process of assessing them was “progressing well”.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero declined to add any further comment.

At the end of September, the International Energy Agency, of which the UK is a member, released a report reiterating the need for a phaseout of fossil fuels if climate goals are to be met. 

Lord Deben, the recently retired chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, argued in August that the government should stop approving North Sea licences.

Deltic Energy

Lord Spencer, who has chaired the CPS since the start of 2020, is the largest shareholder of Deltic Energy, which holds stakes in 18 North Sea areas, known as blocks, according to NSTA data.

A former Conservative Party treasurer, Spencer was given a life peerage by Boris Johnson. Official data shows that he has donated more than £7.5 million to the Conservative Party, individual Tory politicians and officially affiliated groups since 2015. He also sits on the board of the party’s multi-million-pound endowment fund. DeSmog revealed earlier this year that many of its directors have significant fossil fuel interests.

Through his holding company, IPGL, Spencer owns a £17.5 million stake in Deltic, according to Refinitiv data – nearly a fifth of the firm. He has held a significant shareholding since at least 2018, and bought more shares in 2019 from its founder Algy Cluff, a pioneer of the original North Sea oil boom in the 1970s who himself later joined the CPS board.

Responding to an enquiry from DeSmog, Cluff said that although the value of the company “may have increased in the view of management”, the stock market is “unimpressed and very much aware of the risks associated with any oil investments nowadays”. He described the “small number” of options he holds in the company as “presently worthless”.

Cluff has nevertheless spoken of the North Sea’s “second coming”, claiming that there is “a lot more oil to be found” and a “huge amount of gas”.

Deltic has made significant discoveries in recent years, touting its “enviable reputation as proven hydrocarbon finders” on its website, and has seen its market value rise in tandem.

It won blocks in North Sea licensing rounds in both 2018 and 2020, with the former is said to represent an area the “size of Bedfordshire”.

In its latest annual report, for the 2022 calendar year, Deltic criticises the government’s windfall tax but praises its accompanying investment allowance, which provides North Sea companies with tax breaks to encourage investment.

A presentation it gave investors in March describes its strategy as “Identify. Explore. Monetise. Repeat.” It says the investment allowance “significantly enhances economics from investment in Deltic exploration”, touts controversial gas-derived “blue hydrogen” as environmentally friendly, and highlights “established export infrastructure” and “regular licensing rounds” as attractive features of the North Sea.

Deltic is chaired by Mark Lappin, a former technical director of fracking company Cuadrilla who has publicly called for more oil and gas production, criticising opposition to new drilling.

Lord Spencer’s Conservative donations, made either personally or through IPGL and ICAP, include £25,000 gifts to the 2022 leadership campaigns of Sunak, Liz Truss, and Penny Mordaunt.

Spencer made £20,000 donations to Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Sajid Javid in 2019, and has made smaller donations to numerous other leading figures within the party in recent years, including Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Theresa May, Brandon Lewis, and Andrew Griffith.

Spencer has also funded “Blue Collar Conservatism”, a large caucus of Conservative MPs working to “champion working people”, with donations totalling £25,000 in 2019 and 2020. The group has campaigned against fuel duty rises.

Spencer’s Other Fossil Fuel Interests

Lord Spencer has also publicly talked up the fossil fuel industry, telling LBC’s Nick Ferrari last September that the UK “sadly has opposed further investment in North Sea oil and gas”. During the interview, he praised then Prime Minister Liz Truss for speaking out against windfall taxes on the sector, calling them “not Tory policy” and “not pro-business”.

He also expressed support for fracking, praised Truss’s “strategy” and “ideology”, and called for investment in renewable energy, but omitted to mention his interests in oil and gas.

In addition to the North Sea, Spencer has various other fossil fuel interests. According to Refinitiv, he holds the second largest stake in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska that recently hailed a potentially enormous discovery.

His brokerage firm ICAP also includes an oil and gas trading arm. Until December last year, Spencer held shares in Petrofac, an oilfield services firm heavily involved in the North Sea, including the controversial Cambo project.

Spencer’s shareholdings are disclosed to the House of Lords – indicating either a stake worth more than £70,000 or significant control over the company. They include Cluff Energy Africa, described as an “early stage oil prospecting company, seeking licences in Africa (Angola and Sierra Leone)”.

Its founder, Algy Cluff, told DeSmog that they had “wound the company up” because they “found the premium being asked by governments for the right to explore not to be consonant with the rewards”.

Cluff was a director of the CPS between 1995 and 2006, coinciding with the executive directorship of the late Tessa Keswick. Cluff confirmed to DeSmog that Keswick helped him find investors for his North Sea consortium in the 1970s, as has been reported.

Tessa’s husband Henry Keswick, chairman emeritus of the conglomerate Jardine Matheson and a major Tory donor, used to own the influential conservative Spectator magazine and sold it to Cluff in the early 1980s. Cluff was its chairman until 2004, during which Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, and Boris Johnson were editors.

The magazine was edited in the 1960s by the late Nigel Lawson, who would become Thatcher’s chancellor and in later life promote climate science denial through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, based at 55 Tufton Street.

Cluff’s remaining business interests include Cluff Mineral Resources, an Africa-focused gold and coal exploration company, which was temporarily based at 55 Tufton Street before moving next door to share an address with the CPS.

The Board

Another CPS board member, Lord Strathclyde, is a senior strategic adviser to Hibiscus Petroleum, a Malaysian oil and gas company that has amassed stakes in 11 North Sea blocks in recent years

Ithaca, the firm behind the high-profile Rosebank and Cambo projects, is partnering with Hibiscus on one of the blocks.

Hibiscus is also one of the firms to have been awarded stakes in the latest round of oil and gas licences.

Strathclyde, who was leader of the House of Lords under David Cameron, is an adviser to oil trading giant Trafigura.

Sir Douglas Flint, chair of Abrdn – formerly, Standard Life Aberdeen – also sits on the CPS board. Abrdn has been targeted by protesters for its investments in oil and gas, which climate researchers Urgewald estimate at £2.9 billion. According to the latest figures, they include oil majors like BP, Shell and Exxon, as well as North Sea-focused firms Serica Energy, Harbour Energy, and EnQuest.

The major asset manager was reportedly one of a group of financial institutions recently summoned by the Treasury to increase investment in the North Sea.

Lord Spencer’s entry in the register of interests indicates he also holds a stake worth more than £70,000 in Abrdn.

Other CPS board members include Jon Moulton, chair of FinnCap, a financial advisory firm whose activities include raising finance for North Sea oil and gas companies, and Roger Orf, a partner at Apollo Global Management, a US private equity firm with £349 million of investments in BP and Shell, both major North Sea players.

Two further CPS board members have wider interests in oil and gas: Ian Molson, deputy chair of Central European Petroleum, which is exploring for oil in Germany and Poland; and major Tory donor Lord Bamford, chair of construction giant JCB, a sector still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

In April 2023, DeSmog revealed that CPS board members had donated more than £600,000 to the Conservatives since Rishi Sunak became prime minister. 

The CPS also leans on its board for funding. According to the group’s latest accounts – for the period up to September 2022 – its directors donated £1 million to the company during the year. Turnover was £650,000 during the year and ‘other operating income’ hit £1.5 million, meaning that the CPS board contributed nearly half (47%) of its income during the period.

North Sea Push

The Centre for Policy Studies has strongly supported new North Sea oil and gas drilling in recent years.

In a March 2022 economic bulletin, it recommended that the government “look at accelerating regulatory approval for upcoming oil and gas projects such as Rosebank [Phase 1], Clair South, Glengorm, Cambo and Bentley [Phase 2]”. 

The bulletin added that introducing a windfall tax on profits would be a “terrible idea” and “completely self-defeating”. It welcomed “reports” suggesting the government was planning to launch another licensing round for fossil fuel projects.

A month later, the CPS welcomed the government’s “energy security strategy”, calling the return of annual North Sea licensing rounds “overdue”. A 33rd licensing round was launched in October.

In September 2022, an economic bulletin from the think tank called for “improved tax incentives for firms operating in the North Sea”.

In February this year, one of the CPS’s senior researchers criticised the “punishment beatings inflicted on the North Sea oil and gas industry from George Osborne onwards” – despite the sector having enjoyed one of the most generous tax regimes in the world until the recent windfall tax.

Other articles published on CapX, a commentary website run by the CPS, have labelled the Labour Party’s policy of no new North Sea licences “more than a little nuts” and the SNP’s similar position a “dangerous gambit”.

Andy Mayer, chief operations officer at the BP-funded Institute of Economic Affairs, writes regularly for CapX. He has used the platform to describe opposition to the Rosebank project as “shrill hysteria”, Shell’s bumper profits this year as “brilliant stuff”, and North Sea companies being fined for gas flaring as a “dotty investment message to send”. Following the announcement of the latest North Sea licences, Mayer wrote a story for CapX headlined “Hurrah for new North Sea oil licences!”

CPS Influence

The CPS has significant political access, having conducted private, one-to-one meetings with ministers on 27 occasions since 2014 and attended many other larger ministerial meetings, according to data compiled by Transparency International from government disclosures.

A number of the think tank’s former employees are now working as government advisers and its homepage carries supportive quotes from former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. 

Rishi Sunak spoke at a CPS event at the Conservative Party conference in 2019 and wrote a report for the organisation in 2016 backing the roll-out of freeports, which have since been introduced.

The think tank, which was co-founded by Margaret Thatcher, hosted a “dedicated space” at this year’s party conference, with speakers including Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, and Grant Shapps.

The chair of Times Newspapers, which publishes The Times and Sunday Times, and the editor of The Spectator, both sit on the CPS board. All of the titles editorially support new North Sea oil and gas.

Richard Sharp, who was forced to resign as chairman of the BBC earlier this year over his connection to a secret £800,000 loan to Boris Johnson, sat on the CPS board for 19 years before joining the BBC in 2021.

The CPS, which does not disclose its funding, has offices on Tufton Street in Westminster, alongside several other “free market” pressure groups and think tanks, including the climate science denying Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Other board members include Rachel Wolf, a co-author alongside CPS Director Robert Colvile of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, which said the “North Sea oil and gas industry has a long future ahead” and supported a deal with the sector that allows for new drilling projects.

Original article republished from DeSmog.

Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
Continue ReadingTop Tory Think Tank’s North Sea Oil and Gas ‘Vested Interests’

GB News Owner’s Hedge Fund Has $2.2 Billion Fossil Fuel Investments

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Original article by Sam Bright and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.

One of the owners of GB News runs a hedge fund that has a major financial stake in more than 100 oil and gas firms, DeSmog can reveal. 

This news comes after former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a new presenter on the television broadcaster on Friday.

An investigation by DeSmog in May found that one in three GB News presenters had spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half had attacked climate action. GB News presenters have used their platforms to urge the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more coal, oil and gas.

Paul Marshall is the chairman and chief investment officer of Marshall Wace, a London-based hedge fund that he co-founded in 1997.

Marshall Wace is now one of the world’s largest hedge funds – an investment vehicle that bets on rising and falling share prices – with around $63 billion (£51.9 billion) in assets under management.

According to DeSmog’s analysis of Marshall Wace’s filings with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), his fund owns shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms. This includes companies that specialise in extracting, refining, transporting and distributing fossil fuels.

In its latest SEC filing, for the quarter ending 30 June 2023, Marshall Wace reports a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies. 

The value of Marshall Wace’s stake in Chevron, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel company, has more than doubled from $105 million (£86.6 million) to $213 million (£175.6 million) in two years, even though its total number of shares and equity options has increased over that period by just 35 percent. 

The hedge fund’s stake in Chevron appears to be one of its top 50 most valuable investments, among the thousands of companies in which it currently holds shares.

This reflects the soaring value of fossil fuel companies following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up the price of fossil fuels and therefore the profits of suppliers. At the end of June 2021, Chevron’s share price stood at $107.30 (£88.27), rising to $157.35 (£129.45) by June 2023.

Marshall Wace held shares in 112 fossil fuel companies as of June 2023. Two years earlier, in June 2021, the hedge fund held shares in 50 of these firms. The value of the stakes in these 50 firms almost trebled over the period, from $565.4 million (£466.1 million) to $1.4 billion (£1.15 billion). 

“I’ve always wondered why anyone would invest in comically inept, loss-making GB News,” said John Nicolson MP, a member of Parliament’s influential Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee. “Step forward one major investor who makes bundles of cash from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, a disturbing number of GB News presenters question climate science. I’m beginning to see a connection.”

Marshall Wace has 22 partners and its latest company accounts, for the period ending February 2022, show that they shared bumper profits of more than £720 million as the firm’s annual turnover jumped 62 percent to more than £1.5 billion. The average salary at Marshall Wace is £561,000 a year.

Paul Marshall, who is one of these partners, is also a lead investor in the startup broadcaster GB News, holding a 45 percent stake. Marshall, estimated to be worth £800 million, reportedly invested £10 million in GB News when it first launched two years ago. In August 2022, he joined the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum Group in a £60 million capital injection and buyout of GB News’s other major investor, Discovery. 

On the announcement of the buyout, Marshall said: “This is more than a financial investment. As investors we’re proud of what GB News [sic] doing for media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation on issues that matter to real Britain.”

Marshall also owns UnHerd, a publication founded in 2017 that claims to give a platform to marginalised views. UnHerd has published multiple articles and videos critical of climate action, including an interview in July with Bjorn Lomborg about “how global warming will save lives”.

Marshall is involved in other projects that are linked to key opponents of climate action. He is one of the directors of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new group established by the backers of GB News. The ARC advisory board features a host of individuals who have denied climate science, downplayed the extent of the climate crisis, and attacked net zero policies. A number of these advisers are speaking at a conference hosted by ARC in London this week, alongside Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch.

It has been reported that Marshall is preparing to expand his media investments and is “readying a bid” for the right-wing Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine, with both expected to be put up for sale in the coming weeks.

The Conservative Party has also received funds from Marshall, who donated £500,000 in 2019. 

GB News lost more than £30 million during its first year on air and has been hit by multiple scandals over its use of Conservative MPs as presenters, its alleged lack of impartiality, and its habit of platforming of conspiracy theories

The broadcast regulator Ofcom ruled in March that Mark Steyn had broken its rules on harmful content by claiming on GB News that the third Covid vaccine was causing higher infection, hospitalisation and deaths. Steyn’s claims were “potentially harmful and materially misleading,” Ofcom ruled. Steyn, who has also questioned the existence of climate change, resigned from the channel in February after GB News reportedly demanded he personally pay the fines issued if found in breach of the broadcasting code.

Ofcom currently has 12 open investigations into GB News. Its TV output reached 2.87 million viewers in December, while its website had a UK audience of 5.7 million in April. 

Paul Marshall’s investments in GB News and UnHerd have been made in a personal capacity and there is no evidence that Marshall Wace’s investments have influenced the editorial output of either outlet. 

Marshall Wace claims on its website that “sustainable investing is an organisational focus” and that the firm is “committed to achieving positive social and environmental impact”.

GB News and UnHerd did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Marshall Wace declined to comment.

‘State Control Over Your Life’

Since it launched in June 2021, GB News has been a prominent mouthpiece for individuals who support more fossil fuel extraction and oppose the UK’s target to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.

The UK’s 2050 net zero target is legally binding and is backed by the world’s top climate scientists. They agree that rapidly cutting carbon emissions is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including drought, famine, and ill health.

On 5 November last year, GB News host Neil Oliver used his show to attack “net zero [and] the green agenda”, which he claimed was part of “a hellish potpourri of policies guaranteed to condemn hundreds of millions to death by poverty, death by starvation”. 

Host Nigel Farage – who has a long record of opposing climate action – used his GB News platform to launch a campaign for a Brexit-style referendum on net zero. 

GB News host and Conservative MP Philip Davies was one of five MPs to vote against the Climate Change Act in 2008. Fellow presenters and Tory MPs Jacob Rees Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey are all supporters of the anti-climate action Net Zero Scrutiny Group of backbench Conservative MPs. 

This opposition to net zero is often tied to a denial of established climate science, which has been expressed repeatedly by GB News presenters. 

During last summer’s record UK heatwave, on 16 July 2022, then GB News host Calvin Robinson accused the Met Office of “alarmism”, adding: “Man-made climate change, I don’t buy it, because how much of an impact do we really make if we’re talking about carbon levels?”

Five days later, presenter Beverley Turner called summer heat warnings “fear mongering” in order to “facilitate state control over your life”.

The IPCC has warned that false and misleading information “undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency” of cutting emissions.

Several GB News hosts have also been vocal about their support for policies that would maintain and even extend the UK’s reliance on oil and gas. 

Flagship presenter Dan Wootton argued on 10 March 2022 that the war in Ukraine meant “for now the rush to net zero must die”. He urged the government to “frack, frack, frack” for shale gas. Wootton has recently been suspended by the channel.

In a 9 December show, host Mark Dolan praised plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria. He said the UK should “drill, baby, drill” for coal, oil and gas,  adding: “I think the push for net zero here is another element of liberal progressivism which is infecting the West.”

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that any new fossil fuel projects would be incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C.

‘Genuinely Independent Thinking’

Marshall has defended GB News’s output on the basis that “in a world of too much groupthink”, the broadcaster provides a “space for genuinely independent thinking”. 

However, Marshall appears to share the opposition to net zero, and support for more fossil fuel extraction, expressed by a number of GB News presenters.

In July, Marshall shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Reform UK Leader Richard Tice, on the subject of Norway’s approval of new oil and gas projects worth $18 million. Tice’s post claimed that these fossil fuel resources are “essential to Europe’s energy security” and that the UK “could have these jobs and prosperity. But selfish wallies in Westminster want to make us poorer and colder with net zero”.

Tice has recently been hired by GB News.

A month later, Marshall claimed in a post that “The public are still being shamefully ill informed by the BBC about differing views on climate change policy”. This post linked to an article by Charles Moore, which argued that “Voters can see the disparity between the highly speculative and distant achievement of global net zero and the concrete and imminent prospect of becoming colder and poorer”. 

In fact, the UK government’s failure to implement green reforms has added an estimated £2.5 billion to domestic energy bills due to the rising costs of fossil fuels and poor energy efficiency in homes. A reliance on gas has also cost the UK an additional £50-60 billion since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, equivalent to around £1,000 for every adult.

Original article by Sam Bright and Joey Grostern republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingGB News Owner’s Hedge Fund Has $2.2 Billion Fossil Fuel Investments

Cabinet Ministers Set to Speak at GB News Linked Conference Alongside Climate Science Deniers

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Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0
Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, run by the owners of GB News, is hosting an event next week that it claims will be attended by 100 parliamentarians from across the world.

Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch are due to speak at a major event next week alongside leading critics of climate action, DeSmog can report.

The three-day conference is being hosted in London by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which shares its directors with the startup broadcaster GB News

ARC was launched in March to address six “fundamental issues of our time”, including “energy and resources” and “environmental stewardship”. The group is fronted by psychologist Jordan Peterson and its advisory board includes senior politicians and academics from the UK and abroad.

As revealed by DeSmog, a number of ARC advisers have a history of attacking net zero policies and questioning climate science, many of whom are speaking at next week’s conference.

Levelling Up Secretary Gove and Business and Trade Secretary Badenoch will be speaking alongside these individuals at the conference, which culminates on 1 November in a public event at the 20,000-seat O2 arena.

Peterson, who is headlining the O2 event, has regularly posted about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. He claimed in a Telegraph article in October that “eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation”. 

Gove and Badenoch will also be speaking alongside Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called climate change a “hoax”, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott – a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group.

Badenoch has not always been supportive of climate action. During the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, she suggested that the UK government’s legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 should be pushed back.

ARC claims that over 1,000 people will be attending its conference, “including over 100 parliamentarians from across Europe, the UK, and Australia, as well as a delegation of congressional leaders from the USA”.

This news comes after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month watered down a number of flagship policies designed to achieve net zero emissions – moves that were welcomed by climate science deniers. 

ARC, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Department for Business and Trade were approached for comment.

ARC’s Origins

ARC has extensive ties to GB News, which has prominently platformed climate science denial since its launch in June 2021. 

According to Companies House, the same five individuals who own GB News’s parent company are also the people who control the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited: Paul Marshall, Alan McCormick, Richard Douglas, Mark Stoleson, and Christopher Chandler.

McCormick, Chandler, and Stoleson are all executives at Legatum Group, the Dubai-based investment fund that, alongside Marshall, is a principal financial backer of GB News. 

ARC’s CEO, Tory peer Baroness Stroud, formerly served as chief executive of the Legatum Institute think tank, founded by the Legatum Group. The institute received $77,000 in 2018 from the Charles Koch Foundation, funded by the proceeds of Koch Industries, one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States, which trades heavily in fossil fuels.

Conservative peer Helena Morrissey, one of the directors of GB News’s parent company, is an ARC adviser, as is ex-GB News presenter Colin Brazier. Two Conservative MPs – Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates – are also ARC advisers. 

Morissey, Marshall, Kruger and Cates are all set to speak at the ARC conference.

GB News has been a prominent opponent of climate action since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation in May revealed that one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked climate policies.

Its presenters have claimed that net zero will cause “death by poverty and starvation”, that the policy “poses an existential threat to the free world”, and have called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels. 

ARC’s 44-member advisory board includes a number of climate science deniers and leading critics of climate action.

Writer Douglas Murray, who will be speaking alongside Peterson at the O2, has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Brits, and has argued that “terrifying our children with doom-mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse”. 

ARC adviser Tony Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.

Abbott is joined on the ARC advisory board by fellow ex-Australian prime minister John Howard, who told Sky News in March that he was “increasingly sceptic [sic]” about climate policies, adding that Australia should “continue to benefit” from coal and gas.  

ARC adviser Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be speaking at the conference alongside Gove, Badenoch, Abbott and Howard, recently tweeted to his 1.3 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten U.S. prosperity.”

Tupy and Cato

ARC also plans to publish regular research papers, which it claims will be “written by leading thinkers and researchers across the world” and “provide deep analysis and offer solutions to the problems we face”.

The first papers were published earlier this month, including one from Cato Institute researcher Marian Tupy on the topic of “superabundance” – in other words, if the world and its natural resources can sustain population growth.

In the report, Tupy suggests that critics of established climate science have been censored by the media. He claims that “Inconvenient questions about ‘sensitive’ issues, such as the extent of climate change and the long-term threats posed by global warming, are being silenced in the media, and their proponents are being condemned as ‘denialists’”. 

In reality, climate science denial is given a significant platform in the press and via social media. DeSmog reported in September that otherwise fringe climate crisis deniers are being exposed to millions more people due to the promotional efforts of ARC’s Jordan Peterson.

Tupy echoes Peterson’s language in his ARC study, claiming that the “precursors” to “extreme environmentalism” include “fascism and communism”. He claims that extreme environmentalism maintains a hold “on the public imagination, thus contributing to a sense of despair and decline”.

Tupy has commented on the topics of natural resources and global warming for a number of years. 

Interviewed in April 2021 about “the true risk of global warming”, Tupy said that “I’m more or less convinced that human economic activity contributes to slight increases in global warming that we are currently experiencing”. 

However, he suggested that the planet was merely “lukewarming”, and that “it is not… an existential crisis”. Tupy argued that humanity would be able to “adapt and technologically innovate” its way out of the problem. He said this would happen by slowly lessening our reliance on fossil fuels and creating solutions that allow people to adapt to the consequences of climate change. 

“We don’t need to do it immediately; we don’t need to do it in the scope of 10 or 20 years, but it would be nice if say in 40 years time most of the world’s energy was provided by energy sources that do not spew CO2 into the atmosphere,” he said.

For 21 years, Tupy has worked at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C.. He currently holds the position of senior fellow at the group’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. 

The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Charles Koch of Koch Industries. Charles Koch and his late brother David have channelled millions into right-wing organisations over recent decades, donating almost $9 million to the Cato Institute between 1997 and 2015. 

The institute has downplayed the need to take urgent action on climate change and has in the past suggested that lawmakers shouldn’t pass any legislation to restrict the emissions of carbon dioxide.

Tupy’s arguments around “lukewarming” and technological innovation reflect the statements of the Cato Institute towards global warming. 

“Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals,” claims the institute’s public statement on global warming. 

In December 2015, Patrick J. Michaels and Chip Knappenberger wrote a Cato Institute “working paper” making the “case for lukewarming”.

“[W]e conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded. It is high time to rethink those efforts,” they wrote.

In 2009, Cato’s “Handbook for Policymakers” on global warming began with the suggestions that Congress should “pass no legislation restricting emissions of carbon dioxide”. In the same year, more than 100 scientists signed a statement, circulated by the institute, disputing the climate change “consensus”.

A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. 

The IPCC also states that global warming will cause “increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, heavy precipitation, and, in some regions, agricultural and ecological droughts; an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones; and reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.”

The IPCC’s chair, Jim Skea, has said that “Without immediate action to reduce emissions and adapt to continued warming, threats to planetary health and human systems are inevitable.”

The Cato Institute and Marian Tupy were approached for comment.

Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Related: GOP Climate Denier Vivek Ramaswamy Headlining Jordan Peterson’s ARC Conference

Continue ReadingCabinet Ministers Set to Speak at GB News Linked Conference Alongside Climate Science Deniers