Skip to content

Fossil Fuels

‘Fossil Fuels Are Still Winning’ As Carbon Emissions Reach Record Highs

The most recent Global Carbon Budget report has found that the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels reached a record high in 2024, pushing the planet further off track from avoiding the most destructive impacts of global heating. The 2024 Global Carbon Budget — produced by the Global Carbon Project team of 120-plus scientists from around the world — projects that emissions from fossil carbon dioxide will reach 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024, an increase of 0.8 percent over the previous year, according to a press release from the Global Carbon Project.

Two Notorious Fossil Fuel-Backing Law Firms Got Called Out

Lawyers and climate crisis campaigners held law firms that represent planet-wrecking companies to account on Wednesday 13 November. They targeted the headquarters of two of the most notorious firms: A&O Shearman and Akin. Lawyers and allies staged a protest outside the London headquarters of legal firms A&O Shearman and Akin, as their staff arrived this morning. Representatives from a coalition of groups including Lawyers are Responsible and Fossil Free London held portraits of people across the world whose homes and lives have been devastated by floods and fires due to climate breakdown.

COP29 Starts As It Will Probably Go On

Campaign group Fossil Free London staged a protest outside BP’s headquarters on the first day of the COP29 in Azerbaijan. It was over not only BP and the host nation’s reliance on fossil fuels, but both of their propping up of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It also comes as part of a series of actions on the intersections of COP29, the climate crisis and Palestine in London, culminating in the March for Global Climate Justice on Saturday 16 November. Joanna Warrington, a campaigner with Fossil Free London, said: It’s the very same fossil fuel giants that profit from the suffering of billions as our climate tips closer to collapse, which are fuelling and enabling Israel’s horrific colonial genocide. This is all playing out right in front of our world leaders, who sit clapping in the audience instead of standing up to protect human rights and life.

UK COP29 ‘Partners’ Include Firm With Hundreds of Fossil Fuel Clients

The UK’s pavilion at this year’s flagship climate conference is being co-sponsored by an industrial software firm that has worked for some of the world’s biggest polluters, DeSmog can reveal.  This year’s conference will begin next week (11 November) in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the new UK government has vowed to be an international climate leader, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband both set to attend the talks.  The government earlier this week announced the sponsors of the UK COP29 pavilion, which will host a number of events featuring politicians, climate experts, and businesses. 

COP29 CEO Caught Facilitating Oil And Gas Deals During Climate Summit

Chief Executive Officer of the United Nations COP29 Climate Change Conference Elnur Soltanov has been recorded by Global Witness apparently agreeing to help facilitate fossil fuel industry deals at the summit, reported The Guardian. A member of the campaign organization posed as a fake oil and gas representative offering to sponsor the event in exchange for assistance with the deals. “COP29 officials abused their positions by facilitating talks about oil and gas deals at a climate conference, pitching a dystopian future which includes fossil fuels ‘perhaps forever,’” a spokesperson for Global Witness said in a press release. “Petrostates are perfecting a sinister playbook which sees COP as just another business opportunity for polluters.”

EU Accused Of Inviting Fossil Fuel Executives To COP28

The European Commission is facing criticism from politicians and campaigners for giving a free pass for senior oil and gas executives to attend last year’s COP28 summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).  The EU invited five representatives of fossil fuel giants, including executives from BP, ExxonMobil, and Eni, to the flagship climate talks in December last year. More fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the Dubai summit than any previous year. EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra explained in late April that the five oil executives were invited to COP28 on the basis of their participation in EU events during the summit. 

No Coal No Gas Builds On Recent Victory With Focus On Community

David Graeber once posited that “the biggest problem facing nonviolent direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.” He observed that, by the time activists recognize some of our initial successes, those gains tend to be obscured by infighting and/or repressive backlash. More to the point, he said, activists unsatisfied with anything short of a total revolution miss the steady gains that our movements make. A New England-based campaign to phase out fossil fuels provides a helpful counter-example. Activists with No Coal No Gas, or NCNG, have shown that we do know how to handle victory.

Citibank Is Bankrolling The Largest Offshore Oil Facility In The US

On an early morning this September, I stood in front of the headquarters of Citibank, chanting and singing as 31 activists were dragged away by police for blocking the building’s entrance. I’m a retired teacher and a grandmother living in Texas. How did I wind up helping lead this action in New York City? Over the past three months, organizers have engaged in the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, the largest sustained civil disobedience campaign in the climate movement’s history. For the past twelve weeks this summer, more than 5,000 people — from faith leaders to scientists, from students to grandparents — have taken to the streets, demanding that Wall Street banks end their funding of climate chaos. That’s how I ended up rallying at Citibank’s doorsteps.

EPA Found No Threat Of Air Pollution During An Oil Spill In Louisiana

The pungent smell of oil woke Gerald and Janet Crappel on the morning of Saturday, July 27. Stepping outside their home on the banks of Bayou Lafourche in Raceland, Louisiana, they spotted the fumes’ source: crude oil from Crescent Midstream’s Raceland pump station was gushing into the picturesque waterway, sparsely lined with homes and fishing boats, via a stormwater canal directly across from their home. The oil’s fumes were thick that morning. “It choked you,” Gerald told DeSmog correspondent Julie Dermansky, who documented the incident as it unfolded. Before cleanup crews contained the spill, reportedly 34,000 gallons of crude oil, a slick stretched for eight miles, just past the area’s drinking water system.

From UK To Norway, Drillers Legally Dump Tons Of Waste Into The North Sea

It was a stormy grey day in 1987 when a young environmental scientist found himself wearing a survival suit with a set of homemade sampling contraptions trailing in the ocean on an inflatable boat in the Baltic Sea. He was hunting a waste stream much of the world had never heard of: oilfield waste. Working at that time for the environmental group Greenpeace, Marco Kaltofen was racing after a stunning realisation: that in many offshore oil and gas settings, oilfield waste is simply being dumped right into the ocean. Fast-forward almost four decades, and an analysis by DeSmog shows that companies have been legally dumping toxic and radioactive oilfield waste into the North Sea — Europe’s arm of the North Atlantic — for decades, with largely unknown consequences for a sensitive and beloved marine environment.

Fossil Fuel Companies Are Hijacking Our Universities

Elite universities in the United States — which conduct important climate research — are raking in millions from fossil fuel interests, potentially creating conflicts of interest. This is according to a collection of new reports compiled by student organizers and released by the student-led Campus Climate Network, as The Guardian reported. “Universities globally are often caught in a web of financial and research dependencies with the fossil fuel sector. These ties not only conflict with the ethics of academic independence but also hinder the progress of genuine climate research,” Campus Climate Network said on its website. One institution, Princeton University, seems to have actually owned an oil company — Petrotiger, named after its mascot — earning it millions of dollars, reported The Guardian.

Fall Of FERC Actions A Wild Success!

Washington, DC - Beyond Extreme Energy folks kicked things off at 6:00 am on Thursday, September 19, by hanging large banners across from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. At 7:00 am, a crew of elders from Third Act DMV and Beyond Extreme Energy used rocking chairs to blockade the driveway to FERC’s garage. They held banners reading “The Fall of FERC” and “US Courts: FERC is a Climate Denier.” The Federal Protective Service of the Department of Homeland Security arrived and asked the blockaders to leave. At 9:00 am, dozens of adults and kids from Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana and Texas rallied with their supporters outside FERC, demanding that commissioners listen to their concerns about FERC continuing to greenlight LNG export terminals, which are hugely polluting for frontline communities and for the climate.

Deaths, Asthma, Climate Pollution Linked To Citi’s Funding Of Gas

The lives and health of families in Texas and Louisiana are being directly impacted by Citi’s funding of nearby liquified methane gas projects (LNG), a new report released today shows. Over $36 million in health costs, two deaths, and more than 1,600 incidences of asthma symptoms per year in the region are linked to the $1.6 billion the bank has pumped into four LNG facilities in the Gulf South. The bank’s financed emissions related to these facilities is equivalent to over 6 coal plants or 6 million gasoline cars annually. The report, Citi: Funding Fossil-Fueled Environmental Racism in the Gulf South, quantifies the projected health impacts the facilities’ permitted air pollution could have on the region and highlights three communities in the area that are fighting back against fossil fuel development.

Inside The International Uprising Disrupting Air Travel

A new international coalition is disrupting airports to make one demand: the adoption of a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030. Under the banner Oil Kills, small groups of activists have occupied airport departure lounges, plane cabins, terminals, tarmacs and roads across three continents — and they aren’t done yet. Here are the numbers so far: 500 people, 31 airports, 22 groups, 166 arrests, 42 people on remand in prison — all in support of their one demand. The coalition formed when members of Extinction Rebellion, the A22 Network and Stay Grounded began reaching out to other groups globally. What resulted was an unprecedented alliance of civil resistance groups focused on the sustained disruption of airports — a key pillar of the fossil fuel economy.

Violations Discovered At Nation’s First Carbon Capture And Storage Project

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found multiple Safe Drinking Water Act violations at the nation’s first carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) storage project, PoliticoPro’s E&E News reported today. The Decatur, IL, project, run by Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), violated rules meant to protect against leaks of captured carbon, the EPA wrote in a notice of violation issued on August 14th. The EPA said it had inspected three ADM wells in mid-June — one used for storing captured carbon dioxide and two used to monitor for leaks and other problems. ADM told E&E News that the violations relate to corrosion in one of the two monitoring wells — a problem that ADM said it had discovered back in March.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.