In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.

To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.

Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever.

The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground.

The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream.

In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups. Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco.

But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.

But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution.

The Environmental Protection Agency late last week announced it would end a 20-plus-year effort to develop methods to monitor air pollution from factory farms, effectively shuttering the agency’s stop-and-start attempts to regulate the potentially pollutant-spewing facilities under the Clean Air Act.

The announcement came just days before the midterm elections and was characterized by the agency as a long-awaited reprieve for farmers, a historically important constituency for Trump and the Republican Party.

When tens of thousands of animals are packed into one place, pollution from their waste is blown from ventilation fans or emanates from giant lagoons of liquid effluent. Livestock facilities emit fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, all contributing to a toxic mix. Research has shown that emissions from these operations are a major cause of air pollution, causing nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States a year.

Strictly speaking, concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are required to get permits under the Clean Air Act and report emissions of these pollutants under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability and Act and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. But through a deal crafted in tandem with the EPA and the livestock industry, they’ve been given amnesty from doing so for more than 20 years.

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The MIC bootlicking is too damn high.

You could spend an entire year commuting, heating your home, cooking meals, and going about your daily life — and still produce less carbon dioxide than a private jet releases on a single flight.

That’s the striking conclusion of a new Oxfam report, which estimates that the average private jet flight emitted 3.7 metric tons of CO₂ in 2025, roughly as much as the average person worldwide produces in an entire year.

The same report also shows that the world’s richest 0.1% produce more greenhouse gas emissions than half of humanity.

Welcome to the Mordor Economy, where ever more energy, extraction and environmental destruction are required just to keep the economic machine running.
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Inspired by the work of systems thinker @natehagens, this brilliant comic by @bruce_mahalski draws a disturbing parallel between our growth-dependent economy and the industrial wasteland of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
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Just as Sauron's armies depended on exploiting Middle-earth's resources, and Saruman cut down the forests of Isengard to fuel his war machine, our economy increasingly consumes the natural world to sustain its own expansion.
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Hagens explains this through Energy Return on Investment (EROI), the amount of energy obtained relative to the energy required to produce it.
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Historically, abundant fossil fuels delivered enormous energy surpluses. But as easily accessible resources are depleted, extracting, processing and delivering energy can require increasingly large investments of energy and materials.
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As EROI declines, more of society's energy must be reinvested simply to obtain the next supply, leaving less available for hospitals, schools, infrastructure and improving human wellbeing.
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Hagens warns that this creates a vicious cycle: an economy increasingly devoted to powering itself, while mounting ecological damage demands still more resources for remediation.
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GDP may continue growing even as the net benefits to society diminish. More economic activity does not necessarily mean better lives.
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Meanwhile, the living world pays the price through habitat destruction, pollution, resource depletion and climate breakdown.
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Perhaps it's time to stop feeding the machine and form our own fellowship, building an economy that serves life rather than destroying it.
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The goal must be a good life for everyone within planetary boundaries, not endless growth on a finite planet.
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Artwork: @brucemahalski
Inspired by: @natehagens

"I can just see the fake headlines," Trump said. "President Trump is talking about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump."

"But I said, ‘I don't give a damn, I'm gonna say it: We're making a frickin fortune,’" he added.

Attn Karen Bass:

Bike Bike ≠ Big Oil

Chevron gave $50,000 to re-elect you.

They know Nithya would fight against their interests (fossil fuels).

We deserve cleaner air and a Mayor who is not beholden to Big Oil.

Mortality is one of the most salient consequences of climate change. Existing estimates have largely focused on the direct effects of local heat exposure. This column argues that this perspective can miss an important part of the overall health burden. New evidence based on fluctuations in global temperature suggests that climate change also affects mortality indirectly through its effects on economic activity and living standards. Accounting for these broader channels substantially increases estimated mortality damages and highlights an important role for economic resilience in limiting the health consequences of climate change.

Small EVs and efficient people carriers update familiar names for the modern age.

The United States runs on gas powered generators.

As of 2022, the US had nearly 1,000 gas-fired plants, which was already more than the next nine countries combined. Under returning president Donald Trump, the country’s embrace of high-carbon power has only accelerated, as energy developers abandon environmentally-friendly projects like off-shore wind farms in favor of more noxious gas- and coal-powered facilities.

As if our rapidly warming world wasn’t being choked by enough smog, the ["AI" grift] is now adding even more fuel to the proverbial fire. According to a new analysis by the Environment America Research and Policy Center, first flagged by Electrek, the buildout of more [data centers] will come with a 44 percent increase in gas-fired generator capacity over the next four years.

That’s a stunning rise of nearly 20 gigawatts by 2030, compared to the country’s current gas generator capacity of 41.8 gigawatts, a milestone which took centuries of development — and untold tons of carbon exhaust — to reach.

The global wildfire crisis1 is often attributed to climate change, a framing that overlooks crucial historical drivers. Biomes at the forefront of this crisis, such as the temperate eucalypt forests of Australia, have seen alarming increases in large, intense wildfires in recent decades. Yet evidence of how colonial land-use change and the disruption of Indigenous fire use altered vegetation structure and fuel dynamics remains scarce. Here we reconstruct 1,000 years of vegetation and fire change in a temperate eucalypt forest in southeastern Australia. Before the British invasion (from 1788 ce), fire use by the Indigenous Gunaikurnai people maintained stable, open woodlands through frequent, fine-grained, low-temperature cultural burning. Colonial disruption drove cascading changes: increased fire temperature, a fourfold rise in eucalypt cover, a shift from open woodland to forest and increased soil erosion. These transformations preceded anthropogenic warming, indicating that the vulnerability of these forests to wildfire is shaped by colonial land-use legacies. By creating more flammable landscapes, colonial land use amplified the influence of climate change, suggesting a reinforcing feedback (the ‘catastrophic wildfire loop’) in which high-intensity wildfires raise fuel loads and further increase the likelihood of climate-driven fire. Integrating Indigenous knowledge into fire management is therefore essential to restoring resilience and mitigating future wildfire risk.

Drinking water costs spiked faster than inflation, grocery prices and median household income, researchers at nonprofit Food & Water Watch outlined in a first-of-its-kind report released Tuesday.

The average community water system increased household drinking water prices by 62 percent between 2015 and 2025 — with costs in Louisiana, Maryland and New Hampshire having particularly steep rises, according to the 17-page report. California also stood out in the data when it comes to seeing expensive water bills.

Article fails to mention the guy that they tried to scapegoat for this inevitable environmental collapse.

This report comes out just after the trial ofc...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/25/us/palisades-fire-jonathan-rinderknecht

The 451,000 heat deaths now projected, and the hunger deaths no one has counted yet, should not be decided by who owns the land, the grain, the power plants, the housing, and the clinics — or by the debt imposed on entire countries.

Fascism literally profits from death and planetary destruction.

Burning one cubic foot of natural gas releases the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, including extraction, processing, and distribution, according to the IEA. The additional demand from data centers will generate 1 million metric tons more greenhouse gas pollution daily. That’s about 12% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions today.

Atahualpa Sofía Enciso lives near the Santiago River and is a member of Salto de Vida, a collective that defends it. She holds a book showing what the river used to look like. Tamara Pearson

Atahualpa Sofía Enciso’s children don’t know what a normal river is, she says. Living by the Santiago River in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, which overflows with dense white foam from the hundreds of industries that pollute it, she notes that the area is also getting hotter.

“My father talks about how when he was younger, he didn’t need sweaters, because it was never that hot or cold, but now there are these extremes, because the river is polluted and it can’t regulate temperatures as it used to,” she tells Truthout.

For activists like Enciso, the term “climate change” is insufficient for describing such violence perpetrated by industry against the environment and against residents. Indigenous activists like Nahua grasshopper farmer Miguel López Vega describe the severe droughts, water scarcity, crop failure, and hunger that Mexico is experiencing as “signs of death” of the planet, and say any solutions have to involve direct care of the land while stopping the harm.

A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.

“Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”