Coal, Oil and Gas

Ernest Moniz, an enthusiastic booster of Southern Company’s Kemper “clean coal” power plant on which his Department of Energy spent almost a half billion dollars only to see it abandoned when the technology failed to operate, is joining the board of directors of Southern Company, the utility giant announced late Monday. In a bizarre twist …

In his October 12th congressional testimony about why he cost U.S. taxpayers some $56,000 for travel on non-commercial aircraft, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry suggested that his predecessor, Ernest Moniz, had done essentially the same thing. Indeed, the Secretary may have a point – – but only because some of Secretary Moniz’s travel was highly …

With Southern Company’s board voting today to green light the completion of the Vogtle nuclear power plant, the prospect that Georgia utility customers may be on the hook for many billions for a plant that may never be economically feasible becomes very real. Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning has blamed the bankruptcy of nuclear reactor …

A new study published in Science this week references multiple internal Exxon documents that are available in original form on ClimateFiles. The study got a lot of news coverage: New York Times, Guardian, Associated Press, Politico, LA Times, NPR, CNN, CNBC…

This post includes some of the documents, advertisements and news clips that were featured in the three part documentary, “The Power of Big Oil,” aired April 2022. I have also included additional resources from our ClimateFiles archive where appropriate PART ONE: DENIAL You can watch and find a handy transcript of Part One here. Global …

An investigation published on March 24 in the Business Section of the New York Times by Hiroko Tabuchi tells the long history of Exxon/ExxonMobil fighting US sanctions against the USSR and Russia – going back to 1981, President Reagan’s first year in office. As the Times story states: Those efforts, nearly a half-century ago, show …

Uh, they knew…. The landmark move by the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday to force corporations to expand the evaluation and submission of “climate-related disclosures” reminded me that in our ClimateFiles collection we have evidence that oil companies have seen this coming for a long time. They certainly were aware that their products, used as …

Success! Just recovered some 23 year old TV ads via my old friend Eric Gravley of PlanetVox. Way back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, before YouTube, before digital media, DVRs, “on demand” and all the things we take for granted today, Gravely and team ran a production studio, made documentaries and taped important stuff …

The BBC has launched a two hour series on the history of corporate climate denial. The series starts in 1988 and traces the rise in climate policy attacks through the George W. Bush Administration in the 2000s. They been researching this series for several months. Great to hear it finally! Featured interviews include Naomi Oreskes, …