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    Divestment Goes Mainstream as Major Funds Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit

    Divestment Goes Mainstream as Major Funds Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit

    With a shift of nearly two billion dollars away from fossil fuels, the divestment campaign has moved into new territory. Last week, seventeen of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations announced commitments to pull their money out of fossil fuel companies and reinvest it in the clean energy economy. The newly formed Divest-Invest coalition urges other organizations to take […]

    Why Investing in Dirty Fuels is a Bad Idea

    Why Investing in Dirty Fuels is a Bad Idea

    A mind-boggling sum of about $800 for each person on the planet is invested into fossil fuel companies through the global capital markets alone. That’s roughly 10 percent of the total capital invested in listed companies. The amount of money invested into the 200 biggest fossil fuel companies through financial markets is estimated at 5.5 trillion dollars. […]

    EPA to Finalize First-Ever Coal Ash Regulations This Year

    EPA to Finalize First-Ever Coal Ash Regulations This Year

    Late yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced plans to finalize first-ever federal regulations for the disposal of coal ash by Dec.19, 2014, according to a settlement in a lawsuit brought by environmental and public health groups and a Native American tribe. The settlement does not dictate the content of the final regulation, but […]

    Court Denies Offshore Oil Drilling Lease Sale in Arctic

    Court Denies Offshore Oil Drilling Lease Sale in Arctic

    Yesterday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the Department of the Interior violated the law when it opened almost 30 million acres of the outer continental shelf in the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska to oil and gas drilling. Icebergs in the high Arctic. Photo credit: Wikimedia The court concluded the Department’s estimate […]

    12 Days After West Virginia Chemical Spill, Company Admits to Second Chemical

    12 Days After West Virginia Chemical Spill, Company Admits to Second Chemical

    By Tina Casey Yep, you read that right. Almost two weeks after a storage tank was discovered to be leaking 7,500 gallons of the coal-washing chemical Crude MCHM into the Elk River/water supply for nine counties in West Virginia, company officials finally disclosed yesterday that 300 gallons of another chemical, “PPH, stripped,” was also part […]

    Transporting Fossil Fuels: Rail vs. Pipeline is the Wrong Question

    Transporting Fossil Fuels: Rail vs. Pipeline is the Wrong Question

    Debating the best way to do something we shouldn’t be doing in the first place is a sure way to end up in the wrong place. That’s what’s happening with the “rail versus pipeline” discussion. Some say recent rail accidents mean we should build more pipelines to transport fossil fuels. Others argue that leaks, high […]

    President Obama Gives $1 Billion Game-Changing Gift to ‘Clean’ Coal

    President Obama Gives $1 Billion Game-Changing Gift to ‘Clean’ Coal

    In the same days an entrepreneur went on federal trial for fraud over an unproven “clean coal” scheme, President Obama’s Department of Energy (DOE) gave a game-changing approval for a $1 billion gift to continue the unproven FutureGen “clean coal” boondoggle in Illinois. Kind of ironic, ain’t it—if it weren’t so tragic. On the heels of the West Virginia coal-cleaning chemical disaster, […]