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It has been three months since Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed their memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a new bitumen oil pipeline to the west coast. With an April 1 deadline for a final deal with the oil industry only a month away, how are negotiations for this “grand bargain” going?

Private sector investors are still nowhere in sight. If a pipeline and associated Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage (CCS) project goes ahead, Canadian taxpayers will be unsurprisingly footing most of the bill. The signing deadline will almost certainly be missed, and most major stakeholders are in open conflict.

In other words, not great.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is already demanding major concessions to water down industrial carbon pricing meant to finance the Pathways project. Environmental groups fault the federal government for giving up a laundry list of important climate policies including a proposed emissions cap, clean energy regulations, and the greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act.

Ottawa committed to waiving the oil tanker ban on the north British Columbia coast, enraging local First Nations whose Traditional Territories would be decimated by an oil spill. The feds also caved on contentious tax credits for enhanced oil recovery from CCS and further delayed methane reduction targets. Despite such sweeping capitulations, no private pipeline proponent has come forward, and it is now obvious that none will.

Former Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage said that industry still expects taxpayers to open their wallets for this latest oil patch boondoggle. Enbridge spilled the same tea on an earnings call with investors. When asked if his company would be the mythical pipeline proponent, CEO Greg Ebel said, “that’s not the type of risk that we’re looking to take on at this time. We don’t need to with all the other opportunities.”

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Oil industry grievance has become a commodity perhaps more valuable than oil itself. Cultivating a narrative of meddlesome political interference previously netted bitumen producers the $34 billion Trans Mountain pipeline paid for by Canadian taxpayers. Threats of another contentious pipeline corralled the BC government into supporting an increase in capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline by up to 400,000 barrels per day. An industry hit list of important climate policies has finally been killed off after years of patient spin machine effort.

With that stunning record of success, why would the oil patch dial down the rhetoric now? Following the Carney- Smith MOU smiling photo op on November 27, all the main stakeholders are either genuinely or performatively pissed off and the clock is ticking.

The root of this impasse is an endemic sense of entitlement of Canada’s most coddled industry. The non-profit Pembina Institute points out that if Alberta gets a bespoke policy carve-out for methane reductions, it would be grossly unfair to other industrial emitters across the country putting in the hard work and investments required to lower climate destabilizing emissions. Despite the federal government being on the hook for up to half of the Pathways project and billions more in subsidies from Alberta, the largest bitumen producers still refuse to pony up any of their own money.

If the MOU was intended to lower the rhetorical temperature with the Alberta government, it has so far been an utter failure. The ink was barely dry on the agreement when premier Smith reneged on Alberta’s commitment to raise provincial industrial carbon pricing to meaningful levels.

The current price has been frozen at $95  per tonne and was supposed to raise to $130 when the agreement is finalized. Just one week after the much-lauded agreement, the Alberta government flooded the market with additional tradeable carbon credits crashing the actual price to below $20. “Expect Alberta to continuously test the federal government for weakness, using moves like this to inform their approach at the negotiating table,” warned Dan Woynillowicz ofPolaris Strategy.

Smith conjured up additional headaches for Ottawa by enacting sweeping changes to electoral law just before Christmas, paving the way for separatists to move forward with a referendum question previously deemed unconstitutional by the courts. MAGA-aligned interests now openly conspire to assist in the breakup of Canada, while Alberta extremists brag about multiple meetings with the hostile Trump Administration.

As this constitutional fire smoulders, Smith is busy igniting several others. The premier recently took to the airwaves to announce a new divisive referendum this fall demanding jurisdiction over immigration, the ability to appoint federal judges and opt out of federal education and health programs while still receiving funding from Ottawa.

It should now be obvious that continuing to shovel concessions at Danielle Smith or her overlords in the oil industry will only lead to additional demands. If there is one winner in the MOU debacle, it is cagey Mark Carney. Sacrificing Indigenous relations and climate policy in favour of a pipeline without a business case or proponent seems to play well in Alberta.

The Liberal Party of Canada – typically despised in the province – is now polling neck and neck with the Conservatives. A new bitumen pipeline is neither needed nor profitable, but perhaps that is not the point. In politics, popularity is the only outcome that matters.

The post Mark Carney’s Pipeline MOU With Danielle Smith Has Been A Disaster appeared first on DeSmog.

The Daily Mail’s parent company (DMGT), which is attempting to buy The Telegraph newspaper, makes a quarter of its money hosting events in Middle East petrostates.

DMGT has made a £500 million bid to purchase the Telegraph Media Group. A previous offer backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was blocked by the UK government in 2024 over fears of foreign state influence in the British press.

The sale was also opposed by Telegraph staff including former editor Charles Moore, who said it would be “unforgivable” for the paper to be “controlled by a foreign power”, calling the UAE “a country which does not have press freedom”.

However, DMGT also has a significant financial stake in the UAE.

The latest DMGT accounts published on 17 February show the company made £259 million in the year to September 2025 from its events and exhibition business, which has its headquarters in the UAE.

Most of this revenue came from running high-profile energy and construction industry events in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, including several with ties to host governments.

This amounted to 24 percent of DMGT’s total revenue – more than it makes from print and digital advertising (23 percent), or from selling newspapers (22 percent). 

Geoff Dickinson, the CEO of DMG Events, is also on the advisory board of the Dubai International Chamber – a trade body representing the Emirate. Dickinson was appointed to the position by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, in 2021.

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Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has referred DMGT’s Telegraph bid to the Competition and Markets Authority, and media regulator Ofcom, which will advise the government on whether the deal should go ahead.

A DMGT spokesperson told The Guardian in December: “DMGT reiterates that the acquisition will be completely free from any prohibited foreign state influence, and that The Telegraph will remain editorially independent, while benefiting from significant investment to accelerate its international growth.”

However, DMGT’s Middle East events business is growing, while its newspaper revenues are in decline. Its latest accounts state that while consumer media revenues fell by two percent in the year to September 2025, its events business “continued to grow, benefitting from increases in exhibitor demand and visitor attendance.” 

DMGT’s total events revenue has increased by 59 percent since 2023, and by 160 percent since 2022.

“If DMGT’s takeover bid for the Telegraph goes through, it’ll be like one Death Star swallowing another,” said Mic Wright, author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. “And the fact that oil and gas events are as profitable to DMGT as its entire advertising business suggests to me that it will be rather inclined to go gently on Gulf petrostates in the long term.” 

The Telegraph and the Daily Mail consistently publish editorials hostile to climate action and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Oil and Gas Events

DMGT describes the “core business” of its events arm as the hosting of five large annual exhibitions in the Middle East.

These are the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition (ADIPEC) energy show, reportedly the world’s largest energy exhibition; the EGYPES energy event in Egypt; two ‘Big 5’ construction sector events in Dubai and Riyadh; and the Saudi Food Show.

Several of these events have ties to the host country governments. ADIPEC is hosted by Adnoc, the UAE’s state oil company. EGYPES is “held under the patronage” of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. And the Big 5 events are backed by the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, and the Saudi Ministry for Municipal, Rural Affairs and Housing.

The new DMGT accounts note another significant earner, Gastech, an annual energy trade show that focuses on “natural gas, LNG and hydrogen”, held last year in Milan, Italy.

On top of these five big events, DMGT also ran events “on behalf of third parties”, including the official Blue Zone at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in December 2023, and the Green Zone at the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan – also a petrostate – in 2024.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia derive most of their wealth from oil production. Saudi Arabia is the world’s second biggest oil producer after the United States as of 2023. Oil and gas dominate Egypt’s exports and imports.

The UAE doesn’t hold popular elections. There are no political parties, critics of the government are often jailed, women face unequal treatment, and its penal code allows for the arrest of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) campaigners.

Daily Mail owner Jonathan Rothermere accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump on a visit to Doha, Qatar, another Gulf petrostate, in May 2025.

Rothermere’s previous bid for The Telegraph in 2023 reportedly involved backers from Qatar.

As DeSmog has reported, Nigel Farage’s pro-fossil fuel party Reform UK – which is leading polls at 29 percent ahead of May’s elections – is also building ties to the UAE through business deals, funded trips, and meetings with government ministers.

Claudia Rothermere, wife of Jonathan Rothermere, donated £50,000 to Reform UK in September.

DMGT and DCMS were approached for comment.

A version of this article was published by Private Eye.

The post Telegraph Bidder Daily Mail Cashing in from Oil Industry Events appeared first on DeSmog.

This story is published in partnership with The Guardian.

As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.
 
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.

“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

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“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”

Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.

Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.

Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.

Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”
 
 ”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum. 

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.

This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January.
 
Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”

At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses.

Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.

Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players. 
 
 In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.

Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said.

During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.” 

The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe.
 
At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.
 
Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes.
 
Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”

Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science.”
 
What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.
 
For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.

“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.
 
Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate,’ but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”
 
McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”

The post Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz appeared first on DeSmog.

In a Prince Rupert board room in mid-January, the British Columbia-based Indigenous alliance Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative (CFN), Lax Kw’alaams and the Haisla Nation met with Prime Minister Mark Carney and reaffirmed their opposition to a new oil pipeline to the northwest coast of the province. 

“It’s loud and clear. That’s a no, and our interest isn’t about money in this situation. It’s about the responsibility of looking after our territories and nurturing the sustainable economies that we currently have here,” CFN President Marilyn Slett said at the time.

The alliance includes nearly all First Nations within the Great Bear Rainforest on B.C.’s central and north coast, meaning that its opposition could be a powerful obstacle to building new oil export infrastructure. Despite that, Carney only met with CFN after he had already signed a pro-pipeline Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith last November. The MOU aims to create the conditions needed to build an oil pipeline to B.C.’s northwest coast, including potentially adjusting a ban on oil tankers through the region.

In late February, Premier Smith told Albertans in an address that she expects “approval from the federal government for a million barrel a day pipeline to our west coast” with no mention of Indigenous consent or rights.

That could prove to be overly optimistic, given that one of the most pro-industry First Nations on the coast also opposes a new oil pipeline.

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The Haisla Nation, no longer a CFN member but whose traditional lands encompass the Douglas Channel and the delta of the Kitimat River, have in recent years invested heavily in Liquefied Natural Gas. The Nation is currently developing the Cedar LNG project on its territory, which promises to be a major economic boost for the small coastal community. Despite this, they too have long opposed any oil transportation on the coast.

Chief Councillor Nyce explained to DeSmog in an interview that projects which involve new oil tankers navigating the coastal waters represent a line that the Haisla will never cross, because the potential damage to local fishing livelihoods and access to ocean sustenance, which many in her community still rely on, is too great a risk.

“We are very disappointed that the government of Canada has committed with Alberta to explore the feasibility of an oil pipeline to the north,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “Basically, they declared that this project is of national interest and without any engagement whatsoever with Indigenous people across the province or along the coast.”

The logic of their opposition isn’t hard to understand. To Nyce, an LNG tanker sinking in the Douglas Channel would be terrible, but wouldn’t be an existential threat to the community. The same can’t be said of an oil tanker sinking and wiping out the Haisla Nation’s ability to fish and feed itself. That, says Nyce, “would be catastrophic for us.”

Around the same time Carney was meeting with CFN, his former Chief Of Staff Marco Mendicino stated that a key goal for the federal Liberals is “to grow our oil production, as complicated as that may be when it comes to our relationship with the climate and First Nations groups.” 

But as DeSmog’s interview with Nyce makes clear, the Haisla are standing firm.

“We’ve Been Down This Road Before”

As the sun set on the town of Kitimat in Northwest, B.C. in April 2014, dozens of people gathered outside town hall to hear the results of a plebiscite that would signal the community’s support or opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil pipeline and supertanker project along the Douglas Channel on the north coast of B.C.

As the results were read out, 60-40 in opposition of the project, the crowed erupted with cheers and sighs of relief. Members of the Haisla Nation, from Kitimaat Village, just across the bay at the top of the Douglas Channel, were not included in the vote. They showed up anyway, pounding thunderous drums in support of their neighbours’ efforts to keep the channel oil free. 

“Enbridge and the government really don’t understand what happened here tonight, not just here in Kitimat but the entire Northwest,” said Gerald Amos, a former Chief Councillor of the Haisla Nation. “What we witnessed was a community building exercises that should scare the shit out of them.” 

More than 10 years on that sentiment hasn’t wavered. 

In a call with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith the day before she signed the MOU with Mark Carney, Haisla Chief Councillor and Mayor of Kitimat Phil Germuth reiterated their determination to never support oil transportation through the Douglas Channel. 

“We’ve been down this road before,” Nyce said in an interview. “We’ll go down this road again to ensure that we are heard and understood about what we value on the coast and why we just aren’t ever going to accept a pipeline to our shore. We take all our food from the Douglas Channel and…a spill on our waterway would be catastrophic for us.”

Federal and provincial leaders appear to now be better at appreciating the Haisla’s concerns. Premier Smith announced in late January that Kitimat, part of the community home to the Haisla, is no longer an option for the proposed pipeline. The shipping route, she explained, would be “too complex.”

Roots Of The Oil Tanker Ban

For more than 50 years, oil export on B.C.’s North Coast has been debated ad nauseam. In the 1970s, an oil ports inquiry determined that the waters off the North and Central Coast were too unpredictable for oil transportation and too ecologically sensitive to the risks from an oil spill. 

Since then, a voluntary exclusion zone has been in place, supported by every First Nation on the coast, including the Haisla.

The Haisla’s opposition to oil transportation deepened during the Northern Gateway era. When Enbridge proposed twin pipelines to bring bitumen to Kitimat for shipment across the Pacific, Haisla leaders joined a broad Indigenous and environmental coalition that opposed tanker traffic and pipeline corridors through Northern B.C. The nation filed legal challenges, participated in public hearings, and mobilized local opposition. 

In 2010, Coastal First Nations formally banned oil tankers through their territories, but since the late 1970s, there has been a voluntary oil tanker exclusion zone, which governments and companies have long adhered to.

The Northern Gateway project was eventually abandoned, after a Federal Court of Appeal overturned the project’s approval due to the government’s failure to adequately consult with First Nations. Since then, the Haisla’s position hasn’t changed, as they have repeatedly signaled that oil-by-tanker is not acceptable in their territory.

In 2019 the federal Liberal government of Justin Trudeau enacted the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which formalized the ban on oil tankers through northern waters.

Why Haisla Sees Oil as a Bigger Threat Than LNG

Chief Councilor Nyce, who took office in 2025, has been one of the Haisla’s most visible spokespeople during this most recent wave of proposals. In a joint statement issued with the District of Kitimat following the call with Premier Danielle Smith, she highlighted the community’s long-standing rejection of an oil pipeline and supertanker port through Haisla territory. Chief Councillor Nyce says this position reflects the lived memory of how oil and marine accidents can devastate subsistence, livelihoods, and culture that the Haisla still depend on.

In 2016, for example, the Nathan E. Stewart, a tugboat, ran aground near Bella Bella on the traditional territory of the Heiltsuk, a CFN member. Over 110,000 liters of diesel were spilled, which has had a lasting impact on clam beds there that haven’t been harvested since.

But Chief Councillor Nyce says the Haisla are not against development, citing the nation’s support for LNG Canada and the construction of its own Cedar LNG project. 

“We have found that with the development of LNG facilities on our shores, we feel that is a fit that works with our values,” said Chief Nyce. “The transportation of LNG on our waterways doesn’t pose a high risk to our food source so we’re supportive of that.”

As pressure mounts on the federal government to support Alberta’s efforts to build a new oil pipeline to the west, one stipulation may throw a wrench in their plans— First Nations consent—which the Haisla, and several other First Nations say they will never give.

“They’re hoping that Indigenous people will buy into the pipeline as equity owners along the way,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “But we weren’t included in that conversation between the premier [of Alberta] and our prime minister at all. We were not engaged in any way shape or form. And I feel like that was a huge signal of disrespect from both of them to not include the leaders who will be affected along the coast that they’re proposing.”

In early December, the Conservative Party put forward a motion in the House of Commons to force the governing Liberals to vote on building an oil pipeline to the north coast. The motion outlined part of the MOU brokered by Carney with Alberta, but excluded language regarding Alberta’s commitment to lowering methane emissions, industrial carbon pricing, and respecting Indigenous rights.

However, one notable vote in support of an oil pipeline to the north coast came from Conservative MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, Ellis Ross. 

Ross, a rookie MP, is also a former Haisla Chief Councillor who opposed Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project more than a decade ago, citing concerns about remediation if an oil spill occurred in Haisla territory. “There’s no real way to pick this product up out of a marine environment,” Ross said in 2013. 
 
 Although Ross voted in favor of the Conservative motion supporting the pipeline, he is still facing criticism from First Nations and constituencies about his lack of clarity on the issue. 
 
 Despite Ross’s apparent support for an oil pipeline to the North Coast, First Nations are digging in and preparing to fight a potential proposal at all costs. And after years of building consensus among First Nations and communities along the North Coast to support LNG development, Nyce points out that the notion of forcing through an oil pipeline has already damaged government relations with First Nations. This could impact future negotiations of developments that require First Nations consent. 
 
 “They’ve taken a major step back, in my opinion, in terms of the relationship with First Nations with this announcement,” said Chief Councillor Nyce. “It makes no reference in the MOU to the need for Indigenous consent for the pipeline to go ahead, and that is completely unacceptable.”

The post Why the Haisla Nation Is Fine With LNG But Not Mark Carney’s New Oil Pipeline appeared first on DeSmog.

Nigel Farage is preparing to fly more than 3,000 miles from his UK constituency to address an anti-climate U.S. think tank with close ties to Donald Trump, DeSmog can report.

For an estimated 12 hours’ work on Saturday (7 March), the Reform UK leader will collect £27,856.88 from Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax lobby group based in Washington D.C. that has vowed “to work closely with President Trump and his team in advance of the 2026 mid-term elections”.

Farage’s latest transatlantic trip, published this week in the register of financial interests, comes days after Reform goes up against Labour and the Green Party at Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election, and two months ahead of UK local elections in May. 

He will be addressing a powerful U.S. group that in the 2024 election helped raise $163 million (£120 million) for Republican candidates. 

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The Club for Growth’s president told Fox News in November that as the country looks toward the mid-terms, his group “is very aligned with President Trump, and we’re especially in these contested races, we’re going to help him win”.

Farage has repeatedly been criticised for spending minimal time in Clacton, Essex, where he was elected as an MP in July 2024. As DeSmog has reported, he mentioned his constituency in parliament just four times during his first year in the role.

The former Brexit Party leader has also come under fire for his lucrative trips abroad — often to give speeches to right-wing groups close to Trump. DeSmog revealed last month that since his election, Farage had made at least seven trips to cheerlead for Trump or attend events associated with the U.S. president, paid for by wealthy donors.

These trips are on top of Farage’s base MP salary of £93,000. He also receives £4,000 a-month for his column with the Daily Telegraph, and more than £300,000 a year as a presenter at GB News.

“Farage’s world tour goes on and on,” said Charlene Pink, campaigns manager at legal advocacy group the Good Law Project. “If you really want to represent Clacton, shouldn’t you actually spend some time there?”

Farage and Club for Growth did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

Green Party MP Siân Berry said the trip “sheds a harsh light on where Nigel Farage’s priorities truly lie”.

“Not in Clacton with his constituents facing poverty and cuts, but in Washington DC with think tanks which support tax cuts for the mega rich, and will pay him the same as many people’s yearly salary for one speech.”
 
 Farage’s Clacton constituency is one of the most deprived in England, and has one of the highest risks of flooding, which has been made worse by climate change. 

Anti-Climate Views

Farage’s latest U.S. host, Club for Growth, focuses its lobbying on promoting free-market policies, lower taxes and deregulation. 

As Reform leader, Farage has promised to cut taxes and regulation for business if elected to government, including net zero policies.

Club for Growth has previously sought to undermine climate policies, and in 2018, called on Trump to exit the Paris Climate Agreement.
 
In a 2020 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Scott Parkinson, vice president of government affairs for the Club for Growth, argued against attempts to make the Republicans more climate-friendly.   
 
The party should not succumb to a “Green New Deal Light”, Parkinson said, but instead “continue to work with principled conservatives who reject climate alarmism and fight for energy and environmental policies based on sound economic principles”.

Last year, Club for Growth released an advert — which aired on Fox News — targeting Republican Senator Kevin Cramerafter he stated he would oppose President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” because he supported Biden era green energy subsidies. 

According to analysis, Trump’s legislation would add an extra seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere between 2025 and 2030.

Additional reporting by Geoff Dembicki

The post Nigel Farage Paid £27,000 to Speak at Pro-Trump U.S. Think Tank appeared first on DeSmog.

The European Union’s package of major corporate environment and sustainability laws was years in the making — and has just been quietly gutted.

A debate that reshaped corporate Europe unfolded almost entirely within Brussels policy circles. Millions of Europeans who believe climate action should be prioritised and favour greater corporate accountability never realized the regulations were under threat. 

This should prompt serious reflection among those of us who believe that the climate and human rights focus of the regulations was deadly serious, but that support among politicians was not.

The so-called “Omnibus” rollback — a regulatory rationalisation ascribed to competitiveness concerns amid pressure from the United States – has exempted 90 percent of Europe’s companies from climate reporting. In parallel, supply chain reporting has been seriously watered down and postponed until the end of the decade.

The overturned rules included mandatory reporting by most EU companies of their impact on climate change, and how environmental dangers could affect their business. They also forced companies selling products on the continent to report on child and forced labour issues, as well as potentially dangerous working conditions in their international supply chains.

In today’s economy, corporate lobbyists seize moments of regulatory weakness to ram home anti-growth or relative competitiveness arguments that instantly gather financial and political support.

Indeed, the printer ink had barely dried on the official publication of the EU Omnibus — finalised this month — before companies started attacking the EU’s 20-year-old Emissions Trading System (ETS) carbon pricing regime on similar international competition grounds.

If we don’t quickly digest the lessons of the Omnibus debacle, sterner tests will come as populists challenge for power across the bloc. 

Why Was the Rollback Invisible?

Why was the European public largely unaware of such a huge regulatory rollback?

The reason is that it took place in a legacy media vacuum. No major polling organisation measured citizen awareness. The BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel barely — if at all — covered the vote. 

Further, how can we support and defend policies when we hide them behind letter jumbles like CSRD, SFDR, CSDDD — acronyms that mean nothing to the public? (The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Sustainability Finance Disclosure Regulation, and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, respectively.)

Fluency in Brussels acronyms becomes a political liability when success requires public mobilisation. 

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Campaigns succeed with vivid phrases that citizens quickly understand. Surveys consistently show that large numbers of Europeans support corporate accountability when it’s described in plain language. Germany’s “Supply Chain Law” campaign gathered over 200,000 supporters by using a clear, native-language label.

No comparable EU-wide branding effort for the sustainable finance regulations emerged. Defenders of the EU sustainability rules never attempted an equivalent translation.

By contrast, industry lobbyists framed their arguments with accessible language such as “simplification” and “cutting red tape,” while pushing the convenient elements of the Draghi report on EU competitiveness.  Advocates countered with “transposition deadlines,” “ESRS requirements,” and “regulatory coherence.” The contrast was decisive.

Post-defeat reflection on this communications failure has been nearly non-existent.

Green Groups: Bureaucratised and Compromised? 

Typically, the rallying call to voters on environmental and rights regulations comes from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In the case of the EU climate and sustainability Omnibus, more than 360 NGOs and other civil society organisations signed a coalition statement against the “disastrous” and “dangerous” deregulation.

Over the decades, many European climate and human rights groups have evolved into Brussels-based policy shops that are staffed by lawyers and technical experts fluent in EU procedure, but which seem to be relatively poorly equipped for mass public and political campaigning.

Their efforts produced no mass protests, no breakthrough petitions, and no broad public mobilisation. 

Some NGO funding structures appear to reinforce this limitation. Major foundations often restrict grants against “political or partisan activities,” while EU funding frameworks have introduced reputational-risk benchmarks that discourage confrontational advocacy. Funders also often seek short-term results to long-term problems that require deep, structural change, not “hope-for-the-best” strategy thinking. 

A coalition spanning 27 countries that relies on consensus decision-making could not move quickly. The NGOs deployed the only tools their structures supported: letters, technical briefings, and procedural complaints. The limitation was not a strategic choice; it was institutional. 

Big-spending corporate lobbyists, meanwhile, began organising months before public announcements on the Omnibus were made. In addition, the accelerated legislative timeline of the Omnibus compressed the opposition response time from multiple years to less than one, leaving opponents flat-footed. 

ExxonMobil alone is reported to have had more than 25 meetings with the European Commission to lobby against the CSDDD, and allegedly threatened to withhold $20bn in renewables spending in Europe if it was not rolled back.

We hear there have been reflections by major NGOs on what went wrong. To stop mistakes from recurring, the publication of these learnings is essential.

Why Doesn’t Capital Defend Itself?

Institutional investors representing €6.6 trillion in assets had strong financial incentives to oppose the Omnibus. Their risk analysis was clear: Stranding of major fossil-fuel assets would likely accelerate without transition planning; weakened disclosure rules would leave investors short of necessary climate information; regulatory uncertainty would stall long-term investment; and Europe would forfeit advantages in green technology. 

Citizens’ pensions and long-term savings could face potential portfolio-wide losses if systemic climate risks go unmanaged. 

Investors wrote detailed letters explaining these dangers. 

Then they watched the regulations collapse. 

They did not mobilize beneficiaries, fund public campaigns, or coordinate with the 362 NGOs in the field. The UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, the huge investor environment, sustainability and governance (ESG) coalition, could only muster a hundred or so of its 5,000-plus investors to sign a letter warning against a serious unravelling of the regulations. Many of the heavyweight investors in its ranks weren’t there.

The failure reveals a deeper structural problem: Even when capital’s interests align with regulation, financial institutions often lack the political capacity and institutional mechanisms to defend those interests against coordinated opposition.

Why Didn’t Progressive Business and Labour Fight?

Allies with different tools and constituencies struggled to convert shared positions into effective action.

Eighty-eight companies — including Unilever, Mars, Nestlé, Ferrero, DP World, and Primark — signed letters opposing the rollback and acknowledged that customers demanded consistent sustainability standards.

Why didn’t they also launch consumer campaigns, threaten relocation, withdraw from trade associations backing deregulation, or apply coordinated market pressure?

Competitive dynamics discouraged unilateral action by business, and company executives feared appearing overtly political during an ESG backlash. Meanwhile, trade associations often lobbied in the opposite direction.

Trades unions showed similar restraint. Despite representing tens of millions of workers, major confederations limited their involvement largely to signing coalition letters.

Unions excel at domestic workplace negotiations but often struggle with international supply chain issues and EU-level regulatory processes. When industry framed the debate as “regulation kills jobs,” unions faced an apparent dilemma between global labour protections and local employment security. 

Did the Regulation Work?

Businesses and investors respond to clear regulatory signals. They rarely get out ahead of politics or the market without a strong policy or pricing foundation to lean on.

One of the overarching responses we’ve heard from business and finance professionals to the Omnibus policy rollback is that the EU regulatory approach in its Action Plan on green and sustainable finance suffered from a “first principles” problem, skewing heavily towards bureaucratic solutions for policy or incentives problems. 

Many told us, for example, that the EU was not prepared to put the budget stimulus alongside hard regulations to seize the future green technology opportunity. Instead, they opted for a lower cost, weaker, reporting-led investment approach (more data encourages more finance) where actual green output (business R&D, investment flows) may be slow or unclear.

This risks creating a sort of Potemkin Village of climate and sustainability progress, because reporting and compliance solutions cannot replace market drivers such as incentives, infrastructure, or price signals.  

Some of these issues are being addressed, but they have been long in the amendment, despite concerns being raised.

To work, reporting frameworks require a clear, gradual shift in rules or pricing that can surmount competition barriers by underpinning market shifts.

Without it, data collection and research are costly and lack an underlying economic “materiality” (policy push, pricing, time-horizon). They quickly become a comparative drag.

The addition of important but complicated regulations, like supply chain reporting, then gets scapegoated as a further cost to EU companies in globally competitive markets. Bureaucratic overreach is easily lobbied against on competitiveness grounds. Policy row-back then becomes itself highly disruptive, creating a cycle of negativity.

Rationalising data points for corporate reporting and focusing, for example, on the biggest corporate CO2 emitters, as the Omnibus proposes, are not in themselves problematic reforms.  

But it is vital to ensure that policy is smart, joined-up, backed by developments in the real economy, competitive, and road-tested for outcome. 

This will be key to embedding regulations that align with the capital spending decisions that companies are already taking (according to EU data) as a result of the EU’s green taxonomy for sustainable activities.

How Should We Understand the Authoritarian-Fossil Fuel Alliance? 

The Omnibus was not a result of routine corporate lobbying. It reflected a broader geopolitical alignment.

Corporate actors, political movements, and transnational advocacy networks converged around shared economic and ideological interests. Months before public announcement, extensive lobbying campaigns began, leveraging substantial financial resources to coordinate messaging across institutions.

This alignment shifted the terrain from a conventional policy dispute to a power asymmetry.

Civil society coalitions and institutional investors faced opponents with larger budgets and stronger political backing. Investor inaction and NGO limitations become more understandable in this context: The imbalance was structural, not incidental.

We need to reflect deeply on this and what it means for EU sustainability regulations. 

Europe’s Own Leverage: What Can Still Work?

The Omnibus outcome is not final. The EU rules can be improved and made to work with the right public and business support, political will, and technical know-how.

Member states can move ahead independently, setting stronger national standards like Germany’s Supply Chain Law, which companies must meet to access their markets. The EU can lean in to sustainability initiatives via issues of global security, energy transition, and justice.

The economic momentum favours transition: Renewable energy capacity continues to expand and market trends are rewarding low-carbon shifts.

Practical paths forward include coordinated member-state regulation, economic-sovereignty instruments tied to market access, judicial challenges, cross-sector coalitions among cities and businesses, and clearer public narratives that link sustainability to competitiveness and security.

Europe’s regulatory influence remains significant when it acts decisively. Large markets can still set de facto global standards. But to get there we need to start answering these hard questions.

The post How Europe’s Climate and Sustainability Rules Were Shredded While Citizens Remained in the Dark appeared first on DeSmog.

The Alberta electricity company Capital Power, which is developing a large new AI data centre in the province powered by natural gas, lobbied the federal Mark Carney government dozens of times last year to eliminate clean energy regulations, DeSmog has learned.

These regulations were subsequently dropped from a fossil fuel accord that the prime minister signed with the government of Alberta last November, allowing large new data centres fuelled by gas turbines to proceed.

“We’ve got a new paradigm that allows us to look at growth capital” for Canadian gas-powered AI projects, Capital Power CEO Avik Dey said in reaction to the Carney government announcing it would suspend the regulations.

The Edmonton-based power company communicated with the government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney close to 40 times between the time Carney was elected in April 2025, and the signing of the Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), in November 2025, according to federal lobbying records analyzed by DeSmog.

The MOU is an agreement between Canada’s federal government and that of the Province of Alberta wherein the federal government agreed in principle to support a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast, as well as special treatment for the province on a range of federal government climate policies.

The MOU lists increasing oil production in Alberta as its first objective, while also suspending Alberta’s Clean Electricity Regulations and eliminating the Oil and Gas Emissions Cap. The same agreement also proposed the development of AI data centres in Alberta, a potential new use for the province’s considerable gas resources.

That agreement has been widely criticized by environmentalists and Indigenous communities.

The term ‘data centre’ appears at least 25 times in notes from Capital Power’s interactions with the federal government, while the term ‘emissions’ appears 17 times, and ‘clean energy regulations’ and ‘net zero’ appear each at least 14 times.

Records show the company has advocated specifically for the development of gas-fired power plants, policies and programs related to the development of AI data centres, and “the energy source(s) required for those data centres to be successful.”

Environment and Climate Change Canada press secretary Keean Nembhard wrote in an emailed statement to DeSmog that the government’s clean energy regulations continue “to apply in all provinces and territories and will require electricity-generating units to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.”

However, Nembhard added, “data centres with their own power generation, not connected to the commercial grid, would not be covered by the [regulation].”  

Capital Power didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Federal clean energy regulations, which aimed to kickstart the energy transition by mandating a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power generation by 2035, were developed under the previous Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Nembhard confirmed that Capital Power Corporation, one of Alberta’s largest energy generators, was included in that process.

“Over a two-year period from 2022-2024, our government undertook extensive engagement with provincial and territorial governments, industry, such as Capital Power, utilities and others,” Nembhard explained.

But Capital Power wasn’t necessarily happy with the regulations. In November 2023, the company blamed the Trudeau government’s environmental regulations for why it wasn’t pursuing any new gas-fired power plants. At the time, Capital Power’s CEO said Trudeau’s then-proposed clean electricity regulations had made investments in gas plants “unviable”. As a result, Dey later explained, Capital Power turned its attention towards expansion in the United States.

Lobbying records show that Capital Power communicated twelve times on record with the federal government in the last year of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s term in office.

But after Carney took office, the company’s lobbying seemed to accelerate. In total, Capital Power communicated with the Carney government 37 times from when Carney took office until the time the MOU was announced.

Duff Conacher, director of Democracy Watch, a Canadian corporate responsibility watchdog group, notes that because of Canada’s lax lobbying laws, it’s possible the actual number of times Capital Power lobbied the Carney government was much higher.

“Many lobbyists are not required to disclose their lobbying,” said Conacher in a statement to DeSmog. “At the federal level, disclosure is not required if a company is lobbying about the enforcement of a law or regulation, or if the lobbyist is working as an employee for a business and lobbying less than 20 percent of their work time, or if the lobbyist is not paid for the lobbying.

“Other loopholes in the requirements mean that letters, emails, texts and other communications are not required to be disclosed,” he added.

The company’s lobbying of the Carney government, including multiple instances of communication between Dey and Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin, focused on developing new gas-fired power plants, federal climate policies, the Clean Electricity Regulations, and the development of large data centres in Canada. In addition, Capital Power’s lobbying effort focused on the federal ministries that regulate resource development, data centres, and emissions. Environment and Climate Change Canada was lobbied nine times while Natural Resources Canada was lobbied eight times.

Twelve days after Carney signed the MOU, Dey was interviewed by Bloomberg saying that because Carney relaxed environmental regulations, it was now possible to build new gas-fired power plants to support AI data centres.

The next day — December 10, 2025 — the Globe and Mail reported Capital Power had signed its own binding memorandum of understanding to supply an unnamed AI data centre developer with 250 megawatts of electricity. The Canada-Alberta MOU “paved the way” to lock in long-term contracts for AI- data centre related gas-generation, the paper reported.

Cashing In On An AI Gas Boom

Prior to his appointment as chief executive of Capital Power, Dey worked for the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), where he served as Managing Director, Head of Energy & Resources. As previously reported by DeSmog, the CPPIB is heavily invested in the development of fossil fuels in the United States, particularly as new power sources to power new AI infrastructure.

The AI boom is itself driving a massive development of gas power generation: over 1,000 gigawatts worldwide, a quarter of which is in the United States. Though AI data centres can be powered by any form of electricity, the gas industry has marketed gas power as cheap, efficient, and reliable.

The environmental and public health consequences of the gas-powered AI data centre build-out are enormous, however. A recent Cornell University study reveals that, at the current rate of growth, AI will add 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the equivalent of adding between 5 and 10 million cars to U.S. roadways.

Experts have been warning for some time that the AI build-out — supported by U.S. President Donald Trump as much as Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — will severely compromise climate change goals and entrench fossil fuel use for another generation.

Yet Nembhard insisted that the Carney government is still committed to achieving “a net-zero electricity grid by 2050” in Alberta and across the country. Federal policymakers will only suspend the application of clean energy regulations in Alberta

“Upon completion of a new carbon pricing agreement and factoring all other measures to the satisfaction of both parties, including on net zero electricity and pursuant to an equivalency agreement.”

Yet this isn’t the first time that the Carney government has taken policy cues from the fossil fuel and AI sectors. Last October, the prime minister directly referenced in a speech the organization Build Canada, which is led by and associated with tech and oil and gas billionaires.

“It’s great to see ideas shared by the Build Canada community get taken up by government,” a spokesperson explained to DeSmog at the time. 

The post Carney Allowed Gas-powered AI Data Centres After Lobbying From Alberta Energy Company appeared first on DeSmog.

For the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted oil companies’ request to weigh in on whether climate accountability lawsuits are preempted by federal law — setting the stage for a battle that could determine if dozens of similar cases are allowed to move toward trial.

The decision means the court will hear arguments from ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to overturn an earlier ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which decided that a case brought by Boulder, Colorado, could move ahead in state court. You can read more about the companies’ petition in ExxonKnews and DeSmog’s previous coverage.

Oil companies have previously and repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to take up issues in the lawsuits, which point to growing evidence that the companies spent decades deceiving the public about climate change and blocked the transition to renewable energy. Since a narrow procedural ruling in 2021, the companies were rejected each time.

But two factors were different this time: the Trump administration urged the justices to take the oil companies’ petition in Boulder’s case, and Justice Samuel Alito participated in discussion of the case, despite recusing himself in the past.

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Alito owns up to $15,000 in stock in ConocoPhillips and between $15,000 and $50,000 in Phillips 66. Those companies are defendants in other cities’ and states’ climate lawsuits, whose fate could be determined by a ruling in Boulder’s case.

Alito clearly acknowledged his conflict of interest in the past, because he recused himself from considering several other appeals related to the climate accountability lawsuits — including a nearly identical petition in Honolulu’s case, which the Supreme Court rejected last year. He even recused himself in Boulder’s case when it was brought before the high court on a jurisdictional question in 2023.

Back then, Exxon’s lawyers argued that Boulder’s case was an “ideal vehicle” for Supreme Court review because it “involves a smaller group of defendants and thus is less likely than those [other climate deception] cases to present recusal issues.” Translation: the companies that posed financial conflicts for some justices were not parties in this specific case. (Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a longtime lawyer for Shell and had a leadership role at the American Petroleum Institute).

Alito has not always recused from cases that would impact companies in which he has financial investments. When oil-funded Republican attorneys general petitioned the court to shut down similar state lawsuits in which ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were defendants, he not only participated in reviewing the request, but also joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissent arguing the court should have taken it.

But Alito did recuse himself from a case the Supreme Court heard in January about oil companies’ liability for coastal damage in Louisiana, even though ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were not direct defendants in that case, either. That was because ConocoPhillips is the parent company of Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Company, a defendant in the lawsuit in the lower courts, but not part of the oil companies’ arguments before the Supreme Court.

According to his 2024 financial disclosure, Alito also invested up to $100,000 in a high-dividend yield that listed Exxon as its third largest holding as of January.

In 2023, the Supreme Court published an unenforceable code of conduct which stated that a justice should recuse from hearing a case if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” including because that justice or their spouse has “a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.”

The code qualifies that “ownership in a mutual or common investment fund that holds securities is not a ‘financial interest’ in such securities unless the judge participates in the management of the fund.” It also says that ““the rule of necessity may override the rule of disqualification” — in other words, if a tie-breaking vote is needed, a judge with conflicts of interest may be asked to participate.

Lisa Graves, executive director of national investigative watchdog group True North Research, said it was “no coincidence” that the court took up Exxon’s plea. Between Alito’s financial ties to oil companies, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father’s long employment for the oil industry, Clarence Thomas’s relationship with the Koch brothers, and the influence of Leonard Leo, who helped pick many of the justices on today’s court and has worked hand in hand with Koch networks, the court is “captured with the help of carbon cash,” Graves said.

Exxon and Suncor have also had help from the Trump administration and the GOP in getting their petition before the court. After an executive order from the President instructing the Department of Justice to block the cases, the DOJ submitted an unsolicited brief in support of the companies’ request. More than 100 Republican members of Congress also filed a brief on behalf of the companies, asking the justices to protect the industry from cases that “would restructure the American energy industry if not bankrupt it altogether.”

Big Oil and Leonard Leo muster their forces

As some climate lawsuits have inched closer to trial, the fossil fuel industry has gotten more desperate to stop them. “I have to win every case that is brought,” said Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a November panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal advocacy group funded in part by fossil fuel interests and co-chaired by Leonard Leo. “They just need to find one they can get through — and that’s why it is so important for the Supreme Court to take this case.”

The U.S. oil lobby and their allies in state and federal government — along with the same Leo network that helped stack the court — have been ramping up pressure on lawmakers to pass a “liability waiver,” or a bill that would immunize the fossil fuel industry from such lawsuits. Last week, U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) said she was working to draft such a bill.

At the state level, lawmakers in Utah and Oklahoma have introduced bills that would shield fossil fuel companies from climate liability; Utah’s is now awaiting the governor’s signature. Those bills appear to draw from a model bill published by Consumer Defense, a Leonard Leo-linked project, the New York Times reported. Alliance for Consumers, another Leo-tied project, has also been behind other broader state bills that would limit corporate liability. The Leo network has also pressured the Supreme Court to step into the climate accountability cases on behalf of oil companies.

The DOJ has also attempted, unsuccessfully, to preemptively block Michigan and Hawaiʻi from filing climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.

“It’s a bad sign for sure” for the plaintiffs that the justices took the case, said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School. But, Parenteau noted, the court may not end up ruling on the preemption question at all. In their decision to grant review, the justices said they would consider the question of whether the court has jurisdiction over the case, considering there has not yet been any final decision from a lower court on its merits.

While the Trump administration has backed the industry in fighting the lawsuits, its EPA also recently repealed the Endangerment Finding, the scientific finding behind federal greenhouse gas regulation in the United States. That decision could undermine the companies’ preemption argument and open up a new front for litigation against the fossil fuel industry.

Boulder’s lawsuit argues that the companies violated state laws like public nuisance, trespass and conspiracy, among others, and should help communities pay to adapt and recover from increasingly devastating and expensive climate disasters.

“The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was correct in holding that these state law claims for in-state injuries can continue in state court,” said Michelle Harrison of legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International, who serves as co-counsel for Boulder. “Exxon’s ever-evolving arguments as to why they should be immunized from such claims are baseless.”

Exxon is represented in the Boulder case by Paul Weiss, a law firm that has worked to defend a wide range of corporate clients from liability and, last year, cut a deal to work for Trump. The firm’s longtime chairman recently resigned after his name appeared multiple times in emails with Jeffrey Epstein.

This month, the firm notified courts in Connecticut, Hawaiʻi, Maine and Washington state that they would no longer be representing Exxon in pending climate lawsuits there.

The post Supreme Court Will Hear Exxon’s Effort to Crush Climate Lawsuits appeared first on DeSmog.

An anti-net zero lobby group with ties to the Conservative Party held an event in the United States to raise funds for its pro-fossil fuel agenda, DeSmog can report. 

Net Zero Watch (NZW), which campaigns against net zero targets and renewable energy, put on an evening panel on “Net Zero and Freedom” in New York on Thursday (February 19), where speakers attacked the UK’s climate targets and praised President Donald Trump’s energy policies. 

They also appealed to the U.S. audience for “financial support”, and claimed partial credit for the Conservatives’ net zero U-turn. 

This is the latest example of climate deniers working across the Atlantic. DeSmog has previously reported on how U.S. groups close to President Trump are building ties with allies in Europe to push their anti-green agenda.

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Net Zero Watch is the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a London-based think tank founded by Tory peer Nigel Lawson, which has described CO2 emissions as a “benefit to the planet”, and campaigns for new fossil fuel extraction in the UK. 

The event last week, attended by DeSmog, was held at the swanky Penn Club in midtown Manhattan, and appears to be the group’s first to take place in the United States since its rebrand in 2021. 

It was hosted by the American Friends of the GWPF, a U.S. group which has received funding from oil interests, and donated large sums to its UK affiliate.  

“It has been clear for many years that Net Zero Watch has been acting against the best interests of the British households and businesses by promoting climate change denial,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment at the London School of Economics. 

“But this shows that is now part of a campaign to make the UK more dependent on fossil fuel markets that are controlled by the United States, the world’s biggest producer of both oil and natural gas.”

The burning of fossil fuels makes up the vast majority of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions — and climate scientists warn a rapid phaseout is essential to avoid the very worst impacts of climate change. 

‘Things Are Great’

Drinks and canapés were circulated at the New York event, alongside a selection of Net Zero Watch policy papers. The group’s director Andrew Montford, GWPF advisor and former energy editor John Constable, and Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister and influential Tory backbench MP, all spoke at the event, which was attended by around 30 older men in suits. 

Baker, who lost his seat in the 2024 general election, was a director of the GWPF director between July 2021 and September 2022. He also ran the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, an anti-net zero caucus made up of backbench Conservative MPs which worked closely with the GWPF. 

In Montford’s remarks, he described net zero in the UK as a cautionary tale for the U.S., and praised Trump’s energy policies. Since his November 2024 re-election, Trump has slashed funding for climate research, dismantled support for wind and solar, and focused on “unleashing” oil and gas production. 

“Things are great here at the moment,” Montford said. “[U.S. Energy Secretary] Chris Wright’s doing a great job, and President Trump is sort of leading you in the right direction on energy.” 

Montford also appealed to the U.S. audience for funding. He said: “One of the reasons I’m here is that is to ask for if people can help us financially.” He described NZW as “a two-man team plus a lot of associates, but we punch well above our weight”. 

American Friends

The NZW event was hosted by Francis Menton, a New York-based retired lawyer who criticises climate policy on his blog Manhattan Contrarian. 

He opened the event by welcoming Trump’s recent scrapping of the 2009 “endangerment finding” — the U.S. government’s official policy that deemed greenhouse gases damaging to health and the environment. Menton said he and “a handful of people” had pursued this reversal for ten years. 

Menton is president and board member of the American Friends of GWPF, which has received significant funding from oil interests. 

In 2022, The Guardian revealed that American Friends of the GWPF had channeled more than $860,000 to the UK affiliate between 2018 and 2020, amounting to 45 percent of its funding for this period. 

This included money from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a U.S. oil dynasty with millions invested in ExxonMobil and Chevron, and from Donors Trust, which is funded by the Koch Industries oil family. 

Menton is a member of the CO2 Coalition, a U.S. group which describes CO2 as “plant food” and denies the link between emissions and global warming. The group received $662,000 from charities funded by the Koch Industries oil dynasty between 1997 and 2017.

The GWPF ended its formal ownership of NZW in 2024 after a Charity Commission review, but the groups continue to support each others’ work. 

The NZW website’s “support us” page says “readers in the USA may prefer to give to the American Friends of the GWPF.” 

Net Zero U-Turn

The U.S. event comes as UK climate policy is under renewed attack from Trump ally Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has pledged to scrap net zero, end support for renewable energy, and back new oil, gas and coal power. Reform is currently leading the polls at around 29 percent.

It is also being opposed by the Conservative Party, which under Kemi Badenoch has dropped its previous support for climate action, calling the UK’s 2050 net zero target “impossible” and pledging to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act. 

At the NZW event, Baker welcomed this development. He called net zero a “policy disaster which it seems likely will be repealed by the next centre-right government”, adding: “Kemi Badenoch the Conservative leader is committed to that, and the Reform party has also made similar commitments.”

During the Q&A, DeSmog asked if the panel was advising Reform UK. Baker replied that he was not, but took partial credit for Badenoch’s turn against net zero. 

He said: “No, I’ve said very plainly I won’t be doing so. But I’m pleased that Kemi has adopted the policy and certainly helped her and Claire Coutinho adopt it. I’m very clear that net zero is inimical to human freedom and our prosperity.”

As DeSmog has reported, Tory shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho recently endorsed three policy papers attacking climate policies, all produced by writers and organisations with ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two of the reports were by authors who have written for GWPF and NZW. 

Last week Coutinho appeared in a NZW social media video criticising the UK’s clean power agenda, in which she claimed that net zero would make Brits “poorer”. 

The claim, widely used by climate science deniers, is rejected by experts. In July 2025, the UK’s independent Office for Budget Responsibility concluded that reaching net zero is much more affordable than previously thought — and far less expensive than unchecked climate change. 

The Conservative Party, Net Zero Watch, GWPF and Steve Baker were all contacted for comment. 

The post Tory-Linked Climate Denial Group Seeks Funds in Trump’s America appeared first on DeSmog.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced last November he would support a massive new oil sands pipeline to the west coast, he presented the deal as a win for the climate alongside the economy.

As part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, his government agreed to help support construction of a $16.5 billion project designed to capture carbon emissions from the oil sands industry and then bury those emissions underground.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has a long track record of failed projects and missed targets worldwide and is considered a false climate solution by many experts and environmental advocates.

But Carney claimed at the time that the CCS project, advanced by the oil industry group Pathways Alliance, would “drive down our emissions.” A federal government backgrounder on the agreement stated that the technology would assist in “making Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity-produced barrels of oil in the world.”

The Carney government made this bold announcement about the climate potential of CCS while only having “very limited” data about how much the Pathways Alliance project would cost and whether it was technically feasible, according to Department of Finance briefing notes ahead of a September 2025 roundtable meeting in Edmonton that DeSmog obtained.

“The [Pathways] project is at a very early stage of development, with few front end engineering (FEED) studies done and initial cost estimates based on very limited project information,” read the notes, which were released following a public records request.

Despite the government’s knowledge gaps around carbon capture, Carney went ahead and made the technology central to his climate plan. And in exchange for Alberta agreeing to support carbon capture, his Liberal government signed off on a potential new west coast pipeline that could transport 1 million barrels of oil per day to Asian markets.

As part of that deal, Carney also axed a proposed emissions cap on the oil sands, a rollback that his government seems to have privately previewed to oil producers months before the MOU announcement.

“We welcome suggestions on how to ensure emission reductions are achieved in the oil and gas sector, and in the oil sands in particular, without imposing a cap on production,” the notes read.

Asked by DeSmog about that specific discussion, a Department of Finance spokesperson explained in an emailed statement that the government “was seeking feedback from oil and gas companies who claimed that the proposed oil and gas emissions cap would cap production and be counter-productive to emissions reduction goals.” 

“The goal of the roundtable was to gather more information from key stakeholders across the energy sector in Edmonton about the pressing challenges they are facing,” the spokesperson added.

Pathways Alliance didn’t respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

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The briefing notes obtained by DeSmog were created to provide “speaking points” and background to Liberal Minister of Finance François-Philippe Champagne as he prepared for a September 2025 meeting with top oil and gas executives in Edmonton, Alberta.

The executives had been invited to provide input on the Carney government’s upcoming federal budget. “What are the most pressing challenges facing your sector?” Champagne planned to ask, along with “What top priorities would you like to see reflected in the next federal budget?”

This was part of a series of 50 roundtables led by cabinet officials in 27 cities across every Canadian province and territory. “These consultations are a staple of the annual budget process and the input received helped guide Budget 2025,” the spokesperson explained. 

Industry attendees at the event would include leaders from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Cenovus, Suncor, Imperial Oil, ARC Resources, Tourmaline Oil, Enbridge, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, TC Energy, Pembina Pipeline, Southbow, and TransAlta.

Champagne was instructed in the briefing notes that the executives would request substantial changes to Canada’s climate regulations at the meeting. The briefing notes reference an open letter published by Canadian oil and gas CEOs in March, where they’d demanded a “rapid, dramatic regulatory restructuring to enable investment in critical oil and gas infrastructure across Canada.”

The finance minister was prepared to reassure them. His Liberal government was working to “boost investor confidence, speed up project development and strengthen the economy by increasing competition and productivity,” according to his speaking points.

He would assure Canada’s oil and gas industry that “the Government of Canada has taken ambitious actions to make sure the resource sector can further contribute to Canada’s economy.”

Limited Knowledge About Carbon Capture

The briefing notes stated that several executives set to attend the Edmonton meeting were members of the Pathways Alliance, which had launched in 2022 with a goal of achieving “net zero emissions by 2050” in Canada’s oil sands industry.

Despite running national ad campaigns touting carbon capture and sending delegates to COP climate summits, Pathways seemed to have made very little actual progress over the years on moving its proposed CCS project forward.

By the time the Edmonton meeting happened last fall, Pathways hadn’t yet begun “detailed engineering and design” on the project or undertaken any preliminary work including “clearing of right-of-ways and pipeline construction and commissioning.”

Yet in early November, the Carney government released its Budget 2025, which extended CCS tax credits by five years, now stretching from 2031 to 2035. “Updates will be provided in due course as work advances on the project,” the spokesperson wrote.

Later in November, however, despite lacking basic information about how the project would be funded and engineered, the Carney government assured the country that carbon capture would result in “some of the lowest carbon-intensity oil produced in the world.” 

Why was Carney so intent on a pipeline deal that hinged on financially uncertain and largely unproven climate technology?

According to the prime minister’s former Chief of Staff Marco Mendicino, climate has always been a secondary concern. A key goal for the Carney government, Mendicino explained at a Toronto conference in January, is “to increase our oil production.”

The post Carney Government Knew Carbon Capture Was ‘Very Limited,’ Docs Show appeared first on DeSmog.

Plans by the Donald Trump administration to fund right-wing groups in Europe have been slammed by policymakers and campaigners as an effort to “usurp European democracy”.

According to the Financial Times, the U.S. State Department plans to bankroll think tanks and charities in the UK and Europe which share President Trump’s agenda, with particular focus on blocking attempts to regulate U.S. social media platforms.

Daniel Freund, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Greens, told DeSmog that the funding had “one clear aim: to divide and destabilise Europe.”

“We must clearly name, criticise, and reject such foreign interference,” he added.

Sarah Rogers, U.S. under secretary of state for public diplomacy, is leading this effort, having visited the UK, France, and Italy in early December.

Her visit coincided with the publication of a new U.S. national security strategy, which called for “cultivating resistance” in Europe to liberal, democratic politics.

“The U.S. has a long history of covert manipulation of politics across the globe. But to see it happen in Europe is new, and we should be worried,” said Kenneth Haar of the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory. “Big Tech regulation is set to be the first testing ground of the new American way of imposing their will on Europe.”

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The new U.S. fund would be the latest attempt by Trump and his allies to thwart EU regulations. DeSmog last week reported on a gathering of pro-Trump groups in the European Parliament, during which they turned their fire on the EU’s Digital Safety Act, which aims to tackle the harms caused by social media.

Trump was re-elected in November 2024 following a $270 million donation from the owner of social media platform X Elon Musk, and received $1 million each from the heads of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for his inauguration fund.

The event in Brussels was attended by the Heritage Foundation, the radical right-wing think tank which drafted Project 2025 – the authoritarian, anti-climate blueprint for Trump’s second term.

The Heritage Foundation has been one of the key MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) groups attempting to influence European politics since Trump’s re-election.

As reported by DeSmog, the group gathered hardline conservative groups last year to discuss ideas for dismantling the EU. It also attempted to influence Albania’s election in favour of its conservative candidate in May 2025.

The group has been joined by the Heartland Institute, which has been leading the campaign to spread climate science denial across the UK and EU. The group claims to be advising Nigel Farage’s anti-climate party Reform UK, while it has been forging alliances with far-right parties and campaigners in an attempt to gain a foothold in Europe.

Both groups lobbied aggressively – and successfully – for the dilution of EU laws designed to hold large companies, including U.S. firms, to account for their environmental impacts. They also forcefully oppose the EU’s digital safety laws.

Raphael Kergueno, senior policy officer at Transparency International, said that the new pro-Trump fund adds to growing concern about MAGA’s influence over EU laws. 

“Transparency loopholes are allowing the MAGA movement’s illiberal organisations to usurp European democracy from the inside,” he said. “As a matter of urgency, the rules must be changed to compel them to register on the EU’s lobby register and declare their funding, so that their blatant attempts to bring authoritarianism to Europe can be scrutinised, and thwarted.”

Patrick ten Brink, secretary-general of the European Environmental Bureau, added: “The reporting in the Financial Times confirms what many civil society organisations have been warning about for some time: there is a coordinated effort to import US-style culture-war politics into Europe, using funding, think-tanks and so-called ‘charitable’ fronts to weaken democratic safeguards.

“Europe’s response should be clear-eyed and proportionate. Defending transparency, independent NGOs and evidence-based policymaking is essential to the EU’s democratic resilience and its ability to govern in the public interest. EU policymakers should take care not to weaken environmental and social protections or undermine public well-being in ways that ultimately serve external deregulation agendas.”

MAGA UK

MAGA’s influence is also being felt in the UK, where climate and digital safety regulations are likewise under fire.

Farage is a close Trump ally, stating repeatedly that he is the “bravest man”.

The Reform leader has also been helping to import the architects of Trump’s agenda into the UK, having urged the Heartland Institute to set up a branch in the UK and Europe.

As revealed by DeSmog, Farage has received £150,000 from his donors to attend pro-Trump events or cheerlead for his agenda since he was elected to Parliament in July 2024.

A new Reform-linked think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, was launched last year by James Orr, a close friend of U.S. vice president J.D. Vance and now a senior Reform advisor. The Centre for a Better Britain, set up by Reform donors, is reportedly seeking to raise millions from Trump backers.

Jordan Peterson speaks with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at ARC. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson

During her visit to the UK in December, head of the new U.S. fund, Sarah Rogers, was hosted at an event by the Prosperity Institute (formerly Legatum Institute). The conservative think tank is run by UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns right-wing broadcaster GB News, Farage’s principal employer.

The event related to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires U.S. social media companies to remove illegal content such as child pornography. Along with the EU’s DSA, the OSA has been attacked by the Trump administration for what it calls the “censorship” of Americans’ free speech.

Rogers spoke at the event alongside Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, and Conservative peer Toby Young, who runs the Free Speech Union, a conservative pressure group.

It is not clear which groups Rogers met with in France or Italy. In Washington D.C. in December she hosted Markus Frohnmaier, a Member of the German Parliament for the far-right Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) party, according to a post she shared on social media platform X.

The Legatum Group also helps to run the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network group led by Canadian activist Jordan Peterson. ARC has been a key platform for MAGA figures and far-right European politicians, with its latest London conference planned for this summer. 

Speakers at ARC events have included U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, and Republican donor and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Last year’s ARC event in London was also attended by several oil and gas executives.

“It is time to consider what can be done legally,” Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory said. “When it comes to China or Russia, there are measures in place to defend the public from undue influence. We really need to figure out quickly how the American threat can be handled effectively. 

Dieter Plehwe, an academic at the Berlin Social Science Center likewise called for stronger transparency laws, stating: “It would be wise to increase the opportunities for investigative journalists, academic researchers and the public at large to understand who is behind think tank and media campaigns.”

The post Trump Accused of Trying to ‘Divide and Destabilise’ Europe Through New MAGA Fund appeared first on DeSmog.

The Trump administration just employed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act to discourage coal plant closures in Colorado — repurposing measures initially intended to safeguard public health and prevent pollution to reboot the dirtiest, deadliest fossil fuel. 

Michael Hiatt, deputy managing attorney at the environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice, told DeSmog that the EPA’s action was not what the Clean Air Act intended. “In our view, it’s plainly illegal,” he said. 

Furthermore, Hiatt said the EPA’s move may have implications beyond Colorado, indicating that the agency could take similar actions that affect coal and gas plants elsewhere.

“It’s clearly EPA indicating a policy preference,” he said. “They are communicating that they’re not going to look favorably on future state plans that include coal or gas plant closures.”

As aging, inefficient coal plants barrel toward obsolescence across the U.S., the Trump administration seems dead-set on coming to their rescue. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy issued orders to keep five coal plants online past their planned retirement dates. The orders often came against their operators’ wishes and cost customers millions in the process. Federal officials, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, frequently cited increasing energy demands, including for artificial intelligence. Now, the EPA has stepped in.

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In late January, the EPA issued its final published rule rejecting Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, filed as part of longstanding Clean Air Act rules intended to increase visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. As part of the plan, Colorado had outlined its goal of closing its six remaining coal plants by 2031. Coal plants release multiple smog-forming pollutants that threaten the state’s outdoor recreation industry and harm human health. The utilities involved had voluntarily agreed to this target over the past decade. 

It could have been a routine approval. But at some point in 2025,  Colorado Springs’ city-owned utility told the EPA it no longer wanted to shut down the lone coal-fired generator at the Ray D. Nixon Power Plant, as initially proposed.

The EPA used that development to justify throwing out the entire plan, jeopardizing pollution controls and retirement timelines for industrial sites across the state — from fossil fuel plants and the state’s only oil refinery to the Denver International Airport. In its final rule, the EPA argued the single “forced closure” of a coal-fired unit showed Colorado hadn’t been careful to make sure its plan respected the constitutionally enshrined private property rights of energy providers.

“The state did not properly consider and explain whether the nonconsensual closure of Colorado Springs Utilities’ Nixon Unit 1 power plant would be an act of taking private property without compensation,” the agency wrote in a press release explaining its decision. “EPA legally cannot approve Colorado’s [plan].

Critics took issue with that assessment.

“Colorado had done such a very thorough job working with utilities, and those retirements were voluntarily proposed,” said Ulla Britt-Reeves, clean air program director at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. “So for EPA to come in and essentially say that Colorado was forcing those retirements is simply not true.”

Earthjustice’s Hiatt told DeSmog that the EPA’s decision was “unreasonable, irrational, and illegal under the Clean Air Act.”

He added that, “What this EPA action shows is this Trump administration taking an ideologically motivated stance that it is not going to do anything that might prove or even allow a coal plant to retire under its watch.”

RELATED: These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump.

Hiatt hopes the EPA’s broad disapproval in Colorado won’t impact the many other agreed-upon plant closures and pollution controls covered by the plan. But he expressed worry that the EPA’s action gives the state’s utilities and industrial operators an opportunity to “backtrack” on environmental commitments in the coming years.  

In a proposed rule issued in July, the EPA initially emphasized a different rationale for its pending decision: that closing the coal-fired unit at Nixon would threaten grid reliability — in large part due to a supposed surge in electricity demand, including from artificial intelligence. The agency accused Colorado of not taking grid reliability seriously. Under President Trump, the EPA has listed artificial intelligence (AI) development as one of the top priorities guiding its strategy, as well as restoring “American Energy Dominance,” which Trump has tied specifically to oil, coal, and natural gas.

“This Administration has found as a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy that power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand,” it wrote.

Throughout 2025, Trump administration officials, including DOE Secretary Wright, used a purported rise in energy demand driven by AI to justify fossil fuel expansion, and prevent scheduled coal plant retirements. A December 2025 analysis by DeSmog found that at least 15 coal plants pushed back their retirement dates since Trump took office — with plants often remaining open voluntarily due to projected data center demands, but sometimes due to DOE executive orders. After DeSmog’s story published, the DOE issued a flurry of new executive orders forcing additional coal generators to remain online, including plants in Indiana and Washington that were targeted for the first time.

RELATED: Q&A: Tech Billionaires’ AI Space Empire Fantasies Are ‘An Insidious Form of Climate Denial’

In its public comments, the State of Colorado argued it had in fact assessed reliability, in conjunction with utilities statewide, and that planned closures weren’t projected to contribute to an energy shortfall. 

“EPA cites nothing in the record regarding this alleged ‘rise in electricity demand’ or ‘resurgence of domestic manufacturing’ or even the ‘construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers,” the state’s Air Pollution Control Division wrote.“ The record before EPA … provides no basis to conclude that these issues materially affect Colorado or are impacted by the specific units with Closure Dates.” 

The EPA backtracked slightly in its final rule in January, insisting that grid reliability was not part of its legal determination — only private property considerations. And yet it seemed to warn Colorado against including power plant closures in any future plan, citing the rise in domestic manufacturing and “the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

“Power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand and a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy,” it wrote. “The EPA does not encourage electric generating facilities to close in the face of this energy demand.”

It added that “the EPA does not expect any state to encourage or force an electric generating facility to close in order to comply with the [Clean Air Act’s] regional haze second planning period requirements.” 

Earthjustice’s Hiatt said that statement shows EPA going beyond its disapproval of Colorado’s regional haze plan. “It’s difficult to say how this will play out,” he said, “but it does clearly indicate EPA’s policy preference —  they do not want to see coal or gas closures in regional haze plans.”

“There are a lot of still outstanding haze plans that this EPA needs to act on,” Britt-Reeves, of the National Parks Conservation Association, said. “Are they going to let good plans that actually reduce pollution be approved? That would a great place to go from here — but I don’t expect that that’s where this administration is heading.” She said the language in the final rule indicates that EPA may have “its sights on deregulating the rule itself, which is extremely concerning.”

An EPA spokesperson declined to provide comment or arrange an interview for this story. In a press release announcing its decision on Colorado’s haze plan, EPA cited “turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world” as part of its rationale.

But though EPA spoke of a “forced closure” of the Nixon plant, Colorado Springs Utilities had in fact voted to retire the plant voluntarily by December 31, 2029 — which Colorado had simply noted in its plan. In comments to DeSmog, Danielle Nieves, a spokesperson for Colorado Springs Utilities, confirmed that the utility had reversed course and asked EPA for “non-enforcement” at some point in 2025, years after the plan had been filed.

Matt Gerhart, a Sierra Club attorney, questioned whether it was appropriate for the EPA to disapprove an entire state plan based solely on an 11th-hour change of heart — a precedent that he said could give EPA an excuse to sit on plans it doesn’t like until it found some grounds for dismissal.  

“There’s nothing in EPA guidance that says what the state was supposed to do to guard against the hypothetical possibility that, five years later, a source might change its mind about a retirement,” he said. “I think EPA is really faulting the state for following the agency’s own guidelines here.” 

Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern that the EPA’s actions would set a troubling precedent, undercutting the legality of environmental regulation itself. 

“What’s next? Is any kind of clean air regulation going to be deemed to infringe upon a private property right by virtue of making it more costly and potentially forcing a company to have to shut down?” he said. “I mean, it’s a very dangerous and scary slippery slope.”

In a statement to DeSmog, Colorado’s Senior Director of Air Quality Programs Michael Ogletree said the EPA’s ruling would damage environmental protections in Colorado, which already has some of the worst air quality problems in the nation, and that the state was exploring next steps. 

“Coal plant retirement dates remain in state regulation, and many facilities have already closed or are on track to retire voluntarily because cleaner energy is more affordable and makes economic sense for consumers,” he wrote. “Colorado has demonstrated that it is possible to protect public health, reduce pollution, and maintain a reliable energy system at the same time.” 

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