Climate science, policy, politics, and action
As required by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, BOEM will hold Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale 259 on Wednesday March 29, 2023. The opening and reading of the bids will begin at 9 a.m. Central Daylight Time.
Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement
Active Leases and Bids Received
You are invited to attend a virtual public comment meeting hosted by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) as part of the National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Proposed Program and Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.
Please note that registration to provide an oral comment is strongly recommended as those who register will receive preference. Oral public comments will be limited to two-minutes.
We look forward to hearing your comments on the Proposed Program and Draft Programmatic EIS.
Additional meeting and public comment information can be found here.
To sign up for the mailing list and receive future news and updates, go to the BOEM website.
Register for the webinar and for public comment.
On Tuesday, February 8, 2022, at 10:00 a.m. ET, the Committee on Oversight and Reform will hold a hybrid hearing in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building and on the Zoom video platform to examine the adequacy of climate pledges made by fossil fuel companies to reduce carbon emissions and curb global warming.
The hearing is part of the Committee’s investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s long-running campaign to spread disinformation about climate change and greenwash its role in causing global warming. The Committee will hear from climate experts and environmental advocates who will testify to the urgent need for fossil fuel companies to fundamentally alter their operations and reduce emissions, and assess whether the companies’ climate pledges will meet that goal, or are instead just the latest example of climate disinformation.
Following testimony from the climate experts, the Committee will hold a hearing next month with members of the Boards of Directors of four fossil fuel companies.
Witnesses:
Republican Witness:
Witnesses:
Republican Witness:
In its reconciliation package, the House of Representatives restored some of Biden’s requested funding for climate justice measures that had been slashed by the U.S. Senate’s bipartisan deal, but massive cuts remain.
If the White House heeds the “no double dip” deal it made with Senate centrists, the House funds will be eliminated.
Two Build Back Better climate-justice programs that were cut in the Senate’s infrastructure package (known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, or BIF) are funded at or above President Biden’s requested levels:
However, most face massive cuts, with no prospect for improvement:
Furthermore, the House added on additional funding for the programs that act as bailouts for polluters:
The BIF includes the Civil Nuclear Credit Program, a $6 billion bailout fund for existing nuclear plants.
The Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) is a major climate initiative in the House reconciliation package, establishing a sort of carbon cap-and-trade system for electric utilities with the goal of increasing low-carbon electricity production to 80 percent of the mix by 2030. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has indicated his desire to modify the CEPP to lower its standards to support natural-gas plants.
The New York Times has dropped its long-running
sponsorship of its highly lucrative Oil And Money
conference,
ceding to rising pressure from climate activists. The decision was
announced on
Twitter by
the New York Times Climate team led by editor Hannah Fairfield. The
tweet included a statement from the Times’ communications
SVP, Eileen Murphy:
The New York Times has decided to end its relationship with the Oil & Money conference.
Over the last several years The Times has significantly expanded its reporting on climate change and its impact, as well as broader investigative and explanatory coverage of energy and environmental policy. We have a large team focused solely on the topic and in the last year alone we’ve traveled to every continent to document the effects of a warming planet.
While our partners in Oil & Money, Energy Intelligence, have always maintained high standards of independence and impartiality, the subject matter of the conference gives us cause for concern as we continue to invest in these consequential environmental issues. We want there to be no question of our independence or even the potential appearance of a conflict of interest.
We wish Energy Intelligence well as they continue to gather energy leaders, policy makers, and environmentalists to discuss how to sustainably meet the world’s rising energy needs.
The tweet, like much of The Times’ climate coverage even to this day, avoided directly stating that the fossil-fuel industry causes global warming.
Separately, Energy Intelligence announced the conference will be “renamed the Energy Intelligence Forum” because “the energy industry is changing, and as our conference program has evolved in recent years to address the challenges of climate change and the energy transition, we felt that our conference needed a new identity and a new mandate.”
The London-based conference, which gathers the world’s top oil executives, has been the target of protests for years. In 2014, climate activist Tamsin Ormond stormed the conference, shouting “Oil is fucking our future!”
In 2015, members of Fossil Free London
(@DivestLondon) staged a protest
outside the conference, holding the banner “Climate Change: No Time To
Party”:
and blocking the award ceremony celebrating
ExxonMobil CEO Rex
Tillerson:
The protesters mockingly threw cash at the
executives
as they entered the “Petroleum Executive of the Year” gala: 
Two of the protesters superglued their hands to the
doors of a side entrance, and others tried to infiltrate the gala.
In 2016, the Divest London protests
continued,
with activists declaring a “Climate Crime
Scene”:
The protests at the conference continued in 2017 and 2019.
In June 2019, Extinction Rebellion staged sit-in protests at The New
York Times headquarters in
Manhattan,
blocking traffic on Eighth Avenue and scaling the
NYT building with a large “Climate Emergency –
Mass Murder” banner:
About 70 protesters were
arrested.
At the time, The Guardian’s Amanda Holpuch reported that The New York Times responded: “There is no national news organization that devotes more time, staff or resources to producing deeply reported coverage to help readers understand climate change than The New York Times.”
The New York Times did not report on the protest, which was covered by many other outlets.
The June protest focused on the tenor of The New York Times’ climate coverage and its acceptance of fossil-fuel advertising, not its sponsorship of the Oil & Money Conference. However, Extinction Rebellion NYC soon began to focus on the Oil & Money Conference, including it as a target in their August 7th die-in at Times headquarters and in an August 30 video appeal to the Times.
The New York
Times has for years also hosted a high-priced global summit for the
chieftains of Big Oil.
The Oil & Money summit, which occurs each October in London, will meet for the fortieth time this October 8th to 10th at the luxury Intercontinental London Park Lane hotel. Top speakers this year include the CEOs of BP and Royal Dutch Shell, and the oil ministers of Qatar and Iraq.
The theme, “Strategies for the Energy Transition,” “reflects the crossroads at which the energy industry now finds itself:”
Advances in technology, ranging from electric vehicles and battery charging to solar and wind power promise extensive disruption to existing patterns of energy usage and threaten the dominance of oil and gas in areas like transportation and power generation. But at the same time, technology breakthroughs in other fields have made the exploration and development of petroleum resources cheaper, safer and more efficient.
The overview politely avoids mention of fossil-fueled global warming, referring only to how the oil and gas industry is “harnessing new technologies” to “reduce its carbon footprint.”
The first day’s focus is the natural gas industry—two of the sessions do explicitly mention climate change, in the context of environmentally conscious investors and the promotion of natural gas “as a bridge fuel to a lower carbon economy.”
The second day’s focus is on the geopolitics of the global oil market; the third day discusses what’s needed to keep the U.S. fracking boom going (“technology holds the key to sustaining US tight oil growth once all the best sweet spots have been produced”) and the threat of electric vehicles to the oil industry.
At no point does it appear that the threat of civilizational collapse due to the continued combustion of fossil fuels, nor the industry’s decades-long campaign to thwart government regulation of climate pollution, will be discussed.
Tickets to the summit are $4,195; for another $795 attendees get the benefit of “Toasting the Energy Intelligence Petroleum Executive of the Year with colleagues and clients at the prestigious annual gala dinner.” This year’s honoree is Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell.
With about 500 attendees, this one conference raises over two million dollars for the Times and its co-host, the industry publisher Energy Intelligence.
A handful of young oil and gas professionals get to attend the conference with the ironically named “Energy Leaders for Tomorrow” sponsorship.
The New York Times Company’s president of its international business, Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, will be opening the summit. On Twitter, he has frequently professed great concern about the Trump administration’s attacks on climate policy. He has not indicated how he will address the world’s lords of oil.
Climate activists have protested the “climate criminals” at the conference the past several years.
In a statement to DeSmog UK in 2018, a New York Times Company spokeswoman said the conference would “address the transition to a low carbon economy, an issue which has been covered extensively by The New York Times. That transition is unlikely to occur without the participation of the world’s largest energy companies.”
A newer addition to the New York Times Conferences line-up is the New Rules Summit, where the New York Times calls on leaders “to create a boldly inclusive vision of the workplace— and transform it into reality.” Its speakers reflect that mission- 29 of 34 are women, the majority non-white. The New York Times does not appear to be calling on Oil & Money attendees to do the same—only two of the 53 speakers are women. There do not appear to be any black speakers.
The Times’ editorial board purports that “most sentient people agree the world must rapidly wean itself from” fossil fuels “or risk ecological and social disaster.”
By that measure, the Times’ involvement in helping ExxonMobil develop climate-denial and greenwashing advertorials on its pages and website, as well as its organization of the Oil & Money Conference, puts into question the sentience of its leadership.
Speaker
CSIS B1 Conference Center
1800 K Street, NW
Washington, DC 20006
The CSIS Energy and National Security Program invites you to a discussion with Michael R. Bromwich, Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). Mr. Bromwich will discuss the bureau’s continuing effort to provide responsible stewardship of U.S. offshore oil and natural gas development. Frank A. Verrastro, Senior Vice President and Director of the Energy and National Security Program at CSIS will moderate.
On June 21, 2010 Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar swore-in former Justice Department Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich as Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to lead reforms that will strengthen oversight and regulation of offshore oil and gas development. Mr. Bromwich is overseeing the fundamental restructuring of the former Minerals Management Service, which was responsible for overseeing oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf.
In response to the April 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig and the resulting oil spill, CSIS developed the “Impacts of the Gulf Oil Spill Series.” The project is designed to inform the ongoing public debate by examining the complex interconnections between exploration, risk, regulatory environments, and economic consequences.
This session will be on the record. Registration is required. Please register no later than close of business on Wednesday, January 12th.
Please send your confirmation to [email protected].
The public hearing for the joint investigation is scheduled to continue May 26-29, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (CDT) at the Radisson New Orleans Airport, 2150 Veterans Blvd., Kenner, LA – Bayou Meeting Room. Mr. David Dykes, MMS, and Captain Hung Nguyen, USCG, are the co-chairs of the joint investigation.
Witnesses
The public hearing for the joint investigation is scheduled to continue May 26-29, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (CDT) at the Radisson New Orleans Airport, 2150 Veterans Blvd., Kenner, LA – Bayou Meeting Room. Mr. David Dykes, MMS, and Captain Hung Nguyen, USCG, are the co-chairs of the joint investigation.
Witnesses