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Statement on U.S. Exporting Record Amounts of Crude Oil
DOE Report Confirms Biden is Breaking Climate and Environmental Justice Promises
The Department of Energy reported Tuesday that U.S. crude oil exports averaged 3.99 million barrels per day (b/d), a record high for the first half of a year since 2015, when the ban on most crude oil exports from the United States was repealed. Emissions from the production, transportation, and exportation of domestically produced crude oil fuels the climate crisis and impacts minority, low-income communities from the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast who are already overburdened with existing hazardous pollutant facilities and pipelines.
Existing Gulf Coast export terminals are capable of exporting more than 60% of U.S. oil production, yet companies are pushing to build new offshore export terminals that can load bigger ships quicker, generating bigger profits for exporters and incentivizing faster production growth in the Permian. The spread of pipelines, export terminals, tank farms and petrochemical facilities is fueled by global demand, not domestic use.
President Biden has promised to reduce emissions and protect environmental justice communities, yet his administration continues to approve new fossil fuel projects like the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT), a massive new offshore oil export terminal that would emit more than 300 million tons of greenhouse gasses into the air each year on the Texas Gulf Coast. Earlier this year Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) reintroduced legislation to amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and ban exporting American crude oil and liquified methane gas (LNG) abroad.
Statement from Gwen Jones, resident of the displaced East End community in Freeport, Texas:
“Biden can’t keep claiming to care about climate and environmental justice while allowing more of these projects that put our lives at risk. Prove to us that you will prioritize the health and safety of people and our planet over fossil fuel industry profits.â€
Statement from Kelsey Crane, senior policy advocate at Earthworks:
“This administration continues to act in the interest of billionaire oil executives, not the people who have borne the brunt of the oil and gas industry’s pollution and safety violations for decades. If President Biden is serious about his promises to act on climate and protect environmental justice communities, he must stop the buildout of fossil fuel export terminals in the U.S.â€
Earthworks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting communities and the environment from the adverse impacts of mineral and energy development while promoting sustainable solutions.
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Survivors of Deadly LA Wildfires Seek Criminal Charges for 'Reckless' Big Oil
"While these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes," said one attorney.
Jan 16, 2025
Victims of the deadly wildfires still devastating large swaths of Los Angeles County were joined Thursday by scientists and legal experts at a press conference demanding criminal accountability for the fossil fuel industry over its role in the climate crisis.
"The disasters we are seeing today are not natural. They are crimes," Danielle Levanas, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and whose parents' home was destroyed by the Palisades Fire, said during the press conference attended by Common Dreams. "My elementary and middle school, our rec center, our library, the local community theater, the banks, the post office where we voted, the grocery stores, our favorite restaurants—they have all been taken out."
"How do you communicate the value of your deceased mom's journal from 1981, when she was pregnant with you, or the textiles you collected when you worked in West Africa in your mid-20s, or the boxes of home videos carefully labeled and organized, but not yet digitized, that captured moments with your family you had hoped to one day share with your own kids?" she asked. "Losing that house in some ways feels like losing my mom all over again."
"The severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis."
Sam James, a 24-year-old Santa Monica resident, watched the Palisades Fire rage from her window. James grew up in Altadena, where the Eaton Fire destroyed the homes of her grandfather and other relatives.
"Our roots in Altadena and Pasadena go back to at least 1890, with a legacy of building opportunities for Black generational wealth primarily through home ownership," she explained. "Much of this progress has been destroyed by recent wildfires including the Eaton Fire."
"While we always understood the risks of living in this area, the severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis," James said. "Their reckless pollution and disregard for the environmental impact have directly contributed to climate change and the intensification of natural disasters like these wildfires. They must take responsibility for the harm that they've caused, pay reparations to the affected communities… and take immediate steps to mitigate further damage."
"The science is clear," she added. "We've seen the writing on the walls. Climate change is here, and it's only getting worse. Our communities cannot continue to bear the physical and emotional toll of this crisis caused by the actions of a powerful few. It's time for Big Oil to be held accountable and take real, measurable steps toward a more sustainable future."
Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central, told reporters at the news conference that "we are up against a very deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry that has made it very difficult to address the crisis."
However, "California has held corporations accountable for their role in wildfires, and yet much of the financial burden is still falling on taxpayers and ratepayers," she added, "and the companies that are shaping the conditions under which these fires are occurring are largely let off the hook."
Wildfire evacuee Maya Golden-Krasner, the deputy director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said during the press conference: "Having inflicted as much as—or maybe more than—$250 billion in damages, the LA fires already rank as one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Yet the fossil fuel polluters who rake in massive profits and have created the conditions for the fires, the floods, and the other disasters have faced no responsibility to pay for the consequences, and that leaves the rest of us stuck with the multibillion-dollar tab."
Golden-Krasner continued:
So one of my and my organization's top priorities this legislative session is to pass a climate superfund bill. The bill is modeled on federal law that requires hazardous waste polluters to clean up their toxic messes and also on California's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. It would make the largest fossil fuel polluters pay a portion of their huge profits to address the climate consequences they helped create and help California adapt to future disasters. Vermont and New York have actually already passed similar bills last year. And in California we're already paying for Big Oil's climate destruction not just with money but with our lives.
"That's why we need our own climate superfund bill, to put billions of dollars in climate costs back on corporate polluters where they belong," she added.
While unable to share details about which state lawmakers will sponsor it or exactly when it will be introduced, Golden-Krasner told reporters that new California climate superfund legislation is likely to be released "within the next few days."
"Please stay tuned for that," she said. "There was a bill last session that made it through three committees in 60 days and the fossil fuel industry pushed really hard against it. So we're hoping that this year folks will come out and support it and we'll be able to pass it."
Noting that "climate change didn't happen out of the blue," attorney and Public Citizen Climate Program Accountability Project director Aaron Regunberg said that "the climate effects driving these fires are the direct and foreseeable—and in fact foreseen—consequences of the actions of a small number of fossil fuel companies that knowingly generated a huge portion of all the greenhouse gasses that caused this crisis and fraudulently deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products specifically in order to block and delay the very solutions that could have avoided these catastrophes."
"What's more, they did all of this with full knowledge of just how lethal their conduct really was, having long predicted that the continued burning of their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, 'catastrophic' climate harms," he continued.
"We have a concept in the law for when someone consciously disregards a substantial risk of causing harm to another person," Regunberg said. "That is called recklessness. And that's what we mean when we say that, while these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them," he stressed. "We have new legislative frameworks like the climate superfund. We have the civil justice system, which is designed to repair harms and compensate those who have been injured."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them."
"And that's exactly what cities and states all across the country including California are seeking with their climate accountability lawsuits, which continue to move forward and just this week overcame another dismissal attempt by Big Oil at the [U.S.] Supreme Court," Regunberg said. "And we also have the criminal justice system, which is designed to protect citizens from harm and hold wrongdoers accountable."
Regunberg last year co-authored a legal memo laying out how local or state prosecutors could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat.
"Did you know that it's a felony in California to recklessly cause a fire?" he added. "It's involuntary manslaughter to recklessly cause a death. Local prosecutors should consider whether Big Oil's conduct here amounts to violations of these kind of criminal laws."
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Actuaries and Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Risk 'Planetary Insolvency'
A new report "shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered," said the lead author.
Jan 16, 2025
U.K. actuaries and University of Exeter climate scientists on Thursday warned that "the risk of planetary insolvency looms unless we act decisively" and urged policymakers to "implement realistic and effective approaches to global risk management."
Actuaries have developed techniques that "underpin the functioning of the global pension market with $55 trillion of assets, and the global insurance market, collecting $8 trillion of premiums annually, to help us manage risk," Tim Lenton, University of Exeter's climate change and Earth system science chair, noted in the foreword of a report released Thursday.
Planetary Solvency—Finding Our Balance With Nature is the fourth report for which the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) has collaborated with climate scientists. In financial terms, solvency is the ability of people or companies to pay their long-term debts. Co-authors of one of the previous publications coined the phrase planetary solvency, "setting out the idea that financial risk management techniques could be adapted to help society manage climate change and other risks."
Three IFoA leaders—Kalpana Shah, Paul Sweeting, and Kartina Tahir Thomson—explained in their introduction to the latest report how "planetary solvency applies these techniques to the Earth system," writing:
The essentials that support our society and economy all flow from the Earth system, commodities such as food, water, energy, and raw materials. The Earth system regulates the climate and provides a breathable atmosphere, it is the foundation that underpins our society and economy. Planetary solvency assesses the Earth system's ability to continue supporting us, informed by planetary boundaries, tipping points in the Earth system, and other scientific discoveries to assess risks to this foundation—and thus to our society and the economy.
Our illustrative assessment of planetary solvency in this report shows a more fundamental, policy-led change of direction is required. Our current market-led approach to mitigating climate and nature risks is not delivering. There is an increasing risk of severe societal disruption (planetary insolvency), as our economic system drives further global warming and nature degradation.
"Impacts are already severe with unprecedented fires, floods, heatwaves, storms, and droughts," the document points out, emphasizing that human activity—particularly burning fossil fuels—drives climate change and biodiversity loss. "If unchecked they could become catastrophic, including loss of capacity to grow major staple crops, multimeter sea-level rise, altered climate patterns, and a further acceleration of global warming."
The report was released as wildfires ravage California and shortly after scientific bodies around the world concluded that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first in which the average global temperature exceeded a key goal of the Paris agreement: 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. In the United States, experts identified 27 disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.
"We risk triggering tipping points such as Greenland ice sheet melt, coral reef loss, Amazon forest dieback, and major ocean current disruption," the new publication warns, adding that "tipping points can trigger each other," and if multiple are triggered, "there may be a point of no return, after which it may be impossible to stabilize the climate."
Food system shocks and more frequent and devastating disasters increase the risk of mass mortality for humanity—including due to hunger and infectious diseases—along with mass migration and conflict, the report highlights.
"Climate change risk assessment methodologies understate economic impact, as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognize there is a risk of ruin," the document stresses. "They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right."
Specifically, lead author and IFoA council member Sandy Trust said in a statement, "widely used but deeply flawed assessments of the economic impact of climate change show a negligible impact" on gross domestic product (GDP).
However, Trust continued, "the risk-led methodology, set out in the report, shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered."
To mitigate the risk of planetary insolvency, the co-authors called on policymakers around the world to implement independent, annual assessments; set limits and thresholds that respect the planet's boundaries; enhance governance structures to support planetary solvency; and "enhance policymaker understanding of ecological interdependencies, tipping points, and systemic risks so they understand why these changes are needed."
They also underscored the need to limit global warming and avoid triggering tipping points with actions such as accelerating decarbonization, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, restoring damaged ecosystems, and building resilience.
"You can't have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live," said Trust. "Nature is our foundation... Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity which we must take action to avoid."
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Should Federal Minimum Wage Be Raised Above $7.25? Trump's Treasury Pick: 'No Sir'
"Trump and his billionaire Cabinet have their priorities backwards. Instead of focusing on lower costs and higher wages, they're only trying to line their own pockets while breaking promises to working families," said one critic.
Jan 16, 2025
Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's pick for treasury secretary, indicated during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday that he has no issue with the federal minimum wage remaining at $7.25 an hour, the wage floor that's been in place since 2009.
The admission was prompted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who asked Bessent, "Will you work with those of us who want to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage to take millions of Americans out of poverty?"
Bessent replied, "Senator, I believe that the minimum wage is more of a statewide and regional issue."
Sanders then pressed him, asking, "So you don't think we should change the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour?"
"No, sir," said Bessent, who owns assets worth at least $500 million, according to The Washington Post.
The annual wages of a worker making federal minimum wage is $15,080.
In response to these comments, Alex Floyd, the rapid response director at the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement: "Donald Trump and Scott Bessent will give tax handouts to billionaires but oppose raising wages for the poorest Americans. Trump and his billionaire Cabinet have their priorities backwards. Instead of focusing on lower costs and higher wages, they're only trying to line their own pockets while breaking promises to working families."
Bessent has laid out an economic plan known as "3-3-3," which involves reducing the federal budget deficit down to 3% of gross domestic product, getting real GDP growth to 3%, and producing an additional 3 million barrels of oil a day by 2028. The progressive policy institute the Center for American Progress reports that Bessent's 3-3-3 goal would likely require massive cuts of anti-poverty programs and middle-class tax increases to be achieved, taking into account other priorities Bessent has identified, such as his commitment to extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts that benefited high-income households.
In a statement published Thursday, the government watchdog Accountable.US denounced Bessent's defense of Trump's tax cuts—under which "the top 1% saw benefits nearly three times larger than families in the bottom 60%"—and of the president-elect's proposed tariffs, which economists warn could boost inflation.
"Scott Bessent's nomination isn't about helping American families," said the group. "It's about lining the pockets of the ultrawealthy and doubling down on policies that hurt the middle class."
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