Environmental Integrity Project

Although the Trump Administration's war on Iran was not authorized by Congress, President Trump is using it as a pretext to invoke a wartime law and provide subsidies and support to his allies in the U.S. petroleum industry. The White House recently released a memo saying the President is using the Defense Production Act of 1950 to increase domestic petroleum production. We talk about the implicat...

Wetlands are miracles of nature. They work as the world’s kidneys, filtering and cleaning our water. Wetlands capture carbon dioxide more effectively than even forests and act as cradles of life for biodiversity, sheltering many endangered species. Despite all this, the Trump Administration on November 17 proposed regulations that would strip federal protections from more than 80 percent of wetlan...

On this week's podcast we interviewed EIP's visiting scientist, Dr. Kimberly Terrell. Facing a gag order imposed on her by Tulane University leadership because her study on racial discrimination in petrochemical industry jobs reportedly angered Louisiana’s governor, Dr. Terrell faced a new decision - remain silent and sacrifice her scientific integrity, or resign in protest, speaking out publicly...

The $4 trillion Republican spending bill, signed by President Trump on July Fourth, is packed with giveaways to the oil and gas industry. These include tax breaks, opening more public lands and offshore acres to drilling, and a lowering of royalty rates that oil and gas companies must pay for extracting fuel from government lands. Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” bill is also full of ugly ironie...

State legislatures are seeing a wave of industry-backed bills that would ban or restrict the public’s ability to test for air pollution in local communities. Last year, the Louisiana legislature effectively banned community groups from using their own air monitoring to warn residents about pollution or publicly advocate for cleanups. Violators can face penalties of up to $32,500 per day, plus $1 m...

President Trump won election to his second term promising an “American Energy Dominance” agenda that would stimulate more oil drilling and cut the price of energy in half for consumers. Despite pledges of dramatic regulatory cuts, after his first quarter in office, neither is happening. Drilling is down compared to the first quarter of 2024 and gasoline prices are up, according to data from the Tr...

Although he did not mention it during his campaign, since taking office, President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested the U.S. should buy or seize Greenland – the largest island in the world, and part of the Kingdom of Denmark. A U.S. Geological Survey study estimates that there are 31 billion barrels of oil in eastern Greenland, and beneath the ice are also rare earth metals needed for electri...

When President Trump takes office, one of the first things he is expected to do is to accelerate the approval of permits to drill for oil and gas on federal land. But this is likely to have little to no impact on the production of fuel from federal lands. Why? Because there are already more than 6,000 approved drilling permits and millions of acres of leases owned by oil and gas companies on publi...

One of President Biden’s signature achievements to combat climate change has been the approval of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to encourage carbon capture and storage. It sounds good: capturing carbon dioxide from industry, then piping it underground so it can’t heat the planet. But most of these projects don’t really help the climate. They provide taxpayer money to oil and gas compani...

Last year, environmentalists criticized the Biden Administration’s decision to approve the Willow Project, a proposal by ConocoPhillips to produce up to 600 million barrels of oil on the North Slope over 30 years. Not far away, Australian company Santos is planning a similar proposal called the Pikka Project, which would produce about 400 million barrels over 30 years. That project has gotten much...

President Trump won election this month in part by convincing voters that he could bring down consumer prices for groceries, gasoline, and other products by expanding oil production. We interview an expert on the oil industry and climate change, Professor Robert Kaufmann of Boston University, who debunks this claim. Petroleum is traded on a global market, Kaufmann explains, and so one president of...

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued several earth-shaking decisions recently – including one that overturned decades of precedent about the authority of the EPA to make decisions about pollution. What will the court’s rejection of the 40-year-old “Chevron deference” mean for organizations fighting for clean air and clean water? And what was the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council case that...

Jeff Hammarquist and Oci Canadas moved to Person County, North Carolina, last year, seeking fertile land to grow vegetables and raise livestock. But after learning about plans for a new Dominion Energy liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage site currently under construction nearby, they joined their neighbors in an effort to push back against the facility.

Louisiana is one of the hotspots in the U.S. for sequestration projects that trap carbon dioxide (CO2) underground to protect the climate. Companies are planning 58 storage wells at 24 sites across the state. However, experts say a century of oil and gas drilling has left thousands of pathways for CO2 to squeeze its way back out into the atmosphere, potentially eroding any climate benefits and cre...

Few people know it, but taxpayer dollars are going to help pay for the manufacture of the single-use plastic that is trashing our planet. A new report by the Environmental Integrity Project, “Feeding the Plastics Industrial Complex: Taking Public Subsidies, Breaking Pollution Laws,” reveals that two thirds of the 50 plastics manufacturing plants built or expanded in the U.S. since 2012 received a...

When New York-based company New Fortress Energy upgraded the largest power plant in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to run on natural gas, the decision was supposed to bring relief to an island that struggles with energy security and whose electric grid experiences frequent outages after storms and earthquakes. However, the company is now under fire from local groups after building a liquid natural gas (LN...

Last month, the Biden Administration’s U.S. Forest Service proposed a regulatory change that would allow companies to bury in national forests carbon dioxide waste captured from petrochemical plants and other industries to keep the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. Critics say the proposal would grant fossil fuel and carbon disposal companies access to public property for decades, possibly for...

This week we interview Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics, to learn more about the organization's new report, “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception,” that takes aim at a growing form of plastics reprocessing called “advanced recycling.” While often portrayed as a climate-smart solution to plastics waste, the truth surrounding “advanced recycling” is that it is an energy-intensive, heav...

Next week, Texas voters will be voting on a constitutional amendment that would provide $10 billion in taxpayer funding to build more natural gas-fired power plants in the Lone Star State. The proposal, called “Proposition 7,” would mean a new public subsidy for fossil fuels at a time of climate crisis, in a state with a powerful oil and gas industry that already gets most of its electricity from...

The Biden Administration recently offered leases for sale to oil and gas companies to allow drilling on 67 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. One might think that the oil and gas industry would be thrilled to win access to a vast swath of the Gulf from Texas to Florida. But the industry sued because the administration plans to block drilling on a small percentage of the underwater acres to prote...

Aluminum is a key component in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other projects essential for combating climate change. As demand for low-carbon products grows, aluminum demand is projected to soar 40 percent by 2030. But production of this lightweight metal is energy-intensive and pollution heavy, including greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, sulfur dioxide from smelters...

A Dallas based company called Cox Oil and partners have received federal taxpayer funding to build a 110-mile carbon dioxide pipeline and dumping ground beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Scott Eustice, Community Science Director of the nonprofit organization Healthy Gulf, and Justin Solet, a fisherman and member of the Native American United Houma Nation, discuss their objections to the "Lo...

On April 11, 2023, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) and 12 allied organizations sued EPA over its failure to regulate billions of gallons of water pollution pouring out of oil refineries and petrochemical industry factories across the U.S., as required by the federal Clean Water Act. EIP's Deputy Director, Jen Duggan, explains why we took EPA to court during an online press conference wit...

John Beard is a former Exxon Mobil oil refinery operator and firefighter from Port Arthur, Texas. Like his father before him, he labored his whole life in the refineries that surround this struggling city on the Gulf Coast east of Houston. When Beard finally retired after 38 years in 2017, he decided to make a radical change. He devoted himself, full time, to fighting against the air pollution, ch...

Bruce Ivins is no snowflake. He’s a 62-year-old welder and lifelong farmer who grew up amid the cattle, chickens, and tractors on his family’s farm near Centreville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But then his neighbor built two industrial-sized chicken houses next door, and he filed a complaint with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) because he could not tolerate the clouds of ammonia,...