Blog • Climate Action & Environmental Protection

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Cheater economics

Cheaters are lurking in the U.S. economy, corrupting what should be an honest game of production, commerce, and trade. “Cheater economics” refers to the corporate welfare system in which corporations are given special tax subsidies and granted access to loopholes for avoiding tax payments. Cheater economics drains away needed tax… Read More

Take back our genes join the fight against gene patenting

Most people are shocked to learn that 20 percent of the human genome has been patented by corporations and scientists, granting companies ownership and sole access to these fundamental building blocks of life. Patents on genes limit the ability of scientists and health researchers to learn more about… Read More

Filing suit to block approval of new nuclear reactor design

Friends of the Earth and a coalition of 11 other groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday, February 16 to reverse the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s misguided approval of risky new nuclear reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. The suit asserts that the NRC violated federal environmental law in… Read More

Crude beginnings: the environmental footprint of China National Petroleum Corporation around the world

The growing power of Chinese multinational corporations around the world, particularly in developing countries, is drawing a lot of attention. International companies complain that they are losing out to Chinese businesses benefiting from state support – government backing with few environmental and social requirements. Environmentalists and human rights activists… Read More

800,000+ strong against the Keystone XL pipeline

Wow. In 24 hours, the environmental movement and our progressive allies came together to send a huge, jarring wake-up call to senators wavering in the face of Big Oil’s threats and campaign coffers: reject any attempts to revive the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline—or face hundreds of thousands of… Read More

President’s budget has no solution for climate change

Yesterday President Obama fired the first shot in what is likely to be a series of budget skirmishes with House Republicans leading up to the November elections. Including controversial provisions such as an expiration of the Bush tax cuts for those making above $250,000 in his budget appears to… Read More

Liquid coal is a bad choice

Friends of the Earth has been monitoring the Medicine-Bow liquid coal facility since we first discovered that the Department of Energy is considering giving the project a loan guarantee. Medicine-Bow is a bellwether project because if completed it would be the first liquid coal facility in the U.S. Recently, however,… Read More

24 hours to stop Keystone XL

UPDATE Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. EST: We’ve smashed through our initial goal of half a million and are now over 672,000 messages to the Senate! Unfortunately, some of Big Oil’s bought-and-paid-for friends in the Senate are putting the heat on as well: on Monday afternoon, a group of senators closely tied… Read More

Finally! California gets a ship sewage discharge ban

Today, the U.S. EPA signed a federal rule that will finalize EPA’s decision to approve a California state proposal to ban all sewage discharges from large cruise ships and most other large ocean-going ships to state marine waters along California’s 1,624 mile coast from Mexico to Oregon and… Read More

A new resource for fighting dirty energy giveaways

There’s a lot of uncertainty around exactly how much taxpayer money the government gives out to Big Oil, Big Coal and the rest of the dirty energy industry each year in subsidies. But we know one thing for sure: it’s a lot. A new crowdsourced project called the Energy… Read More