Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World is critical reading for anyone seeking to understand and push back against the far-right coalitions wielding considerable state and corporate power around the world.

Klein and Taylor posit that today’s fascists believe that end times have arrived, and have made it their mission to profit from cascading global crises, while hunkering down and protecting themselves as the world burns around them.

The book details three factions of end times fascists, united by their shared apocalypticism. The religious fundamentalists believe end times are upon us, but they will be saved by their messiah. The Silicon Valley technologists are building technologies they say could be world-ending, that in the meantime are killing jobs, consuming vast resources, and polluting communities. The ethno-nationalists espouse conspiratorial ideas about cultural replacement and treat immigration as an existential threat.

DeSmog Canada editor/reporter Mary Stuart spoke with Astra Taylor about how climate change fits into end times fascism, the importance of AI data centre fights, and how we can understand Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s neoliberal moves in response to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Taylor is a writer, documentarian, and activist. She co-founded the Debt Collective, a membership-based union for debtors, and is the author of several books, including The Age of Insecurity and Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It is Gone.

This interview was conducted by phone and has been edited for length and clarity.

Mary Stuart: I want to start by asking how your book can help us understand some recent elections. Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio won the first round of voting in Brazil’s election and nearly became president. The far-right AfD recently won in Saxony-Anhalt. How do these wins fit into your analysis of end times fascism?

Astra Taylor: One phenomena we describe in End Times Fascism relevant here is the role of Pentecostal religious communities in turning out the vote. To paraphrase reporting from Brazil, a voter said “my heart’s with Lula, but my pastor told me to vote for Flávio”.

The incredibly difficult conditions that we’re living under created fertile terrain for prophecy and religion, for kinds of pentecostalism, a faith that is focused on prosperity, individual advancement and banking on the idea that life is suffering here on earth, but you will be rewarded in the afterlife.

There’s also interference from Tech oligarchs. We don’t know the half of it at this moment, but the way the platform [Meta] refused to run ads for Lula’s party and beyond is certainly a factor. And the Trump regime [is playing a role] as well.

AfD is a similar. Naomi and I wrote a piece in the Financial Times and we open with the images that went viral this summer of the Danube River drying, and Nazi warships emerging. Hundreds of Nazi warships sank during WWII, and as the river receded, this paraphernalia was coming out of the mud. We thought it was a powerful metaphor for today. What’s really striking is the riverbed— the fact that it’s drying because of climate change. Our point is that fascism always emerges from crises. And we cannot separate the ecological and economic crises people are facing.

People are really struggling with affordability. People are feeling that they don’t have a future. And actually quite strikingly, rates of immigration are quite low, right? So [Saxony-Anhalt is] one of the places with the least immigration, but [the AfD] step in and say “the problem is the immigrants, it’s not a larger economic system.” This is a classic fascist move that we describe throughout the book.

MS: What role do climate change and climate denial play in end times fascism?

AT: Naomi and I are insistent that the planet is a player in our politics. Fascism always surges in moments of crisis.

We are in a world that is being roiled by disasters and shocks. We’ve reached a point where the consequences [of climate change] are undeniable. You cannot deny a heat dome when you’re inside it. You cannot deny a hurricane when it’s blowing the roof off your house. Of course, you can still deny why the storm is coming. You can embrace a Marjorie Taylor Greene perspective and say that it’s due to space lasers or you can say “the climate has always chained, this is nothing new, we don’t know if it’s human causing it.”

The far-right is adapting to circumstances … where ecological catastrophes are the norm, people can’t pay their property insurance bills anymore because the rates have been jacked up or because the insurers have pulled out, or where people have to pay the cost of fixing their homes or moving because of disasters.

The far-right is having to acknowledge that there are fires, there are storms, that people are suffering. They’re responding by deflecting, by saying, “don’t blame the fossil fuel companies and the politicians who take their money, blame the globalists in the EU and their climate policies, or blame the immigrants”.

We saw this really vividly after Hurricane Helene, a tropical storm that hit Appalachia. Trump and Elon Musk were going around saying “FEMA has no money for you because the Democrats spent it on immigrants.” So they use the hurricane to advance the Great Replacement Conspiracy. It’s an amazing pivot to go from a storm destroying tens of thousands of houses to say, “the problem is the globalists are importing immigrants to replace you”. But it’s working.

People have been warning for many years about ecofascism being the consequence of climate change. Ecofascism is the consequence of decades of denial, not just from the far-right, but by liberals who insisted that we could address this crisis through market policies that were doomed to fail.

It’s absolutely criminally irresponsible to not talk about climate change right now because that will create a vacuum for this pivot from the real arsonists to the immigrant victims. And we need to insist on robust climate policies. Not just renewables. It’s investments in care work and in all sorts of low carbon important initiatives. It needs to be at the centre of our politics.

There was a time when liberals could think people will stop denying climate change when they experience it firsthand. We’re seeing that is not true. People in that state of vulnerability and shock are more susceptible to strongmen and scapegoating, and we need to be right there with a different plan and a different story.

MS: In the book you talk about a number of site fights and bright spots, one of them being the AI data centre backlash. What is the importance of AI data centre fights in defeating end times fascism? Can these fights be sites of expansion for movements to touch on other issues as well?

AT: The data centre fight is an amazing opportunity to weave together all of these issues that we know are interconnected. People aren’t fighting data centres in their backyard for just one reason. They are fighting them because they care about their air and water, because they don’t want a future where all the jobs are gone and every bit of economically valuable work, as OpenAI calls it, is performed by robots. It’s also a democracy fight. These data centres are coming in under the cover of non-disclosure agreements, often with little input from even the city council and no input from the community.

But it’s more than that. There’s such intensive capital, like borrowing on capital markets right now. That’s part of why interest rates are being jacked up around the world, which increases the cost of borrowing for ordinary people. Rates are going up, it’s making homes more unaffordable. The fact that the population is buried by debt is a huge part of what drove Flávio Bolsonaro’s surge in recent months.

All of these factors are compounding, and so it would be foolish for environmentalists not to intervene and try to connect those those dots. The data centre fight has to be connected to affordability.

MS: In Canada, our Prime Minister Mark Carney is a former investment banker who Naomi recently referred to as the ‘paragon of liberalism’. He’s privatizing key pieces of Canadian infrastructure, doubling down on fossil fuels, other extractive projects, and AI, while using the language of standing up to Trump. His approval ratings are incredibly high. How are we to understand this?

AT: Naomi might call him a paragon of liberalism. I call him Sir banks a lot. I don’t trust bankers, especially those who are committed to the kind of neoliberalism and financialization that he’s proposing.

It’s dangerous to say “peer into the window, asset managers of the world. Canada has lots of resources that you can purchase and we have a healthcare system that can still be privatized and higher education system that still has some public funding that we could siphon off to the private sector.”

These are the policies and conditions that created fertile terrain for the far-right. Carney does not seem to have learned that lesson. It was striking when he gave that speech at Davos, about there being a rupture. The world was so ready for Canada to lead, and to project onto that speech that he was actually standing up for true universalism and for international law.

Instead he’s doing this nostalgic hyper-nationalist neoliberalism that isn’t really nationalist, because it was reported by the the Toronto Star that the amount of money going to [the] American tech sector from the Department of National Defense has doubled in the last year. He’s spending Canadian money to enrich the very companies that are behind Trump. You cannot fight oligarchy with oligarchy. You definitely can’t fight fascism with oligarchy. You fight it with solidarity and with democratic socialism, with addressing the root crises.

People want to believe that this figure can protect them when the truth is protection is in building collective power and insisting on a deep economic and political transformation. What he’s doing is incredibly dangerous. And the fact that he’s rolling back already weak climate policies when Canada’s main export is wildfire smoke, is just incredibly insulting and incredibly dangerous. The world needs Canada to stand firm against fascism.

MS: You talk about the power of stories, and detail the stories that the end times fascists are telling. What’s a counter story that’s been missing?

AT: In the book we talk about how we need to tell stories not of end times but of better times. We are entering a period where there are going to be roiling crises. We need to figure out how to live together well under these conditions.

I think we need stories that just remind us of how critical this fight is and that ground us in a love of this world. Naomi and I want stories that connect people to that, that remind people that we do live in a planetary paradise. It’s worth defending.

Ultimately, the organizer in me says we need more than stories. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to try to find a political home, to face the fact that fascism is not something that we can fight alone, we can only fight it together. If there’s not something for you to join, where you live, then start something … It takes not just stories, but actions, however imperfect, however small, however inadequate, but when we all take them, it adds up.

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World can be ordered in Canada, the U.S. And UK.

The post How the Far-Right Uses Climate Disasters to Build Political Power appeared first on DeSmog.

Would you trust a detox facility that offers a minibar in every room? How about a climate course sponsored by ExxonMobil? If not, you might direct the same incredulity towards Canada’s recently unveiled Responsible Data Centre Development Principles, endorsed by tech giants that are implicated in violating those same principles. 

Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon announced the voluntary and non-binding principles in September in response to mounting public opposition to massive data centre developments. It is hardly encouraging that the same companies leading the disruptive build out of massive data centres, such as Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, quickly signed on to this toothless commitment. 

“Data centres must protect ratepayers, respect water and energy resources, and create lasting benefits for the communities that host them,” assured Solomon at the launch in September. “These principles set a clear national standard: If you build in Canada, you must build responsibly and transparently and you must build for Canadians.”

Really?

Barely three weeks after these companies pledged to Canadians to be “transparent about local impacts,” the U.S. House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into Amazon, Google, and Meta for using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to gag state and local officials from telling their constituents about data centre impacts on local water supplies and electricity rates.

“Google’s own confidentiality agreements have been shown to contain language that explicitly prevents local officials from disclosing ‘the terms of any agreement,’” ranking member Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote in a letter to Google’s parent company Alphabet.

For over a year, the company fought a local newspaper in Oregon in the courts to keep its Dalles data centre’s water consumption hidden, arguing the figure was a “trade secret.” When the courts finally forced the release of this essential information, it was revealed  that Google was using a quarter of the entire city’s water. A company that litigates to hide its water use from the residents of one small town is now asking Canadians to trust its promise of transparency here.

A Meta subsidiary in Louisiana likewise convinced Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to sign an NDA tied to a $50 billion data centre campus. Over 100 Louisiana state public officials signed similar gag orders that apparently silence them even if they leave government. Eric Holl, an adviser to former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, told the Gulf States Newsroom, “I don’t see this being used as anything other than a tool of intimidation and control.”

Citizens in Wisconsin were also forced to sue the local utility regulator to release documents detailing the projected energy demand of a proposed Meta data centre after this basic information was also deemed a trade secret.

The impacts of enormous AI facilities on American communities are well known. The consequences being visited on Canadian towns and residents are concerning to say the least.

The principles say centres must reduce environmental impacts, and prioritize “low-emission energy sources.” Yet a contentious data centre development in Saskatchewan proposed by Bell Canada – also a signatory to Minister Solomon’s principles – would require as much generating capacity as the entire city of Regina. About 900 megawatts (MW) of its power will come from behind-the-fence gas generation. The Regina City Council recently debated the development for over seven hours and voted to demand more information on potential impacts on local water supplies and electricity costs. A total of 18,000 residents have signed a petition opposing the project.

Beacon Data Centers is another signatory, which stated it is “proud to stand with governments, municipalities, and industry in supporting them.” Yet the company is embroiled in a bitter dispute with residents of Lorneville, New Brunswick, who are understandably opposed to the company’s plans to fill in a local wetland to expand an industrial park with a data centre that will require more than 10 percent of provincial energy demand. The data centre would become one of New Brunswick’s biggest emitters, generating 6.6 percent of provincial emissions.

According to reporting from the Narwhal, “documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation … show provincial officials were in discussions to bring a data centre to the [industrial] park long before residents were told about the tenant — and that details of that data centre conflicted with the more low-impact vision for the industrial park advertised to residents.”

DeSmog has already documented the massive buildout of data centres in Alberta, almost entirely powered by burning natural gas. Almost 21 GW of potential new gas capacity is enthusiastically being embraced by provincial regulators, an amount described as “absurdly high” by Alex de Vries  at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Based on similar gas-fired installations around the world, de Vries estimated this amount of new data centres would require about 200 billion litres in cooling water each year. How is this not supposed to impact local electricity rates, heating costs, or water supplies?

This absurd increase in climate-killing gas consumption seems, in fact, to be the point. Internal Privy Council documents obtained by DeSmog from Greenpeace showed that increased gas demand was being touted by senior advisors to Prime Minister Mark Carney as one of the top “public policy benefits to Canada” of data centres.

Bringing “strategic value to Canada” is another vague goal of the newly announced data centre principles. If this is meant to allude to protecting Canadian data sovereignty, building facilities owned by Google, Meta, Amazon or other tech giants will accomplish very little. The U.S. government can compel an American company that controls data – regardless of location – to release it to American regulators under the CLOUD Act (2018). 

Regardless of the law, many of the enthusiastic corporate endorsers of Canada’s new data centre principles have repeatedly demonstrated their obedient political fealty to the Trump administration. Tech leaders attended his inauguration, donated vast sums of money to the Trump campaign, and indulged the president’s geographic fits of pique by rapidly renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” on Google and Apple maps. 

With this cohort driving Canada’s tech build-out, what could possibly go wrong?

Canadians are justifiably concerned data centres will impact local water supplies and electricity costs. We need bold policies that will improve digital safety and address increasing democratic threats from AI-driven disinformation. Rather than bringing in meaningful and enforceable regulations, the federal government has instead trotted out vague platitudes endorsed by the same companies contributing to the problem. Ottawa, we have a credibility problem.

The post Canada’s ‘Responsible’ Data Centre Principles Have a Credibility Problem appeared first on DeSmog.

Campaigners backing attempts to sue Shell over a typhoon in the Philippines have launched an online archive showing that the British oil major knew that burning fossil fuels could harm the climate as early as the 1960s. 

ExposeShell.com features documents including a 1966 memo Shell commissioned from British scientist James Lovelock and the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, a confidential 1988 report predicting that human-caused warming could trigger “dramatic” changes in sea level, ocean currents, weather and precipitation — “larger than any that have occurred over the last 12,000 years.” [Read these and other documents in the DeSmog series #ShellKnew]

The interactive site went live as Shell announced the latest figures showing that oil majors are enjoying bumper profits as the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran pushes oil prices higher. Shell said its adjusted third-quarter earnings had doubled to £10.8 billion in comparison to the same period last year.

“We don’t need any more reports to us that this big oily industry has been creating disaster,” Robin Wells, director of Fossil Free London, one of the groups behind the website, said in a statement. “Shell researched the reality but tore up the truth and locked it in the dark. Now, we are all facing the disastrous consequences.”

Fossil Free London protesters took to the streets outside Shell’s head office in London on Thursday, dressed in 1960s-style suits and holding banners that read “Shell Knew.”

ExposeShell.com is also backed by The Odette Case, a campaign group supporting more than 100 survivors of Typhoon Rai — known in the Philippines as Typhoon Odette — who began seeking damages from Shell last December in a first-of-its-kind case in the UK courts. 

The typhoon tore through the Philippines in December, 2021, killing 400 people, injuring more than 1,000, and forcing almost 3.2 million people from their homes. 

The survivors argue that Shell should be held liable for its historic contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions fuelling extreme weather events and its support for climate science denial via its past membership of industry groups such as the Global Climate Coalition — despite its early knowledge of the risks posed by burning its products.  

Filed by UK law firm Hausfeld, the case draws on recent advances in attribution science that enable scientists to assess the degree to which climate change has contributed to an extreme weather event. Through Shell’s contribution of more than 2.5 percent of historical global greenhouse gas emissions, the suit alleges that Shell contributed to both the likelihood and severity of Typhoon Rai. It is the first civil claim to link the climate impacts of an oil and gas company’s activities with death, personal injury, and damage to property that has already occurred in the Global South.

Shell has dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless” and said that it had no “unique knowledge about climate change.”

(This story was updated at 12:44 GMT on October 29, 2026 to include Shell’s third-quarter earnings)

The post Interactive Archive Shares Secrets of Shell’s Early Climate Research appeared first on DeSmog.

Canada’s already battered reputation on curbing climate emissions has become drastically worse under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney according to a recent report card from Climate Action Tracker, approaching levels of inaction comparable to the “drill baby drill” Trump Administration.

“Prime Minister Mark Carney has so far been unwilling to recommit to either the 2030 or 2035 targets and has conceded that, under his energy plan, Canada’s emissions will be higher in the near term than previously projected,” warned the report. “If Canada were to officially abandon its 2030 and 2035 targets, it would be the first country after the United States to do so.”

The emissions watchdog didn’t mince words about the pace and scale of Canada’s climate rollbacks.

“What is shocking to us is the true extent to which Prime Minister Carney has rolled back climate policies, largely in favour of the fossil fuel industry,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, a CAT partner, said in a release.

“This Carney climate carnage, while not quite as bad as Trump’s, is rapidly heading in the same direction, despite the country being hit by record wildfires and other devastating climate impacts,” he added. 

While Canada’s planned policies were expected to cut emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 two years ago, since Carney has come into office Climate Action Tracker estimates this planned reduction has been cut in half. Current policies are on track to only deliver a 14 percent decrease in emissions.

Carney’s oil-friendly government has swept aside a suite of climate regulations aimed at reducing the massive and growing emissions from the oil sands, which have ballooned by 178 percent since 2005 and now almost equal the entire passenger transport sector.

Perhaps the single fig leaf remaining to cover this naked climate failure is the long-touted and still not-built Pathways carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

But this project is nothing more than a boondoggle in waiting, with rapidly diminishing expectations of what Pathways would accomplish and growing estimates of what it would cost.

“These technologies are nowhere near the scale and commercial viability needed to deliver on the needed emission reductions,” Climate Action Tracker concluded.

Pathways was originally hyped by bitumen producers as the largest CCS project in the world that would eliminate 68 million tonnes (MT) of emissions a year, or three-quarters of the oil sands’ entire output. That dubious goal has since been quietly rolled back to 16 MT by 2050, a decline of 76 percent.

The first phase of the Pathways project was supposed to be completed by 2030 to store 22 MT per year, now revised down to 6 MT sometime after 2032. Dilling bravely characterized these massive decreases in sequestered emissions as “slightly smaller”.

Six years into this alleged climate saving megaproject, no design proposals have been made public and not a single shovel has been stuck in the ground. The only things that have tangibly changed are the steadily diminishing projections about what Pathways could achieve if it ever gets built, and the mounting costs of doing so.

Originally budgeted at $16.5 billion, the current costs of building a potentially dangerous 650 km CO2 pipeline to Cold Lake and injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir three times larger than Prince Edward Island have ballooned to as high as $30 billion. Guess what? The same companies that are on track to pocket $100 billion in war-related profits this year expect the Canadian taxpayer to foot most of the bill.

It is increasingly clear that the Pathways project is less about carbon sequestration and more about political leverage. The so-called grand bargain between Ottawa and Alberta explicitly links Pathways with a new pipeline approval to the west coast to further boost bitumen production that has already increased almost 40 percent since 2015, undoing any climate benefits.

“The Pathways project… will not come close to compensating for the new west coast oil pipeline, which could add up to 28 MTA of greenhouse gas emissions every year,” Aly Hyder Ali, Environmental Defence Canada’s senior program manager for oil and gas told DeSmog. “It will require tens of billions of dollars in public support, while capturing only a small portion of the emissions from oil sands production.”

Carbon capture and storage has long been held up as a way to slow down climate consequences while still burning fossil fuels. Despite much industry-funded hype and $40 billion so far spent around the world, CCS only sequesters a puny proportion of global greenhouse gases.

A recent peer-reviewed study of the technology warned, “continued reliance on CCS is a high-cost gamble that risks delaying the deployment of truly effective climate solutions… Despite decades of promotion and investment, [CCS] remains technologically constrained, economically inefficient, and strategically misapplied.”

Even if Pathways worked perfectly it would do nothing to mitigate the tailpipe emissions once bitumen is refined into transportation fuel, which are four times higher than production emissions.

The Pathways project is a diminishing technological fix for a problem that industry has refused to deal with. Alberta oil sands operators have repeatedly stalled taking action, demanded more taxpayer largess, and allowed their emissions to grow north of 92 MT per year – an increase of more than three percent over the previous year due to ballooning production.

The oil patch is Canada’s biggest climate laggard while banking massive profits. Alberta’s bitumen producers raked in $13.3 billion in the first three months of 2026. Yet such wealthy companies still expect the beleaguered Canadian taxpayer to foot most of the bill for another pipeline to the Pacific and the expensive CCS project that makes the pipeline politically possible. Perhaps oil patch lobbyists deserve a raise. To gaslight a country into shelling out billions in subsidies to a wildly profitable sector that is also fuelling an accelerating climate crisis is no small feat. Pathways’ diminishing targets and mounting costs make this outlandish accomplishment even more outrageous.

The post Carney Almost as Bad as Trump on Climate, Emissions Watchdog Warns appeared first on DeSmog.

Countries should be willing to overlook “mild amounts of corruption” in government if it serves the larger goal of political stability, according to a U.S. lawyer and political activist closely aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

“This may be the most provocative thing I say,” explained Will Chamberlain during a speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Jerusalem, an event that brought together far-right figures from Europe and Israel along with MAGA leaders closely linked to the Trump administration.

Chamberlain is vice president for external affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes NatCon, a conference that in previous years has been hosted in cities across the U.S. and Europe.

He is also senior counsel with the Article III Project, a MAGA group set up to fight against “lawfare,” which it describes as efforts by “Marxist” Democrats to weaponize the justice system against Trump and his political allies. The group has recently targeted what it calls “climate lawfare,” which refers to lawsuits that aim to hold oil and gas companies accountable for misleading the public about climate change

“Corruption is bad,” Chamberlain said during his Oct. 8 speech at NatCon. “But I think in general, countries should be willing to tolerate mild amounts of corruption in order to avoid lawfare.”

Chamberlain, through the Article III Project, works with the conservative political strategist and lawyer Mike Davis, who claims credit for helping win the nomination fights of conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Chamberlain’s comments come as the U.S. approaches midterm elections on Nov. 3 where voters have identified government corruption as a defining issue.

He argued that efforts to impeach and prosecute politicians for corruption have driven up the stakes of elections to the point where candidates either win or risk going to jail, citing the example of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president serving a jail sentence for planning a coup following his 2022 election loss.

He also cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges including fraud and accepting bribes. Earlier this year, Trump said Netanyahu should be pardoned. Chamberlain defended that position, arguing that pardons are a useful tool for reducing political tensions.

“People shouldn’t be afraid of them,” he said. “I think too many people are so obsessed with the idea that no one can ever be above the law that they’ll let their country tear itself apart.”

He added, “There’s another old maxim, ‘let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ I think that’s a bad impulse.”

Chamberlain didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.

‘Climate Lawfare’

This year’s National Conservatism Conference in Israel featured speeches from senior White House official Sebastian Gorka, as well as Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Trump policy blueprint Project 2025.  

It took place as Chamberlain’s legal group, the Article III Project, turned its attention to the dozens of lawsuits filed by cities, counties and states across the U.S. against Big Oil.

In early October it co-hosted a Washington, D.C., event where conservative legal experts argued that efforts to hold oil and gas companies legally liable for misleading the public about climate change is a form of “climate lawfare,” which one participant defined as “trying to basically drag these fossil fuel companies into court to get access to their documents and, of course, their pockets.”

The occasion for the event was the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear oral arguments from the oil companies Suncor and Exxon, which are trying to get the court to invalidate a lawsuit against them currently proceeding in Colorado state court.

That Colorado lawsuit alleges, based on extensive historical documentation, that these and other oil companies engaged in multi-decade campaigns to stave off climate regulation by running disinformation campaigns around their key role in global temperature rise.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has framed this history of climate denial as large-scale deception meriting federal investigations and lawsuits. In 2024, Whitehouse described the Trump administration’s reported offering of political favors to the oil industry in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions as “the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term.”

From the perspective of MAGA legal activists such as Chamberlain, “lawfare is worse than corruption.”

“I mean, corruption’s bad. I kind of imagine it is like a slow-growing cancer that can undermine ultimately and eventually really hurt your country,” he said.

“But lawfare — and reciprocal, brutal lawfare against heads of state, especially — is kind of like having a gushing, gaping bullet wound in your chest,” he added.

‘Openly Corrupt’

That position appears out of step with many U.S. voters. A recent Fox News poll suggested that 88 percent of voters are “extremely/very concerned” about “corruption in government,” making it the top issue ahead of cost of living, healthcare, and the Iran war.

That poll came out following reporting in the Wall Street Journal that Kimberly Guilfoyle, then U.S. ambassador to Greece, had asked a Trump donor for $100,000 to pay off her credit card bill in exchange for favorable access to the administration.

That seemed to cross a line even for Chamberlain and his colleagues.

After Guilfoyle resigned on Oct. 13, Chamberlain questioned on X whether her resignation message was written by AI, while another senior counsel at the Article III Project described her as “an absolutely stupid pick for U.S. Ambassador to Greece in the first place.”

Yet, Chamberlain argued at NatCon that civil and criminal efforts in recent years to hold Trump legally accountable for alleged financial fraud, defamation, his role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, and other legal violations have been “an enormous strain on the president’s time and resources, as well as everybody else.”

Chamberlain claimed that without unique features of the U.S. legal system, including the lack of an attorney general independent from the White House, “I think Trump would be in jail,” adding that “the Western world would be worse for it.”

Meanwhile Trump has reaped $2.2 billion in 2025 revenues alone from his cryptocurrency holdings and other personal business interests. This has led former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission Larry Noble to describe Trump’s second term as potentially “the most openly corrupt administration in our history.”

The post As Midterms Loom, MAGA Lawyer Defends ‘Mild Amounts of Corruption’ in Governments appeared first on DeSmog.

In December 2025, former B.C. Premier Christy Clark gave an interview on Global News where she described Canada’s west coast ban on oil tankers as a “ridiculous” constraint on the Canadian economy.

A clip of Clark’s interview then began to circulate online, where it was shared by several Canadian conservative influencers and aggregator accounts on platforms including X and Facebook with captions including “reality check,” “huge truth bomb” and “economic self-sabotage.”

Within days, the interview clip was spreading across the social media feeds of people in B.C. and beyond, eventually surpassing 1.6 million views.

But this was not necessarily a case of west coast residents suddenly deciding organically they wanted to overturn the ban on coastal oil tanker traffic brought in by former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The digital media amplification of Clark’s comments was orchestrated in part by Canada Action, a pro-oil industry advocacy organization partly funded by Cenovus Energy, Canada’s third-largest oil and gas company.

It was one example of “showcasing Canada Action’s content leadership influencing the public discussion,” according to an internal slidedeck from the Calgary-based group. That slidedeck, which hasn’t yet been reported on, was obtained by Greenpeace Canada and published in its October 2026 report Manufacturing Petro-Populism.

These and other presentation slides from Canada Action demonstrate how fossil fuel interests manufacture the appearance of consent for increased oil and gas production in Canada, according to experts who study the spread of climate disinformation online.

“Most people can pretty easily see through messages coming directly from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) or industry CEOs,” said Shane Gunster, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communications, in a statement to DeSmog. 

“But when the message comes from people in their social network, local business leaders, their family and friends, they’re far more likely to engage with it and maybe even be persuaded by it. And this is especially true for growing segments of the public that don’t consume a lot of news.”

Canada Action didn’t respond to DeSmog’s questions about the slidedeck.

‘Snipped And Posted’

Canada Action was founded in 2012 by Cody Battershill, a Calgary-based realtor. Though Canada Action claims to be a grassroots effort, it has numerous reported ties to the fossil fuel sector and its lobbyists. According to the Greenpeace report, Canada Action spent $1.9 million CAD on marketing in 2024, and $1.5 million CAD in 2023.

The presentations were made in the context of a funder session for the group Canadian Energy Prosperity (CEP), through its Energy in Action (EIA) initiative, and held at the Calgary Petroleum Club in January 2026.

According to the Greenpeace report, Energy in Action is an oil-industry backed network of thirty organizations that advocate for the fossil fuel sector, including front groups, charitable organizations, companies, media organizations and lobby groups. EIA is itself funded by Canadian Energy Prosperity.

Though neither of these are public facing organizations, members of EIA’s network are prominent pro-oil and gas voices in Canada. They include, among others, the Fraser Institute, Canada Action, Energy United, Debunk, Canadians for Affordable Energy, Young Canadians for Resources, Resource Works, Energy Creates, and The News Forum.
 

Two of those organizations, Resource Works and Energy United, prepared a slidedeck for the Calgary Petroleum Club event describing environmental groups as “opponents” and Indigenous rights as a “problem,” as reported previously in the Narwhal.

 Many of the groups that are funded by CEP also receive funding from Gwyn Morgan, a Canadian fracking magnate who has financed a climate misinformation ecosystem with nearly $10 million in funding to right wing anti-regulation lobby groups. Morgan is also linked to Cenovus (which has funded Canada Action), as well as Second Street, a libertarian advocacy organization.

In its presentation to CEP, Canada Action explained how it was able to manufacture viral pro-oil content online from a December 1 interview former B.C. Premier Clark gave to Global News.

First, Canada Action explained, “we snipped and posted a critically important message from former B.C. Premier Christy Clark, highlighting the importance of revisiting the federal tanker ban.”

Then, the group “modified the video to add the ‘On the Oil Tanker Ban’ text on the video, so any other video containing that graphic can be directly attributed to stemming from our post.”

Canada Action carefully tracked “other major pages who have taken our content and then directly re-uploaded it on their platforms as a new post on their page.”

One of these reposts was from the page Debunk, Inc., which characterized Clark’s comments as explaining “why the Pacific tanker bank is pointless.” That post garnered thousands of likes and comments. In a separate slide presentation obtained by Greenpeace, Debunk stated that “the energy narrative is ours to shape. With your continued support we will continue to challenge the myths, engage Canadians, and advocate for the energy future our country deserves.”

All told, the Clark clip generated 1,614,000 views across Canada Action’s social media pages as well as “unattributed traffic” due to the video being shared by third-party accounts, according to metrics shared by the group.

In a separate slide deck, titled “Digital Reach Report: April 2026 Social Media & Website Views & Impression”, Canada Action indicated its social media content received over 37.5 million views. The bulk of its monthly impressions came from one of its three Twitter accounts — @LNGAction, @OilSandsAction, and @CanadaAction — which together brought in over 25 million views.

Amplification Machine

Canada Action has considerable social media reach, noting in its presentation that its Facebook and Instagram posts “are being reached and interacted with by millions of unique Canadians.” Indeed, according to its presentation slides, the Canada Action Facebook page drew 2.8 million unique people while the Oil Sands Action Facebook page drew 1.4 million. On Instagram, Canada Action claimed to have attracted 559,000 while Oil Sands Action drew 476,000.

Canada Action uses its sizable digital imprint to amplify other groups in the CEP network, including Young Canadians for Resources, its youth advocacy arm.

The Canada Action presentation also highlights a  partnership with Resource Works “to amplify the economic leadership of 5 Mayors from the Alliance of Resource Communities,” an effort to build public support for oil and gas and other natural resource projects in B.C.  “We can now say that we are the LNG capital of Canada,” Kitimat mayor Phil Germuth stated in one Facebook post. At the time the screenshot was taken, that post had garnered 6,600 likes, 490 comments, and was forwarded 274 times.

Resource Works is also identified in the Greenpeace report as an organization with ties to the fossil fuel sector. DeSmog has previously reported that the organization has been involved in other influence campaigns, including an astroturf campaign to oppose a ban on natural gas that involved template comments for restaurant owners, hospitality workers and residents of Vancouver.

Gunster argues that the sorts of digital campaigns led by Canada Action and its allies have influenced how Canadians think and feel about the oil and gas sector.

“Look at the big swings in public opinion in favour of oil and gas projects over the past year-and-a-half,” said Gunster. “Some of that is obviously Trump and the trade war, and some of that is the Carney government. But I have no doubt that the kinds of campaigns described in this [Greenpeace] report are also having a significant impact, saturating our social media feeds with pro-industry messaging.” 

DeSmog reached out to Christy Clark and Global News to determine whether Canada Action had asked permission to use the video clip and still images in their promotional materials. Neither responded.

The post ‘Snipped And Posted’: How Pro-Oil Groups Generate Viral Content Online appeared first on DeSmog.

Across Brittany, tractors can be seen trundling onto beaches to remove truckloads of foul-smelling algae ahead of the tourist rush. 

Situated below steep cliffs and ancient forests, these once pristine beaches have been devastated by algal blooms – the rapid growth of toxic seaweed which kills off fish and plant life. This sea lettuce algae can also release a toxic gas that can cause humans dizziness, chest pain, breathing problems, and even cardiac arrest.

The French peninsula is not alone. Fed by harmful pollution from agriculture, and fuelled by seas warmed by climate change, lurid green blooms are increasingly appearing on beaches and lakes across Europe – prompting hundreds of swimming bans across the continent this summer. 

This article was published in partnership with Euronews and Climatica

Scientists are clear on the cause: for decades, chemicals including nitrogen and phosphorus have leached into waterways from human sewage, as well as fertilisers and excess manure fuelled by the rapid growth of Europe’s factory farms. 

These ‘nutrients’ are vital for plant growth – but in large quantities they destroy the delicate balance of ecosystems, allowing certain plants, including algae, to multiply at the expense of animals and other species.

DeSmog visited some of the worst impacted spots in Europe, speaking to fishers, swimmers, and business owners whose livelihoods and wellbeing depend on healthy waters.

On the shores of lakes and beaches across France, Spain, Germany and Northern Ireland, we heard accounts of plummeting fish and insect numbers, swimming bans, and beach closures. 

The risks of algal growth have been known for decades, but higher temperatures and longer summers mean these dangerous blooms are growing larger and lasting longer in many of the continent’s most iconic waterways. 

“I remember our beautiful beach before the pollution,” says Brittany resident Jean Hascoet, who leads local campaign group Baie de Douarnenez Environnement. “Now, with thousands of pigs near our town, everything is different.”

Brittany resident and environmental campaigner Jean Hascoet, pictured here in Douarnenez Bay, France, says the surge in intensive farming in the region has devastated local beaches. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

‘Spain’s Sacrificial Zone’

“You’ll never see me swimming in that water again,” Fina says. 

The 84-year-old from Murcia in southeastern Spain lives with her husband Francisco on the beachfront at Los Urrutias, on the west coast of the Mar Menor, Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon. Rotting seaweed piles up on the shore, giving off a foul stench. 

“This used to be paradise. The sea was teeming with seahorses,” Fina says. 

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in algae growth in the Mar Menor – a hotspot for Spanish and international tourists. Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, is reliant on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to grow, and in this region, intensive farming has provided a ready supply. 

Spain is the EU’s largest producer of pork, accounting for a quarter of the bloc’s production. In the Mar Menor catchment area, according to latest government figures, 305 pig farms house nearly 700,000 animals – producing vast amounts of manure and slurry, a liquid mixture containing faeces and urine. When it rains, the nutrient-rich mixtures flow from fields into rivers feeding the lagoon.

“The land can’t accommodate it all,” says Pedro Luengo, a biologist and spokesperson for the campaign group Ecologistas en Acción in Murcia. “We’re a sacrificial zone.”

Tourists now steer clear of the area closest to the farmland – the western region where Fina lives, which was once an idyllic family holiday spot. 

Instead, on other beaches, such as La Manga in the east, bathers enjoy an artificial paradise thanks to local authorities who, as in France, remove the algae daily over the summer months. In the first three months of 2026, they collected more than 4,000 tonnes from Mar Menor’s shores and nearby water– roughly the weight of 1,000 elephants.

Authorities say these clean-ups help protect human health and allow essential sunlight to reach sea life, which would otherwise be blocked by the blooms. But it has not shielded those who rely on the lagoon for their livelihood.

“We used to catch far more gilthead seabream and prawns. Now the catch is much smaller,” says Rubén Albaladejo, a fisherman from Lo Pagán. “The Mar Menor is a drain into which everyone dumps their rubbish and waste.” 

Algal blooms endanger aquatic life by consuming vast amounts of oxygen, meaning fish, seahorses, and crustaceans can suffocate. They also produce toxins that attack the nervous and respiratory systems of sea life. 

Alongside nutrient pollution, water temperatures rose sharply this year amid record-breaking heatwaves across the continent. “We’ve reached 30 degrees – something we’ve never seen before.” Albaladejo says that in these conditions, species such as gilthead seabream struggle to reproduce.

Scientists warned in August that human-caused climate change was driving record temperatures in the continent’s seas, with a 2C temperature rise registered in the Mediterranean, and around 1.4C in ​Western European seas.

‘The Lough Is Dead’

Albaladejo shares his worries with fishers across Europe. Around 2,000 kilometres away in Northern Ireland, Declan Coney has also seen Lough Neagh – the UK’s largest lake – devastated by blue-green algae every summer since 2023. 

“Fishing is instilled in me – generation after generation,” Coney says. “This year has been the worst ever for fishing. The Lough is dead.”

Coney has been working on the lake since 1975. He used to go out with his father and sometimes caught £1,000 worth of fish in a day, he says. But now the cost of the diesel required to boat to his nets can be greater than the value of the catch. 

Trout and eel numbers have fallen in recent years, in part thanks to the oxygen-hogging blue-green algae, whose weight also forces Coney’s fishing nets shut, so fish can’t swim inside. 

Since the 2000s, the lough has also been besieged by the invasive zebra mussel species. These consume large amounts of phytoplankton, depriving other species of these microscopic plant-like organisms, a vital food source, as well as attaching to fishing nets and ripping them. 

“There’s no money [in it],” Coney says. “It’s not a livelihood anymore.”

As in Spain, Lough Neagh’s algal blooms are the result of decades of nutrient pollution. Northern Ireland’s livestock sector has grown rapidly, supported by government expansion plans since 2013: poultry numbers have risen by a third, and pigs by 74 percent. 

Earlier this year, investigative outlet Watershed and The Guardian found evidence of cattle, pig and human faeces in samples of water from the lough, which spans nearly 400 square kilometres and provides 40 percent of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. 

Mary O’Hagan lives on the north-west of the lake. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she set up a wild swimming group, and found that the cold water had huge benefits – from improving mental health to relieving chronic pain.  

“In my 30s, I didn’t have much of a life, I wasn’t looking after myself. Swimming in Lough Neagh changed my life completely,” O’Hagan says. “We had a community.”

But after the second year of the blooms, she felt forced to shut the swimming group down. 

“I couldn’t in all good conscience organise swims where people would be exposed to bacteria, algae, or god knows what else.” 

“The first year… was awful. It was like Armageddon. To see the shores covered as far as the eye can see in pea green sludge, was horrendous,” she says.

O’Hagan’s concerns are shared by swimmers and local authorities elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, dozens of lakes are also routinely devastated by algal blooms, triggering a spate of temporary swimming bans this summer. 

“The water used to be clear, you could see your own feet,” says Oland Stephan, who has run a kiosk at Sander lake in northern Germany for 18 years. Once a popular bathing spot, the lake has been off-bounds for swimmers for the last few years because of the blue-green algae – which can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and skin irritation, among other issues. 

“I could make a living back then, but not anymore,” Stephan says. “I have bankruptcy papers at home.”

Peter Bünting, a lifeguard at the lake, says the cloudiness of the water from the algae makes search and rescue operations challenging. “You might have a casualty in front of you but you just can’t see.”

‘More Animals Than People’

Certain types of algae have been linked to fatalities. When sea lettuce and blue-green algaes break down, they can produce hydrogen sulfide, a lethal gas that smells like rotten eggs and causes  blocked airways and fluid to build up in the lungs if inhaled in large quantities. 

Since the 1980s, sea lettuce algae has been linked to as many as six deaths on Brittany’s beaches. 

Locals here are clear about the cause of the algae growth. Near the tourist town of Saint-Brieuc, “the pigs” has been scribbled across an official sign warning about the danger and symptoms of inhaling toxic gas from the algae. 

“We have many more animals than people,” environmental author Yves-Marie Le Lay told DeSmog. Although the peninsula covers just five percent of France’s surface, its 6.8 million pigs account for 58 percent of the country’s total population. “We have a manure problem, it all ends up in the rivers.”

For environmental activist Fabrice Hamon, who lives near the Penfoul beach in Western Brittany, bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella from manure run-off have also become a daily concern – washed by rain from farmland down to the sea. 

Since official tests in the summer of 2025 identified E. coli on Penfoul, the beach has been under a partial swimming ban, and is at risk of being closed permanently. 

Hamon says these bacteria are “super dangerous” if they are swallowed or come into contact with areas like the eyes and nose – and can cause infections, such as conjunctivitis, urinary tract infections, and gastro-intestinal infections that lead to diarrhea and vomiting.

Hamon is uneasy about the coming months. This summer’s droughts meant that fewer harmful excess nutrients were washed into the waterways from fields treated with manure, but instead are stored in the soil until it rains. Europe, the fastest-warming continent in the world, is seeing more intense and unpredictable bouts of extreme weather, including increased downpours and flooding.

“Right now there’s a build-up of bacteria in the fields,” Hamon says. “All it takes is a heavy downpour and bingo. It’s a slow-acting poison: little by little, ecosystems are being degraded by the build-up of pollution linked to intensive farming.”

Warming Seas

As climate change accelerates, warming temperatures are also exacerbating the algal blooms. Algae grows quicker and lasts longer in warm waters, as higher temperatures allow it to digest and reproduce at a faster rate. 

Jürgen Leicher, deputy chairman for the German environmental group BUND in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, has been sailing on the Baltic Sea for 40 years, and says this year’s algal blooms were the worst he’s ever seen. 

Temperatures in Germany broke records for three consecutive days in June, reaching almost 42C. Satellite images of the Baltic in August show vast algal blooms swirling towards the coast.“You feel really afraid when you sail for hundreds of miles through a yellow-brown dirty sea,” says Leicher. “All the way through this algae, the sea was dead. You see no birds, no mammals, no fish. It’s so empty.”

Agriculture is the biggest source of the problem: the intergovernmental body HELCOM estimates it accounts for up to 90 per cent of nitrogen and up to 80 per cent of phosphorus in diffuse nutrient run-off into the Baltic. 

Despite decades of intergovernmental efforts to reduce nutrient pollution, the Baltic is struggling to recover from the environmental damage combined with rising temperatures. Each year, when algae dies it sinks to the seabed, taking large amounts of phosphorus with it. That phosphorus is released back into the ocean in future years — a dangerous feedback loop that picks up speed as the sea warms.

Seeking Solutions

In the face of these huge challenges, residents, campaigners and scientists are united in their determination to find solutions. 

Leicher thinks that better monitoring could help track the profound environmental disruption taking place in the Baltic Sea. His colleagues at BUND Schleswig-Holstein have launched a citizen science project, which will see volunteers collect water samples twice a month from local rivers. By analysing the samples in a laboratory, the organisation hopes to pinpoint sources of pollution and help efforts to cut nutrients.

In Brittany, Fabrice Hamon has designed an app – La Météo Bacterio – which helps monitor for bacteria in the 20 odd rivers that flow onto local beaches, meaning tourists and residents can check for warnings before they swim.

Others are focusing their efforts on political and legal action. In recent years, campaigners and residents have won a raft of legal victories – including persuading the Spanish government in 2022 to bestow ‘legal personhood’ on Mar Menor, providing the lagoon with rights to protection and restoration.

Ultimately, though, scientists say that nutrient pollution must be slashed to limit the recurrent harmful algae growth – and that means transforming agricultural practices. 

“The science is clear on what needs to be done,” says Professor Friedhelm Taube from Kiel University (CAU), who spent 12 years advising Germany’s Ministry of Agriculture. Governments should support farmers to use less nitrates-heavy fertiliser, plant catch crops like grass clover that absorb some of the excess nutrients from soils before they run into rivers, lakes and sea, and reduce the number of animals farmed on limited land, he says.

“Farming animals can be fine,” Taube says, but to keep nutrient run-off within safe limits, numbers should be reduced to just one ‘livestock unit’ per hectare – a technical term that translates to just one dairy cow or around three pigs. That means far fewer animals in regions where they are intensively farmed, he adds. 

Campaigners in Spain also face a stark choice. “Either we wreck the Mar Menor,” says Pedro Luengo from Ecologistas en Accion, “or we transform the agricultural model”.

In Northern Ireland, Mary O’Hagan is determined to continue to fight for change. “I credit getting into Lough Neagh for the lovely active life I lead,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons I fight back in the way I do.” 

It’s a long fight, but Mary is hopeful. “I’d like to see improvements in my children’s lifetimes – to see it restored to how it was.”

Additional research by Joey Grostern and Louis Bontemps

Editing by Phoebe Cooke and Clare Carlile

The post In Pictures: ‘Armageddon’ at Europe’s Swim Spots Linked to Climate Change and Factory Farm Pollution appeared first on DeSmog.

Kathryn Porter, a consultant to the fossil fuel industry and a prominent critic of emissions reduction policies, has joined the UK’s foremost climate science denial group.

Porter appears frequently in the media as an “independent” expert on energy issues and has been interviewed on the BBC, LBC, GB News, and TalkTV, while her research is often covered in conservative media.

She also writes a column for The Telegraph, and in recent weeks she spoke on energy panels at both Labour and Conservative party conferences.

Porter’s consultancy Watt-Logic advises the oil and gas industry. Its website states that she works for “businesses with projects across the electricity, gas and oil industries”, including “clients with conventional energy assets including gas-fired power stations, gas storage, upstream oil and gas production and [Liquefied Natural Gas]”.

On 16 October, Porter joined the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a lobby group set up by Conservative peer and former chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson in 2008 to counter the growing consensus on the need to address man-made climate change.

The group, which is currently led by Tory peer Lord Craig Mackinlay, has said CO2 has been “mercilessly demonised” when it is a “benefit to the planet” – claiming that the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration should be “two or three times” higher than it is now. The group does not publicly declare its funding.

In a statement on the GWPF website, Porter said: “I am delighted to be joining the Board of Trustees. Nigel Lawson understood the importance of open debate, rigorous analysis and challenging conventional wisdom, and I look forward to helping build on that legacy.”

Porter has authored two reports for the GWPF, and one for its campaign arm Net Zero Watch, since 2023.

She will sit on the board alongside The Telegraph’s chief interviewer Allison Pearson, and Labour MP Graham Stringer.

Porter has publicly criticised climate policies. In a post on X in January 2025, Porter attacked what she called an “excessive focus on CO2” in energy policy, and in February she suggested the UK’s landmark Climate Change Act should be repealed.

As DeSmog revealed in July 2023, Porter has written blogs that contradict basic climate science. In a 2017 post, she wrote that “climate models overstate global warming”. In fact, climate models have accurately predicted global temperature rises, with observed warming reflecting scientific forecasts.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.

It has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

While Porter and the GWPF claim that reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is unaffordable, a succession of heatwaves during the British summer led to mass school closures, public transport disruption, and a “disaster” harvest – ultimately costing the economy an estimated £4.4 billion.

The Climate Change Committee, an independent government advisory body, has estimated that reaching net zero will cost 0.2 percent of GDP per year – and that its total cost will be less than one fossil fuel price shock.

Porter and the GWPF were approached for comment.

Conservative Connections

Porter and the GWPF have several connections to the Conservative Party.

In January, Clare Coutinho, the then Tory shadow energy secretary, helped to launch a paper written by Porter claiming that renewable energy development could cause blackouts – a claim rejected as “nonsense scaremongering” by the government.

Coutinho had previously suggested that the Labour government should hire Porter to vet its energy policies.

The Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch has ditched its past support for climate action, declaring it would be “impossible” to reach net zero by 2050, and vowing to repeal the Climate Change Act. Badenoch has banned any Tory candidate from supporting net zero.

Earlier this month, Porter spoke at the Conservative Party’s conference in Birmingham on a panel entitled ‘Solving Britain’s Energy Crisis’ alongside newly-appointed shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie, head of policy at Octopus Energy Jack Pardoe, and Liam Halligan, a former GB News presenter and the director of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank.

Porter also spoke on a GWPF panel at last year’s Tory conference entitled ‘Can Britain survive Ed Miliband?’, where she called for net zero to be scrapped and for increased fossil fuel extraction. 

As DeSmog revealed in September 2024, GWPF donors have given more than £7 million to the Conservatives over the past two decades.

At this year’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Porter also spoke on an energy panel organised by the oil exploration company EnQuest, whose CEO Amjad Bseisu is a Conservative Party donor.

Speaking alongside Bseisu, GMB general secretary Gary Smith, and Labour donor Dale Vince, Porter called for taxes to be reduced on the fossil fuel industry and for the UK to expand its North Sea drilling. 

The post Oil Industry Consultant Joins Climate Denial Group Run by Tory Peer appeared first on DeSmog.

As the COP17 nature summit gets underway in Armenia, evidence has emerged of lobbying by a leading international pharmaceuticals group to weaken the terms of a flagship fund for nature.

Documents analysed by DeSmog show that the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) called for a “radical rethink” of the rationale for the landmark Cali Fund – the first mechanism built to take voluntary payments from large companies that profit from genetic sequence data.

The IFPMA states that the “modalities of the decision” to establish the Fund – which was ratified by 196 countries in 2024 at the COP16 summit of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Colombia – should be “significantly reviewed, revised and clarified”.

In the consultation submission, the trade group – which represents the pharmaceutical sector at the UN – also challenged the indicative rates at which companies were invited to contribute to the Fund, agreed at COP16 as 0.1 percent of revenue or 1 percent of profit.

The IFPMA labelled these indicative rates as “premature”, set “without any rational analysis”, and “commercially unrealistic”, suggesting instead that companies be allowed to contribute to the voluntary fund at a level of their choosing. 

Other demands from the IFPMA included a guarantee that any contribution would explicitly substitute payments for digital sequence information required under national or international laws.

Despite contributions to the Cali Fund already being voluntary, following a fierce lobbying push at the last summit, the IFPMA also seeks a guarantee they will remain so, stating that “there are elements in the decision that do not go far enough in creating a truly voluntary mechanism”.

Responses from other sectors, such as biotechnology and cosmetics – which are listed alongside pharma and artificial intelligence firms in the treaty text as industries that should contribute – echo some of the IFPMA’s objections, and appear to be reluctant to support the Fund as it is currently conceived. 

The UK Bioindustry Association (UK BIA), which has 600 biotech and life sciences companies among its members, says the CBD’s expectations for what the Fund can raise are currently set “unrealistically high”, in its consultation response dated March 2025. 

UK BIA states that “for the Fund to succeed in the long term”, questions over its design and operationalisation must be addressed, and “clear incentives” created. 

The revelations come as negotiators gather for the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia this week, with just $10,000 pledged by companies to the Cali Fund. 

It falls far short of the $1 billion to $10 billion that the UN had hoped the Fund could draw in every year, half of which is mandated to flow directly to the Indigenous and local communities that steward biodiversity.

“The tiny amounts contributed to the Cali Fund so far, combined with continued delays from industry, send a clear signal: voluntary contributions are simply not delivering,” An Lambrechts, a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, told DeSmog. 

The latest UN report shows that the world is off track on all but one of 23 targets aimed at reversing catastrophic nature loss, with the total funds raised to date from both private and public bodies falling far short of what is needed to close a $200 billion “biodiversity finance gap”.

“Big multinational corporations are turning massive profits by exploiting nature,” Lambrechts says, “while leaving people all over the world to face the impacts of the biodiversity crisis.”

A spokesperson for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat admits that the sums in the Fund “sit well below the scenarios that were discussed in Cali”, but puts this down to the evolving “operational infrastructure” and its low profile.

“Substantive decisions expected at COP17 are expected to give in-scope companies more solid ground to commit,” they said.

“I do believe companies have legitimate concerns, but there’s also a sense in which they don’t want to pay,” said a source close to the negotiations, who preferred to remain anonymous. “If these industries were really supportive then someone would have put the money in by now, even just as a token, a show of good faith.”

Guilherme Cintra, Director, Innovation Policy at IFPMA wrote in an email that the group had “long supported the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity and continues to deliver against the targets set out in the Global Biodiversity Framework”.

He added: “The level of participation in the Cali Fund reflects ongoing questions about the design and implementation of the mechanism, rather than a lack of commitment to biodiversity. Governments should use COP17 to rethink the Cali Fund to attract broader participation and ensure it supports biodiversity and preserves scientific openness.” 

UK BIA declined to comment on the record. 

“It’s concerning that, nearly two years after the agreements reached at COP16 in Cali, funding for biodiversity protection remains an unfulfilled promise,” Juan Bay, leader of the indigenous Waorani nation of Ecuador told DeSmog.

“This reflects a situation we have been denouncing for years: Indigenous peoples protect some of the most biodiverse territories on the planet, yet we continue to face enormous difficulties in directly accessing the funding needed to protect them.”

History of Pushback

When the Cali Fund was launched in February last year, the UN hailed it as the beginning of “a new era for biodiversity finance”.

The new financial instrument aimed to address a new reality: that genetic data, known as digital sequence information, or DSI, is now available online. This allows companies, or researchers, to access material from plants, animals, bacteria and fungi without ever setting foot in the country of origin – and bypass rules that require payment. 

As a result, the genetic code that underpins a range of lucrative products – everything from sweeteners to the vast majority of cancer drugs – is available with few rules to limit access. 

The Cali Fund, Carbon Brief writes, was aimed at “closing this loophole”. It was agreed that 50 percent of funds would go to Indigenous communities and local communities that steward fragile ecosystems, with the rest going to Global South countries and scientific research.

At the COP16 summit where the Fund was agreed, the business lobby reached a record high, including from sectors that the mechanism was built around: pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, cosmetics, and information services associated with DSI, including artificial intelligence.

A Global South government push at the UN talks for the Fund to be a mandatory mechanism was defeated in the wake of a strong lobbying effort by the pharma, agritech and biotech industry, which dubbed the proposed levy a ‘global tax’.

In the lead up to the summit, UK-based pharma giant AstraZeneca, which posted $12.4 billion in profits last year, had warned the British government it “might cut jobs” if a levy were introduced, according to The Guardian. An AstraZeneca spokesperson denied the comments. 

Another pharma giant, GSK, also pushed back against the Fund, which it called “disproportionate”, telling the UK government it could “hinder the development of new medicines and vaccines”, in emails obtained by Carbon Brief.

A spokesperson from GSK told DeSmog it had set ambitious targets and was investing in nature protection. “We support the intent behind the Cali Fund and will make a decision regarding voluntary contributions when there is more information about how the Cali Fund will work alongside other national and multilateral Access and Benefit Sharing mechanisms,” they said. 

“As a company, we are committed to advancing our research and development in response to the needs of patients,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said in an email. “An assessment of the full impact on our operations will be conducted once there is more clarity from governments on the implementation of the DSI MLM [Cali Fund].”

Since 2024, the pharmaceutical industry’s global lobby group the IFPMA appears to have continued to focus its energy on weakening the rules that were agreed in Colombia.

The COP16 agreement established key elements of the Fund: contribution rates, a list of sectors that should contribute, and set thresholds to ensure large companies were expected to give to the fund, defining qualifying entities as those that exceeded two of three financial thresholds: $20 million in assets, $50 million in sales, or $5 million in profit.

However, rates and thresholds were marked as ‘indicative’ and set to be finalised at the current talks in Armenia. 

Cali Fund Push Back 

To build on what had been agreed in Cali, Colombia, the CBD sought to engage industry over how to make the Fund operational – inviting responses on what sectors should contribute and how.

DeSmog analysed 22 responses, which were submitted by 14 groups in response to stakeholder consultations issued by the Convention of Biological Diversity secretariat, along with available public statements from industry groups that have engaged publicly with the Fund.

In their submissions, industry groups pushed back on a range of fronts. The IFPMA, which claims to represent over 90 percent of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical companies, emerges as the Fund’s most outspoken critic.

It called for a “radical rethink” of the Fund’s rationale, and states that the MLM (multilateral mechanism that gives rise to the Cali Fund) does not “effectively advance biodiversity goals”. 

The group criticised everything from contribution levels, a lack of clarity “on how funds will be allocated or guarantees that funds will directly support conservation efforts”, and proposed that the treaty decision text be “significantly reviewed, revised and clarified”.

’A Tax on Innovation’

The IFPMA states that the MLM “essentially imposes a financial burden on the free exchange of scientific data, which is critical for medical, environmental and other societal research”. It adds that: “by taxing DSI use, the MLM risks creating disincentives for global scientific cooperation, slowing the pace of innovation”.

The IFPMA also stated that it is “critical” that indicative contribution rates (0.1 percent of revenue or 1 percent of profit) be “reconsidered”.

“Establishing indicative contribution rates in Decision 16/2 was premature and the rates themselves are commercially unrealistic, are not based on the underlying value that DSI brings, lack scientific justification, do not take into account sector-specific differences, and serve as a disincentive to participation,” it wrote. 

The IFPMA’s view that setting indicative rates was “premature” is echoed in the submission from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). 

The ICC was approached for comment. In its consultation submission, it states that the ICC is seeking “clarity, certainty and enabling conditions that are essential to incentivise businesses to actively engage”.

“Not Voluntary Enough”

The IFPMA goes on to suggest that the size of any contribution should be left to companies’ discretion, writing that “the expectation of contribution as well as the level of contribution must both be voluntary”.

While IFPMA recognises that payments into the Fund are already “voluntary in principle”, it argues that the wording of the treaty decision does “not go far enough in creating a truly voluntary mechanism” – taking issue with a clause that invites signatories to the CBD treaty to enact laws that incentivise company contributions.

The IFPMA goes on to add: “Given that the indicative rates were chosen without any rational analysis – as acknowledged by the decision itself, which calls for a study to propose replacement realistic rates – it is critical that these placeholder rates are truly indicative.”

In 2026, the UN’s CBD secretariat produced a study, in which it modelled the impact of contribution rates on the competitiveness of eligible companies, and found “the direct cost burden […] to be modest, relative to sector margins”. The IFPMA disputed these findings too, stating that “even modest reductions in expected returns can be enough to delay, scale back or halt a project”.

“Obligation Stacking”

The CBD negotiating text (Decision 16/2), which established the Fund, stated that the treaty would not override national “benefit-sharing” laws that already exist in at least 20 countries – which require companies to pay, or otherwise compensate, communities for their use of digital genetic data.

The IFPMA and BIA trade groups both expressed their concern at what they call “obligation stacking”, in consultation documents analysed by DeSmog. The IFPMA said that any payment into the Cali Fund should rule out paying governments for DSI again under any national laws, and both ask for “legal certainty”.

In response to a request for comment, Guilherme Cintra, IFPMA’s director of innovation policy, said: “The current mechanism overlaps with existing law, relies on inaccurate assumptions about how data is used in the discovery of medicines, and asks companies to hand over a share of their total revenue whether ‘digital sequence information’ was used to develop a medicine or not.”

‘Artful Arguments’

Dr Siva Thambisetty, associate professor of law at the London School of Economics (LSE), describes industry’s core arguments as “artful”.

She explains that the Fund decision to base contributions on revenue or profit, was an attempt aimed at securing “oversight and transparency” in the absence of comparable publicly available data from companies on how they use DSI.

“I think it’s interesting that the very companies that wanted a voluntary mechanism are now claiming that there is no legal certainty,” says Thambisetty. “We have to be careful that national ABS [access and benefit-sharing] laws are not damaged for a system that not many users appear to have any intention of paying into”.

She suggests that industry objections raised touch the fund’s viability and the terms already agreed, rather than how it should be rolled out. “It’s the operational clarity that the negotiations in Armenia should ideally focus on, rather than reopening discussions on the normative basis, and multilateral will – which is clearly set out in CBD decisions,” she said.  

A paper released on the eve of the summit by the Common Initiative think tank acknowledges that the fund is empty due to structural problems, not just to low company ambition. 

It highlights a lack of consensus on how to define DSI, no clear mechanism for counting contributions, and a lack of harmonization between national governments’ implementation.

But these structural problems are not “bad luck,” they write. Rather, “it is what happens when a mechanism designed to extract money from some of the most profitable industries on earth is built on the assumption that those industries will simply volunteer to pay it.”

Indigenous Agency

Finalising the Cali Fund will be top of the agenda at the upcoming Cop17 talks in the Armenian capital Yerevan, which will run from 19-30 October. 

Parties are expected to pin down the details on disbursement of the fund between Global South countries, thresholds for company participation and fund governance, as well as measuring countries’ progress against targets to protect 30 percent of land and seas and restore the earth’s degraded ecosystems.

For June Rubis, an Indigenous representative who sits on the Cali Fund Steering Committee, the question of where money ends up has great importance. “I would like to see Indigenous communities be given meaningful agency over priorities, access and delivery,” she tells DeSmog.

The final Cali Fund text agreed at COP16 stated that half of any funds raised would go to Indigenous and local community stewards for self-defined projects that support biodiversity protection like forest restoration, or the transfer of ecological knowledge between generations.

Indigenous communities manage, or have rights over, around 37 percent of the earth’s natural areas, despite making up just 6 percent of the global population.

“What I want to avoid is a situation in which money is nominally allocated for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but the project priorities are determined elsewhere or communities have to pass through an institution they did not identify,” says Rubis.

Rubis believes it’s important to take the time to build a financial mechanism that works for company contributors, countries, and Indigenous peoples and local communities alike. “Of course,” she adds, “for all this to apply, we also need to have the money coming in.”

More Action From States

Although businesses are expected to pay into the Cali Fund, national governments have the power to negotiate, agree and enforce decisions reached through the CBD process – and bear the responsibility to ensure funds are raised. 

To date, governments have played a mixed role. Some Global North countries, including the EU bloc and UK, appear to have lobbied alongside industry to push for the Cali Fund to be non-binding and voluntary.

However since then, through the Friends of the Cali Fund – which is chaired by the UK and Chile and includes Norway and Armenia – both the UK and the EU are now working to incentivise contributions.

Other countries such as Switzerland, where pharmaceutical companies make up 7 percent of GDP, as well as Japan and Korea, have continued to push back on key elements of the fund architecture.   

“I have been surprised to see industry arguments amplified by some Global North governments,” says Nithin Ramakrishnan from the nonprofit Third World Network,

“Including on areas – such as the relationship with national laws – that appear to go against the text that was agreed in Cali.”

For her part, Thambisetty tells DeSmog she would like to see “more coordinated action” on the part of countries where most of these large firms are situated. 

Thambisetty suggests a global push is needed to frame contributions as a moral responsibility for companies and investors: “a good public narrative about why these payments are necessary”. 

Learning By Doing

So far, the Cali Fund has raised no money from large firms. The only companies to contribute are Prozomix, a small UK-based biotech company that paid in July this year, and UK technology start-up TierraViva AI which contributed in November 2025.

The smaller outfits are encouraging others to follow suit. The first, TierraViva AI, which deposited $1,000, called on companies to embrace “learning by doing”, in an open letter penned last November. 

A second company, the biotech firm Prozomix, which handed over $5,000 in July, states on its website: “We feel companies of our size, and at any and all stages of development, should pay for the privilege of exploiting public DSI”.

Business for Nature, an alliance of more than 100 progressive businesses, has encouraged contributions from its members, pointing out they depend on healthy ecosystems to maintain their business model. It writes in an August briefing that “companies do not need to wait for the final rules to engage”.

It’s a sentiment echoed by the CBD executive secretary Schomaker, who called on companies to commit, ahead of this week’s summit. 

“Maybe if you think it’s too new for you, make a gesture and start paying, and increase over time,” she told environmental news site Mongabay.

“It’s frankly not good enough for a company to say, ‘We have many questions,’ and just sit there and wait.”

With editing by Emma Howard

The post How Big Pharma Tried to Weaken the Rules of the UN’s Nature Fund appeared first on DeSmog.

A former housing executive fired by Reform UK for making “shameful” comments about the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy still claims to have a role in the party, DeSmog can reveal.

Simon Dudley, a former chair of Homes England, was removed as the party’s housing spokesperson for making – in the words of Reform leader Nigel Farage – “shocking” and “deeply inappropriate” comments about the disaster.

In an interview with Inside Housing in April, Dudley said the deadly blaze, which led to the deaths of 72 people, was a “tragedy” but that “everyone dies in the end”. He claimed that rules introduced in the wake of the fire to improve safety standards were examples of “regulation which is not working”.

Dudley was roundly criticised for his remarks, including by groups representing Grenfell survivors and next of kin. The then prime minister Keir Starmer called the comments “shameful”.

However, despite being sacked as Reform’s housing spokesperson, Dudley still appears to work with the party.

He introduced Reform’s deputy leader and housing chief Richard Tice to business delegates at the party’s annual conference in September, and chaired a question and answer session following Tice’s speech.

According to a transcript, Tice thanked Dudley for his “generous” introduction, after which Tice presented Reform’s sweeping policies to deregulate the planning system.

While Dudley’s exact role in the party is not known, his social media profiles – including his up-to-date LinkedIn CV – continue to list him in a ‘Housing and Infrastructure’ position at Reform.

He’s also a keen party activist who has accused the Conservatives of copying Reform’s ideas and who campaigned for Farage in this summer’s Clacton by-election.

Neither Reform nor Dudley denied that he is still involved in the party when approached by DeSmog for comment.

However, Dudley’s continued involvement contrasts starkly with Reform’s response to his remarks in April.

“He’s under Richard Tice’s department, Richard appointed him housing spokesman given his depth of experience in developing new towns,” Farage said at the time. “But the comments were deeply inappropriate, they were frankly rather shocking to many people, and Richard has dealt with it.”

In response to the backlash in April, Dudley said that “Grenfell was an utter tragedy and quite rightly prompted a wholesale review and tightening of fire regulations.”

He added: “I said it was a tragedy in my interview with Inside House [sic] and in no shape or form am I belittling that disaster or the huge loss of life. It must never happen again. I reiterate that, and am sorry if it was not sufficiently clear.”

A new undercover investigation due to be released by ITV in full on Sunday 18 October shows Reform councillors making a number of sexist and racist comments. One Reform councillor from south London is filmed saying that King Charles should be decapitated because he is secretly a Muslim.

A version of this article was also published by The New World.

Reform’s Deregulation Agenda

The Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017 was one of the worst tragedies in modern British history. Just before 1am, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey block in Kensington, London, which spread rapidly due to the highly combustible cladding that had been installed on the building a year earlier.

The government has subsequently introduced new fire safety rules, particularly in relation to high-rise blocks, to prevent another similar disaster.

However, Reform initially echoed Dudley’s remarks about the new regulations being too onerous. Speaking in April, a party spokesperson said: “Simon’s comments on Grenfell reflected his broader point that the regulatory pendulum has swung too far in response to the tragedy. As he explained, there is a fine balance between over-regulation – which can slow the delivery of new homes – and ensuring that more homes are built safely without too much red tape.”

This conforms to Reform’s deregulation agenda, which would reduce the taxes and laws applied to major corporations, potentially benefitting some of the party’s biggest donors.

Reform has supported more permissive rules for the crypto, finance, and housing industries – all of which have contributed substantially to the party’s coffers – with Farage promising a “bonfire of business regulation” if he becomes prime minister.

This also applies to the oil and gas industry. Reform, which has accepted more than £24 million from fossil fuel interests, has said it would scrap the windfall tax on fossil fuel profits, end the ban on new North Sea drilling licences, and ditch the moratorium on fracking for shale gas.

Senior Reform figure Andrea Jenkyns, the mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, has said that she would “turn the countryside into Swiss cheese” through the mass expansion of fracking across the UK.

The party, some of whose senior figures frequently deny the science of climate change, would dramatically increase the production of fossil fuels in the UK and reduce state support for renewable energy – despite the impact of high gas prices on the cost of living, and the growing frequency of climate-induced extreme weather events.

The post Reform Figure Behind ‘Shocking’ Grenfell Comments Still Involved in Party appeared first on DeSmog.