Earthtrack in the Media

Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed to spend $65 billion from the government’s general fund to double the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve...

When he releases his new budget in two weeks, President Obama will propose doing away with roughly $4 billion a year in subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, in his third effort to eliminate federal support for an industry that remains hugely profitable.

Article provides a review of Earth Track's report on nuclear subsidies, prepared for UCS:

If Uncle Sam and co. had bought power on the open market and given it away free, it would have cost less than subsidizing nuclear power plant construction and operation over the last 50 years, says a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Article discusses Earth Track's report on nuclear subsidies, prepared for UCS:

Nuclear power was supposed to be too cheap to meter, but a science-based nonprofit that advocates for environmental and public health issues has published a new report that casts doubt that it was ever really economically viable.

The Energy Information Administration’s latest report on federal energy subsidies, released Aug. 1, underreported direct and indirect federal subsidies to the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, creating an inflated view of the subsidies that benefit renewable energy and efficiency programs, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has officially committed to a multi-million nuclear loan guarantee, it seems like a re-run of an old movie. If it does, readers are reminded that the “balloons” were first released in 2010 when the agency said it would loan $8.3 billion to help build the first reactors in decades.

Carbon offsets—the money polluting business spend on projects that benefit the environment—have been growing in recent years, but it’s a long way from catching up to the money governments spend supporting businesses that are harmful to the environment.

Researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute (Somerville and Seattle, USA) and Earth Track, Inc. (Cambridge, MA, USA) examined 16 subsidies and environmental regulatory exemptions, providing one of the first estimates of how government subsidies will affect investment decisions for new gas fields in the coming decade. Their results are published in the IOP Publishing journal, Environmental Research Letters. 

The Seven Sisters oil companies—now consolidated into ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and Chevron—relied on imperial concessions throughout much of the global south to maintain their cartel over some 85 percent of the world’s oil resources through much of the twentieth century. When local governments threatened that control, the companies turned to the CIA to help protect their property.

During the 2010 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference, 190 countries committed to phasing out or reforming subsidies harmful to biodiversity by 2020.

However, a study by The B Team supported by Business for Nature, the first in over a decade to provide an estimate of the total value of environmentally harmful subsidies across key sectors, shows governments have failed to deliver...