Monthly Archives: May 2024

New report accuses fossil fuel companies of greenwashing, but profits are up

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https://www.energymonitor.ai/features/new-report-accuses-fossil-fuel-companies-of-greenwashing-but-profits-are-up/

A new report by the Senate Committee on the Budget details how fossil fuel companies have avoided tackling the climate crisis.

Last week, US Democrats released a report three years in the making detailing the ways that large fossil fuel producers including Shell, BP and Exxon have sought to avoid responsibility for the climate crisis.

The 65 page-long report, jointly authored by the Democrats House Committee On Oversight And Accountability and the Senate Committee on the Budget, contains files subpoenaed from big oil companies that “demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.

Previous documentation has shown that companies including Exxon knew about human-made climate change since at least 1981, and files released earlier this year suggest it may have been known since the 1950s. The importance of this report lies in proving that fossil fuel companies not only knew, but privately believed the science despite public rejection.

The files also show the tactics used by major fossil companies to discredit climate activism, the report says, among them “pivot[ing] from outright climate denial to a new strategy of deception. Instead of misrepresenting the science and the consequences of climate change, they pivoted to misrepresenting their business plans, their investments in low carbon technologies, the alleged safety of natural gas, and their support for various climate policies and emission reduction targets”.

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Article continues at https://www.energymonitor.ai/features/new-report-accuses-fossil-fuel-companies-of-greenwashing-but-profits-are-up/

Continue ReadingNew report accuses fossil fuel companies of greenwashing, but profits are up

Constituents launch election campaign to ‘clean Parliament of climate deniers’

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/constituents-launch-election-campaign-to-clean-parliament-of-climate-deniers/

‘As a country, we face urgent threats on climate and nature. We need to make policies that follow the scientific evidence.’

MP Watch, a grassroots network of constituents that scrutinise MPs and aim to make them more accountable, has launched its election campaign. The campaign aims to let constituents know if they have an MP who denies climate change exists, so they are able to vote accordingly.

The campaigners list several MPs who are associated with denying the climate emergency exists, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Craig McKinlay, Esther McVey, Mark Jenkinson, Andrea Jenkins, Liz Truss, and Suella Braverman.

At the heart of the campaign launch is a film that lays bare the climate record of Steve Baker, Conservative MP of Wycombe, who the group describes as “climate denier number one.”

Baker was first elected as an MP in 2010 and was re-elected in 2019 with just a four thousand majority. An ardent Brexiteer, Baker was chair of the pro-Brexit group of MPs, the European Research Group (ERG), until he resigned when he was promoted to Brexit minister in 2017. He resigned from the post a year later, following the resignation of David Davis over concerns about the government’s strategy on Brexit.

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MP Watch campaign head Jessica Townsend described the aim of the campaign, as to “clean up parliament at the next election and to finally get rid of the pollution of climate misinformation.”.

“As a country, we face urgent threats on climate and nature. We need to make policies that follow the scientific evidence. Yet at this dangerous time, some in Westminster are playing politics on the issue. Frankly, it beggars’ belief.”

https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/constituents-launch-election-campaign-to-clean-parliament-of-climate-deniers/

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Benefit Fraud: The Right-Wing Lie that Refuses to Die

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/benefit-fraud-the-right-wing-lie-that-refuses-to-die/

For many right-wing politicians and their media allies, ‘welfare cheats’ is a line that bears endless repetition.

News broke this week that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is investigating the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)  over its treatment of disabled people, specifically whether the department failed to make reasonable adjustments for people with learning disabilities or long-term mental health conditions when carrying out benefit health assessments. 

“The DWP has been failing disabled people for decades now” and “full transparency and accountability is imperative,” said David Linden MP, the SNP’s Social Justice Spokesperson, in response to news of the investigation.

For years, successive Tory governments and the media ecosystems that support them, have demonised benefit claimants, presenting them as ‘scroungers,’ ‘frauds’ and ‘cheats.’ Who can forget the Sun’s ‘Beat the Cheat’ campaign in 2012, encouraging readers to be “patriotic” by reporting suspected benefit cheats to a benefit fraud hotline? In 2016, the then chancellor George Osborne refused to apologise for attempting to slice £4.4bn off benefits for people with disabilities, as he defended his controversial budget which led to the resignation of the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

Today, very little has changed, except that the country is mired in a cost-of-living crisis that has fuelled the sharpest increase in absolute poverty in 30 years.

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Disability benefit fraud a ‘non-issue’

Meanwhile, separate and more recent DWP figures show that there were almost no recorded losses to the taxpayer due to fraud in the disability benefits system in the financial year ending 2024.

Disability Living Allowance fraud was just 0.1 percent, rounded down to £0m. PIP cheating was found to be 0 percent in the same period, the data showed.

PIP overpayments represented 0.4 percent, equating to around £90m lost in a year, marking a significant decrease from the previous year, when such overpayments stood 1.1 percent (£200m). The overpayments were said to be mainly due to errors made by the department when allocating award levels at the assessment stage.

Responding to the figures, Mikey Erhardt, campaigner at Disability Rights UK described PIP fraud as a ‘non-issue.’

“New data shows what we, as disabled people, have known for years – PIP fraud is a non-issue. PIP fraud is now the lowest on record – despite the government placing fraud front and centre of their latest public announcements,” he said.

Erhardt added: “If the government is concerned about fraud, it would be serious about the £15.2bn that multinational companies hide from the UK via tax havens. Money which could fund public services that we all need and use. Instead, disabled people continue to be demonised.”

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/05/benefit-fraud-the-right-wing-lie-that-refuses-to-die/

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak describes his benefit to already filthy rich fossil fuel investors and how he hates poor people.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak describes his benefit to already filthy rich fossil fuel investors and how he hates poor people.
Continue ReadingBenefit Fraud: The Right-Wing Lie that Refuses to Die