Protesters oppose Trump’s policies in Los Angeles on Sunday. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images
Thousands take to LA streets to protest against Ice raids and president’s deployment of national guard troops
Federal agents clashed with demonstrators in Los Angeles on Sunday as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” to disperse massive crowds of people protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and his deployment of the California national guard against the will of the state’s elected leaders.
Thousands of Angelenos swamped the streets around city hall, the federal courthouse and a detention center where protesters arrested in days before are being held. They also brought a major freeway to a standstill.
Vocal and boisterous, the crowd for large parts of the day was mostly peaceful. But tensions flared several times. On Sunday afternoon, police used teargas to disperse groups of protesters gathered near the detention center. And in the evening, officers fired round after round of flash-bangs in an attempt to push the protesters back up the freeway off-ramps. Los Angeles police leaders said officers had been shot at with commercial grade fireworks, and had rocks thrown at them.
Trump’s decision to deploy national guard troops into Los Angeles, against the wishes of state and local officials, has sent shockwaves through American politics. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and other Democratic governors have sharply criticized the move, describing it as an “alarming abuse of power”. Newsom has called on the administration to rescind the “unlawful” deployment.
“This is a serious breach of state sovereignty – inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed. Rescind the order. Return control to California,” Newsom said.
Trump ordered the deployment of 2,000 national guard on Saturday night following two days of clashes between demonstrators and US immigration authorities.
The decision marked a stunning escalation in a broad crackdown on immigrants following raids across the country, which have triggered protests.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
British-flagged yacht operated by pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition was making symbolic attempt to deliver aid
Israel’s military took control of a boat trying to deliver food to Palestinians in Gaza in the early hours of Monday morning, and brought its crew of activists including Greta Thunberg to an Israeli port.
The Madleen was making a symbolic attempt to break to the blockade of Gaza and raise awareness of a looming “starvation crisis”.
It was never likely to get through Israel’s naval blockade of the territory, where UN-backed experts have warned of looming famine, and dozens of people have been killed by Israeli forces trying to reach food distribution centres.
Even attempting to reach Gaza by boat is risky. In May, another boat sailing as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the group that organised the Madleen’s voyage, caught fire off Malta and issued an SOS after what the group said was an attack by Israeli drones. Israel’s military declined to comment.
In 2010, nine activists were killed when Israeli commandos raided a small fleet of ships trying to take supplies including building materials to Gaza. Israel began blockading Gaza in 2007.
Among the last communications from the Madleen before it lost communications was a photo showing the 12-strong crew gathered in a circle, wearing lifejackets, with their hands in the air.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg stands near a Palestinian flag after boarding the Madleen boat and before setting sail for Gaza along with activists of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, departing from the Sicilian port of Catania, Italy, June 1, 2025
ISRAEL’S far-right defence minister vowed today to prevent an aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists from reaching the Gaza Strip.
The remarks by Israel Katz comes as the Israelis continue to carry out their attacks on Palestinians desperately seeking aid in Gaza.
Mr Katz said today that Israel wouldn’t allow anyone to break its naval blockade of the Palestinian territory, which he said was aimed at preventing Hamas from importing arms.
“To the anti-semitic Greta and her fellow Hamas propagandists — I will say this clearly: You should turn back, because you will not make it to Gaza,” he said in a statement.
Ms Thunberg, a climate campaigner, is among 12 activists aboard the Madleen, which is operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. The vessel departed Sicily last Sunday on a mission that aims to break the sea blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave.
The vessel was expected to reach Gaza’s territorial waters this evening.
After a three-month total blockade aimed at pressuring Hamas, Israel started allowing some basic aid into Gaza last month, but humanitarian workers have warned of famine unless the blockade [is lifted] and the war end[s].
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Canada Energy Minister Tim Hodgson (left) and climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg (right). Credit: Dan Lofton (CC BY-NC 2.0) and CPAC / YouTube
In audio obtained by DeSmog, Bjorn Lomborg told a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver that the technology is way too expensive to be viable.
Bjorn Lomborg has for years promoted the idea that fossil fuels are crucial for humankind through syndicated newspaper columns, best-selling books and appearances on TV shows including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
Yet the Danish political scientist — who acknowledges that climate change is real but denies that it’s a serious crisis — has a dim view of the oil and gas industry’s preferred solution to climate change: carbon capture and storage.
That technology is favored by Alberta premier Danielle Smith and Liberal energy minister Tim Hodgson, both of whom recently floated the idea of a “grand bargain” where Canada’s oil and gas industry gets approval for new pipelines in exchange for moving forward with a $16.5 billion carbon capture project.
It might seem that a prominent fossil fuel advocate like Lomborg would support technology loudly touted by major oil and gas producers and their political allies. But speaking at a private event last week in Vancouver, exclusive audio of which was obtained by DeSmog, Lomborg argued that “carbon capture will always be a net cost” to oil and gas producers and the taxpayers that subsidize it.
“In realistic terms, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,” he added, referring to the prospect of prices for the technology coming down low enough that it can be rapidly and cost-efficiently deployed worldwide.
On that point Lomborg might actually be in agreement with climate policy experts who are also critical of carbon capture. “There’s a lot of federal money and provincial money that could be thrown at this thing,” Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute, recently told DeSmog. “We’ve been looking at this option for almost 20 years and it hasn’t happened.”
Speaking at the Fraser Institute
Lomborg was in the west coast Canadian city to speak at a private luncheon hosted by the Fraser Institute, a free-market organization with a long history of disputing the scientific reality of climate change that has received funding from the likes of Exxon and the charitable foundation of oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.
It’s a leading member of Atlas Network, an influential coalition of more than 500 groups worldwide that promote free-market policies and whose partners in Canada have developed political strategies for fossil fuel expansion.
“Yes, global warming is real. It’s man-made, but it’s often also vastly exaggerated,” Lomborg claimed at the Fraser Institute luncheon, the same day that the United Nations warned that global temperatures were likely to breach the crucial warming threshold of 1.5 degrees within the next five years.
During the event he was asked for this thoughts about carbon capture, a technology that Canada’s largest oil and gas companies have for years argued is crucial for achieving “net zero” emissions in their operations.
Those companies, via an industry group called Pathways Alliance, are currently in talks with the federal and Alberta governments to build a multi-billion dollar carbon capture project in the heart of the Canadian oil sands which could be subsidized heavily by taxpayers.
“The problem is you need to store it underground,” Lomborg said, referring to the carbon dioxide captured by the technology. And to do that on a meaningful scale worldwide, he argued, “you have to build at least an infrastructure equivalent to the infrastructure that we built in the last hundred years for oil and gas. And remember back then, we did it because it was incredibly profitable. This time we would just have to pay for it.”
Current costs in Canada could be as high as $150 per tonne of CO2. Lomborg noted that for direct air capture projects — which Pathways Alliance is also proposing and involve sucking carbon emissions from the atmosphere — the costs could be as high as $600 per tonne. At those price points, widespread deployment is “not going to happen,” he said.
Growing rightwing backlash to CCS
Climate experts such as University of Pennsylvania scientist Michael Mann have for years argued that carbon capture and storage is a false solution to the climate crisis that allows oil and gas companies to suck up huge amounts of public money while continuing to pump fossil fuels. “It’s not a meaningful climate solution and it displaces meaningful climate solutions like clean energy, renewable energy,” he told a U.S. House panel in 2022.
But recently there has been growing backlash to the technology from conservatives and fossil fuel advocates, some of whom see it as an egregious government waste.
“We might as well take tax money at gunpoint and burn it,” Peterson, the conservative podcaster, wrote last year on X in response to a CCS project in Wyoming.
At Peterson’s ARC conference in London this February, the climate crisis denier Robert Bryce told DeSmog that carbon capture “will never work at scale.” He added, “Once you get that CO2 super-compressed and you’re pushing it down underground, there are very few places where you can actually sequester it. So it’s a lot of money wasted.”
That skepticism is now translating into federal U.S. policy, with Wright’s Department of Energy recently canceling $3.7 billion in decarbonization awards for carbon capture projects from Exxon and other fossil fuel producers.
Canada is still pushing ahead, however. Recently appointed Liberal energy minister Hodgson, a previous board member of oil and producer MEG Energy, said during a speech in Calgary in May that “All of us, governments and industry, need to get the Pathways [carbon capture] project done.”
During his Vancouver talk, Lomborg argued that the main reason oil and gas companies are pursuing such prohibitively expensive climate projects is so they can be generously supported by governments.
“What you can do is you can get a lot of subsidies,” he said.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsOrcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
The online game is targeted at pupils as young as seven
Equinor, the company looking to develop the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea, has funded a computer game aimed at UK school children, promoting the idea that fossil fuels are part of a green energy mix.
In an unusually frank admission of lobbying children, a web page promoting the game stated that it “aligns with our work to build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of . . . the Rosebank development”. The story was first revealed by the Norwegian news publication E24.
Rosebank – the UK’s largest untapped oilfield – was greenlit by the Conservative government in 2023, prompting condemnation from climate campaigners. That decision was ruled unlawful by the courts in January this year because it had not taken into account the carbon emissions created by burning any oil and gas produced. Equinor, Norway’s state energy company, continues preparation work on the site under its joint venture with Shell. [*1]
The game lets players choose between renewable energy or fossil fuels to power their city.
Marketing agency We Are Futures, which describes itself as “the go-to partner for building advocacy for brands amongst young people”, developed Equinor’s schools-based, curriculum-linked education programme, Wonderverse. It also received support from the Association for Science Education (ASE), a UK membership organisation for science teachers and technicians.
The game was promoted on ASE’s School Science website, which also stated: “With over two-thirds of teens believing the oil and gas industry causes more problems than it solves, Wonderverse helps lay misconceptions to rest by exploring some of the challenges involved in a just energy transition.”
The ASE web page, which has been taken down since the story first broke, said the programme, aimed at 7–14 year olds, is “designed to spark wonder for science and the future of energy”. It includes a game, in which players attempt to build a city that survives until the year 2050, and in-school education materials to “showcase how modern cities use energy resources and the ways the energy transition can be managed”.
While players are encouraged to invest in research into renewable energy, TBIJ successfully ran a city powered by oil and some renewables until 2050. Meanwhile, scientists say there must be huge declines in the use of coal, oil and gas to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and avoid further catastrophic climate change.
Screenshot from Game Over screen of Energy Town
Charlotte Howell, who leads the climate campaign group Parents for Future, was shocked that Equinor was behind an energy-themed game aimed at UK schoolchildren. She told E24: “We want to know how this can be allowed. I’m horrified that Equinor, as a partly state-owned company, is working against UK ambitions on climate. They are lobbying directly against our children.”
Tessa Khan, executive director at climate campaign group Uplift, said it was “morally indefensible” to pretend that the UK needed Rosebank for energy security when in reality it would accelerate the climate crisis.
Khan told TBIJ: “It’s one thing for Equinor to mislead the public about the benefits of new oil fields like Rosebank, but it is quite another to target children with blatant fossil fuel propaganda disguised as ‘education’. This so-called ‘computer game’ is not about learning – it’s about teaching the next generation to see oil and gas as inevitable, when the climate science could not be clearer that we need to leave new fossil fuels in the ground.”
Equinor told TBIJ it was not aware of the promotional material associated with the game until notified by media, and denied that rolling out the school game is part of a lobbying campaign to promote developing Rosebank.
A spokesperson said: “The overall intention and aim for Wonderverse and Energy Town is to provide schools and teachers with a suite of high-quality resources to help students learn more about where energy comes from, whilst building … the employability skills needed to successfully enter employment. The learning resources have been awarded a green tick by the Association for Science Education, assuring the programme’s quality for use in schools.” They also said the game was developed using data from the International Energy Agency.
ASE’s School Science website provides free online science resources for teachers and students. The site was sponsored by partners including ExxonMobil, which ASE describes as “the world’s leading nongovernmental energy company aiming to meet world energy demand in an economically, environmentally and socially responsible manner”. ExxonMobil is the world’s third most polluting company, according to Carbon Majors, a database of historical fossil fuel production data.
A spokesperson for ASE said the promotional text was provided via briefing materials from We Are Futures. They said the School Science website was no longer actively maintained and will be decommissioned, and that ExxonMobil is no longer a partner of ASE.
We Are Futures, which also works for the UK government and BP, did not respond to a request for comment.
After the court ruling in January, Equinor is set to reapply to the UK government for approval to develop Rosebank. This time it must include information about the emissions that will be produced by burning the oil extracted from Rosebank. According to Uplift, those emissions could be more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 lowest-income countries in the world, including Uganda, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Equinor is reportedly “confident” that the project will go ahead and expects it to start up in 2026 or 2027.
Khan said: “If Equinor is serious about supporting the next generation, it should start by walking away from Rosebank and using its power and influence to focus solely on renewable energy. That’s the only way to really protect our children’s future.”
Reporter: Josephine Moulds Environment editor: Rob Soutar Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles Editor: Franz Wild Fact checker: Frankie Goodway Production editor: Sasha Baker
TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
*1 by dizzy. Equinor is attempting to develop the Rosebank oil field in partnership with Ithaca Energy, not Shell.
Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsGreenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Climate activist Greta Thunberg stands near a Palestinian flag after boarding the Madleen boat and before setting sail for Gaza along with activists of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, departing from the Sicilian port of Catania, Italy, June 1, 2025
The game lets players choose between renewable energy or fossil fuels to power their city.
Screenshot from Game Over screen of Energy Town
