Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
MORE than 50 activists disrupted Drax’s annual investor meeting in London today, bringing proceedings to a halt for an hour.
The firm operates a wood-burning power plant in Yorkshire, which has received some £6 billion in green subsidies, while operating as Britain’s largest carbon emitter.
Despite a BBC investigation finding that it has burned wood from rare forests in Canada, the firm is set to continue to receive taxpayer money until at least 2031.
Activists blocked the entrance to the venue, preventing shareholders from entering, and dropped a large banner reading “Drax Kills.”
Inside, activists physically disrupted proceedings, rushing to the stage shouting “Drax kills,” before the meeting was forced to close.
Axe Drax spokesperson Sam Johnson said: “We’ve seen over the last year repeated desperate attempts from Drax to silence dissent — from spending millions working with the police to shut down peaceful protest, to silencing whistleblowers. “
Federal subsidies to the oil and gas sector totalled $74.6 billion over five years, Environmental Defence found. Credit: David Niddrie / Flickr (CC BY NC 2.0)
Amid trade war talk of expanding Canadian energy infrastructure, a new report reveals that direct Canadian subsidies to the fossil fuel and petrochemical sectors reached nearly $30 billion in 2024.
For comparison’s sake, Canada spent between $38 billion and $39 billion on defense in 2024.
“Oil and gas companies – emboldened by their influence over President Trump – are exploiting the current economic uncertainty to call on governments to double down on fossil fuels,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate with nonprofit group Environmental Defence, which put out the report, said in a statement.
Levin notes that oil and gas companies have been vocal in their demand that politicians work to expand pipelines and related projects, and seek new export markets for Canadian fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Canadian taxpayers, who fund the companies’ subsidies, face the expensive consequences of climate change and related disasters.
In recent weeks, the chief executives of Canada’s major oil and gas companies — including Suncor, Cenovus, Enbridge, and Imperial — signed an open letter to the leaders of four of Canada’s major political parties. In it, they demand federal party leaders to eliminate regulations, emissions caps, tanker bans on the West Coast, and carbon levees on major emitters.
The open letter was endorsed by prominent Canadian conservatives, including Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently repeated many of the same industry talking points in defending her taxpayer-funded trip to attend a controversial PragerU fundraiser where she shared a stage with far-right influencer Ben Shapiro.
Last month, Liberal leader Mark Carney indicated his interest in building new east-west pipelines, ostensibly to reduce dependence on foreign imports and develop new trade opportunities.
“This push ignores the fact that fossil fuels come at a high price — not just at the pump, but through rising costs of groceries, worsening health outcomes, damage to property and huge government handouts,” said Levin in the statement.
“It also ignores the rapid energy transition towards renewable energy that is happening globally.”
Among Environmental Defence’s principal findings is that the Canadian government spent $29.6 billion on the fossil fuel sector in 2024, which is nearly $6 billion more than what it would cost to build interprovincial grid connection infrastructure. Recent research from the International Institute for Sustainable Development suggests that a national electrical grid could lower electricity costs nationwide, create hundreds of thousands of new clean tech jobs, stabilize electricity costs, improve Canadians’ health, and provide Canada with the energy security currently threatened by the Trump trade war.
The Trans Mountain project has received $21 billion in government financing. Credit: Sally T. Buck / Flickr (CC BC NC ND 2.0)
Canada’s direct subsidies includes approximately $21 billion in financing for the Trans Mountain Pipeline, $7.5 billion from Export Development Canada (which included money for LNG and carbon capture, and financing for Canadian companies and companies and governments seeking to buy Canadian products), and another $700 million for LNG infrastructure.
Big Oil regularly promotes LNG and carbon capture as potential solutions for the climate crisis, though these arguments have been thoroughly debunked. LNG advocates in Canada often characterize it as a “bridge fuel” that could be used to help developing nations transition away from coal. Recent research indicates that the world’s two largest coal users — India and China — are in fact transitioning directly to renewable energy systems like solar and wind.
Moreover, LNG is a deadly fossil fuel that also happens to be resource intensive to produce, and often results in large volumes of methane emissions. Methane is estimated to be 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As for carbon capture, recent research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis poured cold water on Canada’s premier industry-driven carbon capture project — Pathways Alliance — determining that it is not financially viable and is unlikely to provide any environmental benefit. This determination is consistent with expert analyses of other carbon capture projects, both in Canada and globally.
Canada Has Given Away $74.6 Billion in Subsidies
Environmental Defence estimates Canada spent $2.4 billion on carbon capture projects in 2024, more than in previous years.
The group’s report also determined that federal subsidies to the oil and gas sector over the last five years amounted to $74.6 billion. Their analysis of what constitutes federal fossil fuel funding includes direct grants, tax breaks, loans, and loan guarantees from the government of Canada and some federal agencies (such as Export Development Canada).
Despite oil industry claims that fossil fuel companies are investing in climate solutions (claims that have led the federal government to introduce anti-greenwashing legislation), Environmental Defence found that none of Canada’s four largest industry companies reported investments in climate initiatives or emissions reductions as part of their capital spending.
The report has also reveals that pollution created by oil and gas companies reached an estimated $53 billion in 2024. This includes increased health costs, property damage from extreme weather events, as well as decreased agricultural productivity, a consequence of changing weather patterns.
“The calls for a new oil pipeline pose real risks to Canadian taxpayers,” said Levin in an email to DeSmog, noting not only that global demand for oil is set to peak in the next four years and then significantly decline, but that oil demand is already showing signs of plateauing in major energy markets like China.
“No company is willing to bet its own money on what is guaranteed to quickly become a massive stranded asset,” said Levin. “Instead, oil and gas companies want taxpayers to pay the price for new fossil fuel infrastructure as their wealthy shareholders reap the rewards.”
Levin is particularly critical of the under reported fact that federal subsidies to the fossil fuel sector have deepened Canada’s economic vulnerability.
“The Canadian public is already on the hook for the new Trans Mountain Pipeline — to the tune of somewhere around $30 to $40 billion and rising. And the project has done nothing to reduce our dependence on the United States, with nearly half its oil still flowing south of the border,” she said.
Calling the bill a “failure of process and policy,” an MLI paper advocating for abolishment states that it has had a “dramatic silencing effect” on many nationwide businesses and associations that want to communicate their environmental goals. It also says the amendment’s wording exposes companies to frivolous lawsuits.
Canada’s Parliament adopted the omnibus Bill C-59, officially known as the Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023, in June 2024. The bill included anti-greenwashing amendments to the Competition Act, which came about as a result of public meetings held in the spring of 2023.
The bill says that companies found deliberately misleading the public with false environmental claims could be fined up to $10 million.
While Canada’s oil industry argued that the new anti-greenwashing regulations necessitated the removal of advocating for carbon capture efforts as much as their Net-Zero goals, other major Canadian corporations did not have a similar reaction. In addition, major tar sands producers and Pathways Alliance partners, such as Cenovus and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., blamed the regulations when they delayed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting to investors.
Critics argue CCS is an ineffective climate change mitigation technology because it habitually underperforms at capturing carbon dioxide emissions. It’s also historically been used to extend the lifespans of otherwise derelict oil wells, and – irrespective of emissions captured during production – produces fossil fuels that create new emissions when combusted for energy or electricity. Because of these reasons, critics argue CCS’s only purpose is to provide the appearance of social acceptability while continuing fossil fuel production.
Carbon capture has been widely promoted by the Pathways Alliance, which is seeking to develop a massive carbon capture project in Alberta that would link 13 tar sands facilities with 400 kilometers of carbon dioxide pipelines to a centralized carbon capture hub. CCS projects have historically underperformed in Canada; a 2020 report by Global Witness found that Shell Canada’s Quest hydrogen facility — which uses carbon capture — was actually emitting more carbon than it captured.
Recent research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reveals that the Pathways project is not financially viable, and is likely to be subsidy-dependent with limited revenue potential. The IEEFA also notes that Canada’s carbon capture projects have struggled to keep up with projected capture rates.
On the Offensive
Though Bill C-59 is designed to protect Canadian consumers from fraudulent advertising, just as other industries do, fossil fuel advocates — from conservative Canadian newspapers to Koch Brothers-affiliated Canadian think tanks and conservative Alberta politicians — immediately went on the offensive shortly after the bill became law in June 2024.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith described the new requirements as “draconian legislation that will irreparably harm Canadians’ ability to hear the truth about the energy industry and Alberta’s successes in reducing global emissions.” She also stated that the new law was “absurd authoritarian censorship.”
“Freedom for people to express themselves is crucial to a democracy,” said Emilia Belliveau, program manager, Energy Transition, Environmental Defence. “But giving businesses a free pass to spread disinformation and greenwashing isn’t.”
“Bill C-59 builds on the longstanding work of the Competition Bureau to protect fair business practices and ensure the public isn’t being lied to,” Belliveau said in a statement to DeSmog.
“People have a right to know the truth — whether it’s about a product, a service, or the companies behind them. That’s why it’s imperative that our democracy has rules in place to stop ultra-wealthy CEOs and multi-billion-dollar corporations from spreading misinformation and manipulating the public for their own profits,” she added.
The MLI paper contains its own inaccurate and misleading statements, including an assertion that there was no opportunity for discussions. Despite making this statement several times, and including it as a key talking point in the paper’s executive summary, the paper’s authors conceded that a consultation process did take place roughly a year earlier. They said greenwashing was addressed, but still argued that a last-minute amendment is much broader and therefore deserved its own, separate consultation process.
Efforts to contact Charlie Angus, the NDP MP who sponsored the bill, were unsuccessful, as were DeSmog’s efforts at contacting MLI for comment.
Chief among MLI’s concerns are that the wording of the amended competition law puts the onus of proof on the person or company making a representation (such as an oil company claiming carbon capture is a viable climate change mitigation technology). With the C-59 amendment, companies and individuals now have to demonstrate their claims based on an internationally recognized standard. The MLI paper further argues that this exposes companies — such as multi-billion-dollar oil and gas companies — to frivolous lawsuits. MLI also claims that the new regulations open the door to too many potential complainants, such as environmental activists and climate advocacy groups.
“Should companies be allowed to exaggerate, cherry-pick, or straight out lie to us in their advertising? No,” said Melissa Lem, family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) in a statement to DeSmog. “But this is exactly what companies have been doing with their environmental claims for too long.”
“This has had real impacts on our health due to unchecked pollution and escalating climate disasters,” she added.
“At its core, Bill C-59 is about truth in advertising — which ultimately protects us from corporate harm.”
Former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage has said bill C-59 will result in ‘green hushing.’ Credit: CPAC / YouTube
The MLI paper’s authors are former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage and Heather Exner-Pirot, the institute’s director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment.
DeSmog previously reported on Savage’s public statements about her belief that the anti-greenwashing law was “silencing” Canada’s oil and gas sector. Savage was formerly a senior executive with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), as well as Enbridge, a multinational pipeline company. Exner-Pirot is well-known for her fossil fuel advocacy as much as for her campaigns on behalf of the MLI against everything from an emissions cap to electric vehicles.
Both Savage and Exner-Pirot have made misleading statements in the past concerning various legislative efforts to control carbon emissions. For example, Exner-Pirot published op-eds criticizing the federal government’s electric vehicle (EV) mandate and characterized it as a quota, among several inaccurate statements about EVs in general. Savage has described C-59 as part of a global effort to silence Canada’s energy sector and that the regulations constituted an indirect ban on fossil fuel advertising, neither of which are true.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute presents itself as a non-partisan and independent think tank, but is, in fact, part of the Atlas Network. Like Atlas, it has received funding from the Koch Brothers, and generally opposes government regulations — particularly on environmental issues or as they relate to the energy sector. MLI counts among its donors CAPP, Imperial Oil, Canadian Energy Pipeline Association and the Canadian Fuels Association, among others.
MLI has considerable access to mainstream Canadian media and routinely criticizes the environmental movement, attacking efforts to curb emissions as responding to climate change “alarmism.”
A protester holds a ‘This Is A Coup’ sign at a rally against the Trump administration during a “Not My President’s Day” protest on February 17, 2025 in North Hollywood, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Trump’s attempt to incite a coup in 2021 and his subsequent victory in the 2024 presidential election speak volumes of the democratic decline in the United States. We must admit exactly where we are at this point in time.
Over the past few years, there has been an alarming surge of coups d’état across the world, particularly in Africa. The most common definition of a coup is an illegal attempt to seize control of the government. The seizure of power by coup leaders is often justified by pointing to poor governance and/or deteriorating security situations.
Coups are typically irregular transfers of power that occur in countries with weak democratic institutions and may be carried out by military or civilian elites. Consolidated democracies have long prided themselves of being immune to the conditions that generate coups d’etat, but the Trump phenomenon in U.S. politics seems to suggest that there are no absolutes, and that liberal democracy can be brought down.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, was a coup attempt incited by outgoing president Donald Trump, and can be best described as an “attempted auto-coup.” Yet, shockingly enough, not only wasn’t Trump held accountable in the end for being criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election but was allowed to run again for the presidency in 2024. And what is even more shocking is that he prevailed in his third presidential bid by winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.
Trump and his Nazi buddy Elon Musk are trying to destroy civil society by dismantling the State.
Both Trump’s attempt to incite a coup in 2021 and his subsequent victory in the 2024 presidential election speak volumes of the democratic decline in the United States. Citizens’ support not just for a democracy-eroding leader but for one who repeatedly promised during his campaign to be a dictator, even if only for one day, is ample evidence to make the case that the end of democracy in the U.S. (or whatever is left of it as the country was never designed to be democratic) is upon us.
Indeed, an actual neo-fascist coup is now underway. Trump and his Nazi buddy Elon Musk are trying to destroy civil society by dismantling the State. Trump had promised on numerous occasions during his campaign to “demolish the deep state,” and even offered specific details for how he planned to do so. And this is exactly what is happening right now.
During his first month back in office, Trump signed a plethora of executive orders which ranged from a militarized crackdown on immigration and pardoning those who had taken part in the January 6, 2021, coup attempt to shutting down scores of federal agencies and starting mass layoffs across governments. By declaring himself above the law, Trump’s intent is to use executive power not for the purpose of dismantling the “deep state” in order to make federal government more efficient and therefore more responsive to citizen needs, but rather in order to take over government and have it run by loyalists, by people who would faithfully obey the commands of the “Great Leader.”
The aims behind this neofascist coup are threefold: Oligarchic state capture; white Christian nationalism as the hegemonic project; and the rise of a new U.S. empire.
Oligarchic state capture is a key goal of the Trump-Musk strategy behind the demolition of the so-called “deep state.” Dismantling the government bureaucracy is seen by the aspiring dictator and the world’s richest person as an essential course of action if “powerful individuals or corporations” are to have absolute freedom in creating rules and policies that serve their own benefit, at the expense of society. Trump and Musk are both fervent believers in the “natural right” of the rich and powerful to shape society as they please and make government function as they see fit.
Oligarchic state capture is a key goal of the Trump-Musk strategy behind the demolition of the so-called “deep state.”
The assault on regulations and on workers’ rights and vital workers’ institutions by the “two brothers” as prerequisites for economic prosperity forces us to go back to the 1880s when laissez-faire capitalism and social Darwinism ruled the day in order to find comparable situations. Trump has always been anti-labor, but Trump 2.0, influenced as heavily as it is by the anti-labor agenda of Project 2025, that wants to roll back all labor reforms under the Biden administration, outlaw public sector unions and indeedrewrite a hundred years of labor law, could be the most damaging administration the U.S. labor movement has ever faced. Trump’s agenda for the economy revolves around laissez-faire product market regulation and laissez-faire labor market regulations. Thus, the fact that the white working-class, which has been increasingly voting Republican instead of Democrat since 2000, helped Trump to return to power is indeed one of the most disconcerting trends in U.S. society.
Trump’s vision for America’s future is also rooted in white Christian nationalism and, as such, its realization virtually mandates anti-equality and so-called “gender ideology” attacks, along with a host of other “enlightened” undertakings such as book bans and seeking to revoke birthright citizenship. Trump’s white Christian nationalism agenda is born out of the preconceived notion that the rightful owners of this country are losing their political and cultural power. It is thus an exclusionist and nostalgic ideology which transcends social class and thus may explain why a significant segment of white working-class Americans support Trump.
Dark times are ahead—dark times, indeed.
Lastly, Trump envisions a new U.S. empire which includes gaining control of the Panama Canal, the purchase of Greenland, the possibility of turning Canada into the 51st U.S. state, owning Gaza, and even extending America’s manifest destiny into the stars.The acquisition of new wealth, greater security and strategic advantage in power politics are the drivers behind this new U.S. imperialism envisioned by Donald Trump. His imposition of tariffs on imports, which is baffling to economists, is intended to force countries to play according to the rules of the free market, so it is a profound mistake to think that Trump has somehow turned his back on neoliberalism. His deadly anti-regulatory blitz combined with tax-cutting for the rich and corporations and the use of economic rules into politics should be alone sufficient enough to dispel the notion that Trump is somehow waging a war on neoliberalism simply because he is using tariffs as part of his “America First” policy.
This, of course, is not to indicate that the neoliberal world order that the United States created after the end of the Cold War is not in crisis. Economic inequalities, political fragmentation, and social discontent threaten to bring down western liberal democracies and be replaced instead by authoritarian yet staunchly pro-capitalist regimes. The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism have become so extreme that only neofascism may be able to prevent the system’s ultimate collapse. This is precisely why Trump’s billionaire top lieutenant has so enthusiastically embraced far-right parties not only in Europe but across the globe. Neofascism is also needed to defend Christian values from the “radical left” and halt the alleged threat of the Islamization of the western world.
Dark times are ahead—dark times, indeed. And the only question is how to fight back before everything good and decent is lost once again in the return to fascism.
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.
An F-35 arriving back at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, June 24, 2019
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Al-Haq general director Shawan Jabarin said: “F-35 partner nations, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have assessed Israel’s use of these jets and concluded that the risk of violations of international humanitarian law is significant enough to halt direct sales of key components.
“However, components continue to reach Israel indirectly, highlighting the urgent need for the entire F-35 programme to be brought into compliance with international law.”
Human Rights Watch UK director Yasmine Ahmed said: “The government must close the loopholes and end its legal gymnastics — failure to do so displays either a misunderstanding of the government’s legal obligations or a wilful disregard for them.”
Marte Hansen Haugan, president of Norwegian campaign group Changemaker, said: “The unwillingness to halt or pause the production of F-35 components reflects an interpretation of national and international law that excludes Palestinian lives.”
Henry Off, of Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights said: “In clear violation of its legal obligations, Canada continues to maintain its regulatory loopholes that allow components and parts to reach Israel’s F-35s indirectly through the United States.”
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide 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/O74hZCKKdpA
Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
