Protesters during a demonstration for higher wages and in support of the high school protest movement in Paris, November 5, 2026
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of France today [5 Nov] as unions mounted a massive wave of strikes against government cuts, falling living standards and attacks on public services — piling pressure on Macron’s embattled government
WALKOUTS and mass demonstrations swept France today as the five main union federations organised over 1,500 strikes hitting most sectors of the economy and over 250 marches.
A third of the country’s schools were closed and work stopped at oil refineries and nuclear plants. Transport ground to a halt in many regions, and hundreds of thousands marched against the government despite last-minute police instructions rerouting many of the planned demonstrations.
The CGT, CFDT, FO, Unsa and FSU union federations issued a joint statement calling for political change.
“Fuel, food products, rent, gas, electricity… everything’s going up except wages and pensions,” it said.
“Anger is immense. The situation in this country is fragile. The pressing social and environmental challenges must be addressed without delay.”
CGT leader Sophie Binet said: “Nothing will stop us — the only thing that will end the mobilisation is a response to our demands. The longer you wait,” she warned the government, “the higher the price will be.”
Union demands include a rise to both the minimum wage and wages across the public sector, the abandonment of the government’s attempt to force through €54 billion (£45bn) in cuts, higher taxes on the rich and corporations and more money for public services.
“This day of strike action has a dual purpose — to obtain wage increases and to counter a budget that makes workers, those in precarious situations and retirees pay the price for policies in favour of the ultra-rich and large companies,” said the CGT’s Thomas Vacheron.
The government has promised to abolish the controversial Parcoursup university admission system in one of several partial concessions to demands, but its default response is still repression.
Riot police charged marchers on the huge Paris demo early in the afternoon, with footage showing them seizing banners and knocking protesters to the ground.
The influx of oil and gas wastewater into Ohio is placing new pressure on the state. Credit: Sari Williams/DeSmog
This story was co-published with Rolling Stone.
In Ohio’s rural southeastern corner, Marietta College geology professor David Jeffrey was among the residents worried that industry activity in America’s booming natural gas region could be polluting their drinking water. That’s “the biggest fear,” he said at an August meeting with top Ohio officials.
When Jeffrey and residents from advocacy groups Buckeye Environmental Network and Washington County for Safe Drinking Water met with Ohio officials, those state officials repeatedly assured residents that despite the up to 1.4 billion gallons of oil and gas wastewater injected in underground wells in their county and across Ohio each year, the state was unaware of any resulting drinking water contamination there.
“We would have heard about it,” Mary Mertz, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), which oversees both aspects of Ohio’s environment and its oil and gas industry, told residents in the August 17 virtual meeting.
“No one has called us that I’m aware of,” said Eric Vendel, ODNR’s oil and gas division chief. “We have a water investigation form that can be filled out and we would have my team down there and investigate the water.”
What officials did not tell the group that day is that five years earlier, the state did receive a call and, on Vendel’s orders, investigated a drinking water well for oil and gas wastewater contaminants in eastern Ohio, roughly 80 miles away from Washington County. Independent experts say the results are consistent with fracking wastewater contamination. Despite that and the water well’s location near two oil and gas wastewater injection wells, ODNR concluded fracking wastewater was not to blame, according to documents DeSmog and Rolling Stone obtained via public records request.
ODNR spokesperson Andy Chow told DeSmog and Rolling Stone: “When administrators were meeting with representatives in Washington County, they were discussing matters related to injection wells located in Washington County. ODNR stands by the comments made by its administrators.”
Concerns over polluted drinking water cross political and social divides, perhaps nowhere more so than rural Washington County. As intensely salty wastewater pushed below ground resurfaces, residents and officials have injected the issue into the already bitterly divided Ohio governor’s race. Susan Vessels, a Republican official in Washington County, recently appeared alongside Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton because of Acton’s pledge to pause new wastewater wells in this densely drilled area. “We have a chance to prevent the worst from happening, and we need to act now,” Acton told DeSmog and Rolling Stone.
“Drinking water is not political and it is my hope Ohioans will come together across party lines on this issue.”Susan Vessels, Marietta City Council President
Ohio ranks in the top 10 nationally for both oil and gas production. Fracking can occur within 100 feet of a school or rural home, and operators have been able to tap the gas-rich Marcellus and Utica formations by drilling directly beneath water reservoirs and state parks. But in order to maintain that production, the industry has to offload the tidal wave of toxic wastewater — rich in salts, carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactive elements — that surfaces in the weeks and years that follow drilling an oil or gas well.
That wastewater gets pumped into injection wells deep below ground, where impermeable geological layers are supposed to keep it from leaking into oil and gas wells or drinking water supplies. Washington County, whose 19 injection wells outnumber all of Pennsylvania, has received complaints of this wastewater, or brine, flooding nearby oil and gas wells, according to the New York Times.
Now, an hour and a half drive north, in the town of Coshocton, Ohio, records show evidence of a family’s drinking water polluted by high levels of the same types of salts found in fracking wastewater.
“This is different”
In early November 2021, Bill Burgan, an eastern Ohio water well driller, called ODNR to complain about water from a 360-foot well he had drilled in 2017 for the Fisher family in Coshocton, according to ODNR documents. At the beginning of 2021, their water had become salty and corrosive. Not only did it leave a salty taste in the mouth, but it caused their hot water tanks to rust out prematurely. The couple had replaced two tanks in four years. Within weeks, the newest one became coated in an unidentifiable white precipitate.
“Sometimes we drill through pockets of salt,” said Burgan, president of American Drilling and Pump Service, in an interview with DeSmog and Rolling Stone this summer outside his Stone Creek, Ohio, shop. “But this is different, it’s fracking waste.”
Burgan told DeSmog and Rolling Stone, and, separately, ODNR according to public records, that he expressed concern that the Fishers’ drinking water well became impacted by an oil and gas wastewater injection well located less than two miles from the family’s home and operated by a Texas-based company called Buckeye Brine. The local community vigorously opposed Buckeye Brine’s installment of the injection well, where since 2014 the company has injected over 400 million gallons of waste.
After receiving Burgan’s complaint, ODNR swiftly launched an investigation that agency geologist Tamara Richards said “will focus solely on contaminants associated with oil and natural gas exploration and production,” according to public records.
The state’s results indicate signatures of possible drinking water pollution from oil and gas wastewater, according to independent experts who reviewed the findings. Ohio’s final report on the incident, completed in January 2022, found two separate indicators of potential fracking wastewater contamination — total dissolved solids, and chloride — in the Fisher family’s water. Both tested at more than five times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits. ODNR also tested for sodium, which lacks a formal EPA limit but has a threshold, as high levels can cause unpleasant taste and health problems for diabetics. In the Fishers’ water, sodium was 17 times the EPA threshold.
According to Jeffrey, the Marietta College geologist, high levels of total dissolved solids, chloride, and sodium also are found in the sea of fracking wastewater pumped into injection wells like the one operated by Buckeye Brine.
However, ODNR concluded there was “no evidence of an oilfield related impact” and pinned the cause of the contamination on a sandstone layer called the “Big Injun” that the agency, without providing any data, stated “appears to be” naturally salty and surrounded part of the family’s water well.
But Jeffrey said testing done by the state did not look at enough parameters to determine that the contamination was natural and not from fracking wastewater. “It seems ODNR is either stonewalling, misdirecting, or just doesn’t know what they are doing,” he told DeSmog and Rolling Stone.
In a separate case that would unfold over a year after ODNR tested the Fishers’ water, the agency was considering whether leaking injection wells or else the “Big Injun” sandstone formation might be contaminating conventional oil and gas wells in Athens County, just west of Washington County. This time, ODNR concluded the impacts “cannot be plausibly explained” by the sandstone formation due to its unique brine signature, citing a “June 2, 2020 technical analysis prepared by ALL Consulting.” The agency added that impacts from this natural layer would have been consistent from the start, and “it is unlikely” they would have appeared only after the injection well operator began working. ODNR ultimately suspended the permit for a set of three injection wells that were eventually shut in for leaking fracking wastewater. ODNR has not yet replied to questions regarding this case.
When asked about the state’s findings in Coshocton and their scientific evidence, Burgan was dismissive. “They are covering it up,” he said, “because they are making too much money off of this.”
Oil and gas companies pay Ohio five cents a barrel to dispose of in-state wastewater, and 20 cents for wastewater imported from other states. Much of the waste injected comes from neighboring West Virginia and Pennsylvania. With at least a billion gallons of waste injected every year, that income translates to an average of $2.4 million annually for state coffers, according to state documents.
“The ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management uses evidence and facts, testing, and the latest technologies to evaluate complaints of brine migration” and “stands by the results of its investigation,” said ODNR spokesperson Chow.
The entrance to Buckeye Brine’s injection well facility in Coshocton, Ohio. Credit: Justin Nobel/DeSmog
But ODNR did not investigate the Buckeye Brine injection well, subject of the original complaint, or any other injection wells. It did investigate “producing oil and gas wells within a one-half mile radius” of the family’s home.
After Burgan’s company reached out, we “contacted ODNR and ODNR was not interested in any further efforts on the matter,” said Susie Patterson, the manager at Buckeye Brine, by email. Patterson said groundwater monitoring wells installed in 2019 and sampled quarterly showed “no indication of contamination by oilfield substances,” or that “the water was not fit for consumption due to contaminants,” and pinned issues with the Fishers’ well on the water well driller.
“The wells were drilled much deeper than surrounding wells producing good drinking water,” said Patterson. “It is Buckeye’s opinion that the driller was trying to justify to the well owner the bad wells.”
The Fishers declined to participate in the story.
The Oil and Gas Industry’s Trillion-Gallon Problem
Across America, over one trillion gallons of oil and gas wastewater are generated every year — enough to fill a line of waste barrels to the moon and back 28 times. Nearly all of this waste — 96 percent — will be injected deep into the earth at disposal injection wells.
Given the oil and gas industry’s reliance on injection wells as a critical means of disposal for a dangerous waste stream, analysts have referred to injection wells as a linchpin to the sound operation of the entire oil and gas industry. Disposal of oil and gas wastewater is the industry’s “Achilles’ heel,” said Ted Auch, a researcher at the oil and gas industry watchdog Fieldnotes. A 2021 Rice University Center for Energy Studies report stated that if the industry did not have injection wells to rely on for waste disposal, the “resulting economic impacts would be profound — and likely, existential.”
The United States has more than 181,400 oil and gas wastewater injection wells, but as industry leaders testified at the Texas state capitol in August, lack of space to store this toxic brine already is threatening to curtain oil and gas production in Texas’ productive Permian Basin. Even where it has been stored, increasing evidence shows the wastewater is not always staying put.
Independent scientists raise the question of whether other oil and gas states may be facing similar problems.
“We have always been concerned as environmental scientists and geologists in this area that there is no underground containment in these [injection] wells,” said Jen Bowman, a water chemistry expert and the director of environmental programs at Ohio University, in Athens. “What so many folks in this area don’t understand, our underground layers are just rock layers so there is no magic underground lake where you are getting water from, and there is no magic underground storage container where the waste is going.” Injecting millions of gallons of waste at high pressure means contamination miles from the site of injection is inevitable, she said.
“This is not a good plan or disposal mechanism for potentially dangerous materials,” Bowman told DeSmog and Rolling Stone, “especially given that people rely on groundwater in so much of rural Ohio.”
The concern about drinking water in Washington County is exactly what motivates Susan Vessels, the Republican president of the Marietta City Council. She has led the council in writing a resolution, passed last October, urging Ohio state legislators to introduce legislation imposing a three-year moratorium on new wastewater injection wells in Washington County. More recently she has crossed the political aisle when Amy Acton, the former state health director, came to Marietta last month as part of her gubernatorial campaign. Acton supports Vessels’ proposed moratorium and is facing an ugly, expensive race against billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
Acton told DeSmog and Rolling Stone that the fight over injection wells and drinking water contamination comes down to ensuring a better future for Marietta and all of Ohio.
“That is why I am committing to a three-year moratorium on wastewater injection wells in Washington County,” said Acton. “I’m fighting against the corruption in our Statehouse and the cost of that corruption that we pay for. We must act to protect our resources and our drinking water.” Ramaswamy’s campaign has not replied to questions.
“Drinking water is not political,” said Vessels, “and it is my hope Ohioans will come together across party lines on this issue.”
In an op-ed, she took to task the GOP contender Ramaswamy, who called people “whiners” for raising concerns about clean water, energy use, and other issues as proposals for AI data centers arrive in Ohio.
“I think they are full of shit, and that is point-blank my opinion.”Phillip Johnson, Washington County water well driller
Washington County water well driller Phillip Johnson said he has drilled hundreds of private water wells in the region. He disagreed with the state’s conclusion that brine from the sandstone formation caused the Fisher family well’s contamination.
“I think they are full of shit, and that is point-blank my opinion,” he said.
Johnson said that if the sandstone formation was the cause of the salt contamination in the Fishers’ drinking water, then the salty taste should have been there from the beginning, and not strengthened over time as the couple reported, according to ODNR documents.
“Just because you drill 1,000 wells and everything works fine, it just takes one well to not work right for there to be a problem,” said Johnson. “It is nature, if you pump something down under pressure, the path of least resistance is up.”
“I am all for drilling oil and gas,” he added, “but fresh natural water is the most essential natural resource there is, in this country, the state, anywhere in the world, and if you contaminate it, you essentially ruin everything.”
Dominic DiGiulio, a retired EPA scientist with a doctorate in geoscience and decades of experience investigating the movement of underground fluids, provided another assessment of the state’s conclusions in the Coshocton case.
“The ODNR’s logic for stating that the domestic well is partially screened in the Big Injun formation is flawed,” said DiGiulio, who also previously consulted for government agencies and NGOs. “ODNR does not provide compelling evidence.”
A new study found AI-driven fossil fuel productivity could increase emissions. Here are examples of companies already using AI to boost production.
When United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned world leaders last week in his UN address about the unchecked power of both Big Oil and artificial intelligence, he treated them as two of the defining challenges facing governments.
At the same time, the technology companies providing these AI tools are not generally held accountable for the additional fossil fuel production and emissions their products may enable.
“The danger is not technology,” Guterres told the UN General Assembly. “The danger is technology without accountability.”
A DeSmog review of company announcements, industry presentations, and other publicly available information found that, across major fossil fuel companies — Aramco, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies and others — AI is increasingly being integrated into fossil fuel operations, from seismic exploration and drilling to equipment monitoring and field development.
The examples provide a real-world look at the mechanism behind a recent study published inNature: that AI can increase emissions not only because of the electricity required to run data centers, but because it can make fossil fuel production more productive and profitable.
The study found that AI-driven productivity gains in fossil fuel production accounted for most of the modeled increase in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. It estimated that AI could increase global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by between 1.2 and 4.8 percent, with productivity gains in fossil fuel production accounting for most of that increase.
In one example of AI gains, Norwegian energy company Equinor re-scanned the Norwegian continental shelf with “new seismic technology and AI,” resulting in 27 new discoveries of oil, Hege Skryseth, the company’s executive vice president, chief technology officer, said during a June presentation for Equinor’s Capital Market Day.
“By reprocessing the data, the seismic image became much sharper, leading to the discoveries,” Skryseth said. “AI was key here, from automated data interpretation to efficient well planning.”
Chevron is also using AI to produce oil that was “previously considered unreachable.”
In the oil company’s recently launched podcast — in which racing driver Tanner Foust and Chevron Chief Technology and Engineering Officer Ryder Booth chat from a pickup truck tailgate — Booth said that breakthroughs at Anchor, an oil and gas development, represented the “first time unlocking kind of a new horizon around the world.”
“AI, it’s attracted to big data and big opportunities, and the oil and gas industry has big data,” Booth said. Last year, Chevron said it had improved drilling and fracking efficiency in the Permian Basin by over 30 percent.
The value of these productivity gains is significant. A recent McKinsey & Co. report estimated that, for the upstream oil and gas sector, AI can generate $65 billionin profitsannually in the short term, which could increase to $230 billion when the technology is deployed at its “full potential.”
AI-driven efficiency gains have already reduced operational costs by up to 18 percent; and industry executives attribute about 5 percent of their current revenue to “AI-driven initiatives,” according to a 2025 report from IBM, which has multiple partnerships with oil and gas companies.
‘Done in seconds and live-streamed’
At Equinor’s enormous Johan Sverdrup oil field in the North Sea, “data flows up from the ground faster than the oil,” the company’s site states, at the rate of “10,000 Netflix movies a second.”
The company is also using AI to optimize the placement of subsea equipment and wells.
“What used to take 2-3 weeks and involved flying hard disks to shore with helicopter for analysis can now be done in seconds and live-streamed,” Equinor said.
ExxonMobil is also embracing enormous datasets. In 2019, ExxonMobil partnered with Microsoft to use AI in its Permian Basin operations, a move Exxon said would “generate billions of dollars in value” and produce up to an additional “50,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day by 2025.”
The oil giant also said that gains in efficiency from advanced technologies, including AI, “is a first step” towards letting systems respond to events without human intervention.
Holly Alpine, a coauthor of the Nature study, said the significance of such partnerships is easy to miss when attention focuses on the emissions produced by powering AI systems.
“For some reason, tech companies are exempt from accountability for the tech they are creating,” she told DeSmog.
Alpine and her husband, Will Alpine, another author of the Nature study, previously worked for Microsoft, but left after coming to the conclusion thatthe company hid how its products were harming the climate. The couple then founded the Enabled Emissions Campaign, a nonprofit that calls attention to tech’s role in fossil fuel production and advocates for better regulations.
She said that now, oil companies like Exxon pumping 50,000 barrels a day is “actually quite a small deal.”
“The deals have only grown in size, and we realized that that was not part of Microsoft’s accountability whatsoever, even though they are the company creating the technology that is making this happen.”
A recent Reuters article about Exxon’s use of automated drilling in the Permian Basin, which said the company plans to increase production in the region to 2.5 million barrels a day, didn’t mention if Microsoft was still involved with the project; on Exxon’s website, references to Microsoft partnerships still link to the announcement from 2019.
Microsoft did not confirm whether it’s still partnering with Exxon on those operations, but the tech company is the leading cloud provider for the oil and gas industry, according to Kimberlite Research, followed by Amazon and Google.
Data CentersAreIntertwined with AI
Just two years ago, fossil fuels’ share of the world’s energy supply was projected to decline in coming years. Then, AI data centers began expanding rapidly, and with them, the argument that fossil fuels must scale up, too, for the U.S. to win the “AI arms race.”
At the same time, the fossil fuel and technology industries are becoming increasingly intertwined. AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity, and natural gas supplies more than 40 percent of the power used by U.S. data centers, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“AI’s advance will depend not only on the design labs of Silicon Valley, but also on the gas fields of the Permian Basin,” Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chairman and CEO, said in 2024.
In the face of power grid constraints, some data centers are turning to natural-gas power plants built onsite, a setup known as “behind-the-meter” generation, like Chevron’s Kilby project with Microsoft. U.S. data centers’ investments in new gas turbines recently surpassed the total investments of every country except the U.S., according to an IEA report.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies are benefiting both from using AI to increase efficiency, and from supplying the additional energy that its data centers demand.
AI and Net Zero Aims
Online, Microsoft promotes AI tools as a way to “accelerate the energy transition,” “reduce emissions,” and “accelerate climate innovation.”
Instead, AI may be having the opposite effect, prolonging our reliance on fossil fuels and delaying a broader transition to cleaner energy.
“In the absence of continuous reinvestment, oil and gas production would fall by approximately 8 percent annually,” the Nature paper says, quoting IEA reports, and “technological progress has repeatedly delayed ‘peak oil’ forecasts by unlocking resources previously considered un-viable.”
Equinor’s website recognizes the growing scarcity of oil reserves, noting that undersea oil and gas discoveries have dramatically declined in recent decades. “Even with planned projects, the (production) trend is downward,” it states. “Gently at first, but more noticeably if we don’t act fast to create new resource opportunities. This will affect value creation across Norway.”
Chevron’s Booth, meanwhile, says there’s still enough oil, “and technology and innovation will unlock that,” though he also admitted we would need all forms of energy to meet the world’s demand.
In spite of concerns about future scarcity, wartime windfalls and beneficial policies have recently brought record profits for major oil and gas companies, news reports show.
After the August Nature article showing that AI helps the fossil fuel industry create more pollution, Johanna Fornberg, a Greenpeace senior research specialist, said in a statement that, while Big Tech continues to promise that AI technologies will benefit humanity and offer climate solutions, “what is hidden from that story is the aggressive support tech companies provide to fossil fuel companies to continue producing oil and gas that harms communities and the climate.”
Microsoft’s 2025 Responsible AI Transparency Report also said that its enterprise contracts “incorporate our AI Services Code of Conduct, which requires our customers to implement responsible practices (such as human oversight and access controls) and prohibits using our AI services in ways that inflict harm on individuals, organizations, or society, or affects individuals in any way that is otherwise prohibited by law.”
Alpine said very little action is being taken to regulate the use of AI’s climate impacts. Microsoft announced in 2022 that it would only work in certain capacities with companies with net zero targets, she said, but “they don’t follow any standards for net zero.”
That principle, which is listed on Microsoft’s website, says the company may provide “technical or engineering resources to develop or co-develop specialized subsurface exploration and extraction services” or provide products at no cost to energy customers with goals to reach net zero Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 2050.
Exxon and Chevron have both walked back their plans to reach net zero by 2050, saying that necessary advancements in technology and policy that are beyond their control haven’t materialized. Exxon now says it’s on track to achieve net zero across its Permian Basin operations by 2035, while Chevron “continues to have the aspiration” to achieve net zero, but without a timeline.
Microsoft did not respond to a question about whether the changes to Exxon’s and Chevron’s net zero goals has affected the companies’ agreements. Chevron, Equinor, and Exxon also did not respond to requests for comment.
Equinor says it intends to become net zero by 2050 “as part of its commitment to do zero harm to people, the environment, and material assets.”
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that he’s delayed the go-ahead for Jackdaw and Rosebank North Sea oil and gas extraction until after the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election – don’t want democracy interfering with Capitalism.Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
A barge moves along the water past ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy’s Golden Pass liquefied natural gas facility in Port Arthur on April 2, 2026. (Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of liquefied natural gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade, thanks to Trump’s acceleration of exports and the construction of AI data centers.
As President Donald Trump’s push for artificial intelligence data centers sends demand for natural gas soaring, a report released Tuesday projects that wholesale prices will likely double by the late 2030s if his energy and AI policies continue, driving up household energy bills.
The report from the climate activist group Oil Change International, which argues for an end to reliance on fossil fuels, found that recent surges in wholesale natural gas prices are being driven by Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, which has cranked up natural gas exports.
In his second term, Trump has resumed and accelerated approvals for new natural gas export terminals following a pause on permits under the Biden administration.
Nearly 90 million metric tons of new annual liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity reached a final investment decision as of June, on top of 60 million that had already been under construction, the report found. Combined, the researchers predicted that these projects could double US LNG exports by the early 2030s.
While pursuing energy dominance, Trump is also pursuing “AI dominance,” which has included the breakneck development of data centers specifically built to run on fossil fuels, including natural gas.
His administration has fast-tracked federal permits for data center developers, loosened environmental review processes, and directed his agencies to provide incentives to finance the data center boom.
Gas is expected to power much of the near-term energy use from these data centers. The facilities, which operate 24/7, are being constructed faster than transmission lines can keep up, meaning that new gas plants are being proposed as an alternative.
The report finds that the demands of the AI data center boom could increase gas consumption by 17% by the early 2030s. With the cheapest gas being rapidly depleted, more demand will require producers to expand drilling in parts of the country where it’s significantly more expensive to operate, like the Haynesville shale region of Louisiana and East Texas.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have gutted federal support for wind power construction and other renewable energy sources, which will further increase dependency on gas.
In addition to pumping more planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the report finds that this increased demand will likely cause prices to soar for consumers.
Thanks to Trump, the wholesale price of fossil gas could DOUBLE over the next decade, outpacing inflation every year. pic.twitter.com/8FCCmwysWd
— Oil Change International (@PriceofOil) July 28, 2026
Citing fluctuations in the Henry Hub gas price benchmark, the report projected that between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, which it notes was “a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries.”
“Trump’s policies are making everyone’s lives more expensive while Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry cash in. Our research shows that the cost-of-living crisis will only escalate in the coming years if Congress and government agencies don’t intervene,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International.
“Our leaders must stand up to Trump, phase out LNG exports, stop the reckless data center build-out, and transition the US economy off of fossil fuels to make energy affordable again,” he added.
Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Tuesday that Oil Change’s report, as well as another recent report demonstrating how the fossil fuel industry had hidden the climate damage caused by natural gas from the public for more than half a century, showed that it’s long past time to “make gas a dirty word” in a similar fashion to oil.
“Politicians locking us into natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending,” he wrote.
McKibben noted recent reporting in The New York Times detailing how, in the wake of Trump’s war in Iran, which has caused LNG prices to soar across Europe and Asia, nations are beginning to “unshackle” themselves from it as an alternative fuel source. Not so in the US.
“The natural gas industry,” he wrote, “is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Climate activists from Greenpeace and Uplift during a demonstration outside the Scottish Court of Session, Edinburgh, on the first day of the Rosebank and Jackdaw judicial review hearing, November 12, 2024
CONTROVERSIAL North Sea oil and gas plans “won’t take a penny off our bills” and instead increase “profits of a few,” campaigners warned as a public consultation opened into projects today.
Fossil fuel firm Adura claimed the Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw development would “deliver the greatest benefit for the UK.”
But campaigners and researchers with Uplift, which won the legal case against Rosebank in 2025, warned Brits not to fall for the plans which only serve to increase profits for energy firms.
Its executive director Tessa Khan said: “Rosebank won’t take a penny off our bills or meaningfully boost UK energy supplies — it’s overwhelmingly oil for export.
“But burning its oil would produce emissions equal to 70 per cent of the UK’s annual total, making it utterly incompatible with safe climate limits.
“Rosebank has nothing to do with the UK’s energy security and everything to do with increasing the profits of a few, already obscenely wealthy, oil companies.”
Protesters during a demonstration for higher wages and in support of the high school protest movement in Paris, November 5, 2026
