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Climate
Trump Admin Slammed for Yet Another Move to 'Help Corporate Polluters' Exploit Alaska
One critic called the transfer of 1.4 million acres a "massive giveaway to out-of-state corporations that don't want to be burdened by the federal protections that safeguard our lands, waters, wildlife, and communities."
May 06, 2026
Defenders of the planet took aim at President Donald Trump's administration on Wednesday for transferring approximately 1.4 million acres of public lands along the Dalton Utility Corridor from the US Bureau of Land Management to the state of Alaska.
"This corridor encompasses some of Alaska’s most critical transportation and energy assets, including portions of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System corridor, the Dalton Highway, and proposed routes for the Ambler Road and Alaska Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects," the US Department of the Interior noted in a statement, framing the move as part of DOI's commitment to the Alaska Statehood Act, as well as orders issued by Trump and the agency's secretary, Doug Burgum.
As Burgum and Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy cheered the development on Wednesday, Andrea Feniger, director of the state's Sierra Club chapter, declared that "this is less a transfer to Alaskans than a massive giveaway to out-of-state corporations that don't want to be burdened by the federal protections that safeguard our lands, waters, wildlife, and communities."
"Gov. Dunleavy has repeatedly shown he is more interested in helping the Trump administration and fossil fuel executives exploit Alaska than standing up for the people who actually live here," Feniger said. "These companies will not be satisfied until every corner of our state is opened to industrial development and short-term profit, regardless of the permanent damage done to the wild places, subsistence traditions, and communities that make Alaska unique. Alaskans deserve leaders who will protect these lands for future generations, not politicians willing to hand them over to corporate polluters."
Bloomberg reported that "Alaska's acquisition along the highway north of Fairbanks is part of 2.1 million acres" that Burgum offered earlier this year, after revoking a pair of decades-old orders. In March, a coalition of environmental groups, including Trustees for Alaska, filed a federal lawsuit over the secretary "unlawfully removing federal protections."
While Alaska filed a motion to dismiss the case on Wednesday, Bridget Psarianos, senior staff attorney at Trustees for Alaska, told Bloomberg that the land transfer is illegal. She also said that "the interior secretary broke the law when removing federal protections for over 2 million acres of public lands in February without hearings in local communities, without a public comment period, and without addressing that decision's impacts on land, water, and subsistence users."
Other groups supporting that suit include the Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, National Parks Conservation Association, and Sierra Club, whose director of conservation, Dan Ritzman, condemned Wednesday's transfer.
"This action will only help corporate polluters transform Alaska into an industrial wasteland—destroying irreplaceable landscapes for the sake of expanding the portfolios of mining and oil and gas companies that will never have to live with the consequences of this destruction," Ritzman stressed. "This decision completely ignores the wishes of local communities and tribes that depend upon these untouched areas for their livelihoods, cultures, and regional identities."
"Alaska is home to some of the country's last true wild places, and projects like Alaska LNG and the Ambler Road threaten irreversible damage to these precious landscapes, the wildlife that depend on them, and the communities that have stewarded them for generations," he added. "These lands belong to all Americans, not corporate special interests looking to exploit them for short-term profit. We are fighting this in court and will continue opposing any other attempts to sacrifice Alaska's public lands for the benefit of polluters and extractive industries."
Rebecca Noblin, an Alaska senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, similarly told E&E News that "handing this incredible stretch of federal public lands over to the state puts the communities, fish, and wildlife who live there in danger."
"Alaska officials envision bulldozing the area for a private industrial mining road and the LNG pipeline boondoggle," Noblin said. "We're fighting this transfer of our federal public lands in court, and we'll keep standing up for Alaska's wild places."
Climate and conservation groups have also recently sounded the alarm about Interior's forthcoming fossil fuel lease sale for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's Coastal Plain, and warned—in the words of Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity—that that Trump's "ridiculously reckless" plan to dramatically expand offshore drilling, including near Alaska, "could cause thousands of new oil spills, threatening almost every US coast."
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'Shame! Shame! Shame!': Local Residents Furious After Shark Tank Billionaire's Data Center Approved in Utah
The project, which residents were informed of just last week, is expected to more than double Utah’s electricity usage, hike its carbon footprint by 50%, and potentially drain more water from the depleted Great Salt Lake.
May 05, 2026
County commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, were deluged with chants of "Shame! Shame! Shame!" from a crowd of hundreds on Monday night as they voted unanimously to move forward with a sprawling "hyperscale" artificial intelligence data center project that many residents fear will cause energy prices to soar and imperil water access.
The project, known by state officials as "Stratos," was proposed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary and has been rushed along by Utah's Military Installation Development Authority, which recently approved a gigantic energy tax break for the program to help "lure" the billionaire "Shark Tank" investor.
The development, dubbed "Wonder Valley" after O'Leary's "Mr. Wonderful" TV persona, would span more than 40,000 acres of northern Utah—more than two and a half times the size of Manhattan—and would consume more than twice the electricity currently used by the entire state if approved, according to Axios.
CBS 2 KUTV called it "the biggest thing in the region since the completion of the first transcontinental railroad." And yet Utahns say they've been given little information about the plan and few opportunities to voice their concerns.
Residents were given short notice before Box Elder commissioners gathered at the county fairgrounds on Monday for a "special" meeting to vote on the project, but an estimated 500 still showed up to voice their displeasure.
They raised fears that they'd have to endure the same dramatic energy price spikes as other states with high concentrations of data centers. Residential utility costs have jumped 13-20% year over year in Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey, a trend attributed to the rollout of data centers in these states.
The developers of the Utah project have emphasized that it will be powered by an on-site natural gas plant, which they claim would limit the impact on utility bills.
However, that still leaves the massive environmental concern, especially since natural gas is almost entirely made of methane, one of the worst planet-heating pollutants.
Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, has said that the estimated nine gigawatts of power the center would require, "would increase the carbon dioxide emissions for the state of Utah by more than 50%," meaning "there’s a huge climate footprint associated with that proposal.”
Environmental advocates also warn that the facility will further drain water from the Great Salt Lake amid an already severe drought.
The Salt Lake Tribune has found that Utah's dozens of other data centers consume wildly different amounts of water depending on the technology they use.
The developers of the Box Elder facility have claimed the project will use "zero water turbine" technology that allows it to recycle water, resulting in "net zero" consumption.
But Samantha Hawkins, the communications director for Grow the Flow Utah, a group dedicated to protecting the Great Salt Lake, said it's impossible to know if the developers are telling the truth when they say their facility is designed to limit water usage.
"So far, there’s no publicly available hydrologic analysis or independent review to support those claims," she said, "and there haven’t been any manufacturers, technologies, or contracts cited in relation to the 'zero water turbine' technology."
Even if the centers limit water use, they still need to remain cool, which the Tribune said often requires more energy.
Many of the Utahns who showed up to protest Monday's vote felt they were being kept in the dark about the facility's potential harms and that the plans for the facility, which were not made public until last week, were being kept from them.
“I’m outraged," said Colleen Flanagan, a resident of Sandy who spoke with Fox 13 Salt Lake. "I am absolutely angry that there was no studies done—it just came up out of the community. Nobody knew about it."
Mitchell Tousley, who drove more than an hour from Draper to protest the decision, said, "A project of this scale just absolutely requires public input, and there really hasn’t been."
Deals to build these facilities have often been made in secret, with contract details hidden from the public by nondisclosure agreements that stifle dissent until the project has already been approved. Despite this, these projects have often drawn fearsome backlash from the communities where they are planned. In some cases—like in Virginia late last month, where a 2,100-acre center was set to be built—it has led developers to pull out.
But the commissioners in Box Elder County, who said they'd reviewed more than 2,500 public comments on the proposal, appeared unmoved by the outpouring of public concern on Monday night. They said water and air quality issues were not factors in their vote and that the water rights were held by the private landowners.
As the crowd jeered, with chants of "cowards" and "people over profits," Commissioner Boyd Bingham, a Republican, shouted them down.
“For hell’s sakes, grow up,” he yelled. “This is beyond a joke.” The commissioners then left the room and addressed the crowd via a virtual meeting.
In a video response to Monday night's protest, O'Leary said: "I’m the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies. I'm pretty aware of what these concerns are. They are around air, water use, heat, noise pollution. So sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals."
He claimed without evidence that 90% of the opponents of the data center project were "being bused in" from out of state. He also claimed that the facility would be powered in part by "solar, wind, and batteries," when it is actually powered entirely by natural gas.
Opponents continue to characterize Stratos as a billionaire vanity project to loot Utah's vast natural resources with little consideration for how it will affect residents.
Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies told Fox 13 that the Great Salt Lake "is occupied by amazing living systems" and that "projects like this go into environments like this and scrape the living systems right off the face of the Earth.”
He said, “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state… and leave us with a few crumbs.”
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Fuel Prices Have Spiked More in ‘Energy Independent’ US Than in Nations That Have Moved Away From Oil and Gas
"The only real energy independence from the Middle East is renewables," said one policy expert.
May 05, 2026
Average gas prices in the United States are quickly climbing toward $5 per gallon this week as US President Donald Trump's war with Iran shows little sign of resolution.
Where average prices were about $2.98 the day before the war's launch, they had shot up to $4.48 as of Tuesday, according to AAA's gas price tracker, as Iran's restriction of ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz has squeezed global oil shipping and the shipping of other fuel sources like liquefied natural gas (LNG), causing global price hikes.
And while Trump has touted America’s supposed “energy independence” as an ace in the hole, achieved by ratcheting up fossil fuel production while canceling solar and wind power projects, data shows that the US has been hit harder by the price shocks than any other major economy in the world, with those that have embraced renewable energy being especially resilient.
Although the US leads the world in oil production by a large margin, data from JP Morgan Commodities research, analyzed Friday by MarketWatch, showed that between February 23 and April 27, the US experienced about a 42% increase in gas prices, the fifth-highest in the world.
"The spike in US gasoline prices over the past two months has outpaced everywhere except Southeast Asia, the region most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf," explained Yahoo Finance geopolitics reporter Jake Conley.
Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth, explained to MarketWatch last week that while increased fuel production gives the US a "buffer," oil is a global market and "it doesn’t operate in a vacuum." She said, "Global tightness and domestic bottlenecks still show up in gasoline prices."
Meanwhile, some of the countries that have best survived the price hikes include France and Spain, which derive large shares of their power from nuclear energy and renewables, respectively.
Craig Hanson and Jessica Isaacs, a pair of researchers at the World Resources Institute, explained last month that while a mix of factors is at play, countries less reliant on fossil fuels generally "find themselves in a better position to withstand the current crisis."
"Every country has homegrown access to at least two clean energy resources—the sun shines, and the wind blows just about everywhere at some point," they said. "The same cannot be said of oil and gas, where production is concentrated in a small number of countries and exposed to geopolitical disruption."
"Renewable resources like wind, solar, and geothermal have zero fuel costs, and the fuel cost of nuclear power is quite low. Again, the same cannot be said of fossil fuels, which have costs set by volatile global markets," they added. "These two advantages are why some of the world’s clean energy frontrunners are faring better than other countries amidst the Iranian energy crisis."
As Reuters reported in late April, the contrast between Europe's biggest gas guzzlers and green energy adopters is particularly stark.
While Albania has kept energy prices in check and even lowered them compared to last year by using its large system of hydroelectric dams, which supply much of its power, countries like Germany and Italy, which still rely heavily on gas, have seen electricity prices spike.
Hanson and Isaacs noted that while clean energy investments have helped soften the blow of global price shocks, the effects are not the same across the board. While price hikes for the electricity used to power factories, homes, and cars have been blunted by the availability of alternative energy sources, others, like heat—which are more reliant on natural gas—have still been affected.
Still, though, they said the crisis has shown that in addition to environmental sustainability, "clean energy systems’ greatest benefits today might actually be price stability and domestic energy resilience."
While Trump has continued his efforts to choke off any federal investment in renewable energy and double down on oil and gas production, other nations have taken the war’s price hikes as a sign to further accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels.
Germany and several other European Union members, for example, have announced expedited timelines to expand offshore wind and solar investments, explicitly citing the volatility in oil markets caused by the war.
Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the energy price shocks showed that "the only real energy independence from the Middle East is renewables."
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Trump DOJ Sues Minnesota in 'Desperate Effort to Shield' Big Oil From Climate Case
"The American people deserve a Department of Justice that fights for us, and it's a tremendous shame that Trump's DOJ would rather sell us out to Big Oil," said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
May 04, 2026
Just weeks after the Minnesota Supreme Court allowed the state's climate deception lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry to move into discovery, President Donald Trump's Department of Justice took action in federal court on Monday to block the case.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison first sued the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and its subsidiary Flint Hills Resources in state court for orchestrating and executing a "campaign of deception" regarding the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency "with disturbing success" in 2020.
The industry has been fighting to kill the case since then, and the DOJ on Monday filed a complaint in the District of Minnesota against both the state and Ellison. In a related statement, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward declared that "President Trump promised to unleash American energy dominance, and Minnesota officials cannot undermine his directive by mandating that their woke climate preferences become the uniform policy of our nation."
"Minnesota's attempt to impose a national regulation on global greenhouse gas emissions not only is preempted by federal law, but also undermines affordable and reliable American energy, weakening the national and economic security of the United States," Woodward continued, summarizing the argument made in the new federal filing.
While the fossil fuel entities targeted by Minnesota welcomed the Trump DOJ's intervention, Ellison made clear that he was undeterred.
"In 2020, I sued Big Oil for lying to Minnesotans about the true causes of climate change, then sticking us with the bill for the harms it is causing," Ellison said. "Six years later, we are still waiting to go to trial because Big Oil has pulled every procedural trick in the book to delay facing the consequences of their unlawful actions."
"This frivolous and meritless lawsuit is just their latest attempt to hide from accountability, and I will move to have it dismissed immediately," he pledged. "The American people deserve a Department of Justice that fights for us, and it's a tremendous shame that Trump's DOJ would rather sell us out to Big Oil."
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which supports cases against polluters, also ripped the federal filing.
"This is a desperate effort to shield the architects of Big Oil's decadeslong climate deception from facing accountability," said Wiles. "Big Oil and the Trump administration are clearly terrified that Minnesota's lawsuit will reveal exactly how these defendants defrauded the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. Federal courts dismissed the Trump administration's last two attempts to stop states from taking Big Oil companies to court. This naked political intimidation tactic should meet the same fate."
Trump was backed by Big Oil during the 2024 election and campaigned on a promise to "drill, baby, drill." Since returning to office, he's aimed to serve industry interests in a range of ways, including last year's executive order directing the US attorney general to protect "American energy from state overreach."
The Justice Department noted in its Monday statement that last year, its Environment and Natural Resources Division "filed complaints against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont to stop those states' unconstitutional climate actions."
Dozens of state and local governments have filed cases similar to Ellison's in Minnesota. The US Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments related to one from Colorado that dates back to 2018: Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County.
Meanwhile, Trump and Big Oil's allies in Congress are also working to protect polluters. Last month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill that, if passed, would "prohibit liability against those engaged in the mining, extraction, production, refinement, transportation, distribution, marketing, manufacture, or sale of energy for damages or injunctive or other relief from the use of their products, and for other purposes."
Wiles noted at the time that "Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made."
"If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong," he asked, "why do they need immunity?"
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