SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
August, 24 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Erin Jensen,Email:,EJensen@foe.org
Report shows OPIC's energy portfolio still investing billions in fossil fuels
WASHINGTON
A new report analyzing the energy portfolio of the U.S. government's lead development finance institution (DFI), formerly known as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), shows that the institution is still invested heavily in dirty fossil fuels. The analysis finds that over the past 15 years, OPIC invested an average of $357 million in fossil fuel projects and over $500 million in renewables per year.
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) succeeded OPIC in December 2019 with a new emphasis on the world's poorest countries with the aim to reduce poverty and support sustainable development. The investments analyzed in the report included support for small distributed renewables key to improving access to electricity, but they also included billions over the past decade for fossil fuel projects that have devastating impacts on the environment and local communities, like the Vaca Muerta fracking projects in Argentina. Therefore, the report makes the following recommendations to DFC:
- Continue and increase support for renewables, especially for mini and off-grid renewables, drawing from OPIC's lessons learned and the good work of the U.S. African Development Foundation;
- End all support for fossil fuels as they inhibit rather than improve the world's poorest countries' ability to develop and;
- Become a leader in climate policy by once again strengthening its greenhouse gas cap and reduction schedule by accounting for the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire life cycle for the full lifetime of the projects that DFC supports.
"The climate crisis is already upon us and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation still has its head in the sand," said Kate DeAngelis, senior international policy analyst at Friends of the Earth U.S. "Climate change's disproportionate impact on less developed countries will only worsen if finance institutions continue to pour billions of dollars into dirty fossil fuel projects. It is time for DFC to solely support the clean energy investments that will protect our planet, boost sustainable development, and help reduce poverty. The development finance sector must support a just transition to a sustainable energy future and DFC can lead the way."
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
'This Should Be Illegal': Senate GOP Uses AI Deepfake to Attack Talarico
“Political deepfakes are a profound threat to our democracy, because there is no realistic way for voters to understand they are seeing fake representations,” said the co-president of Public Citizen.
Mar 12, 2026
In the latest example of Republicans using artificially generated deepfakes to attack their opponents, the Senate GOP’s official social media account has posted an attack ad depicting a synthetic version of Texas Democrat James Talarico, a state representative and US Senate candidate.
The video, posted on Wednesday to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) page on X, portrays a frighteningly realistic approximation of Talarico's (D-50) appearance and voice.
The state representative, who won the Democratic nomination for Texas’ US Senate seat in a primary earlier this month, is depicted reading an array of old social media posts that the NRSC described as “extreme statements praising transgenderism, twisting Christian beliefs, and advocating for open borders.”
The posts were all real. Talarico did indeed state, following a spate of mass shootings against minorities in 2021, that "radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country." He also did say that his office had added personal pronouns to official business cards out of respect for transgender Texans, that he believed God was "nonbinary," and that he was "the only teenage boy at Planned Parenthood's March for Women's Lives in 2004."
However, all of the posts are at least several years—if not more than a decade—old. The video also depicts its AI simulacrum of Talarico smiling and reminiscing fondly about the posts, which he never actually did.
"So true," he is depicted saying after reading the tweet about "radicalized white men." "I love this one too," he says before reading the post about "pronouns."
Aside from a small, translucent watermark in the bottom-right corner of the video, labeling it "AI Generated," there is no indication that the video is a fabrication.
While both sides of the aisle have dabbled in the use of AI to attack their opponents, Politico's Adam Wren has noted that deepfakes were not being deployed equally and have become central to the "approach" of the GOP in campaigns.
In October, after Republicans made a similar video showing a simulated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) celebrating the government shutdown, Wren noted the frequency with which such tactics were being used by Republican campaigns at both the state and federal level:
Other examples of AI-generated advertising have also come from Republicans. An ad for Mike Braun, now governor of Indiana, last year used AI to fake scenes, without disclosing it. President Donald Trump’s account regularly posts clearly fake videos of the president ridiculing opponents...
The [NRSC] released one hitting Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills as she launched her Senate campaign, and one simulating a Democratic group chat.
Deepfakes have also been deployed heavily by social media accounts for President Donald Trump's White House to degrade opponents.
Earlier this year, the official account posted a photo of an organizer who’d been arrested during a protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), doctored to portray her uncontrollably crying, when actual photos of the event show her appearing stone-faced and stoic while being led away in handcuffs.
While more than half of all US states have legislation regulating the use of AI deepfakes for election-related content, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has said such content needs to be addressed at the federal level.
The group has called on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to designate the use of AI for deceptive political messaging as fraudulent misrepresentation and on Congress to pass legislation banning the practice and requiring AI-generated content to be prominently labeled.
Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, told Common Dreams that the deepfake of Talarico "is a disgrace and the NRSC should put it down immediately."
"Political deepfakes are a profound threat to our democracy, because there is no realistic way for voters to understand they are seeing fake representations rather than real video," Weissman said. "This deepfake has an 'AI-generated' watermark, but it’s all but invisible–sort of like an admission of wrongdoing, more than an effort at transparency.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Catastrophic,' Says UNICEF: 1,100+ Children Killed or Wounded in Mideast Since US-Israel Launched Iran War
The agency demanded that all parties protect civilians and reiterated the secretary-general's call "to end the fighting and engage in diplomatic negotiations."
Mar 12, 2026
Since the United States and Israel launched an unprovoked war on Iran at the end of February, more than 1,100 youth have been killed or injured in related violence across the Middle East, the United Nations Children's Fund said Wednesday, calling for a swift diplomatic resolution.
"The situation is becoming catastrophic for millions of children across the region," UNICEF said in a statement, noting that at least 200 children are reportedly dead in Iran, 91 in Lebanon, four in Israel, and one in Kuwait. "These numbers will likely climb as the violence intensifies and spreads."
Most of the kids killed in Iran died in what mounting evidence suggests was a US attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab on February 28. That attack killed an estimated 175 people, mostly students ages 7-12, part of an overall death toll that the Iranian government has said exceeds 1,300.
Responding to the school bombing, Gordon Brown, a former UK prime minister who's now the UN special envoy for global education, argued in a Guardian opinion piece Thursday that "the world will now need stronger mechanisms to ensure accountability," such as a body complementing the International Criminal Court but specifically for children, "focusing its attention on the bombing of schools, abductions of pupils, and militias that enslave boys and girls."
With the widening conflict in the Middle East, UNICEF noted Wednesday, "widespread disruption to education has left millions of children out of school across the region, while hundreds of thousands of children have been displaced by unrelenting bombardment."
In Lebanon, where Israeli attacks are allegedly targeting the Lebanese political and paramilitary group Hezbollah despite a November 2024 ceasefire deal, nearly 800,000 people, including around 200,000 children, have been forced from their homes, according to Mercy Corps. The Lebanese government has said at least 570 people have been killed and 1,444 injured.
"Civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems—upon which children depend to survive—have been attacked, damaged, or destroyed by parties to the conflict," UNICEF said. "Nothing justifies the killing and maiming of children, or the destruction and disruption of essential services that children depend on."
"Grave violations against children in armed conflict can constitute violations of international law, including international humanitarian law, and international human rights law," the UN agency continued.
Across Iran, several United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites have also been damaged by the US-Israeli war, which experts worldwide argue violates both the US Constitution and UN Charter.
The UN Security Council, which is currently led by President Donald Trump's administration, on Wednesday adopted a resolution condemning Iran's retaliatory attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan—nations that host US military bases—without even mentioning the US-Israeli bombing campaign.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres last Friday demanded a return to negotiations. Trump, who abandoned a previous Iranian nuclear deal during his first term, ditched recent talks with Iran in favor of bombing the country with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has used war on Iran to again close crossings into the Gaza Strip, or as critics have put it, reinstate a "starvation policy" in the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel's 29-month genocidal assault.
In addition to reiterating "the secretary-general's call on parties to the conflict to end the fighting and engage in diplomatic negotiations," UNICEF on Wednesday urged everyone involved "to take all necessary precautions in the choice of means and methods of warfare to minimize harm to civilians, including by avoiding the use of explosive weapons that disproportionally affect children."
"The region's children—all 200 million of them—are counting on the world to act quickly," the agency concluded.
A Wednesday letter signed by every member of the US Senate Democratic Caucus but Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)—who previously helped Republicans block a war powers resolution intended to halt Trump's assault on Iran—called for a probe of the Minab school attack and sounded the alarm about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's rhetoric that "only serves to endanger civilians."
Specifically, Hegseth has said that the US assault on Iran, which they're calling Operation Epic Fury, would have "no stupid rules of engagement," and there will be "death and destruction from the sky all day long."
Keep ReadingShow Less
US-Israeli War on Iran Sparks 'Largest Supply Disruption in History of Global Oil Market': IEA
"The oil market challenges we are facing are unprecedented in scale," said the executive director of the International Energy Agency.
Mar 12, 2026
The International Energy Agency said Thursday that the US-Israeli war on Iran and its reverberating impacts across the region have sparked "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market," with flows of crude and other fossil fuel products through the Strait of Hormuz plummeting and Gulf nations slashing production as they run out of storage space.
The agency noted in its monthly report on the state of the global oil market that "oil prices have gyrated wildly since the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran on 28 February," pointing to "disruptions to Middle Eastern supplies due to attacks on the region’s oil infrastructure and the cessation of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz," which have "sent Brent futures soaring, trading within a whisker of $120/bbl."
The IEA's report came a day after the agency's 32 member nations—including the US—agreed unanimously to release a total of 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves to "address disruptions in oil markets stemming from the war in the Middle East."
"The oil market challenges we are facing are unprecedented in scale, therefore I am very glad that IEA member countries have responded with an emergency collective action of unprecedented size,” said the agency's executive director, Fatih Birol.
The IEA assessment on Thursday came as oil prices surged again as Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader, vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. An estimated 20% of the world's oil passes through the route each year.
Earlier on Thursday, Iraq—which has among the largest confirmed reserves of crude oil in the world—suspended all of its oil terminal operations after two vessels were attacked off the nation's coast. NPR reported that Iran "took responsibility for attacking one of the tankers, which it said was owned by the US."
The US and Israel have also bombed Iran's oil infrastructure, choking Tehran with black smoke and spraying toxic rain that prompted warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO).
"The black rain and the acidic rain coming with it is indeed a danger for the population, respiratory mainly," WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva earlier this week.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said Wednesay that "the potential for vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm arising from strikes targeting energy infrastructure, including uncontrolled deadly fires, major disruptions to essential services, environmental damage, and severe long-term health risks for millions, means there is a substantial risk such attacks would violate international humanitarian law and in some cases could amount to war crimes."
“Regardless of whether a military objective is cited to justify targeting energy infrastructure, under international humanitarian law all parties have a clear obligation to take all feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm and refrain from attacks that cause disproportionate death or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects," said Morayef. "This includes any foreseeable knock-on, indirect adverse effects on civilians’ life and health, such as exposure to toxic chemicals.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular