November, 13 2021, 01:44pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Collin Rees, collin@priceofoil.org, +1 308 293 3159 (WhatsApp / Signal) / +44 7456 153481 (call / text)
Oil Change International ExpertsRespond to COP26 Outcomes
GLASGOW
As the COP26 United Nations climate negotiations wind to a close at the end of their second week, negotiations have centered on the balance between mitigation and adaptation, differentiated responsibilities, Article Six, and the potential inclusion of language on a coal phase-out and a call to end fossil fuel subsidies.
Oil Change International experts had the following responses:
Elizabeth Bast, Executive Director:
"Compared to just a few years ago, the progress and momentum made in the last two weeks towards phasing out fossil fuels is striking. The joint commitment by nearly 40 countries and institutions to end public finance for oil, gas, and coal projects overseas now puts pressure on all countries to end funding for all fossil fuels. The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, launched by 12 countries and regions, is the first diplomatic initiative acknowledging the need for governments to manage the phase-out of fossil fuel production as a key tool to address the climate crisis.
"It is notable that most progress during COP26 occurred outside the negotiating rooms. As fires rage and floods worsen globally, climate change is harming billions of people and disproportionately impacting communities in the Global South, Black and Indigenous Peoples, and People of Color. As the negotiations continue to fail to deliver just outcomes for people most affected by climate change, we must increase the pressure on governments, institutions, and decisionmakers. Governments in the Global North must act first and fastest to address climate injustice, put an end to fossil fuel production, and support a just transition to clean energy."
Laurie van der Burg, Global Public Finance Campaign Co-Manager:
"Thanks to years of tireless and coordinated campaigning, nearly 40 countries and institutions have finally committed to end deadly subsidies for fossil fuel projects overseas. This is a crucial win of the movement, and the inclusion of countries like the United States, Canada, and Germany--some of the largest historical financiers of fossil fuel projects--is a testament to the efforts of countless advocates. A large number of low-income countries also joined, including Sri Lanka, Mali, and Ethiopia, showing many Global South nations do not think fossil fuels provide a valid development pathway and want clean energy investment instead."
"With strong implementation, this initiative could shift at least USD 24.1 billion per year in direct public finance out of fossil fuels and into clean energy--which will shift even larger flows of private finance. This is a massive and real impact. Signatories must work to implement this commitment effectively and recruit additional countries, including Japan, Korea, and China, which together account for 46% of public finance for fossil fuels. The commitment must mean no new financing for fossil fuel infrastructure, and that money must be fully shifted to climate action and loss and damage finance. Signatories must also ingrain their commitment to end international public finance for oil, gas, and coal by the end of 2022 in other policy processes at multilateral fora such as at the OECD, the G7, and the G20."
Romain Ioualalen, Global Policy Campaign Manager:
"The launch of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) at COP26 was a major development. For the first time at a UN climate conference, ministers from 12 countries and regions took to the stage to say: There is no future for oil and gas in a world that meets the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
"By setting up this initiative, BOGA members are asking a very simple question to their peers: Where is your plan to phase out the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis? This is a question that the Scottish and British governments will have to answer urgently, as despite their daily claims of climate leadership, they have failed to join this coalition and still plan to approve new oil and gas projects like the Cambo oil field.
"BOGA members' commitment to end licensing rounds is an urgent first step, but implementing the IEA's call to stop all new oil and gas development--including in licensed areas--must also be part of all countries' climate plans. We will work with our allies around the world to make sure this initiative becomes a rallying cry for movements fighting fossil fuel expansion everywhere."
Collin Rees, United States Program Manager:
"COP26 is winding to a bitter end as rich countries dig in against urgently needed finance to address losses and damages by communities suffering from climate impacts. Glasgow was a chance to make real progress on Loss and Damage, but once again developing countries will return home with little to show but empty promises from massive historical emitters like the United States who are driving the climate crisis through oil and gas expansion.
"For the first time, the climate talks featured a public fight over language on phasing out fossil fuels and ending fossil fuel subsidies. This is a key turning point, and we won't go back. Equitably phasing out oil, gas, and coal must be an animating factor in every climate discussion moving forward, and our movements in the streets will make sure that happens."
Oil Change International is a research, communications, and advocacy organization focused on exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the ongoing transition to clean energy.
(202) 518-9029LATEST NEWS
Pentagon Weighed Sending Boat Strike Survivors to Salvadoran Prison to Avoid Defending Bombings in Court
One former Navy lawyer said the Trump administration "might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Dec 10, 2025
Pentagon officials asked about sending survivors of US boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador in a bid to keep them out of American courts—where the Trump administration's high seas extrajudicial killing spree would be subject to legal scrutiny.
New details published Tuesday by the New York Times revealed that attorneys at the US Department of Defense inquired about whether two survivors of an October 16 strike on a boat allegedly smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean could be sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where the Trump administration has shipped ihundreds of mostly Venezuelan victims of its mass deportation campaign.
The prison—the centerpiece of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s war on crime—has been plagued by allegations of torture and other abuse.
One Trump administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Times that State Department lawyers were "stunned" by the query. The two boat strike survivors were ultimately returned to Colombia and Ecuador, their home countries.
Other unnamed officials told the newspaper that repatriations—either to survivors' home countries or to third nations—would become the administration's default plan for dealing with anyone who lived through the US attacks.
The goal, the officials said, was to avoid trying boat strike survivors in US courts, where the discovery process would compel the Trump administration—which has offered no concrete evidence to support its claims that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs—to provide legal justification for attacks that experts say are illegal.
The Pentagon's inquiry followed a September 2 "double-tap" strike on a vessel carrying 11 passengers. Two men survived the initial bombing but were killed in a second strike. Since then, at least 76 other people have been killed in 23 boat strikes reported by the Trump administration.
In addition to the two men who initially survived the September 2 strike and the two repatriated survivors of the October 16 attack, one other person who lived through a boat bombing was left adrift at sea and is presumed dead.
Some observers have noted similarities between the Trump administration's goal of keeping boat strike survivors out of US courtrooms and War on Terror policies and practices—first implemented during the George W. Bush administration—such as extraordinary rendition, the use of Central Intelligence Agency "black sites," and imprisonment of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba—designed to circumvent the law.
While the Trump administration previously sent migrants captured during its crackdown to Guantánamo, sending boat strike survivors to the lockup allow their lawyers to sue for habeas corpus, a right granted by the US Supreme Court in its 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision.
The Trump administration has revived the term "unlawful enemy combatant"—which was used by the Bush administration to classify people caught up in the War on Terror in a way that skirts the law—to apply to boat strike survivors. The Pentagon has also called such survivors "distressed mariners," a term that normally applies to civilians stranded at sea.
“If we’re in a war, they should be using the term ‘shipwrecked survivors,’” Mark Nevitt, a former Navy lawyer who is now a law professor at Emory University, told the Times. “My theory is they might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Relatives of men killed in the strikes, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, say that at least some of the victims were fishermen who were not linked to the illicit drug trade. One expert said last month that even in cases of vessels that were involved in drug trafficking, the bombings were "the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”
Even if the men targeted in the boat strikes were running drugs, "the appropriate response is to interdict the boats and arrest the occupants for prosecution," former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Wednesday.
"The rules governing law enforcement prohibit lethal force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury," he added, "which the boats do not present."
Keep ReadingShow Less
New DHS Database Suggests That Less Than 5% of Those Arrested by ICE Are the ‘Worst of the Worst’
The database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
Dec 10, 2025
In response to criticism of its aggressive and often lawless "mass deportation" campaign—which has entailed sweeping raids by masked agents, the use of squalid detention centers rife with torture, overt racial profiling, and the near-total abrogation of due process—the Trump administration has often fallen back on a familiar refrain: that the immigrants it targets are "the worst of the worst" dangerous criminals.
Immigration data published throughout the second Trump administration has already undermined this claim. Last month, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute published new data showing that between October 1 and November 15, only 5% of those booked into ICE detention had violent criminal convictions, while 73% had no convictions at all. It mirrored previous data published by Cato in June, which showed that 65% arrested had no criminal convictions of any kind, while 93% had no violent convictions.
Justice Department data published last month, meanwhile, showed that of the at least 614 people snatched up in the Operation Midway Blitz crackdown in Chicago, just 16 had criminal records of any kind.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security published its own "Worst of the Worst" database seeking to reverse the narrative, but it seems to have done the opposite.
"DHS has launched WOW.DHS.GOV for Americans to see the criminal illegal aliens that we are arresting, what crimes they committed, and what communities we removed them from," read a post from the agency on social media.
The post leads to a website containing the names, photos, and nationalities of those arrested by ICE. It also lists alleged past criminal convictions. In many cases, the only documentation of the allegations, if any is provided at all, is a DHS press release rather than official court records.
"Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem's leadership, the hardworking men and women of DHS and ICE are fulfilling President Trump's promise and carrying out mass deportations—starting with the worst of the worst—including the illegal aliens you see here," a header on the website reads.
Among those listed are people who DHS says have been convicted of heinous crimes, ranging from attempted murder to child abduction to domestic battery.
But the database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
"So DHS is implicitly admitting that less than 5% of the people it arrests are people they believe are 'the worst of the worst,'" said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Moreover, even some of those listed among the "Worst of the Worst" have only nonviolent offenses to their name, like drug possession, shoplifting, or disorderly conduct.
Reichlin-Melnick also noted that while immigration law does not require a criminal conviction for a person to be removed, "it matters because the administration talks as if these cases are the majority."
"There are definitely bad people on there who deserve deportation, but plenty of others on the list have nothing worse than a misdemeanor," he said. “If the administration were to actually focus its resources on people who were serious public safety threats or fugitives, there would be less of an outcry. But data shows that the big focus has been on boosting numbers by going after people no previous administration, Republican or Democrat, prioritized.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Escalates in Venezuela With 'Illegal' US Seizure of Oil Tanker
“Millions of civilians will be at risk if the economy deteriorates and tensions rise," warned one anti-war group.
Dec 10, 2025
The US military on Wednesday seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in the latest act of aggression against a nation that President Donald Trump has been openly threatening for several weeks.
Bloomberg, which described the move as a "serious escalation" in tensions between the US and Venezuela, reported that the seizure of the tanker by US forces "may make it much harder for Venezuela to export its oil, as other shippers are now likely to be more reluctant to load its cargoes."
The seizure was described to Bloomberg by a Trump administration official as a "judicial enforcement action on a stateless vessel" that had been docked in Venezuela.
Shortly after the seizure occurred, Trump boasted about it during a meeting with business leaders at the White House, declaring that the tanker was the "largest one ever seized."
Trump: "It's been an interesting day from the standpoint of news. As you probably know, we've just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Largest one ever seized actually. And other things are happening." pic.twitter.com/wyOYMKCJTT
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2025
Just Foreign Policy, a progressive think tank and advocacy group, condemned the seizure of the tanker, describing it as an "illegal US move to take control of Venezuela's natural resources and strangle the economy, which is already struggling under indiscriminate US sanctions," and warning that "millions of civilians will be at risk if the economy deteriorates and tensions rise."
The seizure of the oil tanker is just one of many aggressive maneuvers that the Trump administration has been making around Venezuela.
Starting in September, the administration began a series of murders of people aboard boats in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela and in the Pacific Ocean.
The Trump administration has claimed those targeted for extrajudicial killing are drug smugglers and accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading an international drug trafficking organization called the Cartel de los Soles, despite many experts saying that they have seen no evidence that such an organization formally exists.
Trump late last month further escalated tensions with Venezuela when he declared that airspace over the nation was “closed in its entirety,” even though he lacks any legal authority to enforce such a decree. Trump has also hinted that strikes against purported drug traffickers on Venezuelan soil would occur in the near future.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular