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fossil fuel industry
The Cancellation of a Blue Hydrogen Boondoggle Proves No Project Is Inevitable
This retreat shows that these projects and their false climate solutions are not just unpopular, they’re also a major financial risk to companies, investors, and communities. For Louisiana communities that opposed the project from the beginning, however, the announcement means something else: proof that projects portrayed as inevitable can be stopped.
A Flagship Project That Never Materialized
When Air Products first announced the project in 2021, the company described it as a transformational investment. Their plans included the production of 1,700 metric tons of hydrogen per day from fracked gas with up to 95% of emissions mitigated through carbon capture and storage (CCS). They planned to pump the hydrogen—called "blue" hydrogen due to the addition of CCS—through a pipeline along the Gulf Coast for refineries and petrochemical plants, or turn it into ammonia, which is a toxic, fossil fuel-derived chemical—used primarily as a fertilizer.
(Graphic via CIEL Ammonia Factsheet)
That vision quickly began to unravel. By 2024, Air Products was already seeking partners to offload parts of the project, including the ammonia and carbon capture components. In 2025, it entered advanced negotiations with Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara. By mid-2026, both companies announced the project had been abandoned, citing financial concerns and an inability to find customers for a speculative market.
The cancellation reflects a broader reality: Despite billions in public funds and years of political backing, many blue hydrogen projects continue to struggle with rising costs, uncertain markets, and technical challenges.
Why This Matters Beyond One Company
Air Products is not alone. At least 45 hydrogen and ammonia production facilities have been proposed in recent years across the US—mostly clustered in Texas and Louisiana—with only one making it to the construction phase, and many more on hold. Although more than 80% of ammonia produced in the US is used to manufacture fertilizer, much of the proposed buildout depends on speculative markets—including using ammonia as a shipping fuel, hydrogen carrier, and energy source—none of which are possible at scale today.
To make these projects appear climate friendly, companies increasingly market them as "clean," "blue," or "low-carbon" by pairing fossil fuel-based hydrogen and ammonia production with CCS. Yet, CCS has repeatedly failed to deliver emissions reductions while putting communities at elevated risk for pollution and related disasters. Despite that record, federal carbon capture subsidies were expanded in 2022 and again in 2025, potentially leading to the transfer of $1 trillion in public funds to private corporations over the coming decades.
The collapse of one of the industry’s flagship projects should prompt investors and policymakers alike to ask whether this business model is built on wishful thinking rather than sound evidence and economics.
Louisiana Was Forced to Bear the Risk
Air Products’ proposed Louisiana Complex would have consisted of a hydrogen and ammonia plant in Ascension, Louisiana, with 38 miles of pipeline sprawling across five parishes, connecting to one of at least 10 separate injection wells underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would have formed part of a larger effort to transform Louisiana into a national hub for CCS.
More than just a proposed storage site, Lake Maurepas is an important estuarine ecosystem beloved by locals for recreational activities like boating, fishing, and wildlife observation. One of the nation’s largest forested wetlands borders the lake, supporting wildlife, commercial fishing, and local businesses. For generations, communities have depended on these waters—not simply for income, but as part of their identity. From the moment residents learned about the Air Products project, they organized against it.
Today, more than 30 CCS projects are under review across the state by the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy. Many would be built alongside communities already burdened by decades of petrochemical pollution in the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, known locally as Cancer Alley.
These communities have long borne the health costs of fossil fuel development. Siting this experimental and knowingly dangerous CCS technology alongside frontline communities already overburdened by industrial pollution would force them to shoulder another layer of industrial risk, while companies stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in public money over the next 20 years through a federal tax credit.
This Isn’t the First Time
The failure of Air Products’ vision is not a surprise to anyone watching the proposed CCS buildout; the ballooning costs and failure to deliver on ambitious promises follow a familiar pattern.
The Kemper “clean coal” project in Mississippi was once celebrated as the future of carbon capture, claiming it would capture 65% of emissions from the power plant. Originally budgeted at $3 billion, the costs of the project more than doubled to $7.5 billion over the seven years of its construction (2010-2017), before the carbon capture system was abandoned altogether. Despite the massive investment, the Kemper facility never operated as promised and was partially demolished in 2021. Local residents are still paying for the corporate loss from this experiment through their electricity bills.
The failure of the Kemper project should have been a warning for future investments and should have prompted the more fundamental question: Who bears the cost of these projects?
While Louisiana leads the nation in oil refining, natural gas production, and chemical production, the state consistently ranks among the poorest and least educated states in the US. CCS projects will no doubt add to the unequal environmental burden that the state population is forced to bear for the benefit of corporations. While many of the hardships can be quantified, the joy and love for the land by its residents is immeasurable. There’s no metric that captures the experience of paddling a canoe across Lake Maurepas, seeing alligators bask in the sun, listening to birdsongs echo across the wetlands, or watching the flotant—marsh grasses that float on top of the water—bob with the waves.
An alligator basks in Lake Maurepas, Louisiana, US. (Photo by Jessi Parfait, CIEL.)
For the communities that have called this place home for generations, protecting the lake has never been about stopping a single project—it has been about safeguarding a way of life. The cancellation of the project is a victory not only for the hundreds of community members who organized against it—showing what is possible when people stand together to fight against false solutions—but also for the future generations who will continue to enjoy this remarkable ecosystem.
The cancellation is also a major win for communities that spent years warning about the project’s risks. Concerned residents across the complex’s planned footprint partnered with environmental groups to speak out at public hearings, organize neighbors, and challenge permits, refusing to accept that the project was inevitable.
Their persistence mattered. For years, the fossil fuel industry insisted that carbon capture represented the future—that projects like this were necessary and unavoidable. But as James Hiatt, founder of For a Better Bayou based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, put it:
Air Products pulling out proves that nothing here is inevitable. Industry wants us to believe these projects are a done deal, that our voices don’t matter. They do. Elected and regulators didn’t hand us this win; community pressure did. Consistent, persistent organizing works.
A Warning for The Future
Air Products’ withdrawal is not simply a failed investment by one company. It is a warning to policymakers considering whether public money should continue subsidizing projects that repeatedly fail to deliver.
Communities increasingly reject being asked to bear new risks in exchange for promises that never materialize. And this failure is likely not the last ammonia and CCS project to be canceled. Even now, many projects are on hold or delayed, further signaling to companies, investors, and communities that they are a bad bet.
The cancellation also sends a broader message: Expensive, speculative technologies designed to prolong fossil fuel production aren’t fooling anyone and companies pushing these risky projects will be footing the bill.
Abby Martin's New Documentary Takes On 'Earth's Greatest Enemy'
It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?
The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.
The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.
"When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.World’s Largest Polluter?
RIMPAC training exercises are shown in a still from Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.
It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.
This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.
As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”
"You have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.
In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”
And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check," he says.
Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.
They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.
“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
'Human Detritus'
A helmet and dog tag are seen in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in a still from the film Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.
“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it's not just emissions, it's the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.
The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.
Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.
"We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
“No matter what you think you know, it's worse. It's actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.
One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.
In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.
Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”
“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they're churned up and spit out. They're the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”
Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.
“This isn't about service members,” she said. “This isn't about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.
“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.
A Movie and a Movement
People march against US militarism at COP26 in Glasgow, in a still from Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”
She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”
But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore's filmography.
Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire."
“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can't walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”
She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can't get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can't. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”
Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.
Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing "profound climate anxiety" following the birth of the pairs' first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.
Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it's not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”
The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.
“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it's to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”
So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.
But education is not her only goal.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.
For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.
While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.
“There's so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that's our vision.”
“It's like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”
To attend a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, see the schedule here. To host a screening of your own, email theempirefiles@gmail.com.
US Tax Payers Are Funding the Industry That Is Destroying Our Earth
The report analyzed the financial disclosures of 11 US oil and gas companies with extensive overseas operations and concluded that decades of heavy industry lobbying has engineered a US tax code that pays for a dying fossil fuel industry, specifically for new oil and gas development abroad.
At the report’s launch in DC earlier this fall, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) explained how US taxpayers are effectively forced to subsidize fossil fuel production through a tax code highly favorable to Big Oil. The report’s researchers explained that under the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) regime, multinational companies that shift operations offshore already receive a 50% income tax deduction. But Big Oil lobbying has successfully created special exemptions allowing the largest fossil fuel companies to bypass all US tax on foreign oil and gas extraction income.
US taxpayers not only subsidize the fossil-fuel industry by nearly $35 billion every year, they also shoulder more than $100 billion annually in climate-related costs.
As a result, despite producing more oil and gas domestically than in all other countries combined, American multinational oil and gas companies collectively pay more in taxes to foreign governments than to the US. While domestic operations account for more than 57% of total upstream production among the companies studied in the report, they generate less than a quarter of total taxes due.
Before Trump’s 2017 tax law, corporate income earned abroad from refining, transporting, and selling oil was taxed immediately at the full US rate. But Trump’s Big Oil tax breaks shifted this income into GILTI. Although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tried to curtail government subsidies to fossil fuels, the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” expanded 2017-level tax giveaways, including more direct incentives for foreign drilling. To secure the sweeping benefits contained in the 2025 tax law, the industry’s largest players spent nearly $20 million lobbying Congress in the six months preceding the bill’s passage.
The bill adds $30.8 billion per year in existing subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, restores federal royalty rates to their pre-IRA levels of 12.5-16.7%, and introduces a new carve out allowing oil and gas companies to deduct intangible drilling costs (IDCs)—which represent 60-80% of total well expenses—from income subject to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) (a 15% minimum tax on corporations earning more than $1 billion in book profits). The president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), said that Trump’s 2025 tax reform “includes almost all of our priorities.”
Allowing the wishes of Big Oil to take precedent over the well-being of people and the planet is dooming our shared ecosystem. Today, US taxpayers not only subsidize the fossil-fuel industry by nearly $35 billion every year, they also shoulder more than $100 billion annually in climate-related costs. A Brookings study estimates that climate change now costs the average US household $220 to $570 per year.
Our government continues to prop up oil and gas companies over people and the planet, and is fueling climate disaster at home and abroad.
Meanwhile, the companies driving these damages continue to profit. Chevron and ExxonMobil rank among the world’s five highest-emitting corporations, and a 2025 Nature study estimates that each is responsible for nearly $2 trillion in climate damages. The report notes that federal handouts to US fossil fuel companies operating overseas are especially damaging. They erode the US tax base, accelerate the climate crisis, undermine American energy independence, and fail to generate well-paying domestic jobs.
Working-class people are paying for the continued life support of an already dying industry that’s fueling the climate crisis. Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, noted during the report launch that without federal subsidies, 60% of US oil and gas production would be economically unviable. This sentiment has been well known by economic and political advisers across the political spectrum for decades. For instance, the report quotes Kevin Hassett, a current Trump top economic adviser, who said in a 2006 article that, “ending subsidies for fossil fuel production would level the playing field among energy sources and shift us from a policy of promoting fossil fuel supply to encouraging a reduction in fossil fuel consumption.” The entrenched government support incentivizing our current extractive economy starves the renewable energy sector of crucial federal investment necessary to curb polluting emissions. And eliminating these tax breaks would save US taxpayers more than $75 billion over the next decade.
The FACT Coalition recommends several essential reforms to counter traditional pro-oil tax policies. Eliminating domestic fossil fuel tax preferences and subsidies that fund oil and gas production abroad, ensuring that multinational corporations cannot shift production overseas to scapegoat domestic tax rates, and strengthening corporate tax transparency policy to include how much companies pay in taxes country-by-country.
“Tax fairness is climate justice,” Whitehouse concluded his remarks at the report launch.
Corporate and political greed deepens multigenerational economic vulnerability by eroding safety nets like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, while financially and politically killing the potential of a thriving renewable energy sector that could create stable, well-paying jobs to replace those declining under Big Oil. Our government continues to prop up oil and gas companies over people and the planet, and is fueling climate disaster at home and abroad. We must refuse to let our paychecks fund the industry that is destroying our homes, our lands, and our loved ones.
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