Energy, Mining & Utilities

Energy poverty – the lack of access to basic electricity and fuel – became a fashionable topic after the term was coined in the 1990s. So, when Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a university in Madrid, Spain, launched a Department of Energy and Poverty in 2018, it was seen as a bold initiative.  Read More

A vast tree planting project in the Batéké plateau of the Republic of the Congo, near the border with Gabon, funded by fossil fuel company TotalEnergies to offset company greenhouse gas emissions, has displaced local communities from using their traditional lands. Read More

When Hurricane Fiona, a Category One storm, hit Puerto Rico last September, all three million people on the island were plunged into darkness. Members of the U.S. Congress questioned why LUMA Energy, the company that was awarded the power system management contract in 2020, was unable to cope. Read More

Permian Proud, a recently launched news website, may seem like any other local newspaper at first glance, providing stories on the people of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. A closer look, however, shows that the site is a propaganda machine intended to improve fossil fuel giant Chevron’s image. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the steel giant, has promised to invest $1 billion to upgrade its mining and metallurgical complex in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, where dozens of workers have died in industrial accidents in recent years and the pollution is so bad that winter snow sometimes turns black. Read More

Tamson Hatuikulipi, a key actor in the scandal over bribes paid by Samherji, Iceland’s largest fishing company, to obtain fishing quotas in Namibia, is appearing before the Windhoek High Court in the hope of getting out of jail. “I disagree that I was part of a corrupt scheme,” Tamson Hatuikulipi told the court last month. “All my books are up to date, and all relevant invoices are traceable.” Read More

Two of the biggest U.S. energy utilities - NextEra and Southern Company – have been using Matrix LLC, a secretive political consulting firm in Montgomery, Alabama, to fight regulators and progressive politicians in states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, according to a slew of leaked internal memos. Read More

Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner with Corporate Europe Observatory,* speaks by video with CorpWatch about the annual meeting of the countries that have ratified the United Nations Climate Change Convention that is currently taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. Read More

Roberto David Castillo, former CEO of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA) in the Honduras, has been convicted of the murder of Berta Cáceres, an activist who was fighting the Agua Zarca dam on the territory of the indigenous Lenca people, five years after she was killed in March 2016. Read More

A storm is brewing over the coal mines and power plants operated by Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE) in Poland – notably over the Turów complex in Lower Silesia, close to the border of the Czech republic and Germany, as well as over the Bełchatów complex in the Łódź region. Read More