SACRAMENTO, Calif., Feb. 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — As Californians struggle to rebuild communities torn apart by devastating wildfires, The Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California (CSHC) today announced that it is co-sponsoring the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act of 2025 (SB 684 and AB 1243) along with the Center for Biological Diversity and California Environmental Voters. Introduced by Senator Menjivar and Assemblymember Addis, this bill addresses the financial injustices imposed on taxpayers and working families from climate-related disasters by requiring fossil fuel polluters to pay for the destruction they cause.

California Climate

“For decades, Big Oil has reaped massive profits while driving the climate crisis and misleading the public. It’s time for polluters to pay for the destruction they’ve caused,” said Darryl Molina Sarmiento, Executive Director for Communities for a Better Environment and CSHC Steering Committee Member. “This legislation provides a critical pathway to hold these corporations accountable for the damage caused by their products.”

Fueled by climate change and driven by extreme drought and record-breaking heat waves, California’s wildfires are exacerbated by decades of environmental harm caused by large corporate polluters who knew exactly what their pollution would cause.

Despite heroic efforts by firefighters and first responders, Southern California wildfires burned more than 10,000 structures, including homes and businesses, and have driven 180,000 residents out of their homes. This devastation alone is estimated to cost Californians at least $250 billion.

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act identifies and assesses a fee on a small number of the world’s largest fossil fuel polluters, proportional to their fossil fuel emissions since 1990. This legislation addresses a growing crisis in California, where increasingly frequent and devastating wildfires, extreme weather, and other climate-related disasters have placed an enormous financial burden on families, businesses, and the state.

A recent study revealed that ExxonMobil and other oil giants were aware of the climate risks associated with fossil fuels as far back as the 1950s. Instead of acting responsibly, they funneled millions into disinformation campaigns, stalling action and ensuring continued reliance on their products. This deliberate deception has resulted in irreparable harm to California’s families, infrastructure, and natural environment.

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act will:

• Direct CalEPA to complete a climate cost study to quantify total damages to the state (through 2045), caused by past fossil fuel emissions.
• Direct CalEPA to identify responsible parties and assess compensatory fees on the largest fossil fuel polluters proportional to their fossil fuel emissions 1990 through 2024, to address damages quantified in the cost study.
• Fund California’s future. Fees collected will fund projects and programs to mitigate disaster related rate increases for Californians and remedy or prevent climate-related costs and harms. The bill prioritizes labor and job standards and dedicates at least 40% of the funds to benefit disadvantaged communities.

“As a Steering Committee member for the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California, I am proud to stand alongside a diverse coalition of community leaders and environmental justice organizations in support of the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act,” said Martha Dina Argüello, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and CSHC Steering Committee Member. “This bill represents a unified effort to ensure that Big Oil polluters, who have reaped billions in profits while knowingly sacrificing the health and well-being of frontline environmental justice communities and fueling the climate crisis, are held accountable for the damage they have done. Together, Physicians for Social Responsibility LA, Communities for a Better Environment, California Environmental Justice Alliance, Black Women for Wellness LA, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and Asian Pacific Environmental Network Action demand justice for California communities by making polluters pay.”

The state of New York also recently passed a Climate Superfund Bill that shows growing momentum nationwide to hold Big Oil accountable for decades of pollution and its devastating effects on a state and local level. These actions by states are critical as President-elect Donald Trump vows to unravel corporate accountability for the oil industry’s polluting ways.

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California has long been a leader in climate policy, and the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act builds on this legacy. From wildfire recovery to rebuilding efforts and mitigation, this bill provides a lifeline to families and communities bearing the brunt of climate change.

California’s largest greenhouse gas emitters should be the ones paying for firefighting, disaster recovery, and rebuilding efforts in communities most affected by climate-driven disasters and prevention efforts to limit future tragedies.

“California needs to seize this moment – it is time for our leaders to take bold action to protect our communities and hold those responsible for the climate crisis to account,” said Mabel Tsang, Political Director for California Environmental Justice Alliance and CSHC Steering Committee Member. “Making these polluters pay for their climate damage is the moral and economic responsibility of this generation.”

For more information about the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California and our efforts to hold polluters accountable, visit our website: CAvsBigOil.com/makepolluterspay.

SOURCE Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California

Erica Frantz, Michigan State University; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Yale University, and Joe Wright, Penn State

With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues.

Soon after coming to office for a second term, Trump aggressively sought to overhaul Washington and bring the federal government in line with his political agenda. He is spearheading an effort to purge the government’s ranks of people he perceived as his opponents and slash the size of long-standing bureaucratic agencies – in some instances dismantling them entirely.

At the helm of much of this is businessman Elon Musk, who is not only the world’s richest man but also the largest donor of the 2024 election and the owner of multiple businesses that benefit from lucrative government contracts.

Musk – and a small cohort of young engineers loyal to him but with little experience in government – descended on Washington, announced their control over multiple government agencies, fired career civil servants, and even strong-armed access to government payment systems at the Treasury Department, where the inspector general had just been sacked.

This unprecedented sequence of events in the U.S. has left many observers in a daze, struggling to make sense of the dramatic reshaping of the bureaucracy under way.

Yet, as researchers on authoritarian politics, we understand it is no surprise that a leader bent on expanding his own power, such as Trump, would see the bureaucracy as a key target. Here’s why.

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Dismantle democracy from within

A well-functioning bureaucracy is an organization of highly qualified civil servants who follow established rules to prevent abuses of power. Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior.

For this reason, aspiring strongmen are especially likely to go after them. Whether by shuffling the personnel of agencies, creating new ones, or limiting their capacity for oversight, a common tactic among power-hungry leaders is establishing control over the government’s bureaucracy. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, for example, Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdoğan fired or detained as many as 100,000 government workers.

In the short term, greater executive control over the bureaucracy gives these leaders a valuable tool for rewarding their elite supporters, especially as diminished government oversight increases opportunities for corruption and the dispersion of rewards to such insiders. Erdoğan, for example, by 2017 had worked to fill lower-level bureaucratic positions with loyalists of his party, the AKP, to ensure the party’s influence over corruption investigations.

In the long term, this hollowing out and reshaping of the bureaucracy is part of a broader plan in which aspiring autocrats usurp control over all institutions that can constrain them, such as the legislature and the courts. As we document in our book, “The Origins of Elected Strongmen,” attacks on the bureaucracy constitute a significant step in a larger process in which elected leaders dismantle democracy from within.

Take control of bureaucracy

The seemingly bizarre series of events that have transpired in Washington since Trump came to power are highly consistent with other countries where democracy has been dismantled.

Take Benin, for example. Its leader, Patrice Talon – one of the wealthiest people in Africa – came to power in democratic elections in 2016.

Soon after taking control, Talon created new agencies housed in the executive office and defunded existing ones, as a means of skirting bureaucratic constraints to his rule. The central affairs of the state were in the hands of an informal cabinet, initially led by Olivier Boko, a wealthy businessman considered to be Talon’s right-hand man despite not having any official position in government.

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Talon and his inner circle used this control over the state to enrich themselves, turning the country into what one journalist referred to as “a company in the hands of Talon and his very close clique.”

Consolidating control over the bureaucracy was just one step in a larger process of turning Benin into an autocratic state. Talon eventually amassed greater power and influence over key state institutions, such as the judiciary, and intervened in the electoral process to ensure his continued rule. By 2021, Benin could no longer be considered a democracy.

Purge civil service

A similar dynamic occurred in Hungary. After governing relatively conventionally for one term, Prime Minister Viktor Orban was defeated in elections in 2002. He blamed that outcome on unfriendly media and never accepted the results as legitimate.

Orban returned to office in 2010, bent on retribution.

Orban ordered mass firings of civil servants and put allies of his party, Fidesz, in crucial roles. He also used the dismantling of bureaucratic constraints to pad the pockets of the elites whose support he needed to maintain power.

As a Hungarian former politician wrote in 2016, “While the mafia state derails the bureaucratic administration, it organizes, monopolizes the channels of corruption and keeps them in order.”

Likewise in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez had his cronies draw up a blacklist of civil servants to be purged for signing a petition in support of a referendum to determine whether Chávez should be recalled from office in 2004; government employees who signed were subsequently fired from their jobs.

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More than a decade later, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s current leader, would conduct his own purge of civil servants after they signed a petition to hold another recall referendum. After multiple rounds of government and military purges, Maduro was able to overturn an election he lost and jail his opponents, knowing full well the judges and generals would follow his orders.

Foster culture of secrecy and suspicion

Orban and Chavez, like Talon, were democratically elected but went on to undermine democracy.

In environments where loyalty to the leader is prioritized over all else, and purges can happen at a moment’s notice, few people are willing to speak up about abuses of power or stand in the way of a power grab.

Fostering a culture of secrecy and mutual suspicion among government officials is intentional and serves the leader’s interests.

As a World Bank report highlighted in 1983, in President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, the bureaucracy had been “privatized by the ruling clique,” creating a climate in which “fear and repression … prevented any serious threat from dissenting groups.”

When leaders gain full power over the bureaucracy, they use it to reward and punish ordinary citizens as well. This was a tried-and-true tactic under the PRI’s rule in Mexico for much of the 20th century, where citizens who supported the PRI were more likely to receive government benefits.

In short, when aspiring autocrats come to power, career bureaucrats are a common target, often replaced by unqualified loyalists who would never be hired for the position based on merit. Recent events in the U.S., as unprecedented as they may seem, are precisely what we would expect with the return of Trump, a would-be autocrat, to power.

Erica Frantz, Associate Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy, Jackson School of Public Affairs, Yale University, and Joe Wright, Professor of Political Science, Penn State

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

LONDON /PRNewswire/ — Perenco is pleased to announce the start of the UK’s first Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) injection test for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The test involves CO₂ being injected into a depleted natural gas reservoir in the UK’s Southern North Sea and aims to deliver critical research and development data, essential for the successful utilisation of highly depleted reservoirs for the permanent geological storage of CO₂. 

Following the carbon storage licence award by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) to progress the Poseidon project over the Leman field in the UK Southern North Sea, Perenco UK and partners Carbon Catalyst Ltd and Harbour Energy (The Project Poseidon Joint Venture) are currently conducting the CO₂ injection test from the ERDA rig, newly equipped with the injection test facilities. Petrodec’s ERDA is the first rig in the UK to have achieved an approved safety case for CO₂ injection support.

The start of the test follows months of preparatory work, which included the successful conclusion of the workover of the well, a former gas producer, and entailed a new completion specifically designed for the CO₂ injection test.

The CO₂ injection test has the potential to unlock the Poseidon Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project, which has an initial injection capacity of 1.5Mtpa, rising to an ultimate capacity of 40Mtpa, commencing in 2029. The injection test follows the UK Government’s recent pledge of approximately £22 billion for CCS though the funding of two carbon capture sites. 

Commenting on the start of the injection test, Jo White, General Manager Perenco UK, commented: 

“As the first test of its kind in the UK, today’s news is a key moment, not only for Perenco and the wider Project Poseidon Joint Venture, but also for the UK’s decarbonisation ambitions. If successful, the project could be a significant store for CO₂ in the future, playing a key role in decarbonising industrial emitters and helping the UK achieve its net zero objectives. I would like to extend our thanks for the support to date from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) and congratulate our industry partners, including Petrodec, and the Perenco team in getting the project to this important stage.”

Louis Hannecart, CCS Manager, Perenco, commented:

“We are very pleased with the progress of the project to date. This is a groundbreaking test and the results, which are expected in the coming weeks, will enable us to further develop our approach to delivering the Poseidon CCS project. The energy industry is uniquely placed to use its geological and engineering expertise for this important initiative as we move down the path to Net Zero.”

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Short films

A series of short films following the build up to the injection test can be viewed at Perenco’s dedicated CCS website: www.perenco-ccs.com.

About Perenco UK:

Perenco UK is a leading provider of energy to the UK. It has been present in the UK Southern North Sea Basin (SNS) since 2003 and has operated Europe’s largest onshore oil field at Wytch Farm since 2011. In the North Sea, Perenco UK processes almost 15% of the production from UK gas fields. It owns and operates the largest infrastructure on the UKCS, comprising 45 offshore platforms, 14 subsea wells, and a network of more than 2,400 km of pipelines connected to its two onshore terminals at Bacton and Dimlington where the gas is received, treated, metered and then exported into the UK National Grid. Perenco UK produces approximately 40,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, of which approximately 10,000 barrels is from Wytch Farm, in which Perenco UK holds a 95% share. Perenco UK, as part of the UK based Perenco group, adheres to the highest operating standards and supports economic growth and social development wherever it works.

https://www.perenco.com