TV News LIES

Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.

Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.

He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.

“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.

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Exxon Mobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods urged the incoming Trump administration to avoid making turbulent climate policy swings — and he pushed the president-elect to reject carbon border taxes favored by some GOP lawmakers.

In an interview with POLITICO, Woods signaled that one of the most powerful players in the energy industry might serve as a moderating influence in Washington, even as Republicans seek to dismantle Biden-era climate policies. The future of the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean-energy programs is one of the most important questions hanging over the incoming administration.

Israel is preparing to put boots on the ground with an invasion of Lebanon, its army chief has said.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jets have carried out heavy bombardments of Hezbollah targets to pave the way for “your boots” to “enter enemy territory”, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi told troops on Wednesday.

It came as the Israeli army called up two brigades of reservists, around 4,000 soldiers, for operations on the northern border.

Gen Halevi, speaking during a visit to the border, said: “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”

“The sense is that your military boots, your manoeuvre boots, will enter enemy territory,” he said.

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The United Nations General Assembly adopted a global pact on Sunday that included explicit calls to phase out fossil fuels — which has been a stubborn sticking point in climate change talks for decades.

The call to move away from fossil fuels is outlined in the “Pact of the Future” — a broad plan for the U.N.'s 193 member nations to work together across a range of challenges, from escalating conflicts to rising poverty to climate change. Warning that inaction on various issues threatens to push people around the world “into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown,” the document also laid out a framework for digital cooperation and artificial intelligence governance.

In a press release, the U.N. said the agreement was years in the making. The goal was to address the problems of today, as well as anticipate the troubles of tomorrow. It was reached at the opening of the two-day “Summit of the Future" in advance of the 79th session of the U.N. General Assembly, which kicks off on Tuesday.

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Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers, which are responsible for powering the tech giant's cloud computing and artificial intelligence programs.

Constellation Energy, which bills itself as America's largest producer of "clean, carbon-free energy," announced Friday that it had signed its largest-ever power purchase agreement with Microsoft.

“Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” said Joe Dominguez, Constellation Energy's president and CEO.

The deal will create approximately 3,400 jobs and bring in more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes, according to the company. It also said the agreement will add $16 billion to Pennsylvania's GDP.

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The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

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