Frontier Group July Update

Big Oil ‘Playbook’ Exposed in Battle over Tar Sands

The Keystone XL pipeline isn’t the only front in the battle over shipments of tar sands oil.  Our July report, Inside the Big Oil Playbook, documented how the oil industry used massive spending and international experts in “astroturf” (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns to defeat a local citizen initiative to ban tar sands exports from the port of South Portland, Maine. The South Portland experience is instructive for citizens facing similar battles elsewhere and provides a ray of hope: this month, the South Portland City Council moved to ban tar sands exports, despite heavy oil industry opposition.

Wasting Our Waterways: Exposing America’s Worst Toxic Polluters 

Indiana, Texas and Louisiana lead the nation for industrial releases of toxic chemicals to waterways, according to Wasting Our Waterways, our June report with Environment America Research & Policy Center. The report quantifies the amount of toxic pollution released by industrial polluters into individual waterways across the country, and takes a close look at releases linked to human health effects such as cancer and reproductive and developmental harm.

Fighting Global Warming Pollution with Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles can play a powerful role in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases according to our new report, Driving Cleaner: More Electric Vehicles Mean Less Pollution.  The report estimates that an aggressive push to put electric vehicles on the road, coupled with a cleaner electricity grid, could reduce global warming pollution by 18 million metric tons a year by 2025 – as much as taking 3.8 million of today’s cars off the road.

In Other News

On the Frontier Group blog, Jeff Inglis reviewed two studies that identified the fastest and nicest ways of getting from Point A to Point B; Tony Dutzik challenged restrictive issue “silos” that impair thinking about solutions to societal problems; and Elizabeth Ridlington highlighted the mounting evidence of climate damage from natural gas … Tony Dutzik took part in the Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit in Washington, D.C.