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At a Coal Summit in Warsaw today, the coal industry was told it had to leave most of the existing coal reserves in the ground

Irony: On the one hand you have the Polish government hosting the UN climate talks in Warsaw, where the talk is all about the emerging climate crisis being driven by fossil fuels. On the other hand, the Polish government is pressing ahead with building a $3.7 billion dirty coal plant which may never be profitable.

They say history never repeats itself, but a year ago at the United Nations climate talks in Doha, a typhoon hit the Philippines, killing hundreds of people and leaving an estimated quarter of million people homeless.

The International Energy Agency’s flagship annual report, the World Energy Outlook, is out today and it confirms what Keystone XL opponents have been saying all along. Building pipelines will increase tar sands production.

Yesterday was the eighteen anniversary of the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The charismatic, pipe-smoking activist was murdered by the brutal military junta for his campaign against Shell in the Niger Delta.

As First Nations continue to fight fracking in New Brunswick, the neighbouring provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador has halted the controversial drilling technique.

Today Bloomberg News revealed that the American Petroleum Institute (API) has developed a strategy to challenge America’s crude export regulations using international trade law. Deregulating U.S. crude oil exports would make fracking and the tar sands even more profitable than it already is and enable the industry to go into ever more marginal and extreme reserves to produce more of these extreme oils.

Slowly but surely the concept of “stranded assets” is taking hold and dirty coal looks likely to take the first big hit from a huge Norwegian pension fund.

Canada’s monitoring of the dirty tar sands is clearly failing the local communities, despite attempts by the region's politicians to spin it otherwise.