Lawmakers will grill President Joe Biden’s Energy Secretary at a newly announced oversight hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to face lawmakers for questions amid elevated gas prices, a depleted strategic petroleum reserve, and ongoing criticism of Biden’s energy policies.
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The federal government funded a multilateral research project investigating how “populist” politicians allegedly sowed disinformation and eroded public trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) paid out a grant to support research investigating “how populist politicians distorted COVID-19 pandemic health communication to encourage polarized attitudes and distrust among citizens,” which made the public “more vulnerable to misinformation generally,” according to federal spending records. The project, titled “Pandemic Communication in Times of Populism,” received just over $160,000 from the NSF and is focused on how leaders in the United States, Brazil, Serbia and Poland approached the pandemic, stressing the importance of elevating public health experts over “populist” politicians, according to a presentation produced by the researchers.
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Stanford researchers recently claimed to have found a link between childhood respiratory illnesses and the use of gas stoves.
The study, which was reported last week across multiple national news outlets, posed an interesting contrast to a study in February funded by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found no such link and appeared to received no mention in any such outlet.
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A coalition of 16 states is suing the Biden administration over its January decision to pause approvals for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export hubs.
The lawsuit, which names President Joe Biden, the Department of Energy (DOE) and high-ranking DOE officials as defendants, seeks declaratory and injunctive relief from the pause, which the White House announced on Jan. 26 to give the DOE time to assess the climate impacts of new LNG export capacity. The states filed their challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, alleging that the federal government broke the law by broadly denying relevant permits.
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American billionaires bankrolled an activist campaign targeting liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals that influenced the White House’s decision to pause new and pending approvals for the projects, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The philanthropic organizations of the Rockefeller family and Democratic megadonor Michael Bloomberg cumulatively provided millions of dollars to activists who pressured Biden administration officials to crack down on LNG export hubs over the past several years, according to the WSJ. The activists ultimately got their way on Jan. 26, when the White House announced that the administration would pause new project approvals as the Department of Energy (DOE) widens the scope of its reviews to include climate impacts of LNG export terminals alongside considerations like national security and economic benefits.
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The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals pushed back on a Biden administration effort to tighten regulations on dishwashers and washing machines.
In 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office that led to the Department of Energy replacing a less strict Trump-era rule on those appliances with a more stringent rule for energy and water use.
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