Diesel prices in the U.S. broke a new record high this past weekend, as the U.S. and Israel’s continued war on Iran has led to a rapid increase in worldwide fossil fuel costs over the past six months. On Friday, a gallon of diesel gas surpassed $5.85, the highest price ever recorded. The increased fuel costs will likely translate into higher prices for consumer goods, since many of the…
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Fears of a global energy shortage are rising amid new revelations about damage inflicted last week on a key oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. According to a Monday report in The Associated Press, Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, which is used to transport oil to the Red Sea, will be shut down for weeks after being hit last Thursday by a drone strike. Anonymous officials in the region told…
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A new analysis suggests that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gained as much as $2.9 million in assets from growth in stocks relating to the oil and gas industry over the course of the past two decades. The analysis from the nonprofit watchdog group Court Accountability found that Alito’s assets (not including his personal housing properties) expanded by between $3.4 million and as much as…
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For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is BP’s last unionized oil refinery in the United States. BP says it is pursuing “modernized job structures, training, and upskilling,” but workers and their union—United Steelworkers Local 7-1—say that the company has not bargained in good faith, that its contract proposals pose blatant existential threats to workers’ jobs, pay, and collective bargaining rights, and that the company is illegally trying to crush the union out of existence with the lockout. In this episode of Working People, we speak with three locked out workers at the BP oil refinery in Whiting: Eric Schultz, president of USW Local 7-1; Leno Miller, assistant griever for USW Local 7-1; Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7-1, and a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee.
Additional links/info:
USW Local 7-1 Official Lockout Update/Support Page
USW Local 7-1 Facebook page and Instagram
Sarah Lazare, Workday Magazine / The American Prospect, “Locked out refinery workers say BP is trying to ‘starve us,’ crush union”
Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / TRNN, “I survived the rig explosion that caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is what I saw”
Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These
This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 06, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.
For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.
Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.
“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.
Juliana Leon was one
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 16, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.
“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.
We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026
Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”
There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.
As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.
People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.
This is near Armstrong, Ontario. When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident?