welcome to oil
explore how the resource industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
NOVEMBER 2022
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those
woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and
enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau
*articles*
*OIL COMPANY PROFITS BOOM AS AMERICANS REEL FROM HIGH FUEL PRICES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US OIL FIRMS SET TO REAP UP TO $126 BILLION IN EXTRA PROFITS AMID WAR ON UKRAINE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY DOESN'T CREATE NEARLY AS MANY JOBS AS IT SAYS IT DOES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Louisiana energy firm to pay millions following oil spill that began 17 years ago
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EXCLUSIVE: OIL COMPANIES’ PROFITS SOARED TO $174BN THIS YEAR AS US GAS PRICES ROSE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*REVEALED: 60% OF AMERICANS SAY OIL FIRMS ARE TO BLAME FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HOW ECONOMISTS HELPED BIG OIL OBSTRUCT CLIMATE ACTION FOR DECADES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*In Anti-Reconciliation Blitz, Exxon Spent $275,000 on Facebook Ads in One Week
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HURRICANE IDA MAKES A MOCKERY OF BIG OIL’S PHILANTHROPY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*BIG OIL FOUGHT CYBERSECURITY REGULATIONS, MAKING PIPELINE ATTACKS EASIER
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*150 years of spills: Philadelphia refinery cleanup highlights toxic legacy of fossil fuels(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'INVISIBLE KILLER': FOSSIL FUELS CAUSED 8.7M DEATHS GLOBALLY IN 2018, RESEARCH FINDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACCUSED OF TRYING TO BULLY BANKS INTO FINANCING ARCTIC FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION(ARTICLE BELOW)
*BIG OIL'S ANSWER TO MELTING ARCTIC: COOLING THE GROUND SO IT CAN KEEP DRILLING
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EXXONMOBIL MISLED THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS. NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO SILENCE CRITICS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A NEWLY UNEARTHED JOURNAL FROM 1966 SHOWS THE COAL INDUSTRY, LIKE THE OIL INDUSTRY, WAS LONG AWARE OF THE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Oil and gas industry rewards US lawmakers who oppose environmental protections – study(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Oil and gas firms 'have had far worse climate impact than thought'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: big oil's profits since 1990 total nearly $2tn
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*10 US oil refineries exceeding limits for cancer-causing benzene, report finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Big Oil exploited a loophole in the law to bilk the United States out of billions
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The dark side of America's rise to oil superpower(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ON ITS HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY IN 1959, EDWARD TELLER WARNED THE OIL INDUSTRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING(article below)
oil funnies(at the end)
Oil company profits boom as Americans reel from high fuel prices
ExxonMobil posts second-quarter profits of $17.85bn – four times last year’s figure – with Chevron making $11.62bn
Dominic Rushe in New York - the guardian
Fri 29 Jul 2022 11.44 EDT
The US’s biggest oil companies pumped out record profits over the last few months as Americans struggled to pay for gasoline, food and other basic necessities.
On Friday, ExxonMobil reported an unprecedented $17.85bn (£14.77bn) profit for the second quarter, nearly four times as much as the same period a year ago, and Chevron made a record $11.62bn (£9.61bn). The sky-high profits come one day after the UK’s Shell shattered its own profit record.
Soaring energy prices have rattled consumers and become a political flashpoint. “We’re going to make sure everybody knows Exxon’s profits,” Joe Biden said in June. “Exxon made more money than God this year.”
The record profits came after similarly outsized gains in the first quarter when the largest oil companies made close to $100bn in profits.
High energy prices are one of the major factors driving inflation to a four-decade high in the US. Gas prices have fallen slightly in recent weeks but are now averaging $4.25 a gallon across the US, more than $1 a gallon higher than a year ago.
Consumers are facing high fuel prices not just at the pump. Soaring energy prices are being baked into delivery costs, which is driving up the cost of everything from apples to toilet paper.
One reason gasoline prices have been so high is that fewer refineries are operating in the US than before the pandemic, so there is a limit to how much gasoline can be produced.
Biden has called for the companies to increase production and refining capacities in an attempt to bring down prices. On Friday Exxon said it was expanding refinery and production in Texas and New Mexico.
Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, increased its oil and gas production as crude prices hovered above $100 a barrel. Revenue at Exxon soared to $115.68bn, up from $67.74bn during the same quarter last year.
Natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices are also elevated due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions against Russia, a major supplier of natural gas. Many European nations have been scrambling for alternatives to Russian natural gas, and have been competing for boatloads of LNG, driving up prices for natural gas globally and in the US.
In addition to oil company executives, shareholders also reaped the benefits of high energy prices during the quarter. Since the start of 2022, Exxon and Chevron shares have risen close to 46% and 26%, respectively.
Exxon’s CEO, Darren Woods, attributed the company’s success to its investments in oil and gas fields in Guyana and the Permian Basin, as well as its investments in liquefied natural gas, which has been in high demand globally.
“We’re also helping meet increased demand by expanding our refining capacity by about 250,000 barrels per day in the first quarter of 2023 – representing the industry’s largest single capacity addition in the US since 2012,” Woods said in a prepared statement.
Chevron’s chief executive officer, Mike Wirth, sought to tamp down criticism that the company was profiteering at the expense of consumers.
“We more than doubled investment compared to last year to grow both traditional and new energy business lines,” Wirth said in the statement. “Chevron is increasing energy supplies to help meet the challenges facing global markets,” he said.
Exxon and Chevron’s bumper profits come a day after Shell posted record earnings of $11.4bn (nearly £10bn) for the three-month period from April to June.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of Britain’s Trades Union Congress, called the “eye-watering profits” “an insult to the millions of working people struggling to get by because of soaring energy bills.
“Working people are facing the longest and harshest wage squeeze in modern history. It’s time working people got their fair share of the wealth they create, starting with real action to bring bills down,” said O’Grady.
On Friday, ExxonMobil reported an unprecedented $17.85bn (£14.77bn) profit for the second quarter, nearly four times as much as the same period a year ago, and Chevron made a record $11.62bn (£9.61bn). The sky-high profits come one day after the UK’s Shell shattered its own profit record.
Soaring energy prices have rattled consumers and become a political flashpoint. “We’re going to make sure everybody knows Exxon’s profits,” Joe Biden said in June. “Exxon made more money than God this year.”
The record profits came after similarly outsized gains in the first quarter when the largest oil companies made close to $100bn in profits.
High energy prices are one of the major factors driving inflation to a four-decade high in the US. Gas prices have fallen slightly in recent weeks but are now averaging $4.25 a gallon across the US, more than $1 a gallon higher than a year ago.
Consumers are facing high fuel prices not just at the pump. Soaring energy prices are being baked into delivery costs, which is driving up the cost of everything from apples to toilet paper.
One reason gasoline prices have been so high is that fewer refineries are operating in the US than before the pandemic, so there is a limit to how much gasoline can be produced.
Biden has called for the companies to increase production and refining capacities in an attempt to bring down prices. On Friday Exxon said it was expanding refinery and production in Texas and New Mexico.
Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, increased its oil and gas production as crude prices hovered above $100 a barrel. Revenue at Exxon soared to $115.68bn, up from $67.74bn during the same quarter last year.
Natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices are also elevated due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions against Russia, a major supplier of natural gas. Many European nations have been scrambling for alternatives to Russian natural gas, and have been competing for boatloads of LNG, driving up prices for natural gas globally and in the US.
In addition to oil company executives, shareholders also reaped the benefits of high energy prices during the quarter. Since the start of 2022, Exxon and Chevron shares have risen close to 46% and 26%, respectively.
Exxon’s CEO, Darren Woods, attributed the company’s success to its investments in oil and gas fields in Guyana and the Permian Basin, as well as its investments in liquefied natural gas, which has been in high demand globally.
“We’re also helping meet increased demand by expanding our refining capacity by about 250,000 barrels per day in the first quarter of 2023 – representing the industry’s largest single capacity addition in the US since 2012,” Woods said in a prepared statement.
Chevron’s chief executive officer, Mike Wirth, sought to tamp down criticism that the company was profiteering at the expense of consumers.
“We more than doubled investment compared to last year to grow both traditional and new energy business lines,” Wirth said in the statement. “Chevron is increasing energy supplies to help meet the challenges facing global markets,” he said.
Exxon and Chevron’s bumper profits come a day after Shell posted record earnings of $11.4bn (nearly £10bn) for the three-month period from April to June.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of Britain’s Trades Union Congress, called the “eye-watering profits” “an insult to the millions of working people struggling to get by because of soaring energy bills.
“Working people are facing the longest and harshest wage squeeze in modern history. It’s time working people got their fair share of the wealth they create, starting with real action to bring bills down,” said O’Grady.
US Oil Firms Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine
BY Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
PUBLISHED March 29, 2022
A new analysis released Tuesday estimates that U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as they exploit Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine to raise prices at the pump.
Conducted by Oil Change International, Greenpeace USA, and Global Witness, the analysis uses a database that tracks the fossil fuel industry’s production economics to assess how much money the industry is set to make as a result of high global oil prices.
“Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone,” the groups’ report states.
The higher-end profit estimate is dependent on oil prices spiking to $120 per barrel this summer and remaining elevated as the West moves to restrict Russian oil imports — a major opportunity for U.S. fossil fuel companies, particularly as the Biden administration looks to ramp up gas exports to Europe.
If oil prices average $88 per barrel, the new analysis finds, the U.S. oil and gas industry would reap $37 billion in additional profits in 2022.
The report notes that the top beneficiaries of the windfall would be industry giants ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil.
“It is unconscionable that U.S. upstream companies like Chevron, Occidental, and ExxonMobil, who receive federal tax subsidies totaling millions of dollars every year, are now set to make billions of dollars more from these high wartime gas prices,” Tim Donaghy, the research manager at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement Tuesday.
“American consumers don’t get a break from high prices just because we drill more here at home,” added Donaghy. “Instead, we get more air and water pollution and higher public health risks. The only way to achieve true energy independence is to cut our ties with fossil fuels entirely.”
Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, argued that the new findings bolster the case for a windfall profits tax of the kind congressional Democrats introduced earlier this month.
“From lobbying against climate solutions to actively spreading misinformation, the oil and gas industry has spent decades doing everything in its power to deepen our dependence on dirty fossil fuels,” said Rees. “Now, Big Oil and Gas executives are rolling in cash while working families suffer.”
“It’s high time for Congress to pass a windfall profits tax and prevent the fossil fuel industry from harnessing a war to make billions,” Rees continued. “This can be a clear step toward a fossil-free future if paired with real investments in a renewable energy future.”
The Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in the Senate, would hit large fossil fuel companies with a quarterly tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current per-barrel price of oil and the average pre-pandemic price between 2015 and 2019.
“At $120 per barrel of oil, the levy would raise approximately $45 billion per year,” according to a summary released by Khanna’s office. The bill would use the new revenue to pay out a quarterly rebate to consumers.
A recent survey by the League of Conservation Voters found that 80% of U.S. voters — including 73% of Republicans — would support “placing a windfall profits tax on the extra profits oil companies are making from the higher gasoline prices they are charging because of the Russia-Ukraine situation.”
Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Stop the Oil Profiteering campaign at Fossil Free Media, said Tuesday that “while Americans are struggling to keep up with high prices at the pump and on their utility bills, Big Oil is profiting off of the war in Ukraine, driving up gas prices and raking in record profits.”
“Fortunately, there’s a simple way to stop this profiteering: put a tax on the excess profits oil companies are making because of this crisis and use the money to send a check to the people who need it,” said DiPaola. “Making Big Oil pay for their greedy war profiteering is a win-win for our families and the climate.”
Conducted by Oil Change International, Greenpeace USA, and Global Witness, the analysis uses a database that tracks the fossil fuel industry’s production economics to assess how much money the industry is set to make as a result of high global oil prices.
“Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone,” the groups’ report states.
The higher-end profit estimate is dependent on oil prices spiking to $120 per barrel this summer and remaining elevated as the West moves to restrict Russian oil imports — a major opportunity for U.S. fossil fuel companies, particularly as the Biden administration looks to ramp up gas exports to Europe.
If oil prices average $88 per barrel, the new analysis finds, the U.S. oil and gas industry would reap $37 billion in additional profits in 2022.
The report notes that the top beneficiaries of the windfall would be industry giants ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil.
“It is unconscionable that U.S. upstream companies like Chevron, Occidental, and ExxonMobil, who receive federal tax subsidies totaling millions of dollars every year, are now set to make billions of dollars more from these high wartime gas prices,” Tim Donaghy, the research manager at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement Tuesday.
“American consumers don’t get a break from high prices just because we drill more here at home,” added Donaghy. “Instead, we get more air and water pollution and higher public health risks. The only way to achieve true energy independence is to cut our ties with fossil fuels entirely.”
Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, argued that the new findings bolster the case for a windfall profits tax of the kind congressional Democrats introduced earlier this month.
“From lobbying against climate solutions to actively spreading misinformation, the oil and gas industry has spent decades doing everything in its power to deepen our dependence on dirty fossil fuels,” said Rees. “Now, Big Oil and Gas executives are rolling in cash while working families suffer.”
“It’s high time for Congress to pass a windfall profits tax and prevent the fossil fuel industry from harnessing a war to make billions,” Rees continued. “This can be a clear step toward a fossil-free future if paired with real investments in a renewable energy future.”
The Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in the Senate, would hit large fossil fuel companies with a quarterly tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current per-barrel price of oil and the average pre-pandemic price between 2015 and 2019.
“At $120 per barrel of oil, the levy would raise approximately $45 billion per year,” according to a summary released by Khanna’s office. The bill would use the new revenue to pay out a quarterly rebate to consumers.
A recent survey by the League of Conservation Voters found that 80% of U.S. voters — including 73% of Republicans — would support “placing a windfall profits tax on the extra profits oil companies are making from the higher gasoline prices they are charging because of the Russia-Ukraine situation.”
Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Stop the Oil Profiteering campaign at Fossil Free Media, said Tuesday that “while Americans are struggling to keep up with high prices at the pump and on their utility bills, Big Oil is profiting off of the war in Ukraine, driving up gas prices and raking in record profits.”
“Fortunately, there’s a simple way to stop this profiteering: put a tax on the excess profits oil companies are making because of this crisis and use the money to send a check to the people who need it,” said DiPaola. “Making Big Oil pay for their greedy war profiteering is a win-win for our families and the climate.”
The Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Create Nearly as Many Jobs as it Says It Does
The industry is wildly fudging the numbers to make itself look like a major job creator. We shouldn’t be fooled.
WENONAH HAUTER - in these times
FEBRUARY 14, 2022
For years now, any discussion about climate action or the need to move off fossil fuels has run headlong into a familiar quandary: The industries fueling the climate crisis create good jobs, often in areas of the country where finding work that can support a family is incredibly difficult.
This leaves activists gesturing towards well-intentioned goals like a “just transition,” a promise that likely rings hollow for workers and many labor unions because it’s hard to see where this has actually happened — even though, by every measure, we need to create some real policies that turn this vision into reality. While there are encouraging examples of labor unions throwing their support behind robust climate plans, it has proven difficult for the climate movement to find its way out of the jobs versus environment framing.
But that is especially true when we refuse to question the original premise. The truth is that the fossil fuel industry wildly inflates its employment record, and the recent data show they are producing more fuel with fewer workers. Instead of avoiding this reality, perhaps it is time to tackle it head on. Dirty energy corporations are not creating jobs as much as they are cutting them these days, and that provides an opening to envision the kinds of employment — in areas like orphaned well clean up and energy efficiency — that will provide employment for the thousands of workers the industry is no longer employing.
Some of the most common jobs estimates are produced by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the powerful oil and gas trade association. Over the years, API has released reports claiming that the domestic fracking industry creates somewhere between 2.5 million to 11 million jobs, both directly and indirectly. These numbers — or versions of them — are floated in political debates and in the media, but they are significantly out of step with other estimates, including the federal government’s labor reports. Food & Water Watch, an organization I founded, created a more accurate model that relies on direct jobs and relevant support activities, including pipeline construction and product transportation. The total comes to just over 500,000 in 2020, or about 0.4 percent of all jobs in the country.
How to explain the massive gap between industry propaganda and reality? The API figures include a range of employment categories; in addition to direct industry employment, they add indirect jobs (those within a supply chain) and induced jobs (those that are supposedly ‘supported’ by direct and indirect jobs). These categories make up the vast majority of their total. Convenience store workers, for example — working where gas happens to be sold — make up almost 35 percent of the industry’s supposed employment record.
These wildly inaccurate figures can form the basis for tired debates pitting “jobs versus the environment,” which remain politically potent. In 2020, when all eyes were fixed on Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, Donald Trump made campaign stops in the state declaring that Joe Biden would kill hundreds of thousands of fracking jobs. (Biden, of course, countered by saying that he had no such intentions to rein in drilling.) That framing of the issue, fueled by countless other media reports, reinforces the idea that gas drilling is an especially important jobs bonanza in Pennsylvania, and that Democrats would be wise to continue to support fracking — never mind the cost to clean air, water, climate and human health. The same dynamic is already one of the themes in the state’s Senate Democratic primary race.
But despite the fossil fuel propaganda, the oil and gas industries employ relatively few Pennsylvanians — fewer than 25,000 workers in 2020. This was a sharp drop in the workforce, and it’s not all linked to Covid-19. These jobs have been on the decline since the state’s “boom” years. The story is the same nationally: Since 2014, oil and gas employment has fallen 33 percent, while production has risen 32 percent. While this might be Wall Street’s ideal mode of capitalism — huge profits and lower labor costs — it’s obviously not one that serves the interests of workers.
The trends are clear: After the drilling boom encouraged by the Obama administration, fracking jobs are declining. The political debate rarely acknowledges this reality, and our failure to challenge the industry’s spin is dangerous; it reinforces the notion that climate activists are eager to sacrifice high – paying jobs for the broader goal of decarbonization. It’s hard to imagine how to ‘win’ that argument unless we are willing to confront it head on: Fossil fuel companies are shedding workers, pay is stagnant, and the drilling companies are pulling more oil and gas out of the ground while registering astonishing profits. This is not a record that the industry can plausibly defend as being good for workers, frontline communities or the planet.
This leaves activists gesturing towards well-intentioned goals like a “just transition,” a promise that likely rings hollow for workers and many labor unions because it’s hard to see where this has actually happened — even though, by every measure, we need to create some real policies that turn this vision into reality. While there are encouraging examples of labor unions throwing their support behind robust climate plans, it has proven difficult for the climate movement to find its way out of the jobs versus environment framing.
But that is especially true when we refuse to question the original premise. The truth is that the fossil fuel industry wildly inflates its employment record, and the recent data show they are producing more fuel with fewer workers. Instead of avoiding this reality, perhaps it is time to tackle it head on. Dirty energy corporations are not creating jobs as much as they are cutting them these days, and that provides an opening to envision the kinds of employment — in areas like orphaned well clean up and energy efficiency — that will provide employment for the thousands of workers the industry is no longer employing.
Some of the most common jobs estimates are produced by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the powerful oil and gas trade association. Over the years, API has released reports claiming that the domestic fracking industry creates somewhere between 2.5 million to 11 million jobs, both directly and indirectly. These numbers — or versions of them — are floated in political debates and in the media, but they are significantly out of step with other estimates, including the federal government’s labor reports. Food & Water Watch, an organization I founded, created a more accurate model that relies on direct jobs and relevant support activities, including pipeline construction and product transportation. The total comes to just over 500,000 in 2020, or about 0.4 percent of all jobs in the country.
How to explain the massive gap between industry propaganda and reality? The API figures include a range of employment categories; in addition to direct industry employment, they add indirect jobs (those within a supply chain) and induced jobs (those that are supposedly ‘supported’ by direct and indirect jobs). These categories make up the vast majority of their total. Convenience store workers, for example — working where gas happens to be sold — make up almost 35 percent of the industry’s supposed employment record.
These wildly inaccurate figures can form the basis for tired debates pitting “jobs versus the environment,” which remain politically potent. In 2020, when all eyes were fixed on Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, Donald Trump made campaign stops in the state declaring that Joe Biden would kill hundreds of thousands of fracking jobs. (Biden, of course, countered by saying that he had no such intentions to rein in drilling.) That framing of the issue, fueled by countless other media reports, reinforces the idea that gas drilling is an especially important jobs bonanza in Pennsylvania, and that Democrats would be wise to continue to support fracking — never mind the cost to clean air, water, climate and human health. The same dynamic is already one of the themes in the state’s Senate Democratic primary race.
But despite the fossil fuel propaganda, the oil and gas industries employ relatively few Pennsylvanians — fewer than 25,000 workers in 2020. This was a sharp drop in the workforce, and it’s not all linked to Covid-19. These jobs have been on the decline since the state’s “boom” years. The story is the same nationally: Since 2014, oil and gas employment has fallen 33 percent, while production has risen 32 percent. While this might be Wall Street’s ideal mode of capitalism — huge profits and lower labor costs — it’s obviously not one that serves the interests of workers.
The trends are clear: After the drilling boom encouraged by the Obama administration, fracking jobs are declining. The political debate rarely acknowledges this reality, and our failure to challenge the industry’s spin is dangerous; it reinforces the notion that climate activists are eager to sacrifice high – paying jobs for the broader goal of decarbonization. It’s hard to imagine how to ‘win’ that argument unless we are willing to confront it head on: Fossil fuel companies are shedding workers, pay is stagnant, and the drilling companies are pulling more oil and gas out of the ground while registering astonishing profits. This is not a record that the industry can plausibly defend as being good for workers, frontline communities or the planet.
Louisiana energy firm to pay millions following oil spill that began 17 years ago
Taylor Energy to pay more than $43m in clean-up costs, penalties and damage, and transfer $432m clean-up fund
Edward Helmore in New York
the guardian
Fri 24 Dec 2021 09.12 EST
America’s longest running oil spill dispute is close to a resolution after a Louisiana-based energy firm has agreed to a proposed multi-million dollar settlement.
Taylor Energy agreed to pay more than $43m in clean-up costs, civil penalties and natural resource damage, and transfer a $432m clean-up trust fund to the Department of Interior, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Department of Justice.
The proposed agreement stems from more than a dozen Taylor Energy-owned wells in the Mississippi Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico that began leaking after a production platform was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The pipeline has lost hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil, and continues to leak.
“Offshore operators cannot allow oil to spill into our nation’s waters,” said Todd Kim, assistant attorney general for the DoJ’senvironment and natural resources division, adding: “If an oil spill occurs, the responsible party must cooperate with the government to timely address the problem and pay for the cleanup.”
As part of the settlement, Taylor Energy will withdraw three existing lawsuits it filed against the government and will not be required to admit “any liability to the United States or the State arising out of the MC-20 Incident.” The agreement will now put before a court’s review and approval.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s national ocean service, said in a statement that the “settlement represents an important down payment” to the costs of the environmental clean-up.
“Millions of Americans along the Gulf Coast depend on healthy coastal ecosystems. Noaa and our co-trustees look forward to working in partnership with the National Pollution Funds Center to ensure the region and the ecosystem can recover from this ongoing tragedy,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, national ocean service director
The spill began 17 years ago when a cluster of pipes connecting sixteen wells off the Louisiana coast were damaged by a subsea mudslide caused by the toppling of a Taylor production platform by hurricane winds.
The company plugged nine wells but has said it cannot plug the rest. The Coast Guard said a system had captured and removed more than 800,000 gallons of oil since April 2019.
Taylor Energy sold its oil and gas assets in 2008, according to its website. The trust fund will be created to plug the wells, as well as to permanently decommission the platform and clean contaminated soil.
The agreement, if approved, will also settle a series of legal disputes over the costs of the clean-up.
“Despite being a catalyst for beneficial environmental technological innovation, the damage to our ecosystem caused by this 17-year-old oil spill is unacceptable,” said Duane Evans, US attorney for the eastern district of Louisiana.
Taylor Energy agreed to pay more than $43m in clean-up costs, civil penalties and natural resource damage, and transfer a $432m clean-up trust fund to the Department of Interior, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Department of Justice.
The proposed agreement stems from more than a dozen Taylor Energy-owned wells in the Mississippi Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico that began leaking after a production platform was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The pipeline has lost hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil, and continues to leak.
“Offshore operators cannot allow oil to spill into our nation’s waters,” said Todd Kim, assistant attorney general for the DoJ’senvironment and natural resources division, adding: “If an oil spill occurs, the responsible party must cooperate with the government to timely address the problem and pay for the cleanup.”
As part of the settlement, Taylor Energy will withdraw three existing lawsuits it filed against the government and will not be required to admit “any liability to the United States or the State arising out of the MC-20 Incident.” The agreement will now put before a court’s review and approval.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s national ocean service, said in a statement that the “settlement represents an important down payment” to the costs of the environmental clean-up.
“Millions of Americans along the Gulf Coast depend on healthy coastal ecosystems. Noaa and our co-trustees look forward to working in partnership with the National Pollution Funds Center to ensure the region and the ecosystem can recover from this ongoing tragedy,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, national ocean service director
The spill began 17 years ago when a cluster of pipes connecting sixteen wells off the Louisiana coast were damaged by a subsea mudslide caused by the toppling of a Taylor production platform by hurricane winds.
The company plugged nine wells but has said it cannot plug the rest. The Coast Guard said a system had captured and removed more than 800,000 gallons of oil since April 2019.
Taylor Energy sold its oil and gas assets in 2008, according to its website. The trust fund will be created to plug the wells, as well as to permanently decommission the platform and clean contaminated soil.
The agreement, if approved, will also settle a series of legal disputes over the costs of the clean-up.
“Despite being a catalyst for beneficial environmental technological innovation, the damage to our ecosystem caused by this 17-year-old oil spill is unacceptable,” said Duane Evans, US attorney for the eastern district of Louisiana.
the stupid people blame democrats, right!!!
Oil and gas companies
Exclusive: oil companies’ profits soared to $174bn this year as US gas prices rose
Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP among group of 24 who resisted calls to increase production but doled out shareholder dividends
Oliver Milman
the guardian
Mon 6 Dec 2021 05.00 EST
The largest oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US, according to a new report.
The bumper profit totals, provided exclusively to the Guardian, show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income. From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.
Exxon alone posted a net income of $6.75bn in the third quarter, its highest profit since 2017, and has seen its revenue jump by 60% on the same period last year. The company credited the rising cost of oil for bolstering these profits, as did BP, which made $3.3bn in third-quarter profit. “Rising commodity prices certainly helped,” Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, told investors at the latest earnings report.
Gasoline prices have hit a seven-year high in the US due to the rising cost of oil, with Americans now paying about $3.40 for a gallon of fuel compared with around $2.10 a year ago.
The Biden administration has warned the price hikes are hurting low-income people, even as it attempts to implement a climate agenda that would see America move away from fossil fuels, and has released 50m barrels of oil from the national strategic reserve to help dampen costs.
But oil and gas companies have shown little willingness so far to ramp up production to help reduce costs and the new report, by the government watchdog group Accountable.US, accuses them of “taking advantage of bloated prices, fleecing American families along the way” amid ongoing fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Americans looking for someone to blame for the pain they experience at the pump need look no further than the wealthy oil and gas company executives who choose to line their own pockets rather than lower gas prices with the billions of dollars in profit big oil rakes in month after month,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US.
The analysis of major oil companies’ financials shows that 11 of the group gave payouts to shareholders worth more than $36.5bn collectively this year, while a dozen bought back $8bn-worth of stock. This apparent focus, rather than on further drilling, has caused some frustration within the federal government, with Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, stating that “the oil and gas companies are not flipping the switch as quickly as the demand requires.”
A glut of new oil drilling has made the US awash with oil in recent years, turning the country into a top-level exporter as well as domestic supplier, but this has kept prices low to the displeasure of investors. “A lot of this has been driven by investor sentiment,” said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, of the current reluctance to expand production. “They don’t want them to spoil the party.”
The situation has left the White House in an awkward position with its commitments to rapidly reduce planet-heating emissions, with environmentalists furious at administration attempts to expand drilling and fossil fuel companies also unhappy over some of its earlier climate-related moves, such as shutting down the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
The oil and gas industry has fought Joe Biden’s attempts to pause new drilling permits on federal land, despite its unwillingness to expand operations in order to reap the returns of costlier oil and the fact the industry currently sits on 14m acres of already leased land that isn’t being used, an area about double the size of Massachusetts.
“It’s not the government that is banning them from drilling more,” Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told CNN. “It’s pressure from their shareholders.”
Aside from its role in the current high gasoline prices, the oil and gas industry is a leading driver of the climate crisis, the reality of which it sought to conceal from the public for decades, and is a key instigator of the air pollution that kills nearly 9 million a year, a death toll three times that of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
The American Petroleum Institute, a leading industry lobby group, pointed to a blog that blamed the Biden administration for policies that “significantly weaken the incentives to invest in America’s energy future” but did not answer questions on production rates of oil companies.
The bumper profit totals, provided exclusively to the Guardian, show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income. From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.
Exxon alone posted a net income of $6.75bn in the third quarter, its highest profit since 2017, and has seen its revenue jump by 60% on the same period last year. The company credited the rising cost of oil for bolstering these profits, as did BP, which made $3.3bn in third-quarter profit. “Rising commodity prices certainly helped,” Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, told investors at the latest earnings report.
Gasoline prices have hit a seven-year high in the US due to the rising cost of oil, with Americans now paying about $3.40 for a gallon of fuel compared with around $2.10 a year ago.
The Biden administration has warned the price hikes are hurting low-income people, even as it attempts to implement a climate agenda that would see America move away from fossil fuels, and has released 50m barrels of oil from the national strategic reserve to help dampen costs.
But oil and gas companies have shown little willingness so far to ramp up production to help reduce costs and the new report, by the government watchdog group Accountable.US, accuses them of “taking advantage of bloated prices, fleecing American families along the way” amid ongoing fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Americans looking for someone to blame for the pain they experience at the pump need look no further than the wealthy oil and gas company executives who choose to line their own pockets rather than lower gas prices with the billions of dollars in profit big oil rakes in month after month,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US.
The analysis of major oil companies’ financials shows that 11 of the group gave payouts to shareholders worth more than $36.5bn collectively this year, while a dozen bought back $8bn-worth of stock. This apparent focus, rather than on further drilling, has caused some frustration within the federal government, with Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, stating that “the oil and gas companies are not flipping the switch as quickly as the demand requires.”
A glut of new oil drilling has made the US awash with oil in recent years, turning the country into a top-level exporter as well as domestic supplier, but this has kept prices low to the displeasure of investors. “A lot of this has been driven by investor sentiment,” said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, of the current reluctance to expand production. “They don’t want them to spoil the party.”
The situation has left the White House in an awkward position with its commitments to rapidly reduce planet-heating emissions, with environmentalists furious at administration attempts to expand drilling and fossil fuel companies also unhappy over some of its earlier climate-related moves, such as shutting down the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
The oil and gas industry has fought Joe Biden’s attempts to pause new drilling permits on federal land, despite its unwillingness to expand operations in order to reap the returns of costlier oil and the fact the industry currently sits on 14m acres of already leased land that isn’t being used, an area about double the size of Massachusetts.
“It’s not the government that is banning them from drilling more,” Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told CNN. “It’s pressure from their shareholders.”
Aside from its role in the current high gasoline prices, the oil and gas industry is a leading driver of the climate crisis, the reality of which it sought to conceal from the public for decades, and is a key instigator of the air pollution that kills nearly 9 million a year, a death toll three times that of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
The American Petroleum Institute, a leading industry lobby group, pointed to a blog that blamed the Biden administration for policies that “significantly weaken the incentives to invest in America’s energy future” but did not answer questions on production rates of oil companies.
Climate crimes
Environment
Revealed: 60% of Americans say oil firms are to blame for the climate crisis
While a strong majority of Americans believe global heating is happening, a new Guardian poll shows sharp partisan divides
Chris McGreal -the guardian
Tue 26 Oct 2021 08.00 EDT
A majority of Americans want to see oil and gas companies held to account for lying about the climate crisis and contributing to global heating, according to a new YouGov poll commissioned by the Guardian, Vice News, and Covering Climate Now.
Released today, the poll reveals that the US remains sharply divided over the causes of the deepening environmental emergency following the fossil fuel industry’s long campaign to downplay and deny climate science. That division falls largely along political lines, with Democrats and Republicans at odds over the source of climate disinformation.
The poll surveyed 1,000 American adults and found that 70% said global warming was happening. More than 60% said oil and gas companies were “completely or mostly responsible”.
But while Democrats overwhelmingly (89%) accept the scientific basis of the climate emergency, opinion is split among Republicans. Just 42% of Republicans agreed that global warming is a reality while 36% denied it. The remainder said they didn’t know.
The findings offer insight into the growing public pressure on the oil and gas industry as it faces dozens of lawsuits by states and municipalities. The plaintiffs demand that companies pay for the steep financial costs associated with the environmental devastation caused by burning fossil fuels.
A majority of Americans support the central aims of the lawsuits after being told that fossil fuel companies knew about their products’ impact on climate change. A little more than half wanted oil and gas companies to pay for damage caused by extreme weather events driven by the climate crisis, and 60% said the industry should pay to improve infrastructure to withstand the fires and floods caused by global heating.
---
Still, nearly two-thirds of Republicans said oil and gas firms bore some degree of responsibility for the changing climate even though fewer of them acknowledged the existence of global heating. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans said the industry bore the greatest weight of responsibility while 35% said it was somewhat responsible.
A little more than 80% of Democrats said oil and gas companies were completely or mostly responsible for causing climate change. The young and people of colour leaned more heavily than the nation as a whole toward blaming the industry.
But political division emerged again when people were asked about the specifics of the fossil fuel industry’s misdeeds.
Democrats said oil and gas companies lied about the existence of climate change, and their part in creating it, at more than three times the rate of Republicans. Just under half of Republicans said oil and gas companies had done nothing wrong.
About 45% of Americans said the companies lied about contributing to climate change. A slightly smaller percentage said the industry had deceived the public about the existence of climate change and ignored their own scientists’ findings.
One of the starkest divisions was over scientific opinion on the climate crisis.
While 68% of Democrats said that most scientists think global warming is human-caused, just 22% of Republicans agreed. Half of Republicans said there is “a lot of disagreement” on the issue among scientists, a position held by less than 15% of Democrats.
In fact, a recent survey of scientists showed that 99.9% agree that the climate emergency is the result of humans’ actions.
Scepticism and denial about climate science are higher in the US than in many other countries. Americans deny the link between humans and global heating at three times the rate of the British and Japanese.
That is in part the result of decades of denial and cover-up by the oil industry, including the suppression of the evidence from its own scientists about the damage being done by burning fossil fuels.
The divisions also reflect fault lines on other issues, such as Covid vaccinations, with substantially fewer Republicans than Democrats being inoculated.
Experience of the climate crisis varied. Nearly half said it was harming their local community in varied ways from lower air quality to increased cost of living, with a higher proportion of women and Black Americans seeing its effects.
Released today, the poll reveals that the US remains sharply divided over the causes of the deepening environmental emergency following the fossil fuel industry’s long campaign to downplay and deny climate science. That division falls largely along political lines, with Democrats and Republicans at odds over the source of climate disinformation.
The poll surveyed 1,000 American adults and found that 70% said global warming was happening. More than 60% said oil and gas companies were “completely or mostly responsible”.
But while Democrats overwhelmingly (89%) accept the scientific basis of the climate emergency, opinion is split among Republicans. Just 42% of Republicans agreed that global warming is a reality while 36% denied it. The remainder said they didn’t know.
The findings offer insight into the growing public pressure on the oil and gas industry as it faces dozens of lawsuits by states and municipalities. The plaintiffs demand that companies pay for the steep financial costs associated with the environmental devastation caused by burning fossil fuels.
A majority of Americans support the central aims of the lawsuits after being told that fossil fuel companies knew about their products’ impact on climate change. A little more than half wanted oil and gas companies to pay for damage caused by extreme weather events driven by the climate crisis, and 60% said the industry should pay to improve infrastructure to withstand the fires and floods caused by global heating.
---
Still, nearly two-thirds of Republicans said oil and gas firms bore some degree of responsibility for the changing climate even though fewer of them acknowledged the existence of global heating. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans said the industry bore the greatest weight of responsibility while 35% said it was somewhat responsible.
A little more than 80% of Democrats said oil and gas companies were completely or mostly responsible for causing climate change. The young and people of colour leaned more heavily than the nation as a whole toward blaming the industry.
But political division emerged again when people were asked about the specifics of the fossil fuel industry’s misdeeds.
Democrats said oil and gas companies lied about the existence of climate change, and their part in creating it, at more than three times the rate of Republicans. Just under half of Republicans said oil and gas companies had done nothing wrong.
About 45% of Americans said the companies lied about contributing to climate change. A slightly smaller percentage said the industry had deceived the public about the existence of climate change and ignored their own scientists’ findings.
One of the starkest divisions was over scientific opinion on the climate crisis.
While 68% of Democrats said that most scientists think global warming is human-caused, just 22% of Republicans agreed. Half of Republicans said there is “a lot of disagreement” on the issue among scientists, a position held by less than 15% of Democrats.
In fact, a recent survey of scientists showed that 99.9% agree that the climate emergency is the result of humans’ actions.
Scepticism and denial about climate science are higher in the US than in many other countries. Americans deny the link between humans and global heating at three times the rate of the British and Japanese.
That is in part the result of decades of denial and cover-up by the oil industry, including the suppression of the evidence from its own scientists about the damage being done by burning fossil fuels.
The divisions also reflect fault lines on other issues, such as Covid vaccinations, with substantially fewer Republicans than Democrats being inoculated.
Experience of the climate crisis varied. Nearly half said it was harming their local community in varied ways from lower air quality to increased cost of living, with a higher proportion of women and Black Americans seeing its effects.
How Economists Helped Big Oil Obstruct Climate Action for Decades
A Stanford science historian scrutinizes the fossil fuel industry’s endless disinformation campaign.
MARÍA PAULA RUBIANO A. - MOTHER JONES
10/11/2021
For more than a decade, researchers and journalists have tried to lay bare the PR machine employed by fossil fuel companies to delay climate action. In Merchants of Doubt, science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway detailed the critical role some scientists played in denying the soundness of climate science. Later, an investigation by InsideClimate News revealed that while Exxon denied climate change publicly, its own scientists were aware for decades of how fossil fuels warm the planet.
Political leaders have long cited economic research on how taking action on climate change would be prohibitively expensive. President Donald Trump even used the findings as part of his reasoning to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. But who exactly is behind that economic research?
Legal expert, physicist, and now science historian Benjamin Franta, of Stanford University, decided to take a deeper look. He recently published his findings in the journal Environmental Politics: Since the late 1980s, economists at private consulting firms, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have played a key role in shaping public discourse about climate policy in the United States, hawking flawed research and spreading disinformation everywhere from newspapers to congressional testimonies. In an interview with Grist, Franta discusses economists’ role in the fossil fuel industry’s PR campaign, and why these relationships flew under the radar for such a long time. “For decades, [these] economists have been inflating the cost of action,” Franta said, “and downplaying the cost of inaction.”
What inspired you to do this particular research on the economic think tanks that have influenced climate policy?
It happened by accident. About four years ago, in 2017, I was doing research for one of my graduate history classes at Stanford about the American Petroleum Institute and its history with regard to climate change. I was downloading large collections of newspaper articles and I noticed that it wasn’t just the denial of climate science that the industry was promoting, it was these economic talking points as well. I also noticed that the economic experts or sources that the industry cited tended to be the same few people over many years, often Charles River Associates, an economic consulting firm. As I was doing all this research, then-President Trump announced that the United States was going to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. He cited economic statistics that sounded a lot like what I’d been reading from newspaper articles in the 1990s. The study was written by some of the exact same people I had been reading about.
Who were these people, and what were their strategies?
I tried to track all the activities that I could from the economic consulting firm Charles Rivers Associates. Every time a major climate policy was proposed, these economists would be there, writing newspaper articles and giving testimony in front of Congress. From carbon tax conversations in the Clinton administration to [opposing] international treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol and the COP meetings. They also worked to defeat the cap and trade bills that were proposed throughout the 2000s in the United States. When that was basically defeated, and climate policy became an issue for the states, like in California, they would go to address the California climate policies too.
There is one advertorial in the New York Times, an advertisement presented as a news article, from March 6, 1997. This was around when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated. The piece iss called “Stop, Look and Listen before we leap,” and it starts off: “International efforts to deal with climate change are lurching from speculation towards actions that could wreak havoc on nations, even as the underlying science and economics continue to signal caution.” It represents this two-prong strategy that the industry used again and again, where it would cast doubt on the science and say, “Well, actually, we don’t know if climate change is happening, or if it’s from fossil fuels.” And then they would go, “And even if it does, it’s too expensive to act.”
Were these statistics peer-reviewed? How credible were they?
It’s a very corrupt process where the industry pays the consultants to come up with the result that the industry wants. And they can’t give anything else because their model can only produce this outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed publication, the details are not even available to other economists to scrutinize because their models are proprietary. And then it’s printed in newspapers, like the New York Times, and it’s given in congressional testimony to senators and representatives, where it’s passed off—often by the oil companies that paid for it—as independent, rigorous research when it was neither one of those things.
You mentioned that the models are designed in a way that rigs the game from the start. Can you explain that?
Basically, the model starts off assuming that the economy is already optimal, and is already working the best that it can. When you assume that, then the inevitable outcome of any policy to intervene in the economy is, by definition, going to cost money instead of saving money. And of course, that’s not a logical outcome. These economists were assuming things like that renewable energy will always cost eight times more than fossil fuels, even 100 years into the future. They ignored all the benefits of avoiding climate change. Without any sort of evidence, they would say things like, “Climate change is not going to hurt the economy until around the year 2100.” They only add the costs of moving away from fossil fuels.
Did anyone catch those errors in calculations back when they were done?
Some people did notice at the time. When I’m reading the historical record, I’ll sometimes see somebody like Florentine Krause, director of the International Project for Sustainable Energy Paths, say, “Hey, it looks like these models were designed to come up with this answer.” But these were lone voices in the wilderness.
We’ve been talking for years about science denial, and how companies like Exxon publicly denied the problem even when their own scientists were warning them of the changes underway. Why do you think the contributions of economists to this disinformation campaign have been able to fly under the radar for so long?
These economists weren’t completely alone in their approach. Charles River Associates was simply the preferred source for the industry. We might laugh at some proclamations in these economic reports, like that climate change is not going to hurt us until the year 2100. But what surprised me the most is that I found even more outlandish things said by prestigious professors at universities like Stanford, heads of departments, who themselves were getting a lot of funding from the oil and gas industry. They used their academic credentials to kind of launder their bad science.
Has the strategy changed or mutated in more recent years? Are the same economists writing reports today like the ones you found in the 1980s and 1990s?
A lot of the consultants working on climate left Charles River Associates around the same time, and they ended up at NERA, or National Economic Research Associates. That was actually the firm that produced the report that former President Trump cited to justify leaving the Paris Agreement. So the firms change, and sometimes the people change, there are new people that get involved over time, and others retire. But the basic strategy has stayed largely the same for over 30 years now.
What do you think should be the main takeaway from these new findings?
For decades, economists have been inflating the cost of action, and downplaying the cost of inaction. And largely, they’ve been doing that based on an outmoded economic paradigm. Just because a lot of people have built their careers based on this approach, it’s not a good enough reason to keep doing it, if it’s hurting us.
Political leaders have long cited economic research on how taking action on climate change would be prohibitively expensive. President Donald Trump even used the findings as part of his reasoning to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. But who exactly is behind that economic research?
Legal expert, physicist, and now science historian Benjamin Franta, of Stanford University, decided to take a deeper look. He recently published his findings in the journal Environmental Politics: Since the late 1980s, economists at private consulting firms, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have played a key role in shaping public discourse about climate policy in the United States, hawking flawed research and spreading disinformation everywhere from newspapers to congressional testimonies. In an interview with Grist, Franta discusses economists’ role in the fossil fuel industry’s PR campaign, and why these relationships flew under the radar for such a long time. “For decades, [these] economists have been inflating the cost of action,” Franta said, “and downplaying the cost of inaction.”
What inspired you to do this particular research on the economic think tanks that have influenced climate policy?
It happened by accident. About four years ago, in 2017, I was doing research for one of my graduate history classes at Stanford about the American Petroleum Institute and its history with regard to climate change. I was downloading large collections of newspaper articles and I noticed that it wasn’t just the denial of climate science that the industry was promoting, it was these economic talking points as well. I also noticed that the economic experts or sources that the industry cited tended to be the same few people over many years, often Charles River Associates, an economic consulting firm. As I was doing all this research, then-President Trump announced that the United States was going to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. He cited economic statistics that sounded a lot like what I’d been reading from newspaper articles in the 1990s. The study was written by some of the exact same people I had been reading about.
Who were these people, and what were their strategies?
I tried to track all the activities that I could from the economic consulting firm Charles Rivers Associates. Every time a major climate policy was proposed, these economists would be there, writing newspaper articles and giving testimony in front of Congress. From carbon tax conversations in the Clinton administration to [opposing] international treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol and the COP meetings. They also worked to defeat the cap and trade bills that were proposed throughout the 2000s in the United States. When that was basically defeated, and climate policy became an issue for the states, like in California, they would go to address the California climate policies too.
There is one advertorial in the New York Times, an advertisement presented as a news article, from March 6, 1997. This was around when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated. The piece iss called “Stop, Look and Listen before we leap,” and it starts off: “International efforts to deal with climate change are lurching from speculation towards actions that could wreak havoc on nations, even as the underlying science and economics continue to signal caution.” It represents this two-prong strategy that the industry used again and again, where it would cast doubt on the science and say, “Well, actually, we don’t know if climate change is happening, or if it’s from fossil fuels.” And then they would go, “And even if it does, it’s too expensive to act.”
Were these statistics peer-reviewed? How credible were they?
It’s a very corrupt process where the industry pays the consultants to come up with the result that the industry wants. And they can’t give anything else because their model can only produce this outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed publication, the details are not even available to other economists to scrutinize because their models are proprietary. And then it’s printed in newspapers, like the New York Times, and it’s given in congressional testimony to senators and representatives, where it’s passed off—often by the oil companies that paid for it—as independent, rigorous research when it was neither one of those things.
You mentioned that the models are designed in a way that rigs the game from the start. Can you explain that?
Basically, the model starts off assuming that the economy is already optimal, and is already working the best that it can. When you assume that, then the inevitable outcome of any policy to intervene in the economy is, by definition, going to cost money instead of saving money. And of course, that’s not a logical outcome. These economists were assuming things like that renewable energy will always cost eight times more than fossil fuels, even 100 years into the future. They ignored all the benefits of avoiding climate change. Without any sort of evidence, they would say things like, “Climate change is not going to hurt the economy until around the year 2100.” They only add the costs of moving away from fossil fuels.
Did anyone catch those errors in calculations back when they were done?
Some people did notice at the time. When I’m reading the historical record, I’ll sometimes see somebody like Florentine Krause, director of the International Project for Sustainable Energy Paths, say, “Hey, it looks like these models were designed to come up with this answer.” But these were lone voices in the wilderness.
We’ve been talking for years about science denial, and how companies like Exxon publicly denied the problem even when their own scientists were warning them of the changes underway. Why do you think the contributions of economists to this disinformation campaign have been able to fly under the radar for so long?
These economists weren’t completely alone in their approach. Charles River Associates was simply the preferred source for the industry. We might laugh at some proclamations in these economic reports, like that climate change is not going to hurt us until the year 2100. But what surprised me the most is that I found even more outlandish things said by prestigious professors at universities like Stanford, heads of departments, who themselves were getting a lot of funding from the oil and gas industry. They used their academic credentials to kind of launder their bad science.
Has the strategy changed or mutated in more recent years? Are the same economists writing reports today like the ones you found in the 1980s and 1990s?
A lot of the consultants working on climate left Charles River Associates around the same time, and they ended up at NERA, or National Economic Research Associates. That was actually the firm that produced the report that former President Trump cited to justify leaving the Paris Agreement. So the firms change, and sometimes the people change, there are new people that get involved over time, and others retire. But the basic strategy has stayed largely the same for over 30 years now.
What do you think should be the main takeaway from these new findings?
For decades, economists have been inflating the cost of action, and downplaying the cost of inaction. And largely, they’ve been doing that based on an outmoded economic paradigm. Just because a lot of people have built their careers based on this approach, it’s not a good enough reason to keep doing it, if it’s hurting us.
In Anti-Reconciliation Blitz, Exxon Spent $275,000 on Facebook Ads in One Week
BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout
PUBLISHED September 30, 2021
Oil giant ExxonMobil is pouring millions into Facebook advertisement purchases in a wider lobbying effort against the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, which is slated to include a corporate tax raise and proposals to address the climate crisis.
As of Thursday, Exxon spent $275,000 on Facebook ads just this past week. These ads include a campaign against Democrats’ tax reform proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. CNBC reports that Exxon has spent $2 million on Facebook ads over the past 90 days.
Though the extent of the issues Exxon is targeting is unclear, CNBC reports that at least six of the anti-reconciliation bill ads ran from Friday to Monday. One of the ads said, “Tell Congress no tax hikes,” and brought users to a page encouraging them to contact their elected officials to “let them know you oppose the proposed tax increases on American businesses.”
The text of the Build Back Better Act hasn’t yet been finalized, but drafts of the bill have included a corporate tax hike from 21 percent to 26.5 percent. This incredibly modest hike falls short of the 28 percent statutory rate that President Joe Biden had proposed in the spring, and even further from the 35 percent rate in effect before Republicans slashed taxes for corporations and the rich in 2017.
Furthermore, it’s dishonest to imply that the tax increases will affect businesses uniformly. In August, the Treasury Department said the tax increases won’t affect 97 percent of small businesses, meaning that the tax raise will mostly only affect larger businesses and corporations like Exxon.
The fossil fuel industry has long been the recipient of extra tax breaks, on top of corporate tax breaks they have likely benefited from.Though climate advocates and progressives like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) have fought against these tax breaks, the fossil fuel industry is slated to receive fossil fuel subsidies in the reconciliation bill — many of which they have been receiving for years.
Still, the oil and gas industry isn’t satisfied with the massive amount of support they already receive from the government.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Gas Association have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads targeting climate provisions in the reconciliation bill. API broke its single-day total for Facebook ad buys with a $10,800 purchase in early August — and, since then has spent $423,000 on ads, according to a report by InfluenceMap. The American Gas Association has spent $18,000 on similar efforts. In total, these ads have been viewed 23.2 million times.
The API is also targeting specific members of Congress on Facebook, running hundreds of ads encouraging people to either voice their support for elected officials like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for “being a champion of AMERICAN MADE ENERGY” or calling their representatives to voice their displeasure for being “ready to risk YOUR job by hiking taxes on U.S. ENERGY PRODUCERS.” Which jobs will be affected by a marginally higher tax rate, however, is unclear.
The fossil fuel industry has rallied together to lobby against climate action in Washington over the past year. After President Joe Biden announced a climate plan on his campaign trail last year, fossil fuel companies and trade groups launched a $10 million ad campaign just for Facebook, promoting the idea that natural gas should play a role in the country’s future.
The fossil fuel lobby against the Build Back Better Act is part of a larger campaign by corporations and conservative groups to scale back various aspects of the bill, including tax reforms and Medicare expansion. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the lobbying effort against the act, and lobbyists representing corporations like Exxon and Pfizer are targeting Capitol Hill to sway lawmakers against key parts of the package.
The lobbyists’ influence appears to be working. Manchin, who is in charge of writing climate policies in the bill as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is making efforts to carve many of the bill’s most powerful climate policies out of the bill. Instead, he’s working to ensure that the bill protects the use of natural gas and coal, as well as other policies favored by the fossil fuel industry.
As of Thursday, Exxon spent $275,000 on Facebook ads just this past week. These ads include a campaign against Democrats’ tax reform proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. CNBC reports that Exxon has spent $2 million on Facebook ads over the past 90 days.
Though the extent of the issues Exxon is targeting is unclear, CNBC reports that at least six of the anti-reconciliation bill ads ran from Friday to Monday. One of the ads said, “Tell Congress no tax hikes,” and brought users to a page encouraging them to contact their elected officials to “let them know you oppose the proposed tax increases on American businesses.”
The text of the Build Back Better Act hasn’t yet been finalized, but drafts of the bill have included a corporate tax hike from 21 percent to 26.5 percent. This incredibly modest hike falls short of the 28 percent statutory rate that President Joe Biden had proposed in the spring, and even further from the 35 percent rate in effect before Republicans slashed taxes for corporations and the rich in 2017.
Furthermore, it’s dishonest to imply that the tax increases will affect businesses uniformly. In August, the Treasury Department said the tax increases won’t affect 97 percent of small businesses, meaning that the tax raise will mostly only affect larger businesses and corporations like Exxon.
The fossil fuel industry has long been the recipient of extra tax breaks, on top of corporate tax breaks they have likely benefited from.Though climate advocates and progressives like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) have fought against these tax breaks, the fossil fuel industry is slated to receive fossil fuel subsidies in the reconciliation bill — many of which they have been receiving for years.
Still, the oil and gas industry isn’t satisfied with the massive amount of support they already receive from the government.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Gas Association have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads targeting climate provisions in the reconciliation bill. API broke its single-day total for Facebook ad buys with a $10,800 purchase in early August — and, since then has spent $423,000 on ads, according to a report by InfluenceMap. The American Gas Association has spent $18,000 on similar efforts. In total, these ads have been viewed 23.2 million times.
The API is also targeting specific members of Congress on Facebook, running hundreds of ads encouraging people to either voice their support for elected officials like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for “being a champion of AMERICAN MADE ENERGY” or calling their representatives to voice their displeasure for being “ready to risk YOUR job by hiking taxes on U.S. ENERGY PRODUCERS.” Which jobs will be affected by a marginally higher tax rate, however, is unclear.
The fossil fuel industry has rallied together to lobby against climate action in Washington over the past year. After President Joe Biden announced a climate plan on his campaign trail last year, fossil fuel companies and trade groups launched a $10 million ad campaign just for Facebook, promoting the idea that natural gas should play a role in the country’s future.
The fossil fuel lobby against the Build Back Better Act is part of a larger campaign by corporations and conservative groups to scale back various aspects of the bill, including tax reforms and Medicare expansion. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the lobbying effort against the act, and lobbyists representing corporations like Exxon and Pfizer are targeting Capitol Hill to sway lawmakers against key parts of the package.
The lobbyists’ influence appears to be working. Manchin, who is in charge of writing climate policies in the bill as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is making efforts to carve many of the bill’s most powerful climate policies out of the bill. Instead, he’s working to ensure that the bill protects the use of natural gas and coal, as well as other policies favored by the fossil fuel industry.
HURRICANE IDA MAKES A MOCKERY OF BIG OIL’S PHILANTHROPY
During Hurricane Ida, energy companies briefly paused efforts to claim credit for combating the problems they’ve caused.
Sharon Lerner - the intercept
September 2 2021, 3:00 a.m.
...Just weeks before the hurricane, Exxon, which manufactured doubt about climate change for decades despite knowing that its production of fossil fuels was causing the crisis, tweeted about its support for the Paris Agreement. Shell bragged about its support for wind technology, even though the vast majority of the company’s business is still oil and petrochemical production, and it is on track to still be producing 1 million barrels a day in 2050. Chevron pledged to advance a low-carbon future and invest $750 million in renewables and offsets by 2028, while spending far more fighting an attorney who won a judgment against the company over the environmental harm from oil extraction in Ecuador. And Valero boasted about giving away 500 trees near its refinery in Meraux, Louisiana — a plant that has violated the Clean Air Act.
Such greenwashing — or perhaps false advertising — is par for the course for big energy companies, according to Karen Sokol, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. “They frame themselves not as a major source of the problem, but instead a key part of the solution,” said Sokol, who was reached in New Orleans, where she and other residents have no electricity. “That’s nuts, but so far it has been well received by policymakers, even inside the Biden administration as well as some environmental groups.”
To be fair, the energy companies have had a lot to focus on — and perhaps little time to tweet — over the past few days. Hurricane Ida forced the partial or full closure of many oil rigs and refineries, and companies have had to evacuate workers and cope with rising waters and intense winds that can trigger leaks, spills, and flares. “Our focus is on employees and their families,” Ola Morten Aanestad, a spokesperson for Equinor ASA, which owns and operates an offshore oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico, wrote to The Intercept.
Everyone else in the area is in crisis mode too — something that’s become routine in recent years. “We’re entering a new phase of climate change now where we see climate related disasters on a daily or weekly basis,” said Bill Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University. Ripple’s most recent report found that records have recently been set in 18 of 31 critical planetary measures, including levels of melting ice, greenhouse gases, ocean changes, and temperature. “We are in an emergency that humanity has never seen before. We’re looking at unfathomable changes and impacts to society.”
Claiming Credit for Combating the Crisis They Caused
Most of the time, the fact that fossil fuel companies are causing these cataclysmic changes doesn’t stop them from claiming credit for combating them. After an unprecedented storm froze most of Texas in February, an occurrence that clearly stemmed from the warming of the Arctic, oil and gas shippers from Phillips 66 and other companies set out to save the sea turtles in the unusually cold waters — and then to memorialize their acts of environmental heroism on company’s website, which deemed the rescue “a great day for more than 2,000 green sea turtles.” Phillips 66 heralded the crew’s efforts without noting the irony that the turtle-savers had, on balance, done more to harm than help the creatures.
Big Oil’s assistance to the human victims of climate disasters also appears absurd and insulting given the industry’s responsibility for the crisis. Energy companies’ donations to the communities that suffer most from climate change and the other environmental harms oil production causes are particularly paltry when considering both the true costs of the destruction and the great wealth they have amassed extracting resources from those areas.
PBF Energy’s Chalmette Refining in Louisiana touts a $150,000 contribution it made to the St. Bernard Parish government to help fund redevelopment of Bluebird Park, which has been heavily damaged from previous hurricanes. Marathon Petroleum is the largest fundraiser for United Way in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, according to the company’s website. St. John, which is home to the census tract with the highest risk of cancer from air pollution in the country, is a short drive east from the company’s refinery in Garyville and has suffered major damage and flooding from Ida. Marathon, which is valued at more than $28 billion, gave over $300,000 to the charitable organization, which provides food, water, and toilet paper to locals during hurricanes.
In Houston, where temperatures regularly reach into the 90s, Phillips 66 supplied volunteers who helped plant native trees at De Chaumes Elementary School to bring much-needed shade for the students. Last August, after Hurricane Laura, the Exxon Beaumont refinery along with another local company, Tri-Con, donated nearly 15,000 gallons of fuel to the Texas cities of Orange and Vinton, which were both hit hard by that storm. The gift garnered the company good will from the locals, according to the Exxon website, which quoted Orange Mayor Larry Spears as saying, “ExxonMobil’s support brings hope in this time of need.” In Vinton, where about a third of the population lives under the poverty line, Mayor Kenneth Stinson said, “It is heartwarming that ExxonMobil thought of us.”
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a group that works in communities living near refineries and chemical plants, said that such oil industry philanthropy is aimed at the larger public rather than the people directly affected by their facilities. “Rich guys in big cities are their audience, not the people who are feeling the climate change impacts or the pollution,” she said.
It should be noted that Exxon also gave $500,000 — along with the company’s “thoughts and prayers” — to Gulf Coast communities in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey, a storm that caused an estimated $125 billion of damages. And, in late summer, Phillips 66 contributed $1 million to support hurricane and wildfire disaster relief efforts: a considerable sum compared to donations from other companies and yet a tiny fraction of an estimated $210 billion in damages caused by climate change last year. Those costs are expected to reach $1.9 trillion annually by 2021, if the warming continues unchecked.
Exxon, PBF Energy, Valero, Shell, and Phillips 66 did not respond to inquiries for this story. But on its website, Valero describes itself as “tirelessly focused on safety.” The company also prides itself on its “gumbo giveaway” event in Port Arthur, a town that has the largest concentration of oil refineries in the U.S. and an elevated cancer rate. The site also notes that “Valero strives to be a good neighbor and looks for opportunities to work directly with local officials and fence-line residents to improve the quality of life in its communities.” PBF Energy, which operates the Chalmette refinery, writes on its website that “safety is above priorities, it is a life value.” According to Shell’s website, “Shell’s top priority is to protect people, assets, nearby communities and the environment.” In addition to outlining its work on turtles and wetland protection, Phillips 66’s website says, “Our commitment to sustainability is based on operating excellence, environmental stewardship, social responsibility and financial performance led by rigorous governance. Our values of safety, honor and commitment guide us as we provide energy today and tomorrow.”
Fighting Efforts to Extract the True Climate Costs
The problem isn’t the gifts from the oil industry, but the fact that they ease the way for companies to continue inflicting damage, according to Sokol. “Why is it funding these community projects? Why is it now not overtly denying climate change but instead positioning itself as a fossil fuel savior? So it can maintain its way of doing business,” she said. “They are working concertedly and have been for years on ensuring that they will be the ones dictating the sorts of policies that will be in place to respond when there was a concerted call for climate action.”
While Big Oil continues to make — and publicize — their philanthropic contributions, they are fighting legal efforts to collect on the true costs of the climate crisis. More than 20 cities, states, and localities, including Baltimore, have recently sued fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for the financial burdens now being shouldered by the public. Although those cases could help bring much-needed funds to suffering communities, Sokol insists that saving face — and the ability to keep producing fossil fuels — is more important to the oil industry than the money.
“Whatever it pays it could write off as a cost of doing business,” said Sokol. “Why the industry is fighting tooth and nail against these is it doesn’t want to lose its social license.”
So far none of these cases have reached the discovery stage. But if they do, Sokol believes that documents released through that legal process will be devastating for oil companies. “That’s one of the reasons the industry is so freaked out by these cases,” she said. “Once that starts happening, I believe it will completely unravel.”
In the meantime, Rolfes, of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said that there are a few things she’d really like from the oil companies. “I want them to acknowledge that climate change is a real problem and that they’re fueling it — and stop pursuing fossil fuels,” said Rolfes, who was heading out with a generator, gas cans, tarps, food, and water to help people affected by the hurricane in St. James, Louisiana. “Every storm and every wildfire is a message that we need to take that action.”
Such greenwashing — or perhaps false advertising — is par for the course for big energy companies, according to Karen Sokol, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. “They frame themselves not as a major source of the problem, but instead a key part of the solution,” said Sokol, who was reached in New Orleans, where she and other residents have no electricity. “That’s nuts, but so far it has been well received by policymakers, even inside the Biden administration as well as some environmental groups.”
To be fair, the energy companies have had a lot to focus on — and perhaps little time to tweet — over the past few days. Hurricane Ida forced the partial or full closure of many oil rigs and refineries, and companies have had to evacuate workers and cope with rising waters and intense winds that can trigger leaks, spills, and flares. “Our focus is on employees and their families,” Ola Morten Aanestad, a spokesperson for Equinor ASA, which owns and operates an offshore oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico, wrote to The Intercept.
Everyone else in the area is in crisis mode too — something that’s become routine in recent years. “We’re entering a new phase of climate change now where we see climate related disasters on a daily or weekly basis,” said Bill Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University. Ripple’s most recent report found that records have recently been set in 18 of 31 critical planetary measures, including levels of melting ice, greenhouse gases, ocean changes, and temperature. “We are in an emergency that humanity has never seen before. We’re looking at unfathomable changes and impacts to society.”
Claiming Credit for Combating the Crisis They Caused
Most of the time, the fact that fossil fuel companies are causing these cataclysmic changes doesn’t stop them from claiming credit for combating them. After an unprecedented storm froze most of Texas in February, an occurrence that clearly stemmed from the warming of the Arctic, oil and gas shippers from Phillips 66 and other companies set out to save the sea turtles in the unusually cold waters — and then to memorialize their acts of environmental heroism on company’s website, which deemed the rescue “a great day for more than 2,000 green sea turtles.” Phillips 66 heralded the crew’s efforts without noting the irony that the turtle-savers had, on balance, done more to harm than help the creatures.
Big Oil’s assistance to the human victims of climate disasters also appears absurd and insulting given the industry’s responsibility for the crisis. Energy companies’ donations to the communities that suffer most from climate change and the other environmental harms oil production causes are particularly paltry when considering both the true costs of the destruction and the great wealth they have amassed extracting resources from those areas.
PBF Energy’s Chalmette Refining in Louisiana touts a $150,000 contribution it made to the St. Bernard Parish government to help fund redevelopment of Bluebird Park, which has been heavily damaged from previous hurricanes. Marathon Petroleum is the largest fundraiser for United Way in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, according to the company’s website. St. John, which is home to the census tract with the highest risk of cancer from air pollution in the country, is a short drive east from the company’s refinery in Garyville and has suffered major damage and flooding from Ida. Marathon, which is valued at more than $28 billion, gave over $300,000 to the charitable organization, which provides food, water, and toilet paper to locals during hurricanes.
In Houston, where temperatures regularly reach into the 90s, Phillips 66 supplied volunteers who helped plant native trees at De Chaumes Elementary School to bring much-needed shade for the students. Last August, after Hurricane Laura, the Exxon Beaumont refinery along with another local company, Tri-Con, donated nearly 15,000 gallons of fuel to the Texas cities of Orange and Vinton, which were both hit hard by that storm. The gift garnered the company good will from the locals, according to the Exxon website, which quoted Orange Mayor Larry Spears as saying, “ExxonMobil’s support brings hope in this time of need.” In Vinton, where about a third of the population lives under the poverty line, Mayor Kenneth Stinson said, “It is heartwarming that ExxonMobil thought of us.”
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a group that works in communities living near refineries and chemical plants, said that such oil industry philanthropy is aimed at the larger public rather than the people directly affected by their facilities. “Rich guys in big cities are their audience, not the people who are feeling the climate change impacts or the pollution,” she said.
It should be noted that Exxon also gave $500,000 — along with the company’s “thoughts and prayers” — to Gulf Coast communities in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey, a storm that caused an estimated $125 billion of damages. And, in late summer, Phillips 66 contributed $1 million to support hurricane and wildfire disaster relief efforts: a considerable sum compared to donations from other companies and yet a tiny fraction of an estimated $210 billion in damages caused by climate change last year. Those costs are expected to reach $1.9 trillion annually by 2021, if the warming continues unchecked.
Exxon, PBF Energy, Valero, Shell, and Phillips 66 did not respond to inquiries for this story. But on its website, Valero describes itself as “tirelessly focused on safety.” The company also prides itself on its “gumbo giveaway” event in Port Arthur, a town that has the largest concentration of oil refineries in the U.S. and an elevated cancer rate. The site also notes that “Valero strives to be a good neighbor and looks for opportunities to work directly with local officials and fence-line residents to improve the quality of life in its communities.” PBF Energy, which operates the Chalmette refinery, writes on its website that “safety is above priorities, it is a life value.” According to Shell’s website, “Shell’s top priority is to protect people, assets, nearby communities and the environment.” In addition to outlining its work on turtles and wetland protection, Phillips 66’s website says, “Our commitment to sustainability is based on operating excellence, environmental stewardship, social responsibility and financial performance led by rigorous governance. Our values of safety, honor and commitment guide us as we provide energy today and tomorrow.”
Fighting Efforts to Extract the True Climate Costs
The problem isn’t the gifts from the oil industry, but the fact that they ease the way for companies to continue inflicting damage, according to Sokol. “Why is it funding these community projects? Why is it now not overtly denying climate change but instead positioning itself as a fossil fuel savior? So it can maintain its way of doing business,” she said. “They are working concertedly and have been for years on ensuring that they will be the ones dictating the sorts of policies that will be in place to respond when there was a concerted call for climate action.”
While Big Oil continues to make — and publicize — their philanthropic contributions, they are fighting legal efforts to collect on the true costs of the climate crisis. More than 20 cities, states, and localities, including Baltimore, have recently sued fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for the financial burdens now being shouldered by the public. Although those cases could help bring much-needed funds to suffering communities, Sokol insists that saving face — and the ability to keep producing fossil fuels — is more important to the oil industry than the money.
“Whatever it pays it could write off as a cost of doing business,” said Sokol. “Why the industry is fighting tooth and nail against these is it doesn’t want to lose its social license.”
So far none of these cases have reached the discovery stage. But if they do, Sokol believes that documents released through that legal process will be devastating for oil companies. “That’s one of the reasons the industry is so freaked out by these cases,” she said. “Once that starts happening, I believe it will completely unravel.”
In the meantime, Rolfes, of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said that there are a few things she’d really like from the oil companies. “I want them to acknowledge that climate change is a real problem and that they’re fueling it — and stop pursuing fossil fuels,” said Rolfes, who was heading out with a generator, gas cans, tarps, food, and water to help people affected by the hurricane in St. James, Louisiana. “Every storm and every wildfire is a message that we need to take that action.”
greed, of course!!!
Big Oil Fought Cybersecurity Regulations, Making Pipeline Attacks Easier
BY Igor Derysh, Salon - truthout
PUBLISHED June 2, 2021
The American Petroleum Institute, the top trade group for the oil and gas industry, spent years opposing federal cybersecurity regulations before the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. After the attack, watchdog groups say API is still opposing strong federal regulation and pushing for taxpayer “subsidies” instead.
Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest pipelines in the country, which carries 45% of the fuel from Texas to New York, was forced to shut down after a ransomware attack by the foreign cybercriminal group known as DarkSide. Cybersecurity experts believe that Colonial lacked advanced cybersecurity defenses that can monitor networks for irregularities and detect threats like DarkSide’s infiltration tools. But Colonial is not the first pipeline affected by cyberattacks and many other pipelines in the U.S. may have similar vulnerabilities.
A ransomware attack hit an unidentified natural gas facility in 2020, forcing it to shut down for two days, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said after the attack that the owner of the facility “did not specifically consider the risk posed by cyberattacks” or prepare employees to deal with one.
Federal officials have been sounding the alarm on the lax cybersecurity measures for years. Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioners Neil Chatterjee and Richard Glick warned in a 2018 op-ed that a lack of federal cybersecurity standards left energy firms vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Government Accountability Office in 2019 found that federal cybersecurity guidelines were badly out of date and lacked preparation to respond to an attack on critical infrastructure. After the Colonial attack, the cybersecurity firm Byos estimated that “less than 25% of the U.S. oil and gas industry has adequate cybersecurity in place,” according to Bloomberg News.
One of the reasons that the federal government failed to enact regulations to protect critical infrastructure before the Colonial Pipeline attack appears to be a relentless campaign against federal regulations by the energy industry and API, which has spent more than $20 million on lobbying expenditures since 2018.
Last year, API argued that “voluntary frameworks and public-private solutions, rather than prescriptive federal regulations, offer businesses the know-how and flexibility to respond to the ever-changing security landscape.” The group says its member companies believe the private sector “should retain autonomy and the primary responsibility for protecting companies’ assets” against cyberattacks.
In the aftermath of the Colonial attack, API has changed its tune only slightly, arguing that it is “premature” to discuss regulations “until we have a full understanding of the details surrounding the Colonial attack.” API CEO Mike Sommers even suggested that it was just as important to protect the industry from regulators as from cyberattacks.
“We need, of course, to take care of cybersecurity, but we also need to protect existing infrastructure from attacks from regulators and government officials who want to shut these pipelines down,” he told CNN International this month.
API has instead pushed the federal government to grant exemptions and fuel waivers to energy companies after the Colonial attack. It has also called for policymakers to invest in infrastructure for the energy industry, which already gets millions in federal subsidies.
“For policymakers, this incident should underscore the vital importance of further investment in pipeline infrastructure and expanding the delivery systems that supply the energy resources that Americans need every day,” API’s Lem Smith wrote earlier this month.
A progressive watchdog group accused the group of trying to cash in on the cyberattack.
“In the wake of dangerous cyber threats, the American Petroleum Institute is apparently angrier with the government for stepping up to stop future attacks than they are with the hackers doing the attacking,” Kyle Herrig, president of the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement to Salon. “The government has an obligation to protect American interests from cyberattacks including pipelines and other infrastructure — API treating these serious threats as a cash cow to line oil industry pockets while lobbying against the government stepping up protections shows they have the wrong priorities.”
API denied that it opposes federal regulations, pointing Salon to a more recent comment welcoming the Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) plans to roll out a new regulation requiring companies to report cyberattacks to the government and keep a dedicated cybersecurity coordinator on call.
“Our industry works continuously with policymakers to strengthen cybersecurity, which is an economy-wide issue that requires constant collaboration and information sharing between the public and private sector,” said API Manager of Operations Security and Emergency Response Suzanne Lemieux. “API is supportive of TSA’s efforts to strengthen cyber reporting and is working closely with the administration to develop incident reporting policies and procedures that best protect our critical infrastructure, including pipelines. Any regulations should enhance reciprocal information sharing and liability protections, as well as build upon our robust existing public-private coordination to streamline and elevate our efforts to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.”
A spokesperson for the group told Salon that it has been working to improve the industry’s pipeline security standards since before the Colonial attack.
Cybersecurity experts, however, say stronger federal regulations are necessary to protect critical infrastructure.
Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Notre Dame, said in an email to Salon that defending energy infrastructure is “of the utmost national security interest,” adding that government regulation is the only suitable response. “In the absence of regulation, companies are left to their own devices to decide what level of security is appropriate and risk/benefit trade-off decisions are left in the hands of corporate executives who are focused on the firm’s bottom-line profitability,” he said.
That focus on the bottom line is a key reason why ostm energy firms have not invested enough in cybersecurity measures. Colonial Pipeline, for example, has distributed “nearly all its profits, sometimes more” to its owners even as its “aging pipelines have suffered a series of accidents,” Bloomberg News reported this month.
“Over the years, control of Colonial Pipeline has moved away from oil and gas companies towards private equity firms and institutional investors,” Bill Caram, the executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a public interest nonprofit, said in an email. “These types of investors have a history of wringing every dollar of revenue out of an asset while spending as little as possible on things like safety.”
Many companies have focused on efforts to mitigate the threat of cyberattacks, Caram said, but many others have not and don’t plan to, meaning that minimum safeguards must be in place to ensure infrastructure security and protect the environment.
“The industry has been raking in profits over the years, aided by federal subsidies,” he said. “Some operators have not been effective stewards over the critical infrastructure under their charge, diverting funds away from safety and security towards share buybacks and dividends. Taxpayers should not be expected to bail out companies for their lack of responsible asset management.”
The TSA, which the digital security of pipelines, on Thursday issued its first cybersecurity regulation for the pipeline sector. Under the new regulation, about 100 pipeline companies will be required to have a cybersecurity coordinator on call at all times and report any incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within 12 hours. Pipelines that fail to comply with the regulation could face escalating fines starting at $7,000, a DHS official told NBC News.
But this is just a first step and broader regulation is still needed to ensure the security of key infrastructure, said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
“Robust and transparent reporting structures, assessments, and related regulations will provide a better defense strategy,” he said in an email. “The directives now being considered by Homeland Security should likely have been in place some time ago. Such approaches need to be applied across the sector and from supply through demand.”
Chapple of Notre Dame said that other industries also had lax cybersecurity before the federal government began regulating them.
“The government has stepped in and set minimum cybersecurity requirements for many other sectors, including nuclear power, health care and financial services,” he said. “It’s time to do the same thing for oil and gas pipelines.”
Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest pipelines in the country, which carries 45% of the fuel from Texas to New York, was forced to shut down after a ransomware attack by the foreign cybercriminal group known as DarkSide. Cybersecurity experts believe that Colonial lacked advanced cybersecurity defenses that can monitor networks for irregularities and detect threats like DarkSide’s infiltration tools. But Colonial is not the first pipeline affected by cyberattacks and many other pipelines in the U.S. may have similar vulnerabilities.
A ransomware attack hit an unidentified natural gas facility in 2020, forcing it to shut down for two days, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said after the attack that the owner of the facility “did not specifically consider the risk posed by cyberattacks” or prepare employees to deal with one.
Federal officials have been sounding the alarm on the lax cybersecurity measures for years. Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioners Neil Chatterjee and Richard Glick warned in a 2018 op-ed that a lack of federal cybersecurity standards left energy firms vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Government Accountability Office in 2019 found that federal cybersecurity guidelines were badly out of date and lacked preparation to respond to an attack on critical infrastructure. After the Colonial attack, the cybersecurity firm Byos estimated that “less than 25% of the U.S. oil and gas industry has adequate cybersecurity in place,” according to Bloomberg News.
One of the reasons that the federal government failed to enact regulations to protect critical infrastructure before the Colonial Pipeline attack appears to be a relentless campaign against federal regulations by the energy industry and API, which has spent more than $20 million on lobbying expenditures since 2018.
Last year, API argued that “voluntary frameworks and public-private solutions, rather than prescriptive federal regulations, offer businesses the know-how and flexibility to respond to the ever-changing security landscape.” The group says its member companies believe the private sector “should retain autonomy and the primary responsibility for protecting companies’ assets” against cyberattacks.
In the aftermath of the Colonial attack, API has changed its tune only slightly, arguing that it is “premature” to discuss regulations “until we have a full understanding of the details surrounding the Colonial attack.” API CEO Mike Sommers even suggested that it was just as important to protect the industry from regulators as from cyberattacks.
“We need, of course, to take care of cybersecurity, but we also need to protect existing infrastructure from attacks from regulators and government officials who want to shut these pipelines down,” he told CNN International this month.
API has instead pushed the federal government to grant exemptions and fuel waivers to energy companies after the Colonial attack. It has also called for policymakers to invest in infrastructure for the energy industry, which already gets millions in federal subsidies.
“For policymakers, this incident should underscore the vital importance of further investment in pipeline infrastructure and expanding the delivery systems that supply the energy resources that Americans need every day,” API’s Lem Smith wrote earlier this month.
A progressive watchdog group accused the group of trying to cash in on the cyberattack.
“In the wake of dangerous cyber threats, the American Petroleum Institute is apparently angrier with the government for stepping up to stop future attacks than they are with the hackers doing the attacking,” Kyle Herrig, president of the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement to Salon. “The government has an obligation to protect American interests from cyberattacks including pipelines and other infrastructure — API treating these serious threats as a cash cow to line oil industry pockets while lobbying against the government stepping up protections shows they have the wrong priorities.”
API denied that it opposes federal regulations, pointing Salon to a more recent comment welcoming the Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) plans to roll out a new regulation requiring companies to report cyberattacks to the government and keep a dedicated cybersecurity coordinator on call.
“Our industry works continuously with policymakers to strengthen cybersecurity, which is an economy-wide issue that requires constant collaboration and information sharing between the public and private sector,” said API Manager of Operations Security and Emergency Response Suzanne Lemieux. “API is supportive of TSA’s efforts to strengthen cyber reporting and is working closely with the administration to develop incident reporting policies and procedures that best protect our critical infrastructure, including pipelines. Any regulations should enhance reciprocal information sharing and liability protections, as well as build upon our robust existing public-private coordination to streamline and elevate our efforts to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.”
A spokesperson for the group told Salon that it has been working to improve the industry’s pipeline security standards since before the Colonial attack.
Cybersecurity experts, however, say stronger federal regulations are necessary to protect critical infrastructure.
Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Notre Dame, said in an email to Salon that defending energy infrastructure is “of the utmost national security interest,” adding that government regulation is the only suitable response. “In the absence of regulation, companies are left to their own devices to decide what level of security is appropriate and risk/benefit trade-off decisions are left in the hands of corporate executives who are focused on the firm’s bottom-line profitability,” he said.
That focus on the bottom line is a key reason why ostm energy firms have not invested enough in cybersecurity measures. Colonial Pipeline, for example, has distributed “nearly all its profits, sometimes more” to its owners even as its “aging pipelines have suffered a series of accidents,” Bloomberg News reported this month.
“Over the years, control of Colonial Pipeline has moved away from oil and gas companies towards private equity firms and institutional investors,” Bill Caram, the executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a public interest nonprofit, said in an email. “These types of investors have a history of wringing every dollar of revenue out of an asset while spending as little as possible on things like safety.”
Many companies have focused on efforts to mitigate the threat of cyberattacks, Caram said, but many others have not and don’t plan to, meaning that minimum safeguards must be in place to ensure infrastructure security and protect the environment.
“The industry has been raking in profits over the years, aided by federal subsidies,” he said. “Some operators have not been effective stewards over the critical infrastructure under their charge, diverting funds away from safety and security towards share buybacks and dividends. Taxpayers should not be expected to bail out companies for their lack of responsible asset management.”
The TSA, which the digital security of pipelines, on Thursday issued its first cybersecurity regulation for the pipeline sector. Under the new regulation, about 100 pipeline companies will be required to have a cybersecurity coordinator on call at all times and report any incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within 12 hours. Pipelines that fail to comply with the regulation could face escalating fines starting at $7,000, a DHS official told NBC News.
But this is just a first step and broader regulation is still needed to ensure the security of key infrastructure, said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
“Robust and transparent reporting structures, assessments, and related regulations will provide a better defense strategy,” he said in an email. “The directives now being considered by Homeland Security should likely have been in place some time ago. Such approaches need to be applied across the sector and from supply through demand.”
Chapple of Notre Dame said that other industries also had lax cybersecurity before the federal government began regulating them.
“The government has stepped in and set minimum cybersecurity requirements for many other sectors, including nuclear power, health care and financial services,” he said. “It’s time to do the same thing for oil and gas pipelines.”
150 years of spills: Philadelphia refinery cleanup highlights toxic legacy of fossil fuels
By Laila Kearney, Valerie Volcovici - REUTERS
2/16/2021
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Wearing blue hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirator masks, workers carted away bags of debris on a recent morning from a sprawling and now-defunct oil refinery once operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES).
Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.
Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said.
It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.
President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities.
It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.
In recent months, at least six other large U.S. oil refineries - from New Jersey to California - have announced they will close or cease oil refining as the coronavirus pandemic has sapped global fuel demand.
“The energy transition will require massive attention to both new infrastructure and addressing aging or outdated systems,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne School of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.
In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June.
Asbestos abatement alone will require four years to complete, said Roberto Perez, chief executive of the Chicago-based company.
“There’s enough pipeline to connect you from here to Florida, and the majority of that pipeline today is wrapped in asbestos,” Perez said.
The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.
A lot is riding on the outcome. Transformation of the refinery, the oldest and largest on the U.S. East Coast, could bring jobs to a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood that needs them.
But residents also want a say in how the work proceeds after enduring the brunt of the refinery’s pollution. Some complained about feeling shut out of the process during a recent virtual public meeting organized by companies involved in the cleanup.
The refinery’s previous owner, Sunoco Inc, had gone years without holding city-mandated public meetings about pollution at the site.
Evergreen Resources Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer LP, which is in charge of managing a share of the cleanup, declined to comment on the lapse in meetings. It pointed to a website it launched last year to engage with the public about the project.
Hilco’s Perez has no illusions about the work ahead.
“This is a very heavy lift,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most complicated things I’ve ever done.”
SURPRISES IN A TOXIC SOUP
Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time.
The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.
“That’s one of the reasons that a lot of these refineries have been kept going for such a long time,” said Fred Quivik, a Minnesota-based industrial historian. “They’re so contaminated, it’s hard to figure out what else to do with them.”
Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said.
Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies, said Charles Haas, professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.
Perez, Hilco’s chief executive, said clean energy will be a centerpiece of the final project. The warehouse complex, for example, will aim to feature charging stations for a fleet of electric delivery vehicles, he said.
The company is also considering a hotel, residential homes, and a restaurant on the site, two people familiar with the plans said.
The project is expected to take 10 to 15 years to finish. Cleanup and construction are projected to create about 13,000 jobs, the company said, with another 19,000 jobs tied to warehousing, offices and transporting goods.
PICKING UP THE BILL
The final price tag is unclear.
The development’s fate hinges on previous polluters paying their fair share. The site, founded by the Atlantic Refining Company, later known as ARCO, has cycled through several owners.
Sunoco, which owned the refinery for about two decades, sold its majority stake in 2012 to Carlyle Group Inc, which later formed PES. That deal stipulated that Sunoco assume all environmental liabilities dating to the plant’s inception in the 1800s. Energy Transfer, which bought Sunoco the same year as the refinery sale, now shoulders that burden.
Dallas-based Energy Transfer has $205 million in insurance to cover all of Sunoco’s decommissioned sites, including PES, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amanda Goodin, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice who has litigated major environmental cleanup cases, said comparable projects, such as clearing shuttered mining operations, can run into the billions of dollars.
“These cleanups are just enormously expensive, and companies basically never set aside enough money to fully remediate a site,” Goodin said.
Energy Transfer would not say how much it expects its share of the PES refinery cleanup to cost, but spokeswoman Vicki Granado said it is “fully funded”.
Hilco, as part of its 2020 purchase of PES, assumed liabilities tied to the last eight years of the refinery’s life, a tab it estimates will amount to “hundreds of millions” of dollars. The company declined to be more specific, but said it believes it has the funds for the job.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said it has consent orders against Sunoco and Hilco that enable the regulator to sue the companies if they attempt to walk away, spokeswoman Virginia Cain said.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Abdul Muhammad, 34, who lives near the Philadelphia refinery, says life has improved since it shut down. His asthmatic baby son now sleeps through the night, while his wife’s chronic headaches have become less frequent.
“I just don’t want chemicals and environmentally contaminated things going in and out of there,” he said of his wishes for the site.
Philly Thrive, a community activist group, has been pressuring Hilco and city officials to ensure that neighborhood residents have a say in the cleanup and redevelopment.
Some of their hopes rest with the Biden administration, which has committed to direct 40% of any federal clean-energy investment to communities most impacted by industrial pollution.
But whether climate legislation emerges from a divided Congress remains to be seen.
Philadelphia officials hope PES can become a model for refinery cleanups elsewhere. Kenyatta Johnson, a city councilman who represents neighborhoods surrounding the facility, sees a healthy, more prosperous community emerging from its toxic shadow.
“Some may deem the site a health hazard and eyesore, but nevertheless it’s an opportunity,” Johnson said.
Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.
Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said.
It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.
President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities.
It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.
In recent months, at least six other large U.S. oil refineries - from New Jersey to California - have announced they will close or cease oil refining as the coronavirus pandemic has sapped global fuel demand.
“The energy transition will require massive attention to both new infrastructure and addressing aging or outdated systems,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne School of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.
In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June.
Asbestos abatement alone will require four years to complete, said Roberto Perez, chief executive of the Chicago-based company.
“There’s enough pipeline to connect you from here to Florida, and the majority of that pipeline today is wrapped in asbestos,” Perez said.
The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.
A lot is riding on the outcome. Transformation of the refinery, the oldest and largest on the U.S. East Coast, could bring jobs to a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood that needs them.
But residents also want a say in how the work proceeds after enduring the brunt of the refinery’s pollution. Some complained about feeling shut out of the process during a recent virtual public meeting organized by companies involved in the cleanup.
The refinery’s previous owner, Sunoco Inc, had gone years without holding city-mandated public meetings about pollution at the site.
Evergreen Resources Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer LP, which is in charge of managing a share of the cleanup, declined to comment on the lapse in meetings. It pointed to a website it launched last year to engage with the public about the project.
Hilco’s Perez has no illusions about the work ahead.
“This is a very heavy lift,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most complicated things I’ve ever done.”
SURPRISES IN A TOXIC SOUP
Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time.
The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.
“That’s one of the reasons that a lot of these refineries have been kept going for such a long time,” said Fred Quivik, a Minnesota-based industrial historian. “They’re so contaminated, it’s hard to figure out what else to do with them.”
Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said.
Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies, said Charles Haas, professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.
Perez, Hilco’s chief executive, said clean energy will be a centerpiece of the final project. The warehouse complex, for example, will aim to feature charging stations for a fleet of electric delivery vehicles, he said.
The company is also considering a hotel, residential homes, and a restaurant on the site, two people familiar with the plans said.
The project is expected to take 10 to 15 years to finish. Cleanup and construction are projected to create about 13,000 jobs, the company said, with another 19,000 jobs tied to warehousing, offices and transporting goods.
PICKING UP THE BILL
The final price tag is unclear.
The development’s fate hinges on previous polluters paying their fair share. The site, founded by the Atlantic Refining Company, later known as ARCO, has cycled through several owners.
Sunoco, which owned the refinery for about two decades, sold its majority stake in 2012 to Carlyle Group Inc, which later formed PES. That deal stipulated that Sunoco assume all environmental liabilities dating to the plant’s inception in the 1800s. Energy Transfer, which bought Sunoco the same year as the refinery sale, now shoulders that burden.
Dallas-based Energy Transfer has $205 million in insurance to cover all of Sunoco’s decommissioned sites, including PES, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amanda Goodin, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice who has litigated major environmental cleanup cases, said comparable projects, such as clearing shuttered mining operations, can run into the billions of dollars.
“These cleanups are just enormously expensive, and companies basically never set aside enough money to fully remediate a site,” Goodin said.
Energy Transfer would not say how much it expects its share of the PES refinery cleanup to cost, but spokeswoman Vicki Granado said it is “fully funded”.
Hilco, as part of its 2020 purchase of PES, assumed liabilities tied to the last eight years of the refinery’s life, a tab it estimates will amount to “hundreds of millions” of dollars. The company declined to be more specific, but said it believes it has the funds for the job.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said it has consent orders against Sunoco and Hilco that enable the regulator to sue the companies if they attempt to walk away, spokeswoman Virginia Cain said.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Abdul Muhammad, 34, who lives near the Philadelphia refinery, says life has improved since it shut down. His asthmatic baby son now sleeps through the night, while his wife’s chronic headaches have become less frequent.
“I just don’t want chemicals and environmentally contaminated things going in and out of there,” he said of his wishes for the site.
Philly Thrive, a community activist group, has been pressuring Hilco and city officials to ensure that neighborhood residents have a say in the cleanup and redevelopment.
Some of their hopes rest with the Biden administration, which has committed to direct 40% of any federal clean-energy investment to communities most impacted by industrial pollution.
But whether climate legislation emerges from a divided Congress remains to be seen.
Philadelphia officials hope PES can become a model for refinery cleanups elsewhere. Kenyatta Johnson, a city councilman who represents neighborhoods surrounding the facility, sees a healthy, more prosperous community emerging from its toxic shadow.
“Some may deem the site a health hazard and eyesore, but nevertheless it’s an opportunity,” Johnson said.
pollution
'Invisible killer': fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds
Pollution from power plants, vehicles and other sources accounted for one in five of all deaths that year, more detailed analysis reveals
Oliver Milman
the guardian
Tue 9 Feb 2021 03.00 EST
Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.
Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower.
The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study’s researchers. “We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution,” said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. “It’s pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find.”
The 8.7m deaths in 2018 represent a “key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”, states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.
Scientists have established links between pervasive air pollution from burning fossil fuels and cases of heart disease, respiratory ailments and even the loss of eyesight. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year, while global economic and health costs would fall by about $2.9tn.
The new estimate of deaths, published in the journal Environmental Research, is higher than other previous attempts to quantify the mortal cost of fossil fuels. A major report by the Lancet in 2019, for example, found 4.2m annual deaths from air pollution coming from dust and wildfire smoke, as well as fossil fuel combustion.
This new research deploys a more detailed analysis of the impact of sooty airborne particles thrown out by power plants, cars, trucks and other sources. This particulate matter is known as PM2.5 as the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – or about 30 times smaller than the diameter of the average human hair. These tiny specks of pollution, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.
“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”
Instead of solely relying upon averaged estimates from satellite and surface observations that account for PM2.5 from a range of sources, the researchers used a global 3D model of atmospheric chemistry overseen by Nasa that has a more detailed resolution and can distinguish between pollution sources. “Rather than rely on averages spread across large regions, we wanted to map where the pollution is and where people live, so we could know more exactly what people are breathing,” said Karn Vohra, a graduate student at University of Birmingham and study co-author.
The researchers then developed a new risk assessment based on a tranche of new research that has found a much higher mortality rate from fossil fuel emissions than previously thought, even in relatively low concentrations. Data was taken from 2012 and then also 2018 to account for rapid improvements in air quality in China. Deaths were counted for people aged 15 and older.
The results show a varied global picture. “China’s air quality is improving but its fine particle concentrations are still staggeringly high, the US is improving, although there are hotspots in the north-east, Europe is a mixed bag and India is definitely a hotspot,” said Marais.
The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research. “Overall, however, this new work makes clearer than ever that, when we talk about the human cost of air pollution or climate change, the major causes are one and the same – fossil fuel combustion,” he said.
Philip J Landrigan, director of the program for global public health and the common good, said: “Recent research has been exploring the use of newer exposure-response functions, and several recent papers that use these newer functions have produced higher estimates of pollution-related mortality than the Global Burden of Disease analyses.” He added: “I consider it important that different risk assessment models are now being developed, because their development will force re-examination of the assumptions that underlie current models and will improve them.”
Ed Avol, chief of the environmental health division at the University of Southern California (USC), said: “The authors have applied improved methodologies to better quantify exposures and better document health outcomes in order to reach the unsettling (but not surprising) conclusion that fossil-fuels-combustion-related air pollution is more damaging to global human health than previously estimated. The remote satellite imagery exposure specialists and health epidemiologists on the research team are highly competent investigators and among the most talented scholars in this dynamic field.”
“Fossil fuels have a really large impact upon health, the climate and the environment and we need a more immediate response,” said Marais. “Some governments have carbon-neutral goals but maybe we need to move them forward given the huge damage to public health. We need much more urgency.”
Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower.
The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study’s researchers. “We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution,” said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. “It’s pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find.”
The 8.7m deaths in 2018 represent a “key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”, states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.
Scientists have established links between pervasive air pollution from burning fossil fuels and cases of heart disease, respiratory ailments and even the loss of eyesight. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year, while global economic and health costs would fall by about $2.9tn.
The new estimate of deaths, published in the journal Environmental Research, is higher than other previous attempts to quantify the mortal cost of fossil fuels. A major report by the Lancet in 2019, for example, found 4.2m annual deaths from air pollution coming from dust and wildfire smoke, as well as fossil fuel combustion.
This new research deploys a more detailed analysis of the impact of sooty airborne particles thrown out by power plants, cars, trucks and other sources. This particulate matter is known as PM2.5 as the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – or about 30 times smaller than the diameter of the average human hair. These tiny specks of pollution, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.
“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”
Instead of solely relying upon averaged estimates from satellite and surface observations that account for PM2.5 from a range of sources, the researchers used a global 3D model of atmospheric chemistry overseen by Nasa that has a more detailed resolution and can distinguish between pollution sources. “Rather than rely on averages spread across large regions, we wanted to map where the pollution is and where people live, so we could know more exactly what people are breathing,” said Karn Vohra, a graduate student at University of Birmingham and study co-author.
The researchers then developed a new risk assessment based on a tranche of new research that has found a much higher mortality rate from fossil fuel emissions than previously thought, even in relatively low concentrations. Data was taken from 2012 and then also 2018 to account for rapid improvements in air quality in China. Deaths were counted for people aged 15 and older.
The results show a varied global picture. “China’s air quality is improving but its fine particle concentrations are still staggeringly high, the US is improving, although there are hotspots in the north-east, Europe is a mixed bag and India is definitely a hotspot,” said Marais.
The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research. “Overall, however, this new work makes clearer than ever that, when we talk about the human cost of air pollution or climate change, the major causes are one and the same – fossil fuel combustion,” he said.
Philip J Landrigan, director of the program for global public health and the common good, said: “Recent research has been exploring the use of newer exposure-response functions, and several recent papers that use these newer functions have produced higher estimates of pollution-related mortality than the Global Burden of Disease analyses.” He added: “I consider it important that different risk assessment models are now being developed, because their development will force re-examination of the assumptions that underlie current models and will improve them.”
Ed Avol, chief of the environmental health division at the University of Southern California (USC), said: “The authors have applied improved methodologies to better quantify exposures and better document health outcomes in order to reach the unsettling (but not surprising) conclusion that fossil-fuels-combustion-related air pollution is more damaging to global human health than previously estimated. The remote satellite imagery exposure specialists and health epidemiologists on the research team are highly competent investigators and among the most talented scholars in this dynamic field.”
“Fossil fuels have a really large impact upon health, the climate and the environment and we need a more immediate response,” said Marais. “Some governments have carbon-neutral goals but maybe we need to move them forward given the huge damage to public health. We need much more urgency.”
Trump administration accused of trying to bully banks into financing Arctic fossil fuel extraction
November 21, 2020
By Common Dreams - raw story
Responding to grassroots pressure and shareholder activism, five of the six largest U.S. banks have decided they want no part of financing fossil fuel drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—but that isn’t stopping the Trump administration from what critics on Friday called bullying banks into funding oil and gas extraction.
“No amount of saber-rattling in the final days of the Trump administration is going to change the fact that Arctic drilling is a risky investment that any savvy financial institution would stay far away from.”
—Ben Cushing, Sierra Club
The Wall Street Journal reports the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday proposed a new rule that would bar financial institutions from refusing to lend to entire categories of lawful businesses. In the name of “fair access,” the proposed rule would force banks to finance not only the fossil fuel industry that is largely responsible for the ever-worsening climate emergency, but also other highly controversial sectors such as for-profit private prisons and firearms manufacturers.
“We need to stop the weaponization of banking as a political tool,” Brian Brooks, the acting comptroller, told the Journal. “It’s creating real economic dislocations.”
Under the proposal—which came on the heels of complaints by Republican politicians that banks are discriminating against Big Oil—institutional lenders would only be permitted to decline loans if an applicant failed to meet “quantitative, impartial, risk-based standards established by the bank in advance.”
The proposal will be open for public comment until January 4, 2021 before it is subject to final approval. That would leave Brooks just over two weeks to enact the measure before President Donald Trump leaves office on January 20. The financial services industry is likely to push back against the proposal, fearing it could force banks to finance individuals, entitites, or endeavors against their will.
Critics say the measure is meant to compel banks to finance destructive drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to the Gwich’in Indigenous people and hundreds of animal species. On Tuesday, the Trump administration began accepting requests from fossil fuel companies staking claims to where they want to drill for oil and natural gas. This, as Arctic temperatures warm to record high and Arctic sea ice recedes to record low levels.
Sierra Club campaign representative Ben Cushing fired back against GOP “discrimination” claims.
“Contrary to the claims of oil-backed politicians, banks don’t want to finance more drilling in the Arctic not because of some vast liberal conspiracy, but because it’s bad business,” he said in a statement Friday. “The idea that this constitutes discrimination is ludicrous. No amount of saber-rattling in the final days of the Trump administration is going to change the fact that Arctic drilling is a risky investment that any savvy financial institution would stay far away from.”
“No amount of saber-rattling in the final days of the Trump administration is going to change the fact that Arctic drilling is a risky investment that any savvy financial institution would stay far away from.”
—Ben Cushing, Sierra Club
The Wall Street Journal reports the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday proposed a new rule that would bar financial institutions from refusing to lend to entire categories of lawful businesses. In the name of “fair access,” the proposed rule would force banks to finance not only the fossil fuel industry that is largely responsible for the ever-worsening climate emergency, but also other highly controversial sectors such as for-profit private prisons and firearms manufacturers.
“We need to stop the weaponization of banking as a political tool,” Brian Brooks, the acting comptroller, told the Journal. “It’s creating real economic dislocations.”
Under the proposal—which came on the heels of complaints by Republican politicians that banks are discriminating against Big Oil—institutional lenders would only be permitted to decline loans if an applicant failed to meet “quantitative, impartial, risk-based standards established by the bank in advance.”
The proposal will be open for public comment until January 4, 2021 before it is subject to final approval. That would leave Brooks just over two weeks to enact the measure before President Donald Trump leaves office on January 20. The financial services industry is likely to push back against the proposal, fearing it could force banks to finance individuals, entitites, or endeavors against their will.
Critics say the measure is meant to compel banks to finance destructive drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to the Gwich’in Indigenous people and hundreds of animal species. On Tuesday, the Trump administration began accepting requests from fossil fuel companies staking claims to where they want to drill for oil and natural gas. This, as Arctic temperatures warm to record high and Arctic sea ice recedes to record low levels.
Sierra Club campaign representative Ben Cushing fired back against GOP “discrimination” claims.
“Contrary to the claims of oil-backed politicians, banks don’t want to finance more drilling in the Arctic not because of some vast liberal conspiracy, but because it’s bad business,” he said in a statement Friday. “The idea that this constitutes discrimination is ludicrous. No amount of saber-rattling in the final days of the Trump administration is going to change the fact that Arctic drilling is a risky investment that any savvy financial institution would stay far away from.”
DESTROYING THE EARTH FOR PROFIT!!!
Big oil's answer to melting Arctic: cooling the ground so it can keep drilling
Technology is keeping patches of Alaska permafrost frozen to preserve energy infrastructure even as indigenous residents’ world is transformed by the climate crisis
Nat Herz
THE GUARDIAN
Mon 19 Oct 2020 10.09 EDT
The oil company ConocoPhillips had a problem.
It wanted to pump 160,000 more barrels of oil each day from a new project on Alaska’s North Slope. But the fossil fuels it and others produce are leading to global heating, and the Arctic is melting. The firm’s drilling infrastructure could be at risk atop thawing and unstable permafrost.
A recent environmental review of the project describes the company’s solution: cooling devices that will chill the ground beneath its structures, insulating them from the effects of the climate crisis.
The oil development that is fueling climate change continues to expand in the far north, with companies moving into new areas even as they are paying for special measures to protect equipment from the dangers of thawing permafrost and increasing rainfall – both expected outcomes as Arctic temperatures rise three times as fast as those elsewhere.
Countries from Norway to Russia are advancing new Arctic oil developments. But under Donald Trump’s administration, Alaska has emerged as a hotbed of Arctic oil extraction, with big projects moving forward and millions of acres proposed to be opened to leasing.
The administration recently finalized its plan to open a piece of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to the oil industry. And drilling is expanding at an Indiana-sized region next door: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which, despite its name, also contains treasured subsistence areas for locals.
Critics of Arctic oil expansion argue that while companies can use technology to temporarily and locally dampen climate disruptions, the region’s indigenous residents cannot. And even some who support oil development in the region argue that the Trump administration’s plans go too far.
At the start of Trump’s term, the mayor of the oil-rich North Slope borough, an Iñupiaq whale hunter named Harry Brower Jr, endorsed the federal government’s plans to push development forward in the Arctic refuge and in the petroleum reserve.
Taxes on infrastructure at the huge Prudhoe Bay oilfield help generate nearly $400m a year for the 10,000-person borough, which is almost all of its revenue.
Three years after Brower’s endorsement, the administration released a rewritten management plan that would vastly expand the share of the petroleum reserve open to oil companies: four-fifths of the area would be available, up from roughly half now.
But the proposal also would allow oil and gas leasing at Teshekpuk Lake, which Brower had asked the Trump administration to keep off-limits. The lake, in tandem with nearby wetlands, is considered one of the most important animal habitats in the entire Arctic, and the region’s indigenous residents harvest its abundant fish and wildlife.
“It’s like God’s country,” said George Ahmaogak Sr, a former mayor of the North Slope borough, who has built three subsistence fishing cabins not far from the lake. “I’ve lived there, I’ve seen it and I subsisted on it, and it’s beautiful – resources are bountiful there.”
The lake hosts birds that come from all seven continents. Molting geese, unable to fly, try to avoid predators by forming rafts in the middle of lakes, sometimes by the thousands. And hundreds, even thousands, of migrating caribou travel along Teshekpuk Lake’s shore.
“I’m not an environmentalist or anything like that – I’ve been pro-development all these years,” Ahmaogak said. “But Teshekpuk is a concern of mine, and I wanted to see it protected.”
The North Slope is already warming at disconcerting speed. Utqiagvik, the region’s hub town, is one of the fastest-warming communities in the nation, with its five record warmest winters all coming since 2014.
Amid record high temperatures and record low sea ice last year, crews in Utqiagvik had to wait weeks longer than usual for the arrival of the bowhead whales that they hunt – and which make up a substantial portion of North Slope residents’ diets.
Amid that rapid change, the oil industry is enjoying a renaissance in the region, in part thanks to technologies enabling infrastructure to withstand climatic shifts. Such technology is decades old, but veterans of the oil industry say that demand for it is becoming more ubiquitous and intense as the Arctic heats up.
One Alaska company, BeadedStream, sells equipment that measures and transmits tundra temperature data, so that the oil industry can know as soon as it is frozen solid enough to transport equipment, according to National Public Radio. Another firm, Arctic Foundations, is doing increasingly brisk business selling thermosiphons – the tubes that pull heat out of the ground to keep permafrost from thawing underneath oil infrastructure.
ConocoPhillips plans to make use of these devices at its massive Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve, and it’s also building taller bridges and wider culverts to accommodate larger spring floods.
The backers of another new project, meanwhile, see opportunity in the thaw. The melting of Arctic sea ice removes an obstacle from shipping liquefied natural gas off Alaska’s North Slope, according to the Anchorage-based company, Qilak LNG.
“Our reliability quotient goes up,” said Mead Treadwell, the Republican businessman and former Alaska lieutenant governor who has helped to spearhead the project. “Climate change, the changing composition of sea ice, has made this more economic.”
At Teshekpuk Lake, the Trump administration says it can protect the region’s caribou, birds and fish with tight restrictions and time frames for drilling and development. No infrastructure would be allowed on or next to the lake itself; companies would have to drill horizontally to access it.
That’s not enough for conservation groups, which sued to block the rewritten plan in August.
“Out of all the places in the world, the Arctic is changing the fastest,” said Natalie Dawson, the head of the Audubon Society’s Alaska branch. “So, we might want to give ourselves a little bit of room to figure out what we want to protect.”
Qaiyaan Harcharek, a 38-year-old Iñupiaq hunter, fisherman and trapper, said he is disgusted by the Teshekpuk proposal. He called the area a “guaranteed food source” that his ancestors turned to in times of starvation.
Opening Teshekpuk, Harcharek said, is “absolutely reckless and dangerous”.
It wanted to pump 160,000 more barrels of oil each day from a new project on Alaska’s North Slope. But the fossil fuels it and others produce are leading to global heating, and the Arctic is melting. The firm’s drilling infrastructure could be at risk atop thawing and unstable permafrost.
A recent environmental review of the project describes the company’s solution: cooling devices that will chill the ground beneath its structures, insulating them from the effects of the climate crisis.
The oil development that is fueling climate change continues to expand in the far north, with companies moving into new areas even as they are paying for special measures to protect equipment from the dangers of thawing permafrost and increasing rainfall – both expected outcomes as Arctic temperatures rise three times as fast as those elsewhere.
Countries from Norway to Russia are advancing new Arctic oil developments. But under Donald Trump’s administration, Alaska has emerged as a hotbed of Arctic oil extraction, with big projects moving forward and millions of acres proposed to be opened to leasing.
The administration recently finalized its plan to open a piece of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to the oil industry. And drilling is expanding at an Indiana-sized region next door: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which, despite its name, also contains treasured subsistence areas for locals.
Critics of Arctic oil expansion argue that while companies can use technology to temporarily and locally dampen climate disruptions, the region’s indigenous residents cannot. And even some who support oil development in the region argue that the Trump administration’s plans go too far.
At the start of Trump’s term, the mayor of the oil-rich North Slope borough, an Iñupiaq whale hunter named Harry Brower Jr, endorsed the federal government’s plans to push development forward in the Arctic refuge and in the petroleum reserve.
Taxes on infrastructure at the huge Prudhoe Bay oilfield help generate nearly $400m a year for the 10,000-person borough, which is almost all of its revenue.
Three years after Brower’s endorsement, the administration released a rewritten management plan that would vastly expand the share of the petroleum reserve open to oil companies: four-fifths of the area would be available, up from roughly half now.
But the proposal also would allow oil and gas leasing at Teshekpuk Lake, which Brower had asked the Trump administration to keep off-limits. The lake, in tandem with nearby wetlands, is considered one of the most important animal habitats in the entire Arctic, and the region’s indigenous residents harvest its abundant fish and wildlife.
“It’s like God’s country,” said George Ahmaogak Sr, a former mayor of the North Slope borough, who has built three subsistence fishing cabins not far from the lake. “I’ve lived there, I’ve seen it and I subsisted on it, and it’s beautiful – resources are bountiful there.”
The lake hosts birds that come from all seven continents. Molting geese, unable to fly, try to avoid predators by forming rafts in the middle of lakes, sometimes by the thousands. And hundreds, even thousands, of migrating caribou travel along Teshekpuk Lake’s shore.
“I’m not an environmentalist or anything like that – I’ve been pro-development all these years,” Ahmaogak said. “But Teshekpuk is a concern of mine, and I wanted to see it protected.”
The North Slope is already warming at disconcerting speed. Utqiagvik, the region’s hub town, is one of the fastest-warming communities in the nation, with its five record warmest winters all coming since 2014.
Amid record high temperatures and record low sea ice last year, crews in Utqiagvik had to wait weeks longer than usual for the arrival of the bowhead whales that they hunt – and which make up a substantial portion of North Slope residents’ diets.
Amid that rapid change, the oil industry is enjoying a renaissance in the region, in part thanks to technologies enabling infrastructure to withstand climatic shifts. Such technology is decades old, but veterans of the oil industry say that demand for it is becoming more ubiquitous and intense as the Arctic heats up.
One Alaska company, BeadedStream, sells equipment that measures and transmits tundra temperature data, so that the oil industry can know as soon as it is frozen solid enough to transport equipment, according to National Public Radio. Another firm, Arctic Foundations, is doing increasingly brisk business selling thermosiphons – the tubes that pull heat out of the ground to keep permafrost from thawing underneath oil infrastructure.
ConocoPhillips plans to make use of these devices at its massive Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve, and it’s also building taller bridges and wider culverts to accommodate larger spring floods.
The backers of another new project, meanwhile, see opportunity in the thaw. The melting of Arctic sea ice removes an obstacle from shipping liquefied natural gas off Alaska’s North Slope, according to the Anchorage-based company, Qilak LNG.
“Our reliability quotient goes up,” said Mead Treadwell, the Republican businessman and former Alaska lieutenant governor who has helped to spearhead the project. “Climate change, the changing composition of sea ice, has made this more economic.”
At Teshekpuk Lake, the Trump administration says it can protect the region’s caribou, birds and fish with tight restrictions and time frames for drilling and development. No infrastructure would be allowed on or next to the lake itself; companies would have to drill horizontally to access it.
That’s not enough for conservation groups, which sued to block the rewritten plan in August.
“Out of all the places in the world, the Arctic is changing the fastest,” said Natalie Dawson, the head of the Audubon Society’s Alaska branch. “So, we might want to give ourselves a little bit of room to figure out what we want to protect.”
Qaiyaan Harcharek, a 38-year-old Iñupiaq hunter, fisherman and trapper, said he is disgusted by the Teshekpuk proposal. He called the area a “guaranteed food source” that his ancestors turned to in times of starvation.
Opening Teshekpuk, Harcharek said, is “absolutely reckless and dangerous”.
ExxonMobil misled the public about the climate crisis. Now they're trying to silence critics
Newly leaked documents reported by Bloomberg News show that ExxonMobil’s climate dishonesty is even worse than we thought
GEOFFREY SUPRAN AND NAOMI ORESKES
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 16 Oct 2020 08.42 EDT
In 2017, we published the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate change communications. We found that the company and its parents, Exxon and Mobil, misled the public about climate change and its severity. Central to this conclusion was the contrast between what Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists said in internal reports and scientific articles versus what Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil told the public in non-peer-reviewed publications and in “advertorials” – paid advertisements dressed up to look like opinion pieces – in The New York Times.
Newly leaked documents, reported recently by Bloomberg News, show that ExxonMobil’s climate dishonesty is even worse than we thought. While the company privately has an internal “plan for surging carbon emissions…by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece,” according to Bloomberg, ExxonMobil executives “shield their carbon forecasts from investors.” In other words, ExxonMobil drew up plans to expand fossil fuel production, internally calculated how much this would increase their carbon dioxide emissions, then failed to disclose those estimates to investors. Indeed, the company has never publicly disclosed its emissions forecasts. In response to the Bloomberg report, ExxonMobil claimed that the leaked documents were not up-to-date, but declined to provide “any details on the new projections,” according to Bloomberg.
ExxonMobil has launched a new attack on our research, penned by ExxonMobil Vice President Vijay Swarup in the academic journal where we published our original study. In fact, ExxonMobil, in trying to dismiss our findings, has inadvertently made them stronger. They have done so in three ways, which we summarize today in a peer-reviewed rebuttal.
First, ExxonMobil has not challenged any of our findings about the 187 documents analyzed in our original study. They do not deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all had early knowledge that their products have the potential to cause dangerous global warming. Nor do they deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all promoted doubt about climate science and its implications in order to delay action.
Second, ExxonMobil accused us of analyzing “less than 3%” of their advertorials. This is misleading: less than 4% of their advertorials concerned climate change; most were irrelevant. Nevertheless, we have expanded our research program to include advertorials of which we were originally unaware, and found that – spoiler alert – “the results strengthen our original finding.”
Third, ExxonMobil claims that our original publication “obscur[ed] the separateness” of Exxon and Mobil prior to their 1999 merger. This is incorrect and misleading: when Exxon and Mobil merged, ExxonMobil inherited legal and moral responsibility for both. Moreover, as we summarize in today’s rebuttal, additional work we have done in response to ExxonMobil’s complaints “further demonstrates that both Exxon and Mobil separately misled the public, and continued to do so once they merged to become ExxonMobil Corp.”
All told, “we can now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp have all, variously, misled the public.”
Unable to disprove our findings, ExxonMobil’s critique has resorted to quoting a non-peer-reviewed report commissioned and paid for by the company. Instead of subjecting their positions to the independent scrutiny of academic peer-review, as we (and all scientists) do, ExxonMobil found a backdoor, so that they could then claim that our work has been refuted.
These Big Tobacco-style tactics – doubt-mongering, character assassination, intellectual hitjobs, and undisclosed conflicts of interest – are precisely the sort of product-defense maneuvers that ExxonMobil perfected while attacking climate science and climate scientists. The only difference now is that they are coming after the social sciences, too.
But it’s hardly the first time. When we published our study, ExxonMobil immediately responded with a straw man, a falsehood, cherry picking, and ad hominem attacks. Last year, they sent a now-leaked memo to Members of European Parliament in an attempt to discredit one of us (Geoffrey Supran) who had been invited to testify to that parliament as an expert witness about the company’s history of climate denial. And for the past three years, ExxonMobil has run a social media campaign accusing us of publishing “manufactured” science at the behest of “a political campaign.” It has been viewed millions of times.
With ExxonMobil so evidently offering its critiques in bad faith, we hesitated whether to engage at all. They don’t need to win this debate, they just need to make it seem like there is one. Personally, we don’t care what ExxonMobil says about us. But their attempts to smear our research do matter, because – in the face of mounting lawsuits, surging public protests and crumbling market value – ExxonMobil is swinging for a way to discredit the work that demonstrates what they have done.
Alas, it is a swing and a miss. ExxonMobil’s reaction to our work is nothing more than a case in point of the deceptive behavior we described in our original study. ExxonMobil is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public. Indeed, as Bloomberg’s new report reveals, the company is hiding climate information, too.
RELATED: ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers
The company’s professed support for a carbon tax is a disingenuous public relations ploy to delay government action.
Newly leaked documents, reported recently by Bloomberg News, show that ExxonMobil’s climate dishonesty is even worse than we thought. While the company privately has an internal “plan for surging carbon emissions…by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece,” according to Bloomberg, ExxonMobil executives “shield their carbon forecasts from investors.” In other words, ExxonMobil drew up plans to expand fossil fuel production, internally calculated how much this would increase their carbon dioxide emissions, then failed to disclose those estimates to investors. Indeed, the company has never publicly disclosed its emissions forecasts. In response to the Bloomberg report, ExxonMobil claimed that the leaked documents were not up-to-date, but declined to provide “any details on the new projections,” according to Bloomberg.
ExxonMobil has launched a new attack on our research, penned by ExxonMobil Vice President Vijay Swarup in the academic journal where we published our original study. In fact, ExxonMobil, in trying to dismiss our findings, has inadvertently made them stronger. They have done so in three ways, which we summarize today in a peer-reviewed rebuttal.
First, ExxonMobil has not challenged any of our findings about the 187 documents analyzed in our original study. They do not deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all had early knowledge that their products have the potential to cause dangerous global warming. Nor do they deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all promoted doubt about climate science and its implications in order to delay action.
Second, ExxonMobil accused us of analyzing “less than 3%” of their advertorials. This is misleading: less than 4% of their advertorials concerned climate change; most were irrelevant. Nevertheless, we have expanded our research program to include advertorials of which we were originally unaware, and found that – spoiler alert – “the results strengthen our original finding.”
Third, ExxonMobil claims that our original publication “obscur[ed] the separateness” of Exxon and Mobil prior to their 1999 merger. This is incorrect and misleading: when Exxon and Mobil merged, ExxonMobil inherited legal and moral responsibility for both. Moreover, as we summarize in today’s rebuttal, additional work we have done in response to ExxonMobil’s complaints “further demonstrates that both Exxon and Mobil separately misled the public, and continued to do so once they merged to become ExxonMobil Corp.”
All told, “we can now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp have all, variously, misled the public.”
Unable to disprove our findings, ExxonMobil’s critique has resorted to quoting a non-peer-reviewed report commissioned and paid for by the company. Instead of subjecting their positions to the independent scrutiny of academic peer-review, as we (and all scientists) do, ExxonMobil found a backdoor, so that they could then claim that our work has been refuted.
These Big Tobacco-style tactics – doubt-mongering, character assassination, intellectual hitjobs, and undisclosed conflicts of interest – are precisely the sort of product-defense maneuvers that ExxonMobil perfected while attacking climate science and climate scientists. The only difference now is that they are coming after the social sciences, too.
But it’s hardly the first time. When we published our study, ExxonMobil immediately responded with a straw man, a falsehood, cherry picking, and ad hominem attacks. Last year, they sent a now-leaked memo to Members of European Parliament in an attempt to discredit one of us (Geoffrey Supran) who had been invited to testify to that parliament as an expert witness about the company’s history of climate denial. And for the past three years, ExxonMobil has run a social media campaign accusing us of publishing “manufactured” science at the behest of “a political campaign.” It has been viewed millions of times.
With ExxonMobil so evidently offering its critiques in bad faith, we hesitated whether to engage at all. They don’t need to win this debate, they just need to make it seem like there is one. Personally, we don’t care what ExxonMobil says about us. But their attempts to smear our research do matter, because – in the face of mounting lawsuits, surging public protests and crumbling market value – ExxonMobil is swinging for a way to discredit the work that demonstrates what they have done.
Alas, it is a swing and a miss. ExxonMobil’s reaction to our work is nothing more than a case in point of the deceptive behavior we described in our original study. ExxonMobil is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public. Indeed, as Bloomberg’s new report reveals, the company is hiding climate information, too.
RELATED: ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers
The company’s professed support for a carbon tax is a disingenuous public relations ploy to delay government action.
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Coal Knew, Too
A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change.
By Élan Young - huff post
11/22/2019 05:45 am ET
“Exxon knew.” Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like Exxon Mobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists.
But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.
In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
Cherry was floored.
“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”
In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
Climate change is not Cherry’s area of study, but he was struck by how the tone of the articles differed from the way many fossil fuel companies talk about climate change today. Rather than engage in denial, the articles offered a fairly straightforward acknowledgment of the emerging science. (This reporter is also a writer for UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, where Cherry teaches.)
As Cherry did some of his own digging, he soon realized his discovery could be the first evidence that the coal industry was aware of the impending climate crisis more than half a century ago — a finding that could open mining companies to the type of litigation that the oil industry is now facing.
Decades Of Denial
While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”
“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.
“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”
Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost: “Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”
Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even Exxon Mobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.
The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.
All of this was taking place well after climate change had become a commonly understood idea in the scientific community. A 1965 report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was the first from the White House to address climate change (and is likely what precipitated the Mining Congress Journal article). “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” it warned. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about what was then known as the “greenhouse effect.” And in 1992, the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to begin addressing the problem.
But as this consensus emerged, so too did a wave of industry-funded climate denial via vast, shadowy networks of front groups, public relations campaigns and scientists for hire.
Pulling Back The Curtain
In 2015, journalists at InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University exposed internal Exxon Mobil documents showing that the company’s scientists had a deep understanding of climate change even as Exxon worked publicly to downplay that science.
Twenty state attorneys general launched an “Exxon Knew” campaign, which eventually led to communities across the country filing at least 14 legal challenges against Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. One lawsuit, from the New York state attorney general’s office, went to trial on Oct. 22 and focuses on how the company accounted for the costs of potential future regulations on climate change. The Massachusetts attorney general filed another suit on Oct. 24, this time claiming the company had engaged in deceptive advertising and misled investors about the systemic financial risks to its business posed by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Earlier this month, two of Hawaii’s biggest municipalities sued Exxon and other big oil companies to recoup the costs of adapting to rising seas and more violent storms.
Evidence of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when is critical to the legal strategy of those seeking damages for carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel companies were aware of their products’ harmful effects on the planet, they could be held liable for damages.
Legal liability boils down to four factors, said David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, which is representing counties in Colorado that have filed suit: one, whether the defendants knew that their products would cause climate change; two, what they told or did not tell the public about the consequences of using their products; three, the extent of injuries caused by climate change; and four, whether the defendants’ actions have led to a portion of those injuries. What the plaintiffs in these suits can prove remains to be seen.
What we do know is that coal, when burned, has by far the biggest climate footprint of any fossil fuel, producing more carbon dioxide per unit than oil or gas. In the U.S. alone, coal produced 65% of the power sector’s planet-warming emissions. The 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal certainly raises questions about what the coal industry knew at the time.
Robert Brulle, a professor emeritus of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, authored a recent paper that suggests the coal industry must have known quite a bit, given how prominently it positioned itself in the climate denial movement.
Brulle researched 12 major groups and coalitions that argued against mandatory regulation of carbon dioxide from 1989 to 2015 — which he calls the “climate change countermovement.” That countermovement included 2,000 different businesses, political or social groups, as well as other organizations, but Brulle found that 179 core organizations belonged to multiple coalitions. Coal companies and predominantly coal-burning utilities were the most prevalent. He describes oil and gas companies as “more of a marginal player” by comparison.
“The coal mining industry — the utilities that were burning it for electricity, along with the railroads who were hauling it — and manufacturing industries like steel were the first corporate forces to become climate deniers and try to block action on climate policy,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. “They fought the hardest because they had the biggest existential threat.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, Exxon and other oil giants leased large parcels of land for coal mining with the goal of manufacturing synthetic fuels and lowering U.S. dependence on the Middle East.
Some previously released documents show that Exxon’s scientists began advising that the world phase out coal as a fuel as early as 1979. In one scenario, the Exxon scientists concluded that non-fossil fuels would need to be substituted for coal beginning in the 1990s to keep carbon dioxide levels below atmospheric concentrations of 440 parts per million. In 1999, Exxon merged with Mobil, and by 2002, Exxon Mobil had dumped its coal assets.
Meanwhile, the coal industry tried to reinvent itself with the concept of “clean coal.” This as-yet-undelivered promise that carbon capture and other technological advances could lower coal’s environmental impact has been around for decades but resurged in the early 2000s as regulations seemed imminent.
The biggest proponent of this idea was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal front group that spent $35 million on public relations campaigns in 2008 alone, seeking to influence the election. A year later, ACCCE was caught sending Congress fraudulent letters opposing federal climate legislation and pretending to be from veterans, women’s and civil rights groups. The incident led many members to leave the organization, but Peabody remains a member to this day.
“Its whole mission was to stop climate regulations but pretend that they were in favor of clean coal, which, of course, doesn’t exist,” said Davies.
Peabody Energy filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, the same year carbon dioxide levels hit 400 parts per million. Eight other coal companies have filed for bankruptcy this year. Even as the Trump administration has promised a coal resurgence and rolled back Obama-era regulations, the industry’s profitability continues to experience a downward slide. If the slogan “Coal Knew” ever does take off, it’s unclear who’ll be left to sue.
But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.
In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
Cherry was floored.
“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”
In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
Climate change is not Cherry’s area of study, but he was struck by how the tone of the articles differed from the way many fossil fuel companies talk about climate change today. Rather than engage in denial, the articles offered a fairly straightforward acknowledgment of the emerging science. (This reporter is also a writer for UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, where Cherry teaches.)
As Cherry did some of his own digging, he soon realized his discovery could be the first evidence that the coal industry was aware of the impending climate crisis more than half a century ago — a finding that could open mining companies to the type of litigation that the oil industry is now facing.
Decades Of Denial
While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”
“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.
“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”
Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost: “Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”
Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even Exxon Mobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.
The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.
All of this was taking place well after climate change had become a commonly understood idea in the scientific community. A 1965 report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was the first from the White House to address climate change (and is likely what precipitated the Mining Congress Journal article). “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” it warned. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about what was then known as the “greenhouse effect.” And in 1992, the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to begin addressing the problem.
But as this consensus emerged, so too did a wave of industry-funded climate denial via vast, shadowy networks of front groups, public relations campaigns and scientists for hire.
Pulling Back The Curtain
In 2015, journalists at InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University exposed internal Exxon Mobil documents showing that the company’s scientists had a deep understanding of climate change even as Exxon worked publicly to downplay that science.
Twenty state attorneys general launched an “Exxon Knew” campaign, which eventually led to communities across the country filing at least 14 legal challenges against Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. One lawsuit, from the New York state attorney general’s office, went to trial on Oct. 22 and focuses on how the company accounted for the costs of potential future regulations on climate change. The Massachusetts attorney general filed another suit on Oct. 24, this time claiming the company had engaged in deceptive advertising and misled investors about the systemic financial risks to its business posed by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Earlier this month, two of Hawaii’s biggest municipalities sued Exxon and other big oil companies to recoup the costs of adapting to rising seas and more violent storms.
Evidence of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when is critical to the legal strategy of those seeking damages for carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel companies were aware of their products’ harmful effects on the planet, they could be held liable for damages.
Legal liability boils down to four factors, said David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, which is representing counties in Colorado that have filed suit: one, whether the defendants knew that their products would cause climate change; two, what they told or did not tell the public about the consequences of using their products; three, the extent of injuries caused by climate change; and four, whether the defendants’ actions have led to a portion of those injuries. What the plaintiffs in these suits can prove remains to be seen.
What we do know is that coal, when burned, has by far the biggest climate footprint of any fossil fuel, producing more carbon dioxide per unit than oil or gas. In the U.S. alone, coal produced 65% of the power sector’s planet-warming emissions. The 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal certainly raises questions about what the coal industry knew at the time.
Robert Brulle, a professor emeritus of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, authored a recent paper that suggests the coal industry must have known quite a bit, given how prominently it positioned itself in the climate denial movement.
Brulle researched 12 major groups and coalitions that argued against mandatory regulation of carbon dioxide from 1989 to 2015 — which he calls the “climate change countermovement.” That countermovement included 2,000 different businesses, political or social groups, as well as other organizations, but Brulle found that 179 core organizations belonged to multiple coalitions. Coal companies and predominantly coal-burning utilities were the most prevalent. He describes oil and gas companies as “more of a marginal player” by comparison.
“The coal mining industry — the utilities that were burning it for electricity, along with the railroads who were hauling it — and manufacturing industries like steel were the first corporate forces to become climate deniers and try to block action on climate policy,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. “They fought the hardest because they had the biggest existential threat.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, Exxon and other oil giants leased large parcels of land for coal mining with the goal of manufacturing synthetic fuels and lowering U.S. dependence on the Middle East.
Some previously released documents show that Exxon’s scientists began advising that the world phase out coal as a fuel as early as 1979. In one scenario, the Exxon scientists concluded that non-fossil fuels would need to be substituted for coal beginning in the 1990s to keep carbon dioxide levels below atmospheric concentrations of 440 parts per million. In 1999, Exxon merged with Mobil, and by 2002, Exxon Mobil had dumped its coal assets.
Meanwhile, the coal industry tried to reinvent itself with the concept of “clean coal.” This as-yet-undelivered promise that carbon capture and other technological advances could lower coal’s environmental impact has been around for decades but resurged in the early 2000s as regulations seemed imminent.
The biggest proponent of this idea was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal front group that spent $35 million on public relations campaigns in 2008 alone, seeking to influence the election. A year later, ACCCE was caught sending Congress fraudulent letters opposing federal climate legislation and pretending to be from veterans, women’s and civil rights groups. The incident led many members to leave the organization, but Peabody remains a member to this day.
“Its whole mission was to stop climate regulations but pretend that they were in favor of clean coal, which, of course, doesn’t exist,” said Davies.
Peabody Energy filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, the same year carbon dioxide levels hit 400 parts per million. Eight other coal companies have filed for bankruptcy this year. Even as the Trump administration has promised a coal resurgence and rolled back Obama-era regulations, the industry’s profitability continues to experience a downward slide. If the slogan “Coal Knew” ever does take off, it’s unclear who’ll be left to sue.
How Big Oil exploited a loophole in the law to bilk the United States out of billions
Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate - alternet
October 30, 2019
When you’re undergoing a dental procedure, there’s one thing you never want to hear your dentist say: “Oops!”
It’s also alarming to hear that from a former senator 25 years after he passed a temporary subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly owned crude they took from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to cut our dependence on the Arabian cartel by giving oil corporations a brief reprieve on royalties so they would drill here.
But — oops! — our lawmakers made a big (and costly) slip-up: They forgot to specify in the law that the exemption was temporary. Republicans and Democrats had agreed that when market prices recovered, the corporations were to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says an official who was involved in the original negotiations.
Sure enough, market prices had recovered by 2006. But “greed” is both the industry’s motto and its modus operandi, so the oil barons that had benefited from this public generosity in their time of need have thumbed their nose at the public ever since, essentially saying, “Tough luck, suckers! There’s no limit in the law, so we’re just gonna keep sucking up all the oil we can without paying a dime in royalties.”
This is no petty thievery. Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and even China’s state-run oil corporation are among the giants that have taken at least $18 billion from our nation’s treasury so far. And their haul increases every day that they’re allowed to pump up profits through this unintended loophole.
The only thing bigger than Big Oil’s avarice is its arrogance. The industry’s lobbying front group has warned Congress not to try plugging the loophole, declaring that such an attempt would be “engaging in a dangerous game of bait and switch.”
Big Oil’s greed knows no bounds either. For example, Exxon, which banked a whopping $290 billion in sales last year, makes money the old-fashioned way: lying, cheating, exploiting workers, extracting subsidies from taxpayers, dodging taxes, refusing to pay for its pollution and other forms of corporate finagling.
But mighty Exxon now finds itself in federal court, finally called to account for lying to its own shareholders, the public and government officials. At issue are the true financial and environmental costs of the damages that its oil and gas operations are inflicting upon Earth’s climate. The legal case points out that it is perversely profitable to pollute if you don’t have to include the costs of those damages on your corporate books.
Technically, the charge is that Exxon kept two sets of financial books: one secretly acknowledging internally that its pollution was devastating our climate and would eventually cost shareholders a fortune, the other a rosy public presentation hiding those costs in order to claim that its fossil fuel empire was more cost-effective than wind, solar and other clean energy sources.
This blatant deceit has defrauded shareholders about the actual value of their investment, diverted public policy from necessary conversion to nonpolluting fuels and accelerated the radical impacts of climate change.
While the lawsuit filed against Exxon will largely focus on arcane aspects of securities law, it is fundamentally about corporate morality. As environmental activist Lee Wasserman recently put it, the case is a chance “for society to free itself from the grasp of this lethal industry,” adding that “we’re victims of a small group of gargantuan companies that recklessly and deliberately ignored the implications of their own science and worked to deceive the public.”
Indeed, their recklessness continues. Even though Exxon now admits the damage its products are causing, Wasserman notes, the careless behemoth “plans to increase its oil output by 25 percent by 2025.”
Of course, any monetary fine the corporation might have to pay is only a tiny fraction of its yearly income, so that’s no deterrent. The real punishment is that Exxon and its executives are tagging themselves as the same morally repugnant profiteers those in the soulless tobacco industry have been. One force bigger than Big Oil is an infuriated public. To learn more and to fight for our environment, go to the Sierra Club.
It’s also alarming to hear that from a former senator 25 years after he passed a temporary subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly owned crude they took from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to cut our dependence on the Arabian cartel by giving oil corporations a brief reprieve on royalties so they would drill here.
But — oops! — our lawmakers made a big (and costly) slip-up: They forgot to specify in the law that the exemption was temporary. Republicans and Democrats had agreed that when market prices recovered, the corporations were to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says an official who was involved in the original negotiations.
Sure enough, market prices had recovered by 2006. But “greed” is both the industry’s motto and its modus operandi, so the oil barons that had benefited from this public generosity in their time of need have thumbed their nose at the public ever since, essentially saying, “Tough luck, suckers! There’s no limit in the law, so we’re just gonna keep sucking up all the oil we can without paying a dime in royalties.”
This is no petty thievery. Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and even China’s state-run oil corporation are among the giants that have taken at least $18 billion from our nation’s treasury so far. And their haul increases every day that they’re allowed to pump up profits through this unintended loophole.
The only thing bigger than Big Oil’s avarice is its arrogance. The industry’s lobbying front group has warned Congress not to try plugging the loophole, declaring that such an attempt would be “engaging in a dangerous game of bait and switch.”
Big Oil’s greed knows no bounds either. For example, Exxon, which banked a whopping $290 billion in sales last year, makes money the old-fashioned way: lying, cheating, exploiting workers, extracting subsidies from taxpayers, dodging taxes, refusing to pay for its pollution and other forms of corporate finagling.
But mighty Exxon now finds itself in federal court, finally called to account for lying to its own shareholders, the public and government officials. At issue are the true financial and environmental costs of the damages that its oil and gas operations are inflicting upon Earth’s climate. The legal case points out that it is perversely profitable to pollute if you don’t have to include the costs of those damages on your corporate books.
Technically, the charge is that Exxon kept two sets of financial books: one secretly acknowledging internally that its pollution was devastating our climate and would eventually cost shareholders a fortune, the other a rosy public presentation hiding those costs in order to claim that its fossil fuel empire was more cost-effective than wind, solar and other clean energy sources.
This blatant deceit has defrauded shareholders about the actual value of their investment, diverted public policy from necessary conversion to nonpolluting fuels and accelerated the radical impacts of climate change.
While the lawsuit filed against Exxon will largely focus on arcane aspects of securities law, it is fundamentally about corporate morality. As environmental activist Lee Wasserman recently put it, the case is a chance “for society to free itself from the grasp of this lethal industry,” adding that “we’re victims of a small group of gargantuan companies that recklessly and deliberately ignored the implications of their own science and worked to deceive the public.”
Indeed, their recklessness continues. Even though Exxon now admits the damage its products are causing, Wasserman notes, the careless behemoth “plans to increase its oil output by 25 percent by 2025.”
Of course, any monetary fine the corporation might have to pay is only a tiny fraction of its yearly income, so that’s no deterrent. The real punishment is that Exxon and its executives are tagging themselves as the same morally repugnant profiteers those in the soulless tobacco industry have been. One force bigger than Big Oil is an infuriated public. To learn more and to fight for our environment, go to the Sierra Club.
Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
by Charlie Simmons | the smirking chimp
October 20, 2019 - 5:24am
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General Assembly in New York: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.”
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
the polluters
destroying the earth for profit!!!
World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
Data reveals crucial role of BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard in climate crisis
by Patrick Greenfield - the guardian
Sat 12 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
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The world’s three largest money managers have built a combined $300bn fossil fuel investment portfolio using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions, the Guardian can reveal.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
- Vanguard ($161.1bn), BlackRock ($87.3bn) and State Street ($38.3bn) oversee a combined $286.7bn of shares in oil, coal and gas companies through 1,712 funds. Their total combined portfolio is likely to be higher as the calculation excludes direct holdings and non-listed fund holdings.
- The potential CO2 emissions from the investments have increased from 10.593 gigatonnes (Gt) to 14.283Gt since the Paris agreement, equivalent to 38% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions last year.
- BlackRock and Vanguard opposed or abstained on more than 80% of climate-related motions at FTSE 100 and S&P 500 fossil fuel companies between 2015 and 2019, according to data provided by ProxyInsight.
- The big three are among a number of asset managers that offer “climate-friendly” and “sustainable” investment funds that have substantial holdings in fossil fuel companies.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
The dark side of America's rise to oil superpower
Bloomberg
Javier Blas
The last time U.S. drillers pumped 10 million barrels of crude a day, Richard Nixon was in the White House. The first oil crisis hadn’t yet scared Americans into buying Toyotas, and fracking was an experimental technique a handful of engineers were trying, with meager success, to popularize. It was 1970, and oil sold for $1.80 a barrel.
Almost five decades later, with oil hovering near $65 a barrel, daily U.S. crude output is about to hit the eight-digit mark again. It’s a significant milestone on the way to fulfilling a dream that a generation ago seemed far-fetched: By the end of the year, the U.S. may well be the world’s biggest oil producer. With that, America takes a big step toward energy independence.
The U.S. crowing from the top of a hill long occupied by Saudi Arabia or Russia would scramble geopolitics. A new world energy order could emerge. That shuffling will be good for America but not so much for the planet.
For one, the influence of one of the most powerful forces of the past half-century, the modern petrostate, would be diminished. No longer would “America First” diplomats need to tiptoe around oil-supplying nations such as Saudi Arabia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would find it tougher to agree on production guidelines, and lower prices could result, reopening old wounds in the cartel. That would take some muscle out of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, while Russia’s oligarchs would find it more difficult to maintain the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed.
President Donald Trump, sensing an opportunity, is looking past independence to what he calls energy dominance. His administration plans to open vast ocean acreage to offshore exploration and for the first time in 40 years allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It may take years to tap, but the Alaska payoff alone is eye-popping—an estimated 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude.
It sounds good, but be careful what you wish for. The last three years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began in the 19th century, and there’s little room in Trump’s plan for energy sources that treat the planet kindly. Governors of coastal states have already pointed out that an offshore spill could devastate tourism—another trillion-dollar industry—not to mention wreck fragile littoral environments. Florida has already applied for a waiver from such drilling.
More supply could lower prices, in turn discouraging investments in renewables such as solar and wind. Those tend to spike when oil prices rise, so enthusiasm for nonpolluting, nonwarming energies of the future could wane.
For now, though, the petroleum train is chugging. And you can thank the resilience of the U.S. shale industry for it.
Shale’s triumph seemed impossible a few years ago. In late 2014, Saudi Arabia targeted rivals, including American drillers. Rather than cutting production to keep prices high, Saudi Arabia persuaded OPEC to open the taps, sending prices lower than $40 a barrel in December, down from more than $100 a barrel just four months previous. The Saudis were hoping to starve the shale revolution. At first, they seemed poised to succeed, like they had in the past. U.S. production fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day to 8.5 million barrels a day. Bankruptcies riddled shale patches from Texas’ Permian Basin to the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Rather than declare defeat, shale companies dug in, slashing costs and borrowing like crazy to keep drilling. By late 2016 the Saudis blinked. They persuaded OPEC and the Russians to cut output. Slowly, steadily, West Texas Intermediate, the oil benchmark traded in New York, rose from $26 a barrel in February 2016 to where it lingers today.
What didn’t kill shale drillers made them stronger. The survivors have transformed themselves into leaner, faster versions that can thrive even at lower oil prices. Shale isn’t any longer just about grit, sweat, and luck. Technology is key. Geologists use smartphones to direct drilling, and companies are putting in longer and longer wells. At current prices, drillers can walk and chew gum at the same time—lifting production and profits simultaneously.
Fracking—blasting water and sand deep underground to free oil from shale rock — has improved, too. It’s what many call Shale 2.0. And it’s not just the risk-taking pioneers who dominated the first phase of the revolution, such as Trump friend Harold Hamm of Continental Resources Inc., who are benefiting from the surge. Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., and other major oil groups are joining the rush. U.S. shale is “seemingly on steroids,” says Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “The market remains enchanted by the ability of shale producers to adapt to lower prices and to continue to grow.”
The results are historic. In October, American net imports of crude and refined products dropped below 2.5 million barrels a day, the lowest since official data were first collected in 1973. A decade ago, U.S. net oil imports stood at more than 12 million barrels a day. “For the last 40 years, since the Arab oil embargo, we’ve had a mindset of energy scarcity,” says Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former Obama administration official. “As a result of the shale revolution, the U.S. has emerged as an energy superpower.”
For OPEC, the emergent superpower presents an unprecedented challenge. If the cartel cuts production, shale drillers can respond by boosting output, stealing market share from OPEC nations and undermining their effort to manipulate prices. The only solution for OPEC is to prolong the limits, as it’s doing now, and hope for the best. If cooperation between OPEC and Russia breaks down, it’s not impossible that OPEC breaks down, too.
If Shale 2.0 output keeps prices low, Russia would be a big loser. Moscow has used oil revenue to finance aggressive foreign intervention from Ukraine to Syria. The only solution is to continue cooperating with Saudi Arabia on keeping production low — not something the oligarchs relish.
With shale surging, U.S. imports of Saudi oil plunged to a 30-year low last year. The turnabout makes China and Japan far more dependent than the U.S. on the Middle East. It’s now possible for the U.S. to argue that other countries should help shoulder the burden of policing the shipping lanes leading to Middle Eastern and North African oil exporters.
Yet not all traffic lights are green for the U.S. It’s not immune from the ups and downs of the world market. When the price rises because of, say, political upheaval in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter where you are and how much you pump. The price rises in America, too.
There’s another problem: Shale 2.0 could hurt refiners. Shale oil is too good. For years, refiners spent billions of dollars on special equipment to process the dense, high-sulphur, low-quality crudes coming from Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and Saudi Arabia. The quality of shale oil is so high that it yields little diesel, the fuel that powers manufacturing.
Such limitations may be mere speed bumps. But U.S. dominance is far from a panacea. It won’t reverse climate change. It won’t lessen the political influence of fossil-fuel producers in Washington. Nor will it completely neutralize the political influence of erratic petrostates.
With demand rising despite the emergence of renewables and the development of electric vehicles, shale may struggle to keep pace with global consumption. There’s a chance the world will witness that rarest of market loop-de-loops — high oil prices as well as rising U.S. production.
Saudi Arabia and Russia could then remain formidable obstacles to U.S. energy independence. They would be crowing from the top of the hill even as they keep a wary eye on America’s shale drillers.
These are troubles that would have been an embarrassment of riches for Americans who had to wait in line to fill up in the 1970s, when the U.S. determining its own energy future was just a dream. Any celebration over this accomplishment ignores the evidence that such dependence on fossil fuels is no independence at all.
Almost five decades later, with oil hovering near $65 a barrel, daily U.S. crude output is about to hit the eight-digit mark again. It’s a significant milestone on the way to fulfilling a dream that a generation ago seemed far-fetched: By the end of the year, the U.S. may well be the world’s biggest oil producer. With that, America takes a big step toward energy independence.
The U.S. crowing from the top of a hill long occupied by Saudi Arabia or Russia would scramble geopolitics. A new world energy order could emerge. That shuffling will be good for America but not so much for the planet.
For one, the influence of one of the most powerful forces of the past half-century, the modern petrostate, would be diminished. No longer would “America First” diplomats need to tiptoe around oil-supplying nations such as Saudi Arabia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would find it tougher to agree on production guidelines, and lower prices could result, reopening old wounds in the cartel. That would take some muscle out of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, while Russia’s oligarchs would find it more difficult to maintain the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed.
President Donald Trump, sensing an opportunity, is looking past independence to what he calls energy dominance. His administration plans to open vast ocean acreage to offshore exploration and for the first time in 40 years allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It may take years to tap, but the Alaska payoff alone is eye-popping—an estimated 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude.
It sounds good, but be careful what you wish for. The last three years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began in the 19th century, and there’s little room in Trump’s plan for energy sources that treat the planet kindly. Governors of coastal states have already pointed out that an offshore spill could devastate tourism—another trillion-dollar industry—not to mention wreck fragile littoral environments. Florida has already applied for a waiver from such drilling.
More supply could lower prices, in turn discouraging investments in renewables such as solar and wind. Those tend to spike when oil prices rise, so enthusiasm for nonpolluting, nonwarming energies of the future could wane.
For now, though, the petroleum train is chugging. And you can thank the resilience of the U.S. shale industry for it.
Shale’s triumph seemed impossible a few years ago. In late 2014, Saudi Arabia targeted rivals, including American drillers. Rather than cutting production to keep prices high, Saudi Arabia persuaded OPEC to open the taps, sending prices lower than $40 a barrel in December, down from more than $100 a barrel just four months previous. The Saudis were hoping to starve the shale revolution. At first, they seemed poised to succeed, like they had in the past. U.S. production fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day to 8.5 million barrels a day. Bankruptcies riddled shale patches from Texas’ Permian Basin to the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Rather than declare defeat, shale companies dug in, slashing costs and borrowing like crazy to keep drilling. By late 2016 the Saudis blinked. They persuaded OPEC and the Russians to cut output. Slowly, steadily, West Texas Intermediate, the oil benchmark traded in New York, rose from $26 a barrel in February 2016 to where it lingers today.
What didn’t kill shale drillers made them stronger. The survivors have transformed themselves into leaner, faster versions that can thrive even at lower oil prices. Shale isn’t any longer just about grit, sweat, and luck. Technology is key. Geologists use smartphones to direct drilling, and companies are putting in longer and longer wells. At current prices, drillers can walk and chew gum at the same time—lifting production and profits simultaneously.
Fracking—blasting water and sand deep underground to free oil from shale rock — has improved, too. It’s what many call Shale 2.0. And it’s not just the risk-taking pioneers who dominated the first phase of the revolution, such as Trump friend Harold Hamm of Continental Resources Inc., who are benefiting from the surge. Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., and other major oil groups are joining the rush. U.S. shale is “seemingly on steroids,” says Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “The market remains enchanted by the ability of shale producers to adapt to lower prices and to continue to grow.”
The results are historic. In October, American net imports of crude and refined products dropped below 2.5 million barrels a day, the lowest since official data were first collected in 1973. A decade ago, U.S. net oil imports stood at more than 12 million barrels a day. “For the last 40 years, since the Arab oil embargo, we’ve had a mindset of energy scarcity,” says Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former Obama administration official. “As a result of the shale revolution, the U.S. has emerged as an energy superpower.”
For OPEC, the emergent superpower presents an unprecedented challenge. If the cartel cuts production, shale drillers can respond by boosting output, stealing market share from OPEC nations and undermining their effort to manipulate prices. The only solution for OPEC is to prolong the limits, as it’s doing now, and hope for the best. If cooperation between OPEC and Russia breaks down, it’s not impossible that OPEC breaks down, too.
If Shale 2.0 output keeps prices low, Russia would be a big loser. Moscow has used oil revenue to finance aggressive foreign intervention from Ukraine to Syria. The only solution is to continue cooperating with Saudi Arabia on keeping production low — not something the oligarchs relish.
With shale surging, U.S. imports of Saudi oil plunged to a 30-year low last year. The turnabout makes China and Japan far more dependent than the U.S. on the Middle East. It’s now possible for the U.S. to argue that other countries should help shoulder the burden of policing the shipping lanes leading to Middle Eastern and North African oil exporters.
Yet not all traffic lights are green for the U.S. It’s not immune from the ups and downs of the world market. When the price rises because of, say, political upheaval in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter where you are and how much you pump. The price rises in America, too.
There’s another problem: Shale 2.0 could hurt refiners. Shale oil is too good. For years, refiners spent billions of dollars on special equipment to process the dense, high-sulphur, low-quality crudes coming from Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and Saudi Arabia. The quality of shale oil is so high that it yields little diesel, the fuel that powers manufacturing.
Such limitations may be mere speed bumps. But U.S. dominance is far from a panacea. It won’t reverse climate change. It won’t lessen the political influence of fossil-fuel producers in Washington. Nor will it completely neutralize the political influence of erratic petrostates.
With demand rising despite the emergence of renewables and the development of electric vehicles, shale may struggle to keep pace with global consumption. There’s a chance the world will witness that rarest of market loop-de-loops — high oil prices as well as rising U.S. production.
Saudi Arabia and Russia could then remain formidable obstacles to U.S. energy independence. They would be crowing from the top of the hill even as they keep a wary eye on America’s shale drillers.
These are troubles that would have been an embarrassment of riches for Americans who had to wait in line to fill up in the 1970s, when the U.S. determining its own energy future was just a dream. Any celebration over this accomplishment ignores the evidence that such dependence on fossil fuels is no independence at all.
they knew!!!
On its hundredth birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming
Somebody cut the cake – new documents reveal that American oil writ large was warned of global warming at its 100th birthday party.
Benjamin Franta
the guardian
Mon 1 Jan ‘18 06.00 EST
...The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:
Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:
At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.
And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential.
Talk about a buzzkill.
How did the petroleum industry respond? Eight years later, on a cold, clear day in March, Robert Dunlop walked the halls of the U.S. Congress. The 1967 oil embargo was weeks away, and the Senate was investigating the potential of electric vehicles. Dunlop, testifying now as the Chairman of the Board of the American Petroleum Institute, posed the question, “tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” His preferred answer was the latter:
We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.
Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
We might surmise that the odorless gas simply passed under Robert Dunlop’s nose unnoticed. But less than a year later, the American Petroleum Institute quietly received a report on air pollution it had commissioned from the Stanford Research Institute, and its warning on carbon dioxide was direct:
Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
Thus, by 1968, American oil held in its hands yet another notice of its products’ world-altering side effects, one affirming that global warming was not just cause for research and concern, but a reality needing corrective action: “Past and present studies of CO2 are detailed,” the Stanford Research Institute advised. “What is lacking, however, is [...] work toward systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”
This early history illuminates the American petroleum industry’s long-running awareness of the planetary warming caused by its products. Teller’s warning, revealed in documentation I found while searching archives, is another brick in a growing wall of evidence.
In the closing days of those optimistic 1950s, Robert Dunlop may have been one of the first oilmen to be warned of the tragedy now looming before us. By the time he departed this world in 1995, the American Petroleum Institute he once led was denying the climate science it had been informed of decades before, attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and fighting climate policies wherever they arose.
This is a history of choices made, paths not taken, and the fall from grace of one of the greatest enterprises – oil, the “prime mover” – ever to tread the earth. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.
American oil’s awareness of global warming – and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction – goes further than any one company. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. The industry is implicated to its core by the history of its largest representative, the American Petroleum Institute.
It is now too late to stop a great deal of change to our planet’s climate and its global payload of disease, destruction, and death. But we can fight to halt climate change as quickly as possible, and we can uncover the history of how we got here. There are lessons to be learned, and there is justice to be served.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:
At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.
And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential.
Talk about a buzzkill.
How did the petroleum industry respond? Eight years later, on a cold, clear day in March, Robert Dunlop walked the halls of the U.S. Congress. The 1967 oil embargo was weeks away, and the Senate was investigating the potential of electric vehicles. Dunlop, testifying now as the Chairman of the Board of the American Petroleum Institute, posed the question, “tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” His preferred answer was the latter:
We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.
Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
We might surmise that the odorless gas simply passed under Robert Dunlop’s nose unnoticed. But less than a year later, the American Petroleum Institute quietly received a report on air pollution it had commissioned from the Stanford Research Institute, and its warning on carbon dioxide was direct:
Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
Thus, by 1968, American oil held in its hands yet another notice of its products’ world-altering side effects, one affirming that global warming was not just cause for research and concern, but a reality needing corrective action: “Past and present studies of CO2 are detailed,” the Stanford Research Institute advised. “What is lacking, however, is [...] work toward systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”
This early history illuminates the American petroleum industry’s long-running awareness of the planetary warming caused by its products. Teller’s warning, revealed in documentation I found while searching archives, is another brick in a growing wall of evidence.
In the closing days of those optimistic 1950s, Robert Dunlop may have been one of the first oilmen to be warned of the tragedy now looming before us. By the time he departed this world in 1995, the American Petroleum Institute he once led was denying the climate science it had been informed of decades before, attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and fighting climate policies wherever they arose.
This is a history of choices made, paths not taken, and the fall from grace of one of the greatest enterprises – oil, the “prime mover” – ever to tread the earth. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.
American oil’s awareness of global warming – and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction – goes further than any one company. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. The industry is implicated to its core by the history of its largest representative, the American Petroleum Institute.
It is now too late to stop a great deal of change to our planet’s climate and its global payload of disease, destruction, and death. But we can fight to halt climate change as quickly as possible, and we can uncover the history of how we got here. There are lessons to be learned, and there is justice to be served.
oil funnies
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