welcome to oil
explore how the resource industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
Aug 2, 2019
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*
*How the world’s dirtiest industries have learned to pollute our politics
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Just 10% of fossil fuel subsidy cash 'could pay for green transition'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*West Virginia Bets Big on Plastics, and on Backing of Trump Administration
(EXCERPT BELOW)
*Current Investigation of ExxonMobil Could Spur Broader Climate Action
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*For the first time ever renewables beat coal in the US
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Renewables now cheaper than new coal or gas ‘across two-thirds of the world’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: Mobil sought to fight environmental regulation, documents show
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ARE EXXONMOBIL EXECS THE MOST EVIL PEOPLE IN THE 200,000-YEAR HISTORY OF HUMANITY?(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Utilities rush for the exit door on coal — and there's nothing Trump can do to stop them
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Mining Companies Use Excessive Legal Powers to Gamble With Latin American Lives
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*STUDY: U.S. FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES EXCEED PENTAGON SPENDING
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Russia contaminated $2.7 billion of oil exports to Europe
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*COLORADO DEMS TOOK ON THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY. NOW THE RECALLS ARE STARTING.
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump policy of less safety and more offshore drilling is 'a recipe for disaster'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Pennsylvania governor under scrutiny for role in approving pipeline
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*It’s cheaper to replace most coal plants with renewables than keep them open, per report
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA’s ‘secret science’ proposal being used by Big Oil to undermine clean water rules
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US and Saudi Arabia blocking regulation of geoengineering, sources say
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Oil companies calling for methane regulations are part of lobbying group that opposes them
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA changed rules to help profitable refiners get biofuel waivers: lawsuit
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Residents Say Natural Gas Production Is Marring West Virginia. And the Legislature Isn’t Doing Anything About It.(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)
opinion: Fossil fuels - How the world’s dirtiest industries have learned to pollute our politics
George Monbiot - The Guardian
Wed 7 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT
The tragedy of our times is that the gathering collapse of our life support systems has coincided with the age of public disservice. Just as we need to rise above self-interest and short-termism, governments around the world now represent the meanest and dirtiest of special interests. In the United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many other nations, pollutocrats rule.
The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly.
Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia they are starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.
A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.
The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.
But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by the Philippines, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Shapps – who until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group, which promotes the expansion of roads and airports – as transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.
We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.
The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly.
Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia they are starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.
A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.
The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.
But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by the Philippines, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Shapps – who until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group, which promotes the expansion of roads and airports – as transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.
We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.
this would happen if we had a real government!!!
Just 10% of fossil fuel subsidy cash 'could pay for green transition'
Redirecting small portion of subsidies would unleash clean energy revolution, says report
Damian Carrington Environment editor
The Guardian
Thu 1 Aug 2019 09.20 BST
Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”
The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.
“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”
The transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy is already under way. Annual investment in renewables has been greater than that in fossil fuel electricity generation since 2008 and new renewable capacity has exceeded fossil fuel power each year since 2014.
But progress is slow compared with the urgency required, said Bridle. “There is no question that renewables can power the energy system,” he said. “The question now is can we transition quickly enough away from fuels like coal, and subsidy reform is a very obvious step towards that.” Very few ways of cutting emissions actually save governments money, he said.
“Taking away subsidies from fossil fuels and channelling them towards clean energy would boost their development at a much faster pace, and help secure our climate goals,” said Ipek Gençsü of the Overseas Development Institute. An added bonus is the social and economic benefits, such as reduced air pollution and health spending, she said.
“A key breakthrough [in the energy transition] could occur if countries cut their fossil fuel subsidies, which are propping up dirty energy,” said Rana Adib, the executive secretary of the global sustainable energy network REN21. A recent REN21 report found 112 nations subsidised fossil fuel prices.
Reform of fossil fuel subsidies could have a significant impact on global heating. An earlier IISD study of 20 countries with large fossil fuel subsidies found that a 30% swap to renewables would lead to emissions reductions of between 11% and 18%.
Most experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those buying fuel or the companies producing it. The IMF also includes the cost of the damage fossil fuel burning causes to climate and health, leading to an estimate of $5.2tn of fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies would cut global emissions by about a quarter, the IMF estimates, and halve the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution.
Bridle said funding fossil fuel subsidies was “madness”, but said ending them could cause short-term price rises and political difficulties, as the benefits of lower costs in the future and reduced air pollution are less obvious.
“There are political problems but it is worth persevering because the prize is so big,” he said. “You have to bring people along with you.” Gençsü said governments must ensure that the most vulnerable people were not adversely affected by changes.
Fossil fuel subsidies are most prominent in oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, which subsidises petrol, and some coal-using countries such as Indonesia, which caps the cost of the fuel at 75% of the market rate. Some nations are making progress, with India cutting petrol subsidies by about 75% since 2014, according to the IISD.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”
The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.
“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”
The transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy is already under way. Annual investment in renewables has been greater than that in fossil fuel electricity generation since 2008 and new renewable capacity has exceeded fossil fuel power each year since 2014.
But progress is slow compared with the urgency required, said Bridle. “There is no question that renewables can power the energy system,” he said. “The question now is can we transition quickly enough away from fuels like coal, and subsidy reform is a very obvious step towards that.” Very few ways of cutting emissions actually save governments money, he said.
“Taking away subsidies from fossil fuels and channelling them towards clean energy would boost their development at a much faster pace, and help secure our climate goals,” said Ipek Gençsü of the Overseas Development Institute. An added bonus is the social and economic benefits, such as reduced air pollution and health spending, she said.
“A key breakthrough [in the energy transition] could occur if countries cut their fossil fuel subsidies, which are propping up dirty energy,” said Rana Adib, the executive secretary of the global sustainable energy network REN21. A recent REN21 report found 112 nations subsidised fossil fuel prices.
Reform of fossil fuel subsidies could have a significant impact on global heating. An earlier IISD study of 20 countries with large fossil fuel subsidies found that a 30% swap to renewables would lead to emissions reductions of between 11% and 18%.
Most experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those buying fuel or the companies producing it. The IMF also includes the cost of the damage fossil fuel burning causes to climate and health, leading to an estimate of $5.2tn of fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies would cut global emissions by about a quarter, the IMF estimates, and halve the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution.
Bridle said funding fossil fuel subsidies was “madness”, but said ending them could cause short-term price rises and political difficulties, as the benefits of lower costs in the future and reduced air pollution are less obvious.
“There are political problems but it is worth persevering because the prize is so big,” he said. “You have to bring people along with you.” Gençsü said governments must ensure that the most vulnerable people were not adversely affected by changes.
Fossil fuel subsidies are most prominent in oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, which subsidises petrol, and some coal-using countries such as Indonesia, which caps the cost of the fuel at 75% of the market rate. Some nations are making progress, with India cutting petrol subsidies by about 75% since 2014, according to the IISD.
GOVERNED BY GREED AND IDIOTS!!!
West Virginia Bets Big on Plastics, and on Backing of Trump Administration
The state’s leaders want a federal loan guarantee to build a giant chemical storage plant that could cost as much as $10 billion.
by Keith Schneider for ProPublica July 31, 5 a.m. EDT
West Virginia’s industrial might has faded, but as 2020 approaches, the state has two resources that could be crucial to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and tries to make good on his pledge of “American energy dominance” — Republican votes and abundant natural gas.
It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.
West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.
And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.
By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.
The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.
But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.
“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.
The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.
Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.
If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”
Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”
Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.
In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.
John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”
Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”[...]
It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.
West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.
And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.
By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.
The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.
But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.
“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.
The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.
Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.
If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”
Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”
Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.
In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.
John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”
Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”[...]
Current Investigation of ExxonMobil Could Spur Broader Climate Action
BY Patti Lynn, Truthout
PUBLISHED July 10, 2019
On January 7, 2019, after two years of struggle in the lower courts, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey received some good news: The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for her to investigate one of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — ExxonMobil — regarding what it knew, and when, about climate change.
The rapid heating of our planet poses an existential threat to all of us. Over the next decade, we must make significant changes to limit the most dire consequences of climate change. If we fail to do so, we know that under today’s global power structures, the people who will be the most affected are the same ones who are currently experiencing the harshest effects of climate change.
No wonder then, that women, communities of color, communities in the global South, youth, low-income communities and Indigenous communities around the world have been developing just climate solutions that will address this crisis. What we need now is to move the fossil fuel industry and its backers out of the way so these solutions can be implemented. Those of us in the U.S. have significant opportunities to leverage the political climate at the state level toward that end.
And investigations like Healey’s just might be the key.
The Power of AG Investigations
The fossil fuel industry’s role in actively preventing effective global climate action has become increasingly clear with the publication of books like Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt. For about half a century, fossil fuel corporations manufactured doubt, attacked science and bought political loyalty. They effectively immobilized political will to implement any kind of legislation that would threaten their profits.
But not everyone was fooled. People on the front lines of climate change have been raising the alarm and developing solutions for decades. The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, released last December, highlight many of these solutions, including energy democracy, agro-ecological practices and ecological restoration to recover natural carbon sinks. Just imagine where we could be today in implementing these kinds of just climate solutions but for the deception of the fossil fuel industry.
Healey’s investigation of ExxonMobil is one step toward making up for this lost time. In 2016, the Massachusetts attorney general launched a civil investigation demand, attempting to force ExxonMobil to hand over internal documents related to climate change. The corporation not only refused to comply, it went one step further and sued Healey. Undeterred, Healey doggedly pursued her office’s right to investigate ExxonMobil, even as the corporation took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now, with the refusal of the Supreme Court to hear ExxonMobil’s case, Healey has set the precedent for other states that have similar consumer protection laws to launch similar investigations.
In fact, Healey’s investigation hearkens back to the work of another attorney general taking on another abusive industry. Under former Attorney General Skip Humphrey III, Minnesota took its lawsuit against Big Tobacco all the way to trial –and settled in 1998.
But more importantly, this lawsuit led to the release of more than 30 million pages of internal industry documents — documents that would help pave the way for the implementation of lifesaving tobacco control laws around the world. The damning evidence of the tobacco industry’s wrongdoings found in those documents spurred those working on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty.
Formally known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it is the first public health and corporate accountability treaty in the world, and it is also one of the most quickly adopted and widely ratified treaties. It was adopted five years after the release of the industry documents.
There is no doubt that Healey’s investigation and others can have similar global ramifications. The evidence they could uncover has the potential to spark action not only in the U.S. but also at the U.N. climate treaty, where necessary action has been stymied for decades under the influence of the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters.
It is no surprise, then, that the industry is scrambling to block these investigations and avoid litigation.
Going on the Offensive, State by State
Not only did ExxonMobil pull out all the stops to try to halt the Massachusetts investigation, it is also attempting to protect itself from lawsuits related to climate change (along with other fossil fuel corporations). In 2017, ExxonMobil, along with BP, Shell and General Motors were founding members of an institute devised to promote market-based solutions to climate change. The institute subsequently released a plan that ExxonMobil, Shell and BP pledged millions of dollars to support. The plan proposes a modest tax on carbon — nothing in the scope of what would actually be needed to reduce emissions — in exchange for rollbacks on environmental protections and an end to climate liability lawsuits.
The U.S. is the largest total energy producer in the world, and under the Trump administration, the federal government is aggressively advancing the fossil fuel industry’s agenda. For those of us who call this country home, we must do what we can to stand up to the industry bent on prioritizing its profits over global survival. Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to go on the offensive at the state level — and investigations by attorneys general are critical to this.
Such investigations will help create the political climate and financing needed for the implementation of climate justice solutions led by those on the front lines of climate change. They will support other legal actionsagainst the industry — including a lawsuit by Vanuatu, if the Pacific island country decides to go that route. Moreover, attorney general investigations have great potential to shift the public climate so more people demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry.
There are far too many ways that democracy is failing in the U.S. But Healey’s investigation is one place where our political system is doing exactly what it should be doing: using the resources and power of public office to hold a powerful and harmful corporation to account. We need more elected officials to do the same.
The rapid heating of our planet poses an existential threat to all of us. Over the next decade, we must make significant changes to limit the most dire consequences of climate change. If we fail to do so, we know that under today’s global power structures, the people who will be the most affected are the same ones who are currently experiencing the harshest effects of climate change.
No wonder then, that women, communities of color, communities in the global South, youth, low-income communities and Indigenous communities around the world have been developing just climate solutions that will address this crisis. What we need now is to move the fossil fuel industry and its backers out of the way so these solutions can be implemented. Those of us in the U.S. have significant opportunities to leverage the political climate at the state level toward that end.
And investigations like Healey’s just might be the key.
The Power of AG Investigations
The fossil fuel industry’s role in actively preventing effective global climate action has become increasingly clear with the publication of books like Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt. For about half a century, fossil fuel corporations manufactured doubt, attacked science and bought political loyalty. They effectively immobilized political will to implement any kind of legislation that would threaten their profits.
But not everyone was fooled. People on the front lines of climate change have been raising the alarm and developing solutions for decades. The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, released last December, highlight many of these solutions, including energy democracy, agro-ecological practices and ecological restoration to recover natural carbon sinks. Just imagine where we could be today in implementing these kinds of just climate solutions but for the deception of the fossil fuel industry.
Healey’s investigation of ExxonMobil is one step toward making up for this lost time. In 2016, the Massachusetts attorney general launched a civil investigation demand, attempting to force ExxonMobil to hand over internal documents related to climate change. The corporation not only refused to comply, it went one step further and sued Healey. Undeterred, Healey doggedly pursued her office’s right to investigate ExxonMobil, even as the corporation took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now, with the refusal of the Supreme Court to hear ExxonMobil’s case, Healey has set the precedent for other states that have similar consumer protection laws to launch similar investigations.
In fact, Healey’s investigation hearkens back to the work of another attorney general taking on another abusive industry. Under former Attorney General Skip Humphrey III, Minnesota took its lawsuit against Big Tobacco all the way to trial –and settled in 1998.
But more importantly, this lawsuit led to the release of more than 30 million pages of internal industry documents — documents that would help pave the way for the implementation of lifesaving tobacco control laws around the world. The damning evidence of the tobacco industry’s wrongdoings found in those documents spurred those working on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty.
Formally known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it is the first public health and corporate accountability treaty in the world, and it is also one of the most quickly adopted and widely ratified treaties. It was adopted five years after the release of the industry documents.
There is no doubt that Healey’s investigation and others can have similar global ramifications. The evidence they could uncover has the potential to spark action not only in the U.S. but also at the U.N. climate treaty, where necessary action has been stymied for decades under the influence of the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters.
It is no surprise, then, that the industry is scrambling to block these investigations and avoid litigation.
Going on the Offensive, State by State
Not only did ExxonMobil pull out all the stops to try to halt the Massachusetts investigation, it is also attempting to protect itself from lawsuits related to climate change (along with other fossil fuel corporations). In 2017, ExxonMobil, along with BP, Shell and General Motors were founding members of an institute devised to promote market-based solutions to climate change. The institute subsequently released a plan that ExxonMobil, Shell and BP pledged millions of dollars to support. The plan proposes a modest tax on carbon — nothing in the scope of what would actually be needed to reduce emissions — in exchange for rollbacks on environmental protections and an end to climate liability lawsuits.
The U.S. is the largest total energy producer in the world, and under the Trump administration, the federal government is aggressively advancing the fossil fuel industry’s agenda. For those of us who call this country home, we must do what we can to stand up to the industry bent on prioritizing its profits over global survival. Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to go on the offensive at the state level — and investigations by attorneys general are critical to this.
Such investigations will help create the political climate and financing needed for the implementation of climate justice solutions led by those on the front lines of climate change. They will support other legal actionsagainst the industry — including a lawsuit by Vanuatu, if the Pacific island country decides to go that route. Moreover, attorney general investigations have great potential to shift the public climate so more people demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry.
There are far too many ways that democracy is failing in the U.S. But Healey’s investigation is one place where our political system is doing exactly what it should be doing: using the resources and power of public office to hold a powerful and harmful corporation to account. We need more elected officials to do the same.
For the first time ever renewables beat coal in the US
Renewables provided 23% of U.S. power in April, while coal generated 20%.
JOE ROMM - Thinkprogress
JUN 26, 2019, 3:40 PM
In a remarkable sign of the shifting fortunes of dirty energy and clean energy, more renewable power was generated in April than coal power — something that’s never happened before in the United States.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced Wednesday that, in April, “U.S. monthly electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time.”
While coal provided 20% of U.S. power in April, renewables — which include utility-scale hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass — provided 23% of total generation.
Coal power generation cycles seasonally because temperatures moderate over much of the country in the spring and fall, reducing the power generation needed for air conditioning and heating. During those seasons, coal generation drops, and some plants are shut down for maintenance.
This seasonal drop in coal power is on top of the steady decline of coal, which has been increasingly unable to compete economically with cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.
In fact, the EIA reports that U.S. wind power hit a record monthly high in April. And solar will almost certainly hit a record monthly high sometime this summer.
The country continues adding both solar and wind generation at a very strong pace. So, when will annual renewable electricity generation surpass annual coal generation? The EIA projects out to only 2020 in its latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” (STEO).
The EIA expects coal will out-generate renewables in 2019 and 2020 — though it projects renewables will top nuclear next year for the first time ever.
Renewables will likely top coal in the next decade, but the exact timing will depend on who the president is in 2021. President Donald Trump is trying to hold on to the dirty energy sources of the past, while all the Democrats running have promised to speed up the switch to clean energy in order to protect public health and avoid catastrophic climate change.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced Wednesday that, in April, “U.S. monthly electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time.”
While coal provided 20% of U.S. power in April, renewables — which include utility-scale hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass — provided 23% of total generation.
Coal power generation cycles seasonally because temperatures moderate over much of the country in the spring and fall, reducing the power generation needed for air conditioning and heating. During those seasons, coal generation drops, and some plants are shut down for maintenance.
This seasonal drop in coal power is on top of the steady decline of coal, which has been increasingly unable to compete economically with cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.
In fact, the EIA reports that U.S. wind power hit a record monthly high in April. And solar will almost certainly hit a record monthly high sometime this summer.
The country continues adding both solar and wind generation at a very strong pace. So, when will annual renewable electricity generation surpass annual coal generation? The EIA projects out to only 2020 in its latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” (STEO).
The EIA expects coal will out-generate renewables in 2019 and 2020 — though it projects renewables will top nuclear next year for the first time ever.
Renewables will likely top coal in the next decade, but the exact timing will depend on who the president is in 2021. President Donald Trump is trying to hold on to the dirty energy sources of the past, while all the Democrats running have promised to speed up the switch to clean energy in order to protect public health and avoid catastrophic climate change.
Renewables now cheaper than new coal or gas ‘across two-thirds of the world’
By 2030, wind and solar will "undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere."
JOE ROMM - Thinkprogress
JUN 18, 2019, 1:47 PM
A new study reveals just how stunningly rapid the clean energy transition is.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported on Tuesday that renewables are now the cheapest form of new electricity generation across two thirds of the world — cheaper than both new coal and new natural gas power.
Yet just five years ago, renewables were the cheapest source of new power in only 1% of the world, explains BNEF in its New Energy Outlook 2019.
Equally remarkable, BNEF projects that by 2030, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere.”
In other words, within a decade it will be cheaper to build and operate new renewable power plants than it will be to just keep operating existing fossil fuel plants — even in the United States.
The reason for this transformation is the remarkable drop in both solar and wind power prices this decade: Since 2010, wind power has dropped 49% in cost and solar plummeted 85%.
BNEF projects prices will continue to fall for the next decade and beyond, with the cost of solar panels and wind power dropping by another third by 2030. Overall, by 2050, the cost of solar electricity is expected to drop 63% compared to today, and the cost of wind will likely drop 48%.
Because of these ongoing price drops, the world is projected to invest a whopping $4.2 trillion in solar power generation in the next three decades. The result is that solar will jump from a mere 2% of global power generation today to a remarkable 22% in 2050.
Over the same three decades, global investment in wind power will likely hit $5.3 trillion, and wind is expected to rise from 5% of global electricity today to 26% in 2050.
The result is that we are shifting from a world today where two thirds of power generation is from fossil fuels to one three decades from now where two thirds is zero carbon. As BNEF puts it, we are “ending the era of fossil fuel dominance in the power sector.”
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported on Tuesday that renewables are now the cheapest form of new electricity generation across two thirds of the world — cheaper than both new coal and new natural gas power.
Yet just five years ago, renewables were the cheapest source of new power in only 1% of the world, explains BNEF in its New Energy Outlook 2019.
Equally remarkable, BNEF projects that by 2030, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere.”
In other words, within a decade it will be cheaper to build and operate new renewable power plants than it will be to just keep operating existing fossil fuel plants — even in the United States.
The reason for this transformation is the remarkable drop in both solar and wind power prices this decade: Since 2010, wind power has dropped 49% in cost and solar plummeted 85%.
BNEF projects prices will continue to fall for the next decade and beyond, with the cost of solar panels and wind power dropping by another third by 2030. Overall, by 2050, the cost of solar electricity is expected to drop 63% compared to today, and the cost of wind will likely drop 48%.
Because of these ongoing price drops, the world is projected to invest a whopping $4.2 trillion in solar power generation in the next three decades. The result is that solar will jump from a mere 2% of global power generation today to a remarkable 22% in 2050.
Over the same three decades, global investment in wind power will likely hit $5.3 trillion, and wind is expected to rise from 5% of global electricity today to 26% in 2050.
The result is that we are shifting from a world today where two thirds of power generation is from fossil fuels to one three decades from now where two thirds is zero carbon. As BNEF puts it, we are “ending the era of fossil fuel dominance in the power sector.”
Revealed: Mobil sought to fight environmental regulation, documents show
Oil giant looked to make tax-exempt donations to universities and civic groups in the early 1990s to promote the company’s interests
Sharon Kelly in Philadelphia
The Guardian
Wed 12 Jun 2019 01.00 EDT
Oil giant Mobil sought to make tax-exempt donations to leading universities, civic groups and arts programmes to promote the company’s interests and undermine environmental regulation, according to internal documents from the early 1990s obtained by the Guardian.
The documents shine a light on the ways corporations have used their money to buy influence, amass prestige and shape public policy through grants to academic programmes and advocacy groups.
The documents come to light as ExxonMobil, formed when Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999, is now facing investigations by multiple state attorneys general over claims it failed to communicate known climate crisis-related risks to investors and the public.
The documents, dated in 1993 and provided to the Guardian by the Climate Investigations Center, show the Mobil Foundation justified spending by detailing major “benefits to Mobil” they expected in return for more than 80 proposed grants for 1994 – a practice not-for-profit experts said may have violated federal law.
The foundation wrote that its grants for not-for-profits could help Mobil fight environmental regulation, fund scientists whose work had been “favorably received by the industry” and prepare Mobil to defend itself against lawsuits following oil spills and industrial accidents.
For example, in a one-page entry listing past Mobil grants, the company was successful in “having the National Safety Council Board of Directors pass a resolution opposing the mandating of any alternative fuel”, the foundation wrote. Grants for the council totalled nearly a quarter-million dollars, according to the entry, which recommended further grants for the coming year.
The internal grant-making recommendations and records, many marked confidential, cover $1.2m worth of funding – about 10% of the foundation’s annual budget. More than two-thirds of the roughly 120 full-page grant recommendations predict specific benefits for the oil giant.
Justifications for offering money to not-for-profits and universities included:
Leaders of Mobil and its foundation had offered public hints that they expected to harvest benefits from the company’s charitable giving.
“Should corporations ever engage in pure philanthropy, giving money away because it gives one a nice feeling and the shareholders don’t seem to mind?” Herbert Schmertz, Mobil’s vice-president of public affairs for about two decades and a former Mobil Foundation president, asked during a 22 September 1987 talk on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.
“I guess I’d answer that by saying I don’t know whether corporate philanthropy as I’ve sort of defined it, which is just to get a warm feeling, ever existed,” he said. “But if it did, I’d have to say that it’s a dying concept in terms of corporate giving.”
A 1998 book thanking Richard Mund, who served as Mobil Foundation’s executive director from 1979 to 2000, for his edits offers a similar view of corporate grant-making, advising that companies “identify a significant business reason” for grants and “obtain as much business value from social investments as is allowable and practical”.
Tax experts told the Guardian that the Mobil Foundation’s stated intent to benefit Mobil through “charitable” grants would have raised serious red flags for illegal self-dealing, had it come to light before the statute of limitations ran out.
“The public would have a very hard time finding out any of this,” said Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard University professor of the history of science, adding that “typically one can only see the organization and amount, but no details of what or why”.
“What I see here is a pattern of ‘charitable giving’ that is anything but disinterested,” she said.
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Our philanthropic arm follows all laws and required disclosures.
The ExxonMobil Foundation has a strategic focus supporting education with an emphasis on math and science, promoting women as catalysts for economic development and preventing deaths from malaria.”
A lawsuit filed in October by the New York attorney general alleges ExxonMobil defrauded investors for years about the risks climate crisis regulation posed for the fossil fuel giant.
In January, the US supreme court allowed Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey’s investigation into how ExxonMobil described climate crisis risks to consumers and investors to move forward by refusing to hear the company’s appeal. A spokesperson for Healey declined to comment on the newly revealed documents, citing ongoing litigation.
The ExxonMobil Foundation was also formed after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil.
Corporate watchdogs said issues associated with private industry’s use of not-for-profits to influence American policy have become more pronounced since the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision, which protected political spending by corporations and which critics say fuelled a rapid expansion of so-called “dark money” advocacy groups whose funding is more difficult to trace.
“It’s extremely troubling,” Lisa Graves, president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, said.
“One of the primary rules for nonprofits is that they’re supposed to be in the public interest,” she said, “not for private benefits.”
The documents shine a light on the ways corporations have used their money to buy influence, amass prestige and shape public policy through grants to academic programmes and advocacy groups.
The documents come to light as ExxonMobil, formed when Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999, is now facing investigations by multiple state attorneys general over claims it failed to communicate known climate crisis-related risks to investors and the public.
The documents, dated in 1993 and provided to the Guardian by the Climate Investigations Center, show the Mobil Foundation justified spending by detailing major “benefits to Mobil” they expected in return for more than 80 proposed grants for 1994 – a practice not-for-profit experts said may have violated federal law.
The foundation wrote that its grants for not-for-profits could help Mobil fight environmental regulation, fund scientists whose work had been “favorably received by the industry” and prepare Mobil to defend itself against lawsuits following oil spills and industrial accidents.
For example, in a one-page entry listing past Mobil grants, the company was successful in “having the National Safety Council Board of Directors pass a resolution opposing the mandating of any alternative fuel”, the foundation wrote. Grants for the council totalled nearly a quarter-million dollars, according to the entry, which recommended further grants for the coming year.
The internal grant-making recommendations and records, many marked confidential, cover $1.2m worth of funding – about 10% of the foundation’s annual budget. More than two-thirds of the roughly 120 full-page grant recommendations predict specific benefits for the oil giant.
Justifications for offering money to not-for-profits and universities included:
- “Global warming is likely to be the key international environmental issue of the 1990s,” the foundation’s internal records predicted in 1993, adding that climate regulation was “a real possibility within the next five years”. The foundation recommended a $25,000 grant to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University to help Mobil “develop personal relationships with some of the key experts on this issue” and enable Mobil to “participate in the debate on these regulations”.
- The Mobil Foundation recommended contributing a total of $25,000 to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, saying the center had already effectively argued against tighter fuel economy standards and influenced America’s toxic air pollution laws, and its stances may help keep Mobil’s costs down in future.
“Mobil’s environmental expenditures exceeded $1bn in 1992,” the document said. “Without a greater appreciation of scientific risk analysis, those costs will continue to escalate as environmental rules and programs are made excessively stringent in response to the public’s unfounded panic over relatively minor incidents.”
- The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia describes its Environmental Associates Program as “a group of corporate executives concerned about environmental effects of industrial activities”.
The program was founded by Dr Ruth Patrick, who helped to draft the Clean Water Act, a major federal law giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power to write rules to protect people against harm from water pollution.
“Based on the contacts of the Academy,” the Mobil Foundation wrote, “the Environmental Associates Program has the potential to challenge the EPA behind the scenes on the effectiveness of a regulation for the environment and whether sound science supports the proposed law.”
- The Mobil Foundation recommended offering the National Research Council, part of the National Academies, funding for a study of an oil spill clean-up method, writing: “By helping to fund the study, Mobil may be offered the opportunity to participate or to receive early access to the findings.”
Leaders of Mobil and its foundation had offered public hints that they expected to harvest benefits from the company’s charitable giving.
“Should corporations ever engage in pure philanthropy, giving money away because it gives one a nice feeling and the shareholders don’t seem to mind?” Herbert Schmertz, Mobil’s vice-president of public affairs for about two decades and a former Mobil Foundation president, asked during a 22 September 1987 talk on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.
“I guess I’d answer that by saying I don’t know whether corporate philanthropy as I’ve sort of defined it, which is just to get a warm feeling, ever existed,” he said. “But if it did, I’d have to say that it’s a dying concept in terms of corporate giving.”
A 1998 book thanking Richard Mund, who served as Mobil Foundation’s executive director from 1979 to 2000, for his edits offers a similar view of corporate grant-making, advising that companies “identify a significant business reason” for grants and “obtain as much business value from social investments as is allowable and practical”.
Tax experts told the Guardian that the Mobil Foundation’s stated intent to benefit Mobil through “charitable” grants would have raised serious red flags for illegal self-dealing, had it come to light before the statute of limitations ran out.
“The public would have a very hard time finding out any of this,” said Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard University professor of the history of science, adding that “typically one can only see the organization and amount, but no details of what or why”.
“What I see here is a pattern of ‘charitable giving’ that is anything but disinterested,” she said.
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Our philanthropic arm follows all laws and required disclosures.
The ExxonMobil Foundation has a strategic focus supporting education with an emphasis on math and science, promoting women as catalysts for economic development and preventing deaths from malaria.”
A lawsuit filed in October by the New York attorney general alleges ExxonMobil defrauded investors for years about the risks climate crisis regulation posed for the fossil fuel giant.
In January, the US supreme court allowed Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey’s investigation into how ExxonMobil described climate crisis risks to consumers and investors to move forward by refusing to hear the company’s appeal. A spokesperson for Healey declined to comment on the newly revealed documents, citing ongoing litigation.
The ExxonMobil Foundation was also formed after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil.
Corporate watchdogs said issues associated with private industry’s use of not-for-profits to influence American policy have become more pronounced since the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision, which protected political spending by corporations and which critics say fuelled a rapid expansion of so-called “dark money” advocacy groups whose funding is more difficult to trace.
“It’s extremely troubling,” Lisa Graves, president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, said.
“One of the primary rules for nonprofits is that they’re supposed to be in the public interest,” she said, “not for private benefits.”
Utilities rush for the exit door on coal — and there's nothing Trump can do to stop them
Despite Trump's promise to revive coal, the market has spoken: Even big utilities in red states are moving on
CARL POPE - salon
MAY 20, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
The keynote speaker at McKinsey’s Global Sustainability Summit in Chicago was Anne Pramaggiore, vice president and CEO of Exelon, one of America’s biggest utilities. Her message: Exelon is going clean. Its future role will emphasize being a connector, not a generator, in the distributed grid of the future, exploiting the utility’s tradition of providing universal service — but this time to partner with its customers as providers as well as consumers.
She’s not alone in projecting a very different role and future, even for well established utilities. The mood from the utility representatives at the sessions couldn’t be more different than the groans and moans that the Trump administration’s appointees emit as they try, somehow, to find someone to bail out outmoded, dirty, uncompetitive coal- fired power plants. Southern California Edison representatives mentioned they had an entire corporate strategy to encourage households to return to lower-carbon electric stoves in place of carbon-polluting natural gas.
But the story that has been playing itself out around the country is remarkably consistent, so perhaps the mood in Chicago wasn’t so surprising. Coal is going away — and utilities are changing their role in ways that accelerate that decline. Take Indiana. Former EPA Scott Pruitt was hired by coal interests to persuade the Indiana legislature to support a coal bailout. Pruitt turned out to be just as ineffective as a self-declared coal industry lobbyist as he had been cloaked as the ostensible administrator of environmental protection – his coal bailouts keep going down in flames. Even the Indiana Chamber of Commerce said, “No thanks, we can’t afford coal.” It turns out the state’s business climate has been significantly hurt by providing expensive power bought from outdated coal plants.
If coal can’t garner support from Indiana business interests, it’s really pretty much game over. And the Hoosier State is not alone. President Trump’s appointees to the Tennessee Valley Authority Board refused his pressure to slow their transition to renewables. In Colorado, where utilities and clean energy advocates have successfully collaborated, the state’s biggest utility, XCEL, committed in December to 100% clean energy by 2050. Simultaneously, another major Colorado utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, was facing financial collapse created by its continued reliance on dirty power.
Tri-State, which provides power — predominantly coal — to its member cooperatives, has been hemorrhaging members for the past year because its power is too expensive. A recent report from Rocky Mountain Institute concluded that going to renewables would save the utility’s customers $600 per person by 2030.
Faced with dangers to its member electric co-ops if Tri-State collapsed, the Colorado legislature passed legislation that placed Tri-State under the regulatory authority of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — to help it get off coal. At the same time, lawmakers gave legislative blessing to XCEL’s innovative strategies for quickly exiting from coal. The Xcel provisions codify the company’s clean energy commitments and permits the utility to own 50% of its future renewable energy assets.
Montana joined Indiana in rejecting coal industry appeals for bailouts, this time for the Coalstrip power plant, whose current owners have decided it is cheaper to shut it down than continue to operate it. (Wyoming, however, passed a weaker bailout proposal, requiring a utility shutting down a coal plant to first offer to sell it — a pathway already tried by the Trump administration, unsuccessfully, to keep the Navajo Power Plant in Arizona open.) New Mexico, whose major utility, PNM, is now moving rapidly towards clean energy, refused to weaken emission standards for the remaining coal plants, instead agreeing to help PNM finance its losses from shutting down coal plants.
What is happening across the country is an emerging set of new partnerships between clean energy advocates and public utilities, driven by a stark recognition by utilities that the pathway forged some years ago by California’s power companies — cooperating, not resisting, the clean energy revolution — is not only better for the climate, but for customers and shareholders as well.
This is not just happening with those utilities that were already moving away from carbon intensive power — nor just utilities in the West ,where state governments are climate conscious. Utility Dive has released the following table showing that the biggest carbon utilities of all, in some of the most conservative states — Southern, Duke, AEP — have all joined the rush to the coal exit door.
She’s not alone in projecting a very different role and future, even for well established utilities. The mood from the utility representatives at the sessions couldn’t be more different than the groans and moans that the Trump administration’s appointees emit as they try, somehow, to find someone to bail out outmoded, dirty, uncompetitive coal- fired power plants. Southern California Edison representatives mentioned they had an entire corporate strategy to encourage households to return to lower-carbon electric stoves in place of carbon-polluting natural gas.
But the story that has been playing itself out around the country is remarkably consistent, so perhaps the mood in Chicago wasn’t so surprising. Coal is going away — and utilities are changing their role in ways that accelerate that decline. Take Indiana. Former EPA Scott Pruitt was hired by coal interests to persuade the Indiana legislature to support a coal bailout. Pruitt turned out to be just as ineffective as a self-declared coal industry lobbyist as he had been cloaked as the ostensible administrator of environmental protection – his coal bailouts keep going down in flames. Even the Indiana Chamber of Commerce said, “No thanks, we can’t afford coal.” It turns out the state’s business climate has been significantly hurt by providing expensive power bought from outdated coal plants.
If coal can’t garner support from Indiana business interests, it’s really pretty much game over. And the Hoosier State is not alone. President Trump’s appointees to the Tennessee Valley Authority Board refused his pressure to slow their transition to renewables. In Colorado, where utilities and clean energy advocates have successfully collaborated, the state’s biggest utility, XCEL, committed in December to 100% clean energy by 2050. Simultaneously, another major Colorado utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, was facing financial collapse created by its continued reliance on dirty power.
Tri-State, which provides power — predominantly coal — to its member cooperatives, has been hemorrhaging members for the past year because its power is too expensive. A recent report from Rocky Mountain Institute concluded that going to renewables would save the utility’s customers $600 per person by 2030.
Faced with dangers to its member electric co-ops if Tri-State collapsed, the Colorado legislature passed legislation that placed Tri-State under the regulatory authority of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — to help it get off coal. At the same time, lawmakers gave legislative blessing to XCEL’s innovative strategies for quickly exiting from coal. The Xcel provisions codify the company’s clean energy commitments and permits the utility to own 50% of its future renewable energy assets.
Montana joined Indiana in rejecting coal industry appeals for bailouts, this time for the Coalstrip power plant, whose current owners have decided it is cheaper to shut it down than continue to operate it. (Wyoming, however, passed a weaker bailout proposal, requiring a utility shutting down a coal plant to first offer to sell it — a pathway already tried by the Trump administration, unsuccessfully, to keep the Navajo Power Plant in Arizona open.) New Mexico, whose major utility, PNM, is now moving rapidly towards clean energy, refused to weaken emission standards for the remaining coal plants, instead agreeing to help PNM finance its losses from shutting down coal plants.
What is happening across the country is an emerging set of new partnerships between clean energy advocates and public utilities, driven by a stark recognition by utilities that the pathway forged some years ago by California’s power companies — cooperating, not resisting, the clean energy revolution — is not only better for the climate, but for customers and shareholders as well.
This is not just happening with those utilities that were already moving away from carbon intensive power — nor just utilities in the West ,where state governments are climate conscious. Utility Dive has released the following table showing that the biggest carbon utilities of all, in some of the most conservative states — Southern, Duke, AEP — have all joined the rush to the coal exit door.
Are ExxonMobil execs the most evil people in the 200,000-year history of humanity?
COMMON DREAMS - COMMENTARY - raw story
19 MAY 2019 AT 13:48 ET
Internal ExxonMobil documents show that the company’s scientists predicted in 1982 that by 2020, parts per million of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere would reach 410-420 ppm. For the first time this spring ppm of CO2 exceeded 415.
The memo says in part,
Considerable uncertainty also surrounds the possible impact on society of such a warming trend, should it occur. At the low end of the predicted temperature range there could be some impact on agricultural growth and rainfall patterns which could be beneficial in some regions and detrimental in others.
At the high end, some scientists suggest there could be considerable adverse impact including the flooding of some coastal land masses as a result of a rise in sea level due to melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.
They understood that the full effect of this vast increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would cause enormous changes, though much of the damage would occur centuries down the line.
The company covered up these memos and staged a multi-million-dollar disinformation campaign to throw doubt on the reality of human-made climate change, to ensure that ExxonMobil could go on making billions in profits each year from selling gasoline.
The scientists nailed it. ExxonMobil nailed it. They can be proud of their scientific prowess and predictive abilities, right?
Wrong. They are evil.
They are the most evil human beings to walk the earth since Homo Sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago.
ExxonMobil has single-handedly been conducting a vast terraforming experiment that will displace hundreds of millions of people. Some two-thirds of Egypt’s 100 million people live in the Nile River delta, which has low elevations and some of which will be submerged even in the current century. Bangladesh isn’t going to be there after a while, displacing 150 million people.
This is not to account for the increased destructiveness of tropical storms or the acidification of the oceans, which will likely kill off half of marine life.
Characters in science fiction that wreck a whole planet are rare. George Lucas’s Darth Vader destroyed a planet with the Death Star in Star Wars. Stan Lee’s Thanatos wiped out half the population of earth in The Avengers: Endgame. In 2009’s Star Trek the mad Romulan Nero destroyed the planet of Vulcan with 6 billion people on it.
CEOs of ExxonMobil such as Lee Raymond or Rex Tillerson or currently Darren Woods are banal in their evil, as Hannah Arendt would lead us to expect. They probably aren’t even interesting to talk to. They are like wind-up toys, their springs being profit, that can’t change direction, driving toward extinction.
But they are much worse in the practical effect of their evil than Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the other genocidal maniacs we’ve seen in the past century.
They deliberately wrecked a planet to make a few bucks (in Lee Raymond’s case, $400 million of them). Tens of millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions.
They are Darth Vaders and Thanatoses, they are destroyers of a planet. And they manage in their cupidity and their cunning and their dishonesty to be utterly boring and worthy of no one’s interest as people. They lack a soul.
Sooner or later the judges will permit people to begin suing ExxonMobil for the environmental damage it has caused. The judges are turning these suits back now. But minds will change.
All it would take would be one gigantic glacier from Antarctica to plop in and suddenly raise sea level noticeably, a sort of climate tsunami. I wish it wouldn’t happen, but it will. The question is only when, as Exxon noticed in 1982. Judges in Miami would notice.
The company is doomed to an early bankruptcy.
Get your money out of it if you hope to retire.
And switch to public transportation or an electric car as soon as you can afford to.
That is the only redemption we will have from this cabal of evil, to know that they are already on the trash heap of history and have no part in the future of our increasingly challenged planet.
Their names will be vilified for as long as human beings live.
The memo says in part,
Considerable uncertainty also surrounds the possible impact on society of such a warming trend, should it occur. At the low end of the predicted temperature range there could be some impact on agricultural growth and rainfall patterns which could be beneficial in some regions and detrimental in others.
At the high end, some scientists suggest there could be considerable adverse impact including the flooding of some coastal land masses as a result of a rise in sea level due to melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.
They understood that the full effect of this vast increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would cause enormous changes, though much of the damage would occur centuries down the line.
The company covered up these memos and staged a multi-million-dollar disinformation campaign to throw doubt on the reality of human-made climate change, to ensure that ExxonMobil could go on making billions in profits each year from selling gasoline.
The scientists nailed it. ExxonMobil nailed it. They can be proud of their scientific prowess and predictive abilities, right?
Wrong. They are evil.
They are the most evil human beings to walk the earth since Homo Sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago.
ExxonMobil has single-handedly been conducting a vast terraforming experiment that will displace hundreds of millions of people. Some two-thirds of Egypt’s 100 million people live in the Nile River delta, which has low elevations and some of which will be submerged even in the current century. Bangladesh isn’t going to be there after a while, displacing 150 million people.
This is not to account for the increased destructiveness of tropical storms or the acidification of the oceans, which will likely kill off half of marine life.
Characters in science fiction that wreck a whole planet are rare. George Lucas’s Darth Vader destroyed a planet with the Death Star in Star Wars. Stan Lee’s Thanatos wiped out half the population of earth in The Avengers: Endgame. In 2009’s Star Trek the mad Romulan Nero destroyed the planet of Vulcan with 6 billion people on it.
CEOs of ExxonMobil such as Lee Raymond or Rex Tillerson or currently Darren Woods are banal in their evil, as Hannah Arendt would lead us to expect. They probably aren’t even interesting to talk to. They are like wind-up toys, their springs being profit, that can’t change direction, driving toward extinction.
But they are much worse in the practical effect of their evil than Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the other genocidal maniacs we’ve seen in the past century.
They deliberately wrecked a planet to make a few bucks (in Lee Raymond’s case, $400 million of them). Tens of millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions.
They are Darth Vaders and Thanatoses, they are destroyers of a planet. And they manage in their cupidity and their cunning and their dishonesty to be utterly boring and worthy of no one’s interest as people. They lack a soul.
Sooner or later the judges will permit people to begin suing ExxonMobil for the environmental damage it has caused. The judges are turning these suits back now. But minds will change.
All it would take would be one gigantic glacier from Antarctica to plop in and suddenly raise sea level noticeably, a sort of climate tsunami. I wish it wouldn’t happen, but it will. The question is only when, as Exxon noticed in 1982. Judges in Miami would notice.
The company is doomed to an early bankruptcy.
Get your money out of it if you hope to retire.
And switch to public transportation or an electric car as soon as you can afford to.
That is the only redemption we will have from this cabal of evil, to know that they are already on the trash heap of history and have no part in the future of our increasingly challenged planet.
Their names will be vilified for as long as human beings live.
Mining Companies Use Excessive Legal Powers to Gamble With Latin American Lives
BY Manuel Perez-Rocha & Jen Moore, Inequality.org - truthout
PUBLISHED May 14, 2019
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The right of foreign investors to sue governments in international tribunals is one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations through free trade agreements and investment treaties.
For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But this public outrage hasn’t stopped companies from continuing to file such lawsuits. In January 2019, for example, U.S.-based Legacy Vulcan LLC registered a case against Mexico over an environmental dispute concerning limestone quarrying near the well-known vacation destination Playa de Carmen. The company cited ecological land use regulations in the municipality of Solidaridad preventing the company from expanding mining operations on two properties. Using NAFTA investment rules, the company is reportedly planning to demand approximately $500 million in compensation.
The same month, U.S. firm Odyssey Marine Exploration filed its notice of intent to sue Mexico for the outrageous sum of $3.54 billion for having failed to obtain permits needed to advance an offshore phosphate mine project off the coast of Baja California Sur. This is the largest amount that Mexico has ever been threatened with in any ISDS suit.
These are just two of 38 mining-related investor-state cases documented in a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, MiningWatch Canada, and the Center for International Environmental Law. Extraction Casino: Mining Companies Gambling with Latin American Lives and Sovereignty through Supranational Arbitration exposes how transnational mining companies are among the biggest abusers of this system — especially in cases of unwanted investments where communities are in hard-fought battles to defend their land, water, health, and ways of life from the destructive impacts of mining.
Worldwide, the extractive sector is behind 24 percent of all known investor-state claims and the number of mining-related cases is booming. Out of the 169 cases filed by oil, gas and mining companies since 1974, 96 have been filed since 2010.
The geographic distribution of mining-related cases is concentrated in Latin America, where Central and South American governments face 29 percent of known claims. This report looked at all 38 of the mining-related cases that have been brought against Latin American governments with increasing intensity since 1998.
Canadian firms have brought most of these cases, reflective of the disproportionate role of Canadian financing in the global mining sector. Some 55 percent of Canadian mining assets abroad are concentrated in Latin America.
Some of the hardest hit countries include Colombia, which currently faces over $18 billion dollars in threatened or pending suits. Just one of these suits claims $16.5 billion. These claims relate to government actions aimed at protecting Indigenous territory and fragile páramo ecosystems, which provide water to over a million people.
Mexico and Uruguay face over $3 billion each in suits for measures that have put ecologically-sensitive areas off-limits to industrial mining. Guatemala and Ecuador are also facing suits or threats of suits related to gold and silver projects that communities have spent many years fighting, facing criminalization and threats to defend their water, health, and livelihoods.
Notably, the majority of these cases have been brought by exploration companies that have no operating mine, or no other mining project at all, and are making a last-ditch effort to extract millions or even billions of dollars from governments in the region through international arbitration whether they have followed local environmental and mining regulations or not, and almost always lacking community consent to operate.
While corporations and governments are exclusive parties to ISDS suits, we find that companies are often targeting laws, court decisions, and other measures resulting from the difficult struggles of mining-affected communities. In over two-thirds of the 38 cases examined, communities have been actively organizing to resist mining activities and defend their land, health, environment, self-determination and ways of life. As a result, these investor lawsuits represent a further assault against their self-determination and already limited legal protections.
In terms of the nature of government measures in dispute:
For transnational mining companies, the power to bring suits to supranational arbitration is yet another opportunity to strike it rich through reckless, casino-style gambling. In this system, the deck is heavily stacked in their favor. The corporations are allowed to bypass domestic courts and sue governments before private tribunals, such as the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The tribunal members are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider the rights of local communities or the importance of health and environmental protections.
Current investment rules are a threat to public and environmental welfare, as well as the right to community self-determination and national sovereignty over policymaking. Investor-state dispute settlement should be abolished, and all trade and investment treaties should be audited and, only after meaningful public participation, either be cancelled or rewritten in terms that put people’s rights and the environment first.
For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But this public outrage hasn’t stopped companies from continuing to file such lawsuits. In January 2019, for example, U.S.-based Legacy Vulcan LLC registered a case against Mexico over an environmental dispute concerning limestone quarrying near the well-known vacation destination Playa de Carmen. The company cited ecological land use regulations in the municipality of Solidaridad preventing the company from expanding mining operations on two properties. Using NAFTA investment rules, the company is reportedly planning to demand approximately $500 million in compensation.
The same month, U.S. firm Odyssey Marine Exploration filed its notice of intent to sue Mexico for the outrageous sum of $3.54 billion for having failed to obtain permits needed to advance an offshore phosphate mine project off the coast of Baja California Sur. This is the largest amount that Mexico has ever been threatened with in any ISDS suit.
These are just two of 38 mining-related investor-state cases documented in a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, MiningWatch Canada, and the Center for International Environmental Law. Extraction Casino: Mining Companies Gambling with Latin American Lives and Sovereignty through Supranational Arbitration exposes how transnational mining companies are among the biggest abusers of this system — especially in cases of unwanted investments where communities are in hard-fought battles to defend their land, water, health, and ways of life from the destructive impacts of mining.
Worldwide, the extractive sector is behind 24 percent of all known investor-state claims and the number of mining-related cases is booming. Out of the 169 cases filed by oil, gas and mining companies since 1974, 96 have been filed since 2010.
The geographic distribution of mining-related cases is concentrated in Latin America, where Central and South American governments face 29 percent of known claims. This report looked at all 38 of the mining-related cases that have been brought against Latin American governments with increasing intensity since 1998.
Canadian firms have brought most of these cases, reflective of the disproportionate role of Canadian financing in the global mining sector. Some 55 percent of Canadian mining assets abroad are concentrated in Latin America.
Some of the hardest hit countries include Colombia, which currently faces over $18 billion dollars in threatened or pending suits. Just one of these suits claims $16.5 billion. These claims relate to government actions aimed at protecting Indigenous territory and fragile páramo ecosystems, which provide water to over a million people.
Mexico and Uruguay face over $3 billion each in suits for measures that have put ecologically-sensitive areas off-limits to industrial mining. Guatemala and Ecuador are also facing suits or threats of suits related to gold and silver projects that communities have spent many years fighting, facing criminalization and threats to defend their water, health, and livelihoods.
Notably, the majority of these cases have been brought by exploration companies that have no operating mine, or no other mining project at all, and are making a last-ditch effort to extract millions or even billions of dollars from governments in the region through international arbitration whether they have followed local environmental and mining regulations or not, and almost always lacking community consent to operate.
While corporations and governments are exclusive parties to ISDS suits, we find that companies are often targeting laws, court decisions, and other measures resulting from the difficult struggles of mining-affected communities. In over two-thirds of the 38 cases examined, communities have been actively organizing to resist mining activities and defend their land, health, environment, self-determination and ways of life. As a result, these investor lawsuits represent a further assault against their self-determination and already limited legal protections.
In terms of the nature of government measures in dispute:
- In one-third of the cases, corporations are retaliating against measures related to Indigenous Rights and community consent;
- Over half of cases concern the enforcement of environmental and health protections; and
- Over one-third concern resource management (including nationalization or taxation).
For transnational mining companies, the power to bring suits to supranational arbitration is yet another opportunity to strike it rich through reckless, casino-style gambling. In this system, the deck is heavily stacked in their favor. The corporations are allowed to bypass domestic courts and sue governments before private tribunals, such as the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The tribunal members are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider the rights of local communities or the importance of health and environmental protections.
Current investment rules are a threat to public and environmental welfare, as well as the right to community self-determination and national sovereignty over policymaking. Investor-state dispute settlement should be abolished, and all trade and investment treaties should be audited and, only after meaningful public participation, either be cancelled or rewritten in terms that put people’s rights and the environment first.
Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending
The world would be richer and healthier if the full costs of fossil fuels were paid, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund
TIM DICKINSON - rolling stone
The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was$599 billion.
The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.
The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.
Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,” the study found. (These net gains are “calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.”)
For the United States, the $649 billion in fossil fuel subsidies exceeded even the extravagant amount of money the country spent on defense. To offer a sense of scale, Pentagon spending accounted for 54 percent of the discretionary federal budget in 2015. In comparison to another important, but less well-funded part of the federal budget, fossil fuel subsidies were nearly 10 times what Congress spent on education. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 that year.
At the opening of the IMF’s spring meetings in April, Managing Director Christine Lagarde laid out the benefits she sees in properly pricing fossil fuels. “The numbers are quite staggering” she said, referring to the savings that could be achieved “fiscally, but also in terms of human life, if there had been the right price on carbon emission as of 2015.”
Lagarde continued to rattle off the benefits to humanity of realizing these savings. “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people,” she said.
For Lagarde and the IMF, the conclusion was obvious: “We believe that removing fossil fuel subsidies is the right way to go.”
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was$599 billion.
The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.
The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.
Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,” the study found. (These net gains are “calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.”)
For the United States, the $649 billion in fossil fuel subsidies exceeded even the extravagant amount of money the country spent on defense. To offer a sense of scale, Pentagon spending accounted for 54 percent of the discretionary federal budget in 2015. In comparison to another important, but less well-funded part of the federal budget, fossil fuel subsidies were nearly 10 times what Congress spent on education. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 that year.
At the opening of the IMF’s spring meetings in April, Managing Director Christine Lagarde laid out the benefits she sees in properly pricing fossil fuels. “The numbers are quite staggering” she said, referring to the savings that could be achieved “fiscally, but also in terms of human life, if there had been the right price on carbon emission as of 2015.”
Lagarde continued to rattle off the benefits to humanity of realizing these savings. “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people,” she said.
For Lagarde and the IMF, the conclusion was obvious: “We believe that removing fossil fuel subsidies is the right way to go.”
How Russia contaminated $2.7 billion of oil exports to Europe
Olga Yagova, Gleb Gorodyankin, Dmitry Zhdannikov - reuters
APRIL 30, 2019 / 8:49 AM
MOSCOW/LONDON (Reuters) - It was a quiet Easter holiday at the offices of major European oil companies and refiners when an email in Russian landed. “What the hell does it say?” one manager recalled thinking as he sent it to his Moscow office for translation.
He was in for a shock.
The letter was from the state pipeline company in Belarus, Gomeltransneft, telling oil refiners and pipeline operators in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic that the crude heading toward them from Russia down the 5,500 km (3,400 mile) Druzhba pipeline network was heavily contaminated.
“We ask you to immediately take all measures to avoid potential losses and other negative consequences,” said the Gomeltransneft letter dated April 19 and seen by Reuters.
For the next 10 days, refiners and oil firms in Europe cut purchases of Russian oil by up to a million barrels a day - or 10 percent of European oil imports - in a major disruption to supply from the world’s second largest oil exporter.
The disruption sent oil to a six-month high above $75 a barrel, tarnished Russia’s reputation as an exporter at a time of rising competition with U.S. oil sales and triggered a Russian probe into whether the pipeline had been sabotaged.
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As the crisis entered its 11th day on Tuesday, oil buyers had yet to hear directly from Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft, the owner of the network that exported the tainted oil, 10 sources at Western oil firms and trading houses said.
“I have to rely on gossip and rumor to get an idea when clean oil will resume flowing,” said a trading manager at a Western oil company which had to suspend purchases of Russian oil in Germany, which is connected to Druzhba via Poland.
Transneft, the world’s largest pipeline company run by Nikolai Tokarev, declined to comment.
Transneft moves about 10 million barrels of oil a day in Russia and exports more than 4 million barrels a day.
Managers at all large Russian oil producers also said their attempts to get information from Transneft had failed and it remained a mystery as to how the oil had been contaminated or who was to blame.
‘HUGE PROBLEM’
Oil contamination is not unique to Russia - European and Asian buyers of U.S. oil have rejected a number of cargoes from Texas over the past year citing poor quality - but the scale and severity of the problem is rare, industry sources said.
Before the incident, Transneft, which operates 68,000 km of pipelines - enough to go almost twice round the world - was considered very reliable.
“It poses a huge problem for European refineries dependent on Russian pipeline flows,” said Amrita Sen at the think-tank Energy Aspects. “While this looks like a one-off, it does raise the question of the need to look for alternative suppliers as a back-up.”
The oil was contaminated with organic chlorides, compounds used in the industry to boost extraction from oilfields by cleaning oil wells and accelerating the flow of crude.
The compounds must be removed before oil enters pipelines as they can destroy refining equipment or, at high temperatures, create the poisonous gas chlorine.
Tests by Belarus on oil from Druzhba showed organic chloride levels of 150-330 parts per million (ppm) between April 19 and 22, according to Gomeltransneft documents seen by Reuters, well above the maximum 10 ppm allowed by Transneft.
The state oil company in Belarus said on Tuesday it was not expecting to get clean oil before May 4 and said it might take months to resume normal operations.
CLEAN-UP COSTS
Contaminated oil has been found in Belarus, Poland, Germany, Ukraine and the Baltic port of Ust Luga, all of which are served by the Druzhba network, said multiple sources involved in trading Russian oil said.
“This oil is not sellable. You cannot just dump the price and sell it at a discount. No one wants this oil,” a second source at a Western oil company said.
Buyers who have received contaminated oil now need to store it somewhere and dilute it with cleaner crude to lower chloride levels, an operation that could costs millions of dollars for each large crude tanker, according to oil trading sources.
The oil at the Ust Luga port, for example, could gradually be loaded onto ships mixed with better quality crude but solutions are less obvious for oil still in the pipeline.
Germany and Poland would need to reverse the flow and pump the crude back to Russia, or ports in Poland, as the refineries in those countries lack sufficient storage tanks to keep it until it can be diluted.
“This will take months and Russian exports and even production may have to fall,” said Sen at Energy Aspects, adding that European countries might have to tap strategic oil stocks if the outage lasts longer.
‘IN PARALYSIS’
Taken by surprise and left in the dark by a lack of communication from Transneft about how long the crisis will take to resolve, Western buyers of Russian oil have started looking at ways to shield themselves from further losses.
Last week, the world’s biggest oil trader, Vitol, refused to take a cargo from Ust Luga saying it was contaminated, forcing the port to shut down for 24 hours, according to several sources at Western oil companies and trading houses.
Vitol and Transneft, which owns the port, declined to comment.
Ust Luga reopened for crude loading on April 26 but as of April 29, the levels of chloride were still at about 80 ppm, according to two industry sources.
“Even though Russia says it has resumed shipments of clean oil, we are still very much in paralysis as the quality is bad,” said a major Western buyer of Russian oil.
Belarus has given a preliminary estimate of its losses from contaminated oil at $100 million, according to Gomeltransneft.
At least 10 tankers with a combined 1 million tonnes of contaminated oil - worth more than $500 million at current prices - have already sailed from Ust Luga, according to a dozen traders.
The buyers of the shipments - Total, Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura among others - will now have to store the oil somewhere in Europe and gradually dilute it, according to trading sources.
Total, Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura declined to comment.
SABOTAGE?
For now, there is no explanation as to how the oil was tainted. The scale of the contamination suggests corrupted crude could have been pumped into the pipeline for days, if not weeks.
Belarus said on Tuesday that the volume of contaminated crude could be as high as 5 million tonnes - equivalent to a month’s exports via Druzhba of about 1.2 million barrels a day and worth $2.7 billion at current prices.
In a news briefing on Friday, Igor Dyomin, an aide to Transeft’s Tokarev, told Russian media “the contamination was intentional”.
The pollution was detected at the private Samara Transneft-terminal, where oil is pumped into the Transneft network by several small producers, Dyomin was quoted as saying.
He did not name the producers and said investigators were searching several private companies in the Samara region.
Tokarev reiterated on Tuesday in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the contaminated oil had been pumped deliberately by a private company.
Anton Tomilov, first deputy director at the Samara Transneft-terminal, said his company had sold the crude oil loading terminal in 2017 and he didn’t know who owned it now.
Reuters was unable to identify the current owner.
Putin said on Saturday that law enforcement agencies could step in if Transneft’s internal investigation failed to provide enough answers.
He was in for a shock.
The letter was from the state pipeline company in Belarus, Gomeltransneft, telling oil refiners and pipeline operators in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic that the crude heading toward them from Russia down the 5,500 km (3,400 mile) Druzhba pipeline network was heavily contaminated.
“We ask you to immediately take all measures to avoid potential losses and other negative consequences,” said the Gomeltransneft letter dated April 19 and seen by Reuters.
For the next 10 days, refiners and oil firms in Europe cut purchases of Russian oil by up to a million barrels a day - or 10 percent of European oil imports - in a major disruption to supply from the world’s second largest oil exporter.
The disruption sent oil to a six-month high above $75 a barrel, tarnished Russia’s reputation as an exporter at a time of rising competition with U.S. oil sales and triggered a Russian probe into whether the pipeline had been sabotaged.
---
As the crisis entered its 11th day on Tuesday, oil buyers had yet to hear directly from Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft, the owner of the network that exported the tainted oil, 10 sources at Western oil firms and trading houses said.
“I have to rely on gossip and rumor to get an idea when clean oil will resume flowing,” said a trading manager at a Western oil company which had to suspend purchases of Russian oil in Germany, which is connected to Druzhba via Poland.
Transneft, the world’s largest pipeline company run by Nikolai Tokarev, declined to comment.
Transneft moves about 10 million barrels of oil a day in Russia and exports more than 4 million barrels a day.
Managers at all large Russian oil producers also said their attempts to get information from Transneft had failed and it remained a mystery as to how the oil had been contaminated or who was to blame.
‘HUGE PROBLEM’
Oil contamination is not unique to Russia - European and Asian buyers of U.S. oil have rejected a number of cargoes from Texas over the past year citing poor quality - but the scale and severity of the problem is rare, industry sources said.
Before the incident, Transneft, which operates 68,000 km of pipelines - enough to go almost twice round the world - was considered very reliable.
“It poses a huge problem for European refineries dependent on Russian pipeline flows,” said Amrita Sen at the think-tank Energy Aspects. “While this looks like a one-off, it does raise the question of the need to look for alternative suppliers as a back-up.”
The oil was contaminated with organic chlorides, compounds used in the industry to boost extraction from oilfields by cleaning oil wells and accelerating the flow of crude.
The compounds must be removed before oil enters pipelines as they can destroy refining equipment or, at high temperatures, create the poisonous gas chlorine.
Tests by Belarus on oil from Druzhba showed organic chloride levels of 150-330 parts per million (ppm) between April 19 and 22, according to Gomeltransneft documents seen by Reuters, well above the maximum 10 ppm allowed by Transneft.
The state oil company in Belarus said on Tuesday it was not expecting to get clean oil before May 4 and said it might take months to resume normal operations.
CLEAN-UP COSTS
Contaminated oil has been found in Belarus, Poland, Germany, Ukraine and the Baltic port of Ust Luga, all of which are served by the Druzhba network, said multiple sources involved in trading Russian oil said.
“This oil is not sellable. You cannot just dump the price and sell it at a discount. No one wants this oil,” a second source at a Western oil company said.
Buyers who have received contaminated oil now need to store it somewhere and dilute it with cleaner crude to lower chloride levels, an operation that could costs millions of dollars for each large crude tanker, according to oil trading sources.
The oil at the Ust Luga port, for example, could gradually be loaded onto ships mixed with better quality crude but solutions are less obvious for oil still in the pipeline.
Germany and Poland would need to reverse the flow and pump the crude back to Russia, or ports in Poland, as the refineries in those countries lack sufficient storage tanks to keep it until it can be diluted.
“This will take months and Russian exports and even production may have to fall,” said Sen at Energy Aspects, adding that European countries might have to tap strategic oil stocks if the outage lasts longer.
‘IN PARALYSIS’
Taken by surprise and left in the dark by a lack of communication from Transneft about how long the crisis will take to resolve, Western buyers of Russian oil have started looking at ways to shield themselves from further losses.
Last week, the world’s biggest oil trader, Vitol, refused to take a cargo from Ust Luga saying it was contaminated, forcing the port to shut down for 24 hours, according to several sources at Western oil companies and trading houses.
Vitol and Transneft, which owns the port, declined to comment.
Ust Luga reopened for crude loading on April 26 but as of April 29, the levels of chloride were still at about 80 ppm, according to two industry sources.
“Even though Russia says it has resumed shipments of clean oil, we are still very much in paralysis as the quality is bad,” said a major Western buyer of Russian oil.
Belarus has given a preliminary estimate of its losses from contaminated oil at $100 million, according to Gomeltransneft.
At least 10 tankers with a combined 1 million tonnes of contaminated oil - worth more than $500 million at current prices - have already sailed from Ust Luga, according to a dozen traders.
The buyers of the shipments - Total, Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura among others - will now have to store the oil somewhere in Europe and gradually dilute it, according to trading sources.
Total, Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura declined to comment.
SABOTAGE?
For now, there is no explanation as to how the oil was tainted. The scale of the contamination suggests corrupted crude could have been pumped into the pipeline for days, if not weeks.
Belarus said on Tuesday that the volume of contaminated crude could be as high as 5 million tonnes - equivalent to a month’s exports via Druzhba of about 1.2 million barrels a day and worth $2.7 billion at current prices.
In a news briefing on Friday, Igor Dyomin, an aide to Transeft’s Tokarev, told Russian media “the contamination was intentional”.
The pollution was detected at the private Samara Transneft-terminal, where oil is pumped into the Transneft network by several small producers, Dyomin was quoted as saying.
He did not name the producers and said investigators were searching several private companies in the Samara region.
Tokarev reiterated on Tuesday in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the contaminated oil had been pumped deliberately by a private company.
Anton Tomilov, first deputy director at the Samara Transneft-terminal, said his company had sold the crude oil loading terminal in 2017 and he didn’t know who owned it now.
Reuters was unable to identify the current owner.
Putin said on Saturday that law enforcement agencies could step in if Transneft’s internal investigation failed to provide enough answers.
big oil upset that they can't destroy the environment!!!
COLORADO DEMS TOOK ON THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY. NOW THE RECALLS ARE STARTING.
Aída Chávez - the intercept
April 28 2019, 6:08 a.m
AFTER SEIZING UNIFIED control of the Colorado state government in November’s wave election, Democrats there did something unusual: They governed.
For decades, the oil and gas industry has had a stranglehold on Colorado politics, but the newly empowered Democrats unveiled a sweeping bill to rein in fracking. The industry spent millions to stop it, but Democrats muscled it through, and it was signed by Gov. Jared Polis, an independently wealthy Democrat who ran in opposition to the industry.
Now the industry is fighting back by threatening to recall state Rep. Rochelle Galindo, who was elected last year and represents Weld County, the state’s top oil and gas producer. Galindo is the first openly gay person or woman of color to hold her seat.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office approved a recall petition against Galindo earlier this month, giving opponents until June 3 to collect 25 percent of the total votes cast in her election, which would mean 5,696 signatures.
Recall efforts have also been launched against Polis, Rep. Meg Froelich and Sen. Jeff Bridges, but no official petitions have been approved. According to state law, a governor must be in office for at least six months before a recall can be petitioned. Polis opponents would have to obtain 630,000 signatures in 60 days to get a recall election on the next ballot, and the signatures can’t be collected until July.
It isn’t an empty threat, either. The last time Colorado Democrats held a trifecta of control, two Democratic lawmakers were successfully voted out of office in the state’s first-ever recall elections. Former Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron were ousted in an NRA-led effort for their support of tougher gun laws following the Sandy Hook and Aurora mass shootings. Those recalls have haunted Colorado politics since.
So far this legislative session, Democrats have rallied behind a “red-flag” gun measure and a comprehensive sex ed bill, but their most high-profile war was over fracking and the effort to pass Senate Bill 181, the most significant oil and gas regulation reform since the 1950s.
A single Weld County rancher, Steve Wells, is bankrolling the effort to push Galindo out of office. Wells, whose property has hundreds of oil and gas wells, has donated $100,000 to the Committee to Recall Rochelle Galindo through his company, according to filings with the Secretary of State’s office.
There was initially another recall effort against the freshman representative that has now been disbanded, pushed by Joe Neville, brother of Senate Minority Leader Patrick Neville; Weld County pastor Steven Grant, who called Galindo a “homosexual pervert”; and gun rights lobbyist Dudley Brown.
“The voters of House District 50 are not going to be intimidated by millionaires and special interests cutting six-figure checks to political operatives engaging in the divisive Washington-style politics Coloradans consistently reject,” Galindo said in a statement earlier this month. “People are free to disagree with the decisions I make at the state capitol, and they’re free to vote for someone else in 2020. I will fight every day for our community and our shared best interests, and even for the people who disagree with me.”
“The reality is, [the oil and gas industries] are not used to not getting their way,” Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg, a sponsor of the legislation, told The Intercept. “Specifically, they get to say which bills pass and which ones fail, and that’s what led us to the point of where we are now. So they gave it all they got. They spent millions of dollars on TV ads and patch-through phone calls to members to make it feel like there was a groundswell of opposition.”
Fenberg added that the oil and gas industries held rallies at the Capitol, hired an army of lobbyists, and were part of creating an obstructionist atmosphere in the state Senate, in which Republican senators would ask for bills to be read “at length,” a parliamentary tactic used to slow legislation.
Under the legislation, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state board that approves regulations on the industry, is ordered to prioritize public health and safety rather than industry profit. SB 181 also gives cities and counties more control in regulating drilling and reduces the number of members with industry experience allowed to serve on the 9-member board from three to one, turning it into a full-time board rather than a volunteer one.
Despite its opposition to the bill, industry groups did manage to get some concessions in amendments slipped in before final passage, Fenberg added.
“So when it’s all said and done, no matter how much money they spent — and it’s in the multiple millions of dollars — they got some concessions out of it, I suppose, but overall the bill checks all the boxes I wanted to check in the beginning, and it’s still in line with the objective in the spirit of what we wanted to accomplish,” he said. “But they had a huge fight, and it was nasty and vitriolic at times, but I also don’t think this will be the end of it, unfortunately. I think there will be more to come.”
In the 2018 midterm elections, Colorado Democrats seized unified control of the state government for the first time since 2014, winning back the state Senate while holding down the House and governor’s seat. It opened up opportunities to pass legislation like the conversion therapy ban, for example, that had otherwise been getting stuck in the Senate. They have also passed a “red-flag” gun bill, which would allow law enforcement to remove the firearms of individuals perceived as threats, and the National Popular Vote bill, which pledges Colorado’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections.
Though much of the recall chatter is happening online, Republican organizing isn’t limited to Facebook groups like the one against Polis. Last week, Ben Engen of Constellation Political Consulting, a Republican consulting firm, held a recall election training seminar in Buena Vista to teach the party how to “mount a successful recall effort.”
Left-leaning blog Colorado Pols first posted a full version of the video of the training seminar, which Engen later redacted online so their strategies aren’t used to “hamstring” the effort. During the seminar, Engen said that recalls are “uniquely powerful” because while voters are generally aware of midterm elections, they aren’t as aware “of a special election like a recall that just comes out of nowhere and blindsides them.”
“That was one of the things that really helped us in 2013,” he continued. “We aren’t going to be able to count on all of those advantages again, so we have to be extra cognizant of the timing and executing things in a way that will preserve that power.”
For decades, the oil and gas industry has had a stranglehold on Colorado politics, but the newly empowered Democrats unveiled a sweeping bill to rein in fracking. The industry spent millions to stop it, but Democrats muscled it through, and it was signed by Gov. Jared Polis, an independently wealthy Democrat who ran in opposition to the industry.
Now the industry is fighting back by threatening to recall state Rep. Rochelle Galindo, who was elected last year and represents Weld County, the state’s top oil and gas producer. Galindo is the first openly gay person or woman of color to hold her seat.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office approved a recall petition against Galindo earlier this month, giving opponents until June 3 to collect 25 percent of the total votes cast in her election, which would mean 5,696 signatures.
Recall efforts have also been launched against Polis, Rep. Meg Froelich and Sen. Jeff Bridges, but no official petitions have been approved. According to state law, a governor must be in office for at least six months before a recall can be petitioned. Polis opponents would have to obtain 630,000 signatures in 60 days to get a recall election on the next ballot, and the signatures can’t be collected until July.
It isn’t an empty threat, either. The last time Colorado Democrats held a trifecta of control, two Democratic lawmakers were successfully voted out of office in the state’s first-ever recall elections. Former Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron were ousted in an NRA-led effort for their support of tougher gun laws following the Sandy Hook and Aurora mass shootings. Those recalls have haunted Colorado politics since.
So far this legislative session, Democrats have rallied behind a “red-flag” gun measure and a comprehensive sex ed bill, but their most high-profile war was over fracking and the effort to pass Senate Bill 181, the most significant oil and gas regulation reform since the 1950s.
A single Weld County rancher, Steve Wells, is bankrolling the effort to push Galindo out of office. Wells, whose property has hundreds of oil and gas wells, has donated $100,000 to the Committee to Recall Rochelle Galindo through his company, according to filings with the Secretary of State’s office.
There was initially another recall effort against the freshman representative that has now been disbanded, pushed by Joe Neville, brother of Senate Minority Leader Patrick Neville; Weld County pastor Steven Grant, who called Galindo a “homosexual pervert”; and gun rights lobbyist Dudley Brown.
“The voters of House District 50 are not going to be intimidated by millionaires and special interests cutting six-figure checks to political operatives engaging in the divisive Washington-style politics Coloradans consistently reject,” Galindo said in a statement earlier this month. “People are free to disagree with the decisions I make at the state capitol, and they’re free to vote for someone else in 2020. I will fight every day for our community and our shared best interests, and even for the people who disagree with me.”
“The reality is, [the oil and gas industries] are not used to not getting their way,” Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg, a sponsor of the legislation, told The Intercept. “Specifically, they get to say which bills pass and which ones fail, and that’s what led us to the point of where we are now. So they gave it all they got. They spent millions of dollars on TV ads and patch-through phone calls to members to make it feel like there was a groundswell of opposition.”
Fenberg added that the oil and gas industries held rallies at the Capitol, hired an army of lobbyists, and were part of creating an obstructionist atmosphere in the state Senate, in which Republican senators would ask for bills to be read “at length,” a parliamentary tactic used to slow legislation.
Under the legislation, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state board that approves regulations on the industry, is ordered to prioritize public health and safety rather than industry profit. SB 181 also gives cities and counties more control in regulating drilling and reduces the number of members with industry experience allowed to serve on the 9-member board from three to one, turning it into a full-time board rather than a volunteer one.
Despite its opposition to the bill, industry groups did manage to get some concessions in amendments slipped in before final passage, Fenberg added.
“So when it’s all said and done, no matter how much money they spent — and it’s in the multiple millions of dollars — they got some concessions out of it, I suppose, but overall the bill checks all the boxes I wanted to check in the beginning, and it’s still in line with the objective in the spirit of what we wanted to accomplish,” he said. “But they had a huge fight, and it was nasty and vitriolic at times, but I also don’t think this will be the end of it, unfortunately. I think there will be more to come.”
In the 2018 midterm elections, Colorado Democrats seized unified control of the state government for the first time since 2014, winning back the state Senate while holding down the House and governor’s seat. It opened up opportunities to pass legislation like the conversion therapy ban, for example, that had otherwise been getting stuck in the Senate. They have also passed a “red-flag” gun bill, which would allow law enforcement to remove the firearms of individuals perceived as threats, and the National Popular Vote bill, which pledges Colorado’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections.
Though much of the recall chatter is happening online, Republican organizing isn’t limited to Facebook groups like the one against Polis. Last week, Ben Engen of Constellation Political Consulting, a Republican consulting firm, held a recall election training seminar in Buena Vista to teach the party how to “mount a successful recall effort.”
Left-leaning blog Colorado Pols first posted a full version of the video of the training seminar, which Engen later redacted online so their strategies aren’t used to “hamstring” the effort. During the seminar, Engen said that recalls are “uniquely powerful” because while voters are generally aware of midterm elections, they aren’t as aware “of a special election like a recall that just comes out of nowhere and blindsides them.”
“That was one of the things that really helped us in 2013,” he continued. “We aren’t going to be able to count on all of those advantages again, so we have to be extra cognizant of the timing and executing things in a way that will preserve that power.”
Trump policy of less safety and more offshore drilling is 'a recipe for disaster'
Nine years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Trump administration is exacerbating the industry’s ‘systemic failures’, report warns
Oliver Milman in New York
the guardian
Thu 18 Apr 2019 04.00 EDT
Offshore oil and gas drilling in the US is plagued by “systemic failures” in oversight that are being worsened by Trump administration attempts to expand drilling and roll back safety requirements, a new report has warned.
The analysis of public documents by the conservation group Oceana found that while some minor improvements have been made since the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, a system of lax oversight, paltry fines and overstretched inspectors risks further major oil spills.
This situation is further deteriorating due to the Trump administration opening up almost all US waters to offshore drilling, as well as repealing Obama-era safety rules put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to the report, released on the eve of the ninth anniversary of the disaster.
“Less safety and more drilling is a recipe for disaster,” said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana. “We should be implementing safety reforms, not rolling back what we have. Nearly 10 years on from the BP disaster, overarching failures haven’t been remedied.”
The report criticizes the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling, for relying upon industry-written standards and for regularly granting exemptions to safety rules.
Penalties for rule-breaking by drilling companies are capped at little more than $44,000 per violation per day, with just 120 BSEE inspectors tasked with conducting 20,000 inspections in US waters each year. Oceana called this oversight regime “alarming” and demanded a much tougher system of inspections and fines.
A spokeswoman for BSEE said the agency had doubled its number of inspectors since 2010 “to significantly enhance our inspection program and ensure that we are providing sufficient oversight to drive improved safety performance and environmental stewardship.
“BSEE has made significant advances in technology, safety and environmental management systems, inspection strategies and risk management, and the regulatory framework since 2010,” reducing the risk of another accident, the representative said.
Conservationists have attacked the Trump administration for its sweeping “energy dominance” agenda that has seen oil and gas businesses invited to explore for resources in waters surrounding the US, including swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic previously put out of bounds due to concerns over environmental impacts and vocal opposition from coastal communities.
Many leading Republicans in coastal states have also expressed alarm over the huge expansion in drilling, with some warning that the potential auctioning off of Florida’s waters could cost Donald Trump dearly in the state in the 2020 presidential election.
In September, BSEE eased key safety rules put in place by the Obama administration in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon calamity, where an explosion killed 11 people and caused millions of barrels of oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling the coastline. BSEE said the watered-down rule would save industry around $13m a year.
While the BP oil spill is considered the worst environmental disaster in US history, smaller-scale oil spills are commonplace in US waters, with about 6,500 leaks occurring in federal waters between 2007 and 2017.
One such oil spill is now in its 15th year, with up to 700 barrels of oil a day flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from a wrecked Taylor Energy oil platform, which was toppled by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
The analysis of public documents by the conservation group Oceana found that while some minor improvements have been made since the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, a system of lax oversight, paltry fines and overstretched inspectors risks further major oil spills.
This situation is further deteriorating due to the Trump administration opening up almost all US waters to offshore drilling, as well as repealing Obama-era safety rules put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to the report, released on the eve of the ninth anniversary of the disaster.
“Less safety and more drilling is a recipe for disaster,” said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana. “We should be implementing safety reforms, not rolling back what we have. Nearly 10 years on from the BP disaster, overarching failures haven’t been remedied.”
The report criticizes the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling, for relying upon industry-written standards and for regularly granting exemptions to safety rules.
Penalties for rule-breaking by drilling companies are capped at little more than $44,000 per violation per day, with just 120 BSEE inspectors tasked with conducting 20,000 inspections in US waters each year. Oceana called this oversight regime “alarming” and demanded a much tougher system of inspections and fines.
A spokeswoman for BSEE said the agency had doubled its number of inspectors since 2010 “to significantly enhance our inspection program and ensure that we are providing sufficient oversight to drive improved safety performance and environmental stewardship.
“BSEE has made significant advances in technology, safety and environmental management systems, inspection strategies and risk management, and the regulatory framework since 2010,” reducing the risk of another accident, the representative said.
Conservationists have attacked the Trump administration for its sweeping “energy dominance” agenda that has seen oil and gas businesses invited to explore for resources in waters surrounding the US, including swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic previously put out of bounds due to concerns over environmental impacts and vocal opposition from coastal communities.
Many leading Republicans in coastal states have also expressed alarm over the huge expansion in drilling, with some warning that the potential auctioning off of Florida’s waters could cost Donald Trump dearly in the state in the 2020 presidential election.
In September, BSEE eased key safety rules put in place by the Obama administration in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon calamity, where an explosion killed 11 people and caused millions of barrels of oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling the coastline. BSEE said the watered-down rule would save industry around $13m a year.
While the BP oil spill is considered the worst environmental disaster in US history, smaller-scale oil spills are commonplace in US waters, with about 6,500 leaks occurring in federal waters between 2007 and 2017.
One such oil spill is now in its 15th year, with up to 700 barrels of oil a day flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from a wrecked Taylor Energy oil platform, which was toppled by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
Pennsylvania governor under scrutiny for role in approving pipeline
Tom Wolf’s office has denied he ordered permits for the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which is under criminal investigation for pollution and property damage, to be accelerated
Will Parrish
the guardian
Mon 8 Apr 2019 02.00 EDT
Internal government records obtained by the Guardian raise questions about the role of Pennsylvania’s governor, Tom Wolf, role in permitting construction of a controversial fossil fuel pipeline that now faces two criminal investigations stemming from widespread environmental and property damage.
The 350-mile, $2.5bn Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline through southern Pennsylvania has sparked growing outrage. It has caused roughly 140 documented industrial waste spills into wetlands and waterways,destroying numerous residential water wells, and opening large sinkholesjust steps from residents’ homes.
It is being constructed by the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which first gained notoriety as the builder of the Dakota Access pipeline, a project that drew international attention and widespread opposition, particularly from Native Americans, in 2016 and 2017 on the northern Great Plains.
Emails, text messages and regulatory records show that the secretary of Pennsylvania’s department of environmental protection, Patrick McDonnell, directed staff to cut short their environmental review even as numerous shortcomings remained in the project’s permit application. The department also appeared to be under pressure from Wolf’s office at the time.
DEP staff internally circulated two “deficiency letters” on 20 January 2017 that they were preparing to send to an ETP subsidiary, Sunoco Logistics, citing inadequacies in the company’s plans concerning earth disturbance activities and drilling beneath water bodies.
Five days later, a senior official in Wolf’s office, Yesenia Bane, texted McDonnell to request the agency refrain from sending a deficiency letter, pending a meeting involving Wolf, the governor’s chief of staff, and McDonnell.
“Understood,” McDonnell wrote in response. Less than an hour later, McDonnell emailed several staff members involved in the pipeline review that “Govs [sic] office needs a list of the outstanding issues ASAP.”
Roughly two weeks after that, the DEP approved the pipeline without requiring many of the environmental safeguards it had initially sought. A DEP senior official who was involved in the Mariner East 2 project, John Stefanko, noted in a later legal deposition that McDonnell had directed staff “that we needed to make a decision by February 10th”, although the review had been scheduled to persist for at least several additional months.
The text messages and a handwritten note from a DEP staff member show that the then CEO of Sunoco, Mike Hennigan, regularly talked to McDonnell in the lead-up to the permit authorization, and that McDonnell reported to the governor’s staff on those conversations. “If I need to talk to Mike five times a day, that’s what we will do,” McDonnell wrote to Bane.
A previous report on the text messages involving McDonnell and Banehelped spawn an ongoing Pennsylvania Ethics Commission investigation of Wolf’s office. The other records reviewed by the Guardian have not previously been reported.
JJ Abbott, a spokesperson for Wolf’s office, said the governor never directed the DEP to accelerate its approval of environmental permits.
“Decisions around the permits and any conditions were made by DEP,” Abbott stated in an email. “The governor’s staff routinely schedules briefings on issues of public interest and asks for updates on those issues from agencies. This is normal and responsible governing.”
A previous public statement by Wolf, however, indicates he went beyond just seeking updates. “I asked them what their timetable was and then, ‘Let’s do it,’” he told CBS Pittsburgh in February 2017. “As a CEO, I was the same way. You say you’re going to do something, let’s get it done.” He added: “That’s not political pressure, that’s actually trying to manage an organization.”
A DEP spokesperson also defended the permitting, saying in a statement: “The permits that were issued contain the most environmentally protective conditions of any permits in the department’s history.”
But Alex Bomstein, an attorney for the Philadelphia-based environmental protection group the Clean Air Council, said the DEP ultimately failed to make the company account for many geologically sensitive areas, wetlands and residential well locations.
“Cutting a pipeline corridor across Pennsylvania is bound to be environmentally damaging, but the government was willing to overlook a lot of the things that made this project especially risky,” Bomstein said.
Wolf, who is a Democrat, has received substantial donations from companies with a financial stake in Mariner East 2, including $20,000 toward his 2018 re-election campaign from the gas producer EQT Corporation, which has a shipping contract with the pipeline. During his 2014 campaign, he received$1.5m in campaign contributions from organizations, individuals and Pacs tied to the oil and gas industry.
Yesenia Bane, Wolf’s deputy chief of staff, who sent the text messages to McDonnell, the DEP secretary, is married to a former oil and gas lobbyist.
Since the project was first approved more than two years ago, the political environment surrounding it has changed.
On 12 March, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, and the district attorney of Delaware county, Pennsylvania, announced a joint criminal investigation of the pipeline and the company. The district attorney of Chester county, Pennsylvania, also launched a criminal investigation in December.
A bipartisan group of 14 state legislators have also signed a letter to Wolfrequesting he issue a moratorium on both of the existing Mariner East pipelines until ETP provides an emergency response plan to first responders in Chester county in case of a pipeline rupture or other emergency.
Many of the legislators represent the populous suburbs west of Philadelphia, where the pipeline runs alongside schools, subdivisions, and an elder care facility.
The pipeline is potentially a life or death issue for many residents of the area, said Eric Friedman, spokesman for the group Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety, a group of concerned local residents. According to a study cited by authorities in Delaware county, the probable fatality zone of an explosion of the Mariner East 2 pipeline is more than one mile wide.
“Many parents here fear that our children might not come home from school one day,” said Friedman, whose fourth-grade son attends a school near the pipeline route.
After a separate ETP pipeline in Pennsylvania exploded last month, burning down a house, barn and other structures, the DEP placed a moratorium on issuing any new ETP permits in the state – including several not-yet-issued water quality permits and other approvals for Mariner East 2.
The pipeline’s construction has resulted in more than 80 environmental violations. The DEP has assessed more than $13m in penalties against the company. Several times, ETP has been caught drilling beneath waterways where it had no permits from the DEP, on some occasions contaminating residential well supplies.
In late 2017, ETP failed to report a leak of drilling fluid during pipeline construction in in West Whiteland Township which caused sinkholes to open in a residential subdivision. One 20ft-deep chasm, which exposed the Mariner East 1 pipeline, came within 10 feet of a house. Even though the company claimed it had remediated the problem, roughly a year later, the pipeline caused sinkholes again in virtually the exact same location, raising fears of a pipeline explosion.
An ETP spokeswoman, Lisa Dellinger, said in a statement to the Guardian that “there is no legitimate basis for conducting a criminal investigation into our company and the Mariner East pipelines,” and also said the company had worked closely with local officials to respond to citizens’ concerns.
But Bomstein said the project’s hasty approval resulted largely from industry pressure.
“It’s important to recall that the company put political pressure on our government, and the government caved to that pressure,” he said.
The 350-mile, $2.5bn Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline through southern Pennsylvania has sparked growing outrage. It has caused roughly 140 documented industrial waste spills into wetlands and waterways,destroying numerous residential water wells, and opening large sinkholesjust steps from residents’ homes.
It is being constructed by the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which first gained notoriety as the builder of the Dakota Access pipeline, a project that drew international attention and widespread opposition, particularly from Native Americans, in 2016 and 2017 on the northern Great Plains.
Emails, text messages and regulatory records show that the secretary of Pennsylvania’s department of environmental protection, Patrick McDonnell, directed staff to cut short their environmental review even as numerous shortcomings remained in the project’s permit application. The department also appeared to be under pressure from Wolf’s office at the time.
DEP staff internally circulated two “deficiency letters” on 20 January 2017 that they were preparing to send to an ETP subsidiary, Sunoco Logistics, citing inadequacies in the company’s plans concerning earth disturbance activities and drilling beneath water bodies.
Five days later, a senior official in Wolf’s office, Yesenia Bane, texted McDonnell to request the agency refrain from sending a deficiency letter, pending a meeting involving Wolf, the governor’s chief of staff, and McDonnell.
“Understood,” McDonnell wrote in response. Less than an hour later, McDonnell emailed several staff members involved in the pipeline review that “Govs [sic] office needs a list of the outstanding issues ASAP.”
Roughly two weeks after that, the DEP approved the pipeline without requiring many of the environmental safeguards it had initially sought. A DEP senior official who was involved in the Mariner East 2 project, John Stefanko, noted in a later legal deposition that McDonnell had directed staff “that we needed to make a decision by February 10th”, although the review had been scheduled to persist for at least several additional months.
The text messages and a handwritten note from a DEP staff member show that the then CEO of Sunoco, Mike Hennigan, regularly talked to McDonnell in the lead-up to the permit authorization, and that McDonnell reported to the governor’s staff on those conversations. “If I need to talk to Mike five times a day, that’s what we will do,” McDonnell wrote to Bane.
A previous report on the text messages involving McDonnell and Banehelped spawn an ongoing Pennsylvania Ethics Commission investigation of Wolf’s office. The other records reviewed by the Guardian have not previously been reported.
JJ Abbott, a spokesperson for Wolf’s office, said the governor never directed the DEP to accelerate its approval of environmental permits.
“Decisions around the permits and any conditions were made by DEP,” Abbott stated in an email. “The governor’s staff routinely schedules briefings on issues of public interest and asks for updates on those issues from agencies. This is normal and responsible governing.”
A previous public statement by Wolf, however, indicates he went beyond just seeking updates. “I asked them what their timetable was and then, ‘Let’s do it,’” he told CBS Pittsburgh in February 2017. “As a CEO, I was the same way. You say you’re going to do something, let’s get it done.” He added: “That’s not political pressure, that’s actually trying to manage an organization.”
A DEP spokesperson also defended the permitting, saying in a statement: “The permits that were issued contain the most environmentally protective conditions of any permits in the department’s history.”
But Alex Bomstein, an attorney for the Philadelphia-based environmental protection group the Clean Air Council, said the DEP ultimately failed to make the company account for many geologically sensitive areas, wetlands and residential well locations.
“Cutting a pipeline corridor across Pennsylvania is bound to be environmentally damaging, but the government was willing to overlook a lot of the things that made this project especially risky,” Bomstein said.
Wolf, who is a Democrat, has received substantial donations from companies with a financial stake in Mariner East 2, including $20,000 toward his 2018 re-election campaign from the gas producer EQT Corporation, which has a shipping contract with the pipeline. During his 2014 campaign, he received$1.5m in campaign contributions from organizations, individuals and Pacs tied to the oil and gas industry.
Yesenia Bane, Wolf’s deputy chief of staff, who sent the text messages to McDonnell, the DEP secretary, is married to a former oil and gas lobbyist.
Since the project was first approved more than two years ago, the political environment surrounding it has changed.
On 12 March, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, and the district attorney of Delaware county, Pennsylvania, announced a joint criminal investigation of the pipeline and the company. The district attorney of Chester county, Pennsylvania, also launched a criminal investigation in December.
A bipartisan group of 14 state legislators have also signed a letter to Wolfrequesting he issue a moratorium on both of the existing Mariner East pipelines until ETP provides an emergency response plan to first responders in Chester county in case of a pipeline rupture or other emergency.
Many of the legislators represent the populous suburbs west of Philadelphia, where the pipeline runs alongside schools, subdivisions, and an elder care facility.
The pipeline is potentially a life or death issue for many residents of the area, said Eric Friedman, spokesman for the group Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety, a group of concerned local residents. According to a study cited by authorities in Delaware county, the probable fatality zone of an explosion of the Mariner East 2 pipeline is more than one mile wide.
“Many parents here fear that our children might not come home from school one day,” said Friedman, whose fourth-grade son attends a school near the pipeline route.
After a separate ETP pipeline in Pennsylvania exploded last month, burning down a house, barn and other structures, the DEP placed a moratorium on issuing any new ETP permits in the state – including several not-yet-issued water quality permits and other approvals for Mariner East 2.
The pipeline’s construction has resulted in more than 80 environmental violations. The DEP has assessed more than $13m in penalties against the company. Several times, ETP has been caught drilling beneath waterways where it had no permits from the DEP, on some occasions contaminating residential well supplies.
In late 2017, ETP failed to report a leak of drilling fluid during pipeline construction in in West Whiteland Township which caused sinkholes to open in a residential subdivision. One 20ft-deep chasm, which exposed the Mariner East 1 pipeline, came within 10 feet of a house. Even though the company claimed it had remediated the problem, roughly a year later, the pipeline caused sinkholes again in virtually the exact same location, raising fears of a pipeline explosion.
An ETP spokeswoman, Lisa Dellinger, said in a statement to the Guardian that “there is no legitimate basis for conducting a criminal investigation into our company and the Mariner East pipelines,” and also said the company had worked closely with local officials to respond to citizens’ concerns.
But Bomstein said the project’s hasty approval resulted largely from industry pressure.
“It’s important to recall that the company put political pressure on our government, and the government caved to that pressure,” he said.
It’s cheaper to replace most coal plants with renewables than keep them open, per report
New research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants with renewables would immediately reduce costs.
E.A. CRUNDEN - thinkprogress
MAR 25, 2019, 7:00 AM
It would be more expensive to keep the majority of U.S. coal plants open than to replace them with new wind and solar power alternatives, according to new findings published Monday.
Authored by the environmental firm Energy Innovation in partnership with the grid analysis company Vibrant Clean Energy, the research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants nationally with wind and solar power would immediately reduce power costs, with wind power in particular at times cutting the cost almost in half. By 2025, the analysis indicates, around 86 percent of coal plants could similarly be at risk of cheaper replacement by renewables.
“We’ve been closely following the cost of wind and solar in the U.S. and globally, and the costs have come down so far that we’re now seeing unprecedented low [costs] for wind and solar,” said Mike O’Boyle, Energy Innovation’s electricity policy director, on a call with reporters.
That trend has opened up an opportunity for a dramatic shift, the groups argue, one that could see coal largely replaced in many areas by energy sources that are better for both human health and the environment.
President Donald Trump has worked hard to save U.S. coal, going so far as to advocate for a financial bailout to rescue the dying industry. But data largely suggests that coal’s economic value will continue to plummet, a downturn that comes as wind and solar power are becoming increasingly cheaper and more viable options.
“America has officially entered the ‘coal cost crossover’ – where existing coal is increasingly more expensive than cleaner alternatives,” the report argues.
Using a data set of coal, wind, and solar costs, the report contrasts the cost of generating energy at coal plants against costs associated with potential wind or solar hubs in the nearby area. The report only examines the “local” area — defined as 35 miles from a given coal plant — to determine whether the plant has the potential to be replaced by cheaper renewables within that zone. Restricting the distance to the local area, however, leads the analysis to be more conservative.
“That local analysis is quite constraining,” O’Boyle said, noting that wind and solar grow in number when considering areas farther away from coal plants. The authors indicated that they opted for the local comparison because it offers a greater incentive to communities looking to transition from coal to renewables.
Nonetheless, the findings are stark even on a local level: 211 gigawatts (GW) of existing U.S. coal capacity as of the end of 2017 is at risk from renewable energy alternatives capable of providing the same amount of energy at a cheaper price. Within six years, that number increases to 246 GW, or nearly the entire U.S. fleet.
Some 93 GW of existing U.S. coal capacity, meanwhile, is substantially at risk from new renewable energy sources in 2018, with wind and solar poised to undercut costs by 25 percent. Even as federal renewable energy tax credits phase out, the amount of coal at risk of being replaced by renewables is projected to increase to 140 GW by 2025.
The firms behind the study both support renewable energy and argue in favor of a transition away from fossil fuels. But their analysis builds on existing research showing that the U.S. coal industry is rapidly on the decline. In fact, more coal plants shut down during Trump’s first two years in office than during former President Barack Obama’s entire first term. U.S. coal consumption also dropped to its lowest rate in nearly 40 years in 2018.
That swift decline has come hand in hand with the rise of wind and solar energy, both of which are widely considered far more economically appealing than coal.
“Coal is a dirty and expensive way to generate electricity,” the report observes, going on to note that it is becoming “increasingly uneconomic” when contrasted with new wind and solar opportunities.
Regional opportunities also abound. While the Midwest is likely to be disproportionately impacted by the closure of coal plants within the next five years, the region has ample potential for wind energy, according to the report. There are also abundant solar opportunities in a number of areas, including the sunny Southeast, where almost all coal plants are already substantially at risk.
The report, however, doesn’t analyze the role of natural gas in dethroning coal power plants. Natural gas is widely seen as a cheap alternative to coal, along with renewables. But natural gas is a fossil fuel with severe implications for human health and the environment, a reality that played a role in its exemption from the report, the authors told ThinkProgress.
The analysis also offers mixed findings for those championing efforts like the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). The resolution pushes for moving away from fossil fuels while creating jobs and protecting the livelihood of communities impacted by the shift. Monday’s study acknowledges that if regulators, customers, and utilities looked beyond the local 35-mile limit examined in the report, the potential for costs to drop increases — but this could mean fewer jobs in the immediate area as renewables replace coal farther outside the local community.
“Building local renewables in the immediate vicinity of coal plants implies wind and solar could replace local jobs, expand the tax base, reuse existing transmission, and locate in the same utility service territory. But these constraints are quite restrictive,” the analysis acknowledges.
That doesn’t mean that starting with a local framework isn’t a good approach. O’Boyle noted that the findings could prompt “policymakers and other stakeholders” to assess the benefits to their communities that a shift to renewables might entail.
“Using local renewables can really be used to address some community transition issues,” he said, in a nod to the jobs that could be lost as the coal industry declines. “[They] can look at that as they’re considering new options.”
Authored by the environmental firm Energy Innovation in partnership with the grid analysis company Vibrant Clean Energy, the research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants nationally with wind and solar power would immediately reduce power costs, with wind power in particular at times cutting the cost almost in half. By 2025, the analysis indicates, around 86 percent of coal plants could similarly be at risk of cheaper replacement by renewables.
“We’ve been closely following the cost of wind and solar in the U.S. and globally, and the costs have come down so far that we’re now seeing unprecedented low [costs] for wind and solar,” said Mike O’Boyle, Energy Innovation’s electricity policy director, on a call with reporters.
That trend has opened up an opportunity for a dramatic shift, the groups argue, one that could see coal largely replaced in many areas by energy sources that are better for both human health and the environment.
President Donald Trump has worked hard to save U.S. coal, going so far as to advocate for a financial bailout to rescue the dying industry. But data largely suggests that coal’s economic value will continue to plummet, a downturn that comes as wind and solar power are becoming increasingly cheaper and more viable options.
“America has officially entered the ‘coal cost crossover’ – where existing coal is increasingly more expensive than cleaner alternatives,” the report argues.
Using a data set of coal, wind, and solar costs, the report contrasts the cost of generating energy at coal plants against costs associated with potential wind or solar hubs in the nearby area. The report only examines the “local” area — defined as 35 miles from a given coal plant — to determine whether the plant has the potential to be replaced by cheaper renewables within that zone. Restricting the distance to the local area, however, leads the analysis to be more conservative.
“That local analysis is quite constraining,” O’Boyle said, noting that wind and solar grow in number when considering areas farther away from coal plants. The authors indicated that they opted for the local comparison because it offers a greater incentive to communities looking to transition from coal to renewables.
Nonetheless, the findings are stark even on a local level: 211 gigawatts (GW) of existing U.S. coal capacity as of the end of 2017 is at risk from renewable energy alternatives capable of providing the same amount of energy at a cheaper price. Within six years, that number increases to 246 GW, or nearly the entire U.S. fleet.
Some 93 GW of existing U.S. coal capacity, meanwhile, is substantially at risk from new renewable energy sources in 2018, with wind and solar poised to undercut costs by 25 percent. Even as federal renewable energy tax credits phase out, the amount of coal at risk of being replaced by renewables is projected to increase to 140 GW by 2025.
The firms behind the study both support renewable energy and argue in favor of a transition away from fossil fuels. But their analysis builds on existing research showing that the U.S. coal industry is rapidly on the decline. In fact, more coal plants shut down during Trump’s first two years in office than during former President Barack Obama’s entire first term. U.S. coal consumption also dropped to its lowest rate in nearly 40 years in 2018.
That swift decline has come hand in hand with the rise of wind and solar energy, both of which are widely considered far more economically appealing than coal.
“Coal is a dirty and expensive way to generate electricity,” the report observes, going on to note that it is becoming “increasingly uneconomic” when contrasted with new wind and solar opportunities.
Regional opportunities also abound. While the Midwest is likely to be disproportionately impacted by the closure of coal plants within the next five years, the region has ample potential for wind energy, according to the report. There are also abundant solar opportunities in a number of areas, including the sunny Southeast, where almost all coal plants are already substantially at risk.
The report, however, doesn’t analyze the role of natural gas in dethroning coal power plants. Natural gas is widely seen as a cheap alternative to coal, along with renewables. But natural gas is a fossil fuel with severe implications for human health and the environment, a reality that played a role in its exemption from the report, the authors told ThinkProgress.
The analysis also offers mixed findings for those championing efforts like the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). The resolution pushes for moving away from fossil fuels while creating jobs and protecting the livelihood of communities impacted by the shift. Monday’s study acknowledges that if regulators, customers, and utilities looked beyond the local 35-mile limit examined in the report, the potential for costs to drop increases — but this could mean fewer jobs in the immediate area as renewables replace coal farther outside the local community.
“Building local renewables in the immediate vicinity of coal plants implies wind and solar could replace local jobs, expand the tax base, reuse existing transmission, and locate in the same utility service territory. But these constraints are quite restrictive,” the analysis acknowledges.
That doesn’t mean that starting with a local framework isn’t a good approach. O’Boyle noted that the findings could prompt “policymakers and other stakeholders” to assess the benefits to their communities that a shift to renewables might entail.
“Using local renewables can really be used to address some community transition issues,” he said, in a nod to the jobs that could be lost as the coal industry declines. “[They] can look at that as they’re considering new options.”
EPA’s ‘secret science’ proposal being used by Big Oil to undermine clean water rules
Fossil fuel trade groups don't want the EPA to update a 1970s-era list of polluting petroleum chemicals.
KYLA MANDEL - thinkprogress
MAR 22, 2019, 8:00 AM
Internal emails reveal two major fossil fuel trade groups are lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from updating a decades-old list of toxic chemicals found in petroleum wastewater — and they’re using the Trump administration’s controversial “secret science” proposal to make their case.
The EPA currently monitors for 16 types of chemicals in wastewater, or effluent, released by petroleum refineries under the Clean Water Act. However, in the more than 40 years since the list was developed, scientific understanding around the number of chemicals and their toxicity levels has grown. As a result, the EPA is in the early stages of determining whether the priority list of chemicals needs to be updated.
But according to emails released to the Sierra Club and reviewed by ThinkProgress, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) are lobbying to limit the scope of the EPA’s study.
The fossil fuel trade groups want to ensure that two categories of chemicals known to be toxic to aquatic life, and potentially harmful to humans, are excluded from the study: alkylated polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (alkylated-PAHs) and naphthenic acids (NAs). The industry even goes so far as to state that including these in a study would risk “legal challenges.”
These two sets of chemicals are not currently on the EPA’s priority list. There are hundreds of different variations of PAH chemicals and levels of toxicity (alkylated-PAHs, for instance, are a derivative of the main “parent” PAH compounds). Burning coal and oil is the main source for these chemicals.
Yet, according to Jan Andersson, a chemistry professor at the University of Münster in Germany who has studied the EPA’s list, roughly 97 percent of the PAH chemical compounds found in crude oil are alkylated chemicals, making any lobbying against their inclusion quite significant. Meanwhile, NAs are found primarily in the byproduct of tar sands oil; the non-biodegradable compounds are stored in giant tailings ponds.
Excluding these types of chemicals from the EPA study would therefore serve to preemptively limit the scope of any potential rule changes in the future.
“They’re trying to cook the books at the very earliest stages of a study for petroleum refinery and ignoring the considerable data that’s out there that alkylated-PAHs are absolutely at least as toxic, if not more toxic, than the ones everybody monitors for right now,” Betsy Southerland, former director of the EPA’s Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology, told ThinkProgress. Southerland worked for the EPA for 30 years before resigning in 2017 in response to the change in leadership.
At high or prolonged exposure, PAH chemicals can cause tumors in aquatic life and birds as well as impact their reproduction, development, and immunity. Studies show that NAs have similar impacts, along with causing liver and heart damage in mice. Some known health effects to humans from PAH exposure include eye and skin irritation, nausea, and diarrhea, as well as longer-term impacts such as kidney or liver damage and asthma-like symptoms.
Scientists are still studying how the various chemicals impact humans; a range of PAH chemicals are classified as suspected or possibly carcinogenic to humans. What is known though, is that alkylated-PAHs are likely more toxic than other types of PAHs. They also take a longer time to biodegrade in the environment.
The ‘secret science’ argument
Issued by the EPA in 1976, the list of 16 types of PAH chemicals is used to determine which chemicals must be monitored for risks to drinking water and human health. Under the Clean Water Act, petroleum wastewater effluent guidelines establish a national floor — a baseline limit — for these chemicals. So, if there is a discharge of waste such as the release of industrial wastewater, stormwater runoff, or oil spills, only these 16 chemicals are tested to determine the level of toxicity.
The simplicity of the list has made the process easily applicable and cost-effective, and other countries have also turned to it as a resource. The list hasn’t just been used to monitor wastewater, either — environmental studies frequently use it as a basis for research. However, as a 2015 article co-authored by Andersson and published in the academic journal Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds notes, the list leaves out three large groups of these chemical compounds, including alkylated-PAHs. As the paper states, crude oil and coal are “rich” in alkyl compounds.
Despite the potential impact on human health and the environment, the levels of these chemicals currently found in petroleum wastewater is unknown; that’s one thing the EPA’s study would determine. PAH concentrations can vary from site-to-site and by the source of the crude oil. The findings would then help guide any necessary changes to the list of chemicals that should be regulated.
As part of its argument against the EPA measuring these chemicals, the trade groups are using the EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule to argue against disclosure of NAs because that would constitute a risk to companies’ proprietary data.
The proposed rule, also known as the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, was introduced last April by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The rule has been supported by climate science deniers and effectively aims to restrict the use of scientific evidence in the rule-making process. The plan has been stalled under Administrator Andrew Wheeler, but if adopted, it would require the EPA to rely only on scientific studies where the underlying data used by the researchers is made public. Critics argue the bill would severely limit the kind of science the EPA could use in justifying regulations (excluding public health data, for instance) and would place a number of unnecessary burdens on EPA scientists.
Some in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, both of which maintain close ties with the Trump administration, have also warned that the rule would expose confidential corporate information. In a June 8, 2018 letter attached to an email to Brian d’Amico, branch chief at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, API and AFPM wrote that using the industry’s own proprietary method of analyzing naphthenic acids would be a “clear contradiction” to the EPA’s proposed secret science rule.
“Independent validation is clearly not possible when a proprietary analytical method is used to generate the data,” the organizations argued. “In the interest of transparency, per its own proposed rule, EPA should abandon the use of this proprietary method in the Detailed Study.”
“Data derived from these methods could result in the EPA facing substantial scientific and legal challenge,” API and AFPM warned.
In other words, under the hypothetical scenario where the EPA decides to update its chemicals list at a time when the secret science rule is officially adopted, it would require the results of the EPA’s effluent study be made public, as that would be considered underlying data used to introduce the new chemicals rule. But doing so would, in the eyes of the fossil fuel industry, violate their proprietary methods used to analyze the chemical and so the chemicals should instead be simply excluded from the very beginning to avoid such a scenario.
“Quoting a rule that has not even gone final yet for the reason why [the EPA] shouldn’t be allowed to monitor it is pretty outrageous,” said Southerland.
The EPA did not respond to a request for comment from ThinkProgress about whether or not it will be studying the two types of chemicals the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying against. The API and AFPM also did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Obsolete’ list
The fossil fuel industry is also arguing that the EPA doesn’t have sufficient data to claim that these two groups of chemicals should be regulated. As Roger E. Claff, senior scientific adviser at API, wrote in a February 2018 email to d’Amico, among the concerns is a “lack of toxicity data for decision-making.”
But as Southerland explained, that’s precisely why the EPA is initiating its study; growing scientific findings suggest these chemicals are highly toxic and therefore updates might be warranted. Meanwhile, she said, “API is saying ‘hell no.'”
Andersson made the case for updating the list in his 2015 paper. The 1976 list was created based on what was commercially available at the time, but many more variations of PAH chemicals exist now. Meanwhile, toxicology has improved understanding of the adverse health impacts of a wide range of these chemicals, and “a wealth of new compounds have been added to the inventory of confirmed or suspect carcinogens.”
“This list of compounds is not suitable,” Andersson told ThinkProgress. “Most of them are pretty innocuous… [there are] many that are much more toxic that don’t appear on this list because in 1976, people didn’t know about them. This list looks pretty obsolete.”
‘Collaboration through the years’
The first meeting between the EPA and the fossil fuel trade groups on this issue occurred in May 2016, under the Obama administration. And as a January 2018 slide show presentation to the Trump administration shows, the industry highlighted its “collaboration through the years” with the EPA.
Of course, some degree of collaboration is needed in order for the EPA to properly conduct its study and gather the necessary data. However, the internal emails provide insight into the scale of influence the fossil fuel lobby is trying to exert at the very early stages of decision making.
Dalal Aboulhosn, who works on federal water policy for the Sierra Club, said this shows how under the current administration industry “is allowed to come in and pretty much write their wish list.”
On water specifically she said, there has been a pattern of industry approaching the EPA under both Pruitt and Wheeler with policy ideas before the EPA has actually decided to move on the issue. Shortly after, a change is announced.
“It’s very blatant and it’s across the board when it comes to issues in the agency, and we’re seeing it very starkly on water issues,” Aboulhosn said.
Indeed, after arguing last June that “the science and data for the toxicity of NAs and alkylated-PAHs are still a work in progress,” the two trade groups go so far as to suggest that, should the EPA wish to study them, the agency must address these two groups of chemicals “in a project outside of the Study.”
They argue the EPA should make a new official rule in order to create a new “method” for studying these chemicals. This separate project should undergo “the appropriate public notice and comment period required to gain method approval,” the trade groups’ letter states.
This, however, would be highly uncommon given public notice and comment periods typically apply to new regulations, or changes to existing regulations (such as repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan or introducing the “secret science” rule); it would also serve to delay the process by several years.
“It sounds like they’re trying to set some new bar to any future detailed studies,” Southerland said, “where no analyses can be done unless there’s a standard method… that would be a bar not just for petroleum refinery but every industry category.”
It quickly becomes a “chicken and egg” situation, Southerland said; you need a study to determine if a new rule is needed, but the industry is arguing you need a new rule before conducting the study.
But as the June 2018 industry letter to the EPA reads, “API and AFPM members believe in due diligence and support EPA in developing sound science.”
The EPA currently monitors for 16 types of chemicals in wastewater, or effluent, released by petroleum refineries under the Clean Water Act. However, in the more than 40 years since the list was developed, scientific understanding around the number of chemicals and their toxicity levels has grown. As a result, the EPA is in the early stages of determining whether the priority list of chemicals needs to be updated.
But according to emails released to the Sierra Club and reviewed by ThinkProgress, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) are lobbying to limit the scope of the EPA’s study.
The fossil fuel trade groups want to ensure that two categories of chemicals known to be toxic to aquatic life, and potentially harmful to humans, are excluded from the study: alkylated polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (alkylated-PAHs) and naphthenic acids (NAs). The industry even goes so far as to state that including these in a study would risk “legal challenges.”
These two sets of chemicals are not currently on the EPA’s priority list. There are hundreds of different variations of PAH chemicals and levels of toxicity (alkylated-PAHs, for instance, are a derivative of the main “parent” PAH compounds). Burning coal and oil is the main source for these chemicals.
Yet, according to Jan Andersson, a chemistry professor at the University of Münster in Germany who has studied the EPA’s list, roughly 97 percent of the PAH chemical compounds found in crude oil are alkylated chemicals, making any lobbying against their inclusion quite significant. Meanwhile, NAs are found primarily in the byproduct of tar sands oil; the non-biodegradable compounds are stored in giant tailings ponds.
Excluding these types of chemicals from the EPA study would therefore serve to preemptively limit the scope of any potential rule changes in the future.
“They’re trying to cook the books at the very earliest stages of a study for petroleum refinery and ignoring the considerable data that’s out there that alkylated-PAHs are absolutely at least as toxic, if not more toxic, than the ones everybody monitors for right now,” Betsy Southerland, former director of the EPA’s Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology, told ThinkProgress. Southerland worked for the EPA for 30 years before resigning in 2017 in response to the change in leadership.
At high or prolonged exposure, PAH chemicals can cause tumors in aquatic life and birds as well as impact their reproduction, development, and immunity. Studies show that NAs have similar impacts, along with causing liver and heart damage in mice. Some known health effects to humans from PAH exposure include eye and skin irritation, nausea, and diarrhea, as well as longer-term impacts such as kidney or liver damage and asthma-like symptoms.
Scientists are still studying how the various chemicals impact humans; a range of PAH chemicals are classified as suspected or possibly carcinogenic to humans. What is known though, is that alkylated-PAHs are likely more toxic than other types of PAHs. They also take a longer time to biodegrade in the environment.
The ‘secret science’ argument
Issued by the EPA in 1976, the list of 16 types of PAH chemicals is used to determine which chemicals must be monitored for risks to drinking water and human health. Under the Clean Water Act, petroleum wastewater effluent guidelines establish a national floor — a baseline limit — for these chemicals. So, if there is a discharge of waste such as the release of industrial wastewater, stormwater runoff, or oil spills, only these 16 chemicals are tested to determine the level of toxicity.
The simplicity of the list has made the process easily applicable and cost-effective, and other countries have also turned to it as a resource. The list hasn’t just been used to monitor wastewater, either — environmental studies frequently use it as a basis for research. However, as a 2015 article co-authored by Andersson and published in the academic journal Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds notes, the list leaves out three large groups of these chemical compounds, including alkylated-PAHs. As the paper states, crude oil and coal are “rich” in alkyl compounds.
Despite the potential impact on human health and the environment, the levels of these chemicals currently found in petroleum wastewater is unknown; that’s one thing the EPA’s study would determine. PAH concentrations can vary from site-to-site and by the source of the crude oil. The findings would then help guide any necessary changes to the list of chemicals that should be regulated.
As part of its argument against the EPA measuring these chemicals, the trade groups are using the EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule to argue against disclosure of NAs because that would constitute a risk to companies’ proprietary data.
The proposed rule, also known as the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, was introduced last April by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The rule has been supported by climate science deniers and effectively aims to restrict the use of scientific evidence in the rule-making process. The plan has been stalled under Administrator Andrew Wheeler, but if adopted, it would require the EPA to rely only on scientific studies where the underlying data used by the researchers is made public. Critics argue the bill would severely limit the kind of science the EPA could use in justifying regulations (excluding public health data, for instance) and would place a number of unnecessary burdens on EPA scientists.
Some in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, both of which maintain close ties with the Trump administration, have also warned that the rule would expose confidential corporate information. In a June 8, 2018 letter attached to an email to Brian d’Amico, branch chief at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, API and AFPM wrote that using the industry’s own proprietary method of analyzing naphthenic acids would be a “clear contradiction” to the EPA’s proposed secret science rule.
“Independent validation is clearly not possible when a proprietary analytical method is used to generate the data,” the organizations argued. “In the interest of transparency, per its own proposed rule, EPA should abandon the use of this proprietary method in the Detailed Study.”
“Data derived from these methods could result in the EPA facing substantial scientific and legal challenge,” API and AFPM warned.
In other words, under the hypothetical scenario where the EPA decides to update its chemicals list at a time when the secret science rule is officially adopted, it would require the results of the EPA’s effluent study be made public, as that would be considered underlying data used to introduce the new chemicals rule. But doing so would, in the eyes of the fossil fuel industry, violate their proprietary methods used to analyze the chemical and so the chemicals should instead be simply excluded from the very beginning to avoid such a scenario.
“Quoting a rule that has not even gone final yet for the reason why [the EPA] shouldn’t be allowed to monitor it is pretty outrageous,” said Southerland.
The EPA did not respond to a request for comment from ThinkProgress about whether or not it will be studying the two types of chemicals the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying against. The API and AFPM also did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Obsolete’ list
The fossil fuel industry is also arguing that the EPA doesn’t have sufficient data to claim that these two groups of chemicals should be regulated. As Roger E. Claff, senior scientific adviser at API, wrote in a February 2018 email to d’Amico, among the concerns is a “lack of toxicity data for decision-making.”
But as Southerland explained, that’s precisely why the EPA is initiating its study; growing scientific findings suggest these chemicals are highly toxic and therefore updates might be warranted. Meanwhile, she said, “API is saying ‘hell no.'”
Andersson made the case for updating the list in his 2015 paper. The 1976 list was created based on what was commercially available at the time, but many more variations of PAH chemicals exist now. Meanwhile, toxicology has improved understanding of the adverse health impacts of a wide range of these chemicals, and “a wealth of new compounds have been added to the inventory of confirmed or suspect carcinogens.”
“This list of compounds is not suitable,” Andersson told ThinkProgress. “Most of them are pretty innocuous… [there are] many that are much more toxic that don’t appear on this list because in 1976, people didn’t know about them. This list looks pretty obsolete.”
‘Collaboration through the years’
The first meeting between the EPA and the fossil fuel trade groups on this issue occurred in May 2016, under the Obama administration. And as a January 2018 slide show presentation to the Trump administration shows, the industry highlighted its “collaboration through the years” with the EPA.
Of course, some degree of collaboration is needed in order for the EPA to properly conduct its study and gather the necessary data. However, the internal emails provide insight into the scale of influence the fossil fuel lobby is trying to exert at the very early stages of decision making.
Dalal Aboulhosn, who works on federal water policy for the Sierra Club, said this shows how under the current administration industry “is allowed to come in and pretty much write their wish list.”
On water specifically she said, there has been a pattern of industry approaching the EPA under both Pruitt and Wheeler with policy ideas before the EPA has actually decided to move on the issue. Shortly after, a change is announced.
“It’s very blatant and it’s across the board when it comes to issues in the agency, and we’re seeing it very starkly on water issues,” Aboulhosn said.
Indeed, after arguing last June that “the science and data for the toxicity of NAs and alkylated-PAHs are still a work in progress,” the two trade groups go so far as to suggest that, should the EPA wish to study them, the agency must address these two groups of chemicals “in a project outside of the Study.”
They argue the EPA should make a new official rule in order to create a new “method” for studying these chemicals. This separate project should undergo “the appropriate public notice and comment period required to gain method approval,” the trade groups’ letter states.
This, however, would be highly uncommon given public notice and comment periods typically apply to new regulations, or changes to existing regulations (such as repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan or introducing the “secret science” rule); it would also serve to delay the process by several years.
“It sounds like they’re trying to set some new bar to any future detailed studies,” Southerland said, “where no analyses can be done unless there’s a standard method… that would be a bar not just for petroleum refinery but every industry category.”
It quickly becomes a “chicken and egg” situation, Southerland said; you need a study to determine if a new rule is needed, but the industry is arguing you need a new rule before conducting the study.
But as the June 2018 industry letter to the EPA reads, “API and AFPM members believe in due diligence and support EPA in developing sound science.”
destroying the world for oil!!!
US and Saudi Arabia blocking regulation of geoengineering, sources say
Delegates at UN environment assembly say the oil producers are protecting their industries
Jonathan Watts
the guardian
Mon 18 Mar 2019 02.00 EDT
The United States and Saudi Arabia have hamstrung global efforts to scrutinise climate geoengineering in order to benefit their fossil fuel industries, according to multiple sources at the United Nations environment assembly, taking place this week in Nairobi.
The world’s two biggest oil producers reportedly led opposition against plans to examine the risks of climate-manipulating technology such as sucking carbon out of the air, reflective mirrors in space, seeding the oceans and injecting particulates into the atmosphere.
Deeper analysis of the risks had been proposed by Switzerland and 12 other countries as a first step towards stronger oversight of potentially world-altering experiments that would have implications for food supply, biodiversity, global inequality and security. Some have been tried, but as yet none deployed at a scale that would affect the climate.
This call for caution was supported by the president of the assembly, Siim Kiisler, Estonia’s environment minister, “We need to talk about governance of geoengineering. We need an international agreement on this in the future. Just ignoring the issue does not help. We need to talk about it and how to govern those technologies in the future.”
But sources involved with the talks said the initiative was blocked, initially by the US and Saudi Arabia, then by Japan and other countries.
Once dismissed as reckless science fiction, geoengineering has risen up the political agenda of some nations as the climate crisis has become more apparent.
The petrochemical industry sees it as a way to justify further expansion of fossil fuel industries. Chevron, BHP and other high-emitting companies have invested in companies that are pushing ahead with experiments to pull CO2out of the air.
US academics at Harvard are also poised to conduct the biggest outdoor test of stratospheric aerosol injection, which simulates the cloaking effect of a volcano eruption. The researchers say this test, known as Scopex, will probably take place in New Mexico.
One of the leading US scientists behind such research, David Keith, published a paper this week claiming the risks of geoengineering are not as great as previously feared.
Opponents counter that earlier, more thorough studies show serious impacts on Asian monsoon cycles, African droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme temperatures. They want the UN to impose a moratorium on outdoor experiments using this form of technology.
“More than a scientific test, this is a political test. It’s a way to establish the technology,” warned Silvia Ribeiro of the industry watchdog ETC Group. “Stratospheric aerosol injection would cause huge imbalances in the climate. We think it will also exacerbate geopolitical unfairness.”
Many climate scientists argue such research is a distraction from proven methods of mitigating emissions through tree planting and a switch to renewable energy.
Jacqueline McGlade, professor of sustainable development at University College London, said she supported certain types of locally appropriate land-based geoengineering but was extremely concerned about efforts to play with the stratosphere. “If we mess around with particulate matter, it could potentially affect everyone. As far as atmospheric physics are concerned, we don’t know everything.”
Currently, the main prohibition on testing is the Convention on Biological Diversity, which the US is the only country not to have ratified. There are also provisions in the London Protocol, which forbids ocean seeding – another form of geoengineering, which aims to increase the capacity of sea water to absorb CO2. The question now is whether to strengthen the controls, by tightening rules and broadening oversight, or to narrow them down.
The US argues that geoengineering should be left to climate forums, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This week, consensus proved impossible. On Wednesday evening, the Swiss delegation withdrew their resolution and expressed regret that “some countries” were reluctant to move forward. “Our motivation was to get more information to inform discussions,” the head of the delegation Felix Wertli said. “Governance of geoengineering is an important topic today, and even more tomorrow. The topic is not off the table. It is the start of a further conversation.”
This was seen as a defeat for the “precautionary principle”, under which nations are supposed to put safety first when faced with uncertain but potentially catastrophic risks. Campaigners warned future debates on the subject are now more likely to focus narrowly on science and politics, rather than other species, food supply, water use, inequality and peace.
“It is regrettable that efforts to strengthen existing UN governance on geoengineering met with resistance from a handful of high-emitting oil-producing countries,” said Lili Fuhr of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. “This task is now more important than ever as we see real-world experiments and public support for these technologies growing in exactly those countries, like the USA and Saudi Arabia, that were blocking progress on this issue this week in Nairobi.”
This was not the only agenda item in Nairobi that Trump administration diplomats were accused of watering down; they were also accused of undermining efforts to ensure strong environmental governance. “They are trying to remove all targets and timelines,” said one senior delegate.
An ambitious Indian resolution to phase out single-use plastics by 2025 has been diluted to resolving to “significantly reduce” them by 2030, said another delegate. The US was supported by Brazil and at least four other countries in pushing back the deadline and making the language more vague.
On marine waste, a Norwegian proposal to build an effective global strategy for dealing with plastics that enter the oceans has also met with resistance from the US. “They want to postpone measures so they can protect their industry,” said an ambassador from a large developing country.
Approached by the Guardian, a US official denied his country was playing an obstructionist role.
This could prove to be the last time the UK is part of the European Union delegation at an international conference, and there is speculation that after Brexit the British position may be realigned with the economy-first, environment-second approach of Washington.
The world’s two biggest oil producers reportedly led opposition against plans to examine the risks of climate-manipulating technology such as sucking carbon out of the air, reflective mirrors in space, seeding the oceans and injecting particulates into the atmosphere.
Deeper analysis of the risks had been proposed by Switzerland and 12 other countries as a first step towards stronger oversight of potentially world-altering experiments that would have implications for food supply, biodiversity, global inequality and security. Some have been tried, but as yet none deployed at a scale that would affect the climate.
This call for caution was supported by the president of the assembly, Siim Kiisler, Estonia’s environment minister, “We need to talk about governance of geoengineering. We need an international agreement on this in the future. Just ignoring the issue does not help. We need to talk about it and how to govern those technologies in the future.”
But sources involved with the talks said the initiative was blocked, initially by the US and Saudi Arabia, then by Japan and other countries.
Once dismissed as reckless science fiction, geoengineering has risen up the political agenda of some nations as the climate crisis has become more apparent.
The petrochemical industry sees it as a way to justify further expansion of fossil fuel industries. Chevron, BHP and other high-emitting companies have invested in companies that are pushing ahead with experiments to pull CO2out of the air.
US academics at Harvard are also poised to conduct the biggest outdoor test of stratospheric aerosol injection, which simulates the cloaking effect of a volcano eruption. The researchers say this test, known as Scopex, will probably take place in New Mexico.
One of the leading US scientists behind such research, David Keith, published a paper this week claiming the risks of geoengineering are not as great as previously feared.
Opponents counter that earlier, more thorough studies show serious impacts on Asian monsoon cycles, African droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme temperatures. They want the UN to impose a moratorium on outdoor experiments using this form of technology.
“More than a scientific test, this is a political test. It’s a way to establish the technology,” warned Silvia Ribeiro of the industry watchdog ETC Group. “Stratospheric aerosol injection would cause huge imbalances in the climate. We think it will also exacerbate geopolitical unfairness.”
Many climate scientists argue such research is a distraction from proven methods of mitigating emissions through tree planting and a switch to renewable energy.
Jacqueline McGlade, professor of sustainable development at University College London, said she supported certain types of locally appropriate land-based geoengineering but was extremely concerned about efforts to play with the stratosphere. “If we mess around with particulate matter, it could potentially affect everyone. As far as atmospheric physics are concerned, we don’t know everything.”
Currently, the main prohibition on testing is the Convention on Biological Diversity, which the US is the only country not to have ratified. There are also provisions in the London Protocol, which forbids ocean seeding – another form of geoengineering, which aims to increase the capacity of sea water to absorb CO2. The question now is whether to strengthen the controls, by tightening rules and broadening oversight, or to narrow them down.
The US argues that geoengineering should be left to climate forums, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This week, consensus proved impossible. On Wednesday evening, the Swiss delegation withdrew their resolution and expressed regret that “some countries” were reluctant to move forward. “Our motivation was to get more information to inform discussions,” the head of the delegation Felix Wertli said. “Governance of geoengineering is an important topic today, and even more tomorrow. The topic is not off the table. It is the start of a further conversation.”
This was seen as a defeat for the “precautionary principle”, under which nations are supposed to put safety first when faced with uncertain but potentially catastrophic risks. Campaigners warned future debates on the subject are now more likely to focus narrowly on science and politics, rather than other species, food supply, water use, inequality and peace.
“It is regrettable that efforts to strengthen existing UN governance on geoengineering met with resistance from a handful of high-emitting oil-producing countries,” said Lili Fuhr of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. “This task is now more important than ever as we see real-world experiments and public support for these technologies growing in exactly those countries, like the USA and Saudi Arabia, that were blocking progress on this issue this week in Nairobi.”
This was not the only agenda item in Nairobi that Trump administration diplomats were accused of watering down; they were also accused of undermining efforts to ensure strong environmental governance. “They are trying to remove all targets and timelines,” said one senior delegate.
An ambitious Indian resolution to phase out single-use plastics by 2025 has been diluted to resolving to “significantly reduce” them by 2030, said another delegate. The US was supported by Brazil and at least four other countries in pushing back the deadline and making the language more vague.
On marine waste, a Norwegian proposal to build an effective global strategy for dealing with plastics that enter the oceans has also met with resistance from the US. “They want to postpone measures so they can protect their industry,” said an ambassador from a large developing country.
Approached by the Guardian, a US official denied his country was playing an obstructionist role.
This could prove to be the last time the UK is part of the European Union delegation at an international conference, and there is speculation that after Brexit the British position may be realigned with the economy-first, environment-second approach of Washington.
Oil companies calling for methane regulations are part of lobbying group that opposes them
The American Petroleum Institute has led the charge on weakening methane emission regulations.
E.A. CRUNDEN - thinkprogress
MAR 14, 2019, 12:30 PM
Several of the world’s biggest oil companies are voicing their support for federal regulations on methane emissions, even as the trade association lobbying on their behalf continues to back the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken those rules.
Oil giants, including Shell and ExxonMobil, said this week that they oppose the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to weaken regulations on methane, a major byproduct of fracking for oil and gas. But the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association representing the oil and gas industry, has consistently resisted stricter methane rules, leaving environmental advocates skeptical about the new push from oil companies.
“There’s a real disconnect here… these companies are members of API,” Kelly Martin, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, told ThinkProgress.
She noted that API has been at the forefront of the push for less stringent methane regulations. While carbon dioxide is typically singled out as a leading greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent when it comes to trapping heat, making it an undeniable contributor to global warming.
The sudden outpouring of support for federal methane regulations from several major oil companies came during CERAWeek, a major global energy event in Houston, Texas. On Tuesday, Gretchen Watkins, the U.S. president of Shell, announced that the company was breaking its policy of not “trying to tell governments how to do their jobs” to call for the EPA to continue “direct regulation” of methane emissions.
“The U.S. should not strip methane regulations out of the Clean Air Act. We need to do more,” said Watkins.
The Houston-based EOG Resources Inc. — formerly Enron Oil & Gas — similarly announced on its website that the company supports regulating methane, following shareholder pressure to reduce emissions. And through its subsidiary XTO Energy Inc., Exxon expressed related sentiments in an interview with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), advocating for the EPA to continue regulating methane.
Also on Tuesday, BP CEO Bob Dudley acknowledged the influence of changing public perception on climate change. “There’s a rising tide of concern on many fronts about the lack of progress on climate issues, and I would say not just concern, but anger,” Dudley said at CERAWeek, noting that young people in particular are increasingly more concerned about climate change and want action.
Oil companies’ public recognition of that trend, and stated support for stricter methane regulations, has earned some praise from lawmakers. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) tweeted that the support for regulations from such companies prove “just how dangerous it [methane] really is,” while Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) underscored the message being conveyed to the EPA.
“When even the oil and gas industry agrees we need stronger methane standards to combat climate change, maybe it’s time to strengthen methane emissions rules,” wrote Heinrich on Twitter.
But environmental advocates remain largely unimpressed, not least of all because of the looming shadow of API.
“Many of these same companies that are coming out with these strong statements are still members of API,” said Lila Holzman, the energy program manager for the nonprofit shareholder advocacy group As You Sow.
Holzman told ThinkProgress that the shift in rhetoric from oil and gas companies reflects years of pressure from shareholders, along with the threat leaking methane poses to companies themselves. “I think it shows that they recognize the risks we’ve all been talking about,” she said.
But their ongoing relationship with API represents a hurdle for Holzman. “They’re [the oil companies] allowing groups to speak for them that say the opposite” when it comes to this regulation, she said.
Martin, of the Sierra Club, similarly expressed skepticism.
“API has been lobbying extensively against methane protection,” she said. “These companies are still affiliating with API.”
That cynicism is seemingly merited. In his comments Tuesday, BP CEO Dudley spoke about the support for proposals like the Green New Deal resolution introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA).
“These are young people on the cusp of being able to vote,” Dudley said, noting the scale of support among young people for ambitious proposals like the Green New Deal. “They’re tomorrow’s legislators, regulators, jurists, and consumers, of course.”
But BP itself is under fire for undermining that messaging. While the oil company is notably collaborating with EDF in an effort to reduce methane emissions, a report on Wednesday found that the company has lobbied the Trump administration to weaken regulation of the greenhouse gas. According to documents collected by Unearthed, an investigative news site house at Greenpeace UK, BP both opposed and then successfully helped reverse methane regulations in the United States. The company worked closely with API on the association’s efforts to undermine the emissions rules.
“In yet another example of corporate doublespeak, BP claims to support limiting wasteful methane leakage and flaring, yet lobbied against a common sense rule to do just that. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a statement. The lawmaker sits on the Senate environment committee.
Despite that clear conflict, oil and gas companies do appear to be acknowledging public sentiment. Polling indicates that the majority of Americans care about climate change and are growing concerned about inaction. But advocates worry that companies like Shell and BP are changing their tone without changing their actual practices.
“We need to keep pressing so it’s not the sort of thing that a company thinks they have a box checked and they’re set,” said Holzman, noting that real climate action will take far more than pushing for basic regulations.
Martin, meanwhile, emphasized that no amount of lip service will shift how many climate advocates view the oil and gas industry.
“I see oil and gas as incompatible with climate action,” she said. “If companies like Shell were truly interested in climate action, they would be accelerating investments in clean energy.”
Oil giants, including Shell and ExxonMobil, said this week that they oppose the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to weaken regulations on methane, a major byproduct of fracking for oil and gas. But the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association representing the oil and gas industry, has consistently resisted stricter methane rules, leaving environmental advocates skeptical about the new push from oil companies.
“There’s a real disconnect here… these companies are members of API,” Kelly Martin, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, told ThinkProgress.
She noted that API has been at the forefront of the push for less stringent methane regulations. While carbon dioxide is typically singled out as a leading greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent when it comes to trapping heat, making it an undeniable contributor to global warming.
The sudden outpouring of support for federal methane regulations from several major oil companies came during CERAWeek, a major global energy event in Houston, Texas. On Tuesday, Gretchen Watkins, the U.S. president of Shell, announced that the company was breaking its policy of not “trying to tell governments how to do their jobs” to call for the EPA to continue “direct regulation” of methane emissions.
“The U.S. should not strip methane regulations out of the Clean Air Act. We need to do more,” said Watkins.
The Houston-based EOG Resources Inc. — formerly Enron Oil & Gas — similarly announced on its website that the company supports regulating methane, following shareholder pressure to reduce emissions. And through its subsidiary XTO Energy Inc., Exxon expressed related sentiments in an interview with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), advocating for the EPA to continue regulating methane.
Also on Tuesday, BP CEO Bob Dudley acknowledged the influence of changing public perception on climate change. “There’s a rising tide of concern on many fronts about the lack of progress on climate issues, and I would say not just concern, but anger,” Dudley said at CERAWeek, noting that young people in particular are increasingly more concerned about climate change and want action.
Oil companies’ public recognition of that trend, and stated support for stricter methane regulations, has earned some praise from lawmakers. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) tweeted that the support for regulations from such companies prove “just how dangerous it [methane] really is,” while Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) underscored the message being conveyed to the EPA.
“When even the oil and gas industry agrees we need stronger methane standards to combat climate change, maybe it’s time to strengthen methane emissions rules,” wrote Heinrich on Twitter.
But environmental advocates remain largely unimpressed, not least of all because of the looming shadow of API.
“Many of these same companies that are coming out with these strong statements are still members of API,” said Lila Holzman, the energy program manager for the nonprofit shareholder advocacy group As You Sow.
Holzman told ThinkProgress that the shift in rhetoric from oil and gas companies reflects years of pressure from shareholders, along with the threat leaking methane poses to companies themselves. “I think it shows that they recognize the risks we’ve all been talking about,” she said.
But their ongoing relationship with API represents a hurdle for Holzman. “They’re [the oil companies] allowing groups to speak for them that say the opposite” when it comes to this regulation, she said.
Martin, of the Sierra Club, similarly expressed skepticism.
“API has been lobbying extensively against methane protection,” she said. “These companies are still affiliating with API.”
That cynicism is seemingly merited. In his comments Tuesday, BP CEO Dudley spoke about the support for proposals like the Green New Deal resolution introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA).
“These are young people on the cusp of being able to vote,” Dudley said, noting the scale of support among young people for ambitious proposals like the Green New Deal. “They’re tomorrow’s legislators, regulators, jurists, and consumers, of course.”
But BP itself is under fire for undermining that messaging. While the oil company is notably collaborating with EDF in an effort to reduce methane emissions, a report on Wednesday found that the company has lobbied the Trump administration to weaken regulation of the greenhouse gas. According to documents collected by Unearthed, an investigative news site house at Greenpeace UK, BP both opposed and then successfully helped reverse methane regulations in the United States. The company worked closely with API on the association’s efforts to undermine the emissions rules.
“In yet another example of corporate doublespeak, BP claims to support limiting wasteful methane leakage and flaring, yet lobbied against a common sense rule to do just that. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a statement. The lawmaker sits on the Senate environment committee.
Despite that clear conflict, oil and gas companies do appear to be acknowledging public sentiment. Polling indicates that the majority of Americans care about climate change and are growing concerned about inaction. But advocates worry that companies like Shell and BP are changing their tone without changing their actual practices.
“We need to keep pressing so it’s not the sort of thing that a company thinks they have a box checked and they’re set,” said Holzman, noting that real climate action will take far more than pushing for basic regulations.
Martin, meanwhile, emphasized that no amount of lip service will shift how many climate advocates view the oil and gas industry.
“I see oil and gas as incompatible with climate action,” she said. “If companies like Shell were truly interested in climate action, they would be accelerating investments in clean energy.”
EPA changed rules to help profitable refiners get biofuel waivers: lawsuit
Reuters - raw story
07 MAR 2019 AT 16:33 ET
U. S. environmental regulators quietly changed the way they assess applications from refineries for waivers from the nation’s biofuels law, making it possible for highly profitable plants to secure lucrative exemptions, according to court documents filed by a biofuels trade group on Thursday.
The new documents, part of a lawsuit that began last year, could provide the most complete explanation to date of how the Environmental Protection Agency vastly expanded the number of small refinery hardship biofuel waivers under former Administrator Scott Pruitt, including by granting exemptions to oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
The expansion of the waiver program saved the oil industry hundreds of millions of dollars but angered farmers in the nation’s heartland, who said it crushed the credit prices that are an integral part of the ethanol industry.
According to the documents, filed by the Advanced Biofuels Association (ABFA), the EPA in 2017 stopped considering whether compliance with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) would prevent a refinery from making money and being competitive.
Instead, the agency considered primarily whether compliance would cause a “disproportionate” impact on the facility, an easier hurdle to clear.
Under the RFS, refiners must mix biofuels like ethanol with their gasoline and diesel, but smaller refineries can be exempted if they can prove that complying would cause them measurable financial harm.
ABFA, which represents 35 companies responsible for 4.4 billion gallons of renewable fuel production around the globe, is asking a federal judge to rule whether the EPA’s expansion of the waiver program was legal, which they argue depresses demand for their biofuel.
The Department of Energy traditionally scored the hardship applications on a two-prong matrix that considered whether the RFS posed a disproportionate hardship, and whether the plant could remain viable if required to comply.
Prior to May 2017, a refinery would have to pass both tests to get an exemption, ABFA alleged, citing EPA correspondence with a refiner it said it had obtained.
“In prior decisions, EPA considered that a small refinery could not show disproportionate economic hardship without showing an effect on ‘viability,’ but we are changing our approach,” the EPA wrote in 2017 to an unnamed refiner, according to an excerpt included in the court filing.
The EPA went on to say that “RFS obligations may impose a disproportionate economic hardship when it is disproportionately difficult for a refinery to comply with its RFS obligations — even if the refinery’s operations are not significantly impaired.”
The EPA turned over documents related to 48 applications for waivers to the ABFA as part of the legal discovery process. In 24 cases, the Energy Department gave the applicant a viability score of zero, meaning the RFS would have no impact on the refinery’s ability to stay competitive and profitable, but the EPA still granted the waiver, ABFA alleged in the court documents.
The EPA also routinely ignored the department’s recommendations to grant partial exemptions and instead granted full exemptions, ABFA alleged in court documents.
An EPA official said the agency had no comment.
The trade group has asked a federal court in Washington to rule on the legality of the expansion of the hardship waivers under Pruitt. The scoring system has faced judicial scrutiny in the past, with judges in different circuits siding with and against the agency.
In an often cited case, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in 2017 that the EPA had in the past used too strict a definition of viability that required the applicant to prove complying with the RFS would cause the plant to shut or the company to file for bankruptcy.
While the EPA did not announce the changes publicly, the agency clearly sent the message to refiners, ABFA said. Oil majors such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil, who did not apply for waivers in the past, were granted exemptions at their smaller refineries, Reuters previously reported.
Billionaire Carl Icahn, a one-time Trump adviser who helped Pruitt land the job at the EPA, was also granted exemptions at his smaller refineries owned by CVR Energy after previously been denied them by the Obama administration.
In all, the number of exemptions granted went from 7 in 2015 to at least 29 in 2017, EPA data shows.
The EPA is set to decide on 37 additional pending applications for 2018 by the end of the month, a move that will be closely watched by the corn and oil industries.
The new documents, part of a lawsuit that began last year, could provide the most complete explanation to date of how the Environmental Protection Agency vastly expanded the number of small refinery hardship biofuel waivers under former Administrator Scott Pruitt, including by granting exemptions to oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
The expansion of the waiver program saved the oil industry hundreds of millions of dollars but angered farmers in the nation’s heartland, who said it crushed the credit prices that are an integral part of the ethanol industry.
According to the documents, filed by the Advanced Biofuels Association (ABFA), the EPA in 2017 stopped considering whether compliance with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) would prevent a refinery from making money and being competitive.
Instead, the agency considered primarily whether compliance would cause a “disproportionate” impact on the facility, an easier hurdle to clear.
Under the RFS, refiners must mix biofuels like ethanol with their gasoline and diesel, but smaller refineries can be exempted if they can prove that complying would cause them measurable financial harm.
ABFA, which represents 35 companies responsible for 4.4 billion gallons of renewable fuel production around the globe, is asking a federal judge to rule whether the EPA’s expansion of the waiver program was legal, which they argue depresses demand for their biofuel.
The Department of Energy traditionally scored the hardship applications on a two-prong matrix that considered whether the RFS posed a disproportionate hardship, and whether the plant could remain viable if required to comply.
Prior to May 2017, a refinery would have to pass both tests to get an exemption, ABFA alleged, citing EPA correspondence with a refiner it said it had obtained.
“In prior decisions, EPA considered that a small refinery could not show disproportionate economic hardship without showing an effect on ‘viability,’ but we are changing our approach,” the EPA wrote in 2017 to an unnamed refiner, according to an excerpt included in the court filing.
The EPA went on to say that “RFS obligations may impose a disproportionate economic hardship when it is disproportionately difficult for a refinery to comply with its RFS obligations — even if the refinery’s operations are not significantly impaired.”
The EPA turned over documents related to 48 applications for waivers to the ABFA as part of the legal discovery process. In 24 cases, the Energy Department gave the applicant a viability score of zero, meaning the RFS would have no impact on the refinery’s ability to stay competitive and profitable, but the EPA still granted the waiver, ABFA alleged in the court documents.
The EPA also routinely ignored the department’s recommendations to grant partial exemptions and instead granted full exemptions, ABFA alleged in court documents.
An EPA official said the agency had no comment.
The trade group has asked a federal court in Washington to rule on the legality of the expansion of the hardship waivers under Pruitt. The scoring system has faced judicial scrutiny in the past, with judges in different circuits siding with and against the agency.
In an often cited case, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in 2017 that the EPA had in the past used too strict a definition of viability that required the applicant to prove complying with the RFS would cause the plant to shut or the company to file for bankruptcy.
While the EPA did not announce the changes publicly, the agency clearly sent the message to refiners, ABFA said. Oil majors such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil, who did not apply for waivers in the past, were granted exemptions at their smaller refineries, Reuters previously reported.
Billionaire Carl Icahn, a one-time Trump adviser who helped Pruitt land the job at the EPA, was also granted exemptions at his smaller refineries owned by CVR Energy after previously been denied them by the Obama administration.
In all, the number of exemptions granted went from 7 in 2015 to at least 29 in 2017, EPA data shows.
The EPA is set to decide on 37 additional pending applications for 2018 by the end of the month, a move that will be closely watched by the corn and oil industries.
Residents Say Natural Gas Production Is Marring West Virginia. And the Legislature Isn’t Doing Anything About It.
Though studies recommended additional protections years ago, lawmakers have not taken action to put them in place. But when residents sued, a Supreme Court justice said it was the Legislature’s job.
by Kate Mishkin, The Charleston Gazette-Mail - pro publica
March 6, 11 a.m. EST
West Virginia Delegate Terri Sypolt says she understands how natural gas drilling has changed the look and feel of communities in the state, bringing an influx of noisy truck traffic and construction.
“I’m thinking about a neighbor’s dog howling for two years right at your doorstep,” said Sypolt, a Republican from Preston County, in the northern region of the state.
So when she returned to Charleston for this year’s legislative session, she introduced a bill for the third consecutive year to monitor the air and noise around drilling operations, hoping her colleagues would take action to help residents.
The bill didn’t make it onto a committee agenda, let alone to the floor of the House of Delegates.
As natural gas booms around the Marcellus Shale, nearby residents continue to bear the burden of the industry’s growth. Many live with constant light, truck traffic, dust and noise from gas production fueled by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the Gazette-Mail and ProPublica chronicled last year. Business groups and the state coal association have argued in court filings that the inconveniences are unavoidable.
With days left in the legislative session, proponents of reform have essentially given up. The deadline has passed for bills to initially clear the House, and lawmakers and groups that have pushed for protection for residents have moved on to other issues.
Delegate Barbara Fleischauer, a Democrat from Monongalia County, in the northern part of the state, sponsored legislation this year to increase the distance between drilling and homes. But even early in the session, she gave it little chance of passing and said she’s now focused on legislation that would protect women from discrimination and unequal pay.
Her bill would increase the “limit of disturbance” of a drilling operation from 625 feet to 1,500 feet of a home, meaning people would be farther removed from the noise, dust and light. It also would require drilling companies to set up real-time monitoring and compensate landowners for any property value decrease.
She’s introduced similar bills every year since 2015, but they’ve never made it out of the House of Delegates Energy Committee.
“You’re the first person to ask me about it,” she told a reporter in January.
Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat from Kanawha County, sponsored legislation to protect surface owners from 2015 to 2017, but he didn’t bother this year.
“I’m more kind of on bills that I feel like I can get support for and get passed,” he said. “I feel like the current climate of the Legislature — sometimes those of us who come down on the side of property rights and come down on the side of protecting the environment, air, water, land — a lot of times, these days we find ourselves playing defense.”
The inaction isn’t what was promised in 2011, when then-Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed into law the Natural Gas Horizontal Well Control Act. The law included a variety of new environmental protection standards, but it delayed some key protections for residents until mandated studies of those issues were completed by the state Department of Environmental Protection and West Virginia University.
Those studies were completed in May 2013 and recommended heightened safeguards, including a more stringent setback, or a buffer zone, measured from the edge of drilling operations to homes, and building a fence or planting trees to curb “problematic” noise levels.
Lawmakers never acted on those recommendations under either Democratic or Republican leadership. Under the current governor, Jim Justice, the state Department of Environmental Protection revoked a rule that would have protected residents from some noise and light.
Downstream Strategies, a Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm, conducted its own study about the effects of natural gas drilling and extraction in 2017.
According to the report, well pads, which are clearings where horizontal natural gas wells are drilled into the earth, grew from 1.6 acres, on average, to 2.4 acres between 2007 and 2014. In that time, the land area covered by well pads and wastewater impoundments grew from 12 acres to 1,286 acres. The solution, the group argued, was to require buffer zones between drilling and sensitive areas, like schools and public land.
Evan Hansen, a Democrat from Monongalia County, co-authored the study and was elected last year to a seat in the House of Delegates. This session, he co-sponsored Sypolt’s bill to implement the DEP and WVU study recommendations, saying he is interested in applying the best science.
“I don’t think anyone in the industry wants to harm people, so there’s that,” Hansen said. “I think they want to be good neighbors. And on top of that, I think there are less likely to be litigation expenses and delays due to litigation.”
But Delegate Bill Anderson, who chairs the House Energy Committee and sets the agenda, said there’s no “appetite” for the bills.
“Well, they’re not as high on my priority list as some other bills,” said Anderson, a Republican from Wood County.
Anderson said he remembers visiting communities affected by Marcellus Shale drilling in 2011. He wanted a 1,000-foot distance between wells and homes, he said, but lawmakers ultimately decided on a 625-foot distance between the center of the pad and a house, which remains the law.
“I don’t think the industry is insensitive to the needs of the people in the community,” he said, “but people in the community need to understand the needs of the industry, if we’re going to have the benefits in terms of jobs.”
The state’s oil and natural gas industry employed about 12,000 people in drilling and extraction jobs in 2017, according to WorkForce West Virginia, which is a division of the state Department of Commerce. The West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association, the Independent Oil and Gas Association and the DEP did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
This legislative session, Anderson’s committee moved along bills he co-sponsored that are favored by oil and gas organizations because they would make it easier and cheaper to drill. One would allow companies to drill horizontal deep wells close together. Another would remove the severance tax on low-producing oil and gas wells. The bills passed out of Anderson’s committee and are pending in other committees now.
In November, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw said he thought the DEP might be best equipped to handle the 2013 studies’ recommendations in its rulemaking process.
“Protection of surface-owner rights is important and, from time to time, we do need to review those rules to make sure they still comport with both current industry practices and current surface-owner and homeowner needs,” said Hanshaw, a gas industry lawyer and Republican from Clay County whose conflicts of interest were detailed last fall by the Gazette-Mail and ProPublica.
Those decisions, he said, could be made by the DEP. But the DEP hasn’t acted, and recommended in 2013 that the Legislature take action.
Even as the Legislature declines to act, there are signs that the courts don’t want to get involved either — saying it’s the Legislature’s responsibility.
In January, the West Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments from a lawyer representing four families who live in Harrison County and say they face constant light, noise and traffic issues from Antero Resources’ Marcellus Shale drilling. The lawyer argued that a jury should determine whether these kinds of disturbances count as a nuisance, although lower courts had dismissed the case.
In response, Justice Evan Jenkins asked why the matter belonged in the courts and not before lawmakers.
“Why should this really not be an issue for the Legislature to address, rather than a jury issue on any given nuisance claim to decide what is reasonable or not?” he said.
The court hasn’t ruled yet, and oral arguments in a related case are scheduled for March 12.
Citizen groups said they now have different priorities, too. The Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, which has strongly pushed for the implementation of the studies, has shifted focus to getting the DEP to clean up abandoned wells, said Dave McMahon, co-founder of the group. A lobbyist for the West Virginia Farm Bureau said it would support the legislation, but it has other priorities, as well.
“If you have a well pad right next to your house going 24/7 and you can’t sleep in your own home, that’s ridiculous, that should not happen,” said Tom Huber, president of the West Virginia Royalty Owners Association. Still, he said, the bill wasn’t as high a priority as a bill to reform the way property is divided among heirs.
The failure to act on recommendations isn’t new, said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. The Legislature routinely stalls its decision-making, saying it needs more information, she said. And then, when lawmakers receive that information, they often refuse to act, putting citizens at risk.
That’s not just frustrating, she said, it’s dangerous.
“There’s no explanation I can come up with for why these study recommendations have just sat there, other than complete political paralysis when it comes to doing anything that may draw industry opposition,” Rosser said.
“I’m thinking about a neighbor’s dog howling for two years right at your doorstep,” said Sypolt, a Republican from Preston County, in the northern region of the state.
So when she returned to Charleston for this year’s legislative session, she introduced a bill for the third consecutive year to monitor the air and noise around drilling operations, hoping her colleagues would take action to help residents.
The bill didn’t make it onto a committee agenda, let alone to the floor of the House of Delegates.
As natural gas booms around the Marcellus Shale, nearby residents continue to bear the burden of the industry’s growth. Many live with constant light, truck traffic, dust and noise from gas production fueled by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the Gazette-Mail and ProPublica chronicled last year. Business groups and the state coal association have argued in court filings that the inconveniences are unavoidable.
With days left in the legislative session, proponents of reform have essentially given up. The deadline has passed for bills to initially clear the House, and lawmakers and groups that have pushed for protection for residents have moved on to other issues.
Delegate Barbara Fleischauer, a Democrat from Monongalia County, in the northern part of the state, sponsored legislation this year to increase the distance between drilling and homes. But even early in the session, she gave it little chance of passing and said she’s now focused on legislation that would protect women from discrimination and unequal pay.
Her bill would increase the “limit of disturbance” of a drilling operation from 625 feet to 1,500 feet of a home, meaning people would be farther removed from the noise, dust and light. It also would require drilling companies to set up real-time monitoring and compensate landowners for any property value decrease.
She’s introduced similar bills every year since 2015, but they’ve never made it out of the House of Delegates Energy Committee.
“You’re the first person to ask me about it,” she told a reporter in January.
Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat from Kanawha County, sponsored legislation to protect surface owners from 2015 to 2017, but he didn’t bother this year.
“I’m more kind of on bills that I feel like I can get support for and get passed,” he said. “I feel like the current climate of the Legislature — sometimes those of us who come down on the side of property rights and come down on the side of protecting the environment, air, water, land — a lot of times, these days we find ourselves playing defense.”
The inaction isn’t what was promised in 2011, when then-Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed into law the Natural Gas Horizontal Well Control Act. The law included a variety of new environmental protection standards, but it delayed some key protections for residents until mandated studies of those issues were completed by the state Department of Environmental Protection and West Virginia University.
Those studies were completed in May 2013 and recommended heightened safeguards, including a more stringent setback, or a buffer zone, measured from the edge of drilling operations to homes, and building a fence or planting trees to curb “problematic” noise levels.
Lawmakers never acted on those recommendations under either Democratic or Republican leadership. Under the current governor, Jim Justice, the state Department of Environmental Protection revoked a rule that would have protected residents from some noise and light.
Downstream Strategies, a Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm, conducted its own study about the effects of natural gas drilling and extraction in 2017.
According to the report, well pads, which are clearings where horizontal natural gas wells are drilled into the earth, grew from 1.6 acres, on average, to 2.4 acres between 2007 and 2014. In that time, the land area covered by well pads and wastewater impoundments grew from 12 acres to 1,286 acres. The solution, the group argued, was to require buffer zones between drilling and sensitive areas, like schools and public land.
Evan Hansen, a Democrat from Monongalia County, co-authored the study and was elected last year to a seat in the House of Delegates. This session, he co-sponsored Sypolt’s bill to implement the DEP and WVU study recommendations, saying he is interested in applying the best science.
“I don’t think anyone in the industry wants to harm people, so there’s that,” Hansen said. “I think they want to be good neighbors. And on top of that, I think there are less likely to be litigation expenses and delays due to litigation.”
But Delegate Bill Anderson, who chairs the House Energy Committee and sets the agenda, said there’s no “appetite” for the bills.
“Well, they’re not as high on my priority list as some other bills,” said Anderson, a Republican from Wood County.
Anderson said he remembers visiting communities affected by Marcellus Shale drilling in 2011. He wanted a 1,000-foot distance between wells and homes, he said, but lawmakers ultimately decided on a 625-foot distance between the center of the pad and a house, which remains the law.
“I don’t think the industry is insensitive to the needs of the people in the community,” he said, “but people in the community need to understand the needs of the industry, if we’re going to have the benefits in terms of jobs.”
The state’s oil and natural gas industry employed about 12,000 people in drilling and extraction jobs in 2017, according to WorkForce West Virginia, which is a division of the state Department of Commerce. The West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association, the Independent Oil and Gas Association and the DEP did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
This legislative session, Anderson’s committee moved along bills he co-sponsored that are favored by oil and gas organizations because they would make it easier and cheaper to drill. One would allow companies to drill horizontal deep wells close together. Another would remove the severance tax on low-producing oil and gas wells. The bills passed out of Anderson’s committee and are pending in other committees now.
In November, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw said he thought the DEP might be best equipped to handle the 2013 studies’ recommendations in its rulemaking process.
“Protection of surface-owner rights is important and, from time to time, we do need to review those rules to make sure they still comport with both current industry practices and current surface-owner and homeowner needs,” said Hanshaw, a gas industry lawyer and Republican from Clay County whose conflicts of interest were detailed last fall by the Gazette-Mail and ProPublica.
Those decisions, he said, could be made by the DEP. But the DEP hasn’t acted, and recommended in 2013 that the Legislature take action.
Even as the Legislature declines to act, there are signs that the courts don’t want to get involved either — saying it’s the Legislature’s responsibility.
In January, the West Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments from a lawyer representing four families who live in Harrison County and say they face constant light, noise and traffic issues from Antero Resources’ Marcellus Shale drilling. The lawyer argued that a jury should determine whether these kinds of disturbances count as a nuisance, although lower courts had dismissed the case.
In response, Justice Evan Jenkins asked why the matter belonged in the courts and not before lawmakers.
“Why should this really not be an issue for the Legislature to address, rather than a jury issue on any given nuisance claim to decide what is reasonable or not?” he said.
The court hasn’t ruled yet, and oral arguments in a related case are scheduled for March 12.
Citizen groups said they now have different priorities, too. The Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, which has strongly pushed for the implementation of the studies, has shifted focus to getting the DEP to clean up abandoned wells, said Dave McMahon, co-founder of the group. A lobbyist for the West Virginia Farm Bureau said it would support the legislation, but it has other priorities, as well.
“If you have a well pad right next to your house going 24/7 and you can’t sleep in your own home, that’s ridiculous, that should not happen,” said Tom Huber, president of the West Virginia Royalty Owners Association. Still, he said, the bill wasn’t as high a priority as a bill to reform the way property is divided among heirs.
The failure to act on recommendations isn’t new, said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. The Legislature routinely stalls its decision-making, saying it needs more information, she said. And then, when lawmakers receive that information, they often refuse to act, putting citizens at risk.
That’s not just frustrating, she said, it’s dangerous.
“There’s no explanation I can come up with for why these study recommendations have just sat there, other than complete political paralysis when it comes to doing anything that may draw industry opposition,” Rosser said.
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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