welcome to oil
explore how the resource industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
dec 6, 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*
*Trump Quietly Provides Offshore Drilling Industry Sweetheart Giveaway
(ARTICLE BELOW)
COAL KNEW, TOO
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fossil fuel production on track for double the safe climate limit
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Big Oil Needs to Pay for the Damage It Caused
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Land affected by Keystone pipeline leak bigger than thought
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Big Oil exploited a loophole in the law to bilk the United States out of billions
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*FROM CLIMATE DENIAL TO “GREEN” PETROLEUM: MASSACHUSETTS ACCUSES EXXON MOBIL OF DECEPTIVE MESSAGING(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Keystone oil pipeline leaks 383,000 gallons in North Dakota
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Biggest Private Coal Miner Goes Bust as Trump Rescue Fails
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How things got so fracking bad in Ohio
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Dark Money Is Pouring in To Protect the “Worst Energy Policy in the Country”
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*There Is No Economic Justification for Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*RADICAL REPUBLICANS ON ENERGY PANEL PUSH GIANT ALASKA GAS PIPELINE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UNMASKED: NEW PLANNED ALASKA PIPELINE COULD SPEW 3.5 BILLION CUBIC FEET OF GAS — PER DAY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Low-cost fracking offers boon to oil producers, headaches for suppliers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there (ARTICLE BELOW)
*STUDY: U.S. FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES EXCEED PENTAGON SPENDING
(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)
Trump Quietly Provides Offshore Drilling Industry Sweetheart Giveaway
BY Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams - truthout
PUBLISHED December 5, 2019
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was condemned Monday for a proposed policy shift on offshore drilling panned as a “sweetheart giveaway” for a former client.
The new extraction-encouraging proposal was announced last month in a report by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), two agencies within the Interior Department and occurred, according to transparency group Western Values Project, “under the cloud of impeachment.”
Bernhardt’s announcement followed longstanding fears that the former lobbyist would use his position in the federal government to serve the interests of the fossil fuel lobby above those of the American people and public lands. The recommendations laid out in the report pertain to royalties for offshore leasing and drilling.
“Federal officials,” as Louisiana’s Houma Today reported, “are offering oil and gas companies a discount on the fees they pay the government to drill in the Gulf of Mexico’s shallow waters.”
If enacted, the policy to “ensure maximum resource recovery” would benefit the oil and gas industry National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), on whose behalf Bernhardt previously lobbied, said Western Values Project.
Also noteworthy, said the advocacy group, is that the report was co-authored by BSEE Director Scott Angelle, who also has ties to the fossil fuel industry. Western Values Project said that, during the government shutdown, Angelle — who has NOIA’s stamp of approval for his current position — green-lit 53 permits for offshore drilling for companies that sit on the board of directors for NOIA.
“Since day one, Secretary Bernhardt has operated as though Interior was his own personal lobby shop by doling out favors for his former clients with impunity. This offshore royalty rate reduction deal is short selling our shared resources and ripping off taxpayers,” said Jayson O’Neill, deputy director of Western Values Project.
“With Trump’s own corruption dominating headlines,” he continued, “Bernhardt probably thought this sweetheart giveaway to his former oil and gas client would slip by unnoticed.”
Oil giants like Chevron and Shell are already taking advantage of a loophole in federal law to avoid paying at least $18 billion in royalties on oil and gas drilled in the Gulf since 1996, the New York Times reported in October, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office.
The possible policy shift sparked environmental worries from New Orleans-based advocacy group Healthy Gulf, which called the proposal “a recipe for disaster” in a tweet last month.
“This administration wants to lease areas of the Gulf for ‘high-risk, small-upside opportunities’ to smaller oil companies who don’t have the resources to handle spills,” the group said. “This proposal is as illogical as it is dangerous.”
The new extraction-encouraging proposal was announced last month in a report by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), two agencies within the Interior Department and occurred, according to transparency group Western Values Project, “under the cloud of impeachment.”
Bernhardt’s announcement followed longstanding fears that the former lobbyist would use his position in the federal government to serve the interests of the fossil fuel lobby above those of the American people and public lands. The recommendations laid out in the report pertain to royalties for offshore leasing and drilling.
“Federal officials,” as Louisiana’s Houma Today reported, “are offering oil and gas companies a discount on the fees they pay the government to drill in the Gulf of Mexico’s shallow waters.”
If enacted, the policy to “ensure maximum resource recovery” would benefit the oil and gas industry National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), on whose behalf Bernhardt previously lobbied, said Western Values Project.
Also noteworthy, said the advocacy group, is that the report was co-authored by BSEE Director Scott Angelle, who also has ties to the fossil fuel industry. Western Values Project said that, during the government shutdown, Angelle — who has NOIA’s stamp of approval for his current position — green-lit 53 permits for offshore drilling for companies that sit on the board of directors for NOIA.
“Since day one, Secretary Bernhardt has operated as though Interior was his own personal lobby shop by doling out favors for his former clients with impunity. This offshore royalty rate reduction deal is short selling our shared resources and ripping off taxpayers,” said Jayson O’Neill, deputy director of Western Values Project.
“With Trump’s own corruption dominating headlines,” he continued, “Bernhardt probably thought this sweetheart giveaway to his former oil and gas client would slip by unnoticed.”
Oil giants like Chevron and Shell are already taking advantage of a loophole in federal law to avoid paying at least $18 billion in royalties on oil and gas drilled in the Gulf since 1996, the New York Times reported in October, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office.
The possible policy shift sparked environmental worries from New Orleans-based advocacy group Healthy Gulf, which called the proposal “a recipe for disaster” in a tweet last month.
“This administration wants to lease areas of the Gulf for ‘high-risk, small-upside opportunities’ to smaller oil companies who don’t have the resources to handle spills,” the group said. “This proposal is as illogical as it is dangerous.”
Coal Knew, Too
A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change.
By Élan Young - huff post
11/22/2019 05:45 am ET
“Exxon knew.” Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like Exxon Mobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists.
But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.
In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
Cherry was floored.
“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”
In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
Climate change is not Cherry’s area of study, but he was struck by how the tone of the articles differed from the way many fossil fuel companies talk about climate change today. Rather than engage in denial, the articles offered a fairly straightforward acknowledgment of the emerging science. (This reporter is also a writer for UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, where Cherry teaches.)
As Cherry did some of his own digging, he soon realized his discovery could be the first evidence that the coal industry was aware of the impending climate crisis more than half a century ago — a finding that could open mining companies to the type of litigation that the oil industry is now facing.
Decades Of Denial
While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”
“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.
“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”
Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost: “Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”
Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even Exxon Mobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.
The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.
All of this was taking place well after climate change had become a commonly understood idea in the scientific community. A 1965 report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was the first from the White House to address climate change (and is likely what precipitated the Mining Congress Journal article). “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” it warned. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about what was then known as the “greenhouse effect.” And in 1992, the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to begin addressing the problem.
But as this consensus emerged, so too did a wave of industry-funded climate denial via vast, shadowy networks of front groups, public relations campaigns and scientists for hire.
Pulling Back The Curtain
In 2015, journalists at InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University exposed internal Exxon Mobil documents showing that the company’s scientists had a deep understanding of climate change even as Exxon worked publicly to downplay that science.
Twenty state attorneys general launched an “Exxon Knew” campaign, which eventually led to communities across the country filing at least 14 legal challenges against Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. One lawsuit, from the New York state attorney general’s office, went to trial on Oct. 22 and focuses on how the company accounted for the costs of potential future regulations on climate change. The Massachusetts attorney general filed another suit on Oct. 24, this time claiming the company had engaged in deceptive advertising and misled investors about the systemic financial risks to its business posed by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Earlier this month, two of Hawaii’s biggest municipalities sued Exxon and other big oil companies to recoup the costs of adapting to rising seas and more violent storms.
Evidence of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when is critical to the legal strategy of those seeking damages for carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel companies were aware of their products’ harmful effects on the planet, they could be held liable for damages.
Legal liability boils down to four factors, said David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, which is representing counties in Colorado that have filed suit: one, whether the defendants knew that their products would cause climate change; two, what they told or did not tell the public about the consequences of using their products; three, the extent of injuries caused by climate change; and four, whether the defendants’ actions have led to a portion of those injuries. What the plaintiffs in these suits can prove remains to be seen.
What we do know is that coal, when burned, has by far the biggest climate footprint of any fossil fuel, producing more carbon dioxide per unit than oil or gas. In the U.S. alone, coal produced 65% of the power sector’s planet-warming emissions. The 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal certainly raises questions about what the coal industry knew at the time.
Robert Brulle, a professor emeritus of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, authored a recent paper that suggests the coal industry must have known quite a bit, given how prominently it positioned itself in the climate denial movement.
Brulle researched 12 major groups and coalitions that argued against mandatory regulation of carbon dioxide from 1989 to 2015 — which he calls the “climate change countermovement.” That countermovement included 2,000 different businesses, political or social groups, as well as other organizations, but Brulle found that 179 core organizations belonged to multiple coalitions. Coal companies and predominantly coal-burning utilities were the most prevalent. He describes oil and gas companies as “more of a marginal player” by comparison.
“The coal mining industry — the utilities that were burning it for electricity, along with the railroads who were hauling it — and manufacturing industries like steel were the first corporate forces to become climate deniers and try to block action on climate policy,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. “They fought the hardest because they had the biggest existential threat.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, Exxon and other oil giants leased large parcels of land for coal mining with the goal of manufacturing synthetic fuels and lowering U.S. dependence on the Middle East.
Some previously released documents show that Exxon’s scientists began advising that the world phase out coal as a fuel as early as 1979. In one scenario, the Exxon scientists concluded that non-fossil fuels would need to be substituted for coal beginning in the 1990s to keep carbon dioxide levels below atmospheric concentrations of 440 parts per million. In 1999, Exxon merged with Mobil, and by 2002, Exxon Mobil had dumped its coal assets.
Meanwhile, the coal industry tried to reinvent itself with the concept of “clean coal.” This as-yet-undelivered promise that carbon capture and other technological advances could lower coal’s environmental impact has been around for decades but resurged in the early 2000s as regulations seemed imminent.
The biggest proponent of this idea was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal front group that spent $35 million on public relations campaigns in 2008 alone, seeking to influence the election. A year later, ACCCE was caught sending Congress fraudulent letters opposing federal climate legislation and pretending to be from veterans, women’s and civil rights groups. The incident led many members to leave the organization, but Peabody remains a member to this day.
“Its whole mission was to stop climate regulations but pretend that they were in favor of clean coal, which, of course, doesn’t exist,” said Davies.
Peabody Energy filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, the same year carbon dioxide levels hit 400 parts per million. Eight other coal companies have filed for bankruptcy this year. Even as the Trump administration has promised a coal resurgence and rolled back Obama-era regulations, the industry’s profitability continues to experience a downward slide. If the slogan “Coal Knew” ever does take off, it’s unclear who’ll be left to sue.
But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.
In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
Cherry was floored.
“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”
In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
Climate change is not Cherry’s area of study, but he was struck by how the tone of the articles differed from the way many fossil fuel companies talk about climate change today. Rather than engage in denial, the articles offered a fairly straightforward acknowledgment of the emerging science. (This reporter is also a writer for UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, where Cherry teaches.)
As Cherry did some of his own digging, he soon realized his discovery could be the first evidence that the coal industry was aware of the impending climate crisis more than half a century ago — a finding that could open mining companies to the type of litigation that the oil industry is now facing.
Decades Of Denial
While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”
“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.
“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”
Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost: “Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”
Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even Exxon Mobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.
The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.
All of this was taking place well after climate change had become a commonly understood idea in the scientific community. A 1965 report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee was the first from the White House to address climate change (and is likely what precipitated the Mining Congress Journal article). “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” it warned. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about what was then known as the “greenhouse effect.” And in 1992, the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to begin addressing the problem.
But as this consensus emerged, so too did a wave of industry-funded climate denial via vast, shadowy networks of front groups, public relations campaigns and scientists for hire.
Pulling Back The Curtain
In 2015, journalists at InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University exposed internal Exxon Mobil documents showing that the company’s scientists had a deep understanding of climate change even as Exxon worked publicly to downplay that science.
Twenty state attorneys general launched an “Exxon Knew” campaign, which eventually led to communities across the country filing at least 14 legal challenges against Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. One lawsuit, from the New York state attorney general’s office, went to trial on Oct. 22 and focuses on how the company accounted for the costs of potential future regulations on climate change. The Massachusetts attorney general filed another suit on Oct. 24, this time claiming the company had engaged in deceptive advertising and misled investors about the systemic financial risks to its business posed by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Earlier this month, two of Hawaii’s biggest municipalities sued Exxon and other big oil companies to recoup the costs of adapting to rising seas and more violent storms.
Evidence of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when is critical to the legal strategy of those seeking damages for carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel companies were aware of their products’ harmful effects on the planet, they could be held liable for damages.
Legal liability boils down to four factors, said David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, which is representing counties in Colorado that have filed suit: one, whether the defendants knew that their products would cause climate change; two, what they told or did not tell the public about the consequences of using their products; three, the extent of injuries caused by climate change; and four, whether the defendants’ actions have led to a portion of those injuries. What the plaintiffs in these suits can prove remains to be seen.
What we do know is that coal, when burned, has by far the biggest climate footprint of any fossil fuel, producing more carbon dioxide per unit than oil or gas. In the U.S. alone, coal produced 65% of the power sector’s planet-warming emissions. The 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal certainly raises questions about what the coal industry knew at the time.
Robert Brulle, a professor emeritus of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, authored a recent paper that suggests the coal industry must have known quite a bit, given how prominently it positioned itself in the climate denial movement.
Brulle researched 12 major groups and coalitions that argued against mandatory regulation of carbon dioxide from 1989 to 2015 — which he calls the “climate change countermovement.” That countermovement included 2,000 different businesses, political or social groups, as well as other organizations, but Brulle found that 179 core organizations belonged to multiple coalitions. Coal companies and predominantly coal-burning utilities were the most prevalent. He describes oil and gas companies as “more of a marginal player” by comparison.
“The coal mining industry — the utilities that were burning it for electricity, along with the railroads who were hauling it — and manufacturing industries like steel were the first corporate forces to become climate deniers and try to block action on climate policy,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. “They fought the hardest because they had the biggest existential threat.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, Exxon and other oil giants leased large parcels of land for coal mining with the goal of manufacturing synthetic fuels and lowering U.S. dependence on the Middle East.
Some previously released documents show that Exxon’s scientists began advising that the world phase out coal as a fuel as early as 1979. In one scenario, the Exxon scientists concluded that non-fossil fuels would need to be substituted for coal beginning in the 1990s to keep carbon dioxide levels below atmospheric concentrations of 440 parts per million. In 1999, Exxon merged with Mobil, and by 2002, Exxon Mobil had dumped its coal assets.
Meanwhile, the coal industry tried to reinvent itself with the concept of “clean coal.” This as-yet-undelivered promise that carbon capture and other technological advances could lower coal’s environmental impact has been around for decades but resurged in the early 2000s as regulations seemed imminent.
The biggest proponent of this idea was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal front group that spent $35 million on public relations campaigns in 2008 alone, seeking to influence the election. A year later, ACCCE was caught sending Congress fraudulent letters opposing federal climate legislation and pretending to be from veterans, women’s and civil rights groups. The incident led many members to leave the organization, but Peabody remains a member to this day.
“Its whole mission was to stop climate regulations but pretend that they were in favor of clean coal, which, of course, doesn’t exist,” said Davies.
Peabody Energy filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, the same year carbon dioxide levels hit 400 parts per million. Eight other coal companies have filed for bankruptcy this year. Even as the Trump administration has promised a coal resurgence and rolled back Obama-era regulations, the industry’s profitability continues to experience a downward slide. If the slogan “Coal Knew” ever does take off, it’s unclear who’ll be left to sue.
Fossil fuels
Fossil fuel production on track for double the safe climate limit
‘We’re in a deep hole over the climate crisis and we need to stop digging,’ warn experts
Damian Carrington Environment editor
the guardian
Wed 20 Nov 2019 00.01 EST
The world’s nations are on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas as can be burned in 2030 while restricting rise in the global temperature to 1.5C, analysis shows.
The report is the first to compare countries’ stated plans for fossil fuel extraction with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which is to keep global heating well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and to aim for 1.5C. It exposes a huge gap, with fossil fuel production in 2030 heading for 50% more than is consistent with 2C, and 120% more than that for 1.5C.
Scientists have warned that even the difference between 1.5C and 2C of heating will expose hundreds of millions of people to significantly higher risks of extreme heatwaves, drought, floods and poverty.
The report was produced by the UN Environment Programme and a coalition of research organisations. It complements an earlier UN analysis showing the current Paris agreement pledges to cut emissions would still lead to a catastrophic 3-4C rise.
“We’re in a deep hole – and we need to stop digging,” said Måns Nilsson, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which was part of the analysis. “Despite more than two decades of climate policymaking, fossil fuel production levels are higher than ever.”
Most action to tackle the climate crisis involves reducing emissions, but Inger Andersen, head of the UN Environment Programme, said a focus on fossil fuel production was long overdue. Most of the action pledges made by countries under the Paris deal do not even mention changes to production.
The UK is a “striking” example of this mismatch, said Cleo Verkuijl, at the SEI’s centre in Oxford, UK. It was the first major economy to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, she said, but also subsidises fossil fuel production at home and abroad and intends to extract “every drop of oil and gas” from its North Sea fields. In recent years, the UK oil and gas industry has received £176m more annually in government support than it paid in taxes, the report said.
The UK Oil and Gas Authority said in a statement: “Oil and gas will remain an important part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future, including under net zero scenarios. Maximising the economic recovery from the UK remains vital to meet those energy demands as long as they exist, and to reduce reliance on imports.”
The report’s warning was strongly backed by senior figures. “Ensuring a liveable planet for future generations means getting serious about phasing out coal, oil and gas,” said Christiana Figueres, at Mission 2020 and is the person who delivered the Paris agreement in 2015 as the UN’s top climate official. “Countries such as Costa Rica, Spain and New Zealand are already showing the way forward, with policies to constrain exploration and extraction – others must now follow their lead. There is no time to waste.”
Prof Nicholas Stern, at the London School of Economics, said: “This important report shows planned levels of coal, oil and gas production are dangerously out of step with the goals of the Paris agreement.”
The report highlights the nations that are taking some action, including the closure of most coal mines in Spain and some in China, along with the end of new offshore oil and gas exploration licences in New Zealand and some parts of the Arctic governed by Canada, the US and Norway.
Verkuijl said a global agreement to phase out production would be ideal but is difficult at present with the US under President Donald Trump, as the country is due to withdraw from the Paris agreement. But she said many Democratic presidential candidates have promised to cut fossil fuel production by restricting extraction on public land, for example, or removing subsidies. She said such a candidate beating Trump in the 2020 election would be a “gamechanger”.
The report said it was crucial that workers in fossil fuel industries were helped into new employment as production ramped down. “Leaders need to [talk with] workers and their unions to plan a just transition away from fossil fuels,” said Sharan Burrow, head of the International Trade Union Confederation.
The analysis is based on the published national plans of eight key producers: Australia, Canada, Russia, US, China, India, Indonesia and Norway, which account for 60% of global fossil fuel production. The plans of other big producers, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, are not publicly available. The researchers assumed these nations would follow similar paths as the eight countries that were covered.
The report is the first to compare countries’ stated plans for fossil fuel extraction with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which is to keep global heating well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and to aim for 1.5C. It exposes a huge gap, with fossil fuel production in 2030 heading for 50% more than is consistent with 2C, and 120% more than that for 1.5C.
Scientists have warned that even the difference between 1.5C and 2C of heating will expose hundreds of millions of people to significantly higher risks of extreme heatwaves, drought, floods and poverty.
The report was produced by the UN Environment Programme and a coalition of research organisations. It complements an earlier UN analysis showing the current Paris agreement pledges to cut emissions would still lead to a catastrophic 3-4C rise.
“We’re in a deep hole – and we need to stop digging,” said Måns Nilsson, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which was part of the analysis. “Despite more than two decades of climate policymaking, fossil fuel production levels are higher than ever.”
Most action to tackle the climate crisis involves reducing emissions, but Inger Andersen, head of the UN Environment Programme, said a focus on fossil fuel production was long overdue. Most of the action pledges made by countries under the Paris deal do not even mention changes to production.
The UK is a “striking” example of this mismatch, said Cleo Verkuijl, at the SEI’s centre in Oxford, UK. It was the first major economy to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, she said, but also subsidises fossil fuel production at home and abroad and intends to extract “every drop of oil and gas” from its North Sea fields. In recent years, the UK oil and gas industry has received £176m more annually in government support than it paid in taxes, the report said.
The UK Oil and Gas Authority said in a statement: “Oil and gas will remain an important part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future, including under net zero scenarios. Maximising the economic recovery from the UK remains vital to meet those energy demands as long as they exist, and to reduce reliance on imports.”
The report’s warning was strongly backed by senior figures. “Ensuring a liveable planet for future generations means getting serious about phasing out coal, oil and gas,” said Christiana Figueres, at Mission 2020 and is the person who delivered the Paris agreement in 2015 as the UN’s top climate official. “Countries such as Costa Rica, Spain and New Zealand are already showing the way forward, with policies to constrain exploration and extraction – others must now follow their lead. There is no time to waste.”
Prof Nicholas Stern, at the London School of Economics, said: “This important report shows planned levels of coal, oil and gas production are dangerously out of step with the goals of the Paris agreement.”
The report highlights the nations that are taking some action, including the closure of most coal mines in Spain and some in China, along with the end of new offshore oil and gas exploration licences in New Zealand and some parts of the Arctic governed by Canada, the US and Norway.
Verkuijl said a global agreement to phase out production would be ideal but is difficult at present with the US under President Donald Trump, as the country is due to withdraw from the Paris agreement. But she said many Democratic presidential candidates have promised to cut fossil fuel production by restricting extraction on public land, for example, or removing subsidies. She said such a candidate beating Trump in the 2020 election would be a “gamechanger”.
The report said it was crucial that workers in fossil fuel industries were helped into new employment as production ramped down. “Leaders need to [talk with] workers and their unions to plan a just transition away from fossil fuels,” said Sharan Burrow, head of the International Trade Union Confederation.
The analysis is based on the published national plans of eight key producers: Australia, Canada, Russia, US, China, India, Indonesia and Norway, which account for 60% of global fossil fuel production. The plans of other big producers, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, are not publicly available. The researchers assumed these nations would follow similar paths as the eight countries that were covered.
OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
Big Oil Needs to Pay for the Damage It Caused
BY Tamara Toles O’Laughlin & Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine - truthout
PUBLISHED November 19, 2019
This month in a Manhattan courthouse, New York State’s attorney general Letitia James argued that ExxonMobil should be held accountable for layers of lies about climate change. It’s a landmark moment — one of the first times that Big Oil is having to answer for its actions — and James deserves great credit for bringing it to trial. But it comes with a deep irony: Under the relevant New York statutes, the only people that New York can legally identify as victims are investors in the company’s stock.
It is true that Exxon should not have misled its investors — lying is wrong, and that former CEO Rex Tillerson had to invent a fake email persona as part of the scheme (we see you, “Wayne Tracker”) helps drive home the messiness. But let’s be clear: On the spectrum of human beings who are and will be hit by the climate crisis, Exxon investors are not near the top of the list.
In fact, if the “justice system” delivered justice, the payouts for Exxon’s perfidy would go to entirely different people, because the iron law of climate is, the less you did to cause it, the more you’ll suffer.
The right set of priorities might put different groups of people at the front of the line for payouts: dwellers along the edge of the African deserts that are expanding fast as climate warms, Bangladeshi peasant farmers losing their land as the Bay of Bengal spreads inland, and Inuit hunters no longer able to depend on the sea ice. Every one of these groups was directly harmed by the decision of the fossil fuel industry to bury its knowledge of climate change in the 1980s and instead work to deny, deflect, and delay action.
When the CEO of Exxon told Chinese leaders in 1997 that the Earth was cooling and that it didn’t matter when they took action on climate change, the direct and indirect harm fell on South Pacific islanders now having to plan for the evacuation of their nations and South American cities losing their sole source of drinking water as glaciers disappear.
Even in the U.S., the burden falls disproportionately and violently on the most vulnerable communities — poor people and people of color. Wander into any disaster zone, from Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey to the California fires, and you’ll find that the hardest-hit people are the ones set up by the status quo with the least. Hurricane Sandy shut down Wall Street for a few days, but for working class and subway-dependent communities in the Rockaways and throughout Brooklyn and Queens, it changed lives forever.
Put another way, those who made their money peddling fossil fuels — the executives and shareholders holding funds — owe something to those who got hurt. It’s not, in the bigger picture, all that different from the demand for reparations by African American descendants of slaves — claims that in recent months more than a few institutions have begun to pay, among a growing number of faith denominations, universities and politicians, including presidential candidates, have begun to publicly endorse.
That’s not to say that fossil fuel extraction is a crime of the same kind as owning human beings. It isn’t — but the two are not unrelated; the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds. And we have always understood the evil of slavery, but until about 40 years ago, as newly developed supercomputers made climate modeling possible, it wasn’t even clear that fossil fuel extraction and use carried with it a systemic danger. And where a wide variety of thinking offers plans for a real possibility of compensation for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, there’s no practical way to compensate everyone who will be harmed by climate change.
Indeed, the high-end estimate for economic damage from the global warming we’re on track to cause is $551 trillion, which is more money than exists on planet Earth. Even that figure is notional: How do you compensate the generations of people yet unborn who will inherit a badly degraded world? Even if Exxon et al were to disgorge every dirty penny they’d ever made, it wouldn’t pay for relocating Miami, much less Mumbai.
We obviously should expand the circle of obligation. Even as we write, investment banks continue to bet against our survival and lend huge sums to this industry to expand its network of pipelines and wells. And they do this over the calls for a new economy and the end of the age of fossil fuels. At this point, JPMorgan Chase and Citi are the functional arms of Chevron and Shell. They literally make fossil fuel investments possible. But even holding them to the reckoning they deserve — though we will certainly try to do it — can’t bring back sea ice to the Arctic or compensate the fishermen around the world now watching their harvests shrink in a hot and acidic ocean.
The staggering cost of inaction here demands that we co-create the solutions with a concentric circle of communities that were made vulnerable to the effects of climate change. And that starts with thinking together about aligning these movements for “climate reparations” as a necessary framework for thinking about how we move forward.
Justice demands real money moving from the global North to the global South to compensate for the damage we’ve done. The United States has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation historically, and we’re champs when you measure it per capita, too. So it’s particularly painful that the Trump administration has stopped funding even the modest payments envisioned under the Paris Accords.
And as we think about our own country and its efforts to deal with the climate crisis, we need to hold onto equity and justice as our guide. The communities that deserve priority in public spending are those that have suffered the most. It is a sadness to lose a second home on the Carolina coast or in California wine country, but it is a life-destroying tragedy when poor communities go underwater. Priority for the good jobs in a new energy economy belong to those whose communities suffered most from in the dirty energy era. The images from the Superdome in New Orleans during Katrina should haunt Americans as long as the climate crisis lasts. At its start, it was clear who the first and worst victims were going to be.
Framing the climate crisis as a matter of equity and another opportunity for justice doesn’t mean we stop thinking about it in other ways, too. In the end, this is a tussle with chemistry and physics, and clearly the most urgent goal is to slow down the planet’s heating. Building solar panels and wind turbines in the end ultimately benefits the most vulnerable. If the Marshall Islands have a chance at surviving, if the rice farmers of the Mekong Delta have any prayer of passing on their land to their sons and daughters, then it depends on a rapid energy transition for the whole planet.
But at this point, even the best-case scenarios are relentlessly grim; lots of damage has been done, and far more is in the offing. We’re going to have to remake much of the world to have a chance at survival. And if we’re going to try, then that repair job shouldn’t repeat the imbalances of power and wealth that mark our current planet. Justice demands a real effort to make the last, first this time around.
It is true that Exxon should not have misled its investors — lying is wrong, and that former CEO Rex Tillerson had to invent a fake email persona as part of the scheme (we see you, “Wayne Tracker”) helps drive home the messiness. But let’s be clear: On the spectrum of human beings who are and will be hit by the climate crisis, Exxon investors are not near the top of the list.
In fact, if the “justice system” delivered justice, the payouts for Exxon’s perfidy would go to entirely different people, because the iron law of climate is, the less you did to cause it, the more you’ll suffer.
The right set of priorities might put different groups of people at the front of the line for payouts: dwellers along the edge of the African deserts that are expanding fast as climate warms, Bangladeshi peasant farmers losing their land as the Bay of Bengal spreads inland, and Inuit hunters no longer able to depend on the sea ice. Every one of these groups was directly harmed by the decision of the fossil fuel industry to bury its knowledge of climate change in the 1980s and instead work to deny, deflect, and delay action.
When the CEO of Exxon told Chinese leaders in 1997 that the Earth was cooling and that it didn’t matter when they took action on climate change, the direct and indirect harm fell on South Pacific islanders now having to plan for the evacuation of their nations and South American cities losing their sole source of drinking water as glaciers disappear.
Even in the U.S., the burden falls disproportionately and violently on the most vulnerable communities — poor people and people of color. Wander into any disaster zone, from Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey to the California fires, and you’ll find that the hardest-hit people are the ones set up by the status quo with the least. Hurricane Sandy shut down Wall Street for a few days, but for working class and subway-dependent communities in the Rockaways and throughout Brooklyn and Queens, it changed lives forever.
Put another way, those who made their money peddling fossil fuels — the executives and shareholders holding funds — owe something to those who got hurt. It’s not, in the bigger picture, all that different from the demand for reparations by African American descendants of slaves — claims that in recent months more than a few institutions have begun to pay, among a growing number of faith denominations, universities and politicians, including presidential candidates, have begun to publicly endorse.
That’s not to say that fossil fuel extraction is a crime of the same kind as owning human beings. It isn’t — but the two are not unrelated; the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds. And we have always understood the evil of slavery, but until about 40 years ago, as newly developed supercomputers made climate modeling possible, it wasn’t even clear that fossil fuel extraction and use carried with it a systemic danger. And where a wide variety of thinking offers plans for a real possibility of compensation for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, there’s no practical way to compensate everyone who will be harmed by climate change.
Indeed, the high-end estimate for economic damage from the global warming we’re on track to cause is $551 trillion, which is more money than exists on planet Earth. Even that figure is notional: How do you compensate the generations of people yet unborn who will inherit a badly degraded world? Even if Exxon et al were to disgorge every dirty penny they’d ever made, it wouldn’t pay for relocating Miami, much less Mumbai.
We obviously should expand the circle of obligation. Even as we write, investment banks continue to bet against our survival and lend huge sums to this industry to expand its network of pipelines and wells. And they do this over the calls for a new economy and the end of the age of fossil fuels. At this point, JPMorgan Chase and Citi are the functional arms of Chevron and Shell. They literally make fossil fuel investments possible. But even holding them to the reckoning they deserve — though we will certainly try to do it — can’t bring back sea ice to the Arctic or compensate the fishermen around the world now watching their harvests shrink in a hot and acidic ocean.
The staggering cost of inaction here demands that we co-create the solutions with a concentric circle of communities that were made vulnerable to the effects of climate change. And that starts with thinking together about aligning these movements for “climate reparations” as a necessary framework for thinking about how we move forward.
Justice demands real money moving from the global North to the global South to compensate for the damage we’ve done. The United States has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation historically, and we’re champs when you measure it per capita, too. So it’s particularly painful that the Trump administration has stopped funding even the modest payments envisioned under the Paris Accords.
And as we think about our own country and its efforts to deal with the climate crisis, we need to hold onto equity and justice as our guide. The communities that deserve priority in public spending are those that have suffered the most. It is a sadness to lose a second home on the Carolina coast or in California wine country, but it is a life-destroying tragedy when poor communities go underwater. Priority for the good jobs in a new energy economy belong to those whose communities suffered most from in the dirty energy era. The images from the Superdome in New Orleans during Katrina should haunt Americans as long as the climate crisis lasts. At its start, it was clear who the first and worst victims were going to be.
Framing the climate crisis as a matter of equity and another opportunity for justice doesn’t mean we stop thinking about it in other ways, too. In the end, this is a tussle with chemistry and physics, and clearly the most urgent goal is to slow down the planet’s heating. Building solar panels and wind turbines in the end ultimately benefits the most vulnerable. If the Marshall Islands have a chance at surviving, if the rice farmers of the Mekong Delta have any prayer of passing on their land to their sons and daughters, then it depends on a rapid energy transition for the whole planet.
But at this point, even the best-case scenarios are relentlessly grim; lots of damage has been done, and far more is in the offing. We’re going to have to remake much of the world to have a chance at survival. And if we’re going to try, then that repair job shouldn’t repeat the imbalances of power and wealth that mark our current planet. Justice demands a real effort to make the last, first this time around.
Land affected by Keystone pipeline leak bigger than thought
mpr news
November 18, 2019 11:45 a.m.
A crude oil spill from the Keystone pipeline in eastern North Dakota has turned out to have affected almost 10 times the amount of land as first reported, a state regulator said Monday.
North Dakota environmental scientist Bill Suess said the leak reported on Oct. 29 is now estimated by state regulators to have affected about 209,100 square feet of land near Edinburg. State regulators had said the leak affected about 22,500 square feet of land.
Calgary, Alberta-based TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, estimated its pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons of oil. Suess said that estimate has not changed.
The cause of the spill is still unknown. An affected portion of the pipe has been sent to a third-party laboratory for inspection, as required by federal regulators.
TC Energy said the pipeline returned to service on Nov. 10 after approval of a repair and restart plan by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The company has not given an estimate on the land that was affected, Suess said. The initial estimate by state regulators was “a quick and dirty look at it,” he said. “We did have some surface expansion since then.”
The company reported late Sunday that it had recovered about 337,550 gallons of oil, along with 141,834 gallons of oily water, Suess said.
Cleanup crews and state regulators remained at the site on Monday. Some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water, he said.
TC Energy has said people were at the site working around the clock to clean up the spill. Suess said the cleanup work was cut to daylight hours on Monday.
The company has referred questions to its website but has not updated it in more than a week.
TC Energy has put up berms around the affected area and is excavating contaminated soil from the entire site, at depths of up to 6 feet, Suess said. The oily soil is being stockpiled and will be taken to a landfill in Sawyer, North Dakota, he said.
“We really don’t have any risk of anything spreading at this point,” he said.
Crude began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It’s designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma. It can handle about 23 million gallons (87 million liters) daily.
It is part of a system that also is to include the proposed $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline designed to transport the oil from western Canada to terminals on the Gulf Coast.
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will cause environmental damage.
North Dakota environmental scientist Bill Suess said the leak reported on Oct. 29 is now estimated by state regulators to have affected about 209,100 square feet of land near Edinburg. State regulators had said the leak affected about 22,500 square feet of land.
Calgary, Alberta-based TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, estimated its pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons of oil. Suess said that estimate has not changed.
The cause of the spill is still unknown. An affected portion of the pipe has been sent to a third-party laboratory for inspection, as required by federal regulators.
TC Energy said the pipeline returned to service on Nov. 10 after approval of a repair and restart plan by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The company has not given an estimate on the land that was affected, Suess said. The initial estimate by state regulators was “a quick and dirty look at it,” he said. “We did have some surface expansion since then.”
The company reported late Sunday that it had recovered about 337,550 gallons of oil, along with 141,834 gallons of oily water, Suess said.
Cleanup crews and state regulators remained at the site on Monday. Some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water, he said.
TC Energy has said people were at the site working around the clock to clean up the spill. Suess said the cleanup work was cut to daylight hours on Monday.
The company has referred questions to its website but has not updated it in more than a week.
TC Energy has put up berms around the affected area and is excavating contaminated soil from the entire site, at depths of up to 6 feet, Suess said. The oily soil is being stockpiled and will be taken to a landfill in Sawyer, North Dakota, he said.
“We really don’t have any risk of anything spreading at this point,” he said.
Crude began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It’s designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma. It can handle about 23 million gallons (87 million liters) daily.
It is part of a system that also is to include the proposed $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline designed to transport the oil from western Canada to terminals on the Gulf Coast.
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will cause environmental damage.
How Big Oil exploited a loophole in the law to bilk the United States out of billions
Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate - alternet
October 30, 2019
When you’re undergoing a dental procedure, there’s one thing you never want to hear your dentist say: “Oops!”
It’s also alarming to hear that from a former senator 25 years after he passed a temporary subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly owned crude they took from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to cut our dependence on the Arabian cartel by giving oil corporations a brief reprieve on royalties so they would drill here.
But — oops! — our lawmakers made a big (and costly) slip-up: They forgot to specify in the law that the exemption was temporary. Republicans and Democrats had agreed that when market prices recovered, the corporations were to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says an official who was involved in the original negotiations.
Sure enough, market prices had recovered by 2006. But “greed” is both the industry’s motto and its modus operandi, so the oil barons that had benefited from this public generosity in their time of need have thumbed their nose at the public ever since, essentially saying, “Tough luck, suckers! There’s no limit in the law, so we’re just gonna keep sucking up all the oil we can without paying a dime in royalties.”
This is no petty thievery. Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and even China’s state-run oil corporation are among the giants that have taken at least $18 billion from our nation’s treasury so far. And their haul increases every day that they’re allowed to pump up profits through this unintended loophole.
The only thing bigger than Big Oil’s avarice is its arrogance. The industry’s lobbying front group has warned Congress not to try plugging the loophole, declaring that such an attempt would be “engaging in a dangerous game of bait and switch.”
Big Oil’s greed knows no bounds either. For example, Exxon, which banked a whopping $290 billion in sales last year, makes money the old-fashioned way: lying, cheating, exploiting workers, extracting subsidies from taxpayers, dodging taxes, refusing to pay for its pollution and other forms of corporate finagling.
But mighty Exxon now finds itself in federal court, finally called to account for lying to its own shareholders, the public and government officials. At issue are the true financial and environmental costs of the damages that its oil and gas operations are inflicting upon Earth’s climate. The legal case points out that it is perversely profitable to pollute if you don’t have to include the costs of those damages on your corporate books.
Technically, the charge is that Exxon kept two sets of financial books: one secretly acknowledging internally that its pollution was devastating our climate and would eventually cost shareholders a fortune, the other a rosy public presentation hiding those costs in order to claim that its fossil fuel empire was more cost-effective than wind, solar and other clean energy sources.
This blatant deceit has defrauded shareholders about the actual value of their investment, diverted public policy from necessary conversion to nonpolluting fuels and accelerated the radical impacts of climate change.
While the lawsuit filed against Exxon will largely focus on arcane aspects of securities law, it is fundamentally about corporate morality. As environmental activist Lee Wasserman recently put it, the case is a chance “for society to free itself from the grasp of this lethal industry,” adding that “we’re victims of a small group of gargantuan companies that recklessly and deliberately ignored the implications of their own science and worked to deceive the public.”
Indeed, their recklessness continues. Even though Exxon now admits the damage its products are causing, Wasserman notes, the careless behemoth “plans to increase its oil output by 25 percent by 2025.”
Of course, any monetary fine the corporation might have to pay is only a tiny fraction of its yearly income, so that’s no deterrent. The real punishment is that Exxon and its executives are tagging themselves as the same morally repugnant profiteers those in the soulless tobacco industry have been. One force bigger than Big Oil is an infuriated public. To learn more and to fight for our environment, go to the Sierra Club.
It’s also alarming to hear that from a former senator 25 years after he passed a temporary subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly owned crude they took from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to cut our dependence on the Arabian cartel by giving oil corporations a brief reprieve on royalties so they would drill here.
But — oops! — our lawmakers made a big (and costly) slip-up: They forgot to specify in the law that the exemption was temporary. Republicans and Democrats had agreed that when market prices recovered, the corporations were to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says an official who was involved in the original negotiations.
Sure enough, market prices had recovered by 2006. But “greed” is both the industry’s motto and its modus operandi, so the oil barons that had benefited from this public generosity in their time of need have thumbed their nose at the public ever since, essentially saying, “Tough luck, suckers! There’s no limit in the law, so we’re just gonna keep sucking up all the oil we can without paying a dime in royalties.”
This is no petty thievery. Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and even China’s state-run oil corporation are among the giants that have taken at least $18 billion from our nation’s treasury so far. And their haul increases every day that they’re allowed to pump up profits through this unintended loophole.
The only thing bigger than Big Oil’s avarice is its arrogance. The industry’s lobbying front group has warned Congress not to try plugging the loophole, declaring that such an attempt would be “engaging in a dangerous game of bait and switch.”
Big Oil’s greed knows no bounds either. For example, Exxon, which banked a whopping $290 billion in sales last year, makes money the old-fashioned way: lying, cheating, exploiting workers, extracting subsidies from taxpayers, dodging taxes, refusing to pay for its pollution and other forms of corporate finagling.
But mighty Exxon now finds itself in federal court, finally called to account for lying to its own shareholders, the public and government officials. At issue are the true financial and environmental costs of the damages that its oil and gas operations are inflicting upon Earth’s climate. The legal case points out that it is perversely profitable to pollute if you don’t have to include the costs of those damages on your corporate books.
Technically, the charge is that Exxon kept two sets of financial books: one secretly acknowledging internally that its pollution was devastating our climate and would eventually cost shareholders a fortune, the other a rosy public presentation hiding those costs in order to claim that its fossil fuel empire was more cost-effective than wind, solar and other clean energy sources.
This blatant deceit has defrauded shareholders about the actual value of their investment, diverted public policy from necessary conversion to nonpolluting fuels and accelerated the radical impacts of climate change.
While the lawsuit filed against Exxon will largely focus on arcane aspects of securities law, it is fundamentally about corporate morality. As environmental activist Lee Wasserman recently put it, the case is a chance “for society to free itself from the grasp of this lethal industry,” adding that “we’re victims of a small group of gargantuan companies that recklessly and deliberately ignored the implications of their own science and worked to deceive the public.”
Indeed, their recklessness continues. Even though Exxon now admits the damage its products are causing, Wasserman notes, the careless behemoth “plans to increase its oil output by 25 percent by 2025.”
Of course, any monetary fine the corporation might have to pay is only a tiny fraction of its yearly income, so that’s no deterrent. The real punishment is that Exxon and its executives are tagging themselves as the same morally repugnant profiteers those in the soulless tobacco industry have been. One force bigger than Big Oil is an infuriated public. To learn more and to fight for our environment, go to the Sierra Club.
FROM CLIMATE DENIAL TO “GREEN” PETROLEUM: MASSACHUSETTS ACCUSES EXXON MOBIL OF DECEPTIVE MESSAGING
Alleen Brown - the intercept
October 31 2019, 10:33 a.m
EXXON MOBIL’S RELATIONSHIP with the New York Times is a case study in how the fossil fuel industry’s climate denialism has evolved over the past 20 years. Beginning in the 1970s, Exxon Mobil published an “advertorial” every Thursday on the New York Times editorial page. The quarter-page, essay-style ads were designed to mimic a Times op-ed. Starting in the 1980s, doubt about the seriousness of human-driven climate change was a repeated theme. The ads came with titles including “Apocalypse no,” “Reset the alarm,” “Less heat, more light on climate change,” and “Climate change: a degree of uncertainty.”
According to a lawsuit Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed against Exxon Mobil last week, the oil company’s use of the New York Times editorial section “to shift public perception was among the most significant and longest regular — in this case, weekly — uses of media to influence public and stakeholder opinion in modern U.S. history.”
The ads failed to mention that Exxon’s products’ emissions risked effects that would be “catastrophic (at least for a substantial proportion of the earth’s population),” as an Exxon scientist advised in 1981.
Today, the message has changed, but the method is the same. Exxon Mobil’s contemporary equivalent is native ads produced by T Brand Studio, which sells “the New York Times’s proven recipe for storytelling” created by “talent that’s drawn from media, marketing and journalistic backgrounds.”
A recent Exxon ad published on the New York Times website was titled “The Future of Energy? It May Come From Where You Least Expect.” The heavily designed, article-style ad focused on Exxon’s biofuels research. “We’re aiming to have the technical ability to produce 10,000 barrels of algae-based biofuel a day by 2025,” Rob Brown, an algae researcher, is quoted as saying.
The ad does not mention that the goal only equates to 0.2 percent of the corporation’s current refinery capacity, nor does it note Exxon’s plans for fossil fuel production in the years to come. Last March, the company estimated that by 2024, it would produce 1 million barrels per day of oil and gas in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico — five times more than what it produces today. And it certainly doesn’t mention scientists’ assertion that governments and corporations need to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent before 2030 to have a shot at avoiding catastrophic climate impacts.
According to Healey, Exxon ads like the one by T Brand Studios are “false and misleading” and violate the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act.
Exxon’s Evolving Denialism
On October 24, Healey became the second state attorney general to file a climate liability lawsuit against Exxon Mobil. The suit is broader than similar litigation in New York, where a trial began last week, centered on alleged Exxon securities fraud. Healey alleges that, in addition to the Times ads, the corporation’s marketing of “green” petroleum products under brands like Mobil 1 and Synergy illegally deceives consumers into believing that Exxon’s products can protect the world against the ravages of carbon emissions, without disclosing that the corporations’ products are an existential threat to humanity.
Like the New York case, the Massachusetts case highlights the way the corporation has deceived investors by using a misleading proxy cost of carbon. The cost of carbon is a price meant to account for the regulatory expense of carbon emissions. Exxon told investors it was deciding which projects to invest in according to one carbon price, while it actually used a different, lower price. In effect, investors believed that Exxon was taking climate change more seriously than it actually was, as it invested in some of the most carbon-emitting projects in the world.
Exxon’s history of denialism is key to the two climate liability cases. The corporation’s predecessor conducted serious climate research as early as the 1950s, and by the late 1970s, Exxon was well aware of coming crisis and its cause. In fact, in 1982, the corporation predicted with incredible accuracy 2019’s disturbingly high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and the 1 degree Celsius temperature rise we’ve already met. Yet by the 1990s, its CEO was making statements that flew in the face of that research, sowing doubt about whether climate change was real and funding a wide network of politicians and institutions meant to challenge regulatory regimes that might have prevented extinctions, cultural collapses, hydrological crises, and generations of death and suffering.
The suits center on a more insidious form of modern-day denialism, though. Today, corporations like Exxon spend vast amounts of resources dressing up as climate realists, while at the same time obstructing climate policy behind the scenes and accelerating the crisis by continuing to pull oil out of the tar sands of Canada, the shale formations of Texas, and the deep-water oil deposits of the Gulf of Mexico. The Massachusetts complaint describes Exxon Mobil’s evolving deception playbook.
The “green” Mobil 1 brand — a motor oil dyed a garish green — is a case in point. In 2018, Exxon Mobil was part of a coalition that fought and killed federal policy that would have increased car fuel efficiency and significantly cut down on fossil fuel emissions from the transportation sector. Meanwhile, the corporation has promoted its Mobil 1 product as key to increasing fuel efficiency, by using a new low-viscosity formula. Exxon says another brand, Synergy, which includes an additive to all gasoline in Massachusetts, can “help customers reduce their emissions and improve their energy efficiency” in part by reducing engine deposits.
According to Sharon Eubanks, who led the Justice Department’s racketeering litigation against Big Tobacco, the moment is reflective of Tobacco’s turn to “light” or “mild” cigarettes. “After they realized there was this huge scare, they thought their product was going to become extinct,” Eubanks said. “They were afraid people would quit.”
Greenwashing Petroleum Products
The five largest publicly traded oil majors — Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron — together invested more than $1 billion in climate branding and lobbying in the three years after the landmark Paris climate agreement was signed, according to a study by the British nonprofit InfluenceMap. Exxon spent at least $56 million on climate messaging.
“The Paris Climate Accord was a watershed in terms of corporate engagement and investor engagement,” said Ed Collins, the report’s author. Many shareholders began pressuring the corporations to account for their climate impact, and it became increasingly unviable to explicitly advertise climate doubt.
Exxon Mobil began touting its support for a carbon tax (but only under a very specific set of circumstances), and in 2018, it joined the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a coalition of oil and gas CEOs who promote climate solutions like voluntary methane reductions, carbon capture and storage, and energy efficiency — all approaches that would allow them to continue producing oil and gas.
Ultimately, behind the new branding is the same deadly advocacy for deregulation that the corporations have always carried out. In a new InfluenceMap report on advertising by the oil majors on Facebook, Exxon Mobil was far and away the biggest spender, investing $9.6 million, 10 times more than any other oil company, in political ads. A large proportion was spent to defeat state ballot initiatives in the 2018 midterm elections, including a carbon tax in Washington and limits to oil and gas development in Colorado.
Collins argues that deceptive climate messaging matters. “It mixes up the public knowledge and conversation enough to have a detrimental impact on the overall efforts to try to tackle climate change,” he said.
In the federal racketeering case against Big Tobacco, Justice Department lawyers were able to prove that the corporations knew that light cigarettes offered no clear health benefit compared to regular cigarettes. A judge agreed in 2006 that they were designed to “keep smokers smoking; to stop smokers from quitting; to encourage people, especially young people, to start smoking; and to maintain or increase corporate profits.” She forced tobacco companies to publish corrective statements in newspapers and on TV stating that “there is no safe cigarette” and the corporations had “deliberately deceived the American public.” She also ordered companies to stop branding their products as light, mild, or low tar. Corresponding legislation finally went into effect in 2010, banning the labels.
Prior to the federal lawsuit, the four largest tobacco companies signed a massive settlement agreement with state attorneys general. Eubanks is optimistic about the Exxon cases. “If they’re not prepared to come to the table at all, this will go on for quite some time, and I think you’re going to see success in some of these state cases,” she said. “We’re not going to have to wait 50 years to see one of these companies lose.”
Of course, Big Tobacco ultimately survived the litigation. There’s far less room for the oil industry to do the same. Tobacco companies may have continued to cause users to develop cancer, but continued oil production at anywhere near today’s rates will mean, as the lawsuit puts it, “a substantial increase in deadly extreme weather events, coastal property damage, disruptions of fisheries, the spread of vector-borne diseases, large-scale ecosystem disruption, and other unprecedented threats to human populations.”
According to a lawsuit Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed against Exxon Mobil last week, the oil company’s use of the New York Times editorial section “to shift public perception was among the most significant and longest regular — in this case, weekly — uses of media to influence public and stakeholder opinion in modern U.S. history.”
The ads failed to mention that Exxon’s products’ emissions risked effects that would be “catastrophic (at least for a substantial proportion of the earth’s population),” as an Exxon scientist advised in 1981.
Today, the message has changed, but the method is the same. Exxon Mobil’s contemporary equivalent is native ads produced by T Brand Studio, which sells “the New York Times’s proven recipe for storytelling” created by “talent that’s drawn from media, marketing and journalistic backgrounds.”
A recent Exxon ad published on the New York Times website was titled “The Future of Energy? It May Come From Where You Least Expect.” The heavily designed, article-style ad focused on Exxon’s biofuels research. “We’re aiming to have the technical ability to produce 10,000 barrels of algae-based biofuel a day by 2025,” Rob Brown, an algae researcher, is quoted as saying.
The ad does not mention that the goal only equates to 0.2 percent of the corporation’s current refinery capacity, nor does it note Exxon’s plans for fossil fuel production in the years to come. Last March, the company estimated that by 2024, it would produce 1 million barrels per day of oil and gas in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico — five times more than what it produces today. And it certainly doesn’t mention scientists’ assertion that governments and corporations need to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent before 2030 to have a shot at avoiding catastrophic climate impacts.
According to Healey, Exxon ads like the one by T Brand Studios are “false and misleading” and violate the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act.
Exxon’s Evolving Denialism
On October 24, Healey became the second state attorney general to file a climate liability lawsuit against Exxon Mobil. The suit is broader than similar litigation in New York, where a trial began last week, centered on alleged Exxon securities fraud. Healey alleges that, in addition to the Times ads, the corporation’s marketing of “green” petroleum products under brands like Mobil 1 and Synergy illegally deceives consumers into believing that Exxon’s products can protect the world against the ravages of carbon emissions, without disclosing that the corporations’ products are an existential threat to humanity.
Like the New York case, the Massachusetts case highlights the way the corporation has deceived investors by using a misleading proxy cost of carbon. The cost of carbon is a price meant to account for the regulatory expense of carbon emissions. Exxon told investors it was deciding which projects to invest in according to one carbon price, while it actually used a different, lower price. In effect, investors believed that Exxon was taking climate change more seriously than it actually was, as it invested in some of the most carbon-emitting projects in the world.
Exxon’s history of denialism is key to the two climate liability cases. The corporation’s predecessor conducted serious climate research as early as the 1950s, and by the late 1970s, Exxon was well aware of coming crisis and its cause. In fact, in 1982, the corporation predicted with incredible accuracy 2019’s disturbingly high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and the 1 degree Celsius temperature rise we’ve already met. Yet by the 1990s, its CEO was making statements that flew in the face of that research, sowing doubt about whether climate change was real and funding a wide network of politicians and institutions meant to challenge regulatory regimes that might have prevented extinctions, cultural collapses, hydrological crises, and generations of death and suffering.
The suits center on a more insidious form of modern-day denialism, though. Today, corporations like Exxon spend vast amounts of resources dressing up as climate realists, while at the same time obstructing climate policy behind the scenes and accelerating the crisis by continuing to pull oil out of the tar sands of Canada, the shale formations of Texas, and the deep-water oil deposits of the Gulf of Mexico. The Massachusetts complaint describes Exxon Mobil’s evolving deception playbook.
The “green” Mobil 1 brand — a motor oil dyed a garish green — is a case in point. In 2018, Exxon Mobil was part of a coalition that fought and killed federal policy that would have increased car fuel efficiency and significantly cut down on fossil fuel emissions from the transportation sector. Meanwhile, the corporation has promoted its Mobil 1 product as key to increasing fuel efficiency, by using a new low-viscosity formula. Exxon says another brand, Synergy, which includes an additive to all gasoline in Massachusetts, can “help customers reduce their emissions and improve their energy efficiency” in part by reducing engine deposits.
According to Sharon Eubanks, who led the Justice Department’s racketeering litigation against Big Tobacco, the moment is reflective of Tobacco’s turn to “light” or “mild” cigarettes. “After they realized there was this huge scare, they thought their product was going to become extinct,” Eubanks said. “They were afraid people would quit.”
Greenwashing Petroleum Products
The five largest publicly traded oil majors — Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron — together invested more than $1 billion in climate branding and lobbying in the three years after the landmark Paris climate agreement was signed, according to a study by the British nonprofit InfluenceMap. Exxon spent at least $56 million on climate messaging.
“The Paris Climate Accord was a watershed in terms of corporate engagement and investor engagement,” said Ed Collins, the report’s author. Many shareholders began pressuring the corporations to account for their climate impact, and it became increasingly unviable to explicitly advertise climate doubt.
Exxon Mobil began touting its support for a carbon tax (but only under a very specific set of circumstances), and in 2018, it joined the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a coalition of oil and gas CEOs who promote climate solutions like voluntary methane reductions, carbon capture and storage, and energy efficiency — all approaches that would allow them to continue producing oil and gas.
Ultimately, behind the new branding is the same deadly advocacy for deregulation that the corporations have always carried out. In a new InfluenceMap report on advertising by the oil majors on Facebook, Exxon Mobil was far and away the biggest spender, investing $9.6 million, 10 times more than any other oil company, in political ads. A large proportion was spent to defeat state ballot initiatives in the 2018 midterm elections, including a carbon tax in Washington and limits to oil and gas development in Colorado.
Collins argues that deceptive climate messaging matters. “It mixes up the public knowledge and conversation enough to have a detrimental impact on the overall efforts to try to tackle climate change,” he said.
In the federal racketeering case against Big Tobacco, Justice Department lawyers were able to prove that the corporations knew that light cigarettes offered no clear health benefit compared to regular cigarettes. A judge agreed in 2006 that they were designed to “keep smokers smoking; to stop smokers from quitting; to encourage people, especially young people, to start smoking; and to maintain or increase corporate profits.” She forced tobacco companies to publish corrective statements in newspapers and on TV stating that “there is no safe cigarette” and the corporations had “deliberately deceived the American public.” She also ordered companies to stop branding their products as light, mild, or low tar. Corresponding legislation finally went into effect in 2010, banning the labels.
Prior to the federal lawsuit, the four largest tobacco companies signed a massive settlement agreement with state attorneys general. Eubanks is optimistic about the Exxon cases. “If they’re not prepared to come to the table at all, this will go on for quite some time, and I think you’re going to see success in some of these state cases,” she said. “We’re not going to have to wait 50 years to see one of these companies lose.”
Of course, Big Tobacco ultimately survived the litigation. There’s far less room for the oil industry to do the same. Tobacco companies may have continued to cause users to develop cancer, but continued oil production at anywhere near today’s rates will mean, as the lawsuit puts it, “a substantial increase in deadly extreme weather events, coastal property damage, disruptions of fisheries, the spread of vector-borne diseases, large-scale ecosystem disruption, and other unprecedented threats to human populations.”
polluting for profits111
Keystone oil pipeline leaks 383,000 gallons in North Dakota
omaha world HERALD
10/31/19
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — TC Energy's Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons of oil in northeastern North Dakota, state regulators said Thursday.
Crews on Tuesday shut down the pipeline that carries tar sands oil from Canada through seven states after the leak was discovered, said Karl Rockeman, North Dakota's water quality division director. It remained closed Thursday.
The Calgary, Alberta-based company formerly known as TransCanada said in a statement that the leak affected about 22,500 square feet of land near Edinburg, in Walsh County.
The company and regulators said the cause was being investigated.
"Our emergency response team contained the impacted area and oil has not migrated beyond the immediately affected area," the company said in a statement.
North Dakota regulators were notified late Tuesday night of the leak. Rockeman said some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water.
Regulators have been at the site since Wednesday monitoring the spill and cleanup.
Crude oil began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It's designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma.
It can handle about 23 million gallons daily.
The pipeline spill and shutdown comes as the company seeks to build the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, through Nebraska to refineries in Texas. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will harm the environment.
President Donald Trump issued a federal permit for the expansion project in 2017, after it had been rejected by the Obama administration.
Together, the massive Keystone and Keystone XL network would be about five times the length of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
The original Keystone has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border.
In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 407,000 gallons of oil onto farmland in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border. The company had originally put the spill at about 210,000 gallons.
Federal regulators said the larger figure represented the seventh-largest onshore oil or petroleum product spill since 2010.
North Dakota's biggest spill, and one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history, came in 2013, when 840,000 gallons spilled from a Tesoro pipeline in the northwestern part of the state. The company spent five years and nearly $100 million cleaning it up.
The Sierra Club said the latest spill was an example of why the Keystone XL should not be built.
"We don't yet know the extent of the damage from this latest tar sands spill, but what we do know is that this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won't be the last."
Crews on Tuesday shut down the pipeline that carries tar sands oil from Canada through seven states after the leak was discovered, said Karl Rockeman, North Dakota's water quality division director. It remained closed Thursday.
The Calgary, Alberta-based company formerly known as TransCanada said in a statement that the leak affected about 22,500 square feet of land near Edinburg, in Walsh County.
The company and regulators said the cause was being investigated.
"Our emergency response team contained the impacted area and oil has not migrated beyond the immediately affected area," the company said in a statement.
North Dakota regulators were notified late Tuesday night of the leak. Rockeman said some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water.
Regulators have been at the site since Wednesday monitoring the spill and cleanup.
Crude oil began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It's designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma.
It can handle about 23 million gallons daily.
The pipeline spill and shutdown comes as the company seeks to build the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, through Nebraska to refineries in Texas. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will harm the environment.
President Donald Trump issued a federal permit for the expansion project in 2017, after it had been rejected by the Obama administration.
Together, the massive Keystone and Keystone XL network would be about five times the length of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
The original Keystone has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border.
In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 407,000 gallons of oil onto farmland in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border. The company had originally put the spill at about 210,000 gallons.
Federal regulators said the larger figure represented the seventh-largest onshore oil or petroleum product spill since 2010.
North Dakota's biggest spill, and one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history, came in 2013, when 840,000 gallons spilled from a Tesoro pipeline in the northwestern part of the state. The company spent five years and nearly $100 million cleaning it up.
The Sierra Club said the latest spill was an example of why the Keystone XL should not be built.
"We don't yet know the extent of the damage from this latest tar sands spill, but what we do know is that this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won't be the last."
Biggest Private Coal Miner Goes Bust as Trump Rescue Fails
By Jeremy Hill, Will Wade, and Steven Church - reuters
October 29, 2019, 3:26 AM PDT
Robert E. Murray, the U.S. coal baron who pressed the Trump administration to help save America’s struggling miners, placed his company into bankruptcy as demand for the fossil fuel continues to weaken.
Murray Energy Holdings Co. filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Columbus, Ohio, to restructure more than $2.7 billion of debt. The miner -- the largest privately owned U.S. coal company -- reached a restructuring support agreement with lenders who hold more than 60% of a $1.7 billion loan, the company said in a statement. The deal provides a new $350 million loan to keep operations going during the reorganization.
The bankruptcy comes more than a year after the Trump administration’s efforts to subsidize struggling nuclear and coal-fired power plants failed, shot down by Trump’s own appointed energy regulators. Some of those plants were Murray Energy’s customers. Robert Murray, a big donor to Trump’s campaign, was instrumental in setting his energy agenda and has hosted multiple fundraisers.
The company said Tuesday that it named Robert D. Moore, Robert Murray’s nephew and former chief operating officer, as president and chief executive officer of Murray Energy. Under the restructuring agreement, the lender group will form a new entity -- called Murray NewCo -- that would seek to acquire the company’s assets, with Murray as chairman and Moore as CEO.
Waning Demand
The company’s collapse underscores how deeply cheap natural gas and renewable energy resources have cut into coal’s share of the U.S. power market. Cloud Peak Energy Inc., Cambrian Coal Co., Blackjewel LLC and Blackhawk Mining LLC have all filed for bankruptcy this year. Their downfall mirrors waning demand for fuel that as recently as 2003 accounted for more than half of all U.S. power generation.
Murray warned in 2017 that the shifts in the industry could push it into bankruptcy. The company initially chose to avoid that route and persuaded creditors to ease its debt load somewhat. But analysts said this left the company at a disadvantage with rivals because it remained saddled with high costs and interest expenses.
Murray shuttered some of its West Virginia mining operations in September, citing weak market conditions.
Workers Bracing
The bankruptcy provided a rare peek at the privately held miner’s financial performance, with documents posted on the company’s website showing adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) of $542 million in 2018, down from $574 million the prior year and $643 million in 2016. Revenue from coal was $2.5 billion in 2018, up from $2.2 billion in a year earlier.
The lender agreement calls for the reorganized company to reject any existing collective bargaining agreement between the company and employees, the disclosures show. Murray, which has more than 5,000 employees -- 2,400 of whom are active union members -- said it faces more than $8 billion in liabilities for various pensions and benefit plans.
“We have high-powered legal, financial and communications teams in place that will fight to protect our members’ interests in the bankruptcy court,” United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts said in an emailed statement. “I want our active members to know that this filing changes nothing as far as the current terms and conditions of employment.”
Union Roots
Robert Murray, who began working in coal mines at 16 to support his family, has had deep union ties. Before starting his St. Clairsville, Ohio-based company in 1988, he spent 31 years at North American Coal Corp., eventually becoming CEO.
In his telling, he was fired in October 1987 after refusing to get behind the company’s plan to reincorporate in Delaware and shed obligations to some 1,800 retirees whom Murray had spent years working alongside. North American Coal said at the time that it changed CEOs as part of a broader strategy to diversify into non-coal operations.
As his own company struggled in recent years, Murray continued to be one of the industry’s biggest cheerleaders.
He led the fight against President Barack Obama’s clean-air rules, filing numerous legal challenges and calling the Democrat “the greatest enemy I’ve ever had in my life.” His company donated $1 million to a political action committee backing Trump’s agenda in the 2018 election.
Murray listed almost 100 affiliates that were also filing for Chapter 11. Foresight Energy LP, a struggling St. Louis-based coal miner in which Murray bought a controlling stake, wasn’t part of the proceedings, Murray said in a statement. Foresight skipped an interest payment this month and is evaluating its options as a 30-day grace period expires this week. Moore, Murray’s new CEO, is also Foresight’s CEO.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP is providing legal advice to Murray Energy. Evercore is Murray’s investment banker, and Alvarez & Marsal is its financial adviser.
The case is Murray Energy Holdings Co., 19-bk-56885, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).
(Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.)
Murray Energy Holdings Co. filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Columbus, Ohio, to restructure more than $2.7 billion of debt. The miner -- the largest privately owned U.S. coal company -- reached a restructuring support agreement with lenders who hold more than 60% of a $1.7 billion loan, the company said in a statement. The deal provides a new $350 million loan to keep operations going during the reorganization.
The bankruptcy comes more than a year after the Trump administration’s efforts to subsidize struggling nuclear and coal-fired power plants failed, shot down by Trump’s own appointed energy regulators. Some of those plants were Murray Energy’s customers. Robert Murray, a big donor to Trump’s campaign, was instrumental in setting his energy agenda and has hosted multiple fundraisers.
The company said Tuesday that it named Robert D. Moore, Robert Murray’s nephew and former chief operating officer, as president and chief executive officer of Murray Energy. Under the restructuring agreement, the lender group will form a new entity -- called Murray NewCo -- that would seek to acquire the company’s assets, with Murray as chairman and Moore as CEO.
Waning Demand
The company’s collapse underscores how deeply cheap natural gas and renewable energy resources have cut into coal’s share of the U.S. power market. Cloud Peak Energy Inc., Cambrian Coal Co., Blackjewel LLC and Blackhawk Mining LLC have all filed for bankruptcy this year. Their downfall mirrors waning demand for fuel that as recently as 2003 accounted for more than half of all U.S. power generation.
Murray warned in 2017 that the shifts in the industry could push it into bankruptcy. The company initially chose to avoid that route and persuaded creditors to ease its debt load somewhat. But analysts said this left the company at a disadvantage with rivals because it remained saddled with high costs and interest expenses.
Murray shuttered some of its West Virginia mining operations in September, citing weak market conditions.
Workers Bracing
The bankruptcy provided a rare peek at the privately held miner’s financial performance, with documents posted on the company’s website showing adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) of $542 million in 2018, down from $574 million the prior year and $643 million in 2016. Revenue from coal was $2.5 billion in 2018, up from $2.2 billion in a year earlier.
The lender agreement calls for the reorganized company to reject any existing collective bargaining agreement between the company and employees, the disclosures show. Murray, which has more than 5,000 employees -- 2,400 of whom are active union members -- said it faces more than $8 billion in liabilities for various pensions and benefit plans.
“We have high-powered legal, financial and communications teams in place that will fight to protect our members’ interests in the bankruptcy court,” United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts said in an emailed statement. “I want our active members to know that this filing changes nothing as far as the current terms and conditions of employment.”
Union Roots
Robert Murray, who began working in coal mines at 16 to support his family, has had deep union ties. Before starting his St. Clairsville, Ohio-based company in 1988, he spent 31 years at North American Coal Corp., eventually becoming CEO.
In his telling, he was fired in October 1987 after refusing to get behind the company’s plan to reincorporate in Delaware and shed obligations to some 1,800 retirees whom Murray had spent years working alongside. North American Coal said at the time that it changed CEOs as part of a broader strategy to diversify into non-coal operations.
As his own company struggled in recent years, Murray continued to be one of the industry’s biggest cheerleaders.
He led the fight against President Barack Obama’s clean-air rules, filing numerous legal challenges and calling the Democrat “the greatest enemy I’ve ever had in my life.” His company donated $1 million to a political action committee backing Trump’s agenda in the 2018 election.
Murray listed almost 100 affiliates that were also filing for Chapter 11. Foresight Energy LP, a struggling St. Louis-based coal miner in which Murray bought a controlling stake, wasn’t part of the proceedings, Murray said in a statement. Foresight skipped an interest payment this month and is evaluating its options as a 30-day grace period expires this week. Moore, Murray’s new CEO, is also Foresight’s CEO.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP is providing legal advice to Murray Energy. Evercore is Murray’s investment banker, and Alvarez & Marsal is its financial adviser.
The case is Murray Energy Holdings Co., 19-bk-56885, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).
(Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.)
How things got so fracking bad in Ohio
Ohio’s natural gas production has swelled more than 2,200 percent in just seven years.
DANIEL ROSS - salon
OCTOBER 26, 2019 2:00PM (UTC)
Hydraulic fracturing, savior or sin? That depends on who you ask.
The fossil fuel industry and its proponents tout fracking’s economic benefits as this oil and gas extraction technique has led the march toward the nation’s energy independence. But as our understanding of the technique grows, so too does our knowledge of its many drawbacks. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in Ohio, at the vanguard of the nation’s fracking boom thanks to the Utica and Marcellus shale reserves to the east of the state, which have sparked something of a fossil fuel industry feeding frenzy over the past decade.
The amount of natural gas Ohio produces annually ballooned from 78 billion cubic feet in 2010 to nearly 1.8 trillion cubic feet in 2017 — an increase of more than 2,200 percent — according to federal figures. And what kind of impact has this had? Between 2007 and 2016, employment in Ohio’s shale industries grew 62 percent. A new ethane cracker plant is reported to bring hundreds more full-time jobs to Ohio’s Belmont County. When Vice President Mike Pence trumpeted to the assembled crowd at the Oil and Gas Association’s annual meeting earlier this year in Columbus that the energy industry was “strengthening the foundation under families here in Ohio and all across this nation,” he was met with warm applause.
Ten years on though, tough questions are being asked not just of the industry’s economic impact in Ohio’s poor Appalachian heartland, but also of the damage it’s causing to the environment, the climate and human health.
“It’s impacting people locally,” Ned Ketyer, a medical adviser with the Pennsylvania-basednonprofit Environmental Health Project, told the Independent Media Institute.“It’s impacting their health. It’s impacting regional health. It’s impacting local and regional economies in a negative way. And ultimately, it’s affecting the climate system in a way that’s completely contrary to any kind of urgent climate solutions that we need to embrace right now.”
Environmental effects
The growing literature surrounding the environmental impacts from fracking is already pretty broad. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own years-long study concluded that fracking operations have contaminated drinking water resources and have led to inadequately treated wastewater being dumped into surface water sources. Scientific and government research links fracking with an increased likelihood of earthquakes.
Then there’s the issue of the industry’s climate footprint at a time when a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to avoid some of the worst impacts from global warming. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration found last year that emissions from the oil and gas industry were a major contributor to growing atmospheric levels of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. A new study out of Cornell University came to the same conclusion, linking a global spike in methane emissions to the fracking of shale gas.
In Ohio, some of the localized environmental impacts make for stark reading. A recent article in StateImpact Pennsylvania (part of an excellent series looking at the industry’s environmental footprint in Ohio and Pennsylvania) details complaints among residents living in close proximity to fracking infrastructure of things like gas leaks, drinking water contamination and discoloration, as well as fish kills.
Fish aren’t the only kind of wildlife at risk. Cornell University found a possible link between exposure to gas drilling operations and cases of illness, death and reproductive issues in cows, horses, goats, llamas, chickens, dogs and cats in fracking states like Ohio.
“We know the industry doesn’t pay for its harm and the environmental damage that it causes,” Amy Mall, a senior advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Independent Media Institute. She added that federal regulatory “loopholes” are a large part of the problem.
For example, if oil and gas wastewater were subject to federal hazardous waste rules rather than generic standards that apply to all non-hazardous solid waste, “it would be regulated very differently at the state level,” Mall pointed out. This, at a time when nearby states transport huge quantities of wastewater to Ohio for disposal.
“By not being held accountable for their pollution, the industry is shifting a lot of the economic responsibilities to general society,” she said.
"Ohio wasn’t as well researched"
There’s increasing awareness, too, surrounding the possible human health toll from living too close to fracking infrastructure—issues like cancer, preterm births, low-birthweight babies and asthma. The Physicians for Social Responsibility’s latest compendiumon fracking’s health impacts comprises more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies.
Elise Elliott, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, participated in a community-based study in Ohio looking at proximity to oil and gas wells and the impact that might have on human health and water contamination. The researchers found that the closer Ohioans live to these wells, the more likely they are to suffer general health problems like stress and fatigue. Likewise, proximity to wells was associated with higher concentrations of contaminants in the water.
Nevertheless, there’s still a dearth of hard data, say experts, when it comes to understanding exactly how the fracking boom might be impacting the health of Ohioans. Agencies charged with overseeing the industry report how residents only rarely file official health complaints (though they have submitted thousands of much broader complaints). “We were noticing in the literature that Ohio wasn’t as well researched as some other regions in the U.S.,” said Elliott, explaining why that state was chosen for the community health study.
It also helps explain why Elliott urges caution when it comes to directly linking health issues with exposure to some of the contaminants — air pollutants like benzene, hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde — typically found around fracking sites, at least right now. “Our knowledge on this is definitely growing,” she said, “[but] we’re not quite there yet to say definitively what it does.” She urged continued research in the field, such as the potential link between fracking and childhood leukemia.
Economic impact
On the flip side, proponents of the fracking boom argue that the economic benefit to Ohio outweighs any deleterious effects. “It’s a very, very sizeable industry,” said Gilbert Michaud, an adjunct assistant professor of economics at Ohio University who has studied the impact the fossil fuel industry has had on the state’s economy. According to his own calculations, the shale industry’s direct and indirect impact on the state in 2015 — including that through employment, wages, and the multiplier effect — amounted to more than $22 billion. But how widely felt is this impact?
The nonprofit Ohio Education Policy Institute finds how fracking-generated tax revenue has helped to bridge the wealth gap between school districts, particularly in eastern Ohio. But a deeper look reveals a more complex picture. For example, broad underfunding for elementary education means the statewide wealth disparity still exists between rich and poor school districts. And in his 2018 study, Michaud warned of the “less-desirable vestiges” of fracking in the poor rural areas of Appalachian Ohio. “The shale industry may be another case of resource extraction with a failure to capture and retain local value,” he wrote.
Michaud told the Independent Media Institute how the largest employing sector of Ohio’s shale industry is pipeline construction, which typically offers a short window of employment. “Once the infrastructure is in place, then those occupations aren’t really needed,” he said, adding that these jobs typically go to out-of-state workers anyway.
On top of that, those sectors that provide more stable, long-term employment to Ohioans, like jobs at the well pad itself, generally pay the industry’s smaller wages, said Michaud. “That’s not really the secret sauce for future prosperity, right?”
Then there’s the issue of too little of the fiscal windfall trickling down into poor rural communities that constitute the industry’s heartland, he said. This leaves already underfunded local services stretched to breaking point as they grapple with fracking’s residual environmental and health problems. “A lot of these impacts aren’t being retained in these communities that desperately need positive economic development and jobs,” said Michaud. “This is your quintessential Appalachian curse — your resource extraction boom and bust cycle.”
"Petrochemical cluster-frack"
Describing the shale industry in Ohio as a “petrochemical cluster-frack,” Environmental Health Project’s Ned Ketyer agrees with Michaud’s assessment. “Any job that directly threatens the health of me or my family or my patients — I’m a pediatrician — or that threatens the health of every child, even children who haven’t been born, by accelerating climate change, those jobs are not worth supporting,” he said, adding that, “essentially in the Ohio River Valley, we’re fracking for plastic, which is one thing nature doesn’t need any more of.”
The pathway toward renewables is a complicated one in Ohio, however. In 2014, for example, the state imposed a two-year freeze on its renewable and energy-efficiency standards, and currently is in second-to-last place in the country in terms of total electricity production from renewable sources, just ahead of Delaware. According to Ketyer, other reasons for an expedited switch to renewables exist in plain sight.
“It really is an eye-opening thing to take a drive through the Ohio River Valley. This is an area that should not have such high levels of air pollution — some of the worst air pollution in the country. Shouldn’t have such high levels of ozone,” said Ketyer, describing scenes of rural poverty, dilapidated roads and crumbling buildings, interspersed with oil and gas industry infrastructure. “When you go through the Ohio valley, you see an area that shouldbe achingly beautiful.”
The fossil fuel industry and its proponents tout fracking’s economic benefits as this oil and gas extraction technique has led the march toward the nation’s energy independence. But as our understanding of the technique grows, so too does our knowledge of its many drawbacks. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in Ohio, at the vanguard of the nation’s fracking boom thanks to the Utica and Marcellus shale reserves to the east of the state, which have sparked something of a fossil fuel industry feeding frenzy over the past decade.
The amount of natural gas Ohio produces annually ballooned from 78 billion cubic feet in 2010 to nearly 1.8 trillion cubic feet in 2017 — an increase of more than 2,200 percent — according to federal figures. And what kind of impact has this had? Between 2007 and 2016, employment in Ohio’s shale industries grew 62 percent. A new ethane cracker plant is reported to bring hundreds more full-time jobs to Ohio’s Belmont County. When Vice President Mike Pence trumpeted to the assembled crowd at the Oil and Gas Association’s annual meeting earlier this year in Columbus that the energy industry was “strengthening the foundation under families here in Ohio and all across this nation,” he was met with warm applause.
Ten years on though, tough questions are being asked not just of the industry’s economic impact in Ohio’s poor Appalachian heartland, but also of the damage it’s causing to the environment, the climate and human health.
“It’s impacting people locally,” Ned Ketyer, a medical adviser with the Pennsylvania-basednonprofit Environmental Health Project, told the Independent Media Institute.“It’s impacting their health. It’s impacting regional health. It’s impacting local and regional economies in a negative way. And ultimately, it’s affecting the climate system in a way that’s completely contrary to any kind of urgent climate solutions that we need to embrace right now.”
Environmental effects
The growing literature surrounding the environmental impacts from fracking is already pretty broad. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own years-long study concluded that fracking operations have contaminated drinking water resources and have led to inadequately treated wastewater being dumped into surface water sources. Scientific and government research links fracking with an increased likelihood of earthquakes.
Then there’s the issue of the industry’s climate footprint at a time when a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to avoid some of the worst impacts from global warming. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration found last year that emissions from the oil and gas industry were a major contributor to growing atmospheric levels of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. A new study out of Cornell University came to the same conclusion, linking a global spike in methane emissions to the fracking of shale gas.
In Ohio, some of the localized environmental impacts make for stark reading. A recent article in StateImpact Pennsylvania (part of an excellent series looking at the industry’s environmental footprint in Ohio and Pennsylvania) details complaints among residents living in close proximity to fracking infrastructure of things like gas leaks, drinking water contamination and discoloration, as well as fish kills.
Fish aren’t the only kind of wildlife at risk. Cornell University found a possible link between exposure to gas drilling operations and cases of illness, death and reproductive issues in cows, horses, goats, llamas, chickens, dogs and cats in fracking states like Ohio.
“We know the industry doesn’t pay for its harm and the environmental damage that it causes,” Amy Mall, a senior advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Independent Media Institute. She added that federal regulatory “loopholes” are a large part of the problem.
For example, if oil and gas wastewater were subject to federal hazardous waste rules rather than generic standards that apply to all non-hazardous solid waste, “it would be regulated very differently at the state level,” Mall pointed out. This, at a time when nearby states transport huge quantities of wastewater to Ohio for disposal.
“By not being held accountable for their pollution, the industry is shifting a lot of the economic responsibilities to general society,” she said.
"Ohio wasn’t as well researched"
There’s increasing awareness, too, surrounding the possible human health toll from living too close to fracking infrastructure—issues like cancer, preterm births, low-birthweight babies and asthma. The Physicians for Social Responsibility’s latest compendiumon fracking’s health impacts comprises more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies.
Elise Elliott, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, participated in a community-based study in Ohio looking at proximity to oil and gas wells and the impact that might have on human health and water contamination. The researchers found that the closer Ohioans live to these wells, the more likely they are to suffer general health problems like stress and fatigue. Likewise, proximity to wells was associated with higher concentrations of contaminants in the water.
Nevertheless, there’s still a dearth of hard data, say experts, when it comes to understanding exactly how the fracking boom might be impacting the health of Ohioans. Agencies charged with overseeing the industry report how residents only rarely file official health complaints (though they have submitted thousands of much broader complaints). “We were noticing in the literature that Ohio wasn’t as well researched as some other regions in the U.S.,” said Elliott, explaining why that state was chosen for the community health study.
It also helps explain why Elliott urges caution when it comes to directly linking health issues with exposure to some of the contaminants — air pollutants like benzene, hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde — typically found around fracking sites, at least right now. “Our knowledge on this is definitely growing,” she said, “[but] we’re not quite there yet to say definitively what it does.” She urged continued research in the field, such as the potential link between fracking and childhood leukemia.
Economic impact
On the flip side, proponents of the fracking boom argue that the economic benefit to Ohio outweighs any deleterious effects. “It’s a very, very sizeable industry,” said Gilbert Michaud, an adjunct assistant professor of economics at Ohio University who has studied the impact the fossil fuel industry has had on the state’s economy. According to his own calculations, the shale industry’s direct and indirect impact on the state in 2015 — including that through employment, wages, and the multiplier effect — amounted to more than $22 billion. But how widely felt is this impact?
The nonprofit Ohio Education Policy Institute finds how fracking-generated tax revenue has helped to bridge the wealth gap between school districts, particularly in eastern Ohio. But a deeper look reveals a more complex picture. For example, broad underfunding for elementary education means the statewide wealth disparity still exists between rich and poor school districts. And in his 2018 study, Michaud warned of the “less-desirable vestiges” of fracking in the poor rural areas of Appalachian Ohio. “The shale industry may be another case of resource extraction with a failure to capture and retain local value,” he wrote.
Michaud told the Independent Media Institute how the largest employing sector of Ohio’s shale industry is pipeline construction, which typically offers a short window of employment. “Once the infrastructure is in place, then those occupations aren’t really needed,” he said, adding that these jobs typically go to out-of-state workers anyway.
On top of that, those sectors that provide more stable, long-term employment to Ohioans, like jobs at the well pad itself, generally pay the industry’s smaller wages, said Michaud. “That’s not really the secret sauce for future prosperity, right?”
Then there’s the issue of too little of the fiscal windfall trickling down into poor rural communities that constitute the industry’s heartland, he said. This leaves already underfunded local services stretched to breaking point as they grapple with fracking’s residual environmental and health problems. “A lot of these impacts aren’t being retained in these communities that desperately need positive economic development and jobs,” said Michaud. “This is your quintessential Appalachian curse — your resource extraction boom and bust cycle.”
"Petrochemical cluster-frack"
Describing the shale industry in Ohio as a “petrochemical cluster-frack,” Environmental Health Project’s Ned Ketyer agrees with Michaud’s assessment. “Any job that directly threatens the health of me or my family or my patients — I’m a pediatrician — or that threatens the health of every child, even children who haven’t been born, by accelerating climate change, those jobs are not worth supporting,” he said, adding that, “essentially in the Ohio River Valley, we’re fracking for plastic, which is one thing nature doesn’t need any more of.”
The pathway toward renewables is a complicated one in Ohio, however. In 2014, for example, the state imposed a two-year freeze on its renewable and energy-efficiency standards, and currently is in second-to-last place in the country in terms of total electricity production from renewable sources, just ahead of Delaware. According to Ketyer, other reasons for an expedited switch to renewables exist in plain sight.
“It really is an eye-opening thing to take a drive through the Ohio River Valley. This is an area that should not have such high levels of air pollution — some of the worst air pollution in the country. Shouldn’t have such high levels of ozone,” said Ketyer, describing scenes of rural poverty, dilapidated roads and crumbling buildings, interspersed with oil and gas industry infrastructure. “When you go through the Ohio valley, you see an area that shouldbe achingly beautiful.”
Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
by Charlie Simmons | the smirking chimp
October 20, 2019 - 5:24am
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General Assembly in New York: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.”
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
the polluters
destroying the earth for profit!!!
World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
Data reveals crucial role of BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard in climate crisis
by Patrick Greenfield - the guardian
Sat 12 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
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The world’s three largest money managers have built a combined $300bn fossil fuel investment portfolio using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions, the Guardian can reveal.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
- Vanguard ($161.1bn), BlackRock ($87.3bn) and State Street ($38.3bn) oversee a combined $286.7bn of shares in oil, coal and gas companies through 1,712 funds. Their total combined portfolio is likely to be higher as the calculation excludes direct holdings and non-listed fund holdings.
- The potential CO2 emissions from the investments have increased from 10.593 gigatonnes (Gt) to 14.283Gt since the Paris agreement, equivalent to 38% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions last year.
- BlackRock and Vanguard opposed or abstained on more than 80% of climate-related motions at FTSE 100 and S&P 500 fossil fuel companies between 2015 and 2019, according to data provided by ProxyInsight.
- The big three are among a number of asset managers that offer “climate-friendly” and “sustainable” investment funds that have substantial holdings in fossil fuel companies.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
Dark Money Is Pouring in To Protect the “Worst Energy Policy in the Country”
In Ohio, the fight over a nuclear and coal bailout is getting weirder by the day.
REBECCA LEBER - mother jones Reporter
10/10/19
This summer, Ohio’s beleaguered nuclear and coal plants got a major gift in the promise of a big bailout. Now, the fight over that promise has escalated into one of the most dramatic and bizarre showdowns of the 2020 election cycle.
It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law—called HB6—that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.
Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal—a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”
But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects—FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray—they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.
A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.
As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.
In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.
In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:
The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.
While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.
The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.
FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”
Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.
If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass—making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.
Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,” Stokes says.
Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.
It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law—called HB6—that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.
Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal—a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”
But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects—FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray—they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.
A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.
As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.
In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.
In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:
- Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs bought $10,000 in ads to target Facebook users, directing them to remove their signatures from the petition supporting the referendum. In the ads, it claims that repealing the law would “kill Ohio clean energy jobs.”
- Generation Now, a group that does not disclose its donors, hired the petition firm FieldWorks, which has traditionally worked with Democratic clients. The referendum campaign claims that FieldWorks staff have harassed and allegedly paid off their workers, and firms allegedly deploying “petition blockers” to discourage people from signing onto the referendum. In one case, a confrontation between Fieldworks employees and petition workers escalated to the point where the police were called. Generation Now has rejected those allegations as “vague and unsubstantiated.” Generation Now spokesperson Curtis Steiner added that “Fieldworks has been operating in a very professional manner.” He noted that the employee associated with the incident was dismissed.
- Ohioans for Energy Security has flooded local networks with a 60-second ad in which a narrator warns viewers that signing the referendum petition would help the Chinese government, as it’s “quietly invading our American electric grid.”
The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.
While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.
The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.
FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”
Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.
If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass—making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.
Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,” Stokes says.
Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.
OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
There Is No Economic Justification for Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge
BY - Dean Baker, Truthout
PUBLISHED September 30, 2019
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its final environmental impact study on plans to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). While the study noted environmental risks, it gave the go-ahead for drilling in this incredibly sensitive area.
This summer, my small town of Kanab, Utah, agreed to sell water to a frac sand mine and processing plant that would be operating just over 10 miles from Zion National Park. The county planning commission also approved a conditional use permit that would allow the mine to go forward.
What both of these actions have in common is that they are gratuitous acts of environmental destruction. This is not a story of tough trade-offs between the environment and the economy.
Those do exist in the world. It would be great for the environment to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent tomorrow, but that would devastate the economy, costing many jobs. But neither drilling in the ANWR nor frac sand mining near Zion will provide any great benefit to the economy. Nor would we suffer much, if any, negative economic impact by stopping these plans. They damage treasured landscapes for no good reason.
In the case of the ANWR, the area targeted by the oil and gas industry is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Millions of caribou migrate over the terrain every year. The area is home to grizzly bears, polar bears, the arctic fox and many other rare animals. It is very sensitive terrain, with extreme temperatures. Damage from an oil spill could last for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The economic benefits of allowing drilling in this area are trivial. At best, it will be a drop in the bucket for the world’s supply of oil. The George W. Bush administration tried to push drilling in the Refuge through Congress in the middle of the 2001 recession, with claims that it would lead to up 750,000 jobs.
A more serious analysis showed that, even accepting the methodology used by drilling proponents, a more plausible figure would be in the neighborhood of 50,000 jobs. This is just over 0.03 percent of total employment or approximately equal to the number of jobs generated in a typical week.
Similarly, the proposed frac sand mine near Zion will at best add a trivial number of jobs in the industry. Similar mines in Wisconsin employ on average 35 workers at a time.
In addition, frac sand is not a commodity in short supply. Industry analysts all complain about a glut in the industry, with the existing mines barely able to cover operating costs at current prices. This leaves them little prospect of recovering their capital expenditures in building a plant, which can be in the neighborhood of $75 million.
For a project of dubious profitability and questionable need (even if we accept that fracking is good), local politicians are prepared to jeopardize the extraordinary terrain on the outskirts of Zion. The mining claims of the frac sand company Southern Red Sands border the rims of Peekaboo Slot Canyon, Diana’s Throne and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
In fact, in the case of the frac sand mine, the economics almost certainly go the other way. The economy of the immediate area is almost entirely dependent on tourism and an influx of retirees who come for the area’s natural beauty. Both sources of income will almost certainly take a huge hit with a sand frac mine operating just above Kanab.
In both cases, what we are seeing is gratuitous destruction of environmental treasures, with people in power taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations.
Clearly, there are companies that expect to profit from this degradation of the environment, but they are not the driving force here. There just is not that much money at stake. Rather, people in power are spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever.
This summer, my small town of Kanab, Utah, agreed to sell water to a frac sand mine and processing plant that would be operating just over 10 miles from Zion National Park. The county planning commission also approved a conditional use permit that would allow the mine to go forward.
What both of these actions have in common is that they are gratuitous acts of environmental destruction. This is not a story of tough trade-offs between the environment and the economy.
Those do exist in the world. It would be great for the environment to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent tomorrow, but that would devastate the economy, costing many jobs. But neither drilling in the ANWR nor frac sand mining near Zion will provide any great benefit to the economy. Nor would we suffer much, if any, negative economic impact by stopping these plans. They damage treasured landscapes for no good reason.
In the case of the ANWR, the area targeted by the oil and gas industry is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Millions of caribou migrate over the terrain every year. The area is home to grizzly bears, polar bears, the arctic fox and many other rare animals. It is very sensitive terrain, with extreme temperatures. Damage from an oil spill could last for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The economic benefits of allowing drilling in this area are trivial. At best, it will be a drop in the bucket for the world’s supply of oil. The George W. Bush administration tried to push drilling in the Refuge through Congress in the middle of the 2001 recession, with claims that it would lead to up 750,000 jobs.
A more serious analysis showed that, even accepting the methodology used by drilling proponents, a more plausible figure would be in the neighborhood of 50,000 jobs. This is just over 0.03 percent of total employment or approximately equal to the number of jobs generated in a typical week.
Similarly, the proposed frac sand mine near Zion will at best add a trivial number of jobs in the industry. Similar mines in Wisconsin employ on average 35 workers at a time.
In addition, frac sand is not a commodity in short supply. Industry analysts all complain about a glut in the industry, with the existing mines barely able to cover operating costs at current prices. This leaves them little prospect of recovering their capital expenditures in building a plant, which can be in the neighborhood of $75 million.
For a project of dubious profitability and questionable need (even if we accept that fracking is good), local politicians are prepared to jeopardize the extraordinary terrain on the outskirts of Zion. The mining claims of the frac sand company Southern Red Sands border the rims of Peekaboo Slot Canyon, Diana’s Throne and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
In fact, in the case of the frac sand mine, the economics almost certainly go the other way. The economy of the immediate area is almost entirely dependent on tourism and an influx of retirees who come for the area’s natural beauty. Both sources of income will almost certainly take a huge hit with a sand frac mine operating just above Kanab.
In both cases, what we are seeing is gratuitous destruction of environmental treasures, with people in power taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations.
Clearly, there are companies that expect to profit from this degradation of the environment, but they are not the driving force here. There just is not that much money at stake. Rather, people in power are spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever.
Radical Republicans On Energy Panel Push Giant Alaska Gas Pipeline
800-Mile, $43-Billion Project Is Intended to Send Liquified Natural Gas To China
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
9/12/19
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
Unmasked: New planned Alaska pipeline could spew 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas — per day
September 11, 2019
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory
800-Mile, $43-Billion Project Is Intended to Send Liquified Natural Gas To China
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp.fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp.fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
modernizing the environment's destruction!!!
Low-cost fracking offers boon to oil producers, headaches for suppliers
Liz Hampton - reuters
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
SMILEY, Texas (Reuters) - At a dusty drilling site east of San Antonio, shale producer EOG Resources Inc recently completed its latest well using a new technology developed by a small services firm that promises to slash the cost of each by $200,000.
The technology, called electric fracking and powered by natural gas from EOG’s own wells instead of costly diesel fuel, shows how shale producers keep finding new ways to cut costs in the face of pressures to improve their returns.
E-frac, as the new technology is called, is being adopted by EOG, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and others because of its potential to lower costs, reduce air pollution and operate much quieter than conventional diesel-powered frac fleets. Investment bank Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co analyst George O’Leary estimates e-fracs could lop off up to $350,000 from the cost of shale wells that run $6 million to $8 million apiece.
But these systems can cost oilfield service companies up to twice as much to build compared to conventional frac fleets. A rapid uptake could worsen the economics for a sector already cutting staff and idling equipment as oil producers pare their spending. That leaves this potentially breakthrough technology to small providers without the means to fully exploit it.
ONE-SIDED SAVINGS Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton Co, the top U.S. provider of fracking services, said his firm has tested the technology but has no desire to promote it.
“Halliburton will be really slow around frac,” Miller said, referring to the costs of updating diesel systems to electric. Converting the industry’s 500 frac fleets would cost $30 billion, he estimated, too steep a price for oilfield firms, he said.
He recently advised an oil producer interested in the technology that the benefits of deploying e-fracs “work for you, they don’t work for us,” he said at Barclays energy conference this month.
Halliburton, Schlumberger NV and others have idled scores of diesel-powered fleets this year as producers cut spending due to flat to lower oil and gas prices. Consultancy Primary Vision estimates the number of active fleets in the U.S. fell 19% since April to around 390.
Halliburton cut 8% of its North American workforce and reported second-quarter profit fell 85% over the year-ago period in part because of equipment writedowns and severance costs due to weak demand for its frac service.
“Every week that goes by I get more and more negative about e-frac due to the harsh imbalance between the benefits achieved by the oil company and the costs incurred by the service company,” said Richard Spears, a consultant to top oilfield services suppliers.
Schlumberger paid $430 million in late 2017 to acquire a diesel-powered frac fleet from rival Weatherford International, hoping to expand shale services. A spokesperson declined to comment on e-frac.
This month newly-named CEO Olivier Le Peuch disclosed plans to write down investments that were “based on a much higher activity outlook with the ambition of achieving economies of scale.”
“HARD TO JUSTIFY”
E-frac supplier Evolution Well Services, which supplied the equipment and crew for EOG’s Eagle Ford shale operation, is one of a handful of smaller oilfield firms pioneering the systems.
Evolution operates six e-frac fleets - mobile collections of high-pressure pumps powered by gas turbine generators - and plans to roll out a seventh next year. U.S. Well Services, another e-frac provider, has agreements with Apache Corp and Shell. Conventional pressure pumper ProPetro Holding Corp also announced plans to bring a handful of e-frac fleets to the market.
“We’d kind of would like to” build more systems without firm customer contracts, said Ben Bodishbaugh, CEO of Evolution, the only purely e-frac provider in North America. “But in this market it’s hard to justify,” he said.
The reason: e-frac fleets can cost up to $60 million apiece because they rely on pricey gas turbines similar to those that run utilities to generate electricity, compared with as little as $30 million for a diesel-motor powered fleet. Evolution would not say how much its fleets cost, but noted it is below $60 million.
“It’s a bad time for service companies to be ramping up very capital intensive service offerings,” said Josh Young, chief investment officer with energy investor Bison Interests. “People always feel pressure to invest in the next new things, but sometimes you shouldn’t be investing in any of the things.”
Companies like Evolution and U.S. Well Services that already have e-frac fleets would be winners if the technology takes off, analysts from investment banker Tudor Pickering Holt & Co predict. E-frac accounts for about 3% of active fleets, and could reach between 25% and 33% in the next five years, Tudor estimated.
EOG began testing Evolution’s gear in late 2016, and signed a multi-year agreement about six months later. The shale company, well known for its use of cutting edge technology, runs four of Evolution’s fleets and plans to add a fifth next year.
The agreement with Evolution “is an example of how we continue to find innovative solutions to both reduce our environmental footprint and improve the profitability of our business,” said Billy Helms, EOG’s chief operating officer. EOG is among the handful of top shale producers that generate more cash than they consume in drilling and shareholder dividends.
NO SOOT, LESS NOISE
At its Smiley, Texas, oil and gas well site, EOG’s crew carried on casual conversations despite the whir of e-frac pumps. No one wears ear protection, which is common at conventional diesel fleets, and the towering white silos holding frac sand were gleaming during a visit in August. At a conventional frac site just up the road, the towers were black from diesel exhaust.
Evolution’s Bodishbaugh said some oil and gas firms see less polluting e-frac as improving their standing with investors who rate environmental, social and governance (ESG) attributes in their investments.
“I’d say this year we’ve probably had more inbounds calls on the emissions profile than the economic savings,” he said.
Paul Mecray III, a managing director for investment firm Tower Bridge Advisors who follows major service companies, said e-frac will only catch on if overall demand for oilfield services recovers.
“While it may be a good thing longer term, I think it will take a lot longer to catch on than people think,” he said.
The technology, called electric fracking and powered by natural gas from EOG’s own wells instead of costly diesel fuel, shows how shale producers keep finding new ways to cut costs in the face of pressures to improve their returns.
E-frac, as the new technology is called, is being adopted by EOG, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and others because of its potential to lower costs, reduce air pollution and operate much quieter than conventional diesel-powered frac fleets. Investment bank Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co analyst George O’Leary estimates e-fracs could lop off up to $350,000 from the cost of shale wells that run $6 million to $8 million apiece.
But these systems can cost oilfield service companies up to twice as much to build compared to conventional frac fleets. A rapid uptake could worsen the economics for a sector already cutting staff and idling equipment as oil producers pare their spending. That leaves this potentially breakthrough technology to small providers without the means to fully exploit it.
ONE-SIDED SAVINGS Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton Co, the top U.S. provider of fracking services, said his firm has tested the technology but has no desire to promote it.
“Halliburton will be really slow around frac,” Miller said, referring to the costs of updating diesel systems to electric. Converting the industry’s 500 frac fleets would cost $30 billion, he estimated, too steep a price for oilfield firms, he said.
He recently advised an oil producer interested in the technology that the benefits of deploying e-fracs “work for you, they don’t work for us,” he said at Barclays energy conference this month.
Halliburton, Schlumberger NV and others have idled scores of diesel-powered fleets this year as producers cut spending due to flat to lower oil and gas prices. Consultancy Primary Vision estimates the number of active fleets in the U.S. fell 19% since April to around 390.
Halliburton cut 8% of its North American workforce and reported second-quarter profit fell 85% over the year-ago period in part because of equipment writedowns and severance costs due to weak demand for its frac service.
“Every week that goes by I get more and more negative about e-frac due to the harsh imbalance between the benefits achieved by the oil company and the costs incurred by the service company,” said Richard Spears, a consultant to top oilfield services suppliers.
Schlumberger paid $430 million in late 2017 to acquire a diesel-powered frac fleet from rival Weatherford International, hoping to expand shale services. A spokesperson declined to comment on e-frac.
This month newly-named CEO Olivier Le Peuch disclosed plans to write down investments that were “based on a much higher activity outlook with the ambition of achieving economies of scale.”
“HARD TO JUSTIFY”
E-frac supplier Evolution Well Services, which supplied the equipment and crew for EOG’s Eagle Ford shale operation, is one of a handful of smaller oilfield firms pioneering the systems.
Evolution operates six e-frac fleets - mobile collections of high-pressure pumps powered by gas turbine generators - and plans to roll out a seventh next year. U.S. Well Services, another e-frac provider, has agreements with Apache Corp and Shell. Conventional pressure pumper ProPetro Holding Corp also announced plans to bring a handful of e-frac fleets to the market.
“We’d kind of would like to” build more systems without firm customer contracts, said Ben Bodishbaugh, CEO of Evolution, the only purely e-frac provider in North America. “But in this market it’s hard to justify,” he said.
The reason: e-frac fleets can cost up to $60 million apiece because they rely on pricey gas turbines similar to those that run utilities to generate electricity, compared with as little as $30 million for a diesel-motor powered fleet. Evolution would not say how much its fleets cost, but noted it is below $60 million.
“It’s a bad time for service companies to be ramping up very capital intensive service offerings,” said Josh Young, chief investment officer with energy investor Bison Interests. “People always feel pressure to invest in the next new things, but sometimes you shouldn’t be investing in any of the things.”
Companies like Evolution and U.S. Well Services that already have e-frac fleets would be winners if the technology takes off, analysts from investment banker Tudor Pickering Holt & Co predict. E-frac accounts for about 3% of active fleets, and could reach between 25% and 33% in the next five years, Tudor estimated.
EOG began testing Evolution’s gear in late 2016, and signed a multi-year agreement about six months later. The shale company, well known for its use of cutting edge technology, runs four of Evolution’s fleets and plans to add a fifth next year.
The agreement with Evolution “is an example of how we continue to find innovative solutions to both reduce our environmental footprint and improve the profitability of our business,” said Billy Helms, EOG’s chief operating officer. EOG is among the handful of top shale producers that generate more cash than they consume in drilling and shareholder dividends.
NO SOOT, LESS NOISE
At its Smiley, Texas, oil and gas well site, EOG’s crew carried on casual conversations despite the whir of e-frac pumps. No one wears ear protection, which is common at conventional diesel fleets, and the towering white silos holding frac sand were gleaming during a visit in August. At a conventional frac site just up the road, the towers were black from diesel exhaust.
Evolution’s Bodishbaugh said some oil and gas firms see less polluting e-frac as improving their standing with investors who rate environmental, social and governance (ESG) attributes in their investments.
“I’d say this year we’ve probably had more inbounds calls on the emissions profile than the economic savings,” he said.
Paul Mecray III, a managing director for investment firm Tower Bridge Advisors who follows major service companies, said e-frac will only catch on if overall demand for oilfield services recovers.
“While it may be a good thing longer term, I think it will take a lot longer to catch on than people think,” he said.
Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there
Juliet Eilperin, Steven Mufson - washington post - msn.com
9/4/19
Last summer, Scott Pruitt left his job heading the Environmental Protection Agency and within a few months had started consulting for coal magnate Joseph W. Craft III. Three weeks after leaving the Interior Department, energy counselor Vincent DeVito joined Cox Oil Offshore, which operates in the Gulf of Mexico, as its executive vice president and general counsel. Now, Joe Balash — who oversaw oil and gas drilling on federal lands before resigning from Interior on Friday — is joining a foreign oil company that’s expanding operations on Alaska’s North Slope.
Balash, who had served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management for nearly two years, confirmed in a phone interview Tuesday night that he will begin working for the Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search, which is developing one of Alaska’s largest oil prospects in years.
The company is drilling on state lands that lie nearby — but not inside — two federal reserves where the Trump administration is pushing to increase oil and gas development: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. During his time at Interior, Balash oversaw the department’s work to hold lease sales on the coastal plain of the 19.3 million-acre refuge and to expand drilling on the 22.8 million-acre reserve to the west of the refuge. Both sites are home to large numbers of migratory birds as well as caribou, polar bears and other wildlife.
Balash declined to disclose his specific role and said that while he would oversee employees who would work with the federal government on energy policy, he would abide by the Trump ethics pledge barring appointees from lobbying their former agencies for five years.
“I’ll supervise those who do,” he said, referring to Oil Search staffers with business before the federal government, “but I have a ton of restrictions dealing with the Department of Interior. Most of Oil Search’s properties are state lands. There isn’t really the federal nexus.”
Oil Search has been expanding aggressively in Alaska, where it says it has acquired more than 700 million barrels of crude reserves. In May, the company received the go-ahead from the Army Corps of Engineers and it plans to ramp up production operations this year and over the winter.
Balash noted that Interior “was not even a cooperating agency” in the decision to grant Oil Search the recent permit under the Clean Water Act.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview that the fact that Balash has been working to make more land available for exploration near Oil Search’s ongoing development raises concerns.
“If this ends up being legal, it’s further confirmation to me that our laws are simply inadequate,” Brian said. “It is hard to have confidence that decisions he was making while he was working for the taxpayers were not impacted by his aspirations or hopes to go work for a company that was materially affected by his work.”
Asked about Balash’s job plans last week, neither Oil Search nor Interior would comment on the matter.
“As a matter of policy, I’m unable to comment on business rumors,” Oil Search spokeswoman Amy Burnett said in an email.
Balash has extensive experience in Alaska state politics. He served as the deputy commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources and ran the agency on an acting basis for just over a year, before becoming chief of staff for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). He joined Interior in December 2017.
Earlier, Balash served in the governor’s office as a special assistant on energy and natural resource development. And prior to that, he worked on the joint legislative budget and audit committee and served as chief of staff to the state Senate president. Balash also attended high school in Fairbanks.
Ethics experts said that regardless of the Alaskan’s job description, his decision to join an oil company raises potential conflict of interest issues, although part of it would depend on the nature of his negotiations with the firm before he left public office.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 208, a federal official is barred “from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of” his spouse, children and “a person with whom he is negotiating for or has an arrangement concerning prospective employment.”
“At the point Balash began discussing employment opportunities with Oil Search, he was prohibited from personally and substantially participating in any particular matter that would affect Oil Search’s financial interests,” said Brendan Fischer, federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center.
Oil Search has not bid on federal leases in Alaska, although officials from the firm met with Balash multiple times while he served as assistant secretary, according to his public calendar. On Jan. 10, 2018, he had a meeting classified as a video call with Oil Search executives — including its Alaska business unit president, Keiran Wulff — described as a “meet and greet” in his calendar notes.
“Oil Search is slated to be a large player in Alaska Oil development,” the notes read. “Further, AK is their first play in the USA. Anchorage is slated to be their North American headquarters.”
On April 17, 2018, Balash had a video call with Wulff. Nearly seven months later, Balash took part in what his calendar described as an “Oil Search Presentation/Update.”
This June, both Balash and Wulff appeared as featured speakers during a membership luncheon of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage.
Established in 1929, Oil Search owns oil production and 29 percent of a large liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the world’s 11th-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Oil Search and its partner ExxonMobil are planning to substantially enlarge LNG exports.
The company has also expanded quickly in Alaska. In 2018, it bought oil assets from two private companies and later exercised $450 million of options to buy other nearby fields. On May 14, it received Army Corps of Engineers approval to develop the Nanushuk field in the Pikka Unit, which is on state- and Native Alaskan-owned land on the North Slope. The company says the project could eventually produce 120,000 barrels a day.
“Alaska provides us with world class oil assets with significant upside,” the company said in a report. It also said that it was “building an independent, highly experienced management team to develop and operate our Alaskan assets.”
Balash has consistently argued in favor of curbing federal restrictions on energy development in Alaska, to help boost the state’s economy. In an interview this summer, Balash said he was committed to working with Alaska natives on the North Slope to ensure that the region could expand energy exploration in a way that would improve people’s lives there.
“And so, you know, more than anything, I want to help empower the people who live there to manage those resources in a cooperative way with the federal government,” he said.
Balash, who had served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management for nearly two years, confirmed in a phone interview Tuesday night that he will begin working for the Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search, which is developing one of Alaska’s largest oil prospects in years.
The company is drilling on state lands that lie nearby — but not inside — two federal reserves where the Trump administration is pushing to increase oil and gas development: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. During his time at Interior, Balash oversaw the department’s work to hold lease sales on the coastal plain of the 19.3 million-acre refuge and to expand drilling on the 22.8 million-acre reserve to the west of the refuge. Both sites are home to large numbers of migratory birds as well as caribou, polar bears and other wildlife.
Balash declined to disclose his specific role and said that while he would oversee employees who would work with the federal government on energy policy, he would abide by the Trump ethics pledge barring appointees from lobbying their former agencies for five years.
“I’ll supervise those who do,” he said, referring to Oil Search staffers with business before the federal government, “but I have a ton of restrictions dealing with the Department of Interior. Most of Oil Search’s properties are state lands. There isn’t really the federal nexus.”
Oil Search has been expanding aggressively in Alaska, where it says it has acquired more than 700 million barrels of crude reserves. In May, the company received the go-ahead from the Army Corps of Engineers and it plans to ramp up production operations this year and over the winter.
Balash noted that Interior “was not even a cooperating agency” in the decision to grant Oil Search the recent permit under the Clean Water Act.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview that the fact that Balash has been working to make more land available for exploration near Oil Search’s ongoing development raises concerns.
“If this ends up being legal, it’s further confirmation to me that our laws are simply inadequate,” Brian said. “It is hard to have confidence that decisions he was making while he was working for the taxpayers were not impacted by his aspirations or hopes to go work for a company that was materially affected by his work.”
Asked about Balash’s job plans last week, neither Oil Search nor Interior would comment on the matter.
“As a matter of policy, I’m unable to comment on business rumors,” Oil Search spokeswoman Amy Burnett said in an email.
Balash has extensive experience in Alaska state politics. He served as the deputy commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources and ran the agency on an acting basis for just over a year, before becoming chief of staff for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). He joined Interior in December 2017.
Earlier, Balash served in the governor’s office as a special assistant on energy and natural resource development. And prior to that, he worked on the joint legislative budget and audit committee and served as chief of staff to the state Senate president. Balash also attended high school in Fairbanks.
Ethics experts said that regardless of the Alaskan’s job description, his decision to join an oil company raises potential conflict of interest issues, although part of it would depend on the nature of his negotiations with the firm before he left public office.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 208, a federal official is barred “from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of” his spouse, children and “a person with whom he is negotiating for or has an arrangement concerning prospective employment.”
“At the point Balash began discussing employment opportunities with Oil Search, he was prohibited from personally and substantially participating in any particular matter that would affect Oil Search’s financial interests,” said Brendan Fischer, federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center.
Oil Search has not bid on federal leases in Alaska, although officials from the firm met with Balash multiple times while he served as assistant secretary, according to his public calendar. On Jan. 10, 2018, he had a meeting classified as a video call with Oil Search executives — including its Alaska business unit president, Keiran Wulff — described as a “meet and greet” in his calendar notes.
“Oil Search is slated to be a large player in Alaska Oil development,” the notes read. “Further, AK is their first play in the USA. Anchorage is slated to be their North American headquarters.”
On April 17, 2018, Balash had a video call with Wulff. Nearly seven months later, Balash took part in what his calendar described as an “Oil Search Presentation/Update.”
This June, both Balash and Wulff appeared as featured speakers during a membership luncheon of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage.
Established in 1929, Oil Search owns oil production and 29 percent of a large liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the world’s 11th-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Oil Search and its partner ExxonMobil are planning to substantially enlarge LNG exports.
The company has also expanded quickly in Alaska. In 2018, it bought oil assets from two private companies and later exercised $450 million of options to buy other nearby fields. On May 14, it received Army Corps of Engineers approval to develop the Nanushuk field in the Pikka Unit, which is on state- and Native Alaskan-owned land on the North Slope. The company says the project could eventually produce 120,000 barrels a day.
“Alaska provides us with world class oil assets with significant upside,” the company said in a report. It also said that it was “building an independent, highly experienced management team to develop and operate our Alaskan assets.”
Balash has consistently argued in favor of curbing federal restrictions on energy development in Alaska, to help boost the state’s economy. In an interview this summer, Balash said he was committed to working with Alaska natives on the North Slope to ensure that the region could expand energy exploration in a way that would improve people’s lives there.
“And so, you know, more than anything, I want to help empower the people who live there to manage those resources in a cooperative way with the federal government,” he said.
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.”
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.”
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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