welcome to oil
explore how the resource industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
feb 25, 2020
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those
woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and
enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau
*articles*
*Oil and gas industry rewards US lawmakers who oppose environmental protections – study(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Oil and gas firms 'have had far worse climate impact than thought'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: big oil's profits since 1990 total nearly $2tn
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*10 US oil refineries exceeding limits for cancer-causing benzene, report finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Republicans Are Re-Opening The Energy Market To Underhanded Dealing
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP ADMINISTRATION APPROVES KEYSTONE PIPELINE ON US LAND
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Davos financiers pump $1.4 trillion into fossil fuels: Greenpeace
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fossil Fuel Knocks the Wind Out of Renewable Energy Movement in Ohio
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*COAL GIANT PROVIDED SECRET FINANCING TO GROUP CHALLENGING CLIMATE LAWSUITS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ALEC Behind Ohio Bill Criminalizing Protests Against Fossil Fuel Infrastructure
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fossil fuel groups ‘destroying’ climate talks: NGOs
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*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)
*Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
(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)
Oil and gas industry rewards US lawmakers who oppose environmental protections – study
Companies spent $84m on congressional campaigns in 2018, analysis of votes and political contributions shows
Emily Holden in Washington
the guardian
Mon 24 Feb 2020 15.00 EST
The oil and gas industry substantially rewards US legislators with campaign donations when they oppose environmental protections, according to a new analysis of congressional votes and political contributions.
Oil and gas companies spent $84m on congressional campaigns in 2018. Researchers found a correlation between an increase in anti-environment votes and an increase in contributions. They documented how lawmakers’ scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) dipped and then were followed by campaign funding from the industry.
On average, a 10% decrease in the LCV score in an election cycle was associated with an additional $1,700 in campaign money from the corporations the following cycle.
The peer-reviewed study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors also sought to determine whether campaign donations from industry might prompt legislators to vote against environment rules that oil and gas companies saw as a burden. But they concluded there was little or no relationship between campaign contributions in one election cycle and LCV scores in the following period.
“Legislators proved that they’re willing to vote against the environment consistently and then they’re rewarded later,” said co-author Matthew Goldberg, a postdoctoral associate with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “I suppose this is more of an advantage for oil and gas companies because they need to ensure that people are going to vote in their interest.
Goldberg said the findings should encourage people to “get the right people in office, because they’re not as susceptible to money changing their votes”.
The study analyzed data from 1990 to 2018. In 1990, 63% of oil and gas money went to Republicans, Goldberg noted. In 2018, 88% of the industry’s campaign donations were to the conservative party.
Oil and gas companies spent $84m on congressional campaigns in 2018. Researchers found a correlation between an increase in anti-environment votes and an increase in contributions. They documented how lawmakers’ scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) dipped and then were followed by campaign funding from the industry.
On average, a 10% decrease in the LCV score in an election cycle was associated with an additional $1,700 in campaign money from the corporations the following cycle.
The peer-reviewed study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors also sought to determine whether campaign donations from industry might prompt legislators to vote against environment rules that oil and gas companies saw as a burden. But they concluded there was little or no relationship between campaign contributions in one election cycle and LCV scores in the following period.
“Legislators proved that they’re willing to vote against the environment consistently and then they’re rewarded later,” said co-author Matthew Goldberg, a postdoctoral associate with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “I suppose this is more of an advantage for oil and gas companies because they need to ensure that people are going to vote in their interest.
Goldberg said the findings should encourage people to “get the right people in office, because they’re not as susceptible to money changing their votes”.
The study analyzed data from 1990 to 2018. In 1990, 63% of oil and gas money went to Republicans, Goldberg noted. In 2018, 88% of the industry’s campaign donations were to the conservative party.
epa has lied about methane emissions!!!
Oil and gas firms 'have had far worse climate impact than thought'
Study indicates human fossil methane emissions have been underestimated by up to 40%
Jonathan Watts
the guardian
Wed 19 Feb 2020 11.01 EST
The oil and gas industry has had a far worse impact on the climate than previously believed, according to a study indicating that human emissions of fossil methane have been underestimated by up to 40%.
Although the research will add to pressure on fossil fuel companies, scientists said there was cause for hope because it showed a big extra benefit could come from tighter regulation of the industry and a faster shift towards renewable energy.
Methane has a greenhouse effect that is about 80% more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and is responsible for at least 25% of global heating, according to the UN Environment Programme.
In the past two centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled, though there has long been uncertainty about whether the source was biological – from agriculture, livestock or landfills – or from fossil fuels. There were also doubts about what share of fossil methane was naturally released and what share was from industry.
Earlier estimates were based on intermittent, bottom-up monitoring of oil and gas companies and comparisons with geological evidence from the end of the Pleistocene epoch, about 11,600 years ago.
For a more accurate comparison, a team at the University of Rochester in the US examined levels of methane in the pre-industrial era about 300 years ago. This was achieved by analysing air from that period trapped in glaciers in Greenland. The sample – made up of about a tonne of ice – was extracted with a Blue Ice Drill, capable of producing the world’s biggest ice cores.
The findings, published in Nature, suggest the share of naturally released fossil methane has been overestimated by “an order of magnitude”, which means that human activities are 25-40% more responsible for fossil methane in the atmosphere than thought.
This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate, particularly with regard to methane – a colourless, odourless gas that many plants routinely vent into the atmosphere.
An earlier study revealed methane emissions from US oil and gas plants were 60% higher than reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Accidents are also underreported. A single blowout at a natural gas well in Ohio in 2018 discharged more methane over three weeks than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands released in an entire year. At the time, the company said it was unsure of the size of the leak. The immense scale was only revealed a year later when scientists analysed satellite data provided by the European Space Agency.
Fracking also appears to have worsened the problem. Atmospheric methane had started to flatten off at the turn of the century, but rose again after a surge in fracking activity in the US and elsewhere. The industry, however, continues to claim that the energy source can be used as a “bridge fuel” because it has lower carbon emissions than oil or coal, but this fails to account for leaks and flares of methane and other gases during extraction.
Growing calls for tighter controls will be strengthened by the new study. The lead author, Benjamin Hmiel, said the paper was cause for optimism because it showed that action on methane – which has a relatively short shelf life, persisting in the atmosphere for about nine years – could give a strong short-term boost to efforts to stabilise the climate.
“Placing stricter methane emission regulations on the fossil fuel industry will have the potential to reduce future global warming to a larger extent than previously thought,” Hmiel said. “Methane is important to study because if we make changes to our current methane emissions, it’s going to reflect more quickly.”
Other scientists who were not involved in the research concurred there were positive implications in the findings, but only if governments were able to rein in fossil fuel companies, which has not been the case until now.
“This indicates that the fossil fuel sector has a much more polluting impact beyond being responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon dioxide emissions. This is worrying and overall bad news,” said Dr Joeri Rogelj, a climate change lecturer at the Grantham Institute.
The good news, Rogelj said, was that measures to prevent leaks, reduce flaring and switch to renewables would be more effective than expected. “What this study shows is that we can have a bigger impact on methane in the atmosphere than earlier thought. This allows us to set climate policy priorities right.”
Dave Reay, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, said one of the key messages from the study was that the old bottom-up method of measuring methane emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
“We knew fossil fuel extraction – including fracking – was a major part of global methane emissions, but this impressive study suggests it is a far bigger culprit in human-induced climate change than we had ever thought,” he said.
“If correct, gas, coal and oil extraction and distribution around the world are responsible for almost half of all human-induced methane emissions. Add to that all the carbon dioxide that is then emitted when the fossil fuels are burned, and you need look no further for the seat of the climate emergency fire.”
Although the research will add to pressure on fossil fuel companies, scientists said there was cause for hope because it showed a big extra benefit could come from tighter regulation of the industry and a faster shift towards renewable energy.
Methane has a greenhouse effect that is about 80% more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and is responsible for at least 25% of global heating, according to the UN Environment Programme.
In the past two centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled, though there has long been uncertainty about whether the source was biological – from agriculture, livestock or landfills – or from fossil fuels. There were also doubts about what share of fossil methane was naturally released and what share was from industry.
Earlier estimates were based on intermittent, bottom-up monitoring of oil and gas companies and comparisons with geological evidence from the end of the Pleistocene epoch, about 11,600 years ago.
For a more accurate comparison, a team at the University of Rochester in the US examined levels of methane in the pre-industrial era about 300 years ago. This was achieved by analysing air from that period trapped in glaciers in Greenland. The sample – made up of about a tonne of ice – was extracted with a Blue Ice Drill, capable of producing the world’s biggest ice cores.
The findings, published in Nature, suggest the share of naturally released fossil methane has been overestimated by “an order of magnitude”, which means that human activities are 25-40% more responsible for fossil methane in the atmosphere than thought.
This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate, particularly with regard to methane – a colourless, odourless gas that many plants routinely vent into the atmosphere.
An earlier study revealed methane emissions from US oil and gas plants were 60% higher than reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Accidents are also underreported. A single blowout at a natural gas well in Ohio in 2018 discharged more methane over three weeks than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands released in an entire year. At the time, the company said it was unsure of the size of the leak. The immense scale was only revealed a year later when scientists analysed satellite data provided by the European Space Agency.
Fracking also appears to have worsened the problem. Atmospheric methane had started to flatten off at the turn of the century, but rose again after a surge in fracking activity in the US and elsewhere. The industry, however, continues to claim that the energy source can be used as a “bridge fuel” because it has lower carbon emissions than oil or coal, but this fails to account for leaks and flares of methane and other gases during extraction.
Growing calls for tighter controls will be strengthened by the new study. The lead author, Benjamin Hmiel, said the paper was cause for optimism because it showed that action on methane – which has a relatively short shelf life, persisting in the atmosphere for about nine years – could give a strong short-term boost to efforts to stabilise the climate.
“Placing stricter methane emission regulations on the fossil fuel industry will have the potential to reduce future global warming to a larger extent than previously thought,” Hmiel said. “Methane is important to study because if we make changes to our current methane emissions, it’s going to reflect more quickly.”
Other scientists who were not involved in the research concurred there were positive implications in the findings, but only if governments were able to rein in fossil fuel companies, which has not been the case until now.
“This indicates that the fossil fuel sector has a much more polluting impact beyond being responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon dioxide emissions. This is worrying and overall bad news,” said Dr Joeri Rogelj, a climate change lecturer at the Grantham Institute.
The good news, Rogelj said, was that measures to prevent leaks, reduce flaring and switch to renewables would be more effective than expected. “What this study shows is that we can have a bigger impact on methane in the atmosphere than earlier thought. This allows us to set climate policy priorities right.”
Dave Reay, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, said one of the key messages from the study was that the old bottom-up method of measuring methane emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
“We knew fossil fuel extraction – including fracking – was a major part of global methane emissions, but this impressive study suggests it is a far bigger culprit in human-induced climate change than we had ever thought,” he said.
“If correct, gas, coal and oil extraction and distribution around the world are responsible for almost half of all human-induced methane emissions. Add to that all the carbon dioxide that is then emitted when the fossil fuels are burned, and you need look no further for the seat of the climate emergency fire.”
Oil and gas companies
Revealed: big oil's profits since 1990 total nearly $2tn
BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon accused of making huge profits while ‘passing the buck’ on climate change
Matthew Taylor
the guardian
Wed 12 Feb 2020 07.38 EST
A BP oil refinery in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. BP has made $332bn in profits since 1990. Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP
BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades as their exploitation of oil, gas and coal reserves has driven the planet to the brink of climate breakdown, according to analysis for the Guardian.
The scale of their profits is revealed as experts say the fossil fuel boom is coming to an end, with big oil entering a “death knell” phase, according to one prominent Wall St commentator.
Analysis for the Guardian by Taxpayers for Common Sense in the US reveals that since 1990 – at which point the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the climate had been well known to industry leaders and politicians for years, experts say – the big four companies have accumulated $1.991tn in profits.
Critics say the findings highlight how a few corporations have generated extraordinary wealth by pursuing policies that were known to be driving the climate crisis.
The climate scientist Michael Mann said he was witnessing first-hand in Australia the environmental impact of fossil fuel extraction.
“Here in Sydney, where we’ve seen record drought, heat, bushfires and floods all in the short two months I’ve been here, this latest report provides a sobering reminder that we’re all paying the price – in the form of a planetary climate crisis – so that a few mega-corporations can continue to make record profits,” he said.
The analysis shows that Exxon was the most profitable of the big four over the past three decades, making a total of $775bn. Shell was second with $524bn, followed by Chevron on $360bn and BP on $332bn.
Autumn Hanna, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said: “For decades, oil and gas companies have been pocketing trillion-dollar profits and padding their bottom line with tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. All while passing the buck on climate change.”
Mel Evans, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said the big oil companies knew the danger that their products posed to the climate well before it became common knowledge but pursued profits above the wider interests of the planet.
“Why did they continue to promote those products and dispute science they knew to be correct? Why are they still spending hundreds of billions of dollars on making the problem worse, drilling for new oil and gas we can’t possibly afford to burn?” Evans said.
“These figures provide the answer. Money is like rocket fuel: burn through enough of it and you can escape the pull of the Earth. But there’s nowhere else to go.”
Experts say the decades-long boom is coming to an end as clean energy replaces fossil fuels. Last week Jim Cramer, the influential host of the US investment show Mad Money, said he was “done with fossil fuels” because they had entered a “death knell phase”.
Oil companies have been the worst-performing investments in US stock markets over the past decade, after leading major stock market indices in previous decades. The market value of oil and gas companies now makes up only 4% of the S&P500 index, compared with about 28% in the 1980s.
“If you go back to 1990 you can really see that oil and gas companies once outperformed the market,” said Kathy Hipple, a financial analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
“But the market looks to the future and there has been a gradual awareness that fossil fuels are not going to be as big a part in the world economy. This doesn’t mean that [oil companies] will go away tomorrow, but the market won’t reward them for the profits of the past.”
Last year a Guardian investigation revealed that 20 fossil fuel giants including BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon were directly linked to more than a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
The big four investor-owned corporations were found to be behind more than 10% of all carbon emissions since 1965.
The polluters project highlighted how many of the leading fossil fuel corporations had spent billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.
A study published last year found that the largest five market-listed oil and gas companies – the big four plus Total – spent nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.
The profit figures were calculated in today’s money by using the annual net income attributable to shareholders for each company while taking inflation rates into account. In absolute terms, without inflation, the combined profits since 1990 were a still considerable $1.6tn, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The profits of the world’s most profitable listed oil companies were dwarfed last year by the financial reports of the Saudi state-owned oil firm Aramco. It listed on the Saudi stock exchange after racking up profits of $111.1bn (£84.7bn) in 2018, which was more than double the profits of Apple and five times those reported by Shell.
Experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US, as far back as the mid-60s. Certainly by 1990 the facts were well known: two years earlier the Nasa scientist James Hansen had raised the alarm about the impact of fossil fuels during a landmark hearing at the US Congress. In 1992, world leaders came together at a summit in Rio to recognise the role carbon emissions were playing and to pledge coordinated action.
BP did not respond to a request for comment on the findings.
A spokesperson for Shell said: “Just as reliable, affordable energy has benefited us all, all of society has a role to play in tackling climate change. We’re working hard to develop lower-carbon energy options and meet demand for more and cleaner energy.”
ExxonMobil said it was helping address “the dual challenge of the world’s growing demand for energy and reducing emissions”.
Chevon said it was taking action to address climate change by “lowering the company’s carbon intensity, increasing the use of renewable energy and investing in breakthrough technologies.”
The scale of their profits is revealed as experts say the fossil fuel boom is coming to an end, with big oil entering a “death knell” phase, according to one prominent Wall St commentator.
Analysis for the Guardian by Taxpayers for Common Sense in the US reveals that since 1990 – at which point the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the climate had been well known to industry leaders and politicians for years, experts say – the big four companies have accumulated $1.991tn in profits.
Critics say the findings highlight how a few corporations have generated extraordinary wealth by pursuing policies that were known to be driving the climate crisis.
The climate scientist Michael Mann said he was witnessing first-hand in Australia the environmental impact of fossil fuel extraction.
“Here in Sydney, where we’ve seen record drought, heat, bushfires and floods all in the short two months I’ve been here, this latest report provides a sobering reminder that we’re all paying the price – in the form of a planetary climate crisis – so that a few mega-corporations can continue to make record profits,” he said.
The analysis shows that Exxon was the most profitable of the big four over the past three decades, making a total of $775bn. Shell was second with $524bn, followed by Chevron on $360bn and BP on $332bn.
Autumn Hanna, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said: “For decades, oil and gas companies have been pocketing trillion-dollar profits and padding their bottom line with tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. All while passing the buck on climate change.”
Mel Evans, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said the big oil companies knew the danger that their products posed to the climate well before it became common knowledge but pursued profits above the wider interests of the planet.
“Why did they continue to promote those products and dispute science they knew to be correct? Why are they still spending hundreds of billions of dollars on making the problem worse, drilling for new oil and gas we can’t possibly afford to burn?” Evans said.
“These figures provide the answer. Money is like rocket fuel: burn through enough of it and you can escape the pull of the Earth. But there’s nowhere else to go.”
Experts say the decades-long boom is coming to an end as clean energy replaces fossil fuels. Last week Jim Cramer, the influential host of the US investment show Mad Money, said he was “done with fossil fuels” because they had entered a “death knell phase”.
Oil companies have been the worst-performing investments in US stock markets over the past decade, after leading major stock market indices in previous decades. The market value of oil and gas companies now makes up only 4% of the S&P500 index, compared with about 28% in the 1980s.
“If you go back to 1990 you can really see that oil and gas companies once outperformed the market,” said Kathy Hipple, a financial analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
“But the market looks to the future and there has been a gradual awareness that fossil fuels are not going to be as big a part in the world economy. This doesn’t mean that [oil companies] will go away tomorrow, but the market won’t reward them for the profits of the past.”
Last year a Guardian investigation revealed that 20 fossil fuel giants including BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon were directly linked to more than a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
The big four investor-owned corporations were found to be behind more than 10% of all carbon emissions since 1965.
The polluters project highlighted how many of the leading fossil fuel corporations had spent billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.
A study published last year found that the largest five market-listed oil and gas companies – the big four plus Total – spent nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.
The profit figures were calculated in today’s money by using the annual net income attributable to shareholders for each company while taking inflation rates into account. In absolute terms, without inflation, the combined profits since 1990 were a still considerable $1.6tn, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The profits of the world’s most profitable listed oil companies were dwarfed last year by the financial reports of the Saudi state-owned oil firm Aramco. It listed on the Saudi stock exchange after racking up profits of $111.1bn (£84.7bn) in 2018, which was more than double the profits of Apple and five times those reported by Shell.
Experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US, as far back as the mid-60s. Certainly by 1990 the facts were well known: two years earlier the Nasa scientist James Hansen had raised the alarm about the impact of fossil fuels during a landmark hearing at the US Congress. In 1992, world leaders came together at a summit in Rio to recognise the role carbon emissions were playing and to pledge coordinated action.
BP did not respond to a request for comment on the findings.
A spokesperson for Shell said: “Just as reliable, affordable energy has benefited us all, all of society has a role to play in tackling climate change. We’re working hard to develop lower-carbon energy options and meet demand for more and cleaner energy.”
ExxonMobil said it was helping address “the dual challenge of the world’s growing demand for energy and reducing emissions”.
Chevon said it was taking action to address climate change by “lowering the company’s carbon intensity, increasing the use of renewable energy and investing in breakthrough technologies.”
10 US oil refineries exceeding limits for cancer-causing benzene, report finds
Studies have shown that populations living around refineries, often people of color and low-income, have worse asthma
Emily Holden in Washington
the guardian
Thu 6 Feb 2020 00.01 EST
At least 10 US oil refineries have been emitting cancer-causing benzene above the federal government’s limits, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project.
The group reviewed a year of air monitoring data recorded at the fence lines of 114 refineries, as reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The facilities are not breaking the law, but they are required by EPA to analyze the causes of the emissions and try to reduce them.
Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said while some refineries have made improvements, others are still releasing benzene at harmful rates.
“Benzene comes with elevated cancer risk but also lots of non-cancer issues that are harder to quantify,” Schaeffer said. People can get sick from low levels in the long term or high levels in the short term.
Benzene is just one of multiple dangerous pollutants emitted by refineries – which turn oil into gasoline and other products. Studies have shown the populations living around refineries – often people of color and low-income families – to have worse asthma and other respiratory problems.
Benzene harms cell processes. It can keep bone marrow from producing enough red blood cells and can damage the immune system and increase the risk of infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Over the long term, benzene exposure causes other problems, including cancer, according to the Department of Human Health and Services.
The data is being collected and reported for the first time following a 2012 lawsuit by the Environmental Integrity Project and seven community and environment groups.
The highest-emitting refinery, the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Pennsylvania, shut down in June after erupting in explosions and fires. It was polluting benzene at five times the government’s limit. Most of the other benzene polluters – six out of the top 10 – are in Texas.
The second-worst refinery is the Holly Frontier Navajo refinery in Artesia, New Mexico, where levels were more than three times the EPA’s “action level” of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, which requires companies to address the pollution.
The federal agency collects data from a number of air monitors around a plant. It takes the average for each station and then uses the highest of those numbers to determine a refinery’s benzene level.
The researchers found concerning spikes outside of the time range they analyzed as well. One monitor in June and July of 2018 detected benzene in a concentration of 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter at the distance of about three football fields from an elementary school.
The community within a mile of the Artesia refinery has 3,318 residents, 74% of whom are Hispanic and most of whom live below the poverty line. Schaeffer said the extremely high levels led to public pressure and action from the government.
Corey Williams, policy and research director at Air Alliance Houston, said in many cases people living near the refineries and other industrial facilities know they might be dangerous but haven’t always had proof.
“I think it’s something that a lot of people have come to accept as part of living in the energy capital of the world,” Williams said.
The group reviewed a year of air monitoring data recorded at the fence lines of 114 refineries, as reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The facilities are not breaking the law, but they are required by EPA to analyze the causes of the emissions and try to reduce them.
Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said while some refineries have made improvements, others are still releasing benzene at harmful rates.
“Benzene comes with elevated cancer risk but also lots of non-cancer issues that are harder to quantify,” Schaeffer said. People can get sick from low levels in the long term or high levels in the short term.
Benzene is just one of multiple dangerous pollutants emitted by refineries – which turn oil into gasoline and other products. Studies have shown the populations living around refineries – often people of color and low-income families – to have worse asthma and other respiratory problems.
Benzene harms cell processes. It can keep bone marrow from producing enough red blood cells and can damage the immune system and increase the risk of infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Over the long term, benzene exposure causes other problems, including cancer, according to the Department of Human Health and Services.
The data is being collected and reported for the first time following a 2012 lawsuit by the Environmental Integrity Project and seven community and environment groups.
The highest-emitting refinery, the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Pennsylvania, shut down in June after erupting in explosions and fires. It was polluting benzene at five times the government’s limit. Most of the other benzene polluters – six out of the top 10 – are in Texas.
The second-worst refinery is the Holly Frontier Navajo refinery in Artesia, New Mexico, where levels were more than three times the EPA’s “action level” of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, which requires companies to address the pollution.
The federal agency collects data from a number of air monitors around a plant. It takes the average for each station and then uses the highest of those numbers to determine a refinery’s benzene level.
The researchers found concerning spikes outside of the time range they analyzed as well. One monitor in June and July of 2018 detected benzene in a concentration of 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter at the distance of about three football fields from an elementary school.
The community within a mile of the Artesia refinery has 3,318 residents, 74% of whom are Hispanic and most of whom live below the poverty line. Schaeffer said the extremely high levels led to public pressure and action from the government.
Corey Williams, policy and research director at Air Alliance Houston, said in many cases people living near the refineries and other industrial facilities know they might be dangerous but haven’t always had proof.
“I think it’s something that a lot of people have come to accept as part of living in the energy capital of the world,” Williams said.
Republicans Are Re-Opening The Energy Market To Underhanded Dealing
Get Ready for ‘Enron II,’ as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Keeps Weakening Its Own Power to Stop Manipulators
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
1/23/2020
Neil Chatterjee, head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is taking our nation back to pre-Enron days. That is when the commission was so weak it didn’t even explicitly prohibit manipulating energy markets.
Under Chatterjee, a former Mitch McConnell aide, the number of new investigations was 12 in fiscal 2019, compared with 24 the previous year. The commission reached just two settlement agreements for $14 million, a sixth or less of the annual average for penalties since 2007.
“Several recent actions seem to indicate that the commission may not be fully committed to finding, stopping, and punishing manipulative acts that can stifle competition and result in unjust and unreasonable prices,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) wrote. The letter to FERC commissioners was joined by four other Democratic senators.
Chatterjee, who previously lobbied for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told senators annual averages vary and dropped in part because of FERC’s effectiveness. “Our focus and priority continues to be addressing market manipulation and protecting our markets,” he said.
FERC is pursuing three cases that total about $85 million in penalties, interest and compensation.
Out of the ashes of Enron, Former President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act. Enron, the Houston energy company, went bankrupt after cooking its books to hide billions of dollars in debt. Enron’s former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, who was convicted of insider trading and other charges, was released from prison in 2018.
The Energy Policy Act allow up to $1 million a day in fines per violation. The Electric Power Supply Association and Energy Trading Institute have argued in court that the fines should be thrown out. They said the commission is taking too long to assess penalties.
In May, the commission stopped issuing public notices enacted in 2009 about alleged violations. “Potential adverse consequences … for investigative subjects are no longer justified,” it said.
FERC also eliminated its Division of Energy Market Oversight. The division oversaw our country’s natural gas and electric markets and related energy and financial markets.
Chatterjee’s predecessor as chairman, attorney Norman Bay, had been the commission’s director of enforcement. He resigned in January 2017 when Trump named then-commissioner Cheryl LaFleur acting chair.
Before FERC enacted market behavior rules there was no explicit prohibition or definition of market manipulation in FERC rules, regulations, orders or statutes.
In fiscal 2018, FERC opened 16 investigations into market manipulation, the most for any year in the past decade. It recovered almost $150 million in civil penalties and disrupting profits.
Under Chatterjee, a former Mitch McConnell aide, the number of new investigations was 12 in fiscal 2019, compared with 24 the previous year. The commission reached just two settlement agreements for $14 million, a sixth or less of the annual average for penalties since 2007.
“Several recent actions seem to indicate that the commission may not be fully committed to finding, stopping, and punishing manipulative acts that can stifle competition and result in unjust and unreasonable prices,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) wrote. The letter to FERC commissioners was joined by four other Democratic senators.
Chatterjee, who previously lobbied for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told senators annual averages vary and dropped in part because of FERC’s effectiveness. “Our focus and priority continues to be addressing market manipulation and protecting our markets,” he said.
FERC is pursuing three cases that total about $85 million in penalties, interest and compensation.
Out of the ashes of Enron, Former President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act. Enron, the Houston energy company, went bankrupt after cooking its books to hide billions of dollars in debt. Enron’s former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, who was convicted of insider trading and other charges, was released from prison in 2018.
The Energy Policy Act allow up to $1 million a day in fines per violation. The Electric Power Supply Association and Energy Trading Institute have argued in court that the fines should be thrown out. They said the commission is taking too long to assess penalties.
In May, the commission stopped issuing public notices enacted in 2009 about alleged violations. “Potential adverse consequences … for investigative subjects are no longer justified,” it said.
FERC also eliminated its Division of Energy Market Oversight. The division oversaw our country’s natural gas and electric markets and related energy and financial markets.
Chatterjee’s predecessor as chairman, attorney Norman Bay, had been the commission’s director of enforcement. He resigned in January 2017 when Trump named then-commissioner Cheryl LaFleur acting chair.
Before FERC enacted market behavior rules there was no explicit prohibition or definition of market manipulation in FERC rules, regulations, orders or statutes.
In fiscal 2018, FERC opened 16 investigations into market manipulation, the most for any year in the past decade. It recovered almost $150 million in civil penalties and disrupting profits.
Trump administration approves Keystone pipeline on US land
By MATTHEW BROWN - ap
1/22/2020
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday approved a right-of-way allowing the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to be built across U.S. land, pushing the controversial $8 billion project closer to construction though court challenges still loom.
The approval signed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and obtained by The Associated Press covers 46 miles (74 kilometers) of the pipeline’s route across land in Montana that’s controlled by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Casey Hammond, assistant secretary of the Interior Department.
Those segments of federal land are a small fraction of the pipeline’s 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) route, but the right-of-way was crucial for a project that’s obtained all the needed permits at the state and local levels.
The pipeline would transport up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude oil daily from western Canada to terminals on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Project sponsor TC Energy said in a court filing that it wants to begin construction on the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Montana in April. Opponents promised to challenge those plans in court.
First proposed in 2008, the pipeline has become emblematic of the tensions between economic development and curbing the fossil fuel emissions that are causing climate change. The Obama administration rejected it, but President Donald Trump revived it and has been a strong supporter.
The stretch approved Wednesday includes all federal land crossed by the line, Hammond said. Much of the rest of the route is across private land, for which TC Energy has been acquiring permissions to build on.
Environmentalists and Native American tribes along the pipeline route say burning the tar sands oil will make climate change worse, and that the pipeline could break and spill oil into waterways like Montana’s Missouri River. They have filed numerous lawsuits.
Hammond said Interior officials and other agencies have done a thorough review of the potential effects on the environment. He said TC Energy had provided detailed plans to respond to any spill.
“We’re comfortable with the analysis that’s been done,” Hammond said.
Another oil pipeline in TC Energy’s Keystone network in October spilled an estimated 383,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of oil in eastern North Dakota. Critics say a damaging spill from Keystone XL is inevitable given the length of the line and the many rivers and other waterways it would cross beneath.
An attorney for environmental groups that have sued to overturn Trump’s permit for the line said they will ask the judge in the case to block the new approval.
“We have every confidence that the federal courts will set aside these approvals,” said Steve Volker, who represents the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Additional approvals from the Army Corps of Engineers are needed for the pipeline’s impact to Montana’s Fort Peck dam. Two utilities must approve power lines that would connect to the project’s pumping stations.
On Montana’s Fort Peck Reservation, where tribal members fear an oil spill getting into water supplies, state Sen. Frank Smith said Trump’s strong support for the project appeared to be pushing it through.
“All we can do is pray from here on in,” Smith said. “The president said it’s going through, and it’s going through.”
The Democratic lawmaker added that despite TC Energy’s pledge to operate safely, “there can still be human error” and another spill would happen.
TC Energy spokeswoman Sara Rabern said in a statement that the government approval marked an “important step as we advance towards building this important energy infrastructure project.”
In Phillips County, Montana, where the line would cross the Canada border into the U.S., officials want the tax revenue on the oil that would pass through, estimated at more than $1 million annually.
“It’s a no-brainer for us as far as how the community feels,” county commissioner John Carnahan said. “We’d go out there and help them if we could. It’s not only good for the county, it’s good for America.”
U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Montana initially denied a request from environmentalists to block construction in December because no work was immediately planned. But he also has ruled against the project, including a 2018 decision that stalled the line and prompted Trump to issue a new presidential permit for it to cross the U.S.-Canada border.
In Nebraska, the state Supreme Court removed the last major obstacle for the project in August when it ruled in favor of state regulators who had approved a route for the pipeline in 2017.
TC Energy intends next month to begin mobilizing construction machinery to areas for worker camps and pipeline storage yards in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, according to its court filings. It also plans to start toppling trees along the route in parts of South Dakota.
The approval signed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and obtained by The Associated Press covers 46 miles (74 kilometers) of the pipeline’s route across land in Montana that’s controlled by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Casey Hammond, assistant secretary of the Interior Department.
Those segments of federal land are a small fraction of the pipeline’s 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) route, but the right-of-way was crucial for a project that’s obtained all the needed permits at the state and local levels.
The pipeline would transport up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude oil daily from western Canada to terminals on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Project sponsor TC Energy said in a court filing that it wants to begin construction on the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Montana in April. Opponents promised to challenge those plans in court.
First proposed in 2008, the pipeline has become emblematic of the tensions between economic development and curbing the fossil fuel emissions that are causing climate change. The Obama administration rejected it, but President Donald Trump revived it and has been a strong supporter.
The stretch approved Wednesday includes all federal land crossed by the line, Hammond said. Much of the rest of the route is across private land, for which TC Energy has been acquiring permissions to build on.
Environmentalists and Native American tribes along the pipeline route say burning the tar sands oil will make climate change worse, and that the pipeline could break and spill oil into waterways like Montana’s Missouri River. They have filed numerous lawsuits.
Hammond said Interior officials and other agencies have done a thorough review of the potential effects on the environment. He said TC Energy had provided detailed plans to respond to any spill.
“We’re comfortable with the analysis that’s been done,” Hammond said.
Another oil pipeline in TC Energy’s Keystone network in October spilled an estimated 383,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of oil in eastern North Dakota. Critics say a damaging spill from Keystone XL is inevitable given the length of the line and the many rivers and other waterways it would cross beneath.
An attorney for environmental groups that have sued to overturn Trump’s permit for the line said they will ask the judge in the case to block the new approval.
“We have every confidence that the federal courts will set aside these approvals,” said Steve Volker, who represents the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Additional approvals from the Army Corps of Engineers are needed for the pipeline’s impact to Montana’s Fort Peck dam. Two utilities must approve power lines that would connect to the project’s pumping stations.
On Montana’s Fort Peck Reservation, where tribal members fear an oil spill getting into water supplies, state Sen. Frank Smith said Trump’s strong support for the project appeared to be pushing it through.
“All we can do is pray from here on in,” Smith said. “The president said it’s going through, and it’s going through.”
The Democratic lawmaker added that despite TC Energy’s pledge to operate safely, “there can still be human error” and another spill would happen.
TC Energy spokeswoman Sara Rabern said in a statement that the government approval marked an “important step as we advance towards building this important energy infrastructure project.”
In Phillips County, Montana, where the line would cross the Canada border into the U.S., officials want the tax revenue on the oil that would pass through, estimated at more than $1 million annually.
“It’s a no-brainer for us as far as how the community feels,” county commissioner John Carnahan said. “We’d go out there and help them if we could. It’s not only good for the county, it’s good for America.”
U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Montana initially denied a request from environmentalists to block construction in December because no work was immediately planned. But he also has ruled against the project, including a 2018 decision that stalled the line and prompted Trump to issue a new presidential permit for it to cross the U.S.-Canada border.
In Nebraska, the state Supreme Court removed the last major obstacle for the project in August when it ruled in favor of state regulators who had approved a route for the pipeline in 2017.
TC Energy intends next month to begin mobilizing construction machinery to areas for worker camps and pipeline storage yards in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, according to its court filings. It also plans to start toppling trees along the route in parts of South Dakota.
Davos financiers pump $1.4 trillion into fossil fuels: Greenpeace
January 21, 2020
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
Some of the world’s biggest banks, insurers and pension funds have collectively invested $1.4 trillion in fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal, Greenpeace said Tuesday at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
With the climate emergency expected to be front and centre at the annual summit of the world’s business elite, the charity accused some institutions in attendance of failing to live up to the Forum’s goal of “improving the state of the world”.
Greenpeace analyzed the portfolios of 24 of the banks represented at Davos and found that they had financed the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $1.4 trillion since the landmark 2015 Paris deal.
That accord enjoins nations to limit global temperature rises to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Farenheit) through a rapid and wide-ranging drawdown of planet-warming carbon emissions.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the world’s leading authority on the subject — says that for a better-than-even chance of reaching the safer Paris cap of 1.5C, oil and gas consumption would need to decline 37 percent and 25 percent respectively by 2030.
The IPCC says coal use must fall two thirds by 2030 and fall to virtually zero by mid-century to keep Earth on a 1.5-C path.
Yet carbon emissions are growing every year as global energy demand surges, and the International Energy Association said Monday that fossil fuel companies are still only investing 0.8 percent of their spending in renewables.
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said financial institutions were complicit in climate change by funding the fuels that drive it.
“Banks, insurers and pension funds are as culpable for the climate emergency as the fossil fuel industry — specifically those that go to Davos,” Morgan told AFP.
“These Davos players say they support the Paris agreement but since its signing they’ve pumped $1.4 trillion into fossil fuels.”
The Greenpeace report found that just 10 banks had provided $1 trillion to fossil fuels since Paris. That same amount could pay to double the world’s solar power capacity.
It also identified three pension funds with at least $26 billion in fossil fuel holdings, and alleged that four of the world’s biggest insurance firms — AIG, Prudential, Sompo and Tokio marine — had no publicly disclosed policies to divest from fossil fuels.
“The fossil fuel industry needs the finance sector but its not the same the other way around, so why are these bank, insurers and pensions propping up dirty energy?” asked Morgan, who will be participating in the four-day Davos forum.
Last year green groups issued the Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card, identifying a rise in funding for coal, oil and gas each year since Paris was signed.
“The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a livable future,” said Alison Kirsh, climate and energy lead researcher at Rainforest Action Network.
With the climate emergency expected to be front and centre at the annual summit of the world’s business elite, the charity accused some institutions in attendance of failing to live up to the Forum’s goal of “improving the state of the world”.
Greenpeace analyzed the portfolios of 24 of the banks represented at Davos and found that they had financed the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $1.4 trillion since the landmark 2015 Paris deal.
That accord enjoins nations to limit global temperature rises to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Farenheit) through a rapid and wide-ranging drawdown of planet-warming carbon emissions.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the world’s leading authority on the subject — says that for a better-than-even chance of reaching the safer Paris cap of 1.5C, oil and gas consumption would need to decline 37 percent and 25 percent respectively by 2030.
The IPCC says coal use must fall two thirds by 2030 and fall to virtually zero by mid-century to keep Earth on a 1.5-C path.
Yet carbon emissions are growing every year as global energy demand surges, and the International Energy Association said Monday that fossil fuel companies are still only investing 0.8 percent of their spending in renewables.
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said financial institutions were complicit in climate change by funding the fuels that drive it.
“Banks, insurers and pension funds are as culpable for the climate emergency as the fossil fuel industry — specifically those that go to Davos,” Morgan told AFP.
“These Davos players say they support the Paris agreement but since its signing they’ve pumped $1.4 trillion into fossil fuels.”
The Greenpeace report found that just 10 banks had provided $1 trillion to fossil fuels since Paris. That same amount could pay to double the world’s solar power capacity.
It also identified three pension funds with at least $26 billion in fossil fuel holdings, and alleged that four of the world’s biggest insurance firms — AIG, Prudential, Sompo and Tokio marine — had no publicly disclosed policies to divest from fossil fuels.
“The fossil fuel industry needs the finance sector but its not the same the other way around, so why are these bank, insurers and pensions propping up dirty energy?” asked Morgan, who will be participating in the four-day Davos forum.
Last year green groups issued the Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card, identifying a rise in funding for coal, oil and gas each year since Paris was signed.
“The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a livable future,” said Alison Kirsh, climate and energy lead researcher at Rainforest Action Network.
voters keep electing republicans!!!
Fossil Fuel Knocks the Wind Out of Renewable Energy Movement in Ohio
BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 27, 2019
With no shortage of wide-open land, Ohio is ripe for a transition to renewable energy, but instead the state has become a hotbed for corporate-driven attacks on wind energy. As a result of increasingly restrictive laws on renewables, the state was recently ranked second to last among U.S. states in its renewable energy generation, with only 2.3 percent of its energy generated through renewable sources.
A closer look at the workings of the anti-wind-energy movement in Ohio offers a glimpse of the dynamics that are also at work to suppress wind energy generation elsewhere throughout the country.
One of the most recent attacks on wind energy in Ohio came in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a bill that essentially neutralized renewable energy standards and bailed out dying coal plants, all under the guise of maintaining a free market and helping ratepayers. The bill, HB 6, was called the “worst energy bill of the 21st century” by Vox and the worst clean energy rollback in the nation by Leah Stokes, writing for The Guardian. It sets a low renewable energy standard that most utilities have already met, and will end up costing ratepayers more in the long run.
“Ohio is a hotbed of attacks on renewable energy and has been for quite a few years,” says Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute. Following a bipartisan clean energy standard passed in the state legislature in 2008, fossil fuel producers, utilities like FirstEnergy and outside groups like ALEC lobbied to push back against renewables, according to Anderson; in the ensuing years, Republicans continually tried to repeal and succeeded in stalling the clean energy mandate.
A Midwestern Wind Battle
When it comes to renewable energies like solar and wind, Ohio has a lot to gain. Other states in the Midwest have been taking advantage of the wide-open land that Ohio also shares. From a climate and local health standpoint, according to a Harvard study published in October, the Midwest has the most to gain from renewables; and, according to a 2018 study done by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, increasing energy efficiency by 15 percent nationwide would save Ohio $1.6 billion in health impacts in one year.
Nevertheless, wind energy in particular has fierce rivals in the state. In 2014, state legislators snuck a rule into a budget bill that mandated what wind energy manufacturers say are among the strictest setback laws in the country; the American Wind Energy Association released a report in 2017 saying that the state had missed out on nearly $1.6 billion from already approved projects that were thrown into limbo or cancelled due to the setback law.
In November, Republican Bill Reineke introduced a bill into the state legislature that would require local townships to have final say on wind energy projects after approval from the state siting board. In a statement, the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund said that “Ohio House Bill 401 will make the future of wind energy in Ohio, which is already badly handicapped, even more uncertain” if it were passed.
The anti-wind efforts are a story largely told by two parties: local groups and travelling anti-wind grifters funded by nonrenewable energy interests. The Seneca Anti-Wind Union based in northern Ohio is a particularly large and vocal local coalition — it has an office, holds meetings that can draw hundreds, has the support of Vice President Mike Pence, and has a lawyer who represents and has received money from coal interests. The coalition posts on its Facebook page several times a day, spreading misinformation from people like Michael Shellenberger, who claims to be a climate expert so that he can write articles denouncing the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as alarmists.
A common refrain from anti-wind groups is that they are shut out of the development process, but Ohio law allows affected residents to intervene in and attend meetings on such projects. A 2018 study found that wind energy manufacturers’ engagement with the community was vital to the process — and that those individuals who did engage generally had a more positive view of the project.
Jeremy Firestone, lead author of that study and director of wind research at the University of Delaware, told Truthout that “one of the two strongest predictors of having a positive attitude [toward wind projects] was having the ability to influence the outcome, the other being having developers that are open and transparent.” Some of the communities Firestone studied had worked directly with the developers to modify the scale of a project to alleviate aesthetic issues.
Good faith community members do sometimes raise legitimate concerns with wind projects like turbine aesthetics, shadow flicker and noise. However, there is also a wealth of conspiratorial misinformation online about other side effects of living in proximity to wind farms — the anti-wind movement says living near wind turbines causes the scientifically debunked “wind turbine syndrome” that has symptoms ranging anywhere from cancer to weight gain.
It’s understandable how these views have taken hold in these communities — none of these spurious health concerns have been substantiated by scientific studies, yet it’s exceedingly easy to find information about them online. Anti-wind websites like Master Resource and National Wind Watch are funded, often in roundabout ways, by fossil fuel interests; Wind Watch doesn’t directly receive donations from these groups, but one of its leaders, Tom Stacy, has done consulting for pro-fossil fuel think tanks. Master Resource is run by the Institute for Energy Research, which has ties to multiple oil and gas interests, including Charles Koch.
Stacy has been active in supporting the renewable energy rollbacks and the Ohio legislature’s top anti-wind politician, Republican Sen. Bill Seitz, has said that Stacy has directly affected legislation like 2014’s setback law. Indeed, at the intersection of the fossil-fuel-funded anti-wind figures and the local anti-wind groups lie the legislators and other government officials that they’ve influenced. Seneca Anti-Wind has been able to turn local commissioner Mike Kerschner and Reineke, who represents Seneca county, against wind projects. Meanwhile, Sam Randazzo, who has lobbied against renewables, now sits at the head of the state’s public utilities commission.
Wind Efforts Across the Country
These issues don’t just exist in Ohio — the fossil fuel industry and local residents also converged to cancel an offshore wind project in Cape Cod, and people have stood up against projects in Minnesota. Republicans in North Carolina and Oklahoma have begun waging similar wars against wind energy, and President Donald Trump has painted wind energy as a symbol of what he describes as an elitist environmental movement.
The truth is that wind energy can bring significant financial benefits to often struggling rural communities. “It’s a nice way for the farmers and farming communities that are supportive to have stable incomes,” says Firestone. “[Wind energy] makes it easier to maintain family farms.” Just in Ohio, wind farms contribute millions of dollars to landowners each year, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
But misinformation, especially misinformation that’s spread online, is easily spread and difficult to challenge. Fortunately, in places like the Great Plains, wind energy is on the rise. Maybe such momentum will be contagious.
A closer look at the workings of the anti-wind-energy movement in Ohio offers a glimpse of the dynamics that are also at work to suppress wind energy generation elsewhere throughout the country.
One of the most recent attacks on wind energy in Ohio came in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a bill that essentially neutralized renewable energy standards and bailed out dying coal plants, all under the guise of maintaining a free market and helping ratepayers. The bill, HB 6, was called the “worst energy bill of the 21st century” by Vox and the worst clean energy rollback in the nation by Leah Stokes, writing for The Guardian. It sets a low renewable energy standard that most utilities have already met, and will end up costing ratepayers more in the long run.
“Ohio is a hotbed of attacks on renewable energy and has been for quite a few years,” says Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute. Following a bipartisan clean energy standard passed in the state legislature in 2008, fossil fuel producers, utilities like FirstEnergy and outside groups like ALEC lobbied to push back against renewables, according to Anderson; in the ensuing years, Republicans continually tried to repeal and succeeded in stalling the clean energy mandate.
A Midwestern Wind Battle
When it comes to renewable energies like solar and wind, Ohio has a lot to gain. Other states in the Midwest have been taking advantage of the wide-open land that Ohio also shares. From a climate and local health standpoint, according to a Harvard study published in October, the Midwest has the most to gain from renewables; and, according to a 2018 study done by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, increasing energy efficiency by 15 percent nationwide would save Ohio $1.6 billion in health impacts in one year.
Nevertheless, wind energy in particular has fierce rivals in the state. In 2014, state legislators snuck a rule into a budget bill that mandated what wind energy manufacturers say are among the strictest setback laws in the country; the American Wind Energy Association released a report in 2017 saying that the state had missed out on nearly $1.6 billion from already approved projects that were thrown into limbo or cancelled due to the setback law.
In November, Republican Bill Reineke introduced a bill into the state legislature that would require local townships to have final say on wind energy projects after approval from the state siting board. In a statement, the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund said that “Ohio House Bill 401 will make the future of wind energy in Ohio, which is already badly handicapped, even more uncertain” if it were passed.
The anti-wind efforts are a story largely told by two parties: local groups and travelling anti-wind grifters funded by nonrenewable energy interests. The Seneca Anti-Wind Union based in northern Ohio is a particularly large and vocal local coalition — it has an office, holds meetings that can draw hundreds, has the support of Vice President Mike Pence, and has a lawyer who represents and has received money from coal interests. The coalition posts on its Facebook page several times a day, spreading misinformation from people like Michael Shellenberger, who claims to be a climate expert so that he can write articles denouncing the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as alarmists.
A common refrain from anti-wind groups is that they are shut out of the development process, but Ohio law allows affected residents to intervene in and attend meetings on such projects. A 2018 study found that wind energy manufacturers’ engagement with the community was vital to the process — and that those individuals who did engage generally had a more positive view of the project.
Jeremy Firestone, lead author of that study and director of wind research at the University of Delaware, told Truthout that “one of the two strongest predictors of having a positive attitude [toward wind projects] was having the ability to influence the outcome, the other being having developers that are open and transparent.” Some of the communities Firestone studied had worked directly with the developers to modify the scale of a project to alleviate aesthetic issues.
Good faith community members do sometimes raise legitimate concerns with wind projects like turbine aesthetics, shadow flicker and noise. However, there is also a wealth of conspiratorial misinformation online about other side effects of living in proximity to wind farms — the anti-wind movement says living near wind turbines causes the scientifically debunked “wind turbine syndrome” that has symptoms ranging anywhere from cancer to weight gain.
It’s understandable how these views have taken hold in these communities — none of these spurious health concerns have been substantiated by scientific studies, yet it’s exceedingly easy to find information about them online. Anti-wind websites like Master Resource and National Wind Watch are funded, often in roundabout ways, by fossil fuel interests; Wind Watch doesn’t directly receive donations from these groups, but one of its leaders, Tom Stacy, has done consulting for pro-fossil fuel think tanks. Master Resource is run by the Institute for Energy Research, which has ties to multiple oil and gas interests, including Charles Koch.
Stacy has been active in supporting the renewable energy rollbacks and the Ohio legislature’s top anti-wind politician, Republican Sen. Bill Seitz, has said that Stacy has directly affected legislation like 2014’s setback law. Indeed, at the intersection of the fossil-fuel-funded anti-wind figures and the local anti-wind groups lie the legislators and other government officials that they’ve influenced. Seneca Anti-Wind has been able to turn local commissioner Mike Kerschner and Reineke, who represents Seneca county, against wind projects. Meanwhile, Sam Randazzo, who has lobbied against renewables, now sits at the head of the state’s public utilities commission.
Wind Efforts Across the Country
These issues don’t just exist in Ohio — the fossil fuel industry and local residents also converged to cancel an offshore wind project in Cape Cod, and people have stood up against projects in Minnesota. Republicans in North Carolina and Oklahoma have begun waging similar wars against wind energy, and President Donald Trump has painted wind energy as a symbol of what he describes as an elitist environmental movement.
The truth is that wind energy can bring significant financial benefits to often struggling rural communities. “It’s a nice way for the farmers and farming communities that are supportive to have stable incomes,” says Firestone. “[Wind energy] makes it easier to maintain family farms.” Just in Ohio, wind farms contribute millions of dollars to landowners each year, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
But misinformation, especially misinformation that’s spread online, is easily spread and difficult to challenge. Fortunately, in places like the Great Plains, wind energy is on the rise. Maybe such momentum will be contagious.
COAL GIANT PROVIDED SECRET FINANCING TO GROUP CHALLENGING CLIMATE LAWSUITS
Lee Fang - the intercept
December 17 2019, 10:17 a.m.
IN 2018, a new group appeared seemingly out of nowhere and immediately took aim at the recent wave of lawsuits filed by state attorneys general designed to hold major fossil fuel companies responsible for allegedly misleading investors and customers about the true risk of carbon pollution.
“The global warming lobby has gone too far this time,” declared the innocuously named group, Government Accountability and Oversight, in a video posted on its website. GAO claimed that the lawsuits, which target Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, and Chevron, among other corporations, represent a form of government overreach and that prosecutors are colluding with activist interest groups in an unethical manner.
GAO, which is run as a for-profit company and foundation, does not disclose its donors nor does it provide much information about its origins. But on Saturday, a bankruptcy court in southern Ohio released a filing revealing that the organization received three donations totaling $300,000 from Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal-mining company in the United States. The first payment was made on June 7, 2018, just one month after GAO announced its intention to “expose” the litigation effort against energy companies.
That a secretive group working to defend the fossil fuel industry is financed by Murray Energy may come as no surprise.
Bob Murray, the billionaire founder of Murray Energy, a prolific GOP donor, and early supporter of President Donald Trump, is an outspoken critic of environmental regulations and activist groups. Murray’s influence over the administration, including the push to unravel Environmental Protection Agency rules on carbon emissions and exit the Paris climate accords, is well documented. Even the current chief of the EPA, Andrew Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for Murray.
GAO and Murray Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has provided over $3.8 million in campaign contributions to a range of federal politicians over the last five years, according to the Federal Election Commission. That figure, however, appears to be only part of the story in terms of the company’s influence over the political debate.
In October, following a precipitous drop in coal demand, Murray’s company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, forcing the firm to disclose its recent history of payments to outside political entities. As part of the company’s restructuring process, it filed a statement of financial affairs, which lists creditors and liabilities, as well as a list of recent charitable donations and grants, which revealed the payments to GAO, among many other new revelations about the coal company’s hidden hand in the climate change debate.
Murray Energy showered donations to several think tanks focused on questioning the link between human activity and global warming, providing grants to groups such as the Heartland Institute, which once sponsored billboards comparing those who accept climate change to the Unabomber. The Ohio-based coal giant gave $30,000 to the Heartland Institute in March of last year, shortly after the group announced a campaign to save coal companies on the brink of closure, followed by another $100,00 in contributions in the months that followed.
Other think tanks listed in the filing as having received money from Murray Energy include the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a group that claimed “there is no scientific consensus though that global warming is man-caused”; the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which briefs lawmakers on how the science behind climate change is a “hoax“; the Cato Institute, the Charles Koch-founded think tank that has long sponsored prominent climate change deniers; and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which argues for the “many benefits” of increasing carbon emissions. (“Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the elixir of life,” one pamphlet reads. Emphasis in the original.)
The filing lists nearly a dozen similar payments to right-wing organizations that do not disclose donors. Murray Energy provided $130,000 to “Hardworking Ohioians Inc.,” a mysterious for-profit group, which revealed no information about its donors, tied closely to Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, and aired advertisements last year to maintain the Republican majority in the legislature. Another $50,000 was spent in support of FreedomWorks, a grassroots group that mobilizes public support for rolling back EPA regulations. Judicial Watch, a GOP-aligned investigative nonprofit, is also a beneficiary of Murray Energy money.
“The bankruptcy filing confirms what environmentalists have long suspected about Murray Energy’s connections to a network of special-interest groups that have worked to manufacture doubt about climate change and attack climate scientists and activists,” said David Anderson, communications and policy manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.
Bankruptcy filings have provided a unique opportunity for the public to better understand the political agenda of powerful corporate interests, which typically shroud sensitive donations through nondisclosing entities. The sudden collapse earlier this year of Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal firm, revealed several donations to climate change denial groups. In 2015, The Intercept reported on another wave of coal bankruptcies, which revealed ties between coal firms to a subterranean network of groups dedicated to blocking environmental reform.
The bankruptcy of Alpha Natural Resources three years ago, for instance, showed secret payments to Chris Horner, a former lobbyist who had hounded climate scientists in an attempt to discredit their work. The disclosure was the first time Horner and his nonprofit, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, had been directly tied to the fossil fuel industry.
Horner is now onto new projects. Along with several other lawyers, he is a co-founder of Government Accountability and Oversight.
“The global warming lobby has gone too far this time,” declared the innocuously named group, Government Accountability and Oversight, in a video posted on its website. GAO claimed that the lawsuits, which target Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, and Chevron, among other corporations, represent a form of government overreach and that prosecutors are colluding with activist interest groups in an unethical manner.
GAO, which is run as a for-profit company and foundation, does not disclose its donors nor does it provide much information about its origins. But on Saturday, a bankruptcy court in southern Ohio released a filing revealing that the organization received three donations totaling $300,000 from Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal-mining company in the United States. The first payment was made on June 7, 2018, just one month after GAO announced its intention to “expose” the litigation effort against energy companies.
That a secretive group working to defend the fossil fuel industry is financed by Murray Energy may come as no surprise.
Bob Murray, the billionaire founder of Murray Energy, a prolific GOP donor, and early supporter of President Donald Trump, is an outspoken critic of environmental regulations and activist groups. Murray’s influence over the administration, including the push to unravel Environmental Protection Agency rules on carbon emissions and exit the Paris climate accords, is well documented. Even the current chief of the EPA, Andrew Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for Murray.
GAO and Murray Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has provided over $3.8 million in campaign contributions to a range of federal politicians over the last five years, according to the Federal Election Commission. That figure, however, appears to be only part of the story in terms of the company’s influence over the political debate.
In October, following a precipitous drop in coal demand, Murray’s company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, forcing the firm to disclose its recent history of payments to outside political entities. As part of the company’s restructuring process, it filed a statement of financial affairs, which lists creditors and liabilities, as well as a list of recent charitable donations and grants, which revealed the payments to GAO, among many other new revelations about the coal company’s hidden hand in the climate change debate.
Murray Energy showered donations to several think tanks focused on questioning the link between human activity and global warming, providing grants to groups such as the Heartland Institute, which once sponsored billboards comparing those who accept climate change to the Unabomber. The Ohio-based coal giant gave $30,000 to the Heartland Institute in March of last year, shortly after the group announced a campaign to save coal companies on the brink of closure, followed by another $100,00 in contributions in the months that followed.
Other think tanks listed in the filing as having received money from Murray Energy include the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a group that claimed “there is no scientific consensus though that global warming is man-caused”; the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which briefs lawmakers on how the science behind climate change is a “hoax“; the Cato Institute, the Charles Koch-founded think tank that has long sponsored prominent climate change deniers; and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which argues for the “many benefits” of increasing carbon emissions. (“Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the elixir of life,” one pamphlet reads. Emphasis in the original.)
The filing lists nearly a dozen similar payments to right-wing organizations that do not disclose donors. Murray Energy provided $130,000 to “Hardworking Ohioians Inc.,” a mysterious for-profit group, which revealed no information about its donors, tied closely to Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, and aired advertisements last year to maintain the Republican majority in the legislature. Another $50,000 was spent in support of FreedomWorks, a grassroots group that mobilizes public support for rolling back EPA regulations. Judicial Watch, a GOP-aligned investigative nonprofit, is also a beneficiary of Murray Energy money.
“The bankruptcy filing confirms what environmentalists have long suspected about Murray Energy’s connections to a network of special-interest groups that have worked to manufacture doubt about climate change and attack climate scientists and activists,” said David Anderson, communications and policy manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.
Bankruptcy filings have provided a unique opportunity for the public to better understand the political agenda of powerful corporate interests, which typically shroud sensitive donations through nondisclosing entities. The sudden collapse earlier this year of Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal firm, revealed several donations to climate change denial groups. In 2015, The Intercept reported on another wave of coal bankruptcies, which revealed ties between coal firms to a subterranean network of groups dedicated to blocking environmental reform.
The bankruptcy of Alpha Natural Resources three years ago, for instance, showed secret payments to Chris Horner, a former lobbyist who had hounded climate scientists in an attempt to discredit their work. The disclosure was the first time Horner and his nonprofit, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, had been directly tied to the fossil fuel industry.
Horner is now onto new projects. Along with several other lawyers, he is a co-founder of Government Accountability and Oversight.
they keep electing republicans to sell voters out!!!
ALEC Behind Ohio Bill Criminalizing Protests Against Fossil Fuel Infrastructure
BY Don Wiener, PR Watch
PUBLISHED December 14, 2019
When anti-protest legislation pushed by oil, gas and utility interests was introduced in the Ohio state Senate this year, it met a receptive audience and passed easily on a mostly party-line vote. It has since moved to the state House, where almost one-third of legislators are ALEC members, and will likely pass at the beginning of 2020.
The legislation, SB 33, is modeled after an ALEC proposal, and its corporate backers are big contributors to the Republican party and legislators in Ohio.
ALEC is the corporate bill mill where state legislators and corporations meet behind closed doors to write and advocate for legislation on the environment, criminal justice, health care, and most of the other domestic issues that affect us.
The bill, the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act,” being pushed by ALEC around the country makes it a felony for protestors to trespass on energy company property, such as pipelines, refineries, and power plants.
Prompted by the well-publicized stand-off at the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline in 2016, the industry’s full-court press is working. Ten states, using ALEC’s template bill, have enacted increased criminal penalties through legislation very much like SB 33.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has extensively reported on the controversy surrounding this type of legislation, including an article last month on Wisconsin’s bill, signed by the new Democratic Governor, Tony Evers.
According to the legislature’s Office of Research and Drafting, the Ohio bill “adds a new prohibition under the offense of ‘criminal trespass’ that expressly prohibits a person, without privilege to do so, from knowingly entering or remaining on a ‘critical infrastructure facility.'”
While the offense for an individual protester is a misdemeanor – or a third-degree felony for destroying or tampering with “critical infrastructure” property – the bill would hit any organization found to be “complicit” in the violation with a fine ten times the maximum allowable fine for the protester.
Roxanne Groff, a former county commissioner in Ohio and spokesperson for the Buckeye Environmental Network, testified before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee that,
This bill was created to impose fear upon citizens who have become increasingly aware and vocal about the threats to their health, and their wellbeing as a result of the oil and gas industries’ assault on the land and people of this state by extraction of oil and gas, injection of toxic radioactive waste from this extraction and the infrastructure build outs of pipelines and gas compressor stations….
ALEC’s Grip on the Ohio Legislature
In the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the anti-protest bill was heard, four of the 10 Senators – including the chair, John Ecklund (R) – are ALEC members.
But ALEC’s influence over the bill’s prospects doesn’t stop there.
SB 33, which passed the Ohio Senate 24-8 in May, was introduced by ALEC member Frank Hoagland (R), chair of the state Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, and all 18 ALEC members in the Senate voted for it.
Indeed, the scope of ALEC’s influence in the Ohio Legislature is profound.
Eleven of the 13 state Senate committees are chaired by ALEC members.
And three of the top four state Senate GOP leaders are ALEC members – Senate President Larry Obhof, President Pro Tempore Bob Peterson, and Majority Leader Matt Huffman.
The bill is now pending in the House Public Utilities Committee, where the vice-chair and another five of the committee’s 14 GOP members are ALEC members.
When the bill gets voted out of committee in the 2020 legislative session, it will be welcomed by three of the four top House leaders who are also ALEC members – Speaker Pro Tempore, Jim Butler, and the Majority Leader, Bill Seitz, who sits on ALEC’s board.
Indeed, 23 of 61 of the Ohio state House members belong to ALEC.
Altogether, 41 of the state’s 85 GOP legislative members and five of the top eight Republican House and Senate leaders are ALEC members.
CMD lists the Ohio legislative members at alecexposed.org.
Corporate Interests Backing the Bill
Rob Eshenbaugh, a lobbyist with Capitol Advocates in Columbus, led the charge on the anti-protest bill in committee on behalf of a long list of fossil fuel, utility, chemical, transportation, and water corporations and trade associations.
A number of the SB 33 “supporters” listed in Eshenbaugh’s testimony are ALEC members, including Columbia Gas of Ohio, CSX Transportation, Dominion Energy Ohio, Duke Energy, and Marathon Petroleum Company
Eshenbaugh was previously a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and his lobbying firm represents two other ALEC corporate backers, Caterpillar, Inc. and PhRMA, the drug industry’s trade association.
A CMD analysis of Ohio’s campaign finance records shows that Marathon Petroleum has donated $24,000 to Senate President Obhoff since 2010. It also gave $25,000 to Republican party committees. Duke Energy has paid almost $10,000 for GOP golf outings and has donated $28,000 to Senate Majority Leader Huffman during his career. Utility giant Exelon, another ALEC member, has given GOP party committees $12,500 since 2010.
The legislation, SB 33, is modeled after an ALEC proposal, and its corporate backers are big contributors to the Republican party and legislators in Ohio.
ALEC is the corporate bill mill where state legislators and corporations meet behind closed doors to write and advocate for legislation on the environment, criminal justice, health care, and most of the other domestic issues that affect us.
The bill, the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act,” being pushed by ALEC around the country makes it a felony for protestors to trespass on energy company property, such as pipelines, refineries, and power plants.
Prompted by the well-publicized stand-off at the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline in 2016, the industry’s full-court press is working. Ten states, using ALEC’s template bill, have enacted increased criminal penalties through legislation very much like SB 33.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has extensively reported on the controversy surrounding this type of legislation, including an article last month on Wisconsin’s bill, signed by the new Democratic Governor, Tony Evers.
According to the legislature’s Office of Research and Drafting, the Ohio bill “adds a new prohibition under the offense of ‘criminal trespass’ that expressly prohibits a person, without privilege to do so, from knowingly entering or remaining on a ‘critical infrastructure facility.'”
While the offense for an individual protester is a misdemeanor – or a third-degree felony for destroying or tampering with “critical infrastructure” property – the bill would hit any organization found to be “complicit” in the violation with a fine ten times the maximum allowable fine for the protester.
Roxanne Groff, a former county commissioner in Ohio and spokesperson for the Buckeye Environmental Network, testified before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee that,
This bill was created to impose fear upon citizens who have become increasingly aware and vocal about the threats to their health, and their wellbeing as a result of the oil and gas industries’ assault on the land and people of this state by extraction of oil and gas, injection of toxic radioactive waste from this extraction and the infrastructure build outs of pipelines and gas compressor stations….
ALEC’s Grip on the Ohio Legislature
In the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the anti-protest bill was heard, four of the 10 Senators – including the chair, John Ecklund (R) – are ALEC members.
But ALEC’s influence over the bill’s prospects doesn’t stop there.
SB 33, which passed the Ohio Senate 24-8 in May, was introduced by ALEC member Frank Hoagland (R), chair of the state Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, and all 18 ALEC members in the Senate voted for it.
Indeed, the scope of ALEC’s influence in the Ohio Legislature is profound.
Eleven of the 13 state Senate committees are chaired by ALEC members.
And three of the top four state Senate GOP leaders are ALEC members – Senate President Larry Obhof, President Pro Tempore Bob Peterson, and Majority Leader Matt Huffman.
The bill is now pending in the House Public Utilities Committee, where the vice-chair and another five of the committee’s 14 GOP members are ALEC members.
When the bill gets voted out of committee in the 2020 legislative session, it will be welcomed by three of the four top House leaders who are also ALEC members – Speaker Pro Tempore, Jim Butler, and the Majority Leader, Bill Seitz, who sits on ALEC’s board.
Indeed, 23 of 61 of the Ohio state House members belong to ALEC.
Altogether, 41 of the state’s 85 GOP legislative members and five of the top eight Republican House and Senate leaders are ALEC members.
CMD lists the Ohio legislative members at alecexposed.org.
Corporate Interests Backing the Bill
Rob Eshenbaugh, a lobbyist with Capitol Advocates in Columbus, led the charge on the anti-protest bill in committee on behalf of a long list of fossil fuel, utility, chemical, transportation, and water corporations and trade associations.
A number of the SB 33 “supporters” listed in Eshenbaugh’s testimony are ALEC members, including Columbia Gas of Ohio, CSX Transportation, Dominion Energy Ohio, Duke Energy, and Marathon Petroleum Company
Eshenbaugh was previously a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and his lobbying firm represents two other ALEC corporate backers, Caterpillar, Inc. and PhRMA, the drug industry’s trade association.
A CMD analysis of Ohio’s campaign finance records shows that Marathon Petroleum has donated $24,000 to Senate President Obhoff since 2010. It also gave $25,000 to Republican party committees. Duke Energy has paid almost $10,000 for GOP golf outings and has donated $28,000 to Senate Majority Leader Huffman during his career. Utility giant Exelon, another ALEC member, has given GOP party committees $12,500 since 2010.
Fossil fuel groups ‘destroying’ climate talks: NGOs
December 7, 2019
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
Oil and gas groups were accused Saturday of seeking to influence climate talks in Madrid by paying millions in sponsorship and sending dozens of lobbyists to delay what scientists say is a necessary and rapid cut in fossil fuel use.
A day after tens of thousands marched in the Spanish capital demanding climate action, seven environmental groups raised concerns to AFP over the role of fossil fuel representatives at the COP25 summit.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as close to 1.5C as possible.
The UN’s top science panel says that 1.5C would require a radical drawdown in fossil fuel usage.
Delegates are gathered in Madrid negotiating how to implement the Paris pledges. The summit was moved at short notice after domestic unrest forced original host Chile to cancel.
Spanish energy giants Endesa and Iberdrola stepped in to sponsor the conference, which brings together more than 20,000 negotiators, scientists, NGOs and journalists from around the world.
AFP has been told that each company paid 2 million euros to be COP25 “Platinum” sponsors, affording them prominent branding and trade stalls at the event.
Endesa is one of Spain’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, producing just over 60 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent last year alone.
Iberdrola produced 24.6 million tonnes in 2018.
Neither group nor organisers confirmed the exact cost but their sponsorship of a conference designed to reach consensus on how to cut emissions drew allegations of “greenwashing” from observers.
“Bankrolling the global climate negotiations is a classic trick from the polluter’s playbook,” said Jean Su, energy director with the Center for Biological Diversity.
“For just a fraction of yearly profits, big polluters are able to wrap themselves in the branding of the COP and use this access to influence the negotiations,” added Sriram Madhusoodanan of the Corporate Accountability watchdog.
When COP25 opened on Monday, many Spaniards woke up to advertisements from Endesa splashed across the front pages of national newspapers.
An Endesa spokeswoman told AFP that it was “a marketing action” and denied greenwashing.
“Our objective is to always do better and we are accelerating our energy transition,” she said.
Iberdrola and the conference organisers did not respond to queries over sponsorship.
– ‘We respect UN rules’ –
Trade groups representing energy firms are entitled under UN rules to attend annual UNFCCC talks and inter-sessional meetings as observers.
They frequently host networking meetings or presentations and have the same status and access permits at negotiations as environmental charities.
While few oil and gas majors participate directly in UN talks, they are well represented in Madrid by the trade organisations they partner.
One such group is the International Emissions Trading Agency (IETA), which counts among its members energy giants such as BP and ENI.
It also represents Iberdrola and Endesa’s parent company Enel, and is holding a total of 74 side events during COP25.
According to an official participants list IETA has sent 141 people to Madrid — more than the entire European Union’s delegation, and larger than that of host Chile.
“IETA supports the UNFCCC’s goals and objectives for climate protection –- which are a core part of our mission,” CEO Dirk Forrister told AFP.
“We also respect UNFCCC’s rules and procedures, including its guidelines for observer participation.
“Our members observe UN climate negotiations, because they are serious about bringing business solutions to the climate challenge,” he added.
IPIECA, another trade group, has a smaller delegation in Madrid containing representatives from Chevron, ENI and Petrobras.
It did not respond to a comment request.
Unlike parallel UN processes, there is currently no protection in the UNFCCC against potential conflicts of interest between nations which need emissions slashed rapidly in order to survive, and the biggest emitters whose business plans are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Thousands of energy reps have attended climate talks since 1990.
Hoda Baraka, of 350.org, said trade organisations representing big energy risked undermining climate action.
“We’re seeing yet again how the interests of dirty energy corporations are being put before the needs of vulnerable people and the planet,” she told AFP.
“It’s just common sense that those who are causing the climate crisis need to be kept far away from the political process meant to solve it.”
UN climate change secretary Patricia Espinosa said that “everyone” needed to be involved in transition away from fossil fuels.
“There is no way we will this transformation without the energy industry, including oil and gas,” she said Friday.
– ‘No group influences decisions’ –
The UN last year said “no particular interest group influences the decision-making process” at climate talks, adding that it takes the issue of conflict of interest “very seriously”.
Yet during annual mid-session climate talks in Germany in June, AFP obtained proof that hours of discussions on the subject were omitted from the final conference record.
A collection of 47 developing nations submitted a proposal to draw up provisions to protect against conflict of interest, observers said.
The proposal was opposed by the United States, Australia and the EU among others, yet no reference of it appeared in final discussion summaries.
Another trade group present at COP25 is the Edison Electrical Institute (EEI), which represents dozens of power firms in the US and around the world.
The EEI used to belong to the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a now-disbanded fossil fuel lobby group.
Internal GCC documents compiled by the Climate Investigations Centre showed this year how the group used UN talks to further its members’ agenda.
The documents detail how the GCC pushed to influencing policymakers, including in discussions with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to tone down the links between man-made emissions and global warming.
The GCC disbanded in 2002 after growing disputes among its members over how to respond to advances in climate science, yet organisations it represented are still present at UN talks.
This includes EEI, which has sent more than 200 delegates to negotiations since 1995.
– ‘Destroying our planet’ –
“We and our members understand that addressing the impacts of climate change in the areas of mitigation and adaptation requires a global response,” an EEI spokesman told AFP.
“EEI’s member companies are leading this clean energy transformation and are making real, substantive progress.”
Environmental groups including Oil Change International, Corporate Europe Observatory, the Observatorio de Multinacionales en America Latina, and Power Shift Africa all told AFP they considered oil and gas presence at COP25 as unacceptable.
“Our hard work and determination is easily overpowered by the vast resources of the biggest polluting corporations,” said Sarah Dobson, from the UK Youth Climate Coalition.
“These companies are destroying our planet and our right to fair climate negotiations free from their influence.”
A day after tens of thousands marched in the Spanish capital demanding climate action, seven environmental groups raised concerns to AFP over the role of fossil fuel representatives at the COP25 summit.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as close to 1.5C as possible.
The UN’s top science panel says that 1.5C would require a radical drawdown in fossil fuel usage.
Delegates are gathered in Madrid negotiating how to implement the Paris pledges. The summit was moved at short notice after domestic unrest forced original host Chile to cancel.
Spanish energy giants Endesa and Iberdrola stepped in to sponsor the conference, which brings together more than 20,000 negotiators, scientists, NGOs and journalists from around the world.
AFP has been told that each company paid 2 million euros to be COP25 “Platinum” sponsors, affording them prominent branding and trade stalls at the event.
Endesa is one of Spain’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, producing just over 60 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent last year alone.
Iberdrola produced 24.6 million tonnes in 2018.
Neither group nor organisers confirmed the exact cost but their sponsorship of a conference designed to reach consensus on how to cut emissions drew allegations of “greenwashing” from observers.
“Bankrolling the global climate negotiations is a classic trick from the polluter’s playbook,” said Jean Su, energy director with the Center for Biological Diversity.
“For just a fraction of yearly profits, big polluters are able to wrap themselves in the branding of the COP and use this access to influence the negotiations,” added Sriram Madhusoodanan of the Corporate Accountability watchdog.
When COP25 opened on Monday, many Spaniards woke up to advertisements from Endesa splashed across the front pages of national newspapers.
An Endesa spokeswoman told AFP that it was “a marketing action” and denied greenwashing.
“Our objective is to always do better and we are accelerating our energy transition,” she said.
Iberdrola and the conference organisers did not respond to queries over sponsorship.
– ‘We respect UN rules’ –
Trade groups representing energy firms are entitled under UN rules to attend annual UNFCCC talks and inter-sessional meetings as observers.
They frequently host networking meetings or presentations and have the same status and access permits at negotiations as environmental charities.
While few oil and gas majors participate directly in UN talks, they are well represented in Madrid by the trade organisations they partner.
One such group is the International Emissions Trading Agency (IETA), which counts among its members energy giants such as BP and ENI.
It also represents Iberdrola and Endesa’s parent company Enel, and is holding a total of 74 side events during COP25.
According to an official participants list IETA has sent 141 people to Madrid — more than the entire European Union’s delegation, and larger than that of host Chile.
“IETA supports the UNFCCC’s goals and objectives for climate protection –- which are a core part of our mission,” CEO Dirk Forrister told AFP.
“We also respect UNFCCC’s rules and procedures, including its guidelines for observer participation.
“Our members observe UN climate negotiations, because they are serious about bringing business solutions to the climate challenge,” he added.
IPIECA, another trade group, has a smaller delegation in Madrid containing representatives from Chevron, ENI and Petrobras.
It did not respond to a comment request.
Unlike parallel UN processes, there is currently no protection in the UNFCCC against potential conflicts of interest between nations which need emissions slashed rapidly in order to survive, and the biggest emitters whose business plans are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Thousands of energy reps have attended climate talks since 1990.
Hoda Baraka, of 350.org, said trade organisations representing big energy risked undermining climate action.
“We’re seeing yet again how the interests of dirty energy corporations are being put before the needs of vulnerable people and the planet,” she told AFP.
“It’s just common sense that those who are causing the climate crisis need to be kept far away from the political process meant to solve it.”
UN climate change secretary Patricia Espinosa said that “everyone” needed to be involved in transition away from fossil fuels.
“There is no way we will this transformation without the energy industry, including oil and gas,” she said Friday.
– ‘No group influences decisions’ –
The UN last year said “no particular interest group influences the decision-making process” at climate talks, adding that it takes the issue of conflict of interest “very seriously”.
Yet during annual mid-session climate talks in Germany in June, AFP obtained proof that hours of discussions on the subject were omitted from the final conference record.
A collection of 47 developing nations submitted a proposal to draw up provisions to protect against conflict of interest, observers said.
The proposal was opposed by the United States, Australia and the EU among others, yet no reference of it appeared in final discussion summaries.
Another trade group present at COP25 is the Edison Electrical Institute (EEI), which represents dozens of power firms in the US and around the world.
The EEI used to belong to the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a now-disbanded fossil fuel lobby group.
Internal GCC documents compiled by the Climate Investigations Centre showed this year how the group used UN talks to further its members’ agenda.
The documents detail how the GCC pushed to influencing policymakers, including in discussions with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to tone down the links between man-made emissions and global warming.
The GCC disbanded in 2002 after growing disputes among its members over how to respond to advances in climate science, yet organisations it represented are still present at UN talks.
This includes EEI, which has sent more than 200 delegates to negotiations since 1995.
– ‘Destroying our planet’ –
“We and our members understand that addressing the impacts of climate change in the areas of mitigation and adaptation requires a global response,” an EEI spokesman told AFP.
“EEI’s member companies are leading this clean energy transformation and are making real, substantive progress.”
Environmental groups including Oil Change International, Corporate Europe Observatory, the Observatorio de Multinacionales en America Latina, and Power Shift Africa all told AFP they considered oil and gas presence at COP25 as unacceptable.
“Our hard work and determination is easily overpowered by the vast resources of the biggest polluting corporations,” said Sarah Dobson, from the UK Youth Climate Coalition.
“These companies are destroying our planet and our right to fair climate negotiations free from their influence.”
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.”
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.
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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