welcome to oil
explore how the resource industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
oct 20, 2019
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those
woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and
enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau
*articles*
*Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Dark Money Is Pouring in To Protect the “Worst Energy Policy in the Country”
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*There Is No Economic Justification for Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*RADICAL REPUBLICANS ON ENERGY PANEL PUSH GIANT ALASKA GAS PIPELINE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UNMASKED: NEW PLANNED ALASKA PIPELINE COULD SPEW 3.5 BILLION CUBIC FEET OF GAS — PER DAY(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Low-cost fracking offers boon to oil producers, headaches for suppliers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there (ARTICLE BELOW)
*North Dakota may be hiding an oil spill larger than the Exxon Valdez
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How the world’s dirtiest industries have learned to pollute our politics
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Just 10% of fossil fuel subsidy cash 'could pay for green transition'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*West Virginia Bets Big on Plastics, and on Backing of Trump Administration
(EXCERPT BELOW)
*Current Investigation of ExxonMobil Could Spur Broader Climate Action
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*For the first time ever renewables beat coal in the US
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Renewables now cheaper than new coal or gas ‘across two-thirds of the world’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: Mobil sought to fight environmental regulation, documents show
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ARE EXXONMOBIL EXECS THE MOST EVIL PEOPLE IN THE 200,000-YEAR HISTORY OF HUMANITY?(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Utilities rush for the exit door on coal — and there's nothing Trump can do to stop them
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Mining Companies Use Excessive Legal Powers to Gamble With Latin American Lives
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*STUDY: U.S. FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES EXCEED PENTAGON SPENDING
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*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)
Our Tax System Rewards Polluters
by Charlie Simmons | the smirking chimp
October 20, 2019 - 5:24am
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General Assembly in New York: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.”
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
As a retired businessman and engineer, I can’t help but look at Greta with admiration. Yet I shudder to think that my generation has abdicated our duties to such an extent that we are leaving the mess of climate change on the shoulders of high schoolers.
Lawmakers and business leaders in my generation have a responsibility to act today to mend our planet before these young people have to inherit it. Some of the most straightforward, yet least discussed solutions, lie in our tax system.
Unfortunately, the man-made crisis of climate change is made worse by our man-made tax system. In 2018, many of the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates.
These shocking facts, uncovered by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, flew under the radar of mainstream media.
In total, ITEP found that at least 60 of the biggest American corporations didn’t pay a cent in federal taxes in 2018. Of those, 22 are power utilities and oil and gas corporations, including famous names such as Chevron,
Halliburton, and Occidental Petroleum — and that was only in 2018.
How is this possible?
In part, it’s because there are a mind-boggling number of tax incentives offered to fossil fuel companies. There are deductions for domestic fossil fuel production, tax credits for vague “intangible drilling costs,” and deferred federal tax payments.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated that these provisions amounted to $4.76 billion per year given out to fossil fuel companies from the federal government.
That was before GOP corporate tax cuts worsened the problem in 2017 by slashing the industry’s already low tax rate and offering a new deduction for capital expenditures — while simultaneously opening up half a million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.
Companies like Chevron will tell you they’re committed to preventing climate change, pointing to their $100 million pledge to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-led organization allegedly dedicated to fighting climate change.
This is a paltry amount compared to the $4.5 billion in profit they made in 2018 — or even to the $955 million they avoided in taxes thanks to the Republican tax cuts. Chevron received a $181 million rebate on Tax Day.
Essentially, American taxpayers lost $955 million, funded a $100 million PR stunt, and paid $81 million directly to the corporation to fund more drilling and exploration our planet literally cannot afford. Chevron’s not unique, either — Occidental did the same thing.
While the current administration lets fossil fuel companies raid America’s natural resources and its coffers, the rest of us can’t sit back and wait for change. Greta certainly isn’t, and she’s only 16.
Tax incentives should encourage better behavior from corporations, not pay polluters to profit from environmental degradation.
Forcing our elected officials and 2020 candidates to introduce incentives for fixing climate change — and remove those that accelerate it — should be on the top of the agenda. our economy and the health of our environment ultimately go hand-in-hand, and it’s long past time our tax system reflected that.
the polluters
destroying the earth for profit!!!
World's top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investments
Data reveals crucial role of BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard in climate crisis
by Patrick Greenfield - the guardian
Sat 12 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
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The world’s three largest money managers have built a combined $300bn fossil fuel investment portfolio using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions, the Guardian can reveal.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement, financial data shows.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change, the analysis reveals.
The investment rise is driven by the success in the last decade of tracker funds that use algorithms to follow major stock exchange indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.
The Guardian has worked with the thinktank InfluenceMap and the business data specialists ProxyInsight to analyse the role played by asset managers in the financing and management of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.
Figures compiled by InfluenceMap show how Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – known as the big three – have become crucial climate actors in the financial world. They are the largest money managers in the $74tn industry.
According to an analysis of the data, their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016.
This means they are now the largest investors in public oil, gas and coal companies, managing funds for large pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies.
While asset managers do not own the companies in which they invest, they often exercise shareholders rights on behalf of clients to vote on board members and company policy issues.
Disclosures for publicly available company reports show that from 2015 to 2019 Vanguard and BlackRock used their votes to frequently oppose efforts to improve climate-related financial disclosures.
The investigation by the Guardian has found:
- Vanguard ($161.1bn), BlackRock ($87.3bn) and State Street ($38.3bn) oversee a combined $286.7bn of shares in oil, coal and gas companies through 1,712 funds. Their total combined portfolio is likely to be higher as the calculation excludes direct holdings and non-listed fund holdings.
- The potential CO2 emissions from the investments have increased from 10.593 gigatonnes (Gt) to 14.283Gt since the Paris agreement, equivalent to 38% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions last year.
- BlackRock and Vanguard opposed or abstained on more than 80% of climate-related motions at FTSE 100 and S&P 500 fossil fuel companies between 2015 and 2019, according to data provided by ProxyInsight.
- The big three are among a number of asset managers that offer “climate-friendly” and “sustainable” investment funds that have substantial holdings in fossil fuel companies.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street did not challenge the findings.
They told the Guardian they prioritised private engagements with company boards, where the climate crisis was regularly discussed. They said they had increased the size of their teams responsible for investment stewardship, opting to use their votes as a final resort.
Vanguard said it neither managed the companies in which it invested nor sought to influence their business strategy. “As a steward of lifetime savings for more than 20 million people around the world, and a practically permanent investor in more than 10,000 companies, Vanguard is concerned about the long-term impact of climate risk,” a spokesman said.
“While voting at shareholder meetings is important … it is only one part of the larger corporate governance process. We regularly engage with companies on our shareholders’ behalf and believe that engagement and broader advocacy, in addition to voting, can effect meaningful changes that generate long-term value for all shareholders.”
BlackRock said it “offers investors a wide range of environmentally sustainable investment options … [and] is also a leading investor in renewable power generation globally. Our award-winning climate research helps investors understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on their portfolios.”
State Street said: “If an investor wants to buy an ETF [exchange-traded fund] that tracks the FTSE 100, we would purchase the shares (proportionately) of all the companies in that FTSE 100 index in order to meet the objective of that strategy. That will today undoubtedly include energy companies.
“We do not proactively determine whether to exclude a particular company or sector since it would be inconsistent with the stated ETF objective. If an investor did want a strategy that considered climate issues or other ESG [environmental, social and governance] factors, that would be a different product with a different index; we can provide that too.”
Asset managers are increasingly finding themselves at the heart of social and environmental issues, and corporate governance experts have raised concerns about conflicts of interest in their business models.
Campaigners are demanding asset managers vote out company directors who are not deemed to be taking sufficient action.
In June, the London-based Legal & General, formerly a top 20 investor in ExxonMobil, announced it was selling a $300m stake in the company and would use remaining shares to vote against the chief executive, Darren Woods.
But environmental shareholder proposals face increasing challenges from the management of fossil fuel companies, which are being sustained by the American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC declined to comment.
In April, ExxonMobil shareholders were denied a vote on whether the company should set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the SEC, which called the proposal an attempt to “micromanage” the company.
Data for the 2019 season of annual general meetings for shareholders, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services, shows that only a quarter of proposals made it to a vote at companies in the US, with 79 of the 105 motions either withdrawn or omitted.
Dark Money Is Pouring in To Protect the “Worst Energy Policy in the Country”
In Ohio, the fight over a nuclear and coal bailout is getting weirder by the day.
REBECCA LEBER - mother jones Reporter
10/10/19
This summer, Ohio’s beleaguered nuclear and coal plants got a major gift in the promise of a big bailout. Now, the fight over that promise has escalated into one of the most dramatic and bizarre showdowns of the 2020 election cycle.
It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law—called HB6—that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.
Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal—a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”
But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects—FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray—they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.
A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.
As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.
In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.
In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:
The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.
While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.
The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.
FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”
Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.
If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass—making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.
Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,” Stokes says.
Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.
It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law—called HB6—that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.
Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal—a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”
But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects—FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray—they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.
A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.
As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.
In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.
In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:
- Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs bought $10,000 in ads to target Facebook users, directing them to remove their signatures from the petition supporting the referendum. In the ads, it claims that repealing the law would “kill Ohio clean energy jobs.”
- Generation Now, a group that does not disclose its donors, hired the petition firm FieldWorks, which has traditionally worked with Democratic clients. The referendum campaign claims that FieldWorks staff have harassed and allegedly paid off their workers, and firms allegedly deploying “petition blockers” to discourage people from signing onto the referendum. In one case, a confrontation between Fieldworks employees and petition workers escalated to the point where the police were called. Generation Now has rejected those allegations as “vague and unsubstantiated.” Generation Now spokesperson Curtis Steiner added that “Fieldworks has been operating in a very professional manner.” He noted that the employee associated with the incident was dismissed.
- Ohioans for Energy Security has flooded local networks with a 60-second ad in which a narrator warns viewers that signing the referendum petition would help the Chinese government, as it’s “quietly invading our American electric grid.”
The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.
While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.
The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.
FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”
Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.
If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass—making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.
Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,” Stokes says.
Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.
OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
There Is No Economic Justification for Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge
BY - Dean Baker, Truthout
PUBLISHED September 30, 2019
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its final environmental impact study on plans to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). While the study noted environmental risks, it gave the go-ahead for drilling in this incredibly sensitive area.
This summer, my small town of Kanab, Utah, agreed to sell water to a frac sand mine and processing plant that would be operating just over 10 miles from Zion National Park. The county planning commission also approved a conditional use permit that would allow the mine to go forward.
What both of these actions have in common is that they are gratuitous acts of environmental destruction. This is not a story of tough trade-offs between the environment and the economy.
Those do exist in the world. It would be great for the environment to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent tomorrow, but that would devastate the economy, costing many jobs. But neither drilling in the ANWR nor frac sand mining near Zion will provide any great benefit to the economy. Nor would we suffer much, if any, negative economic impact by stopping these plans. They damage treasured landscapes for no good reason.
In the case of the ANWR, the area targeted by the oil and gas industry is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Millions of caribou migrate over the terrain every year. The area is home to grizzly bears, polar bears, the arctic fox and many other rare animals. It is very sensitive terrain, with extreme temperatures. Damage from an oil spill could last for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The economic benefits of allowing drilling in this area are trivial. At best, it will be a drop in the bucket for the world’s supply of oil. The George W. Bush administration tried to push drilling in the Refuge through Congress in the middle of the 2001 recession, with claims that it would lead to up 750,000 jobs.
A more serious analysis showed that, even accepting the methodology used by drilling proponents, a more plausible figure would be in the neighborhood of 50,000 jobs. This is just over 0.03 percent of total employment or approximately equal to the number of jobs generated in a typical week.
Similarly, the proposed frac sand mine near Zion will at best add a trivial number of jobs in the industry. Similar mines in Wisconsin employ on average 35 workers at a time.
In addition, frac sand is not a commodity in short supply. Industry analysts all complain about a glut in the industry, with the existing mines barely able to cover operating costs at current prices. This leaves them little prospect of recovering their capital expenditures in building a plant, which can be in the neighborhood of $75 million.
For a project of dubious profitability and questionable need (even if we accept that fracking is good), local politicians are prepared to jeopardize the extraordinary terrain on the outskirts of Zion. The mining claims of the frac sand company Southern Red Sands border the rims of Peekaboo Slot Canyon, Diana’s Throne and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
In fact, in the case of the frac sand mine, the economics almost certainly go the other way. The economy of the immediate area is almost entirely dependent on tourism and an influx of retirees who come for the area’s natural beauty. Both sources of income will almost certainly take a huge hit with a sand frac mine operating just above Kanab.
In both cases, what we are seeing is gratuitous destruction of environmental treasures, with people in power taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations.
Clearly, there are companies that expect to profit from this degradation of the environment, but they are not the driving force here. There just is not that much money at stake. Rather, people in power are spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever.
This summer, my small town of Kanab, Utah, agreed to sell water to a frac sand mine and processing plant that would be operating just over 10 miles from Zion National Park. The county planning commission also approved a conditional use permit that would allow the mine to go forward.
What both of these actions have in common is that they are gratuitous acts of environmental destruction. This is not a story of tough trade-offs between the environment and the economy.
Those do exist in the world. It would be great for the environment to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent tomorrow, but that would devastate the economy, costing many jobs. But neither drilling in the ANWR nor frac sand mining near Zion will provide any great benefit to the economy. Nor would we suffer much, if any, negative economic impact by stopping these plans. They damage treasured landscapes for no good reason.
In the case of the ANWR, the area targeted by the oil and gas industry is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Millions of caribou migrate over the terrain every year. The area is home to grizzly bears, polar bears, the arctic fox and many other rare animals. It is very sensitive terrain, with extreme temperatures. Damage from an oil spill could last for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The economic benefits of allowing drilling in this area are trivial. At best, it will be a drop in the bucket for the world’s supply of oil. The George W. Bush administration tried to push drilling in the Refuge through Congress in the middle of the 2001 recession, with claims that it would lead to up 750,000 jobs.
A more serious analysis showed that, even accepting the methodology used by drilling proponents, a more plausible figure would be in the neighborhood of 50,000 jobs. This is just over 0.03 percent of total employment or approximately equal to the number of jobs generated in a typical week.
Similarly, the proposed frac sand mine near Zion will at best add a trivial number of jobs in the industry. Similar mines in Wisconsin employ on average 35 workers at a time.
In addition, frac sand is not a commodity in short supply. Industry analysts all complain about a glut in the industry, with the existing mines barely able to cover operating costs at current prices. This leaves them little prospect of recovering their capital expenditures in building a plant, which can be in the neighborhood of $75 million.
For a project of dubious profitability and questionable need (even if we accept that fracking is good), local politicians are prepared to jeopardize the extraordinary terrain on the outskirts of Zion. The mining claims of the frac sand company Southern Red Sands border the rims of Peekaboo Slot Canyon, Diana’s Throne and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
In fact, in the case of the frac sand mine, the economics almost certainly go the other way. The economy of the immediate area is almost entirely dependent on tourism and an influx of retirees who come for the area’s natural beauty. Both sources of income will almost certainly take a huge hit with a sand frac mine operating just above Kanab.
In both cases, what we are seeing is gratuitous destruction of environmental treasures, with people in power taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations.
Clearly, there are companies that expect to profit from this degradation of the environment, but they are not the driving force here. There just is not that much money at stake. Rather, people in power are spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever.
Radical Republicans On Energy Panel Push Giant Alaska Gas Pipeline
800-Mile, $43-Billion Project Is Intended to Send Liquified Natural Gas To China
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
9/12/19
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
Unmasked: New planned Alaska pipeline could spew 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas — per day
September 11, 2019
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory
800-Mile, $43-Billion Project Is Intended to Send Liquified Natural Gas To China
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp.fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.
“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.
BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp.fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.
Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas
The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.
“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”
A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.
Threatened Caribou Herd
The project would be in the middle of the range of the Central Arctic caribou herd which roams the central region of northern Alaska and could affect the caribou migration. The size of the herd peaked in 2010 at 70,000 animals. Since the mid-1990s, the size of caribou herds in the Alaska-Canada region has declined by 56%.
Alaska natives who depend on caribou and other animals for food, gather berries, and fish could also be harmed by the project, according to the study.
The pipeline would cross or pass near recreation areas including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Denali National Park and Preserve, George Parks Highway, Iditarod National Historic Trail, Dalton Highway Scenic Byway and Denali State Park.
The pipeline would contribute as much to global warming each year as 21 coal-fired power plants. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet since record-keeping began in 1880. In Alaska, sea ice completely melted for the first time in recorded history.
Trump has stacked the regulatory commission with appointees like Bernard McNamee who helped craft a proposal to provide subsidies to uneconomic coal plants. The commission chair, former Mitch McConnell aide Neil Chatterjee has called exports of liquified natural gas “freedom gas” that “is good for the American people, our allies abroad & for U.S. geopolitical interests.”
modernizing the environment's destruction!!!
Low-cost fracking offers boon to oil producers, headaches for suppliers
Liz Hampton - reuters
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
SMILEY, Texas (Reuters) - At a dusty drilling site east of San Antonio, shale producer EOG Resources Inc recently completed its latest well using a new technology developed by a small services firm that promises to slash the cost of each by $200,000.
The technology, called electric fracking and powered by natural gas from EOG’s own wells instead of costly diesel fuel, shows how shale producers keep finding new ways to cut costs in the face of pressures to improve their returns.
E-frac, as the new technology is called, is being adopted by EOG, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and others because of its potential to lower costs, reduce air pollution and operate much quieter than conventional diesel-powered frac fleets. Investment bank Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co analyst George O’Leary estimates e-fracs could lop off up to $350,000 from the cost of shale wells that run $6 million to $8 million apiece.
But these systems can cost oilfield service companies up to twice as much to build compared to conventional frac fleets. A rapid uptake could worsen the economics for a sector already cutting staff and idling equipment as oil producers pare their spending. That leaves this potentially breakthrough technology to small providers without the means to fully exploit it.
ONE-SIDED SAVINGS Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton Co, the top U.S. provider of fracking services, said his firm has tested the technology but has no desire to promote it.
“Halliburton will be really slow around frac,” Miller said, referring to the costs of updating diesel systems to electric. Converting the industry’s 500 frac fleets would cost $30 billion, he estimated, too steep a price for oilfield firms, he said.
He recently advised an oil producer interested in the technology that the benefits of deploying e-fracs “work for you, they don’t work for us,” he said at Barclays energy conference this month.
Halliburton, Schlumberger NV and others have idled scores of diesel-powered fleets this year as producers cut spending due to flat to lower oil and gas prices. Consultancy Primary Vision estimates the number of active fleets in the U.S. fell 19% since April to around 390.
Halliburton cut 8% of its North American workforce and reported second-quarter profit fell 85% over the year-ago period in part because of equipment writedowns and severance costs due to weak demand for its frac service.
“Every week that goes by I get more and more negative about e-frac due to the harsh imbalance between the benefits achieved by the oil company and the costs incurred by the service company,” said Richard Spears, a consultant to top oilfield services suppliers.
Schlumberger paid $430 million in late 2017 to acquire a diesel-powered frac fleet from rival Weatherford International, hoping to expand shale services. A spokesperson declined to comment on e-frac.
This month newly-named CEO Olivier Le Peuch disclosed plans to write down investments that were “based on a much higher activity outlook with the ambition of achieving economies of scale.”
“HARD TO JUSTIFY”
E-frac supplier Evolution Well Services, which supplied the equipment and crew for EOG’s Eagle Ford shale operation, is one of a handful of smaller oilfield firms pioneering the systems.
Evolution operates six e-frac fleets - mobile collections of high-pressure pumps powered by gas turbine generators - and plans to roll out a seventh next year. U.S. Well Services, another e-frac provider, has agreements with Apache Corp and Shell. Conventional pressure pumper ProPetro Holding Corp also announced plans to bring a handful of e-frac fleets to the market.
“We’d kind of would like to” build more systems without firm customer contracts, said Ben Bodishbaugh, CEO of Evolution, the only purely e-frac provider in North America. “But in this market it’s hard to justify,” he said.
The reason: e-frac fleets can cost up to $60 million apiece because they rely on pricey gas turbines similar to those that run utilities to generate electricity, compared with as little as $30 million for a diesel-motor powered fleet. Evolution would not say how much its fleets cost, but noted it is below $60 million.
“It’s a bad time for service companies to be ramping up very capital intensive service offerings,” said Josh Young, chief investment officer with energy investor Bison Interests. “People always feel pressure to invest in the next new things, but sometimes you shouldn’t be investing in any of the things.”
Companies like Evolution and U.S. Well Services that already have e-frac fleets would be winners if the technology takes off, analysts from investment banker Tudor Pickering Holt & Co predict. E-frac accounts for about 3% of active fleets, and could reach between 25% and 33% in the next five years, Tudor estimated.
EOG began testing Evolution’s gear in late 2016, and signed a multi-year agreement about six months later. The shale company, well known for its use of cutting edge technology, runs four of Evolution’s fleets and plans to add a fifth next year.
The agreement with Evolution “is an example of how we continue to find innovative solutions to both reduce our environmental footprint and improve the profitability of our business,” said Billy Helms, EOG’s chief operating officer. EOG is among the handful of top shale producers that generate more cash than they consume in drilling and shareholder dividends.
NO SOOT, LESS NOISE
At its Smiley, Texas, oil and gas well site, EOG’s crew carried on casual conversations despite the whir of e-frac pumps. No one wears ear protection, which is common at conventional diesel fleets, and the towering white silos holding frac sand were gleaming during a visit in August. At a conventional frac site just up the road, the towers were black from diesel exhaust.
Evolution’s Bodishbaugh said some oil and gas firms see less polluting e-frac as improving their standing with investors who rate environmental, social and governance (ESG) attributes in their investments.
“I’d say this year we’ve probably had more inbounds calls on the emissions profile than the economic savings,” he said.
Paul Mecray III, a managing director for investment firm Tower Bridge Advisors who follows major service companies, said e-frac will only catch on if overall demand for oilfield services recovers.
“While it may be a good thing longer term, I think it will take a lot longer to catch on than people think,” he said.
The technology, called electric fracking and powered by natural gas from EOG’s own wells instead of costly diesel fuel, shows how shale producers keep finding new ways to cut costs in the face of pressures to improve their returns.
E-frac, as the new technology is called, is being adopted by EOG, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and others because of its potential to lower costs, reduce air pollution and operate much quieter than conventional diesel-powered frac fleets. Investment bank Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co analyst George O’Leary estimates e-fracs could lop off up to $350,000 from the cost of shale wells that run $6 million to $8 million apiece.
But these systems can cost oilfield service companies up to twice as much to build compared to conventional frac fleets. A rapid uptake could worsen the economics for a sector already cutting staff and idling equipment as oil producers pare their spending. That leaves this potentially breakthrough technology to small providers without the means to fully exploit it.
ONE-SIDED SAVINGS Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton Co, the top U.S. provider of fracking services, said his firm has tested the technology but has no desire to promote it.
“Halliburton will be really slow around frac,” Miller said, referring to the costs of updating diesel systems to electric. Converting the industry’s 500 frac fleets would cost $30 billion, he estimated, too steep a price for oilfield firms, he said.
He recently advised an oil producer interested in the technology that the benefits of deploying e-fracs “work for you, they don’t work for us,” he said at Barclays energy conference this month.
Halliburton, Schlumberger NV and others have idled scores of diesel-powered fleets this year as producers cut spending due to flat to lower oil and gas prices. Consultancy Primary Vision estimates the number of active fleets in the U.S. fell 19% since April to around 390.
Halliburton cut 8% of its North American workforce and reported second-quarter profit fell 85% over the year-ago period in part because of equipment writedowns and severance costs due to weak demand for its frac service.
“Every week that goes by I get more and more negative about e-frac due to the harsh imbalance between the benefits achieved by the oil company and the costs incurred by the service company,” said Richard Spears, a consultant to top oilfield services suppliers.
Schlumberger paid $430 million in late 2017 to acquire a diesel-powered frac fleet from rival Weatherford International, hoping to expand shale services. A spokesperson declined to comment on e-frac.
This month newly-named CEO Olivier Le Peuch disclosed plans to write down investments that were “based on a much higher activity outlook with the ambition of achieving economies of scale.”
“HARD TO JUSTIFY”
E-frac supplier Evolution Well Services, which supplied the equipment and crew for EOG’s Eagle Ford shale operation, is one of a handful of smaller oilfield firms pioneering the systems.
Evolution operates six e-frac fleets - mobile collections of high-pressure pumps powered by gas turbine generators - and plans to roll out a seventh next year. U.S. Well Services, another e-frac provider, has agreements with Apache Corp and Shell. Conventional pressure pumper ProPetro Holding Corp also announced plans to bring a handful of e-frac fleets to the market.
“We’d kind of would like to” build more systems without firm customer contracts, said Ben Bodishbaugh, CEO of Evolution, the only purely e-frac provider in North America. “But in this market it’s hard to justify,” he said.
The reason: e-frac fleets can cost up to $60 million apiece because they rely on pricey gas turbines similar to those that run utilities to generate electricity, compared with as little as $30 million for a diesel-motor powered fleet. Evolution would not say how much its fleets cost, but noted it is below $60 million.
“It’s a bad time for service companies to be ramping up very capital intensive service offerings,” said Josh Young, chief investment officer with energy investor Bison Interests. “People always feel pressure to invest in the next new things, but sometimes you shouldn’t be investing in any of the things.”
Companies like Evolution and U.S. Well Services that already have e-frac fleets would be winners if the technology takes off, analysts from investment banker Tudor Pickering Holt & Co predict. E-frac accounts for about 3% of active fleets, and could reach between 25% and 33% in the next five years, Tudor estimated.
EOG began testing Evolution’s gear in late 2016, and signed a multi-year agreement about six months later. The shale company, well known for its use of cutting edge technology, runs four of Evolution’s fleets and plans to add a fifth next year.
The agreement with Evolution “is an example of how we continue to find innovative solutions to both reduce our environmental footprint and improve the profitability of our business,” said Billy Helms, EOG’s chief operating officer. EOG is among the handful of top shale producers that generate more cash than they consume in drilling and shareholder dividends.
NO SOOT, LESS NOISE
At its Smiley, Texas, oil and gas well site, EOG’s crew carried on casual conversations despite the whir of e-frac pumps. No one wears ear protection, which is common at conventional diesel fleets, and the towering white silos holding frac sand were gleaming during a visit in August. At a conventional frac site just up the road, the towers were black from diesel exhaust.
Evolution’s Bodishbaugh said some oil and gas firms see less polluting e-frac as improving their standing with investors who rate environmental, social and governance (ESG) attributes in their investments.
“I’d say this year we’ve probably had more inbounds calls on the emissions profile than the economic savings,” he said.
Paul Mecray III, a managing director for investment firm Tower Bridge Advisors who follows major service companies, said e-frac will only catch on if overall demand for oilfield services recovers.
“While it may be a good thing longer term, I think it will take a lot longer to catch on than people think,” he said.
Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there
Juliet Eilperin, Steven Mufson - washington post - msn.com
9/4/19
Last summer, Scott Pruitt left his job heading the Environmental Protection Agency and within a few months had started consulting for coal magnate Joseph W. Craft III. Three weeks after leaving the Interior Department, energy counselor Vincent DeVito joined Cox Oil Offshore, which operates in the Gulf of Mexico, as its executive vice president and general counsel. Now, Joe Balash — who oversaw oil and gas drilling on federal lands before resigning from Interior on Friday — is joining a foreign oil company that’s expanding operations on Alaska’s North Slope.
Balash, who had served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management for nearly two years, confirmed in a phone interview Tuesday night that he will begin working for the Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search, which is developing one of Alaska’s largest oil prospects in years.
The company is drilling on state lands that lie nearby — but not inside — two federal reserves where the Trump administration is pushing to increase oil and gas development: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. During his time at Interior, Balash oversaw the department’s work to hold lease sales on the coastal plain of the 19.3 million-acre refuge and to expand drilling on the 22.8 million-acre reserve to the west of the refuge. Both sites are home to large numbers of migratory birds as well as caribou, polar bears and other wildlife.
Balash declined to disclose his specific role and said that while he would oversee employees who would work with the federal government on energy policy, he would abide by the Trump ethics pledge barring appointees from lobbying their former agencies for five years.
“I’ll supervise those who do,” he said, referring to Oil Search staffers with business before the federal government, “but I have a ton of restrictions dealing with the Department of Interior. Most of Oil Search’s properties are state lands. There isn’t really the federal nexus.”
Oil Search has been expanding aggressively in Alaska, where it says it has acquired more than 700 million barrels of crude reserves. In May, the company received the go-ahead from the Army Corps of Engineers and it plans to ramp up production operations this year and over the winter.
Balash noted that Interior “was not even a cooperating agency” in the decision to grant Oil Search the recent permit under the Clean Water Act.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview that the fact that Balash has been working to make more land available for exploration near Oil Search’s ongoing development raises concerns.
“If this ends up being legal, it’s further confirmation to me that our laws are simply inadequate,” Brian said. “It is hard to have confidence that decisions he was making while he was working for the taxpayers were not impacted by his aspirations or hopes to go work for a company that was materially affected by his work.”
Asked about Balash’s job plans last week, neither Oil Search nor Interior would comment on the matter.
“As a matter of policy, I’m unable to comment on business rumors,” Oil Search spokeswoman Amy Burnett said in an email.
Balash has extensive experience in Alaska state politics. He served as the deputy commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources and ran the agency on an acting basis for just over a year, before becoming chief of staff for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). He joined Interior in December 2017.
Earlier, Balash served in the governor’s office as a special assistant on energy and natural resource development. And prior to that, he worked on the joint legislative budget and audit committee and served as chief of staff to the state Senate president. Balash also attended high school in Fairbanks.
Ethics experts said that regardless of the Alaskan’s job description, his decision to join an oil company raises potential conflict of interest issues, although part of it would depend on the nature of his negotiations with the firm before he left public office.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 208, a federal official is barred “from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of” his spouse, children and “a person with whom he is negotiating for or has an arrangement concerning prospective employment.”
“At the point Balash began discussing employment opportunities with Oil Search, he was prohibited from personally and substantially participating in any particular matter that would affect Oil Search’s financial interests,” said Brendan Fischer, federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center.
Oil Search has not bid on federal leases in Alaska, although officials from the firm met with Balash multiple times while he served as assistant secretary, according to his public calendar. On Jan. 10, 2018, he had a meeting classified as a video call with Oil Search executives — including its Alaska business unit president, Keiran Wulff — described as a “meet and greet” in his calendar notes.
“Oil Search is slated to be a large player in Alaska Oil development,” the notes read. “Further, AK is their first play in the USA. Anchorage is slated to be their North American headquarters.”
On April 17, 2018, Balash had a video call with Wulff. Nearly seven months later, Balash took part in what his calendar described as an “Oil Search Presentation/Update.”
This June, both Balash and Wulff appeared as featured speakers during a membership luncheon of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage.
Established in 1929, Oil Search owns oil production and 29 percent of a large liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the world’s 11th-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Oil Search and its partner ExxonMobil are planning to substantially enlarge LNG exports.
The company has also expanded quickly in Alaska. In 2018, it bought oil assets from two private companies and later exercised $450 million of options to buy other nearby fields. On May 14, it received Army Corps of Engineers approval to develop the Nanushuk field in the Pikka Unit, which is on state- and Native Alaskan-owned land on the North Slope. The company says the project could eventually produce 120,000 barrels a day.
“Alaska provides us with world class oil assets with significant upside,” the company said in a report. It also said that it was “building an independent, highly experienced management team to develop and operate our Alaskan assets.”
Balash has consistently argued in favor of curbing federal restrictions on energy development in Alaska, to help boost the state’s economy. In an interview this summer, Balash said he was committed to working with Alaska natives on the North Slope to ensure that the region could expand energy exploration in a way that would improve people’s lives there.
“And so, you know, more than anything, I want to help empower the people who live there to manage those resources in a cooperative way with the federal government,” he said.
Balash, who had served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management for nearly two years, confirmed in a phone interview Tuesday night that he will begin working for the Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search, which is developing one of Alaska’s largest oil prospects in years.
The company is drilling on state lands that lie nearby — but not inside — two federal reserves where the Trump administration is pushing to increase oil and gas development: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. During his time at Interior, Balash oversaw the department’s work to hold lease sales on the coastal plain of the 19.3 million-acre refuge and to expand drilling on the 22.8 million-acre reserve to the west of the refuge. Both sites are home to large numbers of migratory birds as well as caribou, polar bears and other wildlife.
Balash declined to disclose his specific role and said that while he would oversee employees who would work with the federal government on energy policy, he would abide by the Trump ethics pledge barring appointees from lobbying their former agencies for five years.
“I’ll supervise those who do,” he said, referring to Oil Search staffers with business before the federal government, “but I have a ton of restrictions dealing with the Department of Interior. Most of Oil Search’s properties are state lands. There isn’t really the federal nexus.”
Oil Search has been expanding aggressively in Alaska, where it says it has acquired more than 700 million barrels of crude reserves. In May, the company received the go-ahead from the Army Corps of Engineers and it plans to ramp up production operations this year and over the winter.
Balash noted that Interior “was not even a cooperating agency” in the decision to grant Oil Search the recent permit under the Clean Water Act.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview that the fact that Balash has been working to make more land available for exploration near Oil Search’s ongoing development raises concerns.
“If this ends up being legal, it’s further confirmation to me that our laws are simply inadequate,” Brian said. “It is hard to have confidence that decisions he was making while he was working for the taxpayers were not impacted by his aspirations or hopes to go work for a company that was materially affected by his work.”
Asked about Balash’s job plans last week, neither Oil Search nor Interior would comment on the matter.
“As a matter of policy, I’m unable to comment on business rumors,” Oil Search spokeswoman Amy Burnett said in an email.
Balash has extensive experience in Alaska state politics. He served as the deputy commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources and ran the agency on an acting basis for just over a year, before becoming chief of staff for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). He joined Interior in December 2017.
Earlier, Balash served in the governor’s office as a special assistant on energy and natural resource development. And prior to that, he worked on the joint legislative budget and audit committee and served as chief of staff to the state Senate president. Balash also attended high school in Fairbanks.
Ethics experts said that regardless of the Alaskan’s job description, his decision to join an oil company raises potential conflict of interest issues, although part of it would depend on the nature of his negotiations with the firm before he left public office.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 208, a federal official is barred “from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of” his spouse, children and “a person with whom he is negotiating for or has an arrangement concerning prospective employment.”
“At the point Balash began discussing employment opportunities with Oil Search, he was prohibited from personally and substantially participating in any particular matter that would affect Oil Search’s financial interests,” said Brendan Fischer, federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center.
Oil Search has not bid on federal leases in Alaska, although officials from the firm met with Balash multiple times while he served as assistant secretary, according to his public calendar. On Jan. 10, 2018, he had a meeting classified as a video call with Oil Search executives — including its Alaska business unit president, Keiran Wulff — described as a “meet and greet” in his calendar notes.
“Oil Search is slated to be a large player in Alaska Oil development,” the notes read. “Further, AK is their first play in the USA. Anchorage is slated to be their North American headquarters.”
On April 17, 2018, Balash had a video call with Wulff. Nearly seven months later, Balash took part in what his calendar described as an “Oil Search Presentation/Update.”
This June, both Balash and Wulff appeared as featured speakers during a membership luncheon of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage.
Established in 1929, Oil Search owns oil production and 29 percent of a large liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the world’s 11th-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Oil Search and its partner ExxonMobil are planning to substantially enlarge LNG exports.
The company has also expanded quickly in Alaska. In 2018, it bought oil assets from two private companies and later exercised $450 million of options to buy other nearby fields. On May 14, it received Army Corps of Engineers approval to develop the Nanushuk field in the Pikka Unit, which is on state- and Native Alaskan-owned land on the North Slope. The company says the project could eventually produce 120,000 barrels a day.
“Alaska provides us with world class oil assets with significant upside,” the company said in a report. It also said that it was “building an independent, highly experienced management team to develop and operate our Alaskan assets.”
Balash has consistently argued in favor of curbing federal restrictions on energy development in Alaska, to help boost the state’s economy. In an interview this summer, Balash said he was committed to working with Alaska natives on the North Slope to ensure that the region could expand energy exploration in a way that would improve people’s lives there.
“And so, you know, more than anything, I want to help empower the people who live there to manage those resources in a cooperative way with the federal government,” he said.
North Dakota may be hiding an oil spill larger than the Exxon Valdez
September 3, 2019
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory
Workers cleaning up an oil spill in North Dakota that is officially listed as 10 gallons recovered 240,000 gallons, but the actual number might be larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 which released about 11 million gallons of crude.
The discrepancy in the numbers, first reported by the environmental blog DeSmog, shows how inadequate North Dakota’s policy is for reporting spills. The state doesn’t update initial public reports on spills.
“I have seen many instances where it appears spills are being covered up, and there appears to be a pattern of downplaying spills, which makes the narrative surrounding oil and gas development look rosy and makes the industry look better politically,” said Scott Skokos,executive director of the Dakota Resource Council.
A U.S. House subcommittee has been holding hearings on the impact of oil and gas development on local communities and the environment.
North Dakota farmer Daryl Peterson told the committee more than a dozen brine spills over the past 25 years have ruined parts of his farm.
“Regulators were made aware of all spills, but did not hold the companies accountable,” Peterson told the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the House’s Natural Resource Committee.
North Dakota regulators were not required to tell the public about oilfield-related spills until 2013 after a wheat farmer in northwestern North Dakota discovered a massive spill that has been called one of the biggest onshore spills in U.S. history.
The North Dakota spill, which could take another decade to clean up, is in Watford City in the northwest part of North Dakota at the Garden Creek I Gas Processing Plant. Workers noticed a leak in July 2015. Garden Creek processes natural gas and natural gas liquids from Bakken wells.
Reported DeSmog: “Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors coastal spills, nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could provide records to put the spill’s size in context, but according to available reports, if the 11-million-gallon figure is accurate, the Garden Creek spill appears to be among the largest recorded oil and gas industry spills in the history of the United States.”
Regulators said some groundwater was affected at the Garden Creek site, but the spill didn’t reach beyond the facility’s boundaries.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed a law in 2017 that excuses oil companies from reporting spills of up to 10 barrels, or 420 gallons, of oil and produced water if the spill is contained onsite.
Dave Glatt, the state environmental quality chief, said the spill at the gas plant in 2015 would still need to be reported because it doesn’t involve an oil production facility.
The discrepancy in the numbers, first reported by the environmental blog DeSmog, shows how inadequate North Dakota’s policy is for reporting spills. The state doesn’t update initial public reports on spills.
“I have seen many instances where it appears spills are being covered up, and there appears to be a pattern of downplaying spills, which makes the narrative surrounding oil and gas development look rosy and makes the industry look better politically,” said Scott Skokos,executive director of the Dakota Resource Council.
A U.S. House subcommittee has been holding hearings on the impact of oil and gas development on local communities and the environment.
North Dakota farmer Daryl Peterson told the committee more than a dozen brine spills over the past 25 years have ruined parts of his farm.
“Regulators were made aware of all spills, but did not hold the companies accountable,” Peterson told the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the House’s Natural Resource Committee.
North Dakota regulators were not required to tell the public about oilfield-related spills until 2013 after a wheat farmer in northwestern North Dakota discovered a massive spill that has been called one of the biggest onshore spills in U.S. history.
The North Dakota spill, which could take another decade to clean up, is in Watford City in the northwest part of North Dakota at the Garden Creek I Gas Processing Plant. Workers noticed a leak in July 2015. Garden Creek processes natural gas and natural gas liquids from Bakken wells.
Reported DeSmog: “Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors coastal spills, nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could provide records to put the spill’s size in context, but according to available reports, if the 11-million-gallon figure is accurate, the Garden Creek spill appears to be among the largest recorded oil and gas industry spills in the history of the United States.”
Regulators said some groundwater was affected at the Garden Creek site, but the spill didn’t reach beyond the facility’s boundaries.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed a law in 2017 that excuses oil companies from reporting spills of up to 10 barrels, or 420 gallons, of oil and produced water if the spill is contained onsite.
Dave Glatt, the state environmental quality chief, said the spill at the gas plant in 2015 would still need to be reported because it doesn’t involve an oil production facility.
opinion: Fossil fuels - How the world’s dirtiest industries have learned to pollute our politics
George Monbiot - The Guardian
Wed 7 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT
The tragedy of our times is that the gathering collapse of our life support systems has coincided with the age of public disservice. Just as we need to rise above self-interest and short-termism, governments around the world now represent the meanest and dirtiest of special interests. In the United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many other nations, pollutocrats rule.
The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly.
Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia they are starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.
A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.
The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.
But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by the Philippines, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Shapps – who until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group, which promotes the expansion of roads and airports – as transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.
We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.
The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly.
Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia they are starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.
A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.
The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.
But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by the Philippines, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Shapps – who until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group, which promotes the expansion of roads and airports – as transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.
We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.
this would happen if we had a real government!!!
Just 10% of fossil fuel subsidy cash 'could pay for green transition'
Redirecting small portion of subsidies would unleash clean energy revolution, says report
Damian Carrington Environment editor
The Guardian
Thu 1 Aug 2019 09.20 BST
Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”
The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.
“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”
The transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy is already under way. Annual investment in renewables has been greater than that in fossil fuel electricity generation since 2008 and new renewable capacity has exceeded fossil fuel power each year since 2014.
But progress is slow compared with the urgency required, said Bridle. “There is no question that renewables can power the energy system,” he said. “The question now is can we transition quickly enough away from fuels like coal, and subsidy reform is a very obvious step towards that.” Very few ways of cutting emissions actually save governments money, he said.
“Taking away subsidies from fossil fuels and channelling them towards clean energy would boost their development at a much faster pace, and help secure our climate goals,” said Ipek Gençsü of the Overseas Development Institute. An added bonus is the social and economic benefits, such as reduced air pollution and health spending, she said.
“A key breakthrough [in the energy transition] could occur if countries cut their fossil fuel subsidies, which are propping up dirty energy,” said Rana Adib, the executive secretary of the global sustainable energy network REN21. A recent REN21 report found 112 nations subsidised fossil fuel prices.
Reform of fossil fuel subsidies could have a significant impact on global heating. An earlier IISD study of 20 countries with large fossil fuel subsidies found that a 30% swap to renewables would lead to emissions reductions of between 11% and 18%.
Most experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those buying fuel or the companies producing it. The IMF also includes the cost of the damage fossil fuel burning causes to climate and health, leading to an estimate of $5.2tn of fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies would cut global emissions by about a quarter, the IMF estimates, and halve the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution.
Bridle said funding fossil fuel subsidies was “madness”, but said ending them could cause short-term price rises and political difficulties, as the benefits of lower costs in the future and reduced air pollution are less obvious.
“There are political problems but it is worth persevering because the prize is so big,” he said. “You have to bring people along with you.” Gençsü said governments must ensure that the most vulnerable people were not adversely affected by changes.
Fossil fuel subsidies are most prominent in oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, which subsidises petrol, and some coal-using countries such as Indonesia, which caps the cost of the fuel at 75% of the market rate. Some nations are making progress, with India cutting petrol subsidies by about 75% since 2014, according to the IISD.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”
The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.
“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”
The transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy is already under way. Annual investment in renewables has been greater than that in fossil fuel electricity generation since 2008 and new renewable capacity has exceeded fossil fuel power each year since 2014.
But progress is slow compared with the urgency required, said Bridle. “There is no question that renewables can power the energy system,” he said. “The question now is can we transition quickly enough away from fuels like coal, and subsidy reform is a very obvious step towards that.” Very few ways of cutting emissions actually save governments money, he said.
“Taking away subsidies from fossil fuels and channelling them towards clean energy would boost their development at a much faster pace, and help secure our climate goals,” said Ipek Gençsü of the Overseas Development Institute. An added bonus is the social and economic benefits, such as reduced air pollution and health spending, she said.
“A key breakthrough [in the energy transition] could occur if countries cut their fossil fuel subsidies, which are propping up dirty energy,” said Rana Adib, the executive secretary of the global sustainable energy network REN21. A recent REN21 report found 112 nations subsidised fossil fuel prices.
Reform of fossil fuel subsidies could have a significant impact on global heating. An earlier IISD study of 20 countries with large fossil fuel subsidies found that a 30% swap to renewables would lead to emissions reductions of between 11% and 18%.
Most experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those buying fuel or the companies producing it. The IMF also includes the cost of the damage fossil fuel burning causes to climate and health, leading to an estimate of $5.2tn of fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies would cut global emissions by about a quarter, the IMF estimates, and halve the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution.
Bridle said funding fossil fuel subsidies was “madness”, but said ending them could cause short-term price rises and political difficulties, as the benefits of lower costs in the future and reduced air pollution are less obvious.
“There are political problems but it is worth persevering because the prize is so big,” he said. “You have to bring people along with you.” Gençsü said governments must ensure that the most vulnerable people were not adversely affected by changes.
Fossil fuel subsidies are most prominent in oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, which subsidises petrol, and some coal-using countries such as Indonesia, which caps the cost of the fuel at 75% of the market rate. Some nations are making progress, with India cutting petrol subsidies by about 75% since 2014, according to the IISD.
GOVERNED BY GREED AND IDIOTS!!!
West Virginia Bets Big on Plastics, and on Backing of Trump Administration
The state’s leaders want a federal loan guarantee to build a giant chemical storage plant that could cost as much as $10 billion.
by Keith Schneider for ProPublica July 31, 5 a.m. EDT
West Virginia’s industrial might has faded, but as 2020 approaches, the state has two resources that could be crucial to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and tries to make good on his pledge of “American energy dominance” — Republican votes and abundant natural gas.
It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.
West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.
And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.
By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.
The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.
But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.
“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.
The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.
Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.
If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”
Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”
Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.
In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.
John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”
Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”[...]
It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.
West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.
And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.
By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.
The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.
But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.
“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.
The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.
Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.
If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”
Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”
Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.
In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.
John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”
Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”[...]
Current Investigation of ExxonMobil Could Spur Broader Climate Action
BY Patti Lynn, Truthout
PUBLISHED July 10, 2019
On January 7, 2019, after two years of struggle in the lower courts, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey received some good news: The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for her to investigate one of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — ExxonMobil — regarding what it knew, and when, about climate change.
The rapid heating of our planet poses an existential threat to all of us. Over the next decade, we must make significant changes to limit the most dire consequences of climate change. If we fail to do so, we know that under today’s global power structures, the people who will be the most affected are the same ones who are currently experiencing the harshest effects of climate change.
No wonder then, that women, communities of color, communities in the global South, youth, low-income communities and Indigenous communities around the world have been developing just climate solutions that will address this crisis. What we need now is to move the fossil fuel industry and its backers out of the way so these solutions can be implemented. Those of us in the U.S. have significant opportunities to leverage the political climate at the state level toward that end.
And investigations like Healey’s just might be the key.
The Power of AG Investigations
The fossil fuel industry’s role in actively preventing effective global climate action has become increasingly clear with the publication of books like Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt. For about half a century, fossil fuel corporations manufactured doubt, attacked science and bought political loyalty. They effectively immobilized political will to implement any kind of legislation that would threaten their profits.
But not everyone was fooled. People on the front lines of climate change have been raising the alarm and developing solutions for decades. The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, released last December, highlight many of these solutions, including energy democracy, agro-ecological practices and ecological restoration to recover natural carbon sinks. Just imagine where we could be today in implementing these kinds of just climate solutions but for the deception of the fossil fuel industry.
Healey’s investigation of ExxonMobil is one step toward making up for this lost time. In 2016, the Massachusetts attorney general launched a civil investigation demand, attempting to force ExxonMobil to hand over internal documents related to climate change. The corporation not only refused to comply, it went one step further and sued Healey. Undeterred, Healey doggedly pursued her office’s right to investigate ExxonMobil, even as the corporation took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now, with the refusal of the Supreme Court to hear ExxonMobil’s case, Healey has set the precedent for other states that have similar consumer protection laws to launch similar investigations.
In fact, Healey’s investigation hearkens back to the work of another attorney general taking on another abusive industry. Under former Attorney General Skip Humphrey III, Minnesota took its lawsuit against Big Tobacco all the way to trial –and settled in 1998.
But more importantly, this lawsuit led to the release of more than 30 million pages of internal industry documents — documents that would help pave the way for the implementation of lifesaving tobacco control laws around the world. The damning evidence of the tobacco industry’s wrongdoings found in those documents spurred those working on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty.
Formally known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it is the first public health and corporate accountability treaty in the world, and it is also one of the most quickly adopted and widely ratified treaties. It was adopted five years after the release of the industry documents.
There is no doubt that Healey’s investigation and others can have similar global ramifications. The evidence they could uncover has the potential to spark action not only in the U.S. but also at the U.N. climate treaty, where necessary action has been stymied for decades under the influence of the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters.
It is no surprise, then, that the industry is scrambling to block these investigations and avoid litigation.
Going on the Offensive, State by State
Not only did ExxonMobil pull out all the stops to try to halt the Massachusetts investigation, it is also attempting to protect itself from lawsuits related to climate change (along with other fossil fuel corporations). In 2017, ExxonMobil, along with BP, Shell and General Motors were founding members of an institute devised to promote market-based solutions to climate change. The institute subsequently released a plan that ExxonMobil, Shell and BP pledged millions of dollars to support. The plan proposes a modest tax on carbon — nothing in the scope of what would actually be needed to reduce emissions — in exchange for rollbacks on environmental protections and an end to climate liability lawsuits.
The U.S. is the largest total energy producer in the world, and under the Trump administration, the federal government is aggressively advancing the fossil fuel industry’s agenda. For those of us who call this country home, we must do what we can to stand up to the industry bent on prioritizing its profits over global survival. Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to go on the offensive at the state level — and investigations by attorneys general are critical to this.
Such investigations will help create the political climate and financing needed for the implementation of climate justice solutions led by those on the front lines of climate change. They will support other legal actionsagainst the industry — including a lawsuit by Vanuatu, if the Pacific island country decides to go that route. Moreover, attorney general investigations have great potential to shift the public climate so more people demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry.
There are far too many ways that democracy is failing in the U.S. But Healey’s investigation is one place where our political system is doing exactly what it should be doing: using the resources and power of public office to hold a powerful and harmful corporation to account. We need more elected officials to do the same.
The rapid heating of our planet poses an existential threat to all of us. Over the next decade, we must make significant changes to limit the most dire consequences of climate change. If we fail to do so, we know that under today’s global power structures, the people who will be the most affected are the same ones who are currently experiencing the harshest effects of climate change.
No wonder then, that women, communities of color, communities in the global South, youth, low-income communities and Indigenous communities around the world have been developing just climate solutions that will address this crisis. What we need now is to move the fossil fuel industry and its backers out of the way so these solutions can be implemented. Those of us in the U.S. have significant opportunities to leverage the political climate at the state level toward that end.
And investigations like Healey’s just might be the key.
The Power of AG Investigations
The fossil fuel industry’s role in actively preventing effective global climate action has become increasingly clear with the publication of books like Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt. For about half a century, fossil fuel corporations manufactured doubt, attacked science and bought political loyalty. They effectively immobilized political will to implement any kind of legislation that would threaten their profits.
But not everyone was fooled. People on the front lines of climate change have been raising the alarm and developing solutions for decades. The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, released last December, highlight many of these solutions, including energy democracy, agro-ecological practices and ecological restoration to recover natural carbon sinks. Just imagine where we could be today in implementing these kinds of just climate solutions but for the deception of the fossil fuel industry.
Healey’s investigation of ExxonMobil is one step toward making up for this lost time. In 2016, the Massachusetts attorney general launched a civil investigation demand, attempting to force ExxonMobil to hand over internal documents related to climate change. The corporation not only refused to comply, it went one step further and sued Healey. Undeterred, Healey doggedly pursued her office’s right to investigate ExxonMobil, even as the corporation took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now, with the refusal of the Supreme Court to hear ExxonMobil’s case, Healey has set the precedent for other states that have similar consumer protection laws to launch similar investigations.
In fact, Healey’s investigation hearkens back to the work of another attorney general taking on another abusive industry. Under former Attorney General Skip Humphrey III, Minnesota took its lawsuit against Big Tobacco all the way to trial –and settled in 1998.
But more importantly, this lawsuit led to the release of more than 30 million pages of internal industry documents — documents that would help pave the way for the implementation of lifesaving tobacco control laws around the world. The damning evidence of the tobacco industry’s wrongdoings found in those documents spurred those working on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty.
Formally known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it is the first public health and corporate accountability treaty in the world, and it is also one of the most quickly adopted and widely ratified treaties. It was adopted five years after the release of the industry documents.
There is no doubt that Healey’s investigation and others can have similar global ramifications. The evidence they could uncover has the potential to spark action not only in the U.S. but also at the U.N. climate treaty, where necessary action has been stymied for decades under the influence of the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters.
It is no surprise, then, that the industry is scrambling to block these investigations and avoid litigation.
Going on the Offensive, State by State
Not only did ExxonMobil pull out all the stops to try to halt the Massachusetts investigation, it is also attempting to protect itself from lawsuits related to climate change (along with other fossil fuel corporations). In 2017, ExxonMobil, along with BP, Shell and General Motors were founding members of an institute devised to promote market-based solutions to climate change. The institute subsequently released a plan that ExxonMobil, Shell and BP pledged millions of dollars to support. The plan proposes a modest tax on carbon — nothing in the scope of what would actually be needed to reduce emissions — in exchange for rollbacks on environmental protections and an end to climate liability lawsuits.
The U.S. is the largest total energy producer in the world, and under the Trump administration, the federal government is aggressively advancing the fossil fuel industry’s agenda. For those of us who call this country home, we must do what we can to stand up to the industry bent on prioritizing its profits over global survival. Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to go on the offensive at the state level — and investigations by attorneys general are critical to this.
Such investigations will help create the political climate and financing needed for the implementation of climate justice solutions led by those on the front lines of climate change. They will support other legal actionsagainst the industry — including a lawsuit by Vanuatu, if the Pacific island country decides to go that route. Moreover, attorney general investigations have great potential to shift the public climate so more people demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry.
There are far too many ways that democracy is failing in the U.S. But Healey’s investigation is one place where our political system is doing exactly what it should be doing: using the resources and power of public office to hold a powerful and harmful corporation to account. We need more elected officials to do the same.
For the first time ever renewables beat coal in the US
Renewables provided 23% of U.S. power in April, while coal generated 20%.
JOE ROMM - Thinkprogress
JUN 26, 2019, 3:40 PM
In a remarkable sign of the shifting fortunes of dirty energy and clean energy, more renewable power was generated in April than coal power — something that’s never happened before in the United States.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced Wednesday that, in April, “U.S. monthly electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time.”
While coal provided 20% of U.S. power in April, renewables — which include utility-scale hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass — provided 23% of total generation.
Coal power generation cycles seasonally because temperatures moderate over much of the country in the spring and fall, reducing the power generation needed for air conditioning and heating. During those seasons, coal generation drops, and some plants are shut down for maintenance.
This seasonal drop in coal power is on top of the steady decline of coal, which has been increasingly unable to compete economically with cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.
In fact, the EIA reports that U.S. wind power hit a record monthly high in April. And solar will almost certainly hit a record monthly high sometime this summer.
The country continues adding both solar and wind generation at a very strong pace. So, when will annual renewable electricity generation surpass annual coal generation? The EIA projects out to only 2020 in its latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” (STEO).
The EIA expects coal will out-generate renewables in 2019 and 2020 — though it projects renewables will top nuclear next year for the first time ever.
Renewables will likely top coal in the next decade, but the exact timing will depend on who the president is in 2021. President Donald Trump is trying to hold on to the dirty energy sources of the past, while all the Democrats running have promised to speed up the switch to clean energy in order to protect public health and avoid catastrophic climate change.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced Wednesday that, in April, “U.S. monthly electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time.”
While coal provided 20% of U.S. power in April, renewables — which include utility-scale hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass — provided 23% of total generation.
Coal power generation cycles seasonally because temperatures moderate over much of the country in the spring and fall, reducing the power generation needed for air conditioning and heating. During those seasons, coal generation drops, and some plants are shut down for maintenance.
This seasonal drop in coal power is on top of the steady decline of coal, which has been increasingly unable to compete economically with cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.
In fact, the EIA reports that U.S. wind power hit a record monthly high in April. And solar will almost certainly hit a record monthly high sometime this summer.
The country continues adding both solar and wind generation at a very strong pace. So, when will annual renewable electricity generation surpass annual coal generation? The EIA projects out to only 2020 in its latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” (STEO).
The EIA expects coal will out-generate renewables in 2019 and 2020 — though it projects renewables will top nuclear next year for the first time ever.
Renewables will likely top coal in the next decade, but the exact timing will depend on who the president is in 2021. President Donald Trump is trying to hold on to the dirty energy sources of the past, while all the Democrats running have promised to speed up the switch to clean energy in order to protect public health and avoid catastrophic climate change.
Renewables now cheaper than new coal or gas ‘across two-thirds of the world’
By 2030, wind and solar will "undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere."
JOE ROMM - Thinkprogress
JUN 18, 2019, 1:47 PM
A new study reveals just how stunningly rapid the clean energy transition is.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported on Tuesday that renewables are now the cheapest form of new electricity generation across two thirds of the world — cheaper than both new coal and new natural gas power.
Yet just five years ago, renewables were the cheapest source of new power in only 1% of the world, explains BNEF in its New Energy Outlook 2019.
Equally remarkable, BNEF projects that by 2030, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere.”
In other words, within a decade it will be cheaper to build and operate new renewable power plants than it will be to just keep operating existing fossil fuel plants — even in the United States.
The reason for this transformation is the remarkable drop in both solar and wind power prices this decade: Since 2010, wind power has dropped 49% in cost and solar plummeted 85%.
BNEF projects prices will continue to fall for the next decade and beyond, with the cost of solar panels and wind power dropping by another third by 2030. Overall, by 2050, the cost of solar electricity is expected to drop 63% compared to today, and the cost of wind will likely drop 48%.
Because of these ongoing price drops, the world is projected to invest a whopping $4.2 trillion in solar power generation in the next three decades. The result is that solar will jump from a mere 2% of global power generation today to a remarkable 22% in 2050.
Over the same three decades, global investment in wind power will likely hit $5.3 trillion, and wind is expected to rise from 5% of global electricity today to 26% in 2050.
The result is that we are shifting from a world today where two thirds of power generation is from fossil fuels to one three decades from now where two thirds is zero carbon. As BNEF puts it, we are “ending the era of fossil fuel dominance in the power sector.”
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported on Tuesday that renewables are now the cheapest form of new electricity generation across two thirds of the world — cheaper than both new coal and new natural gas power.
Yet just five years ago, renewables were the cheapest source of new power in only 1% of the world, explains BNEF in its New Energy Outlook 2019.
Equally remarkable, BNEF projects that by 2030, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and gas almost everywhere.”
In other words, within a decade it will be cheaper to build and operate new renewable power plants than it will be to just keep operating existing fossil fuel plants — even in the United States.
The reason for this transformation is the remarkable drop in both solar and wind power prices this decade: Since 2010, wind power has dropped 49% in cost and solar plummeted 85%.
BNEF projects prices will continue to fall for the next decade and beyond, with the cost of solar panels and wind power dropping by another third by 2030. Overall, by 2050, the cost of solar electricity is expected to drop 63% compared to today, and the cost of wind will likely drop 48%.
Because of these ongoing price drops, the world is projected to invest a whopping $4.2 trillion in solar power generation in the next three decades. The result is that solar will jump from a mere 2% of global power generation today to a remarkable 22% in 2050.
Over the same three decades, global investment in wind power will likely hit $5.3 trillion, and wind is expected to rise from 5% of global electricity today to 26% in 2050.
The result is that we are shifting from a world today where two thirds of power generation is from fossil fuels to one three decades from now where two thirds is zero carbon. As BNEF puts it, we are “ending the era of fossil fuel dominance in the power sector.”
Revealed: Mobil sought to fight environmental regulation, documents show
Oil giant looked to make tax-exempt donations to universities and civic groups in the early 1990s to promote the company’s interests
Sharon Kelly in Philadelphia
The Guardian
Wed 12 Jun 2019 01.00 EDT
Oil giant Mobil sought to make tax-exempt donations to leading universities, civic groups and arts programmes to promote the company’s interests and undermine environmental regulation, according to internal documents from the early 1990s obtained by the Guardian.
The documents shine a light on the ways corporations have used their money to buy influence, amass prestige and shape public policy through grants to academic programmes and advocacy groups.
The documents come to light as ExxonMobil, formed when Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999, is now facing investigations by multiple state attorneys general over claims it failed to communicate known climate crisis-related risks to investors and the public.
The documents, dated in 1993 and provided to the Guardian by the Climate Investigations Center, show the Mobil Foundation justified spending by detailing major “benefits to Mobil” they expected in return for more than 80 proposed grants for 1994 – a practice not-for-profit experts said may have violated federal law.
The foundation wrote that its grants for not-for-profits could help Mobil fight environmental regulation, fund scientists whose work had been “favorably received by the industry” and prepare Mobil to defend itself against lawsuits following oil spills and industrial accidents.
For example, in a one-page entry listing past Mobil grants, the company was successful in “having the National Safety Council Board of Directors pass a resolution opposing the mandating of any alternative fuel”, the foundation wrote. Grants for the council totalled nearly a quarter-million dollars, according to the entry, which recommended further grants for the coming year.
The internal grant-making recommendations and records, many marked confidential, cover $1.2m worth of funding – about 10% of the foundation’s annual budget. More than two-thirds of the roughly 120 full-page grant recommendations predict specific benefits for the oil giant.
Justifications for offering money to not-for-profits and universities included:
Leaders of Mobil and its foundation had offered public hints that they expected to harvest benefits from the company’s charitable giving.
“Should corporations ever engage in pure philanthropy, giving money away because it gives one a nice feeling and the shareholders don’t seem to mind?” Herbert Schmertz, Mobil’s vice-president of public affairs for about two decades and a former Mobil Foundation president, asked during a 22 September 1987 talk on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.
“I guess I’d answer that by saying I don’t know whether corporate philanthropy as I’ve sort of defined it, which is just to get a warm feeling, ever existed,” he said. “But if it did, I’d have to say that it’s a dying concept in terms of corporate giving.”
A 1998 book thanking Richard Mund, who served as Mobil Foundation’s executive director from 1979 to 2000, for his edits offers a similar view of corporate grant-making, advising that companies “identify a significant business reason” for grants and “obtain as much business value from social investments as is allowable and practical”.
Tax experts told the Guardian that the Mobil Foundation’s stated intent to benefit Mobil through “charitable” grants would have raised serious red flags for illegal self-dealing, had it come to light before the statute of limitations ran out.
“The public would have a very hard time finding out any of this,” said Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard University professor of the history of science, adding that “typically one can only see the organization and amount, but no details of what or why”.
“What I see here is a pattern of ‘charitable giving’ that is anything but disinterested,” she said.
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Our philanthropic arm follows all laws and required disclosures.
The ExxonMobil Foundation has a strategic focus supporting education with an emphasis on math and science, promoting women as catalysts for economic development and preventing deaths from malaria.”
A lawsuit filed in October by the New York attorney general alleges ExxonMobil defrauded investors for years about the risks climate crisis regulation posed for the fossil fuel giant.
In January, the US supreme court allowed Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey’s investigation into how ExxonMobil described climate crisis risks to consumers and investors to move forward by refusing to hear the company’s appeal. A spokesperson for Healey declined to comment on the newly revealed documents, citing ongoing litigation.
The ExxonMobil Foundation was also formed after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil.
Corporate watchdogs said issues associated with private industry’s use of not-for-profits to influence American policy have become more pronounced since the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision, which protected political spending by corporations and which critics say fuelled a rapid expansion of so-called “dark money” advocacy groups whose funding is more difficult to trace.
“It’s extremely troubling,” Lisa Graves, president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, said.
“One of the primary rules for nonprofits is that they’re supposed to be in the public interest,” she said, “not for private benefits.”
The documents shine a light on the ways corporations have used their money to buy influence, amass prestige and shape public policy through grants to academic programmes and advocacy groups.
The documents come to light as ExxonMobil, formed when Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999, is now facing investigations by multiple state attorneys general over claims it failed to communicate known climate crisis-related risks to investors and the public.
The documents, dated in 1993 and provided to the Guardian by the Climate Investigations Center, show the Mobil Foundation justified spending by detailing major “benefits to Mobil” they expected in return for more than 80 proposed grants for 1994 – a practice not-for-profit experts said may have violated federal law.
The foundation wrote that its grants for not-for-profits could help Mobil fight environmental regulation, fund scientists whose work had been “favorably received by the industry” and prepare Mobil to defend itself against lawsuits following oil spills and industrial accidents.
For example, in a one-page entry listing past Mobil grants, the company was successful in “having the National Safety Council Board of Directors pass a resolution opposing the mandating of any alternative fuel”, the foundation wrote. Grants for the council totalled nearly a quarter-million dollars, according to the entry, which recommended further grants for the coming year.
The internal grant-making recommendations and records, many marked confidential, cover $1.2m worth of funding – about 10% of the foundation’s annual budget. More than two-thirds of the roughly 120 full-page grant recommendations predict specific benefits for the oil giant.
Justifications for offering money to not-for-profits and universities included:
- “Global warming is likely to be the key international environmental issue of the 1990s,” the foundation’s internal records predicted in 1993, adding that climate regulation was “a real possibility within the next five years”. The foundation recommended a $25,000 grant to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University to help Mobil “develop personal relationships with some of the key experts on this issue” and enable Mobil to “participate in the debate on these regulations”.
- The Mobil Foundation recommended contributing a total of $25,000 to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, saying the center had already effectively argued against tighter fuel economy standards and influenced America’s toxic air pollution laws, and its stances may help keep Mobil’s costs down in future.
“Mobil’s environmental expenditures exceeded $1bn in 1992,” the document said. “Without a greater appreciation of scientific risk analysis, those costs will continue to escalate as environmental rules and programs are made excessively stringent in response to the public’s unfounded panic over relatively minor incidents.”
- The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia describes its Environmental Associates Program as “a group of corporate executives concerned about environmental effects of industrial activities”.
The program was founded by Dr Ruth Patrick, who helped to draft the Clean Water Act, a major federal law giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power to write rules to protect people against harm from water pollution.
“Based on the contacts of the Academy,” the Mobil Foundation wrote, “the Environmental Associates Program has the potential to challenge the EPA behind the scenes on the effectiveness of a regulation for the environment and whether sound science supports the proposed law.”
- The Mobil Foundation recommended offering the National Research Council, part of the National Academies, funding for a study of an oil spill clean-up method, writing: “By helping to fund the study, Mobil may be offered the opportunity to participate or to receive early access to the findings.”
Leaders of Mobil and its foundation had offered public hints that they expected to harvest benefits from the company’s charitable giving.
“Should corporations ever engage in pure philanthropy, giving money away because it gives one a nice feeling and the shareholders don’t seem to mind?” Herbert Schmertz, Mobil’s vice-president of public affairs for about two decades and a former Mobil Foundation president, asked during a 22 September 1987 talk on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.
“I guess I’d answer that by saying I don’t know whether corporate philanthropy as I’ve sort of defined it, which is just to get a warm feeling, ever existed,” he said. “But if it did, I’d have to say that it’s a dying concept in terms of corporate giving.”
A 1998 book thanking Richard Mund, who served as Mobil Foundation’s executive director from 1979 to 2000, for his edits offers a similar view of corporate grant-making, advising that companies “identify a significant business reason” for grants and “obtain as much business value from social investments as is allowable and practical”.
Tax experts told the Guardian that the Mobil Foundation’s stated intent to benefit Mobil through “charitable” grants would have raised serious red flags for illegal self-dealing, had it come to light before the statute of limitations ran out.
“The public would have a very hard time finding out any of this,” said Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard University professor of the history of science, adding that “typically one can only see the organization and amount, but no details of what or why”.
“What I see here is a pattern of ‘charitable giving’ that is anything but disinterested,” she said.
A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Our philanthropic arm follows all laws and required disclosures.
The ExxonMobil Foundation has a strategic focus supporting education with an emphasis on math and science, promoting women as catalysts for economic development and preventing deaths from malaria.”
A lawsuit filed in October by the New York attorney general alleges ExxonMobil defrauded investors for years about the risks climate crisis regulation posed for the fossil fuel giant.
In January, the US supreme court allowed Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey’s investigation into how ExxonMobil described climate crisis risks to consumers and investors to move forward by refusing to hear the company’s appeal. A spokesperson for Healey declined to comment on the newly revealed documents, citing ongoing litigation.
The ExxonMobil Foundation was also formed after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil.
Corporate watchdogs said issues associated with private industry’s use of not-for-profits to influence American policy have become more pronounced since the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision, which protected political spending by corporations and which critics say fuelled a rapid expansion of so-called “dark money” advocacy groups whose funding is more difficult to trace.
“It’s extremely troubling,” Lisa Graves, president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, said.
“One of the primary rules for nonprofits is that they’re supposed to be in the public interest,” she said, “not for private benefits.”
Utilities rush for the exit door on coal — and there's nothing Trump can do to stop them
Despite Trump's promise to revive coal, the market has spoken: Even big utilities in red states are moving on
CARL POPE - salon
MAY 20, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
The keynote speaker at McKinsey’s Global Sustainability Summit in Chicago was Anne Pramaggiore, vice president and CEO of Exelon, one of America’s biggest utilities. Her message: Exelon is going clean. Its future role will emphasize being a connector, not a generator, in the distributed grid of the future, exploiting the utility’s tradition of providing universal service — but this time to partner with its customers as providers as well as consumers.
She’s not alone in projecting a very different role and future, even for well established utilities. The mood from the utility representatives at the sessions couldn’t be more different than the groans and moans that the Trump administration’s appointees emit as they try, somehow, to find someone to bail out outmoded, dirty, uncompetitive coal- fired power plants. Southern California Edison representatives mentioned they had an entire corporate strategy to encourage households to return to lower-carbon electric stoves in place of carbon-polluting natural gas.
But the story that has been playing itself out around the country is remarkably consistent, so perhaps the mood in Chicago wasn’t so surprising. Coal is going away — and utilities are changing their role in ways that accelerate that decline. Take Indiana. Former EPA Scott Pruitt was hired by coal interests to persuade the Indiana legislature to support a coal bailout. Pruitt turned out to be just as ineffective as a self-declared coal industry lobbyist as he had been cloaked as the ostensible administrator of environmental protection – his coal bailouts keep going down in flames. Even the Indiana Chamber of Commerce said, “No thanks, we can’t afford coal.” It turns out the state’s business climate has been significantly hurt by providing expensive power bought from outdated coal plants.
If coal can’t garner support from Indiana business interests, it’s really pretty much game over. And the Hoosier State is not alone. President Trump’s appointees to the Tennessee Valley Authority Board refused his pressure to slow their transition to renewables. In Colorado, where utilities and clean energy advocates have successfully collaborated, the state’s biggest utility, XCEL, committed in December to 100% clean energy by 2050. Simultaneously, another major Colorado utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, was facing financial collapse created by its continued reliance on dirty power.
Tri-State, which provides power — predominantly coal — to its member cooperatives, has been hemorrhaging members for the past year because its power is too expensive. A recent report from Rocky Mountain Institute concluded that going to renewables would save the utility’s customers $600 per person by 2030.
Faced with dangers to its member electric co-ops if Tri-State collapsed, the Colorado legislature passed legislation that placed Tri-State under the regulatory authority of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — to help it get off coal. At the same time, lawmakers gave legislative blessing to XCEL’s innovative strategies for quickly exiting from coal. The Xcel provisions codify the company’s clean energy commitments and permits the utility to own 50% of its future renewable energy assets.
Montana joined Indiana in rejecting coal industry appeals for bailouts, this time for the Coalstrip power plant, whose current owners have decided it is cheaper to shut it down than continue to operate it. (Wyoming, however, passed a weaker bailout proposal, requiring a utility shutting down a coal plant to first offer to sell it — a pathway already tried by the Trump administration, unsuccessfully, to keep the Navajo Power Plant in Arizona open.) New Mexico, whose major utility, PNM, is now moving rapidly towards clean energy, refused to weaken emission standards for the remaining coal plants, instead agreeing to help PNM finance its losses from shutting down coal plants.
What is happening across the country is an emerging set of new partnerships between clean energy advocates and public utilities, driven by a stark recognition by utilities that the pathway forged some years ago by California’s power companies — cooperating, not resisting, the clean energy revolution — is not only better for the climate, but for customers and shareholders as well.
This is not just happening with those utilities that were already moving away from carbon intensive power — nor just utilities in the West ,where state governments are climate conscious. Utility Dive has released the following table showing that the biggest carbon utilities of all, in some of the most conservative states — Southern, Duke, AEP — have all joined the rush to the coal exit door.
She’s not alone in projecting a very different role and future, even for well established utilities. The mood from the utility representatives at the sessions couldn’t be more different than the groans and moans that the Trump administration’s appointees emit as they try, somehow, to find someone to bail out outmoded, dirty, uncompetitive coal- fired power plants. Southern California Edison representatives mentioned they had an entire corporate strategy to encourage households to return to lower-carbon electric stoves in place of carbon-polluting natural gas.
But the story that has been playing itself out around the country is remarkably consistent, so perhaps the mood in Chicago wasn’t so surprising. Coal is going away — and utilities are changing their role in ways that accelerate that decline. Take Indiana. Former EPA Scott Pruitt was hired by coal interests to persuade the Indiana legislature to support a coal bailout. Pruitt turned out to be just as ineffective as a self-declared coal industry lobbyist as he had been cloaked as the ostensible administrator of environmental protection – his coal bailouts keep going down in flames. Even the Indiana Chamber of Commerce said, “No thanks, we can’t afford coal.” It turns out the state’s business climate has been significantly hurt by providing expensive power bought from outdated coal plants.
If coal can’t garner support from Indiana business interests, it’s really pretty much game over. And the Hoosier State is not alone. President Trump’s appointees to the Tennessee Valley Authority Board refused his pressure to slow their transition to renewables. In Colorado, where utilities and clean energy advocates have successfully collaborated, the state’s biggest utility, XCEL, committed in December to 100% clean energy by 2050. Simultaneously, another major Colorado utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, was facing financial collapse created by its continued reliance on dirty power.
Tri-State, which provides power — predominantly coal — to its member cooperatives, has been hemorrhaging members for the past year because its power is too expensive. A recent report from Rocky Mountain Institute concluded that going to renewables would save the utility’s customers $600 per person by 2030.
Faced with dangers to its member electric co-ops if Tri-State collapsed, the Colorado legislature passed legislation that placed Tri-State under the regulatory authority of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — to help it get off coal. At the same time, lawmakers gave legislative blessing to XCEL’s innovative strategies for quickly exiting from coal. The Xcel provisions codify the company’s clean energy commitments and permits the utility to own 50% of its future renewable energy assets.
Montana joined Indiana in rejecting coal industry appeals for bailouts, this time for the Coalstrip power plant, whose current owners have decided it is cheaper to shut it down than continue to operate it. (Wyoming, however, passed a weaker bailout proposal, requiring a utility shutting down a coal plant to first offer to sell it — a pathway already tried by the Trump administration, unsuccessfully, to keep the Navajo Power Plant in Arizona open.) New Mexico, whose major utility, PNM, is now moving rapidly towards clean energy, refused to weaken emission standards for the remaining coal plants, instead agreeing to help PNM finance its losses from shutting down coal plants.
What is happening across the country is an emerging set of new partnerships between clean energy advocates and public utilities, driven by a stark recognition by utilities that the pathway forged some years ago by California’s power companies — cooperating, not resisting, the clean energy revolution — is not only better for the climate, but for customers and shareholders as well.
This is not just happening with those utilities that were already moving away from carbon intensive power — nor just utilities in the West ,where state governments are climate conscious. Utility Dive has released the following table showing that the biggest carbon utilities of all, in some of the most conservative states — Southern, Duke, AEP — have all joined the rush to the coal exit door.
Are ExxonMobil execs the most evil people in the 200,000-year history of humanity?
COMMON DREAMS - COMMENTARY - raw story
19 MAY 2019 AT 13:48 ET
Internal ExxonMobil documents show that the company’s scientists predicted in 1982 that by 2020, parts per million of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere would reach 410-420 ppm. For the first time this spring ppm of CO2 exceeded 415.
The memo says in part,
Considerable uncertainty also surrounds the possible impact on society of such a warming trend, should it occur. At the low end of the predicted temperature range there could be some impact on agricultural growth and rainfall patterns which could be beneficial in some regions and detrimental in others.
At the high end, some scientists suggest there could be considerable adverse impact including the flooding of some coastal land masses as a result of a rise in sea level due to melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.
They understood that the full effect of this vast increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would cause enormous changes, though much of the damage would occur centuries down the line.
The company covered up these memos and staged a multi-million-dollar disinformation campaign to throw doubt on the reality of human-made climate change, to ensure that ExxonMobil could go on making billions in profits each year from selling gasoline.
The scientists nailed it. ExxonMobil nailed it. They can be proud of their scientific prowess and predictive abilities, right?
Wrong. They are evil.
They are the most evil human beings to walk the earth since Homo Sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago.
ExxonMobil has single-handedly been conducting a vast terraforming experiment that will displace hundreds of millions of people. Some two-thirds of Egypt’s 100 million people live in the Nile River delta, which has low elevations and some of which will be submerged even in the current century. Bangladesh isn’t going to be there after a while, displacing 150 million people.
This is not to account for the increased destructiveness of tropical storms or the acidification of the oceans, which will likely kill off half of marine life.
Characters in science fiction that wreck a whole planet are rare. George Lucas’s Darth Vader destroyed a planet with the Death Star in Star Wars. Stan Lee’s Thanatos wiped out half the population of earth in The Avengers: Endgame. In 2009’s Star Trek the mad Romulan Nero destroyed the planet of Vulcan with 6 billion people on it.
CEOs of ExxonMobil such as Lee Raymond or Rex Tillerson or currently Darren Woods are banal in their evil, as Hannah Arendt would lead us to expect. They probably aren’t even interesting to talk to. They are like wind-up toys, their springs being profit, that can’t change direction, driving toward extinction.
But they are much worse in the practical effect of their evil than Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the other genocidal maniacs we’ve seen in the past century.
They deliberately wrecked a planet to make a few bucks (in Lee Raymond’s case, $400 million of them). Tens of millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions.
They are Darth Vaders and Thanatoses, they are destroyers of a planet. And they manage in their cupidity and their cunning and their dishonesty to be utterly boring and worthy of no one’s interest as people. They lack a soul.
Sooner or later the judges will permit people to begin suing ExxonMobil for the environmental damage it has caused. The judges are turning these suits back now. But minds will change.
All it would take would be one gigantic glacier from Antarctica to plop in and suddenly raise sea level noticeably, a sort of climate tsunami. I wish it wouldn’t happen, but it will. The question is only when, as Exxon noticed in 1982. Judges in Miami would notice.
The company is doomed to an early bankruptcy.
Get your money out of it if you hope to retire.
And switch to public transportation or an electric car as soon as you can afford to.
That is the only redemption we will have from this cabal of evil, to know that they are already on the trash heap of history and have no part in the future of our increasingly challenged planet.
Their names will be vilified for as long as human beings live.
The memo says in part,
Considerable uncertainty also surrounds the possible impact on society of such a warming trend, should it occur. At the low end of the predicted temperature range there could be some impact on agricultural growth and rainfall patterns which could be beneficial in some regions and detrimental in others.
At the high end, some scientists suggest there could be considerable adverse impact including the flooding of some coastal land masses as a result of a rise in sea level due to melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.
They understood that the full effect of this vast increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would cause enormous changes, though much of the damage would occur centuries down the line.
The company covered up these memos and staged a multi-million-dollar disinformation campaign to throw doubt on the reality of human-made climate change, to ensure that ExxonMobil could go on making billions in profits each year from selling gasoline.
The scientists nailed it. ExxonMobil nailed it. They can be proud of their scientific prowess and predictive abilities, right?
Wrong. They are evil.
They are the most evil human beings to walk the earth since Homo Sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago.
ExxonMobil has single-handedly been conducting a vast terraforming experiment that will displace hundreds of millions of people. Some two-thirds of Egypt’s 100 million people live in the Nile River delta, which has low elevations and some of which will be submerged even in the current century. Bangladesh isn’t going to be there after a while, displacing 150 million people.
This is not to account for the increased destructiveness of tropical storms or the acidification of the oceans, which will likely kill off half of marine life.
Characters in science fiction that wreck a whole planet are rare. George Lucas’s Darth Vader destroyed a planet with the Death Star in Star Wars. Stan Lee’s Thanatos wiped out half the population of earth in The Avengers: Endgame. In 2009’s Star Trek the mad Romulan Nero destroyed the planet of Vulcan with 6 billion people on it.
CEOs of ExxonMobil such as Lee Raymond or Rex Tillerson or currently Darren Woods are banal in their evil, as Hannah Arendt would lead us to expect. They probably aren’t even interesting to talk to. They are like wind-up toys, their springs being profit, that can’t change direction, driving toward extinction.
But they are much worse in the practical effect of their evil than Hitler or Pol Pot or any of the other genocidal maniacs we’ve seen in the past century.
They deliberately wrecked a planet to make a few bucks (in Lee Raymond’s case, $400 million of them). Tens of millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions.
They are Darth Vaders and Thanatoses, they are destroyers of a planet. And they manage in their cupidity and their cunning and their dishonesty to be utterly boring and worthy of no one’s interest as people. They lack a soul.
Sooner or later the judges will permit people to begin suing ExxonMobil for the environmental damage it has caused. The judges are turning these suits back now. But minds will change.
All it would take would be one gigantic glacier from Antarctica to plop in and suddenly raise sea level noticeably, a sort of climate tsunami. I wish it wouldn’t happen, but it will. The question is only when, as Exxon noticed in 1982. Judges in Miami would notice.
The company is doomed to an early bankruptcy.
Get your money out of it if you hope to retire.
And switch to public transportation or an electric car as soon as you can afford to.
That is the only redemption we will have from this cabal of evil, to know that they are already on the trash heap of history and have no part in the future of our increasingly challenged planet.
Their names will be vilified for as long as human beings live.
Mining Companies Use Excessive Legal Powers to Gamble With Latin American Lives
BY Manuel Perez-Rocha & Jen Moore, Inequality.org - truthout
PUBLISHED May 14, 2019
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The right of foreign investors to sue governments in international tribunals is one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations through free trade agreements and investment treaties.
For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But this public outrage hasn’t stopped companies from continuing to file such lawsuits. In January 2019, for example, U.S.-based Legacy Vulcan LLC registered a case against Mexico over an environmental dispute concerning limestone quarrying near the well-known vacation destination Playa de Carmen. The company cited ecological land use regulations in the municipality of Solidaridad preventing the company from expanding mining operations on two properties. Using NAFTA investment rules, the company is reportedly planning to demand approximately $500 million in compensation.
The same month, U.S. firm Odyssey Marine Exploration filed its notice of intent to sue Mexico for the outrageous sum of $3.54 billion for having failed to obtain permits needed to advance an offshore phosphate mine project off the coast of Baja California Sur. This is the largest amount that Mexico has ever been threatened with in any ISDS suit.
These are just two of 38 mining-related investor-state cases documented in a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, MiningWatch Canada, and the Center for International Environmental Law. Extraction Casino: Mining Companies Gambling with Latin American Lives and Sovereignty through Supranational Arbitration exposes how transnational mining companies are among the biggest abusers of this system — especially in cases of unwanted investments where communities are in hard-fought battles to defend their land, water, health, and ways of life from the destructive impacts of mining.
Worldwide, the extractive sector is behind 24 percent of all known investor-state claims and the number of mining-related cases is booming. Out of the 169 cases filed by oil, gas and mining companies since 1974, 96 have been filed since 2010.
The geographic distribution of mining-related cases is concentrated in Latin America, where Central and South American governments face 29 percent of known claims. This report looked at all 38 of the mining-related cases that have been brought against Latin American governments with increasing intensity since 1998.
Canadian firms have brought most of these cases, reflective of the disproportionate role of Canadian financing in the global mining sector. Some 55 percent of Canadian mining assets abroad are concentrated in Latin America.
Some of the hardest hit countries include Colombia, which currently faces over $18 billion dollars in threatened or pending suits. Just one of these suits claims $16.5 billion. These claims relate to government actions aimed at protecting Indigenous territory and fragile páramo ecosystems, which provide water to over a million people.
Mexico and Uruguay face over $3 billion each in suits for measures that have put ecologically-sensitive areas off-limits to industrial mining. Guatemala and Ecuador are also facing suits or threats of suits related to gold and silver projects that communities have spent many years fighting, facing criminalization and threats to defend their water, health, and livelihoods.
Notably, the majority of these cases have been brought by exploration companies that have no operating mine, or no other mining project at all, and are making a last-ditch effort to extract millions or even billions of dollars from governments in the region through international arbitration whether they have followed local environmental and mining regulations or not, and almost always lacking community consent to operate.
While corporations and governments are exclusive parties to ISDS suits, we find that companies are often targeting laws, court decisions, and other measures resulting from the difficult struggles of mining-affected communities. In over two-thirds of the 38 cases examined, communities have been actively organizing to resist mining activities and defend their land, health, environment, self-determination and ways of life. As a result, these investor lawsuits represent a further assault against their self-determination and already limited legal protections.
In terms of the nature of government measures in dispute:
For transnational mining companies, the power to bring suits to supranational arbitration is yet another opportunity to strike it rich through reckless, casino-style gambling. In this system, the deck is heavily stacked in their favor. The corporations are allowed to bypass domestic courts and sue governments before private tribunals, such as the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The tribunal members are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider the rights of local communities or the importance of health and environmental protections.
Current investment rules are a threat to public and environmental welfare, as well as the right to community self-determination and national sovereignty over policymaking. Investor-state dispute settlement should be abolished, and all trade and investment treaties should be audited and, only after meaningful public participation, either be cancelled or rewritten in terms that put people’s rights and the environment first.
For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But this public outrage hasn’t stopped companies from continuing to file such lawsuits. In January 2019, for example, U.S.-based Legacy Vulcan LLC registered a case against Mexico over an environmental dispute concerning limestone quarrying near the well-known vacation destination Playa de Carmen. The company cited ecological land use regulations in the municipality of Solidaridad preventing the company from expanding mining operations on two properties. Using NAFTA investment rules, the company is reportedly planning to demand approximately $500 million in compensation.
The same month, U.S. firm Odyssey Marine Exploration filed its notice of intent to sue Mexico for the outrageous sum of $3.54 billion for having failed to obtain permits needed to advance an offshore phosphate mine project off the coast of Baja California Sur. This is the largest amount that Mexico has ever been threatened with in any ISDS suit.
These are just two of 38 mining-related investor-state cases documented in a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, MiningWatch Canada, and the Center for International Environmental Law. Extraction Casino: Mining Companies Gambling with Latin American Lives and Sovereignty through Supranational Arbitration exposes how transnational mining companies are among the biggest abusers of this system — especially in cases of unwanted investments where communities are in hard-fought battles to defend their land, water, health, and ways of life from the destructive impacts of mining.
Worldwide, the extractive sector is behind 24 percent of all known investor-state claims and the number of mining-related cases is booming. Out of the 169 cases filed by oil, gas and mining companies since 1974, 96 have been filed since 2010.
The geographic distribution of mining-related cases is concentrated in Latin America, where Central and South American governments face 29 percent of known claims. This report looked at all 38 of the mining-related cases that have been brought against Latin American governments with increasing intensity since 1998.
Canadian firms have brought most of these cases, reflective of the disproportionate role of Canadian financing in the global mining sector. Some 55 percent of Canadian mining assets abroad are concentrated in Latin America.
Some of the hardest hit countries include Colombia, which currently faces over $18 billion dollars in threatened or pending suits. Just one of these suits claims $16.5 billion. These claims relate to government actions aimed at protecting Indigenous territory and fragile páramo ecosystems, which provide water to over a million people.
Mexico and Uruguay face over $3 billion each in suits for measures that have put ecologically-sensitive areas off-limits to industrial mining. Guatemala and Ecuador are also facing suits or threats of suits related to gold and silver projects that communities have spent many years fighting, facing criminalization and threats to defend their water, health, and livelihoods.
Notably, the majority of these cases have been brought by exploration companies that have no operating mine, or no other mining project at all, and are making a last-ditch effort to extract millions or even billions of dollars from governments in the region through international arbitration whether they have followed local environmental and mining regulations or not, and almost always lacking community consent to operate.
While corporations and governments are exclusive parties to ISDS suits, we find that companies are often targeting laws, court decisions, and other measures resulting from the difficult struggles of mining-affected communities. In over two-thirds of the 38 cases examined, communities have been actively organizing to resist mining activities and defend their land, health, environment, self-determination and ways of life. As a result, these investor lawsuits represent a further assault against their self-determination and already limited legal protections.
In terms of the nature of government measures in dispute:
- In one-third of the cases, corporations are retaliating against measures related to Indigenous Rights and community consent;
- Over half of cases concern the enforcement of environmental and health protections; and
- Over one-third concern resource management (including nationalization or taxation).
For transnational mining companies, the power to bring suits to supranational arbitration is yet another opportunity to strike it rich through reckless, casino-style gambling. In this system, the deck is heavily stacked in their favor. The corporations are allowed to bypass domestic courts and sue governments before private tribunals, such as the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The tribunal members are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider the rights of local communities or the importance of health and environmental protections.
Current investment rules are a threat to public and environmental welfare, as well as the right to community self-determination and national sovereignty over policymaking. Investor-state dispute settlement should be abolished, and all trade and investment treaties should be audited and, only after meaningful public participation, either be cancelled or rewritten in terms that put people’s rights and the environment first.
Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending
The world would be richer and healthier if the full costs of fossil fuels were paid, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund
TIM DICKINSON - rolling stone
The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was$599 billion.
The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.
The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.
Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,” the study found. (These net gains are “calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.”)
For the United States, the $649 billion in fossil fuel subsidies exceeded even the extravagant amount of money the country spent on defense. To offer a sense of scale, Pentagon spending accounted for 54 percent of the discretionary federal budget in 2015. In comparison to another important, but less well-funded part of the federal budget, fossil fuel subsidies were nearly 10 times what Congress spent on education. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 that year.
At the opening of the IMF’s spring meetings in April, Managing Director Christine Lagarde laid out the benefits she sees in properly pricing fossil fuels. “The numbers are quite staggering” she said, referring to the savings that could be achieved “fiscally, but also in terms of human life, if there had been the right price on carbon emission as of 2015.”
Lagarde continued to rattle off the benefits to humanity of realizing these savings. “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people,” she said.
For Lagarde and the IMF, the conclusion was obvious: “We believe that removing fossil fuel subsidies is the right way to go.”
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was$599 billion.
The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.
The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.
Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,” the study found. (These net gains are “calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.”)
For the United States, the $649 billion in fossil fuel subsidies exceeded even the extravagant amount of money the country spent on defense. To offer a sense of scale, Pentagon spending accounted for 54 percent of the discretionary federal budget in 2015. In comparison to another important, but less well-funded part of the federal budget, fossil fuel subsidies were nearly 10 times what Congress spent on education. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 that year.
At the opening of the IMF’s spring meetings in April, Managing Director Christine Lagarde laid out the benefits she sees in properly pricing fossil fuels. “The numbers are quite staggering” she said, referring to the savings that could be achieved “fiscally, but also in terms of human life, if there had been the right price on carbon emission as of 2015.”
Lagarde continued to rattle off the benefits to humanity of realizing these savings. “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people,” she said.
For Lagarde and the IMF, the conclusion was obvious: “We believe that removing fossil fuel subsidies is the right way to go.”
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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