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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180
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 Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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| More misdirection. The rumored SEC investigation has nothing to do with AGs accusations concerning Exxon's purported knowledge of global warming in the 1970s. As for Exxon suing two of the AGs..........as a shareholder, I hope they sue all 17 for the clear abuse of power and for wasting the company's time and resources responding to frivolous accusations. Unlike our Clinton apologist, I firmly believe that public officials should be held to account when they behave inappropriately. Others agree. There are several lawsuits pending aside from Exxon's. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 4:29 pm Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | More misdirection. The rumored SEC investigation has nothing to do with AGs accusations concerning Exxon's purported knowledge of global warming in the 1970s. As for Exxon suing two of the AGs..........as a shareholder, I hope they sue all 17 for the clear abuse of power and for wasting the company's time and resources responding to frivolous accusations. Unlike our Clinton apologist, I firmly believe that public officials should be held to account when they behave inappropriately. Others agree. There are several lawsuits pending aside from Exxon's. |
As the earlier quote notes, some in the oil industry brag that they are not in the honesty business. Apparently mrgybe thinks he has greater insight into Exxon's dishonesty, when it happened, and whether or not there should be criminal or civil liabilities. Perhaps his subpoena has not yet arrived.
I will wait for the results of the investigation. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2016 2:50 pm Post subject: |
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More news of good corporate citizenship from our old friend Exxon. Source is a energy newsletter,
| Quote: | Exxon Mobil Corp. was ordered to pay a record $74 billion fine in Chad for underpaying royalties in the central African nation where the company has been drilling for 15 years, according to a court document.
The fine is about five times more than Chad’s gross domestic product, which the World Bank estimates at $13 billion. The High Court in the capital, N’Djamena, announced its ruling Oct. 5 in response to a complaint from the Finance Ministry that a consortium led by Exxon hadn’t met its tax obligations. The court also demanded the Texas-based oil explorer pay $819 million in overdue royalties, according to the document.
The penalty exceeds the $61.6 billion financial blow BP Plc incurred after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 killed 11 rig workers and fouled the Gulf of Mexico with crude for months, and is more than 70 times larger than the $977.5 million Exxon was ordered to pay fishermen and other victims of the 1989 Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Chad is unlikely to collect most of the fine, said Jeffery Atik, who teaches international law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
“Nobody is going to cooperate outside of Chad in enforcing this judgment,” Atik said in a telephone interview. “This leaves Exxon exposed to possibly losing everything it has inside Chad but that’s such an extraordinary number, I can’t imagine the assets they have there are worth that much.” |
It must be the Trump model. Dewey, Cheatum and Howe.
But wait, there's more. Exxon has trouble hiding its nefarious deeds completely:
| Quote: | By Timothy Cama and Megan R. Wilson - 10/06/16 10:03 AM EDT
Two watchdog groups are accusing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) of abusing its nonprofit status, pointing to information about ExxonMobil Corp. as proof.
The Center for Media Democracy and Common Cause say ALEC is engaging in corporate lobbying for organizations like Exxon, while working under an IRS nonprofit designation that prohibits such lobbying.
The accusation that the conservative ALEC is misusing its 501(c)3 status, usually reserved for educational and charitable organizations, is not new — liberal groups have made the charge for years.
But the two watchdog groups say they have new information, given national attention over the last year to Exxon’s history of lobbying against climate change policies.
“It has become painfully obvious over the past few years that ALEC is a corporate lobby front group masquerading as a charity — at taxpayer expense,” Arn Pearson, general counsel at the Center for Media and Democracy, said in a statement. “If the laws governing nonprofits are to mean anything, the IRS needs to take action to enforce them in this case.”
“For years ALEC has been a key asset in Exxon’s multi-billion dollar campaign to push a dangerous climate-denial agenda and secretly lobby politicians on anti-environmental legislation that pollutes the environment,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause.
ALEC and Exxon both dismissed the watchdog groups’ allegations.
“The Common Cause and Center for Media and Democracy campaign serves their own fundraising purposes alone,” said ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling. “These routine, frivolous complaints delivered to the media — and later to the IRS — seek only headlines where no wrongdoing has taken place.”
Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said the accusations are “ridiculous” and defended the company’s positions and research on climate change.
“Allegations by the Center for Media Democracy and Common Cause are inaccurate — and ridiculous — when you consider that ExxonMobil has long acknowledged the risks of climate change,” Jeffers said. “We are actively working to reduce emissions in our operations, helping consumers reduce their emissions, encouraging productive discussions on policy solutions such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and spending billions on research and technology to support lower emissions energy solutions.”
ALEC’s most visible activities are writing model legislation reflecting pro-business, conservative viewpoints that state lawmakers frequently propose in legislatures. It also writes reports for member legislators and holds conferences with policymakers to press areas of support. The group defends its activities as education.
The organizations filing Thursday’s complaint cite numerous payments Exxon made to ALEC as a member and try to tie those payments directly to ALEC’s work fighting climate policies.
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2016 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Laughable. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2016 12:39 pm Post subject: |
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It is not surprising that mrgybe thinks that Exxon's contributions to ALEC are amusing. ALEC is a lobbying organization that tries to fly under the radar, with 98% of its funding from corporate America trying to cut regulation of public health and the environment. Exxon is joined by Koch's, see http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10887/cmd-special-report-alecs-funding-and-spending
ALEC provides ready to go right wing legislation to friendly Republican legislators. Folks from Exxon just love the bang for the buck they get for supporting organizations like ALEC. Laughable? Hardly.
No comment on the cheating on royalties? Standard business practice in the Trump world? |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
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| Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2016 9:30 am Post subject: |
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| He celebrates a ridiculous judgement, rendered, without due process, by a notoriously corrupt "justice" department", in one of the most corrupt counties on earth, against an American company. No wonder he is so enthusiastic about HRC. |
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real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14880
Location: on earth
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| Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2016 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | He celebrates a ridiculous judgement, rendered, without due process, by a notoriously corrupt "justice" department", in one of the most corrupt counties on earth, against an American company. No wonder he is so enthusiastic about HRC. |
no due process the FBI run by right wingers and the head of the FBI is a right winger. daaaaaaaaaaa
Only 150 agents were put on the case... not enough for your delusional mind.
_________________
when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 6:20 pm Post subject: |
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In today's Chronicle. Stooges for the oil industry continue to argue on this forum for less regulation. Their callous disregard for public and worker health is shameful.
| Quote: | Four years ago, Chevron’s oil refinery in Richmond, Calif. was the scene of an industrial disaster. An 8-inch diameter pipe carrying fuel oil ruptured, releasing a burst of flammable vapors that quickly expanded 100 meters in all directions, engulfing 19 refinery workers. Less than two minutes later, the vapor ignited into a massive fireball and a plume of smoke and toxic gases that spread over the northeastern Bay Area.
During that brief window, 18 of the workers crawled to safety through a blinding atmosphere of hot, flammable vapor. The last worker, a Chevron firefighter, climbed into the cab of his engine moments before the flames rolled over it. He survived. But the disaster wasn’t confined to the plant: In the following days, some 15,000 people in the communities downwind of the plant sought medical attention for symptoms of exposure to smoke and fire gases.
For 33 years, my grandfather, Ed Wilson, worked as an engineer at the Union Oil refinery in what was then the town of Oleum, near the city of Hercules. He was the son of Swedish immigrants and a graduate of Cal Tech, and he worked long hours making sure the plant ran safely, without fail. If he were alive today, I think he would be dismayed to learn what happened at Chevron.
In the years leading up to the fire, Chevron’s managers heard from their own engineers, via at least six different reports, that pipes in the plant’s massive crude unit were corroding and needed inspection and replacement, according to the report published by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. Managers ignored those warnings, even after a corroded pipe failed in 2007, causing a fire that injured one worker and sent out an alert asking people in the surrounding community to stay indoors. By 2009, Chevron engineers warned of the potential for a “catastrophic failure,” and still managers deferred action.
Chevron’s corporate negligence was nothing short of willful; by sheer luck, they avoided burning and killing 19 people who were just keeping the refinery running, like my grandfather did.
The silver lining of the Chevron refinery story starts in the Governor’s Office. Just days after the incident, Governor Brown assembled an interagency working group to assess the state’s refinery safety regulations. Now—four years later—the state’s redrafted regulation is poised for adoption. As chief scientist in the state’s Department of Industrial Relations, I helped draft the regulation, and I continue to follow the issue in my work with the BlueGreen Alliance, a national coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations.
If enacted, the regulation will enable plant engineers and other experts—including union safety representatives—to identify hazards and correct them, not with temporary patches or other Band-Aid measures, but with high-quality engineering solutions known collectively as “inherently safer technologies”. Reinforced with deadlines and reporting requirements, along with the enforcement teeth of the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH), the regulation should make it nearly impossible for plant managers to drive a refinery to the point of failure.
… the explosion caused a statewide 40-cent-per-gallon increase in the price of gas and—in the first six months alone—a $6.9 billion contraction in the California economy.
This is hardly radical. In essence, the 12,000-word proposal requires the state’s refineries to adopt the industry’s own best engineering practices. Using cars as an analogy, the proposed regulations will require the driver to follow the vehicle’s preventive maintenance schedule, rather than driving the car until the wheels fall off or the engine blows up.
While staffers at the DOSH and the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA) labored to draft the new regulation, mismanagement at the ExxonMobil refinery in the Southern California city of Torrance caused an explosion on February 2015 in the plant’s electrostatic precipitator. Contractors working on this multi-storied structure survived, again mostly by luck. The explosion sent tons of industrial dust into the community up to a mile from the plant, and flying debris narrowly missed striking a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid. Given the 330,000 residents, 71 schools and eight hospitals located within three miles of the plant, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board later concluded that a significant release of the acid, which vaporizes if released from its container, had “the potential to cause serious injury or death to many community members.”
The state’s OSHA program issued six “willful” violations against ExxonMobil because—like Chevron—the company had failed to “take action to eliminate known hazardous conditions at the refinery.” The company is appealing.
Again, damage was not confined to the plant alone. During the year the refinery was off-line, it was not producing the gasoline that the state’s economy requires. An analysis by the RAND Corporation concluded that the explosion caused a statewide 40-cent-per-gallon increase in the price of gas and—in the first six months alone—a $6.9 billion contraction in the California economy.
Governor Brown’s proposed regulation is clearly overdue, and yet it still faces opposition. The Western States Petroleum Association—representing refineries—is challenging the regulation’s scope and is pushing hard to scale it back. On the other hand, a coalition led by the United Steelworkers union (representing most refinery workers) and the Sierra Club, together with two dozen other organizations, is seeking to strengthen the regulation by reinstating deadlines and other accountability measures that were dropped from the final draft.
By placing his hand firmly on the side of the coalition, the Governor would side with good engineering practice and with a regulation whose strength might begin to match the seriousness of the risks facing refinery workers and neighboring communities. If he takes that action, he’ll also be stepping up for a nation that is in serious need of leadership on industrial safety.
In 2012 alone, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board tracked 125 significant process safety incidents at the nation’s petroleum refineries. Every two-and-a-half days, our nation experiences a major industrial chemical release. Nearly 23 million Americans live within one mile of a hazardous industrial facility. The regulations governing these facilities have not been updated since the early 1990s, when they were adopted in response to the 1984 industrial disaster in Bhopal, India, where a late-night leak of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide pesticide manufacturing plant killed thousands of people—most of whom were sleeping at the time.
The new regulation, in its strongest form, might give the industry’s corporate leaders heartburn, but there is no question that—at some point in California’s future—it will save lives. With a nod to Bhopal, to Richmond and to Torrance, California is on the cusp of reinventing industrial safety by making it much harder for corporations to dismiss the insights of engineers and plant operators. I think my grandfather would read the Governor’s proposal and smile. |
Written by Mike Wilson, who was the chief scientist in the State of California's Department of Industrial Relations. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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