myiW Current Conditions and Forecasts Community Forums Buy and Sell Services
 
Hi guest · myAccount · Log in
 SearchSearch   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   RegisterRegister 
Big Oil and citizenship
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 78, 79, 80, 81  Next
 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    iWindsurf Community Forum Index -> Politics, Off-Topic, Opinions
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Oct 06, 2021 11:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Imagine that. Conflicts of interest as well as lying and cheating.

Quote:
On a Saturday in early October 2011, Mike Smith was fishing on a pond on his property northwest of Dallas when he noticed a strange odor that smelled like diesel. Texas was in the middle of a prolonged drought, and the odor was emanating from a dried-out section of the pond. When Smith dug into the spot, a yellowish liquid gurgled up. Assuming that the liquid was likely a petroleum product, Smith contacted Burlington Resources Oil and Gas, which operated wells on his property, to report what appeared to be a leak. Burlington referred the matter to Targa Resources, a pipeline company that operated the lines transporting oil and gas from Burlington’s wells.

Despite being required to report the contamination under local environmental rules, neither Burlington nor Targa notified the Texas Railroad Commission, the agency responsible for oil and gas oversight in the state. They also did not conduct technical assessments to determine the extent of contamination or its cause. Instead, after Smith filed a complaint to the Commission, both companies proceeded to deny responsibility for cleanup. The dispute dragged on for the next seven years. After agency staff determined that Targa’s pipelines were the likely cause of contamination, Targa cleaned up the surrounding soil. In 2019, the commissioners denied Smith’s request for additional testing and monitoring and released the two companies of their responsibilities for cleanup without issuing any fines.

It might have been just another example of a painfully slow regulatory agency — were it not for the commissioners’ financial interests in the companies under investigation. Two of the three commissioners that signed off on the cleanup held stock in ConocoPhillips, Burlington’s parent company, while the case was being heard. In 2019, commissioners Wayne Christian and Christi Craddick sold up to 99 ConocoPhillips shares, according to personal financial disclosures. Craddick also reported holding shares in Targa Resources worth up to $4,042 at the end of 2019. From 2015 to 2021, the two commissioners collected a grand total of $31,000 in campaign contributions from ConocoPhillips and Targa’s political action committees and executives employed by the companies.

Regulators who hold a financial stake in a company while simultaneously making official decisions that might affect its bottom line are involved in a clear conflict of interest. Such conflicts are not uncommon at the Texas Railroad Commission, or RRC, which happens to be one of the most powerful agencies charged with environmental protection in the country’s oilfields. According to new and forthcoming reports by Commission Shift, a Texas-based nonprofit that monitors the Railroad Commission, all three current commissioners are subject to conflicts of interest.


It's cheaper to make campaign contributions than comply with the law--or pay taxes. The money comes flooding back in subsidies:

Quote:
Damian Carrington, The Guardian

The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

With $650 billion in annual subsidies, it is easy to own the Republican party with cmpaign contribitions. Source: IMF

Quote:
Summary:This paper updates estimates of fossil fuel subsidies, defined as fuel consumption times the gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations), for 191 countries. Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion). About three quarters of global subsidies are due to domestic factors—energy pricing reform thus remains largely in countries’ own national interest—while coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies. Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP.


Oh, look over there at abortion.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Knothat



Joined: 23 Sep 2021
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the interesting material, a very informative message.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
hamdesneha



Joined: 13 Oct 2021
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

boggsman1 wrote:
matty...I agree with your above post. The silver lining for me from last week's debate is that Mr Romney will immediately revert back to his moderate, even liberal Keynesian self if he wins.

That's true.
CAEC
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 10:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
What, no comment from the apologists for big oil with the Supreme Court passing on a chance to overturn a ruling against Chevron on pollution? The net result is a n $18.2 billion judgement against Chevron for pollution in Ecuador, won in a New York based case, stands. Do we need another lesson in how the carbon industry systematically destroys their credibility?

A federal judge on Friday sentenced former environmental lawyer Steven Donziger to six months in prison after finding him guilty on contempt charges in July. Donziger in the 1990s sued Texaco on behalf of Ecuadorian farmers and Indigenous people, securing an $8.5 billion judgment in 2011. The same year, Chevron, which had since acquired the company, countersued and accused Donziger of bribery and evidence tampering. A federal judge found in Chevron’s favor, overturning the award and later charging Donziger with contempt. Donziger, who has been under house arrest for two years, was disbarred in 2018. Judge Lewis Kaplan took the unusual step of appointing private attorneys as prosecutors in the case after federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York declined to take it. One of the attorneys appointed previously worked for a firm Chevron has retained. In passing the sentence Friday, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska accused Donziger of an “astonishing lack of respect for the law” and “spen[ding] the last seven years thumbing his nose at the judicial system,” according to Bloomberg.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 1:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So do you also suppose that the big oil company liars who appeared before the House Committee yesterday will face legal consequences? They certainly had pet Republicans arguing against them accountable, and they continued to lie about their support for disinformation.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The coverup continues:

Quote:
none of them committed to a proposed independent audit of their funds to guarantee that none of it went to deny climate science. (Reuters)
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sat Oct 30, 2021 12:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mrgybe wrote:
mac wrote:
What, no comment from the apologists for big oil with the Supreme Court passing on a chance to overturn a ruling against Chevron on pollution? The net result is a n $18.2 billion judgement against Chevron for pollution in Ecuador, won in a New York based case, stands. Do we need another lesson in how the carbon industry systematically destroys their credibility?

A federal judge on Friday sentenced former environmental lawyer Steven Donziger to six months in prison after finding him guilty on contempt charges in July. Donziger in the 1990s sued Texaco on behalf of Ecuadorian farmers and Indigenous people, securing an $8.5 billion judgment in 2011. The same year, Chevron, which had since acquired the company, countersued and accused Donziger of bribery and evidence tampering. A federal judge found in Chevron’s favor, overturning the award and later charging Donziger with contempt. Donziger, who has been under house arrest for two years, was disbarred in 2018. Judge Lewis Kaplan took the unusual step of appointing private attorneys as prosecutors in the case after federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York declined to take it. One of the attorneys appointed previously worked for a firm Chevron has retained. In passing the sentence Friday, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska accused Donziger of an “astonishing lack of respect for the law” and “spen[ding] the last seven years thumbing his nose at the judicial system,” according to Bloomberg.


The curious case of Steven Donziger, and the spin we have come to expect from buggy whip. If there is compelling information that Donziger has engaged in bribery and falsifying information, he should indeed be jailed. But that's not what this case is about at the moment. Here is more of the story, courtesy of the NYT:

Quote:
On July 31, 2019, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, a former corporate lawyer, tried to charge Mr. Donziger with contempt of court based on his refusals in 2014 to give the court access to decades of client communications on devices like his phone and his computer. That year, Judge Kaplan supported Chevron’s complaint in a 500-page ruling finding that Mr. Donziger and his associates had engaged in a conspiracy and criminal conduct by ghostwriting an environmental report used as a crucial piece of evidence and bribing a judge in Ecuador.

After the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Judge Kaplan took the rare step of appointing a private law firm, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Mr. Donziger in the name of the U.S. government, Mr. Kuby said.


Kaplan's pursuit of Donziger is controversial in its own right, given that the US Attorney declined to prosecute the case, and at the time Kaplan owned stock which would have required him to recuse himself. His pursuit has been objected to by many other lawyers, to wit:

Quote:
NEW YORK—September 1, 2020—Dozens of legal organizations around the world representing more than 500,000 lawyers along with over 200 individual lawyers today submitted a judicial complaint documenting a series of shocking violations of the judicial code of conduct by United States Judge Lewis A. Kaplan targeting human rights lawyer Steven Donziger after he helped Indigenous peoples win a historic judgment against Chevron in Ecuador to clean up the pollution caused by decades of oil drilling with no environmental controls.

The complaint was formally filed by the National Lawyers Guild in conjunction with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). IADL was founded in Paris in 1946 to fight to uphold the rule of law around the world and has consultative status with UN agencies.


Now we know that really big money is involved, and of course apologists for the industry will insist that Chevron has never done anything wrong. The actual case boils down to a factual and legal question that I had thought was resolved when the Supreme Court refused to hear Chevron's appeal of the judgement. This is found at the end of the NYT article:

Quote:
Chevron has long argued that a 1998 agreement that Texaco signed with Ecuador after a $40 million cleanup absolves it of liability. It contends that Ecuador’s state-run oil company is responsible for much of the pollution in the oil patch that Texaco left in the 1970s.


I do believe that, on the merits of that case, Chevron lost. I also believe that attorney-client privileged documents are not discoverable in most circumstances.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Nov 02, 2021 1:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

funded by pig oil.

Quote:
ns on climate denial content. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
By Cat Zakrzewski
Today at 7:05 a.m. EDT|Updated today at 7:45 a.m. EDT



Breitbart is the most influential producer of climate change denial posts on Facebook, according to a report released Tuesday that suggests a small number of publishers play an outsized role in creating content that undermines climate science.

Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit
The far-right news and commentary site is one of just ten publishers responsible for nearly 70 percent of interactions with climate change denial content on Facebook, according to a study by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), shared exclusively with The Washington Post. This group of publishers, nicknamed the “Toxic Ten” by CCDH, includes organizations with links to foreign governments, such as Russia Today, as well as with ties to fossil fuel giants, such as Media Research Center.

The report includes a broad range of climate disinformation, including articles that undermine the existence or impacts of climate change or misrepresent data in ways that might erode trust in climate science experts.


This includes a Breitbart story published in March that suggested the Green New Deal, proposed legislation to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, would likely result in mass lockdowns if passed into law.

“Every major environmental figure [and] climate activist has praised the COVID [coronavirus] lockdowns as essentially a model for what we should be doing with climate,” the article reads.

The study comes amid increasing political concern about the catastrophic impact of climate change, as global leaders gather in Glasgow for the U.N. brokered COP26, described as a last chance for nations to hammer out a unified plan to significantly cut greenhouse gases.

While the report doesn’t provide a comprehensive look at all misleading climate change content promoted on Facebook, it has the potential to inspire political action as CCDH has historically captured policymakers’ attention. The nonprofit’s March 2021 “disinformation dozen” report about top spreaders of anti-vaccine content, was repeatedly cited by the White House along with numerous lawmakers in Congress, and it was used as a proxy for questions about the role of social media in aggravating vaccine hesitancy.


When you put it all together, you’ve got these two industries, Big Oil and Big Tech, and they are the two industries that pose the greatest threat to the survival of our species,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.


Earlier this year, Facebook promised to start adding informational labels to some climate posts, much like it does with election or coronavirus posts. But CCDH researchers found that of the posts they surveyed containing climate misinformation, just 8 percent carried Facebook’s informational label.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Nov 09, 2021 12:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The decision to lie and misrepresent climate science was a conscious choice by big oil. Just imagine what the world would be like now if Exxon, Chevron, and their competitors had seen themselves as energy companies, not oil companies, and devoted their expertise to creating a more sustainable world. If they had done this years ago, when Jimmy Carter was President and identified the problem, we would be decades further along the path. But they doubled down on buggy whips. The alternatives are cheaper and cleaner.

Quote:
Police departments specialize in protecting the public, not the environment. But around the country and the world, they’re beginning to add electric vehicles to their fleets of squad cars—partly because they’re seeing cost savings in ditching fossil-fuel vehicles.

Last week, the Spokane, Washington police department presented a report to the city council on the performance of two Tesla Model Y vehicles it has been using in a limited way since March. The Spokane Spokesman-Review reported that the department predicted the Tesla will eventually cost $0.69 per mile driven, compared with $0.77 for a hybrid vehicle and $0.79 for a gas-powered car—a difference of $7,000 or more over four years.

The downside was that a small sample of department employees gave relatively low ratings to the Tesla for comfort, reliability, storage and safety. Police officials stressed the results were very preliminary.

Officers might have to get used to EVs, if for no other reason than what the Spokane police found about cost savings. Officer.com reported earlier this year that in 2019, Bargersville, Indiana police chief Todd Bertram ran into a roadblock when he made a pitch to the town council to hire two additional officers. There just wasn’t enough money in the budget. He began hunting for savings, and discovered that his biggest cost item next to staff salaries and benefits was fuel.

That’s when Bertram began looking at electric vehicle options for squad cars. The $79,000 price tag for a Tesla Model S was too rich, but the Model 3 at $42,000 was more affordable. The department bought one and quickly had it outfitted for police use. Then they added when an officer’s gas-powered vehicle was totaled in a crash.

Bargersville now has five Teslas, and Bertram says they save about $64,000 per car per year.


From Route 50.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    iWindsurf Community Forum Index -> Politics, Off-Topic, Opinions All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 78, 79, 80, 81  Next
Page 79 of 81

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum

myiW | Weather | Community | Membership | Support | Log in
like us on facebook
© Copyright 1999-2007 WeatherFlow, Inc Contact Us Ad Marketplace

Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group