EtP warren bak
---
MERRI OK
mofo on slapp
bad code main
---
Energy Transfer facility reportedly saw the worst methane plume in the U.S. in 2025 - Greenpeace
---
NORTH DAKOTA JURY 667M$ --> 345; DUTCH CT
===
exxonknews gmail 12 24
Who’s funding this ‘newspaper’ mailed to potential jurors in Greenpeace’s trial?
A dark money trail linked to pipeline company Energy Transfer could be behind a mysterious mailer targeting North Dakota residents in the lead-up to its major trial with Greenpeace.
The following piece was co-published by DeSmog and ExxonKnews.
In early September, fossil fuel executive and Donald Trump megadonor Kelcy Warren quietly made a large donation to a political action committee few people have ever heard of. Warren is CEO of Energy Transfer, the company behind the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline, which in 2016 faced thousands of protesters including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other opponents.
The timing is potentially significant because Warren made his $5 million donation to the super PAC called Turnout for America while his company pushed forward with a lawsuit against the nonprofit Greenpeace related to the Standing Rock protests.
Two weeks after receiving Warren’s contribution, Turnout for America paid $250,000 to Northern CB Corp. — an Illinois publishing and printing company — for “media services.”
One of the listed directors for Northern CB Corp. is Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman who owns Chicago-based company Metric Media, a Koch-linked network that runs more than 1,100 partisan websites masquerading as local news.
In October, residents in Morton County, where the Greenpeace trial is scheduled to take place, received a mailed publication called “Central ND News,” which featured articles decrying the Dakota Access protests and praising Energy Transfer. Central ND News is produced by Metric Media.
While news of this “weird” paper was first reported by Floodlight and the North Dakota News Cooperative, additional details related to Warren’s Super PAC donation are now being debated in the lawsuit itself.
Greenpeace is urging a North Dakota court to allow further investigation into who paid to send the publication attacking Dakota Access protestors to Morton County residents — and whether there was an attempt to exert “improper influence” over potential jurors in Energy Transfer’s favor.
“Given the importance of securing a fair and impartial jury … knowing who was directing these actions, to whom they directed the information, and why they did so are important issues to the fair administration of justice,” a Greenpeace brief shared with ExxonKnews and DeSmog reads.
A closely watched lawsuit
Energy Transfer’s $300 million lawsuit accuses the environmental group Greenpeace of unlawfully orchestrating protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, during which time hundreds of protestors were arrested near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation — including climate activists and Indigenous water protectors.
Energy Transfer, which worked with law enforcement agencies to curtail the protests and used an international security firm to surveil and shift public opinion about the company’s opponents, claims that Greenpeace waged an “unlawful, malicious, and coordinated attack” to damage and defame the pipeline and the company itself.
According to Greenpeace USA, Energy Transfer is suing the group because it “dared to uplift the Indigenous-led opposition movement at Standing Rock.”
The lawsuit could have implications for whether the fossil fuel industry is able to silence protesters as it embarks on major expansions, including the buildout of new gas and carbon dioxide pipelines, Gulf Coast LNG facilities, and petrochemical infrastructure. Experts and advocates say the case has all the hallmarks of a SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation — a larger legal tactic fossil fuel companies have been using to suppress dissent and drain their opposition of resources and time.
As the February 2025 trial draws near in the closely watched case, Greenpeace is now asking a state district court to grant an emergency motion to reopen discovery in the case, which would allow the environmental group to get more information about who funded the mailer to North Dakota residents.
In its new court filing, Greenpeace alleges that “there may have been improper influence over potential Morton County jurors through direct mailers containing negative reporting about Standing Rock protests that took place eight years ago, and benefits which Energy Transfer conferred on the local community six years ago.”
Greenpeace cites new details indicating that Kelcy Warren’s donation came around the same time as a surge of coverage from Central ND News targeting the Dakota Access protests. Central ND News began running a series on its website in August, called “On This Date in 2016.” The series contained six articles in August, three of which accused protestors of “unlawful” activities in their headlines. Subsequent articles in the series appeared a few times each month up until this week. There is no record of the paper covering those protests before this year.
The same day Turnout for America paid the Illinois publishing company, Central ND News published a story praising a donation that Energy Transfer made to a university in North Dakota six years ago. That story, written by C.D. Marsden (a name that Floodlight first found yields no results in a Google search), was featured in the October newspaper delivered to Morton County residents’ homes, juxtaposed with stories about Dakota Access pipeline protestors.
The 12-page paper included those stories in a section called “This Month in History: October 2016,” featuring one article titled “Area schools locked down as authorities respond to pipeline protests.” Another recounts the details of a felony arrest warrant accusing a pipeline protestor of charging a police officer on horseback.
“The purpose of that publication is quite clearly to remind people about what was happening eight years ago,” a lawyer for Greenpeace, Everett Jack, told the court at a December 9 hearing requesting the reopening of discovery. “We should be entitled to find out who made that decision.”
pix
One of Greenpeace’s lawyers — Derrick Braaten, who resides in Mandan, a city in Morton County — received the Central ND News at his home in October. The paper doesn’t appear to have any physical presence in North Dakota — it directed readers to the outlet’s website, and didn’t include any local advertisements, according to Greenpeace.*
Jack told Southwest Judicial District Court Judge James Gion that reopening discovery would allow Greenpeace’s attorneys to question the Texas-based printing company that sent the newspaper, FMC Printing. The group would seek to subpoena FMC Printing to determine whether the mailer was targeted only to Morton County residents, who directed that the mailer be sent there, and why. Depending on the results of that investigation, Greenpeace would consider requesting a change in venue for the trial.
“We’re filing this motion and seeking this discovery because I think this court would agree there’s nothing more sacred in the legal system than the right to a fair, impartial jury, and every lawyer knows that direct efforts to influenc[e] the jury pool are not okay,” Jack said.
‘Playing both sides’
Greenpeace has been fighting varying iterations of Energy Transfer’s case — which was originally filed under state and federal racketeering charges — for eight years, with individual Indigenous protestors and journalists also brought into the mix. This week, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard an appeal from Energy Transfer in its attempts to subpoena journalists who reported on the protests at Standing Rock, seeking to force them to produce confidential, unpublished material.
The Dakota Access pipeline began operating through North Dakota in 2017 after an executive action from then-President Trump. The pipeline, which protestors warned would threaten water supplies, sacred sites, and the climate, leaked 5 times in its first year of operation alone.
This fall, the day before the October mailing was sent, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a new lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arguing that the pipeline is operating illegally and should be shut down. Energy Transfer CEO Warren gave $5 million in campaign donations to Trump, who recently promised “fully expedited approvals and permits” to companies who invest $1 billion in the U.S.
Energy Transfer’s case, originally filed by the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres (long-time lawyers for Donald Trump), was taken over in 2023 by Gibson Dunn, a law firm with a record of “playing both sides” of the First Amendment on behalf of its corporate clients. }:Gibson Dunn lawyer Trey Cox represented Energy Transfer in its opposition to Greenpeace’s motion this week,:{:{ arguing that juror questionnaires are the appropriate method to ensure a fair trial — and that whether or not Morton County residents received or read the newspaper was irrelevant.}:
ND Central News, he said, was a local newspaper that existed before the mailer was sent, and was simply covering matters involving a high-profile trial. Cox accused Greenpeace of trying to delay the trial date (which Greenpeace denied), and said its motion did not have “any basis in law or in fact.”
Energy Transfer, Metric Media, and Trey Cox did not respond to requests for comment.
“We don’t have any evidence that this newspaper in any way prejudiced potential jurors,” Cox told the court.
an 1 23 maya
Billionaire Kelcy Warren is suing former Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke for defamation after he publicly denounced Warren’s $1 million donation to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s 2021 campaign, Truthout reports.
Truthout reporters Andy Lee Roth and Steve Macek analyzed the pending lawsuit — which was originally reported by Jordan Uhl at Lever News — and what the legal action means for the future of the relationship between money and political campaigns.
The donation was reported by the Texas Ethic Commission and Federal Election Commission to be the “single largest donation” towards any political campaign — both state and federal.
READ MORE:How Donald Trump's massive 'dark money machine' is 'designed to confuse': report
The former Texas congressman has called out Governor Abbott in the past for not holding the Texas oil and gas companies from which Warren’s company, Energy Transfer Partners, makes a billion-dollar profit.
Despite Warren’s claim that O’Rourke's public criticism is defamation because hesuffered “mental anguish,”Lee Roth and Macek offer three reasons why the lawsuit likely won’t go anywhere:
- First, truth often prevails in defamation cases. And the assertion that Warren’s top-dollar donation influenced the campaign outcome is “likely true.”
- Lee Roth and Macek highlight that subjective opinions “are not generally actionable.” And O’Rourke’s criticism is based on his opinion of the billionaire’s contribution, but his critique also sits on “factual evidence”.
- Warren, who is worth $5 billion, is considered a “public figure” by the Supreme Court’s definition: someone with “general fame or notoriety in the community and pervasive involvement in ordering the affairs of society.” There’s proof that Warren has donated to a long list of political candidates across the country, to political actions committees, proving his “pervasive involvement” in campaigns. Therefore, it would be difficult to prove that O’Rourke exhibited “malice” or “knowingly uttered falsehoods or, at least, acted in reckless disregard of the truth — in order to claim any damages.”
READ MORE:How 'dark money' funded the far-right campaign against Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 policies: report
Nonetheless, as Uhl wrote, the legal action against O’Rourke still “could send an intimidating message to political candidates across the country: if you suggest billionaire donors buy political influence, you could face severe punishment.”
Additionally, Lee Roth and Macek assert that the lawsuit is an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), which are defined as “attempts to use civil tort action to stifle political expression.”
And although SLAPPs are not legal in Texas, the lawsuit also exemplifies use “of the legal tactic to deter critical speech,” Uhl reports.
Nonetheless, The Texas Citizen Participation Act (TCPA) says that people like O’Rourke who are “defendants of frivolous SLAPP actions” — and being sued for exercising the freedom of speech — can request that the case be dismissed.
In their conclusion, Lee Roth and Macek warn this specific lawsuit is a direct reflection of dark money groups' influence on political campaigns. The writers also pointed to a recentProject Censored report that found GOP lawmakers continue to push legislation that makes "it more difficult, if not impossible, to identify the sources of dark money contributions, ultimately shielding them from public scrutiny.”
Read the full report at Truthout.
READ MORE: Dark money groups pump nearly $90 million into "independent state legislature" case
===
===
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/10/i-feel-used-how-fossil-fuel-firms-court-black-leaders-to-support-pipelines
pastor Geoffrey Guns was sceptical when asked to join the community advisory board for a gas pipeline, but decided it was his duty to advocate for the Black communities that would be affected by the fossil fuel expansion project.
The Virginia Reliability Project (VRP) is a proposal by the Canadian fossil fuel company behind the Keystone XL pipeline to expand and upgrade gas infrastructure through tribal lands, fragile waterways and underserved neighbourhoods in south-east Virginia.
Almost 50% of the population along the VRP route live below the poverty line and more than half are people of colour.
TC Energy claims the expansion will create thousands of local jobs and that community engagement is core to the company’s mission. For this reason, Guns, a senior pastor at the Second Calvary Baptist church in Norfolk, joined the advisory board along with several other local Black religious leaders.....
---
---
https://theintercept.com/**2022/09/**16/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-free-speech/
REPS. JAMIE RASKIN, D-Md., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., probably didn’t plan for their committee hearings to run at the exact same time this week, but the hearings sure were talking to each other.
In her Committee on Natural Resources hearing, Porter highlighted the role PR firms play in blocking climate policy. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, and his selected witness, Amy Cooke, CEO of the conservative John Locke Foundation, expressed concern that preventing companies and their hired PR firms from spreading misinformation about climate change would have a chilling effect on free speech.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Raskin, focused on free speech attacks against environmentalists, digging into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to curb citizens’ speech rights via strategic litigation and laws that criminalize protest. Taken together, the two are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens.
raskin’s free speech hearing focused on two key tactics: the increased filing of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs— defamation suits aimed at penalizing citizens or citizen groups for exercising their First Amendment rights — and theproliferation of so-called critical infrastructure bills, which pile on fines and criminal sentences for those caught trespassing or vandalizing near pipelines, power plants, railroads, or other infrastructure. These anti-protest bills were a direct industry backlash to the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017. Starting with a law passed in Oklahoma in 2017, they proliferated with the help of the industry group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts and disseminates pro-corporate model legislation for adoption by state governments. Seventeen states now have critical infrastructure laws on the books, with several more considering proposals.
####
“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace and a witness at Raskin’s hearing. “They’re tactics used by the same corporate actors to quash dissent. They’re pushing legislation to silence us, to criminalize our critiques through anti-protest bills. And they’re also filing SLAPP suits to silence dissent.”
Greenpeace has dealt with both. Greenpeace USA activists were arrested in 2019 under Texas’s felony critical infrastructure law for unfurling banners on a bridge, which temporarily blocked shipping. The goal of the action was to highlight the connection between the oil industry and climate change.
Greenpeace is engaged in active litigation in a couple of SLAPP suits too. In one, Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued the organization for its role in the Standing Rock protests. The suit was initially filed in federal court and invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, orRICO, a law designed to prosecute organized crime. “Energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy work to uplift Indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime,” Padmanabha said.
Because RICO allows for damages to be tripled if a defendant is found guilty, Greenpeace faced a $1 billion fine. Losing that suit would have had a truly chilling effect on free speech. A federal judge threw out the case, but Energy Transfer filed again in North Dakota (minus the RICO charge), a state that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law on the books.
:{:{}:
“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin.”
}:
Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants a quick way to get SLAPP suits dismissed, minimizing the time and money spent on meritless cases. Currently, 31 states and the District of Columbia have adopted anti-SLAPP statutes, which makes it fairly easy for corporate entities to go venue shopping for a court in a state without such a law. To address that gap, Raskin proposed new legislation this week to create federal anti-SLAPP protection. While some players in the fossil fuel industry may oppose Raskin’s bill, others have actually sought to avail themselves of anti-SLAPP protections. Exxon Mobil, for example, in its final attempt to thwart the fraud case against it in Massachusetts, argued that the suit was a SLAPP.
The oil company’s attorney Justin Anderson maintained that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s fraud complaint against Exxon was not valid because the company’s public statements on climate policy should be considered political opinion (“petitioning activity,” in legal parlance), not misleading advertising — even when Exxon falsely claimed that climate change wasn’t real and overstated the company’s investments in low-carbon technology.
When one judge asked why Exxon would file an anti-SLAPP complaint rather than make a First Amendment argument in court, Anderson made clear that the point was to avoid discovery, when the corporation would be asked to hand over files and make its executives available for depositions. “The anti-SLAPP statute provides a mechanism to have a case that is brought against someone for petitioning activity dismissed at the outset before burdensome discovery is imposedon the party,” he argued.
The “petitioning activity” argument is one that the industry and its allies have trotted out repeatedly, both in court and in congressional hearings like those held this week. It’s a broad interpretation of free speech rights for corporations, the very sort of protection these same companies are opposed to extending to individuals. In his testimony before Raskin’s subcommittee, Daren Bakst, a senior research fellow on environmental policy and regulation for the Heritage Foundation, said, “The chilling effects are states bringing lawsuits against people for their speech.” It’s hard to tell because he said “people,” but he meant oil companies. Which he made clear by immediately referencing “what municipalities are doing, the government is doing against these fossil fuel companies. And I also see that Massachusetts is doing.”
This view of an oil company as a person who is being silenced for simply sharing their views on climate policy is the basic argument oil companies are making in dozens of cases across the country. These cases, brought by both municipalities and states, hinge either on fraud or nuisance claims and effectively ask that fossil fuel companies pay up for delaying action on climate, which increased both the impacts of the climate crisis and the price of adapting to a warming world. In all of them, the corporate defendants make some version of a free speech argument. They maintain that their public speech about global warming differed from their internal knowledge because their public statements were “petitioning speech,” related to their political views and desires and thus, protected. The industry has been building the foundation for such an argument for about as long as it has known about climate change — since the late 1960s.
:{:{}:
“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws.”
}:
The argument arose out of a situation not unlike the one playing out today, with war driving up prices at the pump and oil companies desperate to control public perception.
According to documents from Mobil’s corporate archive at the University of Texas at Austin, the company’s longtime PR whiz Herbert Schmertz and then-CEO, Rawleigh Warner, came up with an idea to help wrestle back control of the narrative. Using Mobil’s PR and advertising budget, they would create “idea advertising” to push the company’s take on key issues of the day and create the sense of Mobil as a citizen with a distinct personality.
They ran weekly :{advertorial:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:s in the New York Times as well as regular placements in a wide range of other publications, from the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal to Time and Fortune. Then Schmertz proposed TV and radio too. Why not?
In the early 1970s, Mobil took their TV and radio advertorials to all the big broadcast stations and only one, NBC, agreed to run them. CBS and ABC said they preferred to have their journalists cover energy issues. For Schmertz and Warner, it was a battle they had to win. What if the newspapers, or PBS, started to rethink playing nice with Mobil? In a media blitz, the two blasted CBS and ABC from every angle, in their NYT spot, on radio and TV programs, at events. Warner went to various business clubs to talk about the importance of protecting corporate free speech. Schmertz testified before Congress in 1978, urging First Amendment protection for Mobil’s ads and arguing that there was no difference between Mobil advertorials and New York Times editorials, because after all the Times was a business too.
Mobil helped rally support and funding for the first big Supreme Court case on the matter, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the precursor to Citizens United. The court ruled that corporations could spend whatever money they wanted to influence politics, overruling a Massachusetts statute that said otherwise. “If the restricted view of corporate speech taken by the Massachusetts court were accepted,” Justice Lewis A. Powell wrote, “government would have the power to deprive society of the views of corporations.”
Related
How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content
“I don’t think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of speech in the public space,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle said. “Now, suddenly, corporations could use their budgets — which are enormous, you know, much larger than individuals — to advocate their position in the public space. … It allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space that gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else’s.”
The 2010 Citizens United ruling, of course, intensified that dynamic. Whereas Bellotti allowed corporations to publicly campaign for particular ballot initiatives or candidates, Citizens United allowed political speech of any sort without disclosure of who was paying, who was actually speaking. Oil companies have been working to broaden corporate free speech rights even more in recent years, as their arguments in climate litigation and before Congress show.
“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws,” said Brulle, who has co-authored briefs in some of these cases.
Robert Kerr, who’s researched Mobil’s role in the corporate free speech movement for years, said to side with the oil companies’ arguments in these cases, the Supreme Court would have to turn its back on about a century’s worth of legal precedent. “It’s really deeply established even by some of the members of the current Supreme Court that the First Amendment will never protect expression that is fraud,” he said. “The worry now is that with this court there seems to be a majority that wants to say yes to almost any question the corporate interests raise.”
It makes sense then, that the industry and its allies would be working hard to rebrand climate denialism as simply a difference of opinion, to put some distance between greenwashing and fraud, to collectively gasp about the “chilling effect” (a phrase that came up so often in minority witness testimony this week that it’s hard to believe someone somewhere wasn’t disseminating talking points) that tackling misinformation might have on free speech. The fact that those efforts are happening alongside coordinated attempts to criminalize protest is more of the same: corporations drowning out the public.
---
---
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/03/keystone-xl-future-pipeline-permits
On April 15, Judge Brian Morris nullified water-crossing permits in Montana that were granted for the Keystone XL, a major setback for the long-embattled tar sands oil pipeline. The ruling came just days after Keystone XL owner TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, obtained billions of dollars in subsidies from the Alberta government as global oil prices plummeted.
The oil and gas industry has taken notice. Seemingly just a ruling on Keystone XL — the subject of opposition by the climate movement for the past decade — the ruling could have far broader implications for the future of building water-crossing pipelines and utility lines.
In his decision, Judge Morris cited a potential violation of the Endangered Species Act when he ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do a deeper analysis of potential impacts to protected species. Morris required the Corps to demonstrate whether or not it could construct the pipeline without harming endangered species, such as the Pallid Sturgeon or the American burying beetle. Instead, the Army Corps “failed to consider relevant expert analysis and failed to articulate a rational connection between the facts it found and the choice it made,” Morris ruled, when the Corps gave Keystone XL the initial green light.
The original July 2019 complaintin that case — filed by Northern Plains Resource Council, Bold Alliance, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Center for Biological Diversity — also argued that the Army Corps had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in using an obscure regulatory lever to fast-track the review process.
Known as Nationwide Permit 12, the permit only requires a short environmental analysis compared to the more robust environmental impact statement required under NEPA for other major infrastructure projects. But Morris also wrote that the decision applied not just to Keystone XL, but to all major federal projects aiming to utilize Nationwide Permit 12, calling for it to be “vacated pending completion of the consultation process and compliance with all environmental statutes and regulations.”
Just two days after this decision, Army Corps regulatory program Chief Jennifer Moyer wrote in an email obtained by the Associated Press that the agency should suspend the program indefinitely “out of an abundance of caution” until the issue is resolved legally.
The Trump administration has already requested a procedural halt on implementing Morris’ decision until its potential appeal weaves its way through the legal system.
“The Court has eliminated Nationwide Permit 12 for use by any utility line project anywhere in the country, which has extraordinary and immediate implications for numerous projects,” the U.S. Department of Justice attorneys wrote on behalf of the Army Corps.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the lobbying and advocacy voice of the oil and gas industry, has also filed an affidavit in favor of putting a procedural halt to Morris’ ruling.
“The ability to provide reliable energy is even more important now during this sensitive and challenging time brought on by COVID-19,” Robin Rorick, Vice President of Midstream and Industry Operations for API, wrote in the affidavit. “The Court’s Order could threaten API’s members’ ability to continue numerous energy and infrastructure projects, affecting the health of numerous companies and job security in an already-strained economy.”
API also joined North America’s Building Trades Unions and Interstate Natural Gas Association of America in denouncing the ruling along similar lines.
'Single and Complete'
Nationwide Permit 12 historically was used for small “single and complete” projects crossing water parcels half an acre in size or smaller.
But in the aftermath of protests and civil disobedience actions taken against Keystone XL, the Obama administration began using that permitting process to split pipelines into hundreds or thousands of half-acre pieces. The process was a way around the more robust and democratic National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulatory process, which involves both a public commenting and public hearing phase. Nationwide Permit 12 was also used to push through the Dakota Access pipeline, as well as the southern leg of the Keystone XL, both greenlighted by President Barack Obama.
During the Obama era, environmental groups decried this as a form of “segmentation” and a way out of complying with NEPA, which they routinely challeneged in court with some success—though not enough to undo the legal lever. The bedrock environmental law is now under further attack by President Donald Trump, with the administration trying to remove climate change contribution as a factor analyzed under the law for major projects and aiming to narrow the scope of and time it takes to complete these environmental impact reviews.
[vid]
Since March 2017, the Trump administration has utilized Nationwide Permit 12 over 37,000 times, the AP reported. As it stands today, the Army Corps’ decision to halt use of the Nationwide Permit 12 fast-track tool has put 360 permit applications on hold.
“The reason that matters is that the public and the communities and everybody that lives there has the chance to get involved in the process,” Eric Huber, Senior Managing Attorney with the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program, told DeSmog. “Otherwise, these special permits just allow a pipeline company to go out and start construction without notice to anybody or to take private property and just proceed and blast this through regardless of how the local community thinks of it.”
External corporate attorneys, too, have taken notice and expressed their own concerns about the ruling.
“The decision puts in limbo thousands of infrastructure projects nationwide that rely on [Nationwide Permit] 12 for the construction, maintenance, or repair of utility lines and poses particularly acute problems for the oil and gas industry, which relies on the permit to facilitate projects ranging from large interstate pipelines to smaller gathering lines at exploration and production sites,” wrote attorneys fromBrownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a firm with close ties to the Trump administration, in one such reaction to the ruling.
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck’s fossil fuel industry lobbying clients include the American Petroleum Institute, American Public Power Association, Freeport LNG, Talos Energy, Jordan Cove LNG, WPX Energy, and the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association.
Another firm heavily involved in fossil fuel industry litigation and lobbying,Steptoe & Johnson, also weighed in on the ruling and wrote that it could have the impact of “extending permitting time frames for these types of projects” going forward. The firm’s fossil fuel industry lobbying clients include American Gas Association, Gas Technology Institute, and Peabody Energy.
Permian Highway Pipeline in Texas
The legal precedent set in the Keystone XL case is already playing out in federal courts.
On April 30, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuitin the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against the Army Corps of Engineers over another controversial pipeline. The complaint says the Army Corps did not comply with NEPA in issuing a Nationwide Permit 12 to the 428-mile Permian Highway gas pipeline. It also argues the agency is not currently in compliance with the order in the Keystone XL case because it has continued to allow pipeline construction under the contested Nationwide Permit 12 program.
“It is outrageous that the Corps approved this project without public notice or opportunity to comment on their permits,” Rebecca McCreary, a Sierra Club attorney, said of the Permian Highway pipeline in a press release. “Nationwide Permit 12 allows for no public hearings or participation by the local communities before the Corps permits construction to start, nor is there public notice or comment on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits allowing harm to the endangered species along the route. The Corps should stop this project immediately.”
Owned by Kinder Morgan, Permian Highway is a pipeline slated to carry gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Texas’ Permian Basin east across the state. Kinder Morgan told DeSmog it was aware of the lawsuit, but declined to comment on it and the broader Nationwide Permit 12 issue.
Permian Highway has already seen issues with spills into water systems, with one late March incident spilling 36,000 gallons of drilling slurry — including a carcinogenic additive — into groundwater.
[twt]
Responding, the Hays County Commissioners Court voted on April 22 to rescind road permits given by the Texas county to allow Kinder Morgan to drill underneath county roads as it builds the pipeline. And Kinder Morgan, too, has suspended construction on this portion of the pipeline as it “determines the best path forward” in the aftermath of the spill, the company told Houston Chronicle.
The City of Austin, City of San Marcos, Hays County, Travis County, and others also filed their own Endangered Species Act lawsuit in February,arguing that the pipeline could threaten protected Golden Cheeked Warblers, two salamander species, and their habitats.
Keystone XL Decision Looms
In the Keystone XL case in Montana, Morris recently deniedthe Army Corps a procedural stay in the case. TC Energy, for its part, wants the decision struck down as it applies both to its own pipeline and for the permitting program at large.
“If TC Energy does not receive authorization from the Army Corps by early July, its construction plans will be significantly impacted,” Gary Salsman, a TC Energy vice president for the Keystone XL project, wrote in his April 29 affidavit. “Currently, TC Energy is evaluating potential options that would be available to it in that circumstance, each of which have significant adverse consequences.”
Those “potential options,” Salsman wrote, include a potential construction delay across Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska; a change in construction plans this year to avoid the waters it is currently slated to cross that are impacted by the vacating of Nationwide Permit 12; or ending construction all together. He added that if construction does not begin in 2020, it could cost the company $750 million to $1.3 billion.
Morris could make a decision on how broadly his Nationwide Permit 12 decision applies as soon as May 8. Regardless of the outcome, Morris' next move will likely face an appeal from either side.
TAGS:
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck
National Environmental Policy Act
---
Several petrochemical plants and an oil refinery are located nearby along the Calcasieu Ship Channel. Turner Industries, Westlake Chemical Corporation, and Citgo each employ over a thousand engineers.[22] The Trunkline LNG terminal, immediately southwest of Lake Charles, is one of the United States' few liquified natural gas terminals. It has facilities for LNG receipt, storage, and re-gasification. Other industrial companies include PPG Industries, Phillips 66, Sasol, and W. R. Grace. Local industry also includes a number of manufacturing companies. Chennault International Airport hosts AAR Corp, which services airplanes, and a Northrop Grumman facility. The Shaw Group has a manufacturing facility which manufactures and exports parts for nuclear power plants.[23]
---
Kelcy Warren's next frontier? Energy Transfer opens first office ...
https://www.dallasnews.com › business › energy › 2019/04/02 › kelcy-war...
1.
Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners will expand its operations to China andplans to open its first office outside the United States in Beijing.
The oil and natural gas company, one of the largest in the U.S., plans to use the Beijing office to market and sell its energy products. The company's move into the Chinese market comes at a time when China's economy is beginning to show signs it could be stabilizing.
"The deep value that China's people have for developing relationships based on mutual respect aligns with our core values," Energy Transfer president and chief commercial officer Mackie McCrea said in a statement. "We see this office as the foundation for developing successful relationships that will be mutually beneficial for both the U.S. and the China energy markets."
China, long reliant on coal for its power needs, is beginning to turn to natural gas and imported crude oil as energy sources, according to ChinaPower. In 2017, natural gas accounted for 6.4% of China's total energy consumption -- up from 2.7% a decade earlier. The country has pledged to raise that to 10% by 2020. More than 70% of China's crude oil supply is imported.
Energy Transfer's
Beijing
office will market liquefied natural gas, ethane, propane, butane, natural gasoline and crude oil products. Natural gas products account for 63% of Energy Transfer's growth capital and crude oil represents 12%.
[graf A description of Energy Transfer's business model from its March 2019 investor presentation.
Last year,
Energy Transfer
announced a joint venture with
China
-based Satellite Petrochemical to export 150,000 barrels of ethane daily to
China
. A pipeline under construction will move ethane from storage facilities in
Mont Belvieu, Texas,to a new
terminal adjacent to Energy Transfer's
Nederland
facility.
Last week, the company signed a deal with Shell to jointly develop a large-scale LNG export facility in
Lake Charles, La
. The 152-acre site will ship liquified natural gas to customers in
China
and other global markets.
https://www.colorado.edu/program/fpw/2019/04/19/bigger-problem-how-energy-transfer-partners-and-other-pipeline-companies-do-business
The Bigger Problem with How Energy Transfer Partners and Other Pipeline Companies Do Business
Published: April 19, 2019
The recent Bloomberg Businessweek story, “The Billionaire Behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is a Little Lonely,” about Kelcy Warren and his company, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), confirmed what many of us in the human rights community already know – ignoring the social risks of an investment or a project is just bad business.
When the FPIEP studied the controversy around the Dakota Access Pipeline, we tried to calculate the total costs of social pressure to DAPL—not just for ETP, but also for ETP’s shareholders, the banks that financed DAPL, taxpayers and local communities. In our 2018 case study, Social Cost and Material Loss: The Dakota Access Pipeline, we estimated that there were at least $7.5 billion in cumulative losses that could, and should, have been avoided.
But in reading the Bloomberg story, it seems that the DAPL project wasn’t an isolated incident but rather a continuation of a troubling trend in how ETP and other companies do business. Why aren’t companies taking human rights more seriously?
One of our main research findings focused on how companies must implement a human rights-based approach when conducting due diligence on new investments or projects. Specifically, companies should secure the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) from tribes and communities along the route of any pipeline project. FPIC, as defined by the United Nations, allows indigenous peoples to give or withhold consent to a project that may affect them or their territories. This widely accepted global standard is aligned with international human rights treaties and would allow companies to better comply with their responsibilities to respect human rights during all phases of the project, and to manage their reputational, social and material risks.
However, it is clear that ETP has repeatedly failed to meet this FPIC standard, and continues to pay the price.
While the article notes that Energy Transfer and Mr. Warren are learning from past mistakes, the article also talks about how many projects have proceeded seemingly without new or more robust consideration of the impacts of pipeline construction on potentially affected communities. For example, the response to the issues with the Mariner East project, as with the DAPL controversy, appeared reactive and inconsiderate to individuals living in those communities. The article also highlights Mr. Warren’s public statements that if some the issues with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) controversy been addressed earlier, there might have been a different outcome. While Energy Transfer notes that there are always safety and environmental issues with pipeline infrastructure, the article also shows that the company has not updated their approach in a way that truly accounts for all potential risks and reflects intentional engagement with communities prior to construction.
Humans rights issues, such as those highlighted on an international stage throughout the DAPL controversy, must be considered as part of any due diligence process. The Free, Prior and Informed Consent Due Diligence Questionnaire developed by me and my team is just one tool that investors can use to this end, and represents an important step for ETP, and others, towards fully operationalizing their internal and external commitments to human rights.
We agree with Mr. Warren’s conclusion that the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy precipitated a new era for infrastructure projects in the United States. The days of “profitable invisibility” may, indeed, be past. However, this shift is ultimately one that will only benefit communities and the public as more infrastructure projects are planned across the United States.
ETP may never learn their lesson, but other companies just might. Their investors and shareholders will thank them.
==
OMFG
may 2017
Ruth Hopkins, Indian Country Today Media Network
https://truthout.org/articles/footing-the-15-million-bill-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-s-private-army/
==
OMFG
may 2017
Ruth Hopkins, Indian Country Today Media Network
https://truthout.org/articles/footing-the-15-million-bill-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-s-private-army/
Last fall, the eyes of the world were fixated on Standing Rock.
Among the images burned into the brains of so many abroad were those of Morton County sheriff’s department, joined by law enforcement officers from across the country, bedecked in military gear and armed to the teeth, brutalizing defenseless water protectors for expressing their first amendment rights and freedom of religion. Eyes were opened when mercs sicced vicious attack dogs on women and children guarding sacred burial grounds with their lives. Folks thousands of miles away watched in horror as they witnessed concussion grenades being thrown into crowds and elders being maced in the midst of sweat lodge raids. People will never forget live stream video picked up by mainstream media, showing hundreds of civilians being shot with water cannons in subzero temperatures by a corporate police state army.Some photos of injuries were judged too graphic to post by social media, as they revealed a young woman with a near severed limb and another who’d been blinded in one eye.
This was not Iraq or Afghanistan. There was no foreign enemy invading our shores. These events occurred in the middle of the United States, on Lakota treaty lands; and the only thing these innocent people had done was dare to stand in the way of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the same one Bismarck, North Dakota residents rejected due to fears it would contaminate their water supply. This war zone created by Dakota Access and Morton County was meant to subdue Standing Rock residents and water protectors and force them to accept an unwarranted risk to their fresh water and the desecration of ancestral graves, under the barrel of a gun.
Here in the states, hundreds of Native Nations and the American public sided with Standing Rock. Scores came to camp along the shores of the Mni Sosa (Missouri River). Others rallied in the local cities, signed petitions, and called the White House. Millions were outraged by the injustice.
Yet who is paying for the corporate police state brutality I just mentioned? You are.
Senator John Hoeven (R-ND), who accepted money from Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline) and has been vocal in his support of both the Dakota Access Pipeline as well as the Keystone XL pipeline, has announced that North Dakota will receive $15 million in federal funds to reimburse the state for costs incurred as a result of militarizing Barney Fife and company while they pushed the pipeline through for ETP and engaged in the violent, forced removal of water protectors. Hoeven slid said monies into the Department of Justice’s budget as part of Fiscal 2017 funding legislation.
By the way, Hoeven sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.Welcome to Custer’s wet dream.
The distinguished Senator from North Dakota would have us believe his state was alone in its mission to extinguish #NoDAPL. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When Morton County requested backup, law enforcement officials from across the nation came to North Dakota via the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). The Sheriff’s Association also showed up in full force.
New York Daily News writer Shaun King obtained audio where Energy Transfer Partners freely admitted that they worked closely with the Sheriff’s Association, and wow, did they ever. They became one and the same.
Water protectors who lived at camp can attest to ETP and law enforcement’s collusion and fraternization, but the record speaks for itself.
The Sheriffs’ Association has a $3.46 million budget, according to tax forms. Some of this funding comes from corporate sources, like TigerSwan. TigerSwan maintains offices in Iraq and Afghanistan. TigerSwan’s CEO is a former adviser to the multinational private security firm, Blackwater. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a Trump campaign donor and the brother of Betsy DeVos, the US Secretary of Education. Besides funding the Sheriff’s Association, TigerSwan is in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and supervising overall security for the company. Tigerswan works for Dakota Access, while funding and partnering with the Sheriffs’ Association.
The Sheriff’s Association purchased military gear from the US Department’s Defense Logistics Agency thanks to the Defense Department’s 1033 program.Think corporate welfare for the defense industry.
Wait, there’s more. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren offered to reimburse North Dakota and Morton County for costs due to defending the Dakota Access Pipeline.
So why are US taxpayers forking over $15 million to North Dakota?
Despite the fossil fuel industry’s wishes, America is not an oil company with an army. We should not be bankrolling our own oppression.
Incidentally, the Dakota Access Pipeline is not even operational yet, and it’s already sprung a leak in South Dakota, just southwest of the Lake Traverse Reservation. End this foolishness.
==
---
NEW
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/02/ceo-kelcy-warren-dakota-access-pipeline-energy-transfer-partners-country-music/
ENVIRONMENT
MAR/APR 2017 ISSUE
The Billionaire CEO Behind the Dakota Access Pipeline Would Rather Be Talking About Country Music
The bittersweet ballad of Kelcy Warren.
JOHN H. RICHARDSON
Bio
Kelsey Dake
When he’s not building pipelines, Kelcy Warren likes to write melancholy country ballads. In one, the Texas billionaire sees his girlfriend with his best friend and then takes a solitary drive to New Orleans, where he feels even more lonely in the lively crowd. Another song mourns a lost friend: “Do you ever talk with angels? Put in a word for me.”
Warren is a co-founder and CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the conglomerate whose security contractors have deployed pepper spray and snarling dogs against the Native Americans protesting its Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. He’s laying another contested pipeline, the Trans-Pecos, near Big Bend National Park—hallowed ground to many Texans. He’s spent millions of dollars supporting right-wing politicians. He gave $700,000 to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s political action committee and $6 million to PACs supporting former Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. He also put Perry on ETP’S board.
Pipeline foes have called Warren “the face of genocide for Native Americans” and “nothing but a cancer on the planet.”
With his business partners, Warren has distributed $223,000 to the three members of the Texas Railroad Commission, who rule on the eminent-domain requests his companies often use to run pipelines through privately owned farms and ranches. He personally spent $100,000 to help elect Trump—formerly an ETP shareholder—with the unvarnished expectation that the new administration would remove the last hurdles for the stalled North Dakota project on “January 20 or shortly thereafter.” Indeed, four days after taking office, Trump issued an executive order to speed the completion of the pipeline; this week, the Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement that will allow the construction to proceed.
The scale of Warren’s projects is mind-boggling. The 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline will carry 570,000 barrels of oil a day through watersheds and wildlife habitats. Add that to the 75,000 miles of pipe Warren already owns, a carbon-based nervous system worth an estimated $67 billion, and it’s not hard to see why he has become the target of some truly nasty personal attacks. Pipeline foes have called him “the face of genocide for Native Americans” and “nothing but a cancer on the planet.”
After the Standing Rock protesters claimed DAPL was desecrating tribal gravesites, a Native American blogger labeled Warren a “racist” and pointed readers to his parents’ gravesites. An online meme falsely quoted him saying the #NoDAPL protesters were “dirty natives with their phony spirituality and dumbass ecological concerns.” Activists have picketed his Dallas headquarters and even, according to a friend, threatened his life and that of his son.
Warren has vigorously defended his projects, saying the Dakota Access Pipeline is “built to safety standards that far exceed anything government requires.” At a meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission—to which Gov. Abbott appointed him as a commissioner in 2015—Warren responded patiently to a Native American elder who asked if he thought it was right to dig up ancestral graves: “No, sir. I don’t think that would be appropriate. I think that would be bad.”
“But you’ve been doing it,” the elder replied.
“No, sir. Obviously I don’t believe so.”
Sometimes Warren lets his exasperation show. “This is not a peaceful protest—there are violent people,” he told a Fargo, North Dakota, radio host in November. “They just want to stop fossil fuels.” Another time, he compared the tactics of some anti-pipeline activists to “terrorism.”
Warren declined to be interviewed for this article, but his friends, like former Cowboys safety Cliff Harris—who was ETP’s director—see him as “a special person” who “makes others believe the impossible is merely an obstacle.” Singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave, Warren’s partner in an Austin, Texas, record label, describes him as a nature lover and a “very self-effacing, shy guy.” Together they produced Looking Into You, a 2014 Jackson Browne tribute album with tracks from Lyle Lovett, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen.
Warren owns multiple jets, ranches, a private island, a golf resort, and a 27,000-square-foot home with a baseball diamond and a bowling alley.
“He knows the names of all the mountain peaks, he builds nature trails, he gave Don Henley a lot of money to save Caddo Lake,” says LaFave, who set Warren’s “Talk to an Angel” lyrics to music on his own album. He adds that Warren once told him that America needs to stop using “dirty filthy diesel,” and that “if we could just get cars to run on natural gas, we could clean this country up so quick.”
To hear Warren tell it, his story is the stuff of the classic American Dream. He grew up in a working-class family in a small town in east Texas. He played football and basketball and worked summer jobs, including a gig sanding pipeline seams for Sun Pipeline, where his dad worked as a welder. At the University of Texas-Arlington, he “did pretty well at everything except attending class,” he once recalled. He flunked out and went home for a “come to Jesus” moment with his dad, gradually worked his way back into the university, and then landed an entry-level job at a small gas company in Dallas. Fifteen years later, he put together a pool of investors and bought a failing pipeline company with Ray Davis, who is now a part owner of the Texas Rangers. By 2002, he and Davis had amassed $50 million in assets.
Warren is selective about his public biography, leaving out his two ex-wives and a brother he hasn’t spoken with in years. What he does like to talk about is his love of music—Browne’s in particular. He has called the Late for the Sky album “a game changer.” Of Browne’s song “Sky Blue and Black,” he told an interviewer, “It’s one thing to write about your heart being broken, but it’s another thing to write that I’m past that now but I’ll always feel this way…That is an incredible message.”
It’s a sentimental side of a man known as a bulldog deal-maker who uses lawsuits and loopholes to get his way and spends huge sums on expensive toys. He owns multiple jets, a private island off Honduras, a 25,000-acre golf resort near Big Bend, and large ranches in Texas and Colorado. His 27,000-square-foot castle in North Dallas—he’s neighbors with George W. Bush—has a baseball diamond in the backyard and a bowling alley in the basement. A visiting Wall Street Journal reporter gushed about the “vast green-marbled bathroom” and the home studio where Warren keeps drumsticks signed by the Eagles and an autographed picture of Browne.
Yet Warren has been abandoned by the artists he reveres. The Indigo Girls, who appear on the Jackson Browne tribute CD, called for a boycott of the charity music festival Warren started. Actor Tommy Lee Jones signed a protest letter. Browne claimed he had no idea Warren was in the oil business and pledged to donate his licensing proceeds from the album to the Standing Rock tribes. “Jackson Browne and his management knew very well Kelcy Warren was in the energy business,” LaFave scoffs. “And Tommy Lee Jones did a whole ad campaign for fracking! He was a spokesman!”
“We’ve had people make veiled threats to burn down the studio,” says Jimmy LaFave, Warren’s partner in an Austin record label.
To Warren’s friends, the focus on his controversial projects and lavish lifestyle reduces him to a caricature. Warren helps cover musicians’ medical bills and even funerals without seeking public credit, LaFave argues: “This whole thing about demonizing him to the point where he’s some kind of nonhuman being, it’s just really hurtful. Every human being has redeeming qualities.”
LaFave first met Warren at a Dallas gig years ago. “He was just a guy in the crowd,” he recalls. “I thought he was a local plumber or something.” Warren is the kind of person who would rather hang out with the roughnecks than with the suits, LaFave insists. He’s quirky, too—if he sees a penny on the ground, he’ll throw down a quarter and pick up both, because “‘my dad taught me he wouldn’t bend over to pick up a penny.'” When Warren renovated a Dallas park and renamed it after his son, Klyde, he did so under the condition that Klyde spend one afternoon a month picking up the park’s trash.
Not long ago, LaFave posted a defense of Warren on Facebook. Pipeline foes have been sending him hate mail ever since. “We’ve had people make veiled threats to burn down the studio,” he told me. The attacks on Warren are no different from the spiteful rhetoric of Trump loyalists, he adds. “When Kelcy hears stuff like that, that doesn’t help him be a better human being. That would probably just darken a person.”
LaFave calls himself a “yellow dog Democrat” who would vote for a yellow dog before he’d vote Republican. “I try to do my best not to use fossil fuel and burn gas all the time,” he says, “but everything’s made of oil—my TV, my iPhone.” He sighs. “You can tell I’m kind of conflicted. The eminent domain thing pisses everybody off. But he is not trying to destroy anybody’s life. He’s just like any other American entrepreneur saying, ‘Build, build, build.'”
Under the new administration, Warren will do just that.
==