Chevron2

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see FF CEO

SEE CORRUPT 3 BD MEMBER OPEC FTC

see donziger

see boutros 1st amend

SEE GREENWASH

loomer: After she began attacking Republicans who wanted a clean break between Chevron and the Venezuelan government, Trump’s team granted the company new sanctions carve-outs.

capt418 bak

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donziger says chev is fedsoc funder, presker

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ref msnbc

:{Jan. 15, 2026,

By Lisa Rubin and Soorin Kim

As the 2026 midterm election year begins, MAGA Inc., a PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, boasts a war chest of almost $300 million built principally through deep-pocketed donors during the first year of Trump’s second term.

While public reporting on MAGA Inc.’s megadonors has focused on well-known tech and cryptocurrency figures, buried in the long list of the PAC’s 2025 contributors are two names that are lesser known in the usual Trump donor sphere — a New York-based oil heir and former executive who now sits on the board of directors of Chevron, the sole U.S. company currently operating in Venezuela, and his wife.

Federal campaign finance filings show that John Hess and his wife, Susan Hess, each contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc. on Dec. 12, 2025, just weeks before the U.S. took military action to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

On that same day, Trump raised eyebrows after a reporter asked if he intended to seize more oil assets from Venezuela after the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast earlier that week. “I mean, it wouldn’t be very smart for me to tell you that,” he started. But in continuing to talk about attacks on boats, he added, “[And] now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”

By that point, the president for days had repeatedly said “we’re going to start doing those strikes on land too” as he spoke extensively about strikes on boats near the Venezuelan coast and in the Caribbean — a statement some interpreted to mean land strikes were imminent.

There is no indication that those comments factored into the sizable Hess donations on Dec. 12.

Although the couple have long been donors to various political causes and candidates, including occasionally to Democrats, their 2025 contributions to MAGA Inc. were rare seven-figure contributions from them. The Hesses’ $2 million contribution is dwarfed by other massive eight-figure dollar donations from tech giants and crypto companies to MAGA Inc. from the past year, but it’s nonetheless notable after their yearslong hiatus from contributions in support of Trump in the last few years.

John Hess’ last contribution to a Trump-affiliated fundraising vehicle was a $100,000 donation to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising committee in late 2017. Earlier that year, he gave $1 million to Trump’s first inaugural committee — his only other seven-figure donation at the federal level. And during the 2016 election, Susan Hess gave $170,000 in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Prior to his recent seven-figure donation to MAGA Inc., John Hess’ federal political contributions have mostly gone to congressional campaigns and groups, including $500,000 to a Senate GOP-aligned super PAC in 2020.

Hess is perhaps best known as an heir to and a longtime executive of the former Hess Corp., which was acquired by Chevron last year in a transaction worth an estimated $53 billion. As a result of the merger, Hess was also appointed to Chevron’s board of directors.

Since 2007, when then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seized assets from three major North American oil companies — Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil — Chevron has been the only U.S. oil company involved in production within Venezuela through a joint venture with the country’s state-owned oil company. And MS NOW’s sister network CNBC has reported that Chevron exported approximately 140,000 barrels per day from Venezuela in the last quarter of last year.

Last week, in an interview with CNBC, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he spoke with the CEOs of all three companies on Jan. 3, when the U.S. military struck Venezuela and removed Maduro from the country, to encourage their investment in Venezuela long-term.

But while he said Exxon and ConocoPhillips would need “normal, commercial business conditions, rule of law and some security to go back in” to Venezuela, he noted that Chevron is well-versed in this regime.

“Chevron has been there for over 100 years,” Wright told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan. “So with them, [the question for the administration is] how can we provide incremental tweaks or changes to allow their model to grow even more?”

In a response to questions from MS NOW about a possible connection between the Hesses’ MAGA Inc. contributions and Venezuela, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said after the U.S. took control there, “President Trump brokered a historic energy deal with Venezuela that will benefit both the American and Venezuelan people.”

“President Trump has called on all oil companies to make unprecedented investments and take advantage of this generational opportunity to restore Venezuela’s oil infrastructure,” Rogers said in a statement. “That’s why 20 different oil companies came to the White House last week to discuss this with President Trump.”

A spokesperson for MAGA Inc. declined to comment. Neither John Hess nor representatives for Chevron responded to MS NOW’s requests for comment.

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GMAIL 11 25

Reminder: when Big Oil companies claim to be partners in the energy transition, they are lying. Chevron plans to increase its oil production by 2% to 3% per year through 2030, according to a _recent announcement_. The growth comes after years of the fossil fuel company advertising and promoting its plans to decrease emissions in the coming years.

• U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse didn’t mince words last week when talking about the growing threat of climate change at a _press conference_ with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Whitehouse emphasized the importance of not just talking about climate change, but naming the reason why taking action to mitigate the climate crisis is so challenging: Big Oil.

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forbes

Here’s Everyone Who Attended Trump's Dinner With Saudi's Prime Minister

Billionaire attendees worth a combined $719 billion, as well as other business executives and the world’s highest-paid athlete, were among the high-profile attendees at President Donald Trump’s black-tie dinner for Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, on Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are seated for a dinner in the East Room of the White House.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Key Facts

Some of the world’s richest people —including Elon Musk and Steve Schwarzmanof Blackstone—were among the attendees.

Billionaire Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the CEOs of chip giants Nvidia and AMD, attended months after both companies signed deals to supply their advanced semiconductors to AI company Humain—which the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF owns.

Tech and finance billionaires Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Tim Cook of Apple and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood also attended.

David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance Corporation and son of mega billionaire Larry Ellison, was there amid reports the Saudi sovereign fund could partly fund his company’s bid to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery (the company has since denied the claim).

Also among the invitees were General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who signed the world’s most expensive soccer contract with Saudi soccer club Al-Nassr two years ago and has surpassed $1 billion in career earnings, lended his star power to the dinner.

Read More

Have Musk And Trump Made Up?

It’s unclear. The dinner was the first time Musk has been at the White House since he left his role as a special government employee heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in May. He then publicly feuded with Trump, but his attendance is the latest sign pointing to thawing tension between them as Musk’s threat to start his breakaway “America Party” appears stalled.

What Do We Know About Ronaldo’s Ties To Saudi Arabia?

Ronaldo, the legendary soccer star who tops the list of all-time goal scorers, was at the dinner. In 2023, Ronaldo joined Saudi soccer club Al-Nassr on a record €200 million ($231 million) per year deal, amid Riyadh’s push to become a global sporting hub. Al-Nassr is primarily owned by PIF, and the Saudi Crown Prince serves as the fund’s chairman. Earlier this year, Ronaldo signed an extension deal that will keep the 40-year-old at the club till 2027. He ranked number one on Forbes’ list of the World’s Highest Paid Athletes of 2025, and he is projected to earn an estimated $275 million this year.

What Did Trump Say About Ronaldo?

In his speech at the dinner, Trump mentioned Ronaldo by name and said, “My son is a big fan of Ronaldo. And Baron got to meet him, and I think he respects his father a little bit more now, just the fact that I introduced you.”

Who Else Was At The Dinner?

FIFA President Gianni Infantino was also present after cultivating ties with both Trump and the Saudi crown prince over the past few years. Infantino has defended his relationship with the president, calling it “crucial,” and has played down concerns that Trump’s immigration crackdown will affect international fan attendance at the FIFA World Cup in the U.S. next year. The FIFA boss has also defended the decision to award Saudi Arabia the hosting rights for the 2034 World Cup, despite accusations that FIFA was enabling sportswashing.

Forbes Valuations

Musk is the richest person in the world with an almost $468 billion net worth as of Wednesday, according to Forbes estimates. Two of the other attendees are also among the world's 100 richest people: No. 8 Huang ($161.6 billion) and No. 36 Steve Schwarzman ($43.9 billion). Karp is worth $15.2 billion, Armstrong is worth $11.2 billion, Benioff is worth $8.6 billion, Tenev is worth $6.5 billion and Tim cook has a $2.6 billion valuation. Su, the only female executive in attendance, is worth $1.5 billion.

Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, right, listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner for Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the East Room of the White House.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su were among several high profile tech executives at the dinner.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Elon Musk sits during a dinner with President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Other prominent attendees included Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison and Dell CEO Michael Dell.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Further Reading

Who Attended Trump’s Dinner for the Saudi Crown Prince? (New York Times)

---

os 2024

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ggl 11 25

Donor Lookup • OpenSecrets}:

OpenSecrets

https://www.opensecrets.org › donor-lookup › results](https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=michael+wirth&order=desc&sort=D)

WIRTH, MICHAEL K SAN RAMON, CA 94583, CHEVRON CORPORATION, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, 09-06-2024, $208, Chevron Corp, Federal. Money to PACs, WIRTH, ...

[### Chevron CEO says reviewing political donations after U.S. ...

Reuters

https://www.reuters.com › article › business › chevron-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/business/chevron-ceo-says-reviewing-political-donations-after-us-capitol-assault-idUSKBN29H2IP/)

Jan 12, 2021 — Chevron is reviewing political donations after last week's violent invasion of the US capitol, Chief Executive Mike Wirth said on Tuesday.

[### Chevron Gave More Than $1 Million to Lawmakers Who ...

KQED

https://www.kqed.org › news › chevron-gave-more-tha...](https://www.kqed.org/news/11856920/chevron-gave-more-than-a-million-dollars-to-lawmakers-who-voted-to-overturn-the-presidential-election)

Feb 2, 2021 — Chevron has donated more than a million dollars to Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Missing: wirth ‎| Show results with: wirth

[### Chevron Profile: Summary

OpenSecrets

https://www.opensecrets.org › orgs › chevron › summary](https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/chevron/summary?id=D000000015)

Top Recipients ; Trump, Donald, $59,020, $59,020, $0, Candidate (R-PRES) ; Republican National Cmte, $52,747, $52,747, $0, Political Party ...

[### ICYMI: Trump's Big Oil Donors Are Cashing In

Climate Power

https://climatepower.us › News](https://climatepower.us/news/icymi-trumps-big-oil-donors-are-cashing-in/)

Sep 8, 2025 — Washington, D.C. – Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece highlighting the Trump administration's closeness with oil and gas ...

Missing: gop ‎| Show results with: gop

[### Major corporate interests and megadonors gave $239 ...

NBC News

https://www.nbcnews.com › trump-administration › maj...](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/major-corporate-interests-megadonors-gave-239-million-fund-trumps-inau-rcna202074)

Apr 21, 2025 — President Donald Trump's inaugural committee raised $239 million, a new fundraising report shows, buoyed by million-dollar contributions ...

[### Executives due at gas price hearing gave $1 million to ...

Roll Call

https://rollcall.com › 2022/04/05 › executives-due-at-ga...](https://rollcall.com/2022/04/05/executives-due-at-gas-price-hearing-gave-1-million-to-parties-candidates/)

Apr 5, 2022 — One CEO called to testify about high gas prices at a hearing Wednesday gave $469000 since 1993, public records show.

[### Trump gets record donations from big oil but far less than ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › oct › election...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/18/election-trump-oil-gas-fundraising)

Oct 18, 2024 — Republican ex-president has received $14.1m oil and gas industry making it his fourth-biggest source of cash.

Missing: wirth ‎gop

[### List of American Companies that Support President Donald ...

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com › american-businesses-supp...](https://www.newsweek.com/american-businesses-supporting-donating-donald-trump-list-2027957)

Feb 7, 2025 — Donald Trump's 2024 presidential bid attracted significant financial backing from a mix of corporate donors, billionaire executives and ...

Missing: wirth ‎| Show results with: wirth

[### Trump's Corporate Favor Factory - Sludge

readsludge.com

https://readsludge.com › 2025/10/29 › trumps-corporat...](https://readsludge.com/2025/10/29/trumps-corporate-favor-factory/)

Oct 29, 2025 — We researched more than 150 top donors to Trump's inauguration fund and White House ballroom to find the government favors they've received ...

leaving CA?

MSN

After more than 140 years together, Chevron dumped California via text, in a split fueled by snubs, insults, accusations and the lure of a new partner.

Chief Executive Mike Wirth tried to reach Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom for more than a week last summer and texted him, hoping to get the governor on the phone. He wanted to talk to Newsom about the company’s plans to move its global headquarters from San Ramon, Calif., to Houston.

We’re about to make an announcement. I’d like to tell you before you read about it.

Newsom’s reply was, essentially, I don’t need to talk about it. I’m good.

Wirth told Newsom over texts that the company was about to make public its move to a more fossil-friendly state. The CEO called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to tell him personally. Ecstatic, the Republican governor, who had courted Chevron for years, asked if the company needed any special help for relocation.

Wirth declined. Moving to Texas, apparently, was reward enough.

On Aug. 2, when Chevron announced its headquarters move, Abbott described Texas, the No. 1 gasoline consumer in the U.S., as Chevron’s “true home.” Newsom responded in an online video accusing Big Oil of price gouging consumers.

Relations between Wirth, CEO of the nation’s second-largest energy company, and Newsom, governor of America’s populous state, had soured over regulatory and legislative efforts intended to combat climate change—displacing internal-combustion engines with electric vehicles, for one.

“Putting bureaucrats in charge of centrally planning key segments of the economy hasn’t worked in other social states,” Wirth said in a Nov. 1 call with investors. “I doubt it will be any different in California.”

California has acted more aggressively than any other state to steer consumers from fossil fuels, including a state ban on the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035, as well as rules that oil companies blame for the state’s higher gas prices. EVs now account for more than a quarter of new car sales in California.

“Chevron has a future in clean energy in California. They can join us in our steady, long-term transition to a state powered by clean energy,” said Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesman for the governor’s office. Newsom recalled his text exchanges with Wirth last summer as cordial, his office said.

Disagreement over policies turned personal in September 2023, when Newsom seemed to accuse Wirth of having a hand in one of California’s worst disasters.

Invoking a 2018 wildfire that left 85 people dead in Paradise, Calif., Newsom said Wirth had invested far more in shareholder payouts than in developing low-carbon energy. That belied Chevron’s promises to lower carbon emissions, Newsom said. The consequences of the company’s alleged deceit, he said, were “incalculable in terms of the dollars, the lives lost, the funerals, the dead bodies in Paradise.”

Newsom made his pointed remarks during the announcement of a lawsuit against Chevron and other large oil companies, alleging climate-change deception. Villaseñor said the governor wasn’t accusing Chevron or its executives “of anything more than failing to confront the realities of the climate crisis.”

Chevron didn’t respond to Newsom’s remarks.

Before the Nov. 5 election, Newsom’s testy relations with the oil industry might have lost him little political capital. Following Trump’s win, some Democratic lawmakers recognized that the state’s higher energy costs have become a liability, political consultants for both parties said.

When the Los Angeles-area wildfires erupted last month, Newsom made brief references linking oil companies to the disaster that killed 29 people. The California governor thanked Gov. Abbott on X for lending firefighters, engines and equipment: “Red, blue, republican, democrat—in moments like this we come together.”

Political consultants say Newsom appears to be weighing a role as a leader of the Democratic Party. He held a call with Democratic allies the day after the presidential election and has positioned himself as a Trump adversary.

Newsom has now turned his focus from opposing Trump to managing the wildfire recovery. On Wednesday, the governor met with President Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal disaster relief.

California has more than Chevron headquarters at stake. The company, which operates two of the largest oil refineries in the state, has considered the possibility of ceasing production. That would raise gas prices further for California’s more than 27 million drivers. Chevron refineries make up a third of the state’s gasoline-production capacity.

Any decision to close or repurpose refineries would depend on whether California imposes more regulations, among other factors, said Andy Walz, who runs the company’s refining, pipeline and chemical businesses. California’s stringent fuel-quality specifications, initiated to curb harmful emissions, make gasoline more costly to produce compared with other states, industry analysts said.

Shrinking supplies and higher gas prices, while a pain for drivers, might be fine with state regulators charged with protecting the environment.

“Policies that keep average prices low may result in more driving, and hence, more pollution,” the California Energy Commission said in a 2024 report.

Why California?

Like other big breakups, the California-Chevron split figures to be costly for both sides.

If Chevron decides to sell its century-old fuel-making plants, it will be tough to find a buyer for the properties, which encompass nearly 4,000 acres in Northern and Southern California. Among the obstacles: environmental liabilities and a shrinking pool of buyers.

“We used to have competitors,” Walz said. “They’re gone.”

Demand for gasoline in California last year was about 10% lower than in 2019, largely because of an increase in the number of EVs on the road and more people working from home, according to the state energy commission.

Energy-industry analysts said regulations, in addition to softening demand, have depressed oil exploration in California. More than 75% of the state’s oil in 2023 was imported from Alaska and abroad, including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Ecuador.

In 1876, wildcatters drilled California’s first successful oil well in the Santa Susana Mountains, north of Los Angeles. The discovery gave birth to Chevron and kicked off an oil boom that helped power the state economy for more than a century and kept gas prices low for decades.

California has consistently higher gas prices than every state but Hawaii.

Newsom and other state officials blame the oil industry. Chevron posted signs at gas stations saying, “California lawmakers are driving up gas prices,” and, in a message linked to QR codes, urged drivers to complain directly to lawmakers.

“They weren’t prepared to take accountability for their own actions, and they were blaming us,” Walz said of the PR campaign. “That’s when Chevron felt like it was time for us to start talking.”

Chevron and other oil companies opposed a new California law that, among other things, gives regulators the authority to require refiners to keep their storage tanks stocked at certain levels, which lawmakers hope will limit spikes in pump prices because of supply shortages.

Statewide, the number of operating refineries has dwindled to 14 last year from 40 in 1983, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In October, two days after Newsom signed the bill into law, Phillips 66 closed a Southern California refinery. Company CEO Mark Lashier said at the time that the decision was based broadly on shrinking demand and state policies to discourage fossil fuels.

“We expected California to be a pretty challenging refining market going forward,” Lashier said.

The state’s oil production peaked in early 1986 at more than a million barrels a day. In November, the tally was about 279,000 barrels a day, the lowest figure since 1981 and largely attributed to aging oil fields. Only a handful of drilling-rig crews are hunting for new finds.

“Why deal with California when you could go to Texas or New Mexico? You only have so much capital and so much time in the day,” said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston. “Given the regulatory environment in California, I would be investing outside the state.”

High price

Many candidates supported by Chevron and other oil companies during state elections have lost races in recent years, weakening the company’s once-considerable political influence. For the first time, a majority of Democrats who ran in state elections in 2023 refused campaign money from oil companies, according to the nonprofit California Environmental Voters.

The Trump administration, however, is expected to be a powerful industry ally. Four days after Trump returned to the Oval Office, his administration said in court filings that the EPA would review its decision to grant California a waiver that effectively allowed the state to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035 and set more stringent vehicle-emission standards.

California Assemblymember Gregg Hart, who introduced the bill last year, acknowledged that oil companies hate the law. California, he said, is trying to increase the number of people buying EVs, while also providing affordable gas for conventional cars, goals that appear at odds. “We’re just going to have to try to find a way to make this all work,” Hart said.

At the California legislature’s Dec. 2 swearing-in ceremony, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said California would continue to lead the nation on climate change, “but not on the backs of poor and working people, not with taxes or fees for programs that don’t work, and not by blocking housing and critical infrastructure projects.”

In recent years, Newsom has avoided oil lobbyists and rarely entertained oil executives. Oil companies say Newsom’s allegations about industry deception and price gouging have demoralized employees and made it harder to recruit employees.

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, a longtime head of California oil lobbyists, said she never had any trouble establishing a relationship with past governors. During a 2022 Newsom trip to Florida, in connection with a possible presidential bid, her organization, the Western States Petroleum Association, spent nearly $1 million on newspaper, radio and TV ads criticizing the governor for California’s high energy prices. Newsom was furious, according to people familiar with the matter.

State’s energy agencies and oil executives, including at Chevron, say they are trying to work together to keep California’s energy supplies steady and affordable, despite their policy disagreements.

It appears too late to repair relations with the departing oil giant, which last summer had about 2,000 employees at its headquarters in California. Chevron follows moves by Tesla, SpaceX, Oracle and Hewlett Packard from California to Texas.

“Look, we want to be there,” Walz said. “We want to stay, but it’s tough, OK?”

On Jan. 27, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener and another state lawmaker introduced a bill that would allow homeowners and insurers to hold oil-and-gas companies liable for damages stemming from climate-related disasters, such as wildfires.

“By forcing the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis to pay their fair share, we can help stabilize our insurance market and make the victims of climate disasters whole,” Wiener said.

Newsom’s office said the governor doesn’t typically comment on pending or proposed legislation.

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8 25

the first thing Laura Loomer wanted to know when I called her earlier this month was whether this was going to be a “hit piece.” The self-described investigative journalist and unofficial adviser to President Donald Trump is familiar with the genre. She had just attacked the United States Army for praising a recipient of the Medal of Honor. She would soon claim without evidence that Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—another person comfortable trafficking in unsubstantiated allegations—“gave blow jobs in the back rooms of CrossFit gyms.” Soon after that, she said that Palestinian children receiving medical care in the United States posed a “dangerous” threat to American national security.

You never know just how far she will go, but that’s the game she plays. I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.

“Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”

She had toiled for a decade on the dark edges of relevance, pulling public pranks and getting chased off financial and social-media platforms for hate-speech violations. She was arrested after storming the stage at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park to protest a Trump-inspired Julius Caesar and kicked off Uber and Lyft for saying that she did not want Muslim drivers. She also lost two bids for GOP congressional nominations in Florida, symbolically refusing to concede the second because of the “voter fraud” she says was caused by her inability to communicate on social media. She found out at the end of last year that she would not get the White House job she thought she was promised, and lost her ability to make money on X after violating the platform’s doxxing policies.

Yet, here we are. Loomer, the proud, defiant, extremist troll, is one of the most influential public figures in what is still the most important country on the planet—“back from the dead and rose from the ashes,” she told me. How did this come to pass? “I am a genuine person, and I speak my mind. I am not fake,” she offered. “It’s a story of persistence. As I like to say, persistence will beat the resistance.”

Another explanation has to do with her champion and enabler, the most powerful person in the country, who has stuck with her despite the warnings, sneers, and eye rolls of his own senior advisers. “I know she’s known as a radical right, but I think Laura Loomer is a very nice person,” Trump told reporters this month. His early mentor Roy Cohn had previously been an unapologetic adviser to McCarthy during his red-baiting Congressional hearings. Trump’s subsequent political adviser, Roger Stone, a friend and admirer of Cohn, has been a mentor to Loomer.

Whatever the reason, her private research and public X posts have destroyed careers, shaped news cycles, and moved financial markets. Quite often, Trump doesn’t just listen to Loomer—he does what she wants.

In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.

Every day was another opportunity to grab headlines, to protect the president, to expose another potential saboteur. This phone call, included.

“Why do we want to have a woman who is pregnant, who is going to have to take maternity leave as soon as she is confirmed?” Loomer asked me. “You should make a decision: Do you want to have a career, or do you want a family?”

She was referring to Casey Means, a Stanford-trained doctor turned wellness influencer Trump nominated to be surgeon general. Loomer believes that Means is part of an extortionist, Marxist vanguard—led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that will ultimately sabotage the Trump administration and the Republican Party. In her rapid-fire staccato—always urgent, indignant, agrieved—Loomer rattled off facts that she had uncovered about Means’s metabolic-health company and her husband’s past sympathies for Black Lives Matter. (Means did not respond to a request for comment.)

I stopped Loomer and asked her to go back: Did she really believe that pregnant women should not have careers? “You can have a family, and you can have a career,” Loomer responded, beginning what sounded like a pivot toward acknowledging that Congress outlawed employment discrimination based on motherhood back in 1978.

But that was not her point. “If you are going to be working in the federal government, don’t you think it is a little abusive if you have a job where you can’t bring your baby every day?” she asked me. “Are my tax dollars supposed to go to her because she doesn’t use a condom? Is there not a man who is qualified?”

Read: Casey Means and the MAHA takeover

Not so long ago, people who spoke like Loomer were ostracized from political parties and mainstream conversations, cast as the fringe. Provocateurs once needed to find publishers to produce their pamphlets. Activists begged access from White House staff to get on the president’s schedule. Opposition researchers depended on journalists to launder their work. And those who called themselves journalists operated by codes: no undisclosed financial arrangements with political actors, no explicit political advocacy, and extensive editing and legal vetting to assure accuracy. The system minimized a certain type of toxicity, while giving those who already had power—the owners of media outlets, the leaders of government and industry—a gatekeeping role.

The 32-year-old Loomer belongs to a new era, when any thought can be instantly published everywhere and the president is easy to reach on his cellphone. Despite the loss of her accounts on Facebook and Instagram, she has a growing audience of 1.7 million followers on her fully reinstated X account (up by about 30 percent since last year), a sponsored podcast on Rumble, and—she claims—an expanding roster of private clients, including major political donors, whose names she declines to disclose.

Top Trump advisers, unable to cast her away, regularly work with her behind the scenes. In addition to having calls and meetings with the president, Loomer speaks regularly with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, according to people familiar with the relationships. Loomer praises Wiles for being open to her work and has called Gor a friend. But she speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.

“Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,” she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. “Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, ‘How come you didn’t tell me this?’”

It is a high-stakes game that threatens to broaden distrust within Trump’s senior ranks. If isolated, once-anodyne facts from the past can sink careers; nearly anyone is suddenly vulnerable to exposure, setting Loomer up as a tip line for administration officials to inform on their office rivals, while potentially providing other powerful interests a lever to disappear their adversaries. “There are people who message me all the time,” Loomer boasted to me. “In every agency, I have sources.”

Read: “I run the country and the world.”

Last week, she got ahold of a video showing happy Palestinian refugees arriving in the San Francisco airport, owing to efforts by Heal Palestine, a group that provides treatment in the United States to children wounded in Gaza. The group says that the children and their families arrived on temporary visas and will return to the Middle East after treatment. She called the spectacle an “Islamic invasion” and asked the Trump administration to shut it down. A day later, the State Department announced a stop to “all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza” to review the situation. “It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” Loomer posted on X.

Not all of her efforts succeed. I asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to stop Trump’s appointment of Colonel Earl G. Matthews as general counsel of the Department of Defense, making him one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the building. She had attacked Matthews for his past praise of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, and his work with former Trump advisers turned foes such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and National Security Adviser John Bolton. But she did not bring up those points with me. “He sounds like he is speaking Ebonics anytime he speaks,” she said. “I don’t take anything he says seriously.” (Matthews, in fact, a [vid] U.S. Army colonel when he speaks. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

“I would rather be feared than loved,” Loomer added. “I don’t need to be loved by people who work in Washington, D.C.”

Earlier this summer, Loomer told The New York Times that she had five paying clients for her research-consulting firm, an unusual side business for someone who describes themselves as a journalist. Now she says she has more, but she will not give a number. “It is not policy matters,” she told me, adding that some are corporate clients who want her to do “executive-level vetting.” “There are several billionaires I work with, and they have retained me to do their political vetting.”

The foggy boundaries between her activism, so-called journalism, and client work have created widespread concern that she is surreptitiously passing on information to promote the agendas of powerful interests.

After she began posting about the Puerto Rican bankruptcy authority, Trump fired its whole board, immediately improving the stock value of a major natural-gas company that was seeking a contract with the island. After she began attacking Republicans who wanted a clean break between Chevron and the Venezuelan government, Trump’s team granted the company new sanctions carve-outs. After she resurfaced old political comments by Vinay Prasad, a top official at the Food and Drug Administration, he resigned his post, saying through a spokesperson that he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA.”

Like many of Loomer’s crusades, her attacks on Prasad focused on facts that would not have been disqualifying in the previous age when technocrats were hired for their abilities, not their ideological purity. She called Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist at the University of San Francisco, who had long been a critic of the FDA, a “trojan horse” and “saboteur” because he called himself a “Bernie Sanders liberal” in 2022 and wrote on Twitter in 2020 that he wanted Joe Biden to win—facts that did not trouble Kennedy, who was himself a Democrat until 2023. (Loomer accused Kennedy last week of preparing for a 2028 presidential bid, prompting him to announce that he was not running.)

Loomer’s crusade against Prasad came soon after he decided to limit access to a Sarepta Therapeutics drug, following evidence that it causes severe liver damage; this led MAGA influencers to allege that Loomer was secretly working for the pharmaceutical company. Sarepta, through a spokesperson, said that it has not “engaged with nor associated with Laura Loomer.” She told me the same, even offering “to sign an affidavit” saying so. But the wholly unsubstantiated claims still played a role in undermining Loomer’s case against Prasad; two senior Trump advisers told me that, although they had seen no proof of a connection, they believed the rumors. After he resigned, the White House invited Prasad to rejoin the administration, which he did about two weeks after leaving.

Loomer also denies taking money from Chevron or those with interests before the bankruptcy board of Puerto Rico. Although the obscurity of her targets raises suspicions, she said she has always taken on niche issues. She told me that she has been discussing legal action with her attorney against her public critics who accuse her of engaging in pay-to-play, a path that some of her critics have welcomed because of the prospect of uncovering her financial arrangements during discovery.

Those who have known her for years speak of her zeal and commitment as the purest form of MAGA. “It may shock a lot of folks in politics, but some of us are actually involved for reasons other than power, money, and fame,” Ted Goodman, a MAGA-aligned political operative who works for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told me. “She can’t be bought and isn’t swayed by monetary gain.”

Brian Ballard, one of the most influential Trump-aligned lobbyists in Washington, told me that he has not worked with Loomer, but he had nothing but praise. “I think she is incredibly effective, and I understand why people would want to hire her,” he said.

Trump and Loomer agree that a failure to sift through appointees’ pasts in the first term undermined the president’s ambitions. “If there would have actually been proper vetting systems set up in the first Trump administration, the Russian-collusion hoax never would have happened, the first impeachment never would have happened, the second impeachment never would have happened,” she explained on a recent episode of her podcast. Trump seems to have taken this advice to heart. In his second go-round as president, his administration has taken several steps that appear designed to eliminate dissent or checks on his power.

The problem is that no one is clear on what constitutes a fireable offense. Trump’s top advisers, including Wiles, have been working intentionally, with Trump’s support, to expand the tent of Republican politics by embracing leaders such as Kennedy, a scion of the most famous Democratic family, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who previously ran as a Democrat. Past liberal leanings, in this effort, are a benefit, not a liability. Trump has stocked his inner circle with people such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who once speculated mockingly about the size of Trump’s manhood.

Like Trump, Loomer says that Vance and Rubio earned forgiveness because they have made amends. But at other times, Loomer has found herself on the wrong side of Trump. Loomer defended Trump’s initial pick to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, a friend of Elon Musk, even though Isaacman has given money to Democrats in the past. Others in the White House, including Gor, supported removing Isaacman amid Trump’s high-profile fallout with Musk, leading Trump to withdraw Isaacman’s name.

Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk

Trump has ignored other Loomer recommendations, such as her demand to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of Justice Department records on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. (Loomer says Trump is not implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes, and she encouraged him to sue The Wall Street Journal after it wrote about a bawdy letter reportedly from Trump that was found among Epstein’s possessions.) The president remains a strong supporter of Kennedy, who endorsed Trump last year after the president agreed to adopt much of his health agenda. }:}:

(Their agreement was the result of “extortion” on the part of Kennedy, Loomer argues.) The White House leadership is counting on the Make America Healthy Again coalition to help Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump also called Loomer and dressed her down after she criticized his decision to allow the Air Force to accept a commercial plane from the Qatari government. “I want to apologize to President Trump more than anyone because I am a loyal person,” she later posted.}:

The most jarring Loomer crusades challenge the central assumptions of the national project. On August 8, the U.S. Army retold the heroic story of Captain Florent Groberg, a Medal of Honor winner who had tackled a suicide bomber 12 years earlier in Afghanistan, saving the lives of other Americans while sustaining serious injuries to his brain, leg, and, ear. Loomer pounced, denouncing the Army secretary for praising someone like Groberg, who was born in France and had given a supporting the presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

“Are we supposed to believe the Army couldn’t find a Republican and US born soldier?” she wrote on X. “They had to find an immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton and spoke at the DNC as Obama’s guest?” The claim that foreign-born patriots are less worthy of praise than those who are native-born won Loomer articles in The Washington Post, the Daily Mail, and other publications, but no comment from the White House.

Among those who objected was Greene, the Trump-aligned representative from Georgia who has tangled with Loomer—and has directed her own opposition research. “Many people need to wake up about her reporting. Researching facts and then spinning them into lies to serve her agenda doesn’t make her good or trustworthy. It makes her a liar and it makes her dangerous,” Greene concluded in her own social-media post.

This, for Loomer, was an opportunity. She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a “fraud” and a “terrible person.” Loomer let loose on Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)

“Can you call yourself a Christian when your mouth is full of other men’s cock?” read one Loomer zinger, a modern version of the archetypical prompt “When did you stop beating your wife?”

All of it generated headlines, attention, and reposts of her social-media accounts. In a world without gatekeepers, where the most powerful man in the country rewards such behavior, Loomer sees little downside. Out-of-bounds provocation drives attention. Attention increases influence. And the person who matters the most is almost certainly entertained.

“At the end of the day, it is called the Trump administration,” she told me on our phone call. “So the way I look at it, I play for an audience of one.”

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see zetero interv bedoyan 8 12? 25

msn 3 mos before aug

trump-wants-to-let-price-fixing-oil-execs-off-the-hook

the Trump administration is giving executives a pass for an alleged price-fixing scheme after they contributed millions to the Republican Party this past election, including the Trump campaign and his inauguration fund.

To reward the oil and gas industry for its political loyalty, Donald Trump’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Andrew Ferguson, took the first steps last month to lift regulatory restrictions imposed on a pair of the sector’s preeminent CEOs and Trump backers. The two were placed under consent orders by the Biden administration for colluding with foreign governments to raise oil prices.

In an op-ed this week, Ferguson made it clear that he intends to fulfill the executives’ petitions to the agency requesting this rollback, so they can rejoin the boards of their companies. “I’m asking my colleagues to undo the onerous and illegal consent decrees put in place by my FTC predecessor against oil and gas companies,” he wrote.

Chevron also submitted a petition to the agency after contributing $2 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Under Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan, the agency banned Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Oil, from joining the board of Exxon, which had recently acquired his company. A few months later, the FTC did the same to block Hess Oil CEO John Hess from taking a board position at Chevron after the two firms merged.

The agency took these actions after finding evidence during their merger reviews that Sheffield and Hess had separately colluded with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to manage oil production. OPEC is a cartel of producers from the oil-rich Middle East region and Russia that have an outsize impact on the entire global energy market.

According to a trove of documents and communications obtained by the agency, both execs conspired with OPEC leaders to keep oil supply low and raise prices to capitalize on market volatility following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The FTC referred the case to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal complaint, and Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee opened a wider probe into potential collusion across energy markets. The congressional investigation is still ongoing.

Oil and gas heads were incensed that regulators would take action against two of their most esteemed titans of industry. At a campaign fundraiser last year, Trump personally promised irate oil executives that he’d treat them more favorably after several complained specifically about the FTC’s meddling in their merger and acquisition deals, according to theWashington Post.

Shortly after the FTC imposed the consent orders, campaign contributions from Sheffield and Hess, their family members, business associates, and companies started flowing to the Trump campaign.

Sheffield is a longtime rainmaker in Texas GOP politics, spending a total of $4.2 million in federal and state elections since 2020, including contributions from his family members and his company. His son, Bryan Sheffield — who sold his own oil company to his father in 2021 and went to work for him — gave $413,000 to the Republican National Committee for a fund designated to boost the Trump campaign just weeks after his father was put under consent order by the FTC. The younger Sheffield also maxed out individual contributions to the Trump campaign last year.

Sheffield remains on the board of the Williams Companies, a natural gas producer, which gave $25,000 to the RNC fund last year and $500,000 to other GOP spending vehicles.

Hess, a longtime Trump backer, gave a million to Trump’s first inaugural committee through his oil company and was later named to Trump’s Opening the Country Council in 2020 for post-pandemic economic recovery. Trump received $96 million from fossil fuel interests overall last election cycle, one of his top sources of fundraising.

This article was first published by the*Lever*, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

EMAIL 525

Chevron’s latest attack on Rhode Island’s climate deception lawsuit was rejected by a state judge last month, keeping the state on a path to put fossil fuel companies on trial for their decades of climate deception.

Rhode Island was the first state in the U.S. to take fossil fuel giants to court to make them pay for local climate damages they knowingly caused.

The companies have fought for years to escape accountability, but the people of Rhode Island deserve their day in court.

Read our full blog post on our website

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YMAIL 1 25

...I’ve gotten word from inside the Biden team that we were able to push my pardon to the very top. In fact, it was discussed for days by the President’s top advisors. I was told Chevron’s lawyers fought with a bizarre intensity to kill it.

Why in hell were Chevron lawyers allowed in the White House to fight a human rights lawyer seeking a pardon?This is proof of the immense power our campaign has built – and how we pose a serious financial risk to Chevron.

On the day Mr. Biden denied my pardon more than 500,000 people around the world engaged with our social media posts. To put it bluntly, this scares the hell out of Chevron.

I see the result as a capitulation by Mr. Biden to corporate power at the expense of the planet and the rule of law. His decision was extremely disappointing – and also an illustration of the lack of conviction to fight for justice at the top levels of the Democratic Party.

...

1 15?

e xxon resorts to “intimidation” in legal battle over plastics recycling

The oil giant is accusing its opponents of engaging in a “deliberate smear campaign” at the cost of Exxon’s reputation and business prospects.

Months after California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of nonprofits separately sued ExxonMobil for a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the viability of plastic recycling, Exxon is suing them back, accusing Bonta and the nonprofits of defaming the oil giant and intentionally harming its efforts to develop new “advanced” recycling technologies.

Bonta’s lawsuit argues that despite knowing that recycling couldn’t effectively handle significant amounts of plastic waste, Exxon marketed it to the public to assuage environmental concerns and delay limits on plastic production. Now that it’s clear traditional recycling methods are insufficient, California’s lawsuit says, Exxon is once again deliberately misleading the public to believe that “advanced” or chemical recycling technologies are a safe and effective solution to plastic waste. A group of environmental nonprofits — including Sierra Club, Surfrider, Heal the Bay, and Baykeeper — filed a similar lawsuit against Exxon on the same day in September.

Exxon’s new complaint says those cases and accompanying public statements amount to a conspiracy between Bonta, advocates, and “foreign interests” to falsely “attack and defame ExxonMobil’s integrity and reputation.” But others say Exxon’s case is a textbook SLAPP — or strategic lawsuit against public participation — intended to ensnare its opponents in lengthy legal battles and prevent them from speaking out.

“This is a classic lawfare and SLAPP suit,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School. “Intimidation is the whole point of lawsuits like this.”

Exxon’s chemical recycling claims have come under sharp scrutiny in recent years, with government and nonprofit reports and Exxon’s own internal documents obtained by California’s attorney general revealing a widening gap between the company’s promotion of chemical recycling and the technology’s capacity to work as promised, even in the future. Those reports also documented the harm caused by the process of chemical recycling, which involves releasing toxic and carcinogenic pollutants, in close proximity to people — and how these facilities have been most often sited in low-income communities and communities of color.

According to Exxon’s complaint, such criticism — and the legal actions that followed — have derailed Exxon’s existing and prospective business deals, and “further threaten to derail advanced recycling by preventing it from achieving the scale necessary to ensure effective and efficient recycling.” But advocates say that’s a diversion from the fact that chemical recycling doesn’t work to significantly reduce plastic waste, and would only perpetuate the increased production of plastic.

"There is consistent data showing that plastics recycling does not achieve a high level of recycling and that chemical recycling is not a real solution to the growing problem of plastic waste,” said Judith Enck, president of U.S. nonprofit Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator. “It would be so much more productive if ExxonMobil simply told the truth and refrained from attempting to intimidate elected officials and advocates who are working to actually solve the problem."

In the complaint against Bonta, Exxon reports having recycled 70 million pounds of plastic waste to date — just 7% total of its goal of recycling one billion pounds per year via chemical recycling by year-end 2026, which appeared on its website as recently as October 31, 2024. Their website now says that goal will be reached by 2027.

A history of retaliation

The new lawsuit was filed Monday in a federal court in Texas, where Exxon’s chemical recycling operations are focused and where the company says defendants’ “disparaging and defamatory conduct” was targeted. According to law professor Parenteau, the venue was more likely seen as a friendlier court than where the original cases were filed, as “California has one of the strongest anti-SLAPP laws in the country to protect constitutional rights of free speech and access to justice.”

It isn’t the first time that Exxon has dragged its critics into a Texas court. In 2016, the company asked a federal court in Dallas to block investigations by New York and Massachusetts attorneys general into whether Exxon deceived investors and the public about climate change. That case was eventually transferred to New York, where it was dismissed.

After California municipalities sued Exxon for climate deception in 2017, the company requested that a Texas state court allow pre-suit depositions of municipal officials and lawyers involved in the case to determine whether they were aiming “to suppress the Texas energy sector’s Texas-based speech.” Their request was ultimately denied.

Since California brought its plastics suit against Exxon, the oil giant has been named in two separate class-action suits that focus on plastic recycling deception, one filed by Ford County, Kansas, and the other by four individuals in a federal court in Missouri. By Exxon’s own admission, the oil giant “is likely to become involved in additional legal matters bringing similar allegations against ExxonMobil in the near future.” To protect the company from facing “a multiplicity of suits in various forums throughout the country,” Exxon is asking the Texas court to issue a declaratory judgement making clear that the company has a legal right to “engage in and promote advanced recycling.”

That may be an unusual request. “Courts do not normally issue that kind of blanket declaration on an emerging technology with all kinds of technical, economic and environmental considerations that are better left to the legislative and executive branches,” said Parenteau.

The case could be part of a growing trend — by Exxon and other fossil fuel majors including Chevron, Italian oil giant Eni, and oil pipeline company Energy Transfer — to use SLAPPs, and defamation claims in particular, as a way to silence opposition and dodge accountability.

Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment professor at Harvard Law School, said Exxon’s lawsuit against Bonta and advocates should be considered a SLAPP. “Under current doctrine, the First Amendment strongly protects the speech at issue,” she said. “Even though we're in a period of rapid constitutional change, speech in connection with a lawsuit is really at the core of First Amendment protection, and this is pretty appalling (though perhaps not surprising).”

A matter of public concern

In its complaint, Exxon argues that chemical recycling is in fact “part of the solution to plastic waste,” and that the company “has not engaged in a decades-long secret mission to brainwash or deceive the public.” But the complaint hinges on another central point: that criticisms about chemical recycling have gotten in the way of Exxon’s business deals.

“As a result of Defendants’ false statements, major international brands have refused to jointly promote advanced recycling with ExxonMobil,” the complaint reads. “Potential customers have expressed concern and hesitancy to work with ExxonMobil and explicitly referenced statements by Bonta and the US Proxies as the cause of that concern. And, a number of companies have backed out of proposed transactions with ExxonMobil for advanced recycling.”

Exxon claims Attorney General Bonta worked in concert with U.S. nonprofits and Australian-based Intergenerational Environmental Justice Fund (IEJF) — a charity initiative of nonprofit group Minderoo, funded by Australian mining company Fortescue, a competitor of Exxon’s in the “low carbon solution” sector — to falsely malign Exxon’s chemical recycling business and file their lawsuits as “proxies.” Exxon also accuses IEJF of hiring the nonprofits’ law firm, Cotchett, Pitre, & McCarthy, LLP, to “recruit and enlist willing plaintiffs to stand in for the foreign interests’ agenda.” Bonta, IEJF, Minderoo, Fortescue, and the law firm have refuted Exxon’s descriptions of their connections and work

The company is now asking for an injunction requiring the named parties to “take down and retract defamatory statements and to cease interfering with existing and prospective business relationships.”

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, suggested that the case could face challenges for its attempts to rein in public debate — even in Texas. “The anti-SLAPP laws adopted by almost every state, including Texas, are designed to protect citizens from defamation and similar claims over matters of public concern,” he said. “The viability of plastics recycling is certainly a matter of public concern.”

===

10 24 MAIL HEATED

hy Chevron is sponsoring Hurricane Helene journalism

The oil giant wants to convince the public that its new ultra-high-pressure offshore drilling project, Anchor, is climate-friendly.

Arielle Samuelson

Oct 4

A viral tweet showing the Chevron sponsorship in Politico’s recent Power Switch newsletter. Source: X

For a list of Hurricane Helene mutual aid resources, click here.

One day after Hurricane Helene dissipated, the Politico newsletter Power Switch ran a story detailing the terrifying nationwide implications of fossil-fueled storms.

“Nowhere is safe from climate disaster,” the headline roared. “Presented by Chevron,” the next line read.

What followed was a back-and-forth between Politico’s reporters and Chevron’s marketing team. For a few paragraphs, readers were given journalism about Helene’s astronomical human and economic toll. Then, they were given a break for a paid message about Chevron’s new “Anchor” project—an ultra-deepwater drilling endeavor that the oil giant claims will deliver “some of the world’s lowest carbon intensity oil and gas.

A screenshot from Chevron’s website about the Anchor project. Ads placed in Politico, Axios, the New York Times, and across social media link to this website. Source: Chevron

Chevron’s sponsorship in Politico was perhaps its most dystopian example of climate-focused advertising about the Anchor project in recent weeks, but it was far from the only one.

During Climate Week NYC—the annual event that brings together diplomats, politicians, activists and corporate leaders to talk climate solutions—Chevron placed Anchor ads in The New York Times, NPR, and sponsored the Axios climate newsletter. It also advertised Anchor across social media.

chevron

A post shared by @chevron

But what is the Anchor project, exactly, and why is Chevron marketing it to climate-focused audiences?

The $5.7 billion facility, located 140 miles off the coast of Louisiana, is the first time an oil company has cracked the code on how to drill in previously untouched, dangerously high pressure deep sea environments. The technological achievement, which took Chevron a decade, will allow the fossil fuel industry to reach underwater oil and gas fields up to 20,000 pounds per square inch pressures, a third greater than any prior well.

Chevron estimates that Anchor could produce up to 440 million barrels of oil over 30 years, roughly equal to 187 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the same amount of emissions as running 499 methane gas plants in one year. But those millions of barrels are only the beginning of the company’s ambition; Chevron hopes Anchor will pioneer a new type of oil production that could yield billions of gallons of oil and gas from ultra-high-pressure fields across the world.

Chevron’s ambition, however, is coming amid global calls for a massive societal transition away from fossil fuels. Scientists say such a transition is the only way to solve the worsening climate crisis, which is wreaking havoc on human health and the economy.

So in order to achieve its dream of unmitigated oil production, Chevron must sell the public on a ludicrous idea: that drilling deep into the ocean floor is a climate solution.

For five years, HEATED has been digging deep into fossil fuel industry greenwashing—and doing it entirely with reader support. Join the small but mighty group of people who make HEATED’s independent journalism possible, and become a subscriber today.

Upgrade to paid

“Lower carbon” oil and gas

Even before the first barrel of oil was produced from Anchor on August 12, Chevron had spent at least $400,000 placing ads about it on social media and traditional news media, according to a HEATED analysis of data from ad insights firm Media Radar.

The amount is almost certainly an underestimation: Many of the Anchor ads currently on social media, podcasts, and other media outlets were not included in Media Radar’s data. A closer estimation may be the nearly $7 million the company has spent on ad placements over the past three months—outspending competitors like Shell and ExxonMobil by at least 50 percent.

The Anchor project media blitz, which has included press releases and interviews with executives, often claims that ultra-high-pressure deepwater fossil fuel projects are better for the planet than other fossil fuel projects.

“The Anchor project provides…lower carbon intensity oil and natural gas to help meet energy demand,” said Bruce Niemeyer, president of Chevron’s U.S. oil exploration and production, in a press release.

The claim rests in part on a simple fact: The Anchor project no longer uses diesel-powered rigs and fracking equipment, but uses electric-powered drilling rigs and fracking equipment instead.

“To reduce carbon emissions, the Anchor FPU was designed as an all-electric facility with electric motors and electronic controls,” its website reads. The oil giant also touts its re-use of waste heat and captured vapor to move oil and gas through existing pipelines, rather than constructing new ones.

Greenwashing experts told HEATED that these claims amount to paltering: they may be technically true, but purposefully obscure a larger picture. Yes, using electric rigs may make it less carbon-intensive to produce a barrel of oil. But since Chevron intends to use the new technology to produce even more oil and gas, any reductions would likely be offset, and Chevron would pollute even more than it does today. (The company is already one of the world’s biggest polluters, accounting for 3 percent of historic global greenhouse gas emissions).

“You can bring [the carbon intensity] down by a minuscule amount and still make that claim that it's cleaner than before,” said Wren Montgomery, an associate professor of sustainability at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “But they're trying to increase production. So overall, they're not actually reducing their carbon footprint even if they have made some small reduction per barrel.”

Chevron isn’t making these claims in isolation; other fossil fuel companies like BP and Exxon are also using bogus carbon-intensity marketing to justify increased production, while claiming to be tackling climate change.

But Montgomery says that Chevron’s ads, which simultaneously hype its new oil production while claiming that oil is better for the planet, are a sign of an industry hanging on by its fingernails as renewable energy continues to be cheaper than coal and gas.

“I see a lot of these as sort of grasping at straws,” she said. Fossil fuel companies are “driving for new audiences that will support them…so they can keep operating a little bit longer and not be shut down, which we all know is what needs to happen.”

Upgrade to paid

The new frontier of deepwater drilling

Chevron’s “lower carbon” claims aren’t the only concern experts have with the Anchor project. Indeed, some say the entire new field of ultra-high-pressure drilling poses massive environmental risk.

All of Chevron’s ads take care to describe the Anchor project as “safe,” a claim backed up by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s environmental assessment. The BOEM concluded that offshore spills “are possible if an accident were to damage a storage tank onboard the offshore support vessels,” but said the agency’s oversight and Chevron’s safety precautions make it “reasonable to conclude that an accidental spill event is not likely to occur.”

But overshadowing any deepwater drilling project is the infamous rig that caused one of the worst marine oil spills in history: Deepwater Horizon.

Before Deepwater Horizon became synonymous with disaster, killing 11 people and releasing about 300 Olympic-swimming pools-worth of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it successfully drilled the deepest oil and gas well at the time. Three years before it exploded, Deepwater Horizon was described as “one of the most powerful rigs in the world.”

Chevron’s Anchor project is drilling at pressures a third higher than Deepwater Horizon, where the margins for error are smaller. But for Big Oil, the reward is worth the risk because deeper wells produce more oil and gas.

Anchor’s seven deepsea wells sit 34,000 feet below sea level, where temperatures can hit 121 degrees Celsius and the pressure can reach up to 20,000 pounds per square inch. That subsurface pressure “is essentially equivalent to an elephant standing on a quarter,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told CNBC.

The ultra-high-pressure technology is “a breakthrough for the energy industry” that “allows us to unlock previously difficult-to-access resources,” said Nigel Hearne, Chevron’s executive vice president, in a press release.

If successful, energy industry analysts told Reuters that the Anchor project could open the door to developing ultra-high pressure, deepwater oil fields around the world, including off the coasts of Brazil, Angola, and Nigeria. Access to new oil fields could also push the Gulf of Mexico’s fossil fuel production above its previous record output of 2019, according to the same analysts.

Altogether, the Anchor project’s technology could help tap more than 5 billion barrels of oil and gas globally. That’s roughly equivalent to a whopping 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions, an amount so large that it is about equal to the emissions from all of South America and Africa, combined.

To say this new fossil fuel frontier is a significant threat to a livable climate is an understatement. The International Energy Agency warned in 2021 that all new fossil fuel developments must stop if the world wants to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

“There’s no way to make offshore drilling safe, and especially not projects like this one that involve drilling at such depths and under such high pressure,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who sharply criticized the BOEM’s assessment. “And the further offshore oil and gas activities occur, the more difficult oil spill or other responses are, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster highlights all too well.”

The probability of a serious accident or explosion increases by 8.5 percent with each additional 100 feet of depth at which an offshore platform operates, according to a peer-reviewed analysis of fossil fuel production in the Gulf of Mexico. Offshore drilling also represents a risk to critically endangered species like Rice’s whales, and endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.

“The project would also lock in decades of fossil fueled climate destruction from oil that should most definitely stay in the ground,” Monsell pointed out. “We need to be phasing drilling out of our oceans, not allowing oil companies to take drilling to risky new lows.”

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Chevron’s faux news site exploits local journalism’s decline, epitomizing the fossil fuel industry’s insidious greenwashing strategies

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

:{Published 08/28/24

Chevron-sponsored “news” site Permian Proud represents one of the fossil fuel industry's latest and most insidious greenwashing strategies, exploiting the decline of local journalism to shape public opinion in oil-rich regions. This tactic epitomizes a broader trend of deceptive practices by Big Oil, which — combined with national TV news’ failure to scrutinize the industry amid the escalating climate crisis — highlights an urgent need for robust accountability reporting.

Chevron's PR firm published a local “news” site without journalists

Felicia Alvarez's investigation for Floodlight, published in the Louisiana Illuminator, exposed Chevron's Permian Proud as a calculated ploy to manipulate public opinion under the guise of local journalism. The site, devoid of actual reporters or editors, is crafted by a San Francisco PR firm and a Chevron public affairs adviser, eliminating any pretense of editorial independence or journalistic integrity.

A search of the Permian Proud’s two-year-old website shows just a smattering of stories about climate change or greenhouse gas emissions — despite the oil and gas industry’s leading role in causing the climate crisis. As of Aug. 12, there were two stories mentioning climate change; one is a recap of a Texas Tribune series about training oil and gas workers and the other quotes a Chevron official about new techniques for measuring methane emissions.

The site has plenty of articles boasting of the importance of the Permian Basin and Chevron, sprinkled in with coverage of events, sports and awards given to local residents.

One story reported on Chevron receiving the highest environmental rating in the Permian Basin. Another announced that Chevron plans to boost its production to meet U.S. energy needs.

And the site reported on a $145,000 company donation to help students in Carlsbad, New Mexico — to pursue careers in energy and natural resources.

Notably absent is any critical coverage of the oil industry's environmental impact or role in the escalating climate crisis — and an eroding local media landscape leaves local residents vulnerable to a distorted view of the oil industry's true impact on their communities and the planet.

“Many of the counties within the Permian Basin are considered ‘news deserts,’ or areas with limited access to local, credible news sources,” Alvarez writes. “Of the 61 counties considered part of the Permian Basin region in Texas, 13 counties had no local newspapers, and the majority had only one newspaper, according to the news desert map maintained by the University of North Carolina.”

Alvarez reveals that Permian Proud isn't an isolated experiment:

It is also part of a network of Chevron-owned news outlets amplifying the company's viewpoint while publishing feel-good stories about local events and people. The same San Francisco public relations firm that provides content for Permian Proud runs the Richmond Standard news site in Richmond, California. It also operates an English-language website in Ecuador, where the energy giant has fought back decades of litigation.

This model, replicated across Chevron's operational areas, forms part of a broader strategy to control the narrative as the fossil fuel industry faces mounting scrutiny.

Permian Proud ignores climate crisis as Texas faces escalating climate disasters and environmental injustice

Texas recently endured a record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures soaring above 110 F in multiple cities. The Washington Post reported that Abilene shattered its all-time high at 113 F, while other cities set new August records. This extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable, it's potentially deadly — and it’s straining the state's power grid to its limits.

This recent crisis is just the latest example of Texas’ extreme vulnerability to climate change. A stark analysis from Public Citizen reveals that between 1980 and 2022, a staggering 44% of all billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in the country affected Texas. The state faces an onslaught of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires that are increasing in both frequency and intensity.

The climate crisis is also creating significant financial impacts for Texas residents. Erin Douglas of The Texas Tribune reported that insurance rates in Texas have skyrocketed by 22% in 2023, twice the average national increase. Even more troubling, “many areas of the state are likely underpriced relative to their climate risk, according to a model created by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit group of academics and experts that quantifies climate risks,” suggesting that the financial strain on homeowners is only set to worsen.

Notably, the fossil fuel industry operating in Texas bears outsized responsibility for climate change, amplifying the risks facing communities across the state:

Texas emits more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It accounts for 14% of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, and produces more than twice the total emissions of California, the next largest greenhouse gas emitter. Texas is also the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production.

Beyond the climate impacts of the fossil fuel industry, Texas also faces severe environmental justice challenges. Low-income communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution — in Port Arthur and Houston, the concentration of petrochemical facilities and other polluting industries near residential areas is a direct result of historical segregation and discriminatory land-use practices. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's permitting decisions, particularly for facilities like concrete batch plants in Harris County, have further entrenched these disparities, leading to ongoing health risks for vulnerable populations.

The fossil fuel industry deploys multifaceted deception campaigns like Permian Proud to delay climate action

As the climate crisis intensifies, the fossil fuel industry has shifted from outright denial to a broader PR campaign employing more insidious forms of deception. This multifaceted approach, exemplified by Chevron's Permian Proud, aims to manipulate public opinion and delay climate action.

Recent investigations reveal oil giants are targeting youth via gaming platforms, exploiting inconsistent social media ad labeling, and rebranding as “clean energy providers” while promoting false solutions. In addition, The Guardian exposed the industry's funding of legal efforts to block climate action, with the Republican Attorneys General Association receiving $5.8 million from oil and gas interests since 2020.

These coordinated efforts — from exploiting declining local journalism to influencing younger generations and funding legal challenges — demonstrate the fossil fuel industry’s determination to shape public opinion and policy in its favor. As climate change impacts worsen, the industry's tactics aim to preserve its dominance in a decarbonizing world despite scientific evidence demanding a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Outlets like Permian Proud are just one facet of this larger industry campaign, underscoring the urgency of recognizing and counteracting these corporate greenwashing strategies.

Local news vacuum enables corporate narrative control

The erosion of local journalism in the United States has reached crisis levels, creating dangerous information vacuums. A Media Matters analysis in May starkly illustrated this problem: Donald Trump's recent corrupt offer to Big Oil executives, asking them to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign while assuring that they'd be getting a “deal” due to the taxation and regulation they would avoid if he is reelected, was almost entirely ignored by top local newspapers and TV markets in key battleground states.

The 2023 Medill Local News Initiative report quantifies this crisis: Over 50% of U.S. counties now have just one local news source, or none at all. The rate of newspaper closures averages more than two per week, with 2,900 papers having shuttered since 2005 — and “all but about 100 were weeklies, which are often the sole provider of local news in/ small and mid-sized communities.” Most significantly, 43,000 newspaper journalists representing two-thirds of the industry's workforce have lost their jobs.

This systemic erosion of local news coverage is creating information vacuums across the country, leaving communities vulnerable to misinformation and unchecked corporate narratives — with far-reaching implications for public information and democracy. The absence of robust local journalism directly impacts civic engagement, political accountability, and public understanding of critical issues like climate change and climate solutions.

National TV news fails to consistently connect climate dots, enabling industry narratives

As local journalism crumbles, the responsibility of national media to provide comprehensive reporting about critical issues such as global warming becomes even more crucial.

However, recent Media Matters studies reveal that national outlets are falling short, particularly in their coverage of climate-related extreme weather events in places such as Texas. This failure at both the local and national level creates a dangerous information vacuum that fossil fuel companies like Chevron are eager to exploit.

In February, only 2% of cable and corporate broadcast news segments about the Texas wildfires mentioned climate change. Similarly, just 3 out of 21 broadcast news segments connected January’s Texas flooding to climate issues, while 5% of national TV news segments about the June 2023 Texas heat wave mentioned climate change.

This pattern of omission extends far beyond extreme weather coverage, undermining public understanding of the broader climate crisis. In 2023, for example, a mere 12% of climate segments on corporate broadcast networks mentioned fossil fuels. This persistent failure to connect the dots between fossil fuel consumption, global warming, and their cascading harms leaves viewers uninformed about the true drivers of climate change.

The information vacuum created by this lack of context in extreme weather reporting enables misleading narratives from the fossil fuel industry to flourish unchallenged. Chevron's Permian Proud, for instance, exploits this gap to further its Big Oil agenda, shaping public opinion in oil-rich regions without meaningful counterbalance from mainstream media. This vacuum also allows broader industry greenwashing campaigns to go largely unexamined.

Better news reporting on climate change and corporate accountability is crucial to combating industry narratives

Amid declining local journalism and inadequate national coverage, Chevron’s Permian Proud demonstrates that fossil fuel companies are increasingly willing to fill the void left by traditional journalism with their own content.

In the face of these corporate-sponsored narratives, real news outlets must be pressured to provide coverage that consistently connects extreme weather events and fossil fuels to climate change and potential solutions. This comprehensive approach is essential for public understanding of the climate crisis and for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable, empowering news audiences to cut through Big Oil's propaganda and understand the true scale of the challenge we face.

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A top U.S. House Democrat announced Tuesday that he is demanding answers from fossil fuel executives after Washington Post reporting revealed last week that former Republican President Donald Trump recently told industry leaders he would gut climate regulations if they raised $1 billion for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, on Monday wrote to the heads of the American Petroleum Institute (API) and eight companies: Cheniere Energy, Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, Continental Resources, EQT Corporation, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Venture Global LNG.

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Raskin's letters note that the executives "appear to have attended" Trump's fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last month and "media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions."

"Mr. Trump's unvarnished quid pro quo offer is especially troubling evidence in light of recent accounts that the 'U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs, and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term,'" he wrote, citing Politico. "These preparatory actions suggest that certain oil and gas companies, which have a track record of using deceitful tactics to undermine effective climate policy, may have already accepted or facilitated Mr. Trump's explicit corrupt bargain."

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Raskin also highlighted findings from a January Oversight Committee Democrats staff report, which shows that "when Mr. Trump was in office, he accepted at least $7.8 million from kings, princes, and foreign states, including the People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia, in blatant violation of the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause, and rendered a sequence of foreign policy favors to his patrons."

The congressman—and constitutional scholar—asked the executives to respond to questions and document requests by May 27. He is seeking the names of employees who attended the April 11 fundraiser, copies of materials distributed during the event, descriptions of all policy proposals and related campaign contributions discussed, and draft executive orders or policy paperwork prepared by members of the companies.

"The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate 'any matter' at 'any time,'" Raskin explained. "The requested information is needed to investigate and legislate on matters related to presidential and presidential-candidate ethics and to continue to address the major ethics crisis created by Donald Trump's efforts to profit off the presidency."

As Raskin released the letters on Tuesday, Media Matters for America's Allison Fisher pointed out that "unfortunately, over a four-day period, TV news broadcast and cable networks—with the exception of MSNBC—did not cover Trump's proposition to oil executives."

However, Trump has made his policy plans clear. Even before the fundraiser, he publicly pledged to "drill, baby, drill" if he beats Democratic President Joe Biden in November. One March analysis found that a second Trump term would lead to the release of 4 billion more tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide—the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan—by 2030 than if Biden were reelected.

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The letters aren't the first time Raskin has taken aim at the fossil fuel industry this month. At the beginning of May, he testified before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee about a nearly three-year investigation into "Big Oil's campaign of deception and distraction," which he said "undermines the efforts we need to mobilize our people and government to save our climate, our habitat, and our species."

"Unless the deception ends, and until the industry is held accountable," the congressman warned, "we are unlikely ever to be able to muster the national political will to effectively tackle climate change."

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It has been affirmed by six different appellate courts, including Ecuador’s Supreme Court.

Chevron executives don’t much like it when Indigenous peoples hold them accountable.

In fact, they hate it.

Chevron retaliated by launching a vicious demonization campaign targeting me, my wife Laura, and my son Matthew. They even had me locked up at home and in prison for almost three years on a baseless contempt of court charge resulting from a private prosecution.

In all, the company used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to go after me and our team.

Chevron also paid six operatives to follow me and my family around New York City where we live. They even tracked us as we took our son to school.

Now Chevron is at it again.

Last week my Twitter-X account with more than 200,000 followers was hacked. We later discovered that several posts related to Chevron’s destruction of the Amazon had vanished. [twt]

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In the span of two weeks, ExxonMobil made its largest oil acquisition in two decades, Chevron increased its oil production capacityby 10%, and Shell cut 200 clean energy jobs. It’s clearer than ever that Big Oil companies are doubling down on the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis, while they continue to mislead the public about the harm they are causing. Communities around the nation are seeing the industry’s ongoing deception for what it is and taking Big Oil companies to court to make them pay for their climate lies.

In a $60 billion deal, Exxon acquired Pioneer Natural Resources, an oil producer in the Permian Basin. The massive merger — which more than doubles the company’s Permian production to 1.3 million barrels of oil per day — comes after Exxon spent years claiming to support taking action to limit global warming per the Paris Agreement. The oil giant, however, just made a $60 billion bet that it will be able to continue business as usual despite the urgent calls for energy transition.

The greenwashing and deception isn’t surprising; Exxon and other major oil companies are being sued by communities across the country for knowingly lying to the public about their product’s role in advancing climate change and launching a climate science denial campaign to avoid public scrutiny.

Chevron is also doubling down on its oil production, acquiring competitor Hess for $53 billion — a consolidation that will increase Chevron’s existing daily oil production of three million barrels by 10%. Meanwhile, Shell — after one of its most profitable years on record — is reducing its low-carbon workforce by 200 positions just one month after Shell employees penned an open letter to CEO Wael Sawan expressing their concern with the company’s movement away from renewable energy investments.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that the world needs to urgently pivot to renewable fuels in order to avoid worsening impacts of the climate crisis. In 2021, the International Energy Agency declared that all oil and gas infrastructure development must stop immediately in order for the world to meet its goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Earlier this year, the United Nations report on climate change concluded the planet will be pushed past the point of catastrophic warming in the next 10 years without an immediate transition away from fossil fuels.

Despite those warnings, oil giants continue to put profit over public safety and double down on fossil fuel investments — just like they have done for decades. It’s clearer than ever that Big Oil will only continue to act in its own self interest; it’s time to hold these companies accountable for their climate destruction.

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Texas eighth graders will soon be required to learn about climate change — but not without a showdown

man and woman sitting on chairs

Erin DouglasandThe Texas TribuneAugust 30, 2023

Starting next year, Texas will require that eighth graders learn about climate change as part of a science curriculum overhaul approved two years ago.

But which textbooks they’ll use to learn about it will largely depend on the state board charged with setting curriculum standards, and questions during a Tuesday meeting to hear testimony on the proposed teaching materials showed that the 15-member body — which has taken a rightward turn since 2021 — could make its decision along partisan lines.

One Republican member of the State Board of Education asked whether students ought to learn about the benefits of burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Democrats advocated for texts that emphasized the scientific consensus on climate change.

Dozens of publishers submitted textbook proposals for the state’s overhaul of its science curriculums. Any resident of Texas can submit written comments on the instructional materials before Oct. 30. The board plans to adopt instructional materials in November; the new science standards and textbooks will take effect at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.

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Many critics say the new curriculum standards, called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, don’t go far enough to teach kids that climate change is caused by human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels. And while the TEKS changes will require eighth graders to describe how human activities “can” influence climate, students won’t be required to learn about how “a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” could mitigate climate change after the board previously declined to include that language.

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Publishers can choose to include information in textbooks that go beyond the state’s new minimum requirements for teaching climate change — the question is whether the board, which strengthened its Republican majority during last year’s election, will approve such textbooks.

The board’s decision could impact how science is taught in Texas classrooms for years. And while school districts aren’t required to use board-approved textbooks, many do so for the assurance that those materials meet the state’s standards.

At least one Republican board member, Will Hickman, who represents Houston, indicated that he’d advocate for instructional materials that do not include climate change solutions in science courses. He argued those solutions would be a better fit in social studies.

Hickman also asked one testifier if the textbooks should “also include the benefits we get from burning carbon,” arguing that many facets of modern society, such as air conditioning, are powered by fossil fuels. Hickman, an attorney who was elected to the board in 2021, has worked as in-house counsel forShell OilCompany since 2004.

The testifier, Susan Meredith, an Austin-based energy and education consultant who had testified that students should be presented with instructional materials that prepare them for climate change related jobs in the future, told Hickman he was conflating topics.

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“What you’re collapsing is that electricity has to come from gas and oil, and it doesn't,” Meredith said.

Another Republican SBOE member, Pat Hardy, who represents Tarrant and Parker counties and parts of Dallas County, has previously said she wants children to learn about the good fossil fuels have done for human society, such as helping the Texas economy grow. Texas is the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state.

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Texas is one of only six states that does not use the Next Generation Science Standards to guide its K-12 science curriculum. The standards — developed by states and a committee convened by the National Research Council in 2013 — emphasize that climate change is real, severe, caused by humans and can be mitigated with actions that reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

A 2020 analysis of science curriculums in all 50 states by the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund gave Texas an F grade for how well schools in the state taught about the scientific consensus on climate change.

Some Democrats on the board pushed back on the soft-on-fossil-fuels language proposed by their Republican colleagues.

“We absolutely should say humans do impact climate change,” said Marisa Perez-Diaz, a Democrat who represents San Antonio on the board, in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “It doesn’t have to be political — it is just fact. But I think because sometimes we get into these culture-war conversations, it blurs what should and shouldn’t go into the standards.”

Although all the textbooks that have been submitted for approval explain that climate change is happening and “can” be due to human activity, not all of them explicitly say that human activities are the primary reason or include information on how to mitigate climate change. In other words, some of the textbooks don’t say that humans will need to quickly and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions, largely by phasing out fossil fuels, to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, as international climate scientists have long warned.

During the Tuesday board meeting, Perez-Diaz asked the other board members to be cautious of only supporting textbooks that meet the state’s minimum requirements and nothing more.

“When publishers take the time to include additional information past the TEKS [standards], for me, that is a text that stands out above and beyond the others,” she said.

Some educators, former teachers and education advocates are concerned that the political influence of the fossil fuel industry in Texas has prevented, and may continue to block, robust education on climate science ahead of the board’s November vote on science instructional materials.

“Climate change might be politically controversial, but the scientific consensus is clear,” said Carisa Lopez, a senior political director for Texas Freedom Network, during a Tuesday press conference. “It’s past time for the board to be clear about textbooks: that textbooks in public schools should teach the truth.”

Judy Dickey, a graduate lecturer at Texas A&M in the department of atmospheric sciences, said she thought some of the textbooks were trying to “soft-peddle” climate change by not explicitly saying humans were the cause, casting doubt on the scientific consensus or not including solutions.

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But Dickey, who reviewed the textbooks for a Texas Freedom Network analysis of the proposals, said most of them did a good job of explaining climate science, treated climate change seriously and explained how it occurs.

“To me, that is a huge step forward,” said Dickey, who was previously a science teacher in Florida. “I was pleasantly surprised. … It was nice to see that no one was trying to pretend it was volcanoes.”

One 11th-grade student who testified during the Tuesday meeting, Marygrace Beinke, said none of her teachers have ever told her that climate change is a hoax or that evolution isn’t real. She emphasized to the board that all students in Texas should be given the opportunity to learn about those topics, which she said have reinforced her faith in God.

“I’ve never felt closer to God as when I’ve been learning about how fragile, beautiful and complex our Earth is,” Beinke told the board.

Geoff Carlisle, who taught eighth-grade science at a KIPP school in Austin for a decade, said in an interview with the Tribune that like Beinke’s teachers, he taught his students about climate change, even though it was not required by the state’s standards. Carlisle incorporated information about climate science into his own lesson plans — something he said most teachers in Texas don’t likely have the time or resources to do.

He said many of his students understood that climate change was happening and that it might have something to do with burning fossil fuels, but they could not explain the greenhouse gas effect or what role burning fossil fuels had in it. He wants the state to go further and require climate science to be taught at all levels. Other states, such as New Jersey, have such standards.

“When I think about the alarming emergency that our students are going to face or are facing, it’s unethical to not be talking about this in all grade levels,” Carlisle said. “Our students deserve the right to understand what’s happening.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/exxon-chevron-shell-conocophillips-record-profits-earnings-oil-companies-most-profitable-year/

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global oil companies have rebounded since the pandemic to post their highest ever profits since people started using petroleum.

Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and Shell all reported record profits in 2022 — a year in which Russia's war on Ukraine collided with the post-pandemic economic recovery to drive oil prices to their highest levels in history. 

Together, the four companies saw $1 trillion in sales last year, a sum greater than the total economic output of Colombia, South Africa or Switzerland. TotalEnergies and BP are set to report their 2022 financial results next week.

The record profits come after a year of skyrocketing gas prices. After slumping hard in 2020, global consumption of oil and gasoline bounced back far slower than production, putting pressure on gas prices. Russia's invasion of Ukraine a year ago further shrank the world's oil supplies, bringing the average price of gas in the U.S. above $5 a gallon in the spring and summer. [graph]

shell on Thursday reported a nearly $40 billion profit for last year. That's more than double the prior year's results and the most money Shell has ever made in its 115 years of existence. Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the U.S., posted record earnings of $36.5 billion last year, while refiner ConocoPhillips doubled its profits to $18.7 billion, the highest in the 10 years since it spun off its refining business.

Exxon, the largest U.S. oil producer, this week reported an epic $55 billion in profits for 2022. The oil giant's bottom line "clearly benefited from a favorable market," CEO Darren Woods told investors. He also touted Exxon's investments before and during the pandemic, which allowed it to increase production as demand was ramping up. 

"We leaned in when others leaned out, bucking conventional wisdom," Woods said.

The windfall makes Exxon the third-most-profitable company of 2022, behind only Apple and Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to high prices for crude oil, elevated natural-gas prices and high margins in the refining business also pushed up oil company profit, said Peter McNally, industrial and energy analyst at Third Bridge.

"Windfall" profits

The White House and environmentalists have condemned oil companies' ballooning profits. The White House has criticized fossil-fuel companies for not increasing production to help bring down gas prices, and last year floated a tax on oil and gas profits.

A White House spokesperson called Exxon's record profit "outrageous" in a statement to the BBC. The spokesperson, Abdullah Hasan, also blasted Chevron's announcement that it would spend $75 billion on buying back stock from investors.

"Companies clearly have everything they need — record profits and thousands of approved permits — to increase production. The only thing getting in the way is their own decision to keep plowing windfall profits into the pockets of executives," Hasan tweeted.

"A windfall tax on oil and gas profits is needed more than ever, to free up money that's desperately needed to help those struggling with the cost of energy, and as economies around the world face recession," Jonathan Noronha-Gant, senior campaigner with Global Witness, told the Associated Press.

Some jurisdictions, including the European Union and the U.K., have imposed such taxes on surplus energy-company profits, putting the proceeds toward covering citizens' skyrocketing energy costs. In December, Exxon sued to stop the EU's tax.

"We looked at what happened in the EU and said it both is not legal and it's the opposite of what is needed," Woods said Tuesday, calling the tax "a penalty on the broad energy sector."

Dramatic turnaround

Oil companies have seen a remarkable turnaround from 2020, a year when travel ground to a halt, demand for fuel evaporated, dozens of oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy protection, and thousands of industry workers were laid off. Exxon lost $22 billion that year — the first year in decades that it had lost money.

In addition to oil-extracting operations that were taken offline in 2020, refining capacity also fell, contributing to higher gas prices and refinery profit margins.

"The refining business, particularly in the U.S., soared to record levels," McNally, the Third Bridge analyst, said. "The price of crude oil went up but the prices of refined products like gasoline and diesel went up even more. The largest U.S. independent refiner, Marathon Petroleum, delivered record profits, but ExxonMobil and Chevron also compete in refining."

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Corporate Accountability released a hard-hitting exposé calling out Chevron’s junk climate action and how its purported green actions are likely intensifying global harm. It was released alongside an exclusive in The Guardian GUK, which wrote an incredible piece about the report and the actions taking place this week. And with thousands of members like you taking action, we also called on BlackRock, one of Chevron’s biggest investors, to divest from Chevron.

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New Blog: The American Petroleum Institute Loves Pennsylvania, As Its Lobbying Shows

As one of the top fossil fuel producing states, Pennsylvania is a key focus for the oil and gas industry. In fact, with $1.8 million spent in 2022 alone, the American Petroleum Institute reported spending more money on lobbying in Pennsylvania than in any other state last year. Read more from Aly Shaw at the LittleSis Eyes on the Ties blog. 

New Blog: Fossil Fuel Directors’ Ties to University Boards Run Deep

While Harvard professor Jody Freeman’s board seat at ConocoPhillips -- and her lobbying on the company’s behalf -- has been in the headlines, directors from other Big Oil companies and dirty utilities are well-represented on university boards and in other higher ed roles. We mapped out some key ties between the boards of Chevron, Marathon Petroleum, Valero, Southern Company and others to different universities and colleges. Some of the findings may be shocking -- for example, that the chair of the board of trustees of the very liberal Wesleyan University is aChevron director or that three Chevron directors have prominent roles at USC. These relationships don’t only greenwash oil companies -- they throw into doubt the climate gestures made by universities who give fossil fuel directors governing roles at their institutions. Read our latest blog post here.

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on Monday this week the Supreme Court finally weighed in on whether it would take up the jurisdictional argument that oil companies are making in multiple climate liability suits. The companies have been arguing for the past five years that these cases, brought on behalf of municipalities and states, are asking state courts for judgements that would impact federal policy and thus belong in state court. Attorneys representing state and local arguments have argued that their cases—which claim that oil companies' delay tactics on climate increased the cost of adaptation and thus the companies are liable for a portion of those costs—were appropriately filed in state court. Every circuit court has agreed, as has the Department of Justice, and now the Supreme Court as well.

"The companies' history of climate, deception, and misinformation, coupled with their unchecked fossil fuel production promotion, and so on, it makes them liable for at least some of the costs that these communities face, so that these costs don't fall entirely on the taxpayers." — Marco Simons, EarthRights International, attorney representing Boulder and other Colorado municipalities against oil companies.

Suncor, a Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary is headquartered in Colorado, is a defendant in the Boulder climate case.

It's big news, but what will it mean for these cases? Some of them, including Boulder, which was the case invoked in the initial petition to the Supreme Court, will go back to arguing against other motion-to-dismiss arguments in state court. But others, starting with Hawaii, will move towards trial and that's a really big deal because it means some of these cases will get into the phase of litigation oil companies have been trying their hardest to avoid: discovery. In civil cases, the discovery phase is when companies will be asked to hand over documents and make their executives available for depositions. The evidence gathered during discovery in these cases could spell trouble for the oil company defendants in multiple other cases, including ongoing fraud suits in Massachusetts and Minnesota, a RICO, or racketeering, case filed on behalf of Puerto Rican municipalities, and even international cases given that the majority of these companies operate globally.

"At this point, we're optimistic about moving forward and securing justice for our clients, who have been facing significant harms and costs due to the climate crisis while the oil companies, of course, continue to profit from their deception and misinformation." —Marco Simons, EarthRights International

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But of course, oil majors have not put all their eggs in the jurisdictional basket. As I've been writing about for years now, one of the key arguments they're making in these cases is a First Amendment argument. In broad strokes, the argument goes like this: anything they've ever said about climate was in the interest of shaping policy, which makes it political speech (or "petitioning speech" in legalese), and therefore protected. It was clear this was going to be the driving force of these cases when the oil company defendants appointed Chevron's attorney, Ted Boutrous with Gibson Dunn, as their spokesperson across the board. Boutrous is a renowned First Amendment attorney, and Gibson Dunn is the firm that brought and won the most famous corporate free speech in the country's history: Citizens United. And now, even as the broader jurisdictional argument seems to be dead in the water, oil companies have formulated another one: the First Amendment question in these cases is foundational, and is not something that state courts should be weighing in on.

That argument has already been briefed in multiple cases, and it's only a matter of time before it makes its way to the most pro-corporate Supreme Court this country has had in decades...maybe ever. In the meantime, cases will move forward, and it's possible that so many cases moving into discovery will prompt discussion of a tobacco-style settlement. But I wouldn't go counting those chickens just yet.

april 2022

https:/**/theintercept.com/2022/04**/27/deconstructed-steven-donziger-chevron-ecuador/

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this week, after nearly 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, the environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger was released from house arrest.On this week’s podcast, Donziger talks to Intercept investigative reporter Sharon Lerner and Ryan Grim about his decadelong legal battle with Chevron over land contamination in Ecuador.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Sharon Lerner:This week on Deconstructed, I’m Sharon Lerner, investigative reporter for The Intercept, sitting in for Ryan Grim.

Our guest this week is Steven Donziger, the environmental lawyer who sued Chevron and won. Donziger helped win a multi-billion dollar judgment against the company for the contamination of land in Ecuador. Specifically, the Lago Agrio region where he’s been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers for more than 25 years.

As Donziger was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And, since then, Chevron has waged an all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law.

Chevron has hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication just to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him.

As a result, Donziger has been disbarred; his bank accounts have been frozen; he has had alien placed on his apartment; he faces exorbitant fines; and he was prohibited from earning money. A court seized his passport and put him on house arrest. Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $316 billion, has the funds to continue targeting Donziger for as long as it chooses.

In an emailed statement, Chevron wrote that: “any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law should find the fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment to be illegitimate and unenforceable.” The statement also said that: “Chevron will continue to work to hold the perpetrators of this fraud accountable for their actions, including Steven Donziger, who has committed a litany of corrupt and illegal acts related to his Ecuadorian judicial fraud against Chevron.”

Donziger was charged with contempt of court for refusing to hand over his computer, cellphone, and other electronic devices in August of 2019. He had already endured 19 days of depositions and given Chevron large portions of his case file. To him, the request for his devices was beyond the pale, and he appealed it on the grounds that it would require him to violate his commitments to his clients. Still, Donziger said he’d turn over the devices if he lost the appeal. Instead, he ended up confined by the court to his Upper West Side apartment.

Even though the underlying case was civil, the federal court judge who has presided over the litigation between Chevron and Donziger since 2011, Lewis Kaplan, drafted criminal contempt charges against him.

Kaplan ruled in 2014 that the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was invalid because it was obtained through “egregious fraud” and that Donziger was guilty ofracketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering.

The decision hinged on the testimony of an Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, who claimed that Donziger had bribed him during the original trial and that the decision against Chevron had been ghostwritten. In 2015, when Guerra testified in an international arbitration proceeding, he admitted that he had lied and changed his story multiple times.

In another legal peculiarity, in July, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger, after the Southern District of New York declined to do so — a move that is virtually unprecedented. And, as Donziger’s lawyer has pointed out, the firm Kaplan chose, Seward & Kissel, likely has ties to Chevron.

Making the case even more extraordinary, Kaplan bypassed the standard random assignment process and handpicked someone he knew well, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, to oversee the case being prosecuted by the firm he chose. It was Preska who sentenced Donziger to home detention and ordered the seizure of his passport, even though Donziger had appeared in court on hundreds of previous occasions.

When I visited Donziger in his apartment last year, he had no idea that he would end up spending more than 900 days there on house arrest.

On Monday, Donziger was finally released from house arrest. Ryan Grim and I talked to him shortly afterwards. Here is our conversation.

[Musical interlude.]

Steve Donziger:I’m feeling great.

SL:Yeah. Big day!

Ryan Grim:Yeah. What day did you get off? I mean, what time?

SD:It was around 9:30-10, maybe, in the morning?

RG:Did you get an alert that said — I mean, I saw you got an alert that was kind of penal coming after you at like five in the morning. But then did you get an alert saying that you’re now a free person?

SD:[Laughs.] No, they don’t do that.

SL: What’s the first thing you did?

SD:Well, I came outside, and there were some people there and I taped a little talk and took a picture. And then I went into the subway and came home and my wife was there. And some of my friends and we hugged, and we rejoiced in the moment.

I didn’t really fully understand what freedom was until it was taken away. I’ve lived in my home now for 993 days straight, other than 45 days in federal prison. So it’s been quite the experience. It lasted a long time for various reasons I think related to retaliation by Chevron against me for my successful human rights work in Ecuador. But the cost to me and my family, obviously, was very, very high. Although, I think at the end of the day, it really is backfiring against Chevron and that we now have a much bigger, broader platform to advocate from than we did before.

RG: Does it feel different to be in your home now that you know you can leave? Like, does the home itself feel different that you’re there voluntarily?

SD: It does feel different. Freedom is not only the ability to kind of move around, travel, go out to eat, do what you want to do when you want to do it within reason. It’s also a psychological state. I found that I had taken freedom for granted my whole life. I mean, even just the ability to sort of think: Eh, maybe later today I’ll go to dinner or maybe later today, I’ll go see a show or go visit a friend, you know? And what my house arrest did I mean prison is even worse obviously, but house arrest deprives you of the ability to plan. It cuts you off from your friends and your social life. You can’t even think about the future.

I mean, one bizarre feature of my experience was that when it began, I was pretrial and Covid hit and it was very unclear how long it would last and Judge Preska, who put the ankle bracelet on me and forced me into my house on the theory I was a risk of flight — which was preposterous, and I reject — it was very clear, she was never going to take that ankle bracelet off even if Covid lasted five years, and there were no trials being held.

So for a long, long, long period of time, most of the time I’ve been in detention, it felt like it was an indefinite detention. And it was. There was no endpoint. And it wasn’t until I was denied a jury and I had a contempt trial where Judge Preska, the very person who had locked me up for, by that point, two years and two months prior to trial, she was my sole fact finder. And of course, she convicted me after denying me a fair trial, in my opinion. And then she still — on top of the two years and two months — sentenced me to six months in prison [laughs] when, again, the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor is six months. And she gave me the full sentence, not counting the two years and two months she had already made me stay at home.

So this was a very, in my opinion, corporate-generated politicized effort by two federal judges,Judge Preska and her colleague Judge Kaplan who appointed her to the case and who charged me with these supposed crimes. I mean, his charges, by the way, were rejected by the federal prosecutor, but they prosecuted me anyway with his private corporate law firm that had Chevron as a client.

So there were all sorts of things happening. But it was very clear that this was a Chevron prosecution. All the main witnesses in my supposed trial were Chevron lawyers. The prosecutor was from a Chevron law firm and the judge, Judge Preska, is a major leader of the Federalist Society where Chevron is a major funder. So I was surrounded from almost every angle by Chevron during my supposed trial.

RG:And this is not remotely the same thing. But when I was in my late teens, I got put on supervised probation for basically underage drinking, it was an extremely draconian sentence that was laid out. My travel was restricted. I had to do weekly drug tests. I had to meet with the probation officer. And there was something about the entire like, when you talk about the psychology of it, there’s something about the state, like telling you that the public has decided that you are a person that needs to be controlled that is just kind of psychologically devastating, even if you know that it’s not true. And in my case, I knew it wasn’t true. And in your case, obviously wildly different, you are a human rights attorney getting basically by this judge, but there’s still something weighty about the public having dealt a sentence at you.

Is that related to the restriction of freedom or not?

SD: Well, I think you make a really good point with your question. There’s a certain designed humiliation that takes place —

RG: Mhmm.

SD:— when the state sentences anyone to any kind of punishment, or even subjects them to arrest without a conviction. People assume you’re guilty of something if you’re even arrested or detained pretrial, as I was. And really, I would argue that the whole point of why Chevron had this done to me was to try to criminalize my successful human rights advocacy.

This is not uncommon. A lot of big companies go after environmental lawyers and activists who do their jobs effectively to try to make it look like what they’re doing is criminal when what they’re actually doing is, at least in my case, complying with the law and trying to save the planet.

SL: I guess I would say, I think your case is unusual. It’s super unusual, I think. Have we seen any other human rights or environmental attorneys imprisoned in this way? I haven’t, for sure.

SD:Oh, no, I mean, my case is an absolute extreme outlier, there’s no doubt. You’re totally right. But there are a lot of other cases that are less severe where environmental activists have been prosecuted. I mean, the protests at Standing Rock and Line 3 are a great example.

I mean, these people are generally charged with trespassing, but many of them get locked up for months and months; indigenous peoples are charged with trespassing on their own historical ancestral lands to try to block the pipeline.

SL:Yeah.

SD: So there’s all these legal so-called crimes that can be marshaled by, in that case, public prosecutors, in my case by a private law firm, that can create a supposed legal basis to lock people up.

I’d make this point though, which is that my case is an outlier. But I think the industry, the fossil fuel industry and the Chevron’s of the world, want it to become the new normal. And that’s why I think people really need to focus on this and pay attention. It’s an outlier now, but what happens when it happens again? Or for a third time or a fourth time? And suddenly you’re like: Oh, yeah, yeah, private prosecutions, OK, yeah, that happens now. And we can’t let an outlier — an extreme, I would call it — politically motivated prosecution of a human rights lawyer in the United States of America become the new normal, because this case, in my opinion, is a direct violation of the rule of law.

I mean, who’s ever heard of a private corporate law firm prosecuting a lawyer who won a civil case against a big oil company in that private corporate law firm, has the big oil company as a private client, while it’s prosecuting in the name of the U.S. government the main critic and the biggest adversary of the oil company? I mean, that’s not what happens in any rule of law country, much less the United States of America.

So, look, there’s no doubt Chevron broke new ground in terms of the tools and weapons it has and the larger industry has at their disposal, to capture the public machinery of justice of our criminal justice system and wield it in a way that tries to silence legitimate advocacy. That’s new. But that’s why it’s so scary. And I think that’s why, by the way, I’ve gotten so much support over the last two, three years while I’ve been detained. I mean, it’s just extraordinary the amount of support we’ve gotten, because people are really terrified by this. And they understand that this case goes way, way beyond me personally. It really is a direct assault on the ability to advocate by all environmental justice advocates, human rights lawyers who are on the frontlines trying to defend our Earth.

So more and more people get it, and we can’t let this happen again.

RG:And so Sharon, you’ve done for The Intercept some of the best reporting on this case. For people who are just tuning into it, can you catch people up on the background here?

SL:Yeah, thank you. So this case goes back to 1993, which I guess is what I would call the beginning, which is when a class action suit was filed in New York against Texaco over contamination of land in Ecuador that was the home to farmers and indigenous people, 30,000 people.

So I’m thinking that’s about 30 years ago that we’re talking about. So this case was moving forward in New York and was moved to Ecuador at the request of Chevron, actually. And in 2011, the Ecuadorian court ruled against Chevron ordering it to pay $18 billion, an award that was later reduced to $9.5 billion.

And this was a massive, huge and historic win — a real David and Goliath kind of situation. But, that same year, Chevron filed a RICO suit — a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations suit — against Steven in New York. And the company had made it clear a couple of years before in a document that we link in one of my stories, that its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And you can really see that play out both in the RICO suit and again, the RICO suit was, I believe that was 2011. So that’s already 11 years ago, basically that suit — in 2014 the case was decided in federal court by this federal court judge named Louis Kaplan, who ruled that the Ecuadorian judgment was invalid because it was obtained through fraud basically, and that judgment, and I know that’s super complicated, so stay with me, but that hinged on the testimony of an Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, who claimed that Donziger had bribed him in the original trial.

So it turned out that Guerra was actually paid by Chevron hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later admitted to having lied when Steven tried to get that testimony considered and the court to reconsider that testimony and declined.

And basically, what happened since then, was a sort of snowballing of decisions made by first Louis Kaplan, right, that found against Steven. So there’s the RICO suit, and then following the RICO suit that found that he, based on the testimony of this judge, had bribed the judge, even though we knew that that witness was paid by Chevron, and later admitted to lying; everything sort of hinged on that one decision, including the disbarment of Steven, right? And we should say that the charges that got him into this situation where he was on house arrest, and then spent some time in prison on a contempt of court charge, which is a civil charge, right? He was asked to hand over his cell phone and computer, something few attorneys have been asked to do. He said no, because he felt it would not be fair to his clients, and while this is a kind of strange charge, it is a civil charge, and I believe a misdemeanor — something that does not usually land anyone, no one gets arrested for this — in this case, of course, he was not only arrested, but served as he just said — how many days were you in on house arrest?

SD:Yeah —993 days.

SL: Oh my god. So it’s really an extreme and unusual situation. And obviously an epic ordeal for Steven, as he’s telling us, but the reason, I think, beyond our concern for fellow human beings and for activist-attorneys who are working on behalf of fellow human beings, the reason we all need to worry about this, is because of the implications for activism and for trying to hold big oil companies accountable. And obviously, this has been going on for decades, as we said and when we were first getting the decisions in this case, between just those 9-10 years, I just feel like so much has changed in terms of the climate movement, right?

We’re now realizing that in order to survive, we need to hold accountable these companies and Steven’s case was like really one of the first where they were being held accountable for their oil extraction and the very environmental consequences of it. And they made it super clear that they were gonna fight back. And I feel like he was made an example of. And I’d love to talk more, and hear him talk more, about what the example means. In some ways, I think, as he has pointed out, there is some backlash that basically this can backfire on them.

But Steven, I worry, this has been, as you said, incredibly hard for you. And I’m wondering where this leaves you, financially and your career? Do you have a hope of reversing this disbarment? I’m curious.

SD: OK. So I think what Sharon said is really important. And I want to compliment Sharon on her excellent journalism, generally, and her work on this particular case. My case, in particular, she was really the first reporter to report extensively on my detention. And I appreciate The Intercept. I think you guys do great work.

Look, I feel really good right now. Chevron tried to silence me. I’m now through what they put on me. And I feel stronger and more supported than ever. I mean, we have so much support around the world that we never had before, largely because Chevron, I think, overreached. And the world stepped up to try to protect me and protect the Ecuadorians.

I mean, just as an example, there’s 68 Nobel Peace laureates who have demanded my release. There’s 120 human rights and environmental organizations who have written to President Biden demanding he pardon me. There’s dozens of bar associations around the world who demanded my release. So we’re coming out of this, in some ways, a lot stronger.

Yes, I’ve lost my law license. I hope to get it back. I’m starting a Substack, by the way, to become my own kind of journalist. I used to be a journalist. I’m going to be doing a lot of writing about the Ecuador case, and about the prison experience, and about other human rights issues around the world that I’m going to be working on. So I’m really excited about the future.

And I don’t plan anymore to practice law in a traditional sense. I plan to use my legal skills not to have clients, but to just be able to analyze the law and advocate more broadly for victims of human rights abuses. That’s one of the ways I’m planning on maintaining myself and my family.

SL:Are you still on the hook for legal expenses of Chevron, in this case?

SD: Unclear. Judge Kaplan, as part of these attacks on me, ordered me to literally pay millions of dollars to Chevron to reimburse it for legal expenses it used to persecute me, basically. So, look, there’s some legal issues that are still out there. This is not over just because I’m out of this detention situation. But the case is a civil case, not a criminal case. And we’ll see how it plays out.

SL: I wonder, too, I mean, one of the big tragedies of all of this is that while we have rallied to your defense, and I think rightly so, and have been highlighting the fact that this is a terrible example for other climate activists, the people of the Amazon and Ecuador have not received a penny, right, from this company for the destruction of their land? And I’m wondering what you think the prospects are for any justice to be done for any court, anywhere, forcing the company to pay the judgment?

SD:Well, I think that the prospects for forcing Chevron to pay the judgment are significant. I think that’s one reason why they keep attacking me because they’re so scared that I will somehow exercise what they believe are my powers of sorcery to somehow make them pay billions of dollars. I mean, I think they want to destroy me, because I raised most of the money to finance the case up to this point.

But, look, there’s other lawyers working on it now. I’m not going to be leading anything. I’m no longer a lawyer. We’ll see if the Ecuadorian communities and the rest of their legal team want to or are able to bring an enforcement action. I really don’t know how that’s going to play out. I do know that Chevron has a judgment against it in the courts of Ecuador that’s valid and has been affirmed by multiple appellate courts, both in Ecuador and Canada. So they have a real risk there. They’re fighting every step of the way to try to prevent payment of the money to the people that courts have determined they poisoned in the Amazon. How that plays out remains to be seen.

RG: And we’ve reached out to Chevron multiple times. And Sharon, you’ve gotten a handful of either statements or statements that they’ve offered elsewhere. They even created a propaganda outlet, like an entire newspaper, they call The Amazon Post that is dedicated to — and they don’t really hide that it’s their propaganda outlet. I have it here, they say at the very top of it, “Chevron’s views and opinions on the Ecuador lawsuit.” But it’s called The Amazon Post. And beyond that disclaimer at the top, it looks like a normal news outlet.

SL: I was obsessed with that.

RG:Right. [Laughs.]

SL:I have to say. That’s what drew me to your story, Steven. I used to go and look at that page. And after reading :{Patrick Radden Keefe’s The New Yorker story:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, years before, and it just blew me away — I kept thinking the company has hired people to work on this. And it’s like the massive resources they were enabled to focus on a single individual, you, is really mind blowing.

SD:Yeah, it is. I can’t believe it. [Laughs] And didn’t anticipate it.

I mean, they’ve set up two websites dedicated to what I would argue is the destruction of my reputation. They have also, on the legal front, used 60 different law firms, 2,000 lawyers, they have six PR firms, designed to control information around the case and what I and other advocates do.

But that was sort of my point earlier. I think they’ve sort of lost control of the messaging around the case, because the truth has caught up with their lives. That’s what I would argue. The evidence is so strong.

And I also think, Sharon, that locking me up for almost three years and people who interview me and who know me, know, that’s not who I am. I don’t commit crimes. I’m a lawyer, OK? So I think the overreach caused people to be, in my opinion, much, much more skeptical of Chevron’s claims than otherwise would have been. And I think the longer my detention lasts, I think the more people are like: Wait a second, if they’re in a private prosecution locking a lawyer up who won a big pollution judgment against them, then maybe they really did do something wrong. Maybe the lawyer’s right, maybe the courts in Ecuador are right in how they decided the case. So I think it shifted the perception greatly when they locked me up — in our favor.

SL: Well, how confident are you that they’re not going to continue to use their vast resources to smear you and attack you? Because, I mean, even when they’re not with public opinion, they’re incredibly powerful, right? Just because of the amount of money they have. So do you think that they’re going to stop going after you? And, if so, why?

SD: I think they’re gonna keep on the same path they’ve been on. I mean, I fully expect it. But I just don’t think it’s going to be that effective. I just don’t. I think people know too much now. And I think there’s enough people, there’s a critical mass of people out there, who have access to the information, outside of the corporate kind of big media companies, like the New York Times has, for years, ignored this critically important story as an example, you can hardly see anything on networks.

So baked into my life is that there’s a big oil company willing to spend lots of money to try and mess up my life.

SL:[Laughs.]

SD:[Laughs.] That’s just how I have to live. And my guess is I’ll have to live that way for the rest of my life. But you know what? It’s like, good! OK? It means we were effective. And I want to emphasize that this stuff’s happening, I mean they’re attacking us, because we were successful and effective, not because of any other reasons.

So if you’re going to get into this field of work, and really go toe-to-toe with a big, powerful company that’s a major polluter in an effort to save our planet, you’re going probably, if you’re effective, to get hit with some version of what I’m getting hit with. I think I’m getting hit with a really extreme version, because of the size of the judgment and just the number of years it’s lasted.

SL:Well. You have said that you really want Biden to pardon you.

SD:Yep.

SL:And obviously that’s meaningful to you in some way. And I’m wondering what that would achieve for you, and, conversely, if he doesn’t do that, what are you stuck with? I think it’ll be helpful to understand what you’ve been weighed down with.

SD:Yeah, thank you.

I mean, so look, the reason we’re asking President Biden to pardon me is because the system failed, the legal system failed, in this case. And the way it failed is I’m the first person in American history to be prosecuted by a private corporation, a private corporate law firm, that had Chevron, in this case, as one of its clients. And I was the lawyer who beat Chevron in court over this significant, I would say epic, pollution case. And they were trying to retaliate against me and deprive me of my liberty. I’m the only lawyer ever in the U.S. to be held pretrial on a misdemeanor and I was held for over two years and two months, even though the longest sentence ever given a lawyer for my offense level prior to my case was 90 days of home confinement.

So this is clearly retaliation by a corporation. And it’s never been corrected by an appellate court. There’s nowhere to go.

So for the rule of law to be restored in our country, vis-a-vis what happened to me in this case, the only option is for President Biden to issue a pardon. That won’t save me from all the other attacks Chevron’s able to do, by the way. That would just be a pardon for the criminal conviction on this contempt case where I was denied a jury, and where I was prosecuted by this private law firm — and also, by the way, denied the right to put on a real defense by an evidentiary ruling of the judge. So I think it’s important that the United States not become a country that locks up its human rights lawyers, like some other countries around the world do. And I think President Biden is the only person at this point who can really address this problem in any kind of fundamental way.

By the way, we’ve asked Attorney General Garland to deal with it by taking back the prosecution from the Chevron law firm and prosecuting me directly under the auspices of the Department of Justice. Look, for a year, I was probably the only lawyer in U.S. history ever begging the DOJ to prosecute him or her.

SL: [Laughs.] Yeah.

SD: Because it was so preposterous. I couldn’t deal with this private law firm. They wouldn’t even negotiate; they wouldn’t talk with any kind of normal prosecutorial sanity or discretion. I mean, they were just out to harm me as much as they possibly could, backed by a judge who also was out to harm me. So the whole system went awry.

So I’m disappointed, by the way, in Attorney General Garland for not taking back the prosecution. I’m disappointed in his performance on other issues, like the January 6 so-called insurrection. But the only place left to go now in my case is President Biden for a pardon.

And by the way, you can go to my website :{freedonziger.com:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, you can read the letter that 10 lawyers signed, prominent lawyers, to President Biden seeking the pardon for me.

SL: But to be clear, for you, this is about the precedent and clearing your name? Or would it materially change anything for you? That’s what I’m curious about.

SD: Well, I think it is about clearing my name. I think it’s about erasing a conviction that’s a violation of international law and violation of the Constitution. I think it would be very powerful on a symbolic level. Look, it’s not going to give me my two years, and eight months, and two weeks — so it’s not going to give me back my 32 months and two weeks, OK? That’s gone forever. But it will restore, I think, some semblance of fairness to the process. And I think it’ll be symbolically extremely important for President Biden to step in to address this and correct this problem.

[Musical interlude.]

RG:And I also wanted to give you a chance to respond to some of Chevron’s claims. They’ve got these multiple PR firms, they have got different propaganda outlets online. And if you peruse those, you’ll see the claims that they’re making.

Sharon mentioned the bribery allegation, which turns out that Chevron actually paid an extraordinary amount of money to this person, and the person has admitted on the stand that they had lied.

So setting that key witness aside, they also make a number of minor claims. They claim that actually all of the damage to the rainforests was done by Petroecuador, not by Texaco or Chevron. They say that your team manipulated environmental reports and submitted them into the Ecuadorian courts. They say that you blackmailed a judge to get him removed from the case and generally improperly pressured the courts and the people around the court. So what’s the response to those various kinds of Chevron allegations?

SD: Yeah, so, look: We did not do anything wrong. Everything we did was in adherence to the law, and the rules and customs of the civil justice system in Ecuador. There was no bribe. First of all, I would never bribe a judge. None of the people on our team bribed the judge. There’s no evidence there was a bribe other than a paid Chevron witness who later admitted he lied. So I want to be very clear about that. These allegations were taken before the real courts in this case, those in Ecuador, and three appellate courts including the Supreme Court of the country and the country’s constitutional court completely rejected these allegations, because there’s no evidence other than from the mouth of this paid Chevron witness — his name is Alberto Guerra — who by the way, was coached for 53 straight days by Chevron’s lawyers in the United States before he took the stand in Judge Kaplan’s court, and came up with this spectacular allegation against me. He claimed I was in a meeting where he saw me approve the bribe of a trial judge — never happened. There was no evidence it happened other than from his mouth. And I’ve rejected it completely, as have courts all over the place.

They allege a lot of things: We manipulated environmental reports. I don’t know what they’re talking about. We worked, as lawyers, with our paid experts to write environmental reports that we thought accurately reflected the evidence, the soil and water samples that undeniably, unassailable-y, showed massive levels of toxic contamination at former Chevron well sites all over the rainforest. So they call that manipulation? Well, this is how the law works. Lawyers work with their experts to help them write reports; they did the same thing with their experts.

Blackmailed the judge?I completely reject that. [Laughs.] Like, what are they talking about? I mean, it’s crazy. What they’re alleging is the kinds of things they did constantly. Like they say we bribed the judge? Actually, no. They say we manipulated environmental reports? False. We wrote accurate environmental reports. They were the ones manipulating the environmental evidence by taking, for example, soil and water samples hundreds of meters away from the waste pits, and they would turn up no contaminants and say: Oh! There’s no contaminants at the site. That was manipulation.

And we did not blackmail a judge. They were constantly intimidating judges, or trying to, and threatening them with criminal charges, if they didn’t rule in their favor. They completely tried to delay and sabotage the trial by filing literally dozens and dozens of duplicative motions in an hour. I mean, there was crazy stuff happening, and Chevron was the party doing it, not us. So these allegations are completely false or highly misleading. And I’m happy to rest on the 220,000 pages of record evidence in the case, the 64,000 chemical sampling results, and the six appellate court decisions from 28 different appellate judges that affirmed the judgment.

RG:To me, one of the most mind-boggling charges to hear from a global oil company, was that it was unfair because you and your team had exerted political influence —

SD: Ha!

RG:— over the judicial process and over the system.

SD:Yeah

RG:It’s like a multinational oil company — Chevron is one of the top five oil companies in the world. Chevron might be top three.

SL:Yeah.

RG:It is one of the most powerful institutions on the planet. And it is a fact, and you could talk a little bit about this, you’ve been in this world a lot longer, and it is a fact that the legal system is also political, and that that is the case here in the United States, that’s the case in Ecuador, that is the case all over the world. We’d like to pretend that the judicial system is entirely divorced from politics, but it’s not. We know that giant law firms have PR strategies and have political strategies around cases.

So what kind of political approach did you take to the case in Ecuador, and do you think that any of it was over the line? Or was it just: This is how you do a class action suit. Because class action suits are, in a lot of ways, inherently political.

SD:Well the debate over whether the law exists kind of in a separate silo free from politics or subject to politics is something I heard about a lot as a law student, and since. But, I mean, let’s get real. Every judicial system reflects the politics of the country within which it exists. And, for example, in the United States, as corporations I think consolidated their power tremendously over the last 10-20 years, with the Koch brothers funding network, and all these sort of trends that are happening with the Federalist Society now naming judges. The Federalist Society is this right-wing legal group that my trial judge is a member of and a leader of, funded by Chevron and a lot of the big corporations in America. I mean, it’s very clear, there’s been a very concerted effort by the corporate right to control the federal judiciary in this country, as well as state judiciaries.

And I think that what happened to me with this private corporate prosecution would not have happened had this 20-to-30-year effort not been implemented with some degree of success by these elements in our society. It is preposterous for Chevron to accuse us of somehow politicizing the case. All we wanted to do was do a legal case based on evidence. They would, for example, take out full-page advertisements in the leading Ecuadorian newspapers during the trial attacking me, or attacking our experts. The websites that Sharon talked about that are used to defame me today that you can get, The Amazon Post, I think it’s called, I urge people to go look at it. It’s crazy. They did that kind of stuff in Ecuador, they do it here, they do it constantly, not just in this case, but in trying to control what people think about climate change and about what they do as a company in terms of clean energy. It’s all very deceptive. And it’s all designed to impact how the law operates and how judges rule based on political pressure.

I mean, they’re trying to generate pressure to win cases through manipulation or abuse, that I don’t think they could ever win fairly on the merits of the actual claim. So they do that constantly. I saw it with my own eyes, in this case in Ecuador and since. And I observe this industry pretty closely because of the work I do. And you see this all the time.

So the idea that a human rights lawyer, for example, would talk to Sharon Lerner or talk to the press, or invite a documentary filmmaker to record the litigation — for them to try to argue that that was somehow inappropriate when they do those exact same things at a much, much higher and more effective level, I think is obviously hypocritical, insincere, and inaccurate.

SL: And let me just jump in about where Chevron ranks. So they’re second to Saudi Aramco in terms of the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted in the modern era.

SD: Wow. Yeah.

SL:So — yes.

SD:I’ll say this: People are obviously watching the war in Ukraine. Few people know that Chevron is literally the only large American company still doing business in Russia during this war. They’re partnering with Putin’s government on a huge gas pipeline that generates literally hundreds of millions of dollars a day in revenue for Russia, for the government, and for Putin to fund his army that is committing all sorts of atrocities in Ukraine. So Chevron is a company that turned its back on the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador whom it poisoned and to whom it owes money. They don’t pay; they leave these vulnerable communities holding the cleanup bill for harm that Chevron caused. And then they go over to Russia and they’re in business with Putin.

I mean, there’s no end it seems, no floor, to what I would argue is the moral bankruptcy of this particular company. But, of course, it’s an industry wide problem. I mean, it’s all about the money. And it’s very clear that our governmental institutions have been so seriously weakened by corporate money, that they’re incapable of actually standing up to this kind of abuse. I mean, that’s what I experienced again, in my private criminal prosecution.

SL: I definitely see how there’s a way in which this has really backfired for Chevron. And we’ve seen Chris Smalls and all these amazing activists kind of stream through your apartment while you’ve been stuck there. People are sort of going to pay tribute and it’s been this amazing thing to watch on your Instagram, right? All the people, the activists, who are recognizing what you’ve been through and pulling together. And I find that really inspiring and encouraging.

And on the other hand, the people of Ecuador who you were representing, again, have not received any of the money that they were supposed to get, the environmental mess is still there. And you have emerged on the other side of this, but you don’t have your law license and you can’t go defend them. And I hesitate to couch this all in terms of winners and losers. But [laughs] I worry about the upshot of all you’ve been through. I just think that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this, and some of them are positive, and some of them are pretty scary.

SD: I share your concern. This is not all good for me. Look, it’s bad!

SL:Yeah!

SD: I mean, what I’m really trying to convey is I got strengthened through the process of their persecution of me to the point where we’re in a much higher place right now, where I think they actually face more risk now than they did three years ago. But it doesn’t mean that they’re going to pay the Ecuador judgment by any means. It’s unclear how all of this is going to play out.

I think the big loss is for our society. I mean, there was a private corporate criminal prosecution that deprived a human rights lawyer of his liberty for almost three years based on a civil discovery order in a civil case. It’s never happened before. And I think that’s what people really need to focus on.

I mean, I’m confident enough in the support I have, in my resilience to really feel like I will get through whatever they try to throw at me from this point forward. It doesn’t mean I’ll have my old life back, because I have to deal with all sorts of issues and sort of byproduct of what I had to endure the last few years, but, I’m OK. My family’s OK.

I think the real question is: Where are we in the United States of America in terms of corporate control of our judiciary and of our governmental institutions? Because we really should not be living in a society where an oil company can directly prosecute its main adversary and deprive him of his liberty without the U.S. government being involved. That’s wrong. And that’s why I think President Biden, Attorney General Garland, the Congress — where are our leaders? I mean, I know people are busy with lots of obviously critically important issues other than the Ecuador case, and other than Chevron and Steve Donziger, I get it. [Laughs.] But this is a new kind of animal that our criminal justice system has never seen before in terms of the amount of corporate control and allowing someone’s liberty to be taken away, essentially, by a corporate adversary.

So I am hopeful, Sharon, that at least on that issue, enough attention can be drawn to this so that it never happens again to anyone else. At least that’s my hope.

SL: I would also say: You’re right that this is a government story, it’s a judiciary story, it is a climate story. And I think you’re right that it’s also a media story. When I went to see you in January 2020, you had already been on house arrest for a couple of months, and no one had written about it.

SD: I had been on house arrest for five months.

SL:Right!

SD: I got arrested — or put on house arrest August 6, 2019. You came in January of the next year. And by the way, like, I couldn’t believe it lasted seven months. And if you had told me then it was going to last 32 months, I’d be like: There’s no way!

SL:[Laughs.] But it’s also —

SD:So, yes. This has been a story ignored by the mainstream media. Totally. I mean, they don’t know how to deal with it.

SL:And even after that. So after that story, quite a number of publications, I think we can call them lefty publications, have written about this. But I think you’re right, that there’s been a real silence. And I think I know why. You get calls from the attorneys, who scare the bejesus out of editors.

SD:I focus on my own social media; I focus on truly independent outlets like The Intercept, The Nation, and others. And just, we work with what we have. And we have been successful in getting our narrative out there and getting the facts as we see them out there. But I think it’s deeply disappointing that a human rights lawyer was locked up for five months, there were no stories at all, and since you really opened the floodgates — once you wrote, by the way, a lot of other independent outlets started to write. But we still haven’t been able to penetrate the large media companies.

RG:And let me take this opportunity to make a plug, not just for The Intercept but for the independent media sphere. Like if you, as a listener, watch any YouTube shows, you listen to independent podcasts, you read independent websites — become a member. Support that independent media because it’s valuable in a system where the other piece of it is so tightly connected to corporate America, that you can have just absolutely extraordinary stories that go uncovered because of the fear of the consequences of covering them. And so that’s a plug, not just for The Intercept, but for all independent media.

And also, Steven, what was it again, :{stevendonziger.substack.com:(style="font-weight:400"):}:? Is that your newsletter?

SD:Yeah. So I had my first post and launched it last week. I’m going to be writing every week about all sorts of issues related to the criminal justice system. Years ago, I edited a book called “The Real War on Crime.” I used to be a criminal defense lawyer. I just spent 45 days in the belly of the beast in federal prison, and several more months dealing with this home confinement craziness, where I get calls by this for-profit company at all hours of the day and night. So I’m going to be writing about a lot of human rights issues, criminal justice issues, and of course, Chevron and some of the oil industry and climate issues.

And, again, it’s stevendonziger.substack.com. I hope people subscribe, and get interested in some of this material. I’m really no different than The Intercept, just as a person, in the sense that I feel like it’s very hard to create platforms where truly independent reporting and commentary can actually take place. The Intercept is a relatively new institution in our world, but it’s so important. I get so much of my information from y’alls outlet, and I salute all of y’all for what you do — and others as well. The media landscape has changed.

I mean, look, had this happened 25 years ago and The New York Times decided not to cover me, like, I don’t think anyone would have known about this.

RG: Mhmm.

SD:Where would you have gone back then? And now the reality is the story is out. When they arrested me back in 2019, I think I had about 1,000 Twitter followers. And now I have 180,000. Like there’s people very engaged in this story all over the world. By the way, if people want to follow me it’s @sdonziger.

Sorry to keep plugging myself! But I hope you understand why I do that —

RG:I do.

SD: — because it’s the only way I can get support.

So we’re just in a completely different environment where you don’t as much need these big media outlets to get the truth out, like you did years ago. So I’m trying to take full advantage of that. And like even being on this podcast, having The Intercept write about this on a regular basis. You guys read another story about Sen. Gillibrand’s relationship to Chevron and Chevron lawyers. There’s so much interesting reporting going on over there. So I’m just appreciative and I don’t know what to say.

And by the way, I recognize that some of this case is a little complicated. But, to me, it’s real simple. I mean, the Indigenous peoples were poisoned by Chevron, they won a legal case, Chevron’s now trying to destroy the legal case by destroying their lawyer. And if you want to read more about it, you know, on our website, freedonziger.com, there’s a bunch of articles, including from The Intercept, where people can get a lot more background information than we have time to delve into now in this podcast.

RG:Thanks for taking some time out of your first day of freedom. And I hope you enjoy the rest of it. And thank you, Sharon, for joining me as well.

richmond st'd chev newspaper

https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2022.09.14%20Hearing%20Report_PR%20Firms%20Preventing%20Action%20on%20Climate%20Change.pdf

amazonwatch

https://theamazonpost.com/post-trial-brief-pdfs/brief/10PX0528.pdf

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/fossil-fuel-giants-reckless-expansion/

not BP?

an comm dr 11 22

Despite repeated warnings that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with averting climate disaster, oil and gas corporations "are on a massive expansion course" to increase dirty energy production in the coming years, according to an analysis released Thursday at the United Nations COP27 meeting in Egypt.

The new report by the German nonprofit Urgewald and 50 NGO partners, which denounces "an industry willing to sacrifice a livable planet," found that the vast majority of the world's oil and gas companies intend to scale up the extraction of fossil fuels in the years ahead, having collectively dumped $160 billion into exploration since 2020.

None of this investment is consistent with the International Energy Agency's (IEA) blueprint for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, a key component of meeting the Paris agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—beyond which impacts will grow increasingly deadly for millions of people, particularly those residing in poor nations that have done the least to cause the crisis.

The IEA made clear in its May 2021 report that no new oil and gas fields can be exploited if the world is to avoid climate catastrophe. But according to Urgewald, 96% of upstream fossil fuel companies (655 out of 685) are planning to expand their operations, and short-term expansion plans have increased by 20% since last year.

According to Urgewald, 512 of these companies are currently "taking active steps to bring 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) of untapped resources into production before 2030."

If these fossil fuels are removed from the ground and burned, an additional 115 billion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide equivalent will be pumped into the atmosphere by the end of the decade. That's 30 times more greenhouse gas pollution than Europe generates each year.

Urgewald's report comes one day after Climate Trace revealed in a separate analysis that global emissions from oil and gas production are up to three times higher than reported.

"The outcome of our calculations is truly frightening," Fiona Hauke, senior oil and gas researcher at Urgewald, said in a statement. "Oil and gas companies' short-term expansion plans are not in line with the net-zero emissions course put forward by the IEA. Keeping these oil and gas resources in the ground is the bare minimum of what is needed to keep 1.5°C attainable."

As the report points out, even "if the oil and gas industry simply maintained its 2021 production level of 56.3 bboe, it alone would exhaust our remaining carbon budget within 15.5 years."

Just over a dozen corporations—including Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Shell—are responsible for more than half of the industry's short-term expansion efforts, Urgewald found....

11 Civ. 0691 (LAK)

PLAINTIFF’S

EXHIBIT

528#

ChevronToxico I Chevron Using Six Public Relations Firms to Discredit Indigenous Groups

THE CAMPAIGNI FOR JUSTIn INI ECUADOR

ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN NEWS & MULTIMEDIA TAKE ACTION

HOME » News and Multimedia

Chevron Using Six Public Relations

Firms to Discredit Indigenous Groups In

$27.3 Billion Environmental Case In

Ecuador

Lobbyists - Mac McLarty, John Breaux, Trent Lott,

Mickey Kantor, Carla Hills and Others - Charged With

Misrepresenting Facts

FRlliTE DE IlERlNlIA

Amazon Defense Coalition

20 November 2009 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Karen Hinton at 703-798-3109 or

... karen@hintoncommunications.com

Caroline Bennett at 510-520-9390 or caroline@amazonwatch.org

start:]

Washington, DC - Chevron has retained at least twelve public relations firms and lobbyists to

discredit claims of Amazon indigenous groups on the eve of an expected multi-billion dollar

judgment against the oil giant in an environmental lawsuit in Ecuador, according to representatives

of the tribes in the U.S.

Although Chevron is near the top of the list of highest-spending lobbyists in Washington, the

campaign seems to be backfiring. Politico, one of the most influential publications on Capitol Hill,

reported this week that Chevron's lobbying was "drawing fire from environmentalists, media

ethicists, state pension funds, New York's attorney general, members of Congress, and even Barack

Obama when he was a Senator."

The article also quoted Rep. Linda Sanchez (D - CA) as calling Chevron's lobbying "clumsy" and

"very heavy handed". Sanchez - who on Tuesday characterized the Chevron lobbying as "extortion"

in testimony before Congress - said she plans to write three letters to Members of Congress,

blasting what she called the oil giant's "misguided approach" to dealing with the lawsuit from the

indigenous groups.

Separately, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating the company to determine if

it is misleading its own shareholders about the financial risk from the Ecuador case, where damages

are assessed at up to $27.3 billion, Politico reported.

An American legal advisor to the plaintiffs, Steven Donziger, criticized the public relations and

lobbying effort."Chevron is paying huge fees to lobby the U.S. government to inappropriately quash

a legal case brought by indigenous tribes in the country where Chevron asked for the trial to be

held," said Donziger, who has been working on the matter since it was filed in U.S. federal court in

1993.

The case, which alleges Texaco dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon from 1964

to 1990, was transferred from U.S. federal court to Ecuador in 2002 at Chevron's request. The oil

giant filed 14 expert affidavits in the U.S. court praising Ecuador's court system, but later began a

campaign to discredit those same courts once the evidence in the Ecuador trial pointed to its

culpability.

The public relations firms working for Chevron include Hill & Knowlton, which represented the

tobacco industry and - as it did in the debate over tobacco and cancer - has tried to deny a link

between oil contamination and cancer;Edelman Worldwide, which is believed to be preparing a

Wal-Mart-style political campaign against the indigenous groups in anticipation of an adverse court

judgment;Sard Verbinnem, which handles financial press in an effort to stem a budding shareholder

revolt against Chevron management for its handling of the case; Robinson Lerer Montgomery, a

well-highly connected New York-based agency; Sam Singer and Associates, which handles the

matter in the San Francisco area, where Chevron is located; and the Washington-basedCRC

Public Relations, which helped create a pro-Chevron video by former CNN correspondent Gene

Randall to counteract a highly unflattering 60 Minutes segment on the legal case that broadcast

earlier in the year.

The Randall video, which did not mention that it was paid for by Chevron, was blasted by the

Columbia Journalism Reviewfor "blurring the line between public relations and journalism." The

President of CRC, Greg Mueller, spearheaded the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry and is a

former senior aide to Pat Buchanan.

CVX-RICO-0502246

Plaintiff's Exhibit 528# p. 2 of 4

among Chevron's lobbyists isWayne Berman, former McCain campaign national finance chair who chairs the governmental relations practice at Ogilvy Worldwide; former Senators John Breaux and Trent Lott; Mac McLarty, former chief of state to President Clinton who is lobbying the State Department; Mickey Kantor and Carla Hills, former U.S. trade ambassadors who are lobbying their former agency to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences; 

Peter Romero, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ecuador in the early 1990s under the first Clinton Administration; Brian Pomper, the former staff director toU.S. Sen. Max Baucus; Scott Parvin, a career lobbyist who formerly worked with Kantor at the law firm Mayer Brown; and several members of Chevron's governmental relations office in Washington, headed by William Irwin. Lawyers for the Amazon communities have long said Chevron's public relations and lobbying firms are part of a broader effort by the company to undermine the rule of law in Ecuador in anticipation of an adverse judgment. The company has taken out advertisements in both Ecuadorian and American newspapers attacking lawyers for the communities and various judges who have presided over the case.

The public relations firms and lobbyists also state incorrectly that Chevron was released from further clean-up responsibility in Ecuador by the government in exchange for a limited clean-up in the mid 1990s. But the terms of the release itself expressly exclude the private claims in the current lawsuit and the so-called remediation was a fraud that has led to the indictment of two Chevron lawyers and several former government officials, said Donziger.

:{

}:

Evidence at trial against Chevron includes more than 50,000 chemical sampling results produced by the company itself, which prove that 100% of its former well sites are highly contaminated with cancer-causing toxins, according to an independent court-appointed Special Master who reviewed the evidence in the case and assessed damages. A final decision on liability and damages is expected next year. For more information, become a follower of The Chevron Pit or follow @ChevronPit on Twitter

all big CTT ~ Comments to SEC on ESG rule: comments from acc chem, AEI, AFP, API, cato, cei heartland etc CTT, CoC, co2 coalition, conoco phillips, enbridge, inst for free speech, heritage, nam, NMA, noia, lifepoerwed TPPF, WEA western energy? US oil and gas

==

june 2022

https://www.vox.com/23058987/sec-climate-finance-disclosure

as drought spreads and sea levels rise, the economic impacts of climate change will run in the trillions of dollars. The insurance firm Swiss Re projects climate disasters would cost the world as much as $23 trillion by 2050, bigger than the impact from the pandemic and the Great Recession of 2009 combined.

It’s reasonable business planning to account for all this foreseeable risk — just like planning for cyberattacks or business disruptions from a pandemic. Last year, for instance, the US had to spend $145 billion dealing with floods, fires, and other climate-related disasters.

Yet somehow, climate change has fallen through the cracks of US financial regulation. Publicly traded companies are required to disclose information about “material” risks that affect their company regardless of their cause, from sanctions to supply chain chaos. But there are no uniform standards for disclosing how much fossil fuel pollution they generate or the impact that climate change could have on their future growth. Instead, companies have been left free to inflate their environmental progress, all with little scrutiny from the public.

This kind of information is, in theory, essential to a functioning free market, so investors can make decisions based on complete information. But fossil fuel interests, conservative ideologues, and corporate trade groups are striving to keep shareholders in the dark on climate risks.

The Biden administration is trying to make companies more publicly accountable for the risk of the climate crisis. A linchpin of Biden’s plan is a draft rule theSecurities and Exchange Commission (SEC)proposed in March. Over 500 pages, the SEC rule proposes that publicly traded companies disclose how climate change affects their business outlook and identify a board member or board committee to focus on climate-related risks.

Once the rule is finalized, companies will have to disclose how their operations are affected by extreme weather events and the impact of climate change on the short- and medium-term business outlook. They’ll also have to report the emissions both from their company’s operations and from how their products are used. This is particularly bad news for fossil fuel companies with business models predicated on selling pollution. Until this rule, they haven’t had to fully account for the environmental impact from things like selling gas that’s burned by consumers’ cars.

This is a rule, in other words, that helps the free market act like the free market, giving investors exactly the information they need to make the decisions,” Emory University business law expert George Georgiev said.

As the draft rule’s comment period came to a close, it’s clear any regulation on climate change faces serious headwinds. The loudest protests have come from right-wing groups and corporate-aligned nonprofits that have flooded the public comments with previews of the argument they’ll take to courts.

Plenty of businesses in the financial sector stand to benefit from this rule, like the investing giant BlackRock, which has pledged to align its assets with climate goals. But some could be hurt. The companies that benefit from greenwashing their climate commitments are doing everything they can to protect the chaotic status quo.

Financial transparency on climate change is hardly a radical idea

The SEC has required and standardized public company disclosures since 1933. In recent decades, the SEC has issued nonbinding guidance on how publicly traded companies should consider Covid-19 disruptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even a feared “Y2K” meltdown at the turn of the 21st century, so the companies would meet their fiduciary duty.

But the SEC has been painfully slow on climate change. Right now, businesses disclose the risks and costs of their business on the climate on a voluntary, patchy basis with no clear standardization.

A 2020 Government Accountability Office surveyed 32 midsize and large publicly traded companies and found little consistency. Airlines, for example, used years anywhere between 1990 and 2017 as the baseline for calculating their climate footprint. Water companies have used completely different measurements for reporting water extraction. Some companies would just report carbon emissions, while others would report total greenhouse gas emissions (including sources like methane).

The proposed SEC rule cites other evidence of companies not paying attention to this risk, like an internal survey of climate-related keywords in companies’ 10-Ks between June 2019 and December 2020. They found only 31 percent mentioned climate change at all.

This information is not just to benefit climate change efforts; it is also useful to investors. It makes clearer, for instance, that a retail company’s warehouses might be threatened by increased flooding, that an airline company might have to ground more flights because of rising heat waves, or that a bank’s backing of major fossil fuel expansion has the strong chance of backfiring in a world that transitions to renewables. Without any regulation and standardization, companies will just continue to try to outshine one another on their environmental and social commitments without hard data to back it. This mismatch will become an existential risk to financial instability if, for example, extreme weather pummels a business that did not prepare accordingly.

Environmental activists have pushed for more from companies by proposing shareholder resolutions at annual meetings that ask for more transparency, but have met with mixed success in shareholder votes that don’t bind the company to taking action.

In this regulatory vacuum, voluntary global affiliations have cropped up, including the Net Zero Assets Managers Initiative, representing some $43 trillion in assets, and Climate Action 100+, representing more than $60 trillion. Another of these groups is run out of the Financial Stability Board as a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), a voluntary system that has grown to more than 3,000 companies. The task force’s recommendations tell companies to consider the short-, medium-, and long-term climate impacts, emissions that result from investment decisions, and their operations’ pollution, and account for the changing climate’s consequences for the business. The hundreds of companies that voluntarily comply with these standards aren’t necessarily green or good for the environment, but it’s an extra gold star for their sustainability transparency.

Eight countries, including the UK, have passed laws that will mirror the TFCD’s recommendations, but the US would remain an outlier without the SEC rule. “Investors put their money where they think there’s a good opportunity and good information,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets. “If we don’t have good information, we run the risk of falling behind internationally.”

The SEC’s rule is basically the US playing catch-up, based on standards the mainstream corporate community aligned with TFCD have already backed.

Initially, companies will have to spend extra to comply with the rule — up to $530,000 a year for larger companies by the SEC’s estimate, but it will vary depending on how much companies are doing already on climate disclosure. Typically, the costs of rules shrink over time. Otherwise, the rule itself is quite modest. The SEC is “not saying you should or shouldn’t invest in climate products,” Rothstein said. “They’re just saying, tell investors what you’re doing and do it in a consistent way.”

Environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers argue the SEC could be doing even more. The SEC does not change how companies disclose climate-related activities like PR campaigns and political influence, the kind of activities that tend to be outsourced to nonprofits that shield their activities from the public. In March, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called it a “failure of nerve that shies away from a perfectly legal, necessary response to the climate danger we face” because political efforts remain “the single most material disclosures a company could make to achieve climate safety.”

Right-wing groups claim financial transparency is an attack on free speech

Unsurprisingly, the SEC is facing immense pressure to withdraw this rule because of the same shadowy political spending that companies don’t have to disclose in the first place. Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Americans for Prosperity, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have flooded the SEC with comments that argue company free speech would be violated.

Trade groups and right-wing think tanks have argued that requiring companies to report these emissions is akin to violating their First Amendment rights of free speech, pointing to a court case that ruled a regulation requiring the disclosure of conflict-zone minerals would amount to :{“:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{compelled speech”:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}: and violated the companies’ rights.

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobby, has argued the rule “could raise serious First Amendment issues under recent applying strict scrutiny to content-based laws compelling speech.”

The argument has found purchase with conservative lawmakers, like West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey,who picked up the argument in his 2021 letter to Treasury last year. In Congress, 19 Republican senators argued in their submitted comments that the rule is “not within the SEC’s mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Another 40 Republican representatives wrote that the rule will act to “undermine and shame public companies,” while Republican attorneys general describes the rule as a “total reordering of [the SEC’s] present disclosure regime.”

The attack on regulation under the guise of First Amendment rights has become more familiar in recent years. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been steadily giving corporations more and more leeway, more and more rights,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a corporate law expert who has published several books on corporate speech.

The court also opened the door to more of these lawsuits, striking down a California law that required nonprofits to disclose their donors, siding with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s argument against disclosing their donors and providing IRS 990 forms to the state. Other legal challenges to campaign finance laws and unions have used the First Amendment.

Legal experts supportive of the SEC rule consider the argument a long shot in courts. “I think that argument is really far-fetched,” Emory’s Georgiev said.

But it’s still worrisome. If it succeeds, whether in courts or as a scare tactic to get the SEC to backtrack, it sets a dangerous precedent for the financial system at large. “If this climate rule is violating the First Amendment, it’s been all nine decades [the SEC has been] violating the First Amendment,” Georgiev said. “They will definitely try it out in courts. At the end of the day, a lot of far-fetched arguments succeed in courts.”

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20892344-comments-to-sec-on-esg-rule#document/p33/a2075289

comments from  CHEVRONacc chem, AEI, AFP, API, cato, cei heartland etc CTT, CoC, co2 coalition, conoco phillips, enbridge, inst for free speech, heritage, nam, NMA, noia, lifepoerwed TPPF, WEA western energy? US oil and gas

Comments to SEC on ESG rule...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/billionaires-gop-congress/

no lnx table grfx

Just 27 billionaires have spent $90 million to buy GOP congress: report

[ brk windows london? ]

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams July 19, 2022

A few dozen billionaires are spending tens of millions of dollars on the 2022 midterm elections—mostly to support Republican candidates, including many who have parroted the dangerous lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—in a bid to ensure that Congress is full of lawmakers willing "to make their wealthy benefactors even richer," according to a fresh analysis.

Titled Billionaires Buying Elections, the report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) details how "billionaires are increasingly using their personal fortunes and the profits of connected corporations to drown out regular voters' voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation's economy—especially the tax system."

A pair of super PACs tasked with securing Republican majorities in the House and Senate—the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) and the [cnp?] Senate Leadership Fund (SLF)—raised a combined $188.3 million through the first 16 months of the 2022 campaign cycle, according to ATF. Nearly half—$89.4 million, or 48%—came from just 27 billionaires. A whopping 86% of the GOP's billionaire money came from "Wall Street tycoons" who are arguably the biggest beneficiaries of glaring loopholes in the tax code.

The Democratic counterparts of those two super PACs—the House Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC—raised a combined $154 million over the same time period. A smaller share—$25.8 million, or 17%—came from 19 billionaires. A majority of billionaire contributions to Democratic candidates also came from the finance and investment sector (35%), but other industries were also well-represented, including cryptocurrency (26%), and tech (18%).

"Unlike candidates and party committees, super PACs can raise unlimited donations from individuals and corporations," ATF explained. "In return they are not supposed to coordinate activities with the campaigns they support but instead act independently, though that rule is often flouted."

Top billionaire donors to congressional super PACs include hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin, who has given more than $28.5 million to CLF and SLF, and private equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman, who has pumped $20 million into the GOP's two super PACs.

"Anti-democratic vote-buying," ATF wrote, "has been facilitated by—and is facilitating—the accelerating wealth growth of the billionaire class and the record profits of the corporations they own."

The combined net worth of the nation's roughly 750 billionaires surged by $2 trillion, or 70%, during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. The collective wealth of the 27 billionaires bankrolling the GOP's super PACs alone soared by $82.4 billion over that time period, meaning that the $89.4 million they have donated to CLF and SLF constitutes less than 0.1% of their overall pandemic-era gains.

Meanwhile, the return on that modest investment could amount to billions of dollars if Republicans take back Congress in November and preserve their 2017 tax cuts or further slash taxes on superrich people and the corporations they own.

Over a recent nine-year period, the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S. paid an average effective federal income tax rate of just 8.2% when the increased value of their stock holdings is included in their income. That is a lower rate than the nationwide average of 13.3% in 2019.

As ATF explained, focusing on contributions to congressional super PACs fails "to capture the full political influence of billionaires, who in addition to personal donations also steer money to favored candidates from related corporations and organizations."

Billionaires are among the ultrawealthy Americans who control corporations through their extensive stock holdings. Many corporate giants have been distorting the upcoming midterms, ATF pointed out, by spending tens of millions to help GOP candidates who have vowed to defend special tax breaks for the top 1% get elected, including 144 far-right members of Congress who voted to overturn President Joe Biden's electoral victory.

According to the report, seven powerful corporations—AT&T,Chevron, ExxonMobil,FedEx, GM, Merck, and UPS—have collectively given nearly $1.5 million to dozens of election deniers and various Republican PACs and election committees this campaign cycle.The companies' demonstrated lack of concern for democracy, ATF noted, likely stems from their desire to keep dodging taxes. In 2021, these firms paid an average federal income tax rate of just 2.7% on a combined $78.4 billion in profits.

Notably, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who is worth about $5 billion and openly opposed to democracy, has been spending big on his preferred Republican candidates but not through the GOP's congressional super PACs.

Thiel "has so far spent almost $30 million through super PACs supporting the 2022 senatorial bids of two former employees who share his anti-democratic and anti-tax beliefs," ATF found. "J.D. Vance won the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate primary thanks in part to Thiel's $15 million in spending. Blake Masters has a fighting chance in Arizona's GOP U.S. Senate primary in August due to Thiel's $13.5 million in contributions."

Another source of "billionaire dominance of campaign financing, especially on the Republican side," wrote ATF, are so-called "dark money" groups, which are not required to disclose the identity of their donors. Some dark money groups—including Club for Growth, which has received $32 million from billionaire Wall Street trader Jeffrey Yass over the years—are "notorious for having bankrolled insurrectionist members of Congress" like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), ATF noted.

According to the report:

Politically active billionaire Charles Koch has not personally donated to either GOP super PAC this cycle, but his corporation—Koch Industries—has so far given them a total of $1.75 million.

Two of the biggest "dark money" groups, which do not disclose their donors, are essentially sister groups to thetwo congressional GOP super PACs. American Action Networkgave at least $26 million to CLF in the 2020 cycle and $18.7 million so far this cycle.One Nation donated $77.5 million to SLF last cycle and has given $16.5 million so far this cycle.

The ability of the nation's wealthiest individuals to translate their disproportionate economic power into political clout has increased exponentially since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision eliminated effective limits on campaign contributions.

According to the report:

Billionaires pumped $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections, almost 40 times more than the $31 million they donated in 2010, when the Citizens United rules were first in effect. In the 2020 election cycle, billionaires contributed nearly $1 out of every $10, while making up just 0.01% of all donors contributing more than $200.

Billionaires donated almost $240 million to the combined campaign efforts of Donald Trump's two runs for president. Over half came from just one billionaire household, that of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (who has since died).

"Billionaires, who are used to buying whatever they want, have increasingly dedicated their almost unlimited resources to buying American elections," Frank Clemente, executive director of ATF, said in a statement.

"The problem is what's good for billionaires—including cutting taxes on the rich and corporations—is bad for working families," said Clemente. "We need to rein in billionaire political and economic power through campaign finance reforms and tax reforms such as a billionaires income tax."

Several legislative proposals have emerged to tax the increased value of assets owned by the nation's wealthiest households each year regardless of whether they sell or keep them, which would ensure that income derived from wealth is taxed more like income earned from work.

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Biden's plan would raise an estimated $360 billion over 10 years, while Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) plan would raise an estimated $550 billion over a decade, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-N.Y.) proposal possibly even more.

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Billionaire-backed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), however, has joined Senate Republicans in opposing such a measure.

[[why only one of big 4 out front?

:{https://the:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{intercept.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{com:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{/2022/05:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{/25/fossil-fuels-disaster-capitalism-russia-ukraine/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

BACK IN LATE 2021, as Russian President Vladimir Putin began mobilizing troops at the Ukraine border, the fossil fuel industry got its foot soldiers ready too. With the threat of Russian aggression and subsequent sanctions looming, gas prices were on the rise, and the fossil fuel industry wanted the public to know that there was only one culprit: climate policy.

“There are a lot of factors at play as to why energy prices are surging,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, or API, :{t:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{old CNBC:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: at the time. “But certainly one of the key factors is that the Biden administration has made an effort to reduce production in the United States. One of their first acts, for example, was cutting off the Keystone XL pipeline. One of their second acts was cutting up leasing and permitting on federal lands, and then they cut off access to ANWR,” referring to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

He gave roughly the same interview every week for months. On March 7, two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, he repeated it again, telling a CBS reporter, “You know, first they cut off the Keystone XL pipeline. Then they put a moratorium on leasing and permitting on federal lands and on offshore waters. And then they cut off supply from the Alaska natural national wildlife refuge.”

[no lnx]

that’s some consistent messaging! For the record, about 25 percent of fossil fuel drilling happens on public lands; the rest is entirely controlled by private companies. The fossil fuel industry is sitting on at least a decade’s worth of unused leases, so it’s unlikely that a lack of new leases has impacted current production or supply.

The Keystone XL pipeline was intended to transport tar sands oil from Canada to export terminals in the Gulf of Mexico, where two-thirds of it was earmarked for non-U.S. customers. It was nowhere near functional when it was canceled: About 8 percent of the pipeline had been built, and TC Energy, the company behind the project, still needed to find $6.9 billion of the $8 billion construction cost to finish it.

As for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the holy grail for U.S. oil companies, it has been off-limits to oil drilling since 1977. For a brief moment in 2017, the Trump administration reversed that, but no major oil companies — no API members — even bid on leases.These are the only pieces of climate policy Sommers continuously referred to because they’re the only ones the Biden administration has actually managed to pass, but none of them have had any impact on the current supply of domestic oil and gas in the United States or the price at the pump.

But the facts don’t matter if you’re the first one to frame a story and you repeat it often enough.A new report out this week shows that consistent messaging, coordinated messengers, and a massive advertising blitz combined to deliver major policy wins to the fossil fuel industry as early as two weeks from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“On February 24, within hours of Putin’s invasion, I was just watching these serious patterns emerge,” said Christina Arena, a public relations and climate disinformation expert. Arena worked for the PR firm Edelman when it handled the API account, so she knows a campaign when she sees one. “API and other trade associations were echoing similar talking points immediately, anti-Biden talking points, anti-renewable energy talking points.” That kind of consistency and media training takes months, not days, to prep, she said.

That prompted Arena to reach out to InfluenceMap, a think tank that tracks the influence of corporate lobbying on climate policy. InfluenceMap teamed up with Media Matters for America and Triplecheck to look into what various fossil fuel interests were saying about Russia-Ukraine and how those messages were being amplified. The organizations’ resulting report pinpoints the top messages and messengers, and how they map to big policy wins.

Some of the findings are to be expected. API went big, as did Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The usual suspects amplified the industry’s messaging: Breitbart News, Fox News, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn.All told, API placed 651 Facebook ads from the end of January to April 1, reaching more than 19 million people.On February 24, the day of the invasion, API and its network got busy. “There’s a huge peak where we get to 100 fossil fuel misinformation posts that yielded over5 million likes, comments, and shares,” Arena noted.

[“I think you could call it a disinformation-driven heist of public policy.”

But there are some less expected findings too. After battling gas bans for two years, the gas side of the industry seems to have fully embraced the fact that the climate movement doesn’t see it as its friend anymore. Gas entities that joined the party include the American Gas Association (a trade group for gas utilities), Hess Corp., and Sempra Infrastructure.

The types of messages were also a surprise. After a decade or so of greenwashing, the fossil fuel industry is going full culture war. The report finds three key messages across hundreds of social media posts and media appearances: American fossil fuel production ensures freedom and national security; high gas prices are caused by climate policy, and the solution is more drilling; and climate change is something only liberal “woke” elites care about.

There’s also a push to convince people that some kind of Green New Deal-adjacent policy is in place and that is what’s driving up gas prices. “I think you could call it a disinformation-driven heist of public policy,” Arena said.

And there’s the timeline, and the dividends this campaign has paid to the industry. By mid-March, the Energy Department was starting to grant permits to increase the volume at some liquid natural gas export terminals. “So that’s two weeks maybe from the start of the crisis,” said Faye Holder, the lead author of the InfluenceMap report. “We’ve seen a heavy, heavy use of social media, both in advertising and organic content. And then they’re feeding off of media too. A lot of the things that are retweeted by API, for instance, are Mike Sommers on Fox News.”

By March 25, Biden was announcing a U.S.-European Union liquefied natural gas deal that the Trump administration had tried and failed to get done: 15 billion cubic meters in 2022, with a standing order for 50 billion cubic meters a year until 2030. “That’s just a little over four weeks. That’s a very short interval,” Arena said. “And I feel that interval should alarm lawmakers. It should alarm people in the climate community. That’s disaster capitalism.”

---

some lnx

...but there are some less expected findings too. After battling gas bans for two years, the gas side of the industry seems to have fully embraced the fact that the climate movement doesn’t see it as its friend anymore. Gas entities that joined the party include the American Gas Association (a trade group for gas utilities), Hess Corp., and Sempra Infrastructure.

The types of messages were also a surprise. After a decade or so of greenwashing, the fossil fuel industry is going full culture war. The report finds three key messages across hundreds of social media posts and media appearances: American fossil fuel production ensures freedom and national security; high gas prices are caused by climate policy, and the solution is more drilling; and climate change is something only liberal “woke” elites care about.

There’s also a push to convince people that some kind of Green New Deal-adjacent policy is in place and that is what’s driving up gas prices. “I think you could call it a disinformation-driven heist of public policy,” Arena said.

And there’s the timeline, and the dividends this campaign has paid to the industry. By mid-March, the Energy Department was starting to grant permits to increase the volume at some liquid natural gas export terminals. “So that’s two weeks maybe from the start of the crisis,” said Faye Holder, the lead author of the InfluenceMap report. “We’ve seen a heavy, heavy use of social media, both in advertising and organic content. And then they’re feeding off of media too. A lot of the things that are retweeted by API, for instance, are Mike Sommers on Fox News.”

By March 25, Biden was announcing a U.S.-European Union liquefied natural gas deal that the Trump administration had tried and failed to get done: 15 billion cubic meters in 2022, with a standing order for 50 billion cubic meters a year until 2030. “That’s just a little over four weeks. That’s a very short interval,” Arena said. “And I feel that interval should alarm lawmakers. It should alarm people in the climate community. That’s disaster capitalism.”

ref

https://influencemap.org/report/US-Oil-and-Gas-and-the-War-in-Ukraine-19009

How the US oil/gas sector is using the war in Ukraine to undermine Paris-aligned climate policy

See coverage in Agence France-Presse, Forbes Middle East, DeSmog, and The Intercept

This research details an active effort from the US oil and gas industry use the war in Ukraine to advocate for long-standing policy asks relating to the continued expansion of oil and gas. The research looks at the month following the invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022. This has happened across social media, traditional media, public presentations, investor calls, and direct interactions with America’s policymakers. This lobbying behavior mirrors that seen from the oil and gas industry following the COVID-19 crisis.

The industry appears to be using a number of key narratives to push its pro-fossil fuel agenda, many of which appear to include misleading claims or misinformation. These narratives include blaming the Biden Administration's climate policies for the increase in gas prices, calling for the development of more US oil and gas to lower gas prices and increase energy security, promoting LNG as a clean solution to the US's 'allies'.

These narratives are being used to push for a long-term role for oil and fossil gas in the energy mix and appear to be targeted towards specific policy demands. These include advocating for policies which encourage new and/or increased oil and gas production, and rolling back previous climate policy decisions that limited the production of oil and gas or required climate considerations in new projects.

While calling for policies to increase the production of oil and gas, the oil and gas industry continues to actively oppose a number of state level policies designed to reduce the need for fossil fuels. These include opposing fossil gas bans in new buildings and electric vehicle mandates.

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report

executive Summary :

This research details an active effort from the US oil and gas industry to use the war in Ukraine to advocate for long-standing policy asks relating to the continued expansion of oil and gas. This has happened across social media, traditional media, public presentations, investor calls, and direct interactions with America’s policymakers. This research focuses on the month following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. 

The main actors identified in this briefing are the American Petroleum Institute, American Gas Association, National Association of Manufacturers, US Chamber of Commerce, and Consumer Energy Alliance. The lobbying evidence collected covers letters to policymakers, large social media advertising campaigns, and public statements by CEOs. The latter of which also includes speeches and media comments from company CEOs and presidents such as Mike Wirth from Chevron and Ryan Lance from ConocoPhillips.  

The research identifies several key narratives used by the industry to push a pro-fossil fuel agenda during this period. Some of these narratives, particularly those about the causes of the current crises appear to include misleading claims or elements of misinformation. These narratives include: o That the Biden Administration's climate policies have caused a decrease in the supply of oil and gas, leading to high gas prices. A similar narrative used is that the Biden Administration's policies have undermined US energy independence, making America reliant on foreign oil. Both narratives have been found to be misleading by AFP fact-checker.

o That the way to fix gas prices and increase energy security/independence is to increase the supply of US oil and gas, which can be achieved through favorable government policies.

o That LNG is a clean, low-carbon source of energy that can help transition the energy mix and achieve emissions reduction goals. This claim has previously been regulated against by advertising authorities in the UK for containing misleading claims. Moreover, increasing the production of oil and gas is at odds with the advice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest report "Mitigation of Climate Change".

 InfluenceMap has seen these narratives used by CEOs of major oil and gas companies in the US, particularly during CERAWeek, a major energy conference. For example, Ryan Lance, CEO...

conocoPhillips, stated that “poor energy policy, poor regulatory policy […] rapid push to renewable

energy and a maligning of the of fossil fuel industry" has led to the increase in gas prices.

These narratives have also been heavily pushed on social media. For example, between February

4th and March 31st, 2022, theAmerican Petroleum Institute created and ran an ad campaign

through its astroturf group, Energy Citizens, which consisted of 233 individual ads that were seen 

roughly19.6 million times, equivalent to around 10% of all US users of Facebook (Q1 2022). All of

these ads promoted 'American-made energy' or 'energy independence'.

These narratives are being used to push for a long-term role for oil and fossil gas in the energy mix.

The companies and industry associations identified in the research appear to have targeted the

following policy issues:

o Introducing measures that encourage new and/or increased oil and gas production.

o Rolling back previous policy decisions that limit the production of oil and gas or introduce

considerations for climate change in approval processes for oil and gas production.

o Opposing current state-level policies that would reduce the need for oil and gas and

alleviate pressures stemming from demand for oil and gas.

Recent wins for the US oil and gas industry resulting from this lobbying include the rollback of the

FERC's proposal to consider climate change when permitting new gas projects on March 24th

2022, and the approval of two new LNG export terminals on March 16th 2022.]]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/guardian-investigation-fossil-fuel-oil-gas-industry-plans-exploration-climate-disaster/

no lnx gfs

...The money

When BPreported its quarterly earnings in a presentation to financial institutions in February, one analyst said he “really enjoyed the camaraderie and the positivity that you’re generating,” before asking about the company’s cash position.

“We’ve given you a lovely little chart,” said Murray Auchincloss, BP’s chief financial officer. “Certainly, it’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with. For now, I’m going to be conservative and manage the company as if it’s $40 [a barrel] oil. Anything we could get above that just helps, obviously.” At the time, the oil price exceeded $90; today it is $106.

The oil industry is awash with cash. The money companies have belongs to shareholders, including pension funds, or in the case of national oil companies, to governments and, in theory at least, citizens. But the investment plans of the biggest oil companies are sharply at odds with the goal of halting the climate crisis.

Data obtained by the Guardian from the think tank Carbon Tracker shows a dozen of the world’s biggest companies are on track to commit a collective $387 million dollars a day of capital expenditure to exploiting oil and gas fields through to 2030.

A significant portion of this is for maintaining production at existing projects—some oil and gas will still be needed as the world weans itself off fossil fuels—but the exact amount is not publicly available. Nonetheless, it is clear that at least a quarter of this investment—$103 million a day—is for oil and gas that cannot be burned if the worst impacts of the climate crisis are to be avoided, money that could instead be spent ramping up clean energy.

Even more worryingly, the companies have developed further project options that might lead them to spend an additional $84m a day that would not even be compatible with a devastating 2.7C of global heating.

The world’s governments agreed in the Paris climate accord to limit global heating to well below 2C, and pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5C. For the latter, stricter goal, no new oil and gas projects are possible.

The Carbon Tracker data, compiled in September, uses a temperature of 1.65C to represent the well below 2C target and finds that 27 percent of the companies’ projected investments are incompatible with this.

ExxonMobil has the largest of these climate-busting investment plans at $21 million a day through to 2030, followed by Petrobras ($15 million), Chevron and ConocoPhillips (both $12 million), and Shell ($8 million).

In terms of the most dangerous investments—those that could help drive temperatures beyond 2.7C—Gazpromaccounts for $17 million a day of this, ExxonMobil $12 million, Shell $11 million and PetroChina $9 million.

“Companies that continue to develop projects based on business-as-usual demand are betting on the failure of policy action on climate.”

If governments act on the scientific advice to rapidly reduce carbon emissions by boosting clean energy and cutting fossil fuel burning, the companies would have to write off these colossal sums as losses, hitting shareholders, pension funds and public finances. If governments do not act, the companies could cash in as the world burns.

Overall, the international oil companies are making the biggest bets, with almost 40 percent of their projected investments incompatible with 1.65C. ExxonMobil is particularly high, at 56 percent.The national oil company average is 17 percent,although 56 percent of Petrobras’s planned capital expenditure is incompatible with 1.65C.

“Companies that continue to develop projects based on business-as-usual demand are betting on the failure of policy action on climate and underestimating the disruptive potential of new technologies, such as renewables and battery storage,” said Mike Coffin at Carbon Tracker. “Such projects are either not needed or they lead to warming well in excess of Paris goals.”

A separate recent analysis based on Rystad Energy data fromApril, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, found that 20 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies remained on course to spend huge sums—$932 billion—by the end of 2030 developing new oil and gas fields.

Freeing the world from the grip of fossil fuels is made far harder by huge ongoing subsidies for the fuels, making them far cheaper than their true cost when the damage they cause is included—especially air pollution, which kills 7 million people a year. The G20 group of leading economies pledged in 2009 to phase out the subsidies but little has been achieved.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in direct financial supportis received by the producers and consumers of fossil fuels every year—but they benefit from far larger subsidies by not paying for the harm burning fossil fuels causes. When the damage from the climate crisis and air pollution is accounted for, the fossil fuel subsidies reach $6 trillion a year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).The Guardian analysis shows this is equivalent to $11 million a minute globally, $4 million a minute in China and more than $1 million in the US.

The Guardian analysis of more detailed IMF data shows drivers in the US, Canada, and Australia, along with Saudi Arabia, are the world’s biggest beneficiaries of subsidies for road fuels, with some governments under pressure to increase these during the current energy crisis.

The per capita-subsidy for petrol and diesel across the population of Saudi Arabia was more than $1,000 a year in 2020. In the US, the road fuel subsidy per capita is $644 and about $500 in both Canada and Australia.

Japan and Germany also appear in the top 10 of the road fuel analysis, which focused on the 54 large countries with more than 25 million people and that account for 90 percent of global population and subsidies. The UK per capita subsidy for road fuels was only $10 a year, indicating taxes on petrol and diesel in 2020 were close to the level of the damage burning the fuels causes.

The US is also high on the list of the biggest per capita subsidies for all fossil fuels with $2,000 a year, behind only Saudi Arabia ($4,550) and Russia ($3,560). After these countries, only Iran ($1,815) is ahead of Australia ($1,730) and Canada ($1,690).

“Taking the Paris agreement seriously requires a rapid shift away from fossil fuels,” said Simon Black, a climate economist at the IMF. “Getting fossil fuel prices right will help enormously in accelerating this transition.”

The transition

The shift from burning oil and gas cannot happen overnight, and a declining amount will still need to be burned during the transition to a net zero emissions global economy in 2050. The question is whether companies and governments are moving fast enough.

The Guardian wrote to the oil and gas companies named in its analysis and asked for their response.

“Under the IEA net zero emissions scenario, and all Paris-aligned scenarios, all energy sources remain important through 2050, and oil and natural gas remain essential components of the energy mix,” said a spokesperson for ExxonMobil.

However, the role of oil and gas would be vastly reduced in 2050, and the IEA said: “Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development [in our net zero scenario].”

ExxonMobilplanned to invest more than $15 billion on initiatives to lower greenhouse gas emissions over the next six years, the spokesperson said, including carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels. The company aimed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 but only from its own operations, not the fuels it sold, therefore covering only a small fraction of the emissions from the oil and gas it sells.

A spokesperson for Shell cited recent company statements: “As a result of [our] planned level of capital investment, we expect a gradual decline of about 1-2 percent a year in total oil production through to 2030, including divestments.

“By 2025,Shellexpects its expenditure on [low and zero-carbon] products and services across its businesses will have increased to around 50 percent of its total expenditure,” a recent report by the firm states. In 2022, the proportion is expected to be more than 35 percent. In 2021, “Shell achieved its annual investment targets in renewables and energy solutions of $2bn-3bn,” the report says.

“Our goal is to support an orderly transition that matches supply to demand and focuses on [financial] returns.”

ConocoPhillips also cited a recently published net zero emissions plan:“Our goal is to support an orderly transition that matches supply to demand and focuses on returns on, and of, capital while safely and responsibly delivering affordable energy.”

The document states that profits from oil and gas projects are significantly higher than from investments in renewable energy.

ConocoPhillips has allocated $200 million in 2022 to reduce emissions from its operations. To reduce emissions from the burning of the fossil fuels it supplies, the company advocates an “economy-wide price on carbon that would help shift consumer demand from high-carbon to low-carbon energy sources”.

“Petrobras plans its investments considering that the Paris agreement will be successful and global temperature will be kept below 2°C,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Oil will remain important in the coming decades, even in accelerated transition scenarios.”

The spokesperson said the IEA’s scenario for 1.65C indicated some investment in upstream projects was needed. “We are planning for highly resilient assets competitive in scenarios aligned with Paris due to their low production cost and low emissions. Petrobras is following its strategy of maximizing the value of its portfolio, [with 99 percent of the investment on exploration] focusing on deepwater and ultra-deepwater assets.”

TotalEnergies pointed to its recent sustainability report, which it said “showed our stakeholders that we are already on the right track.” The company has a target of a 30 percent cut in emissions from oil and gas sales by 2030 and to increase the proportion of its energy sales that are renewable from 9 percent in 2021 to 20 percent in 2030.

Saudi Aramco and Eni responded to the Guardian but declined to comment. The other companies did not respond to the Guardian’s request....

EMAIL 4/11/22

...Even though my release date is nearing, I cannot rest easy. The reality is that my family and I are still living on pins and needles. Recently, I received a call in the middle of the night from the halfway house at 2:15 a.m. When that phone rings, I shudder: I never know if the voice will say “pack your bags and get here immediately, per directive of the Bureau of Prisons.” That’s what happened in early February and I ended up locked up for 5 days in the halfway house in the Bronx. If I had not awakened the other night, the Bureau of Prisons could have put me on “escape” status and had federal marshals handcuff me in my home and take me back to prison.

While the peril from these attacks will not completely recede, we are optimistic as we get closer to April 25. Here are the key takeaways:

First, we must have the legal firepower toneutralize the continued harassment by Chevron after my sentence ends. It is even possible Judge Kaplan will try to charge me with the same “contempt” over my ongoing protection of the confidential information of my clients on my computer cell phone. I am going to need even more legal protection in the coming months to deal with these attacks – independent of the legal team needed to help the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador force Chevron to comply with the $9.5 billion pollution judgment (affirmed by six appellate courts) so they can finally clean up their ancestral lands.

Second, several high-profile artists are planning a major “homecoming” to Ecuador’s Amazon this summer to celebrate my release. The objective will be to put the focus back where it should be: on the Indigenous peoples being poisoned by Chevron’s despicable acts of pollution, rather than on me and the lawyers the company is attacking. This trip will be a major pivot point but it will take significant resources. (For those who might want to participate, please let me know). 

Third, we are continuing our multi-pronged exoneration strategy toerase my contempt “conviction” by Judge Preska.This includes an international campaign to convince President Biden to pardon me, now backed by 120 human rights and environmental groups (including Amnesty International); our legal work to reverse my conviction in U.S. appellate courts; and our campaign to implement the favorable decision of the United Nations that found my detention to be arbitrary and in violation of international law.

You know what’s really crazy? Not only am I the only lawyer in U.S. history detained for a misdemeanor contempt charge, I am also the only person ever convicted of a misdemeanor forced to serve his entire sentence before the appellate court rules on whether the conviction was legal. That’s one reason why the U.N. concluded my case reflected a “staggering” and “appalling” level of judicial bias by U.S. judges Kaplan and Preska.

https://www.courthousenews.com/big-oil-must-face-california-city-and-county-lawsuits-over-climate-change/

cn seems legit

sAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The Ninth Circuit affirmed Tuesday that lawsuits seeking to hold the world’s largest energy companies financially liable for climate change and the rising sea levels that threaten California’s coastal communities should stay in state court, setting the stage for a legal offensive comparable to one that won multibillion-dollar awards against Big Tobacco.

The rulingcomes after a three-judge panel took a second look at a jurisdictional dispute between the energy companies and four municipalities after being ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court.

San Mateo County, Marin County and the cities of Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach in San Diego County sued Chevron, BP and three dozen other oil, gas and coal companies in separate state courts in July 2017, claiming the fuel companies created a public nuisance by hiding for nearly 50 years that fossil fuel consumption was heating and damaging the earth.

After the cases were removed to federal court, the local governments fought to remand them to state court, arguing state law claims of public nuisance should be decided by California’s judicial system.

The energy giants objected, insisting the claims are governed by federal law because they implicate “uniquely federal interests,” including matters of interstate and international commerce and environmental policy.

In March 2018, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria remanded the cases to their respective state courts.

A unanimous three-judge Ninth Circuit panel upheld Chhabria’s ruling two years later, finding the federal court lacks jurisdiction to consider state law claims. Writing for the majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta, a George W. Bush appointee, rejected the oil companies’ argument that because they provided fuel to the U.S. government through service contracts, they were “acting under” a federal officer’s directions.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted the energy companies’ petition for certiorari and sent the cases back to the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its ruling in light of the high court’s 2021 decision in BP p.l.c. v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore, where it held that a federal appeals court can review a federal judge’s entire remand order. In that case, the city of Baltimore sued 26 oil companies for creating the greenhouse gases responsible for rising sea levels.

But Ikuta and her fellow panelists, U.S. Circuit Judges Morgan Christen and Kenneth Lee, declined to change their minds, sticking to the long-standing principle that federal courts should narrowly limit their reach to protect the jurisdiction of state courts.

“Our adherence to this doctrine does not change merely because plaintiffs raise novel and sweeping causes of action,” she wrote. “We therefore reject the broad interpretations of removal jurisdiction urged on us by the energy companies and affirm the district court’s remand order.”

The panel also rejected the argument that the energy companies’ conduct occurred on federal land and must be governed by federal law. The judges found that while some of the companies operated on federal land, such as the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve run by Chevron predecessor Standard Oil, the companies fail to account for how much of their conduct took place on federal enclaves. “The connection between conduct on federal enclaves and the counties’ alleged injuries is too attenuated and remote to establish that the counties’ cause of action is governed by the federal law applicable to any federal enclave,” Ikuta wrote.

The companies had also argued that the cases should stay in federal court because a portion of their fossil-fuel extraction took place on the Outer Continental Shelf, which falls under federal jurisdiction. “We reject this argument, because the connection between such conduct and the injuries alleged by the plaintiffs here is too attenuated to give rise to jurisdiction,” Ikuta wrote, reasoning that the counties’ lawsuit claim only local injuries, and focus on the companies’ “concerted campaign” to hide the harmful effects of fossil fuels from the public. “These allegations do not refer to actions taken on the Outer Continental Shelf,” she wrote.

The cities and counties praised the opinion as “clear and reasoned” in a statement.

“We appreciate the panel’s thorough review of this matter and are eager to return to the state courts where we filed our cases more than four years ago,” the plaintiffs said an email sent through the law firm Sher Edling LLP. “It is time to go to trial to hold these defendants accountable for deceiving consumers about the dangers associated with the use of their products, and to protect our taxpayers from having to bear the enormous costs resulting from that deception.”

The same Ninth Circuit panel found U.S. District Judge William Alsup lacked jurisdiction when he dismissed similar lawsuits brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland. The judges remanded the cases to Alsup so he can reconsider if alternative grounds justify keeping the two lawsuits in federal court, though their ruling Tuesday means those cases will likely end up in state court as well.

In an email, BP head of corporate communications Megan Baldino said the company could not speak about pending litigation. Chevron spokesman Braden Reddall said in an email that the company “respectfully disagrees” with the panel’s decision.

“Plaintiffs’ claims are based on allegations about worldwide carbon emissions and address global climate change — national and international issues that can be governed only by federal, not state, law. The court acknowledges that cases such as this one “raise novel and sweeping causes of action,'” Reddall said, noting that like Alsup, the Second Circuit had dismissed nearly identical claims as “sprawling” and overly ambitious. “Although the court has decided that plaintiffs’ claims for now can proceed past this preliminary stage, Chevron looks forward to additional challenges that should put an early end to this meritless lawsuit.”

chevron and total pull out of burma myanmar hu rights and lack of rule of law?

1/22 kpfa

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/how-exxon-chevron-and-their-buddies-58986784/

fOOTNOTES:

• Exxon accused of misleading investors on climate change
• An investor enquiry: how much big oil spends on climate lobbying  https://influencemap.org/report/Climate-Lobbying-by-the-Fossil-Fuel-Sector
• Column: A new study shows how Exxon Mobil downplayed climate change when it knew the problem was real
• Exxon’s Climate Concealment  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/exxons-climate-concealment.html?_r=2
• Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show
• Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings
• On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming  https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming
• Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate
• Did ExxonMobil Just Admit It’s Still Funding Climate Science Deniers?  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-exxonmobil-just-admit_b_8625514
• Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change  https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/18/1509433112.abstract
• Two-faced Exxon: the misinformation campaign against its own scientists  https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/25/two-faced-exxon-the-misinformation-campaign-against-its-own-scientists
• Rex Tillerson to oil industry: Not sure humans can do anything to battle climate change
• Exxon May Have Erased 7 Years of Tillerson's 'Wayne Tracker' Emails, Witness Says
• Rex Tillerson Testifies, Denying Exxon Misled Investors About Climate Risk
• ‘All Rhetoric and No Action’: Oil Giants Spent $1 Billion on Climate Lobbying and Ads Since Paris Pact, Says Report https://www.desmog.com/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap/
• The new science fossil fuel companies fear  https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2019/10/22/attribution-science-fossil-fuels-climate-change-001290
• Report details how ExxonMobil and fossil fuel firms sowed seeds of doubt on climate change  https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-21/oil-companies-exxon-climate-change-denial-report

==

https://www.desmog.com/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap/

NO LNX grfx

‘All Rhetoric and No Action’: Oil Giants Spent $1 Billion on Climate Lobbying and Ads Since Paris Pact, Says Report

By Sharon Kelly on Mar 22, 2019

A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.

Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S. — while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.

InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.

InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.”

“Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins, author of the new report, said in a statement. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Today’s report updates the group’s 2016 report that estimated these companies spent $115 million a year lobbying against climate regulations — even policies companies said they supported.

“Say one thing,” said SenatorSheldon Whitehouse, as he described InfluenceMap’s 2016 research on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “do another.”

The new estimates suggest that spending to influence climate policy by the five oil giants has increased sharply over the last two years.

It also comes as global banks are investing more in fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement. In addition, the five oil companies are spending heavily on finding and producing more fossil fuels — and putting only a tiny fraction of their budgets into efforts to transition away from climate-altering fuels.

“This spending accompanies the expansion of the companies’ operations with combined annual sales of over $1 [trillion] and profits of $55 [billion in] 2018, the vast majority of which is oil and gas related,” InfluenceMap wrote. “Combined capital investment will increase to $115 [billion] in 2019 but only about 3 percent of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.”

Lobbying One Message While Advertising Another

The report focuses on the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron, leaving out state-controlled oil giants like Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.

InfluenceMap examined the extent to which each company’s branding efforts and advertising campaigns focused on climate change.

Shell's branded content about its emissions scenario in The New York Times

Shell’s branded content about its “Sky” emissions scenario in The New York Times.

“The research suggests that Total maintains the highest proportion of its branding activities on climate (29 percent),” the new report finds. “Following this, ExxonMobil, which has faced significant negative media attention in 2018, allocates 19 percent. Shell and BP followed with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively. Chevron appears far less concerned, using approximately 2 percent of its branding budget on climate issues in 2018.”

The think tank’s research also looked at what the companies were saying to government regulators, either directly or through industry groups funded by the oil majors.

“Since Paris,Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil have led in opposition to a range of climate-motivated policy stands,” InfluenceMap wrote. “For example, in 2018 both BP and Chevron have directly lobbied U.S. policymakers for a rollback on U.S. methane requirements.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the major constituent in natural gas.)

The report credits Shell and Total for becoming “more positive on a number of climate policy issues” since 2015, but adds that they “continue to support policies that will extend the role for fossil fuels in the energy mix and remain part of highly climate-oppositional trade associations.”

Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups

At times, the public stances of a corporation’s leadership stand starkly at odds with the messages from industry groups funded by that same corporation.

For example, on electric vehicles, Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden had a very direct and simple message in July 2018. “We need battery electric vehicles,” he said. And a year earlier, at the oil industry conference, CERAWeek, in 2017, he expressed support for “regulations that speed up investment in low carbon technologies and ? at the same time ? move consumer demand.”

Oil and gas lobbying on climate policies through trade associations. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

In May 2018, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade group for oil and gas, pushed the U.S. Congress to move in the opposite direction by rolling back incentives for electric vehicles.

“American Petroleum Institute (API) opposes mandates and subsidies,” API testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, according to InfluenceMap’s new report. The fossil fuel trade group voiced its opposition for subsidies for electric vehicles, adding that “the level of market penetration achieved by electric vehicles should not rely on government interference.”

The report also notes the difficulty in tracking corporate lobbying in the U.S. given the rise of so-called “dark money” groups and the lack of transparency surrounding political contributions in the U.S. “Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539 [million] in the 2018 election cycle according to OpenSecrets.org,” the report says.

Social Influencers

InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies usedsocial media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.

“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

All of this spending has implications for shareholders, InfluenceMap observed — and some shareholder groups appear to be listening.

“InfluenceMap’s research confirms a widely held suspicion that Big Oil’s glossy sustainability reports and shiny climate statements are all rhetoric and no action,” Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction, a UK charity focused on responsible investment, said in a statement accompanying the report. “These companies have mastered the art of corporate doublespeak — by boasting about their climate credentials while quietly using their lobbying firepower to sabotage the implementation of sensible climate policy and pouring millions into groups that engage in dirty lobbying on their behalf.”

DeSmog has reached out to ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron for comment.

“We firmly reject the premise of this report. We are very clear about our support for the Paris agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society’s needs for more and cleaner energy,” Shell said in a statement provided to The Guardian. “We make no apology for talking to policymakers and regulators around the world to make our voice heard on crucial topics such as climate change and how to address it.”

“We have not been afforded the opportunity to review the data but we disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in ‘climate-related branding and lobbying’ that is ‘overwhelmingly in conflict’ with the Paris Agreement,” Chevron said in a statement provided to DeSmog, adding that the company was taking “prudent, cost-effective actions” and seeking “balanced and transparent” policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “We believe climate change is real and human activity contributes to it. We accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-figures-are-making-unhinged-connections-between-coronavirus-and

Some of right-wing media’s most prolific climate deniers are using the disastrous effects of the coronavirus to promote their anti-climate agenda across multiple platforms.

These figures have reframed their usual climate attacks around the pandemic. Some have compared the (alleged) outcomes of the Green New Deal to the (real) impacts of the coronavirus, while others have claimed that both the coronavirus and climate change are being used by leftists to push a radical agenda.

Green New Deal

Perhaps the most shameful connection made between coronavirus and the Green New Deal came from Daniel Turner, a fossil fuel industry shill whose recent career has been bankrolled by Koch Industries. Making his debut in **The Federalist**on March 13, with an article titled “How The Wuhan Virus Is Accomplishing The Green New Deal’s Goals,” Turner concluded that “coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America.”

Turner attempted to support this conclusion with false claims about the Green New Deal, claiming that, like the coronavirus, it would crush capitalism, put the “oil and gas industry into panic,” end travel, and control the population.

To add insult to blatant misinformation, he also stated that supporters of the Green New Deal should be “pleased” at what the coronavirus is accomplishing because “green activists don’t fret these casualties” and that “greens will rejoice” over the coronavirus’s disastrous effects.

Turner had previously pushed this narrative on March 11, again connecting the coronavirus and the Green New Deal to “more government control.”

Over the past year, Turner has made a habit of appearing in right-wing outlets to lie and fearmonger about the Green New Deal, and to promote climate denial in general. This is also not the first time he’s claimed that the Green New Deal is just a front for socialism. Since January 2019, he’s appeared on Fox News at least 12 times and on Fox Business at least 21 times, and written at least 40 op-eds for Fox News’ website.

The same day that Turner published his abhorrent piece in The Federalist, well-known climate denier Rush Limbaugh made a similar connection between the climate resolution and coronavirus on his radio show, stating that “If you want to know what the Green New Deal would look like, you're starting to see it”:

[vid? aud?]

rush is no stranger to lying about the Green New Deal; in August, he said that “the premise behind it is bogus,” and also said that “there is no man-made climate change.” He’s been echoing the same sort of misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, even claiming that it’s been “exaggerated and ... lied about.”

Alex Epstein, author of the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which argues that the “overall impact of using fossil fuels is to make the world a far better place,” picked up on the egregious connection between the Green New Deal and coronavirus in a March 16 tweet. He told his followers:

Epstein has produced five videos featuring climate denial with Prager U--a right-wing, propagandist online video resource -- including one in which he lies about the Green New Deal. Perhaps more dangerously, his controversial (and flat out wrong) ideas are being promoted by Chevron to push back on climate activism against the oil industry.:{ In the past, he’s appeared on }:{, }:Fox Business:{, }:{, and the }:{.:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.}:

These climate deniers love to fantasize about the supposed bad outcomes of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that it will have positive climate impacts -- it will help fight climate change and inequality, while reducing the reliance of harmful fossil fuels that are contributing to these very issues in the U.S.

Leftist policies and government control

Claims that climate action, especially as embodied by the Green New Deal, is just a front for more government control over our lives are popular among right-wing media figures, and they’ve also been invoked when talking about the coronavirus.

On March 16, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowlesdid just this, calling the responses to both climate change and coronavirus a “panic” and arguing that these issues are “simply being used to push through all the leftist policies that the left really, really wants.” He specifically referred to efforts “to pump up the Wuhan virus panic,” and he misrepresented climate science multiple times.

[vid]

Knowles is perhaps best known for being too unhinged even for Fox News; after he shamefully called Greta Thunberg a “mentally ill” child on a September appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum, the network apologized for his “disgraceful” comment and stated that it had no further plans to book him. But he apparently still fits in perfectly at the cesspool of hatred and bigotry that is The Daily Wire.

Not to be outdone by Knowles, National Review’s Kevin Williamson invoked fascism when discussing climate change.Although he didn’t claim that the coronavirus is a false crisis, like some of his other right-wing colleagues, Williamson insinuated that both the left and the right are using the pandemic to push their respective “agendas.”

The great American longing for a generation-defining crisis — Pearl Harbor envy — is strange and enduring, and it shapes thinking on both sides of the great sociopolitical divide: On the left, global warming is the Third Reich, the so-called Green New Deal is the moonshot, and whatever unnecessary immiseration and chaos is unleashed by the fantasies of progressives are only sadly inevitable casualties on the beaches of this new Normandy. On the right, it’s an Islamic caliphate, the coming civil war (there’s always one), the nation’s being overrun by hordes of Spanish-speaking people, or — it is almost a relief to consider it — Armageddon itself. With everything from right-wing survivalist novels to ironic hipster zombie shows, we have been preparing ourselves, in our low-impact way, for just such an eventuality.

And in the plague, we see whatever we want to see: the need for a universal health-care system and paid leave, the need for a wall and for severing our relations with the Chinese.

An op-ed in RT (the state-run outlet formerly known as Russia Today) also made the government control point-- and also included a reprehensible attack on children concerned about climate change. Titled “What do the coronavirus & Greta Thunberg have in common? They’re both great for the planet,” the author writes:

Airplanes are grounded. Roads, deserted. The skies are clear and fish swim once again in Venice’s canals. Covid-19 has achieved in three short months what Greta Thunberg and her ilk could only dream of.

…

But climate hysteria has been relegated to the back pages by coverage of Covid-19. Thunberg and her devotees can find some silver linings though: not only does she not have to return to school (nice timing, G), but the virus has helped Mother Earth recover in ways that screaming, crying, and gluing themselves to trains never could.

…

But once things are back to normal, the environmental debate will likely start anew. This time, the Greta Thunbergs of the world can point to the current, virus-induced environmental uptick as proof that we can – when push comes to shove – give up our carbon addiction. However, remember that if your leaders are serious about meeting the climate goals they promise to, the lifestyle changes they ask of you will need to be enforced with the machinery of the state.

The author insinuates that “extreme measures” being taken to stop the spread of coronavirus are what “environmental crusaders” really want in pursuing their climate change goals.

The Russian government-backed RT has posted misleading climate videos on YouTube and has generally sown misinformation through its platform.

The government control idea has also been espoused by fringe, far-right YouTubers. One YouTuber, who has over 360,000 subscribers, produced a saying that coronavirus and climate change are both propaganda and that both of these “scaremonger” stories are being pushed by “globalist-backed” agendas that allow “governments to crack down on the public in various ways.” YouTube, which has a huge problem with climate change misinformation on its platform, has not tagged the video as pushing a climate falsehood.

Right wing-outlets, especially Fox News, have used a lot of misinformation when talking about the coronavirus. It’s no surprise that they’re also using favorite climate denier arguments within the discussions.

wapo

Washington Post Live

The Path Forward: The Future of Energy with Chevron Chair & CEO Michael Wirth

Chevron Chair & CEO Michael Wirth discusses the future of energy in a rapidly changing world on Monday, August 16 (The Washington Post)

By Washington Post Live

August 16, 2021

With growing demand around the world, countries and companies are rethinking the energy sources that fuel our lives. As newer technologies emerge, Chevron chair and CEO Michael Wirth is not only leading the oil giant’s efforts to curb its current carbon output, but he is also spearheading their investments into alternative energy sources. Wirth sits down with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to discuss the future of energy in a rapidly changing world.

Click here for transcript

Highlights

When asked what he expects for crude oil prices going forward, Chevron chair and CEO Michael Wirth said, “We’ve got a market that’s really not in a state of equilibrium. Demand is returning but unevenly and with a lot of uncertainty as the effects of the pandemic still are evident in many of the markets around the world. (Washington Post Live)

Chevron CEO: ‘We believe the future of energy is lower carbon’

Chevron recently announced plans that aim to cut its current carbon output. Chair and CEO Michael Wirth said he believes the “future of energy is lower carbon.” “These are all the things that you should expect us to do in al lower energy future where the system is diversifying so are we.” (Washington Post Live)

Chevron CEO says he’d like to see more engagement between Biden administration and energy industry

Chevron chair and CEO Michael Wirth says he would like to see increased engagement between the energy industry and the Biden administration. “We’d like to engage in discussions about how we can work together to invest, to create jobs, to responsibly develop energy resources, and keep our country strong economically, strong from an energy security standpoint, and meet the objectives of the administration.” (Washington Post Live)

Michael Wirth.

Michael K. (Mike) Wirth, 60, is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Chevron Corporation. He was elected to these positions by Chevron’s board of directors in September 2017 and assumed the roles on February 1, 2018.

Prior to his current role, Wirth served as vice chairman of the board in 2017 and executive vice president of Midstream & Development for Chevron Corporation from 2016 – 2018. In that role, he was responsible for supply and trading, shipping, pipeline and power operating units, as well as corporate strategy; business development; and policy, government and public affairs.....

but his reported annual salary of $1.5 million is likely to be increased along with the perks and compensation package that is expected to exceed $15 million.

10. His exact net worth is unknown but …

Beyond his $1.5 million annual salary we also discovered he took advantage of some stock options that he sold for $3,298,550. This is separate from the earlier $16.6 million in stock he recently sold. That would put is net worth in the $30 to $50 million range, if not higher.

took over from

John S. Watson (born 1956) is an American businessman. He served as the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the Chevron Corporation from January 1, 2010 to January 31, 2018.^[1][2][3]

John S. Watson was born in California in 1956.^[2] In 1978, he graduated with a B.A. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Davis, and in 1980 he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.^[2][3]

In 1980, he joined the Chevron Corporation. He served as its chief financial officer from 2001 to 2005.^[1][2] From 2009 to 2010, he was Vice-chairman of the board.^[1][2] Since 2010, he has served as chairman and CEO.^[1][2]

He also serves as chairman of the board of the American Petroleum Institute, and on the board of directors of Caltex, Dynegy (2001–2004), the National Petroleum Council, the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, JPMorgan International Council, the American Society of Corporate Executives, and the Animal Rescue Foundation.^[1][2][3]

==

mofos

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/

LAST AUGUST, DURING the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.

Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years. So on August 6, Donziger left a Lower Manhattan courthouse unnoticed and boarded the 1 train home with an electronic monitoring device newly affixed to his ankle. Save for the occasional meeting with his lawyer or other court-sanctioned appointment, he has remained there ever since.

“I’m like a corporate political prisoner,” Donziger told me as we sat in his living room recently. The attorney, who is 6-foot-3, graying, and often used to be mistaken for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio when he was able to walk the city streets, was surprisingly stoic and resigned about his predicament during my two visits to the apartment he shares with his wife and 13-year-old son. But on this particular Wednesday, as the winter sunlight in his living room was dimming and the charger for his spare ankle bracelet battery flashed on a nearby shelf, his optimism about his epic battle against one of the biggest oil companies in the world seemed to be flagging. “They are trying to totally destroy me.”

Donziger is not exaggerating. As he was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And since then, Chevron has continued its all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law. Chevron has hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him. As a result, Donziger has been disbarred and his bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment, faces exorbitant fines, and has been prohibited from earning money. As of August, a court has seized his passport and put him on house arrest. Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $228 billion, has the funds to continue targeting Donziger for as long as it chooses.

In an emailed statement, Chevron wrote that “any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law should find the fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment to be illegitimate and unenforceable.” The statement also said that “Chevron will continue to work to hold the perpetrators of this fraud accountable for their actions, including Steven Donziger, who has committed a litany of corrupt and illegal acts related to his Ecuadorian judicial fraud against Chevron.”

The developments that led to Donziger’s confinement were, like much of the epic legal battle he’s been engaged in for decades, highly unusual. The home confinement is his punishment for refusing a request to hand over his cellphone and computer, something that’s been asked of few other attorneys. To Donziger, who had already endured 19 days of depositions and given Chevron large portions of his case file, the request was beyond the pale, and he appealed it on the grounds that it would require him to violate his commitments to his clients. Still, Donziger said he’d turn over the devices if he lost the appeal. But even though the underlying case was civil, the federal court judge who has presided over the litigation between Chevron and Donziger since 2011, Lewis A. Kaplan, drafted criminal contempt charges against him.

In another legal peculiarity, in July, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger, after the Southern District of New York declined to do so — a move that is virtually unprecedented. And, as Donziger’s lawyer has pointed out, the firm Kaplan chose, Seward & Kissel, likely has ties to Chevron.

Making the case even more extraordinary, Kaplan bypassed the standard random assignment process and handpicked someone he knew well, U.S. District JudgeLoretta Preska, to oversee the case being prosecuted by the firm he chose. It was Preska who sentenced Donziger to home detention and ordered the seizure of his passport, even though Donziger had appeared in court on hundreds of previous occasions.

[pix]

A Tainted Witness

Despite Donziger’s current predicament, the case against Chevron in Ecuador was a spectacular victory. The twisted legal saga began in 1993, when Donziger and other attorneys filed a class-action suit in New York against Texaco on behalf of more than 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people in the Amazon over massive contamination from the company’s oil drilling there. Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, has insisted that Texaco cleaned up the area where it operated and that its former partner, the national oil company of Ecuador, was responsible for any remaining pollution.

At Chevron’s request, the legal proceedings over the “Amazon Chernobyl” were moved to Ecuador, where the courts were “impartial and fair,” as the oil company’s attorneys wrote in a filing at the time. The move to Ecuador, where the legal system does not involve juries, may have also appealed because it spared Chevron a jury trial. In any case, an Ecuadorian court ruled against Chevron in 2011 and ordered the company to pay $18 billion in compensation, an amount that was later reduced to $9.5 billion. After years of struggling with the health and environmental consequences of oil extraction, the impoverished Amazonian plaintiffs had won a historic judgment from one of the biggest corporations in the world.

But Donziger and his clients never had a moment to savor their David-over-Goliath victory. Even though the ruling was subsequently upheld by the Ecuadorian Supreme Court, Chevron immediately made clear that it would not be paying the judgment. Instead, Chevron moved its assets out of the country, making it impossible for the Ecuadorians to collect.

That year, Chevron filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, suit against Donziger in New York City. Although the suit originally sought roughly $60 billion in damages, and civil trials involving monetary claims of more than $20 entitle a defendant to a jury, Chevron dropped the monetary claims two weeks before the trial.

In its statement, Chevron wrote that the company “focused the RICO case on obtaining injunctive relief against the furtherance of Donziger’s extortionate scheme against the company.”

Instead, that case was decided solely by Kaplan, who ruled in 2014 that the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was invalid because it was obtained through “egregious fraud” and that Donziger was guilty of racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering.The decision hinged on the testimony of an Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, who claimed that Donziger had bribed him during the original trial and that the decision against Chevron had been ghostwritten.

Guerra was a controversial witness. Chevron had prepped him on more than 50 occasions before his testimony, paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and arranged for the judge and his family members to move to the United States with a generous monthly stipend that was 20 times the salary he received in Ecuador. In 2015, when Guerra testified in an international arbitration proceeding, he admitted that he had lied and changed his storymultiple times. According to Chevron, Guerra’s inaccuracies didn’t change the thrust of his testimony.For his part, Judge Kaplan wrote that his court “would have reached precisely the same result in this case even without the testimony of Alberto Guerra.” In its statement, Chevron said that Guerra was relocated to the U.S. for his safety and noted that the court found that the company’s contacts with the Ecuadorian judge were “proper and transparent.”

Lawyers for Donziger said the changes in Guerra’s testimony completely undermined his original bribery allegations, which Donziger has consistently denied. In any case, that evidence emerged after the trial, and an appeals court declined to consider the new information and ruled against Donziger in 2016.

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“He has effectively been convicted of bribery by the finding of a single judge in a case in which bribery wasn’t even the charge.”

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Had Donziger been criminally charged with bribery, a jury would have assessed Guerra’s credibility. Instead, in the RICO case, which was civil, the decision about a key witness came down to one person — Kaplan — who chose to believe him. That choice has set the stage for the legal losses Donziger has suffered since, according to some close watchers of the Chevron case.

“On the basis of Kaplan saying, ‘I believe this witness; I find Donziger guilty of the crime of bribery of the judge’ — on the basis of that, he’s been destroyed. That is the pinnacle element of all of the other claims against him. And if you take that one out, the rest of them — they’re just not there,” said Charles Nesson, an attorney and Harvard Law School professor. “He has effectively been convicted of bribery by the finding of a single judge in a case in which bribery wasn’t even the charge,” Nesson said of Donziger. “I teach evidence, that you have to prove what you assert. But the proof in this case is the thinnest.”

Nesson, who represented Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case and the plaintiffs in the suit of W. R. Grace featured in the book and film “A Civil Action,” teaches Donziger’s case in his “Fair Trial” course, using it as an example of a decidedly unfair trial. “Donziger epitomizes a person in asymmetric civil litigation who can now be denied a fair trial,” he explains to his students.

Nesson is one of several legal scholars who have opined that Kaplan has a soft spot for Chevron, which the judge once described as “a company of considerable importance to our economy that employs thousands all over the world, that supplies a group of commodities, gasoline, heating oil, other fuels, and lubricants on which every one of us depends every single day.”

In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after notingthat “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”

Donziger’s current prohibition from working, traveling, earning money, and leaving his home shows how successful Chevron’s strategy has been. But even as his fate hangs in the balance, Donziger’s case matters far beyond the life of this one lawyer.

“It should be nothing short of terrifying for any activist challenging corporate power and the oil industry in the U.S.,” said Paul Paz y Miño, associate director of Amazon Watch, an organization devoted to the protection of the rainforest and Indigenous people in the Amazon basin. “They’ve made it clear there’s no amount of money that’s too much to spend on this case,” he said of Chevron. “They will stop at nothing.”

Related

Under Left- and Right-Wing Leaders, the Amazon Has Burned. Can Latin America Reject Oil, Ranching, and Mining?

The Chevron case may be most devastating for the plaintiffs in the Amazon, who never received their judgment despite being left with hundreds of unlined waste pits and contaminated water and soil from millions of gallons of spilled crude oil and billions of gallons of dumped toxic waste. Everything that’s happened to Donziger “is small potatoes compared to the fact that Kaplan has rendered the damage the company actually did as totally irrelevant,” said Nesson.

But the latest twists and turns in the Chevron case may also be particularly bad news for climate activists. A mere 20 companies are responsible for a third of the greenhouse gases emitted in the modern era; Chevron ranks second only to Saudi Aramco among them. And it’s increasingly clear that addressing the climate crisis will require confronting these mega-emitters, whose resources for litigation dwarf that of any individual.

Making Chevron and other companies clean up the messes created by their oil production will speed the transition away from fossil fuels, according to Rex Weyler, an environmental advocate who co-founded Greenpeace International and directed the original Greenpeace Foundation. “If hydrocarbon companies are forced to pay for the true costs of their product, which include these environmental costs, it will make the alternative energy systems more competitive,” said Weyler.

Accordingly, Weyler feels that the climate movement should focus on Chevron’s case — and Donziger’s legal battle. “One of the most effective things climate activists can do right now to change the system would be to not let Chevron get away with polluting in these countries, whether Ecuador, Nigeria, or anywhere” said Weyler. While some human rights and environmental advocates have tried to call attention to Donziger’s case and Chevron’s bullying of him, Weyler felt that the outcry should be louder.

After seeing what’s happened to Donziger, and some of his former allies, whom Chevron has gone after as “nonparty co-conspirators,” people may be afraid to stand up to the company. Donziger himself is living in fear. There is no set punishment when a judge files for criminal contempt of court, so he spends his days worrying over what will happen to him next. “It’s scary,” he told me. “I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

But Weyler pointed out that Chevron, which could still be forced to pay the multibillion-dollar judgment by courts in another country, is also afraid. “They are afraid of the precedent. Not only is Chevron afraid, the entire extraction industry is afraid of the precedent,” said Weyler. “They do not want to be held responsible for the pollution of their industry.”

industry consolidation?!

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/26/chevrons-share-buyback-increase-depends-on-battle-for-anadarko.html

bid war with occidental

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see energy corps 2 for grafs and lnx

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap

all rhet

A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.

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Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S.— while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.

InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.

InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.

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[algae tiny vid]

Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins, author of the new report, said in a statement. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Today’s report updates the group’s 2016 report that estimated these companies spent $115 million a year lobbying against climate regulations — even policies companies said they supported.

“Say one thing,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, as he described InfluenceMap’s 2016 research on the floor of the U.S.Senate, “do another.”

The new estimates suggest that spending to influence climate policy by the five oil giants has increased sharply over the last two years.

It also comes as global banks are investing more in fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement. In addition, the five oil companies are spending heavily on finding and producing more fossil fuels — and putting only a tiny fraction of their budgets into efforts to transition away from climate-altering fuels.

“This spending accompanies the expansion of the companies’ operations with combined annual sales of over $1 [trillion] and profits of $55 [billion in] 2018, the vast majority of which is oil and gas related,” InfluenceMap wrote. “Combined capital investment will increase to $115 [billion] in 2019 but only about 3 percent of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.”

Lobbying One Message While Advertising Another

The report focuses on the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron, leaving out state-controlled oil giants like Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.

InfluenceMap examined the extent to which each company’s branding efforts and advertising campaigns focused on climate change.

Shell's branded content about its emissions scenario in The New York Times

Shell's branded content about its “Sky” emissions scenario in The New York Times.

“The research suggests that Total maintains the highest proportion of its branding activities on climate (29 percent),” the new report finds. “Following this, ExxonMobil, which has faced significant negative media attention in 2018, allocates 19 percent. Shell and BP followed with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively. Chevron appears far less concerned, using approximately 2 percent of its branding budget on climate issues in 2018.”

The think tank's research also looked at what the companies were saying to government regulators, either directly or through industry groups funded by the oil majors.

“Since Paris, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil have led in opposition to a range of climate-motivated policy stands,” InfluenceMap wrote. “For example, in 2018 both BP and Chevron have directly lobbied U.S. policymakers for a rollback on U.S. methane requirements.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the major constituent in natural gas.)

The report credits Shell and Total for becoming “more positive on a number of climate policy issues” since 2015, but adds that they “continue to support policies that will extend the role for fossil fuels in the energy mix and remain part of highly climate-oppositional trade associations.”

Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups

At times, the public stances of a corporation’s leadership stand starkly at odds with the messages from industry groups funded by that same corporation.

For example, on electric vehicles, Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden had a very direct and simple message in July 2018. “We need battery electric vehicles,” he said. And a year earlier, at the oil industry conference, CERAWeek, in 2017, he expressed support for “regulations that speed up investment in low carbon technologies and ? at the same time ? move consumer demand.”

Oil and gas lobbying on climate policies through trade associations. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

In May 2018, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade group for oil and gas, pushed the U.S. Congress to move in the opposite direction by rolling back incentives for electric vehicles.

“American Petroleum Institute (API) opposes mandates and subsidies,” API testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, according to InfluenceMap’s new report. The fossil fuel trade group voiced its opposition for subsidies for electric vehicles, adding that “the level of market penetration achieved by electric vehicles should not rely on government interference.”

The report also notes the difficulty in tracking corporate lobbying in the U.S. given the rise of so-called “dark money” groups and the lack of transparency surrounding political contributions in the U.S. “Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539 [million] in the 2018 election cycle according to OpenSecrets.org,” the report says.

Social Influencers

InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies used social media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.

“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”

graf:

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

All of this spending has implications for shareholders, InfluenceMap observed — and some shareholder groups appear to be listening.

“InfluenceMap’s research confirms a widely held suspicion that Big Oil’s glossy sustainability reports and shiny climate statements are all rhetoric and no action,” Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction, a UK charity focused on responsible investment, said in a statement accompanying the report. “These companies have mastered the art of corporate doublespeak — by boasting about their climate credentials while quietly using their lobbying firepower to sabotage the implementation of sensible climate policy and pouring millions into groups that engage in dirty lobbying on their behalf.”

DeSmog has reached out to ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron for comment.

“We firmly reject the premise of this report. We are very clear about our support for the Paris agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society’s needs for more and cleaner energy,” Shell said in a statement provided to The Guardian. “We make no apology for talking to policymakers and regulators around the world to make our voice heard on crucial topics such as climate change and how to address it.”

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“We have not been afforded the opportunity to review the data but we disagree with the assertion that Chevronhas engaged in ‘climate-related branding and lobbying’ that is ‘overwhelmingly in conflict’ with the Paris Agreement,” Chevron said in a statement provided to DeSmog, adding that the company was taking “prudent, cost-effective actions” and seeking “balanced and transparent” policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “We believe climate change is real and human activity contributes to it. We accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Updated: This article has been updated on March 22, 2019 to reflect a statement from Chevron.

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• Chevron Says It Will Reduce Its Own Emissions, but Won't Cap Production -Bloomberg

no lnx many

https://www.ecowatch.com/exxonmobil-and-chevron-distorting-climate-science-2614802732.html

Yes, ExxonMobil and Chevron Are Still Distorting Climate Science

By Brenda Ekwurzel

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change. Recently, ExxonMobil received major kudos for giving $1 million to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a lobbying offshoot of the industry-backed Climate Leadership Council. Shortly before that, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum got good press for each pledging $100 million to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which amounts to less than one percent of their capital and exploration budget for 2018 (ExxonMobil's is $28 billion while Chevron's is $15.8 billion). Companies have also touted their support for the Paris climate agreement as well as their research and investments in renewables.

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But, as I and my colleagues have analyzed, this "support" is a PR distraction when these companies are keeping up business-as-usual. They intend to continue producing, marketing and selling fossil fuels at current levels for the foreseeable future, which runs counter to the steep reductions in carbon dioxide and methane emissions needed to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Tuesday the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a scorecard, which analyzed what eight major fossil fuel companies are saying they're doing about climate change, and just how much these companies are doing to drastically lower their emissions.

What did we find? Contrary to media reports and shiny company press releases, most of these major fossil fuel companies continue to mischaracterize climate science.

Why is this important? Any company that makes, markets and sells a product that is the primary cause of climate change has a responsibility to stay on top of and clearly communicate with the public scientific developments regarding their product. Misrepresenting climate science and underplaying the urgency of action allows companies to justify their business as usual practices all while climate impacts, including increasingly frequent and severe weather events such as Hurricanes Harvey and Florence, get worse and costlier. Releasing inaccurate statements allows companies to "check the box" for voicing belief in climate change, while continuing to funnel tens of tens of millions of dollars to climate-denying politicians, trade associations and other industry groups that do the dirty work of opposing climate policies.

Major Fossil Fuel Companies Fail to Accurately Represent Climate Science

We measured whether companies consistently and accurately acknowledged the scientific evidence of climate change in their public platforms. Overall, they didn't do great.

We found that five of the eight companies we studied had made public statements on climate change that underplayed the need to urgently reduce emissions, emphasized scientific uncertainty and/or were blatantly incorrect. Only BP amended its statement after UCS and Barnard College called the company out for its deceptive language.

These statements are surprising since these companies have known about climate change for at least four decades now, which would be plenty of time to figure how to make it a priority to accurately convey the latest developments in climate science. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued climate assessments which companies can rely on. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment (2014) represents the latest* mainstream scientific consensus on climate change and it clearly states that "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The primary human influence is through the burning of fossil fuels.

*(Earlier this month, this group released a special report detailing the impacts of a global average temperature increase of 1.5C relative to 2C above pre-industrial levels, and pathways to limit temperature increase to that level. See my colleagues' blog series about what the report means for us and for climate policy).

Let's see how oil and gas company statements on climate change stacked up.

ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil employs a dedicated climate change team and boasts about leading research around cutting-edge technology, such as carbon capture and storage. Yet the company's statements on climate change, including the one above, do not consistently reflect the current scientific consensus around the issue.

Contrary to ExxonMobil's claims, scientific understanding of the likelihood, magnitude and time frame of climate impacts as tied to human-caused climate change has advanced greatly. Research has over the last decade developed to the point where scientists can identify and quantify the part human-caused climate change plays in many types of extreme weather and other climate impacts. For many impacts, the likelihood is high; the magnitude is severe; and the timeframe is now. Scientists have shown, for example, that the likelihood of heat wave similar in magnitude to the one that hit Europe in 2003—during which over 30,000 people died—has doubled. Scientists have also shown that human-caused climate change made the record rainfall that hit Houston during Hurricane Harvey roughly three times more likely and 15 percent more intense.

No matter how much ExxonMobil talks about using oil to lubricate wind turbines, the company knows that most of its oil and gas are being burnt by cars, by energy generation, by human activity—which is the primary cause of climate change.

Chevron

Chevron's statement misrepresents the IPCC Fifth Assessment's conclusions, as mentioned earlier, that human activity is "extremely likely" to be the dominant driver of warming since the 1950s, not simply one possible cause of many possible causes, as is implied by Chevron's phrase "due in part." Chevron's seemingly subtle shift in wording is significant because the report shows that the overwhelming majority of the world's top researchers agree that burning fossil fuels is by far and away the largest contributor to climate change. Injecting any doubt or uncertainty into that conclusion is disingenuous at best, and outright deceiving at worst.

Above: Chevron Corporation. 2018. Climate change resilience: A framework for decision making. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

If Chevron is going to quote the IPCC, the company should, at the very least, cut-and-paste from the panel's report.

ConocoPhillips

ConocoPhillips's statement on climate science suggests the last decade-worth of climate research, including the most recent IPCC report, simply doesn't exist.

Above: ConocoPhillips. No date. Climate change position. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

There are three major issues with the company's statement: 1) the claim that increasing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases "can lead" rather than "are leading" to climate change, as has been established since at least the IPCC third assessment report, is followed by 2) highlighting uncertainties on the first point, when there are none and 3) proposing that it is sufficient for the company to "manage" global warming emissions rather than reducing them. Alone, each of these statements is problematic and inaccurately represents the mainstream scientific consensus. Together, they subvert the public's understanding of climate science and supply the company with an alibi for continuing to extract, sell and profit off of fossil fuels.

BP – Old and New

When we analyzed BP's statements from 2018 we found similarly misinforming language. But when we pointed the problematic language out to company representatives (as we did with all eight companies studied), BP promptly made changes that brought its statement back in line with climate science. As you can see in the first attempt, BP emphasizes scientific uncertainty by referring to atmospheric carbon's "possible" climate impact. Svante Arrhenius, more than a century ago, published the fundamental scientific principle that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration results in changes to Earth's temperature.

Above: BP PLC. 2018a. Energy and the environment. Online here, accessed May 22.

BP's new statement, on the other hand, is an excellent example of an accurate copy-and-paste. The company's new statement mentions the IPCC 5th Assessment and, unlike Chevron, gets its facts right in stating that human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is extremely likely to be the primary driver of climate change.

Above: BP PLC. No date. Energy and the environment. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

Shell

Above: First quote: Royal Dutch Shell Corporation. No date. Climate change and energy transitions. Online here, accessed, Oct. 15. Second quote: Royal Dutch Shell Corporation. 2018c. Energy Transition. Online here, accessed July 10.

Shell's PR machine has gone into overdrive recently in an effort to paint the company as a climate leader.While Shell falls short in a number of areas, its statements on climate science and the need to reach net-zero emissions are accurate and consistent. There's no equivocating, no hedging, no backsliding, no prevaricating and no hiding inaccurate climate statements on less popular pages of its website. Climate change is real, it's caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, and we need to make changes immediately. Check, check and check.

Additional Studies on the Language of Climate Deception

Several peer-reviewed academic papers have documented how fossil fuel companies have used public communications to mislead the public about the state of climate science and its implications. A University of Reading study published this year showed that up until the mid-2000s, climate change was discussed as a problem with a solution; more recently fossil fuel company language has portrayed climate change as unpredictable and unknowable. Last year, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes analyzed 187 climate change communications by ExxonMobil and found that while company's scientists were quietly contributing to climate science and writing reports about it to company executives, the company was paying for advertisements that told a different story.

Watchdogging Matters

Whether through outright climate denial, sowing public confusion on climate science, or funding of third-party groups that spread climate disinformation, each of these companies has tried to obscure climate science. But, as we saw with BP, the threat of public exposure and pressure apparently pushed the company to correct its website. As with most companies, major fossil fuel companies want to avoid the reputational risk of being branded climate deniers. This is why public watchdogging really matters.

Fossil fuel companies need to acknowledge scientific evidence that shows

1. The extraction and burning of their product is the main driver of climate change and,

2. avoiding the worst climate impacts requires dramatic cuts to carbon emissions immediately.

UCS and members of our science network and supporters will continue to hold these companies accountable for what they (and their trade groups) say and do on climate change.

Brenda Ekwurzel is a senior climate scientist and the director of climate science at UCS.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

ExxonMobil's Support for a Carbon Tax Is a Sham ›

Why Is ExxonMobil Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups? ›

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omg borders on dis cap'l, massive subsidies

PORT ARTHUR, Texas (AP) — As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority — to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity.

Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.

That followed Hurricane Harvey, which roared ashore last Aug. 25 and swamped Houston and parts of the coast, temporarily knocking out a quarter of the area’s oil refining capacity and causing average gasoline prices to jump 28 cents a gallon nationwide. Many Republicans argue that the Texas oil projects belong at the top of Washington’s spending list.

“Our overall economy, not only in Texas but in the entire country, is so much at risk from a high storm surge,” said Matt Sebesta, a Republican who as Brazoria County judge oversees a swath of Gulf Coast.

But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change’s validity, doesn’t sit well with some.

“The oil and gas industry is getting a free ride,” said Brandt Mannchen, a member of the Sierra Club’s executive committee in Houston. “You don’t hear the industry making a peep about paying for any of this and why should they? There’s all this push like, ‘Please Senator Cornyn, Please Senator Cruz, we need money for this and that.’”

Normally outspoken critics of federal spending, Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both backed using taxpayer funds to fortify the oil facilities’ protections and the Texas coast. Cruz called it “a tremendous step forward.”

Federal, state and local money is also bolstering defenses elsewhere, including on New York’s Staten Island, around Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in other communities hammered by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Construction in Texas could begin in several months on the three sections of storm barrier. While plans are still being finalized, some dirt levees will be raised to about 17 feet high, and 6 miles of 19-foot-tall floodwalls would be built or strengthened around Port Arthur, a Texas-Louisiana border locale of pungent chemical smells and towering knots of steel pipes.

The town of 55,000 includes the Saudi-controlled Motiva oil refinery, the nation’s largest, as well as refineries owned by oil giants Valero Energy Corp. and Total S.A. There are also almost a dozen petrochemical facilities.

“You’re looking at a lot of people, a lot of homes, but really a lot of industry,” said Steve Sherrill, an Army Corps of Engineers resident engineer in Port Arthur, as he peered over a Gulf tributary lined with chunks of granite and metal gates, much of which is set to be reinforced.

The second barrier project features around 25 miles of new levees and seawalls in nearby Orange County, whereChevron, DuPont and other companies have facilities. The third would extend and heighten seawalls around Freeport, home to a Phillips 66 export terminal for liquefied natural gas and nearby refinery, as well as several chemical facilities.

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-litigation-california-big-oil-2571971191.html

Climate Litigation Against Big Oil Heats Up

By Jason Mark

Can any one group of actors be held responsible for the damages caused by global climate change?

That was the central question argued in federal court on Thursday as attorneys representing San Francisco and Oakland tried to beat back efforts by ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell to have a judge throw out a potentially groundbreaking climate change related lawsuit.

The nearly three-hour hearing was the latest round in a burgeoning effort by cities and counties nationwide to hold major fossil fuel producers accountable for climate change-related damages. Last year, seven California cities and counties sued the oil majors, claiming that their production and sale of fossil fuels—even as they were aware of the risks of CO2 emissions—constitute a public nuisance. Since then, similar suits have been filed by New York City; Boulder and two Colorado counties; and King County, Washington, home to the city of Seattle. (For more, see SIERRA's May/June cover story, "The Case for Climate Reparations.")

Thursday's hearing represented the first major test of such lawsuits as Judge William Alsup considered whether the Oakland and San Francisco complaint should move forward. The defendants challenged the lawsuit on a broad range of grounds, forcing Judge Alsup, a Clinton-appointee known for being an idiosyncratic jurist, to say at one point, "There are a lot of arguments here. As soon as I focus on one, you run off to another one."

The defendants' arguments for dismissing the suit centered on two main questions: whether the Federal District Court for Northern California is an appropriate jurisdiction to decide the case, and, of larger concern, whether the lawsuits might be displaced by existing federal laws and policies.

Arguments hinged on a welter of legal terms such as "general jurisdiction" versus "personal jurisdiction" versus "specific jurisdiction," while also touching on the distinctions between a holding company and an operating company. (Lawyers for Royal Dutch Shell maintained that the Netherlands-based multinational corporation is a holding company, and therefore has no agents in California.) In the course of the arguments it became clear that the very scale of the contested issue—global climate change—further complicates the questions of jurisdiction. The defendants argued that it's hard, if not impossible, to establish direct causation for a specific harm when the source of that harm is billions of people burning fossil fuels worldwide.

"[The plaintiffs] have decided that they do not want to and cannot disaggregate the conduct that leads to their harm," Jaren Janghorbani, an attorney representing ExxonMobil, said. "They cannot attribute any of the harm they are alleging to the company's activities in California."

Jonathan Hughes, a lawyer representing BP, echoed that point. "The amount [of CO2 emissions from its California operations] that could be attributed to BP would be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent. And under the but-for argument, if BP hadn't produced any fossil fuels, would they have still suffered an injury? The answer is yes. We are talking about a speck in the ocean."

In response, Benjamin Krass, a lawyer representing San Francisco and Oakland, said the oil company attorneys were "muddying up" the but-for argument—the principle of tort law that establishes liability. "The end result of the defendants' argument is that a company that does business everywhere should be held accountable nowhere."

In the end, Judge Alsup said he didn't have enough information to make a decision on the jurisdiction question. He gave both sides at least 60 days for a discovery process and depositions to establish whether each of the defendants has sufficient business operations in California for the two California cities to claim injury.

That left Chevron, the only defendant headquartered in California, to argue for dismissal based on the merits of the case. Chevron attorney Theodore Boutrous, Jr. began by saying that the cities' claims stretch federal common law and that "the plaintiffs are asking this court to throw caution to the wind." Boutrous went on to argue that a complex issue like climate change "should be committed to those who write the laws rather than those who interpret them." And Congress, Boutrous argued, has again and again passed laws in favor of fossil fuel production. "Congress has made clear that energy production is not a public nuisance; it is a public necessity."

As a rebuttal, Steve Berman, the lead counsel for the two cities, argued that the cities' complaints are not nearly as novel as the defendants make it seem—but instead merely the application of ancient laws to contemporary circumstances. "The law of nuisance has been around forever, and it has responded to changes in mankind. What we are doing is applying hundreds of years of law to a new situation." Berman later said, "We allege that this was a deliberate nuisance, based on phony science."

The San Francisco and Oakland case has generated a great deal of attention among legal scholars and climate change activists. In March, Judge Alsup held an unusual "climate science tutorial" as a preliminary step in the case—an event that attracted so big a crowd, the court had to reserve an overflow room. The case has also become a proxy battle of sorts. Fifteen states with Republican attorneys general—including Indiana, Colorado, Kansas and Louisiana—filed an amicus brief in support of the oil corporations' position. Meanwhile, California, New Jersey and Washington filed their own brief backing the cities' arguments.

The federal government has also weighed in. Two weeks ago the U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the five oil companies, and on Thursday, Eric Grant, a deputy assistant attorney general, was given time to express the federal government's opposition to the San Francisco and Oakland suits."It is upon Congress, not the courts, to prescribe policy in areas of special interest," Grant said. "As this court knows, in respect to domestic emissions, the kind of national policy-making sought by plaintiffs is inappropriate … [Climate change] is a complex issue involving trade-offs affecting a nation of more than 300 million people. Individual federal district courts lack the competence to undertake that task."

The federal government's arguments appeared to give Judge Alsup pause, even as he continued to express exasperation with the legal maneuverings of some of the defendants. "There is no court in the history of the universe that has extended this [federal common law] to global warming," the judge said. "The United States is pointing to Supreme Court language that judges like me have to move slowly … There's no doubt there will be some sea rise. But will it be in 75 years or 25 years? We don't know."

To which Berman, the plaintiff's attorney, responded, "That's what the trial is for. Today we're talking about a motion to dismiss."

Whether the case will ever make it to a trial is, of course, now in the hands of Judge Alsup....

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/chevron-has-avoided-justice-environmental-crimes-ecuador-and-us-can-canada-hold-it

April 17, a court in Toronto will hear the latest round of arguments in the epic legal battle between Chevron and the Ecuadorian villages that the oil company systematically contaminated for decades.

This latest chapter opens with the country’s second-biggest oil company performing the legal equivalent of the comedy trope known as “Behind a Stick,” when one or more characters attempt to hide using a much-too-thin object. In the case pending before the Ontario Appeals Court, the fat man is Chevron, and the stick is its subsidiary, Chevron Canada, which Chevron believes it can stand behind without being seen—or at least without being held liable for its crimes.

The company is claiming that, in terms of liability, neither it, nor its estimated $15 to $25 billion in Canadian assets, exists. Only Chevron Canadaexists, and any appearance of a relationship between the California-based Chevron and Chevron Canada, its wholly owned subsidiary in the Great White North, is purely coincidental.

One court in Canada has agreed with Chevron that it can’t be seen standing behind Chevron Canada. On Tuesday, the Ecuadorians will begin arguing their appeal.

The story of how Chevron came to be hiding behind a legal coat rack in a Toronto courtroom famously begins a half-century ago in northern Ecuador, where the company devastated an area of rainforest the size of Rhode Island, leaving behind an estimated 1,000 toxic waste pits and a health emergency known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

Less known are the many turns the story has taken since the Ecuadorian Supreme Court in 2013 upheld a $9.5 billion damages award.The biggest class action judgment in historyseemed to herald the arrival of a new paradigm for communities around the world seeking redress for pollution caused by strip-dump-and-split oil and mining companies.

But Chevron and the industry understood the power of this precedent, and announced that it could not stand. As a Chevron lobbyist told Newsweek, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

After losing in Ecuador, where Chevron had insisted the trial be held, it counter-sued in New York, arguing that the Ecuadorian award was based on fraud. The company’s central witness was a corrupt Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, whom the company paid $2 million dollars and coached for nearly two months prior to his taking the stand. Guerra testified that the Ecuadorians’ legal team had bribed Ecuadorian courts and ghostwrote the final decision. Guerra has since admitted he perjured himself, while a forensic report has disproved the ghostwriting allegation.

The Ecuadorians then looked north, where Chevron has billions invested in tar sands, refineries, and other infrastructure. When they filed to collect damages from Chevron Canada, the parent company countered with a string of actions to block the suit from proceeding. In the last few years, the Ecuadorians have been on a roll, winning three consecutive unanimous appellate decisions. These have been won against one of the best-funded legal efforts in history: Chevron has spent an estimated $2 billion to hire 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to target the villagers and their legal representatives since the case began.Based on Guerra’s tainted testimony, a U.S. district court judge named Lewis Kaplan ruled that the Ecuadorians could not enforce their award on U.S. soil. (They couldn’t collect it in Ecuador, either, as Chevron dumped its remaining assets in the country during the original trial.)

Which brings us to Chevron’s current “behind a stick” routine. Last year, Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice accepted Chevron’s technical argument that they and Chevron Canada are distinct legal personages with distinct assets, and that one cannot be held responsible for the other, even though they are part of the same ownership hierarchy.

“To understand the absurdity of the argument, imagine a couple gets divorced,” says John Phillips, a Canadian adviser to the Ecuadorian legal team. “If the husband set up holding companies for his assets, which he owns to the seventh level, do you think any court would hesitate for one second to distribute those assets?”

The implications of next week’s decision extend beyond Ecuador, where villagers are still waiting for the funds needed to remediate their forests and rivers. On Tuesday, the aboriginal rights specialist Peter Grant will argue that letting Chevron skate on a legal technicality will disempower other indigenous communities around the world, including those of Western Canada, which the industry has crisscrossed with pollution-spewing wells and leaking pipelines. In recognition of their shared interests, Canada’s Assembly of First Nations last year signed an historic political accord with the indigenous people of northern Ecuador.

The industry understands the magnitude of these stakes very well, of course. Which is why Chevron has spent billions rather than concede a penny to villagers and farmers living in a toxic zone without access to clean water. “If the Superior Court decision stands, other corporations will think they can walk away from potentially catastrophic environmental liabilities by setting up subsidiaries to insulate themselves,” says Phillips, the Canadian adviser to the legal team, which is led by the Amazon Defense Coalition of Ecuador (FDA), the NGO group that brought the case and is responsible for the recovery of funds. The FDA is also bringing up a delegation seven indigenous leaders and other community leaders from Ecuador to attend the Canadian court hearing alongside Phil Fontaine, the former National Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations who toured the impacted area last September.

The fate of Chevron’s scorched-earth retaliation strategy will be determined by events next week in Toronto.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and a writing fellow of the Independent Media Institute. His most recent book is The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America (Skyhorse Publishing).

https://www.ecowatch.com/chevron-lawsuit-california-climate-science-2551250987.html

Chevron Presents on Climate Science While Oil Companies Move to Dismiss Landmark Case

This was a big week for the suit brought by San Francisco and Oakland against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies for the costs associated with adapting to climate change.

First, the five companies in question—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the case, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had dismissed similar cases in the past because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not private companies, is responsible for setting and enforcing carbon dioxide levels, Forbes reported.

But they didn't file in time to avoid participating in Wednesday's historic climate science tutorial. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who is currently hearing the case, ordered both sides to answer a series of questions about climate science in a two-hour presentation each.

Chevron was the only company whose lawyer actually presented at the tutorial. The other companies did not present as a show of their opposition to the court's jurisdiction, Alyssa Johl, an attorney and the founder of Climate Rights Collective, reported in a live tweet of the tutorial.

Alsup, however, did not let the other companies off the hook, but gave their lawyers two weeks to file statements detailing any differences they had with the testimony of Chevron's lawyer.

...

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trump inaugr slush fund

75

502 1502 ORG

CHEVRON PRODUCTS COMPANY

$500,000 1/12/2017 PO BOX 6042 SAN RAMON CA 94583 Chevron is deeply entangled with the Russian oil industry. Chevon has multiple contracts with Rosneft, several joint ventures in Russia, and funded $800 million of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.

76

https://www.ecowatch.com/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-drilling-2524505765.html

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?423076-2/refinery-town

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http://trofire.com/2014/03/21/chevron-seeking-millions-fees-evading-justice-polluting-rainforest/

donziger

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https://kpfa.org/event/steve-early-gayle-mclaughlin-andres-soto/

:{:{“Refinery Town }:is based on one city’s experience, but it reflects the lessons of grassroots organizing elsewhere…This timely book offers ideas and inspiration for making change where it counts the most–—among friends, neighbors, and fellow community members.”

— Senator Bernie Sanders}:

Labor Activist Steve Early documents how a largely non-white working class community of 110,000 people spawned a vibrant culture of resistance to corporate power after more than a century of political dominance by the Chevron Corporation. Richmond, California – long a proto-typical company town with one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country, with deindustrialization, poverty, joblessness, substandard schools and housing, drug trafficking, street crime, gang violence and wild corruption in City Hall resulting in mismanagement and near bankruptcy – transformed itself over a decade into a progressive city via multi-faceted municipal reforms.  These were led by labor and community activists, environmental justice campaigners, police reformers, and gay rights activists who formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance, “an unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” who worked with incomingMayor Gayle McLaughlin. Richmond became the largest U.S. city run by a Green mayor plus an ally of peasant farmers in Ecuador, which had also battled Chevron.

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content post 2/14

aug 2013

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/chevron_to_pay_2_million_for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_Richmond_Refinery

http://grist.org/climate-energy/a-year-after-a-refinery-explosion-richmond-cali-is-fighting-back/

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Chevron-guilty-of-refinery-criminal-charges-4707675.php?cmpid=twitter

As part of the deal, Chevron agreed to pay $2 million in fines and restitution and accept additional oversight and inspection of its operations during a 3 1/2-year probation period, authorities said.

The misdemeanor charges, alleging violations of California's health and labor codes, were filed Monday by the Contra Costa County district attorney and the state attorney general after an investigation of the fire in a crude oil processing unit on Aug. 6, 2012.

In a prearranged deal, an attorney for the company immediately entered pleas of no contest before Superior Court Judge William Kolin in Martinez, said Deputy District Attorney Steve Moawad.

http://www.eastbaytimes.com/west-county-times/ci_23798674/chevron-pleads-no-contest-criminal-charges-stemming-from

Chevron committed six violations of labor, health and safety standards, according to the complaint. The violations included failure to "correct deficiencies" in equipment, negligent emissions and failure to prevent employees' exposure to hazardous conditions.

Chevron pleads no contest to criminal charges stemming from Richmond refinery fire

By Robert Rogers and Malaika Fraley

Contra Costa Times

POSTED:   08/05/2013 11:25:36 AM PDT | UPDATED:   3 YEARS AGO

Aug 10:

Chevron refinery fire one year later: Fallout, impact show no signs of waning

MARTINEZ -- Chevron will pay $2 million in fines and restitution after pleading no contest Monday to six misdemeanor criminal charges stemming from a fire at its Richmond refinery last year.

Chevron attorneys accepted the terms, including 3 1/2 years of probation, $1.28 million in fines, and more than $720,000 in restitution payments to three different agencies.

The penalties resulted from joint charges filed Monday in Contra Costa Superior Court by state Attorney General Kamala Harris and Contra Costa County District Attorney Mark Peterson. The terms of the plea had been agreed to by both sides before Monday's hearing.

TV news crews, along with the curious, gather on a hillside in Point Richmond to photograph the the fire in an oil unit at the Chevron refinery in

TV news crews, along with the curious, gather on a hillside in Point Richmond to photograph the the fire in an oil unit at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., Monday, Aug. 6, 2012. (D. Ross Cameron/Staff) (D. Ross Cameron/Staff file)

"This criminal case achieves our goals of holding Chevron accountable for their conduct, protecting the public, and ensuring a safer work environment at the refinery," Peterson said in a news release. Peterson also praised Chevron for its "commitment to do more than what is required by law" to prevent future accidents.

Chevron committed six violations of labor, health and safety standards, according to the complaint. The violations included failure to "correct deficiencies" in equipment, negligent emissions and failure to prevent employees' exposure to hazardous conditions.

The Aug. 6 fire knocked out the refinery's No. 4 crude unit and sent more than 15,000 people to area hospitals complaining of respiratory discomfort and other symptoms. Subsequent investigations have revealed that the fire was caused by a corroded pipe that failed, and that the pipe had been recommended for replacement several times during the previous decade.

In addition to the $1.28 million in fines, Chevron will pay restitution to Richmond BUILD, a local workforce development program, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Cal/OSHA and the state Attorney General's Office.

Chevron spokeswoman Melissa Ritchie issued a statement Monday saying "Chevron U.S.A. has resolved this matter by agreement with the offices of the Contra Costa County District Attorney and the Attorney General of the State of California." Ritchie added that the company is committed to improving safety at the refinery.

"We have reimbursed community members and local government agencies in Richmond and West Contra Costa County for medical and response-related costs," Ritchie said. "We are conducting a comprehensive inspection of our refinery."

Frank Pitre, of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, the law firm which is suing Chevron on behalf of the city, said it was too early to speculate on what impact if any the criminal case will have on the city's suit.

"What I can say is this is the same company that just last Friday issued a press statement calling Richmond's lawsuit meritless, yet at the same time was negotiating a settlement to resolve criminal charges against them," Pitre said. "The hypocrisy is astounding."...

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foia/slapp donziger

Sludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers

For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon

By Alexander Zaitchik August 28, 2014

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sludge-match-chevron-legal-battle-ecuador-steven-donziger-20140828#ixzz3Yv9f8Muk

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Chevron Whistleblower Videos Show Deliberate Falsification Of Evidence In Ecuador Oil Pollution Trial

http://desmogblog.com/2015/04/09/chevron-whistleblower-videos-show-deliberate-cover-oil-pollution-ecuador

Chevron has already lost the lawsuit filed against the company by a group of Indigenous villagers and rural Ecuadorians who say Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, left behind hundreds of open, unlined pits full of toxic oil waste it had dug into the floor of the Amazon rainforest.

That hasn’t stopped the oil titan from attempting to retry the case, though, in both the court of public opinion and a New York court, where it counter-sued the Ecuadorian plaintiffs under the RICO Act, claiming their original lawsuit was nothing more than extortion.

But new videos released by an anonymous Chevron whistleblower undermine the company’s entire defense in the original suit as well as its RICO counterattack.

Chevron’s defense in the Ecuador pollution case hinges on the company’s assertion that, before leaving the country when its partnership with state-owned Petroecuador ended in the early 1990s, Texaco remediated a portion of the 350 drill sites and more than 900 associated waste pits, as per its agreement with the Ecuadorean government.

The Ecuadorian plaintiffs argue that, as the sole operator of those drilling operations, Chevron/Texaco is liable for the carcinogenic oil contamination of watercourses, soil and groundwater that leached out of the waste pits and overflowed into local streams and rivers. After inheriting Texaco’s liability, Chevron countered that it had fulfilled its obligations per the terms of its partnership and that the plaintiffs’ real target should be Petroecuador, which Chevron blames for the pollution.

In 2011, Chevron lost the court battle in Ecuador — the venue Chevron itself chose — and was ordered to pay $9.5 billion to clean up its oil pollution in the Amazon. But Chevron had already infamously vowed “We will fight until hell freezes over and then fight it out on the ice,” and the company has been true to its word. Only now has evidence emerged to show just how dirty Chevron was fighting.

“These videos prove Chevron knew full well their ‘remediated’ sites were still contaminated before the trial in Ecuador had even finished,” Amazon Watch’s Paul Paz said in a statement to DeSmogBlog. “Rather than admit that and help people who would be affected, they hid what they knew and denied it to the courts and to the world. Worse than that, they went on to blame the very same people affected by their waste as making it all up to extort money from Chevron.”

One video from March 2005, when the trial in Ecuador was ongoing, shows Chevron contractors examining a core sample and finding petroleum at a well site that Texaco claimed to have remediated. When a worker named Dave tells a Chevron employee named Rene about the discovery, Rene jokingly chastises the worker, saying, “Nice job, Dave. Give you one simple task: Don't find petroleum.” (Skip to the 1:40 mark in the video below.)

By Mike Gaworecki • Thursday, April 9, 2015

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D000000015

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2014 yay

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/11/12661/richmond-voters-beat-chevrons-corporate-coup-d-etat

In Richmond, CA, three seats on the City Council were up for election; the city also stood to elect a new mayor. Nothing unusual in this, perhaps, was it not for Chevron's $3.1 million dollar campaign to highjack the elections, which was first revealed by journalism student and former Center for Media and Democracy reporter, Harriet Rowan in the Berkeley publication *Richmond Confidential*.

Through different independent expenditure groups, the energy behemoth launched an ad blitz targeting progressive candidates, including billboards, TV, radio and even talking door literature. At the ballot box, however, Richmond voters proved that democracy can triumph over corporate cash. Despite being outspent 20-to-1, the three Green Party and Democrat candidates targeted in Chevron's smear campaigns -- Jovanka Beckles, Eduardo Martinez, and outgoing mayor Gayle McLaughlin -- were all elected to City Council. In a further rejection of Chevron's agenda, Tom Butt, who as a council member had taken a hard line against the company, was elected mayor.

"I think this election is a great example that money isn't always the deciding factor, and that it is possible for grassroots organizing on the ground to defeat big money," says Rowan.

Chevron's Rap Sheet

Last year, the city filed a lawsuit against the company following a disastrous fire in August of 2012 at its Richmond refinery that sent 15,000 people to the hospital over the weeks that followed, and also caused property values to drop dramatically. "It's [not about the money, it's] wanting to have some assurance that Chevron has taken the lessons learned to heart and that they have changed their culture of safety," Tom Butt said at the time.

The fire was not an isolated incident. In fact, Chevron has a long and troubled history in Richmond where "some of the company's worst sins have taken place," says Good Jobs First, nonprofit research group promoting corporate and government accountability. The Chevron rap sheet includes a 1989 refinery fire that left three workers severely burned, a $540,000 fine imposed by EPA for polluting the San Pablo Bay, and attempts to bypass monitoring equipment and release pollutants into the air that drew a federal investigation in 2012.

In the 1990s Chevron had a desk in the city managers office. For a long time, Richmond City Council members, colloquially known as "The Chevron Five," consistently voted for Big Oil interests. The era of corporate deference came to an end in 2008 when three of them were voted out of office, and progressives gained control of City Hall. Since then, and in the wake of Citizens United, the company has ramped up its efforts to hand pick rubber stamp politicians.

In 2012, a political action committee calling itself Moving Forward - allegedly a "coalition of labor unions, small businesses, public safety and firefighters associations" - poured $1.2 million into the City Council elections. All the money, however, came from Chevron. This time round, the company upped the ante threefold, but to no avail as voters saw corporate spin for what it was. Incidentally, Nat Bates, whom Moving Forward endorsed for mayor, was part of the infamous Chevron quintet.

This weekend, former Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and Harriet Rowan will be on Bill Moyers & Company to discuss Chevron's assault on democracy. Check your local listings. You can also watch the show online.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/11/12661/richmond-voters-beat-chevrons-corporate-coup-d-etat#sthash.V9HGcpp4.dpuf

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11/14

Big Oil’s influence on corporate media has American news outlets shamefully shirking climate coverage. But oil companies won’t be satisfied by merely controlling the national news. In the poor Californian city of Richmond, where Chevron wants to upgrade a polluting refinery that is wont to explode, the oil giant has started an online newspaper.

The *Richmond Standard* is a hyperlocal journalism site launched in January with the hallmarks of a typical Patch site (before said service was dumped by AOL): minimally reported stories about local crime, public meetings, and sports, told with the inverted-pyramid style of traditional news writing.

But the Standard is not your typical, well-intentioned but underfunded local reporting initiative; it’s a Chevron propaganda rag that’s run and written by the company’s flacks. *The San Francisco Chronicle* delves into the ethics of such an initiative:

The idea of the nation’s second-largest oil company funding a local news site harkens back to an era of journalism when business magnates often owned newspapers to promote their personal financial or political agendas. Now that mainstream newspapers are struggling to survive, online news sites are testing ways to fund their operations, said Edward Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

But the idea of a company sponsoring news in a community where it operates still poses problems, he said.

“The tradition of press independence — even though in many times it’s more aspirational than real — is nevertheless a cornerstone principle,” Wasserman said. The Standard “is a different model. It’s clearly meant as a community outreach effort, so it’s born in an ethically challenged area.”

The Standard claims to be Richmond’s first “community-driven daily news source” since prior to 1990, yet Wasserman’s school runs Richmond Confidential — a rival site that frequently covers Chevron. The Standard has a “Chevron speaks” section, which has so far been used to introduce the website (which it says could “blaze the trail for a new model of corporate-sponsored, community-generated news”), and tocriticize negative press coverage of its plans to upgrade the refinery. But the positive coverage of Chevron and its refinery also spills into the “News” section.

Chevron’s San Francisco-based PR consultants poached colorful crime reporter Mike Aldax away from the San Francisco Examiner late last year, hiring him to work as an account manager and to write Richmond Standard’s articles. A Chevron spokesperson described the writer as “independent,” but a recent tweet reminds us that Aldax’s loyalties lie with his client:

“Richmond residents are not going to be fooled — they know where we’re coming from,” Aldax said. “The onus is on me to provide information that’s factual and accurate.”

Note that Aldax doesn’t say anything about “balance.” As theChronicle points out, Aldax didn’t quote activists who oppose the refinery upgrade in a recent story about the project’s “robust” environmental impact report.

Perhaps we can look forward to more such ventures in other communities where Chevron operates. The *Ecuador Standard*, anyone?

Source:New Chevron website covers Richmond news, San Francisco Chronicle.

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/askchevron-the-hashtag-that-roared-and-paid/

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fedsoc repost of nat rev?

Kevin D. Williamson comments at NRO:

Chevron, which some years back was presented with a multi-billion-dollar judgment related to pollution claims in Ecuador, has been engaged in a years-long battle against a coalition of lawyers, environmental groups, and activists, and its defense has been an interesting one:Not only has Chevron rejected the specific claims against it, it has maintained that the case is the result of a criminal conspiracyinvolving those same lawyers and environmentalists, corrupt judges, bribery, and more. The company’s general counsel, Hewitt Pate, said today: “The case against Chevron was the result of fraud, bribery, and other crimes, and its aim was extortion.”

The story might have struck many as too implausible even for a B movie, but a U.S. district court today issued a remarkable opinion confirming that the judgment against Chevron is indeed the result of fraud. (The complete, 500-page opinion is here.) District Judge Lewis Kaplan writes:

This case is extraordinary. The facts are many and sometimes complex. They include things that normally come only out of Hollywood — coded emails among [lead plantiffs' attorney Steven] Donziger and his colleagues describing their private interactions with and machinations directed at judges and a court appointed expert, their payments to a supposedly neutral expert out of a secret account, a lawyer who invited a film crew to innumerable private strategy meetings and even to ex parte meetings with judges, an Ecuadorian judge who claims to have written the multibillion dollar decision but who was so inexperienced and uncomfortable with civil cases that he had someone else (a former judge who had been removed from the bench) draft some civil decisions for him, an 18-year old typist who supposedly did Internet research in American, English, and French law for the same judge, who knew only Spanish, and much more.

The questionable conduct ranges from the spectacular to the banal: There were bribed judges, to be sure, but there were also articles in The Huffington PostandPoliticoauthored by former Andrew Cuomo and DNC aide Karen Hinton, who, according to court documents, as a public-relations consultant had attempted to negotiate for herself a “success fee” of “at least 5 percent” of fees related to settlement of the case, along with a $10,000-a-month retainer and expenses. Writing in *Politico*, Hinton asked: “I do advocacy work. So why am I accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy? . . . Chevron has charged that the Ecuadorian ‘conspirators’ and their ‘co-conspirators,’ like me, lied, manufactured evidence about the contamination, and committed fraud.”

According to Judge Kaplan’s opinion, that’s about right.

What’s notable here is that Chevron’s complaint is under the RICO law, meaning that it implies the existence of an ongoing criminal organization. What we have here, if the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is correct, is the new face of organized crime, and one of the most spectacular attempts at extortion in recorded history.

I’ve been following the case for a while and will have more to say when I’ve gone through the documents, but the decision is a very bad one for everybody who had a part in the case — from prestigious law firms to environmental groups – especially those with a financial interest in its outcome. Setting aside the legal reasoning and looking only at the findings of fact in the case, a great many reputations will need reconsidering.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that Chevron has occasionally advertised in National Review, and has in the past donated to the National Review Institute.

AlterNet [1] / By Aaron Cantú [2]

Judge Rules Chevron Will Not Have To Pay Billions For Environmental Destruction

March 7, 2014 |

After securing the largest award in the history of environmental litigation, a ruling this week in a federal U.S. court has severely dampened possibility that Chevron will pay $9.5 billion in compensation to Ecuadoran farmers and fishermen most affected by twenty years of unrestrained ecological desecration in the Amazon rainforest.

United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the U.S. oil company was able to prove that the 2011 Ecuadoran ruling for indigenous peoples living in the forrested northeastern corner of the country was secured through fraud. The judgement is a blow to those who have been at the mercy of Chevron's massive oil-producing efforts for decades.

After striking oil in the northeast corner of Ecuador in 1967, Texaco (which merged into Chevron in 2001) struck a partnership with Petroecuador that would eventually lead to 220,000 barrel-a-day production between 1972 and 1992 in an area dubbed "Lago Agrio." As Texaco sucked and slurped up petrol from the ground at a maddening pace, it left an unparalleled trail of degredation deep inside the Amazonian rainforest, home to one of the world's most diverse, and fragile, biospheres.

In its twenty year reign of ecological destruction, Texaco spilled 16 million gallons of crude into the Amazon river--over three times as much spilled by BP into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010--and left "hundreds of toxic waste pits...and an estimated 18 billion gallons of waste, or 'produced,' water, which some tests have shown to contain possibly cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at levels many times higher than those permitted in the US," according to the LA Times [3]. The water sources contaminated by oil production were also those used by local indigeous groups for drinking, bathing and fishing.

In 1993, a group of lawyers representing Lago Agrio indigenous groups most affected by the pollution brought litigation against the oil conglomerate. The suit was kicked around federal trial and appeals courts in the U.S. for ten years before being sent back to an Ecuadoran court, where, in 2011, a judge ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion to the farmers and fishermen represented on the plaintiff side.

Kaplan's new ruling, the result of a countersuit filed by Chevron against the Amazon dwellers in the wake of the 2011 verdict, rests on allegations brought by Chevron that the lead attorney for the the plaintiff engaged in "repeated acts of fraud, bribery [and] money laundering" (a laughable charge coming from the second largest oil company in the United States) sends a message to those whose livelihoods have been uprooted by coporate malfeasance: Money and influence will always enable the rich and powerful to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat.

Han Shan, a U.S. spokesman for the plaintiffs, issued the following statement on Kaplan's judgement:

While the Ecuadorans respect the rule of law in all countries, they do not accept this court’s jurisdiction nor this ruling. The affected communities long ago gave up hope that a U.S. court would provide them relief from Chevron’s contamination, which has taken their loved ones, poisoned their lands, and imperiled their cultures.

However, there remains hope for successful verdicts for the Ecuadoran plaintiffs in other litigation pending against Chevron in Brazil, Argentina and Canada. A Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in December that "the 47 villagers have the right to pursue Chevron’s Canada assets," according to Bloomberg News [4]. The other cases are pending.

See more stories tagged with:

chevron [5],

oil [6],

petroleum [7],

indigenous [8],

ecuador [9],

Lago Agrio [10]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/judge-rules-chevron-will-not-have-pay-billions-environmental-destruction

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/aaron-cantu-0

[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/20/opinion/op-feige20

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-04/ecuador-judgment-against-chevron-ruled-a-fraud-by-u-s-.html

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chevron

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oil-0

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/petroleum

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/indigenous

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ecuador

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/lago-agrio

[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

Or not: Chevron Appalachia deemed the last option an appropriate gesture of goodwill for the residents of Greene County, Pa., where a natural gas well exploded into flames last week. In a letter to 100 residents dated last Sunday -- proof that Chevron employees will work even on the Lord’s Day to ensure that those wronged by their explosions can still enjoy a delicious cheesy treat -- the Chevron Community Outreach Team acknowledged the accident and enclosed a gift certificate redeemable at Bobtown Pizza for a “Special Combo Only.” To those Greene County residents who perchance desired mozzarella sticks: Better luck next time.

THIS STORY CONTINUES