Energy in Depth EID
no merri
SEE TWO BAK
energy in depth
primary on WSJ, FTI, frack?
not technically a trade front gp like api, but look at all mjr players
thehill?
bak txt html indep assessments
===
attack city lawsuits
ctr-? attack climate CIC kert davies gober = legal suppression / slapp
ctr-? attack Oreskes and Westervelt
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context, conspiracy in 2 senses?
https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Inside-Exxon-Mobil-s-fight-to-stop-climate-12994450.php
BUSINESS
Inside Exxon Mobil’s fight to stop climate change litigation in its tracks
James Osborne
Staff Writer
June 15, 2018
[FILE - In this May 31, 2006 file photo, an ice sculpture fashioned by protesters, to demonstrate their view of how the company's policies are affecting the environment, slowly melts outside the Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday, April 13, 2018, that Exxon Mobil must hand over documents for Attorney General Maura Healey's probe into whether the company misled investors and consumers about what it knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)]
WASHINGTON — Imagine this storyline: One of the largest oil companies in the world becomes the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, funded by wealthy liberals who convince Democratic attorneys general across the nation to sue the company to stop it from offering different views about climate change.
What sounds like the stuff of a bad Hollywood thriller is, in fact, the narrative Exxon Mobil’s attorneys are telling as they seek to defend the company from mryiad lawsuits and investigations into what oil companies knew about climate change and when they knew it. With a surprising procedural victory in a Texas court recently, Exxon is attempting to gain greater latitude in what it and other oil companies can say — or not say — about climate change and the impact on their businesses, seeking to build on legal rulings that have expanded corporations’ rights of free speech in recent years, legal scholars say.
The U.S. government has long limited First Amendment protections for corporations, prohibiting them from making false statements to further business interests — a staple of U.S. consumer protection laws going back to the days of snake-oil salesmen peddling so-called magic elixirs. But Exxon’s case could test how far the courts are willing to go to uphold governments’ ability to regulate commercial speech.
Exxon is arguing that the state and local governments suing the company have gone too far, trying to impose an Orwellian code of conduct to drown out those who call attention to uncertainties about how climate change will play out over the long term and affect the global economy.
“Exxon is framing (climate change) as a legitimate political debate in which they are a participant, rather than a for-profit company trying to make a buck,” said Tamara Piety, a law professor at University of Tulsa. “There has been a growing movement (among corporations) to raise the First Amendment. If something can be proven to be unconstitutional it’s completely off the table”
Over the past two decades, companies have successfully used the free speech strategy to challenge government regulations on everything from the placement of workplace signs explaining employee rights to the distribution of patients’ medical data. A key win for corporate America came in 2010 Citizens United case, when the Supreme Court ruled that limits on corporate spending in political campaigns violated companies’ free speech rights.
Now Exxon is seeking to expand corporate rights one step further, arguing that the government legal action, based on the company’s past statements, is little more than leverage to get oil companies to agree to a wide-arching climate change deal that would restrict what they can say about the issue — in violation of “of Exxon Mobil’s constitutional rights.” That includes investigations launched by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general into whether Exxon lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of climate change to the environment and its business, and lawsuits filed by cities and counties in California and Colorado, which are seeking damages from Exxon and other oil companies for the costs of rising sea levels and increased wildfires.
Exxon in January asked a state court in Fort Worth to order more than a dozen city and county officials from California to sit for depositions by Exxon’s attorneys to determine whether they are conspiring with plaintiffs’ attorneys and environmentalist activists to force Exxon into accepting a deal. A New York federal judge in March dismissed a similar request by Exxon to depose the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, ruling it was based on “extremely thin allegations and speculative inference,” but the Texas judge, R.H. Wallace Jr., decided to give the company more room to prove its claim, ruling in April that Exxon could begin making requests to depose specific officials.
Exxon declined to comment. But James Coleman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, said Exxon, which has come out in support of the Paris climate accords and a national carbon tax, is simply protecting its First Amendment rightsto communicate about climate change and the effects on its finances as it sees fit.
“It’s an unusual claim (by Exxon) but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” he said. “The government can make you give accurate information, but the government can’t force you to say things you disagree with. For instance, the government couldn’t make Exxon say climate change is the defining challenge of our time, even if they consider it a fact.”
San Francisco and other California communities are challenging Wallace’s ruling in the Texas 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, potentially setting the case on a path to the Texas Supreme Court. And considering the political makeup of the state’s high court, Exxon stands a good chance of winning its argument, said Tom McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who sits on an advisory board to the California plaintiffs.
“It presents a very sympathetic venue,” he said. “It’s a pro-business Supreme Court.”
Conspiracy
The case in Texas comes three years into a legal campaign against Exxon and other oil companies. In Exxon’s telling, it all stems from meeting of environmental activists in the beach town ofLa Jolla, California, in 2012.
Activists and attorneys discussed a strategy for addressing climate change based on the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, which successfully argued tobacco companies were liable for smokers’ deaths because executives knew the risks but still claimed publicly they did not, according to an account of the meeting published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that helped organize the event
If Exxon and other oil companies could be shown to have known the risks to health and safety of climate change but did nothing to warn the public and investors, then perhaps activists could create a groundswell of public outrage to change the political and economic landscape for oil companies, much as they had for tobacco companies.
“We wrote up a report so other lawyers and policymakers could pick up on those lessons (from tobacco) and use them, like you would any science you would hope is actionable,” said Peter Frumhoff, head of policy and science at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The first tenet of good science is being transparent.”
But the activists also gave Exxon a potential weapon to counterattack.
The company’s lawyers have focused on one line in the Union of Concerned Scientists account, in which activists describe how they could could use litigation for “maintaining pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.” That game plan, Exxon lawyers said, was then adopted by government prosecutors, including former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse.
Wallace, the Texas judge, agreed with the company lawyers, writing that environmentalists who attended the La Jollameeting “aimed to chill and suppress Exxon Mobil’s speech.”
California and Colorado officials dismiss Exxon’s legal maneuvers as little more than intimidation tactics aimed at frightening and bogging them down in paperwork. A spokesman for the New York Attorney General’s Office called Exxon’s strategy an attempt to “distract and deflect from the facts at hand.”
Public opinion
Within conservative circles, Exxon’s conspiracy message seems to be gaining traction.
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Earlier this year, David Bookbinder, an attorney with the libertarian Niskanen Center, filed suit against Exxon and the Canadian oil company Suncor, claiming they were responsible for the costs sustained by Colorado local governments in fighting wildfires and other effects of climate change.
:{:{}:
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A few weeks later, he began seeing his name pop up on conservative websites, including theDaily Caller and one owned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Articles suggested Bookbinder and his colleagues were part of a conspiracy funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a New York charity with more than $800 million in assets that is overseen by the descendants of the late oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was the precursor to Exxon Mobil.
The claim was based on a $200,000 grant the Niskanen Center received shortly before the Colorado lawsuit was filed. Bookbinder said the grant had nothing to do with the lawsuit and scoffed at the idea his plaintiffs were part of a conspiracy to damage Exxon.
:{
}:
“My clients don’t want Exxon out of business,” he said. “Then they don’t get paid.”
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund said in a statement that it does consider a willingness to take oil companies to court in awarding grants to climate activists. “Litigation is one tool that can help to level the playing field by leaning into legal standards that are meant to serve the common good,” the statement said.
In its legal filings, Exxon maintains that the Rockefellers and the hedge fund billionaireTom Steyer, who is funding a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump, are behind the wave of litigation. Exxon lawyers cited a $30,000 campaign donation Steyer made to a former mayor of San Francisco shortly before that city filed suit, as well as a Columbia Journalism School investigation into how Exxon’s past statements questioning climate science conflicted with what its scientists were saying internally.
The Rockefeller Family Fund, another charity controlled by Rockefeller descendants, funded the Columbia investigation.
There’s nothing illegal about using money to try to influence a company’s behavior. But that’s besides the point for Exxon. Just as climate activists succeeded in convincing more Americans that climate change is a large and growing threat, Exxon wants to promote the idea of a liberal conspiracy to undermine a fossil fuel industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and literally fuels the U.S. and global economies.
Exxon is now considering an appeal of a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that found the state’s attorney general’s office had not violated the company’s constitutional rights when it demanded the company turn over documents. Such an appeal would go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Exxon’s success in convincing the public of its liberal conspiracy narrative could make the difference between winning and losing.
“I don’t think the Supreme Court is completely oblivious to public opinion,” said Piety, the Tulsa law professor, “and the more Exxon can marshal public opinion, the better chance they have of convincing the courts.”
energy in depth BS 12/19
SPENCER WALRATH
Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations Center (CIC) is at it again, trying to create a scandal by releasing cherry-picked documents from Imperial Oil’s publicly available archive, even as CIC was slammed by anon-profit group [CALLER "fdn" https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/05/climate-investigations-center-misrepresented-nonprofit-taxpayers-bill/]Thursday for “using dishonest and potentially unlawful business practices and wasting tax dollars to engage in its investigations.”
Anti-energy activists have spent years trying (unsuccessfully) to prove #ExxonKnew. This week was more of the same—literally—as DeSmog Blog and the CIC launched another collection of documents from an ExxonMobil Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil.[FRANTA?] Lost in the hype was the fact that the documents are as stale as the story the activists are stilltrying to sell and have been publicly available for years.
The posted documents include more than 300 pages of company reports, a letter to the Canadian government, and development plans, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s and found in the Imperial Oil archive at The Glenbow Archives, the largest non-governmental archival repository in Canada. All of this material has been publicly accessible for years–the only really “new” aspect about CIC’s trove of documents is that they are digitized.
Nevertheless, CIC and DeSmog are trying to pitch the release of the docs as a trove that sheds new light on Imperial’s (and by extension ExxonMobil’s) climate research and correspondence. That doesn’t hide that these claims are as warmed over as Thanksgiving leftovers.
Again, all of these documents have long been publicly accessible. They have been available to researchers for years, first at the Glenbow Library and then at the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary. Climate activists know this because they have visited the archive before. As the CIC admits, DeSmog first visited the Imperial archive in late 2015. Other materials from the Imperial archive were used in reporting by InsideClimate News in 2016. They even were part of the Rockefeller-funded LA Times/Columbia Journalism School stories that helped lay a foundation for the climate liability lawsuits.
That hasn’t stopped climate activists from attempting to make hay out of the different approaches ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil took on climate policy. Their attacks conveniently disregard that the two companies operate in different countries, facing different regulatory and business environments.
The CIC’s interest in the inner working of Imperial Oil and ExxonMobil is more than a little hypocritical, since the center itself is funded through passthrough donations and a sea of dark money.
Recent reporting by the Washington Free Beacon uncovered that, despite describing itself as “a not-for-profit association of writes and advocates,” the CIC has never registered as a non-profit with the IRS. It also does not produce annual reports, or otherwise list its funders or disclose its parent organization.
Rather than registering as a nonprofit, CIC exists under the umbrella of Our Next Economy, a group founded in 2009 by John Passacantando, who worked with CIC founder and president Kert Davies at Greenpeace and Ozone Action before that. The deceptive arrangement allows CIC to obscure its funders. While the CIC does not appear to receive direct support from groups like the Rockefeller Family Fund, Tide Foundation of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, these groups dramatically increased their support for Our Next Economy in 2014, coinciding with the founding of CIC.
Between September 2010 and August 2017, the Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF) donated nearly $5 million to Our Next Economy through payments to independent contractors earmarked for “program coordination.” For the first three years, these payments ranged between $180,000 and $320,000, but jumped to more than $1.5 million per year after CIC’s founding.
The SMF itself has received major donations from key funders of the climate litigation campaign, including the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The RFF has also promoted previous CIC document dumps and invited Passacantando and Davies to its 2016 strategy session plotting how to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil by “creating scandal.”
CIC is even facing a complaint from D.C.-based free market organization FreedomWorks, which argues that the center misrepresents itself to federal agencies to obtain documents through FOIA requests without paying for them. The CIC “is brazenly asking federal taxpayers to repeatedly foot their bill so they can engage in fishing expeditions into the annals of government records for the purpose of attacking the private entities they are averse to,” according to a lawyer representing FreedomWorks.
“Climate Investigations Center appears to be nothing more than a well-funded attack website that advances the agenda of its unknown financial backers,” the lawyer added. The :{Daily Caller:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{ News Foundation:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: also reports that Daviesappears“to be engaging in undisclosed lobbying activities.”
Ironically for a man seemingly obsessed with transparency, this isn’t the first time Davies has been accused of trying to obscure his funding and operations. In addition to his work with CIC, Davies is also on the board of the organization behind Climate Liability News, an anti-oil and gas website funded by dark money that promotes climate lawsuits against energy producers. That group, which is incorporated in Washington D.C., was subject to a separate complaint earlier this year that accused the organization of failing to register as a foreign business in Maryland, where it is located and conducts its business.
The CIC’s latest document dump adds nothing new to the case activists have been trying for years to build against ExxonMobil. Rather than mounting a new case, they are left reposting old documents to new websites in the name of transparency while engaging in multiple tactics to hide their own financial backers and work around federal disclosure requirement
REF unidentified "non-profit" above, tho ID'delsewhere
https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/05/climate-investigations-center-misrepresented-nonprofit-taxpayers-bill/
no lnx
ENERGY
Environmental Group Misrepresented Itself As A Nonprofit In Order To Stick Taxpayers With The Bill For Its Open Records Requests
Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Holds "Fridays For Future" Event In Denver
DREW JOHNSON
NATIONAL DIRECTOR, PROTECT INTERNET FREEDOM
December 05, 2019
An attorney for FreedomWorks filed a complaint against Climate Investigations Center, an environmental activism organization, alleging that it misrepresented its nonprofit status to take advantage of FOIA requests.
Allegedly, the Center files FOIA requests for information on organizations it opposes and also requests a fee waiver as a nonprofit, even though it is not listed as one in the IRS database.
Climate Investigations Center has submitted in numerous FOIA requests involving energy corporations and think tanks involved with the energy industry as well as testified at House hearings on climate change.
An environmental activism outfitfocused on attacking energy companies and exposing funding for so-called “anti-environmental” organizations is using dishonest and potentially unlawful business practices and wasting tax dollars to engage in its investigations, critics claim.
According to its website, Climate Investigations Center “was established in 2014 to monitor the individuals, corporations, trade associations, political organizations, and front groups who work to delay the implementation of sound energy and environmental policies that are necessary in the face of ongoing climate crisis.”
Chris K. Gober, an attorney representing D.C.-based free market organization FreedomWorks, argues Climate Investigations Center’s efforts to “monitor” its opponents in public policy discussions include misrepresenting itself to federal agencies in order to collect documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at no expense to the Center.
Gober filed a complaint with the Department of Justice on behalf of FreedomWorks accusing Climate Investigations Center of defrauding taxpayers.
[A girl kisses a makeshift Earth during a march for the climate in Bordeaux, southwestern France on December 8, 2018. – Thousands of people were participating today in climate marches in several cities in France. (Photo by NICOLAS TUCAT / AFP) (Photo credit should read NICOLAS TUCAT/AFP via Getty Images)]
The complaint claims the Center requests massive numbers of government documents from federal agencies using the FOIA process. Climate Investigations Center then requests a fee waiver — allowing the organization to receive the FOIA documents at taxpayers’ expense — on the basis that the outfit is a nonprofit.
A review of the IRS charitable database, however, indicates that Climate Investigations Center has never received a nonprofit status from the federal government. The group is also not registered or incorporated as a charity or business in any state.
Kert Davies, the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center did not respond to emails asking for clarification about the structure of the organization. The organization also failed to provide evidence that the Center is a federally registered nonprofit.
The federal government makes documents available through the Freedom of Information Act in order to broaden the public’s understanding of the actions of the federal government. Gober believes information collected and disseminated by Climate Information Center “does not accomplish this task.”
“Climate Investigations Center,” Gober wrote, “is brazenly asking federal taxpayers to repeatedly foot their bill so they can engage in fishing expeditions into the annals of government records for the purpose of attacking the private entities they are averse to.”
One of the Center’s broadest and most burdensome FOIA requests asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to provide digital copies of all emails containing any mention of two large oil and natural gas pipeline projects that were sent or received by a former official in the agency’s Office of Policy over a 49-month period. Due to the expansive and inexact nature of the request, EPA employees were still working to compile documents for Climate Investigations Center nearly seven months later.
In addition to the FOIA fee waivers received by the EPA for this and other requests, the Center has improperly requested and received fee waivers from the Justice Department, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, according to the complaint. (RELATED: DOJ Requests Information That Could Identify Trump Official Behind ‘Anonymous’ Op-Ed)
[HONG KONG, HONG KONG – MARCH 15: Students hold placards and shout slogans as they participate in a protest on March 15, 2019 in Hong Kong, China. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)]
“Itappears that Climate Investigations Center uses the FOIA process to secure government records related toentities averse to its apparent commercial interests, and that it then posts and distributes this information to cause commercial harm to the private subjects of the government records,” Gober said.
In addition to apparently misleading federal agencies in order to receive public records at no cost, Climate Investigations Center appears to have taken extreme measures to mask its supporters and sources of funding.
The organization’s website domain is registered through a proxy server that intentionally conceals the identity of those involved in purchasing the domain name and setting up the website. Climate Investigations Center also does not list a physical office address, only a post office box in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.
No fewer than 78 articles appear on the Center’s website related to funding of corporations and nonprofits engaged in influencing climate and environmental policy. One article demands ExxonMobil publish recipients of the company’s corporate giving.Others attack conservative think tanks and other political nonprofit organizations for receiving money from donors with investments in the energy industry.
In an interview with the Energy and Policy Institute, Davies criticized a conservative foundation for refusing to disclose its donors. “There’s no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them,” Davies complained.
Climate Investigations Center, however, fails to publicly disclose its own donors.
The Center does not solicit donations on its website. In fact, there is no clear way to contribute to the organization, indicating Climate Investigations Center has a stable, reliable source of financing.
Davies did not respond to emails asking how the Center is funded and requesting a list of donors.
Jason Pye, the Vice President of Legislative Affairs for FreedomWorks,said Climate Investigations Center is operating under a hypocritical double standard. “Climate Investigations Center is guilty of hypocrisy,” Pye said. “It’s clear the left doesn’t play by the rules. If any conservative or free-market organization did what Climate Investigations Center has done, there would be cries for donor disclosure laws.”
In addition to failing to publish its sources of funding, the Center also does not reveal salaries for top officers, and hides the identity of its board members. Such information is commonly available for both for-profit businesses and non-for-profit organizations – particularly those engaged in advancing transparency and accountability.
“Climate Investigations Center appears to be nothing more than a well-funded attack website that advances the agenda of its unknown financial backers,” said Gober.
The Center’s staffers may also be violating federal lobbying rules.
Neither Davies nor Climate Investigations Center’s other employee, investigator and freelance reporter Dan Zegart, are registered as lobbyists, but they appear to be engaging in undisclosed lobbying activities.
In the last year, both Davies and Zegart have been in attendance at [PUBLIC? VIDEO?] House subcommittee hearings about climate change, according to sources at the hearings. According to a Congressional staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, Davies was overheard saying he got Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to appear at the hearing. He also boasted of plating a question that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asked about the Koch brothers. (RELATED: Greenpeace Co-Founder: ‘Climate Crisis Is Not Only Fake News. It’s fake Science)
In his complaint to the Department of Justice, Gober asks that no more fee waivers be granted for Climate Investigations Center’s FOIA requests and calls for an investigation into the Center for misrepresenting itself as a nonprofit.
Pye said taxpayers should be reimbursed for the cost of providing FOIA records to the Center under false pretenses.
“Climate Investigations Center should be responsible for paying the FOIA fees they would’ve paid without the improper fee waivers.”
Tags : department of energy freedom of information act justice department
DREW JOHNSON
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[big defeat the mandates popup; malware?]
REF SEP complaint
CLIMATE LAWSUIT PROMOTERS DINGED FOR FLOUTING STATE LAWS
AUGUST 22, 2019 | SPENCER WALRATh
the organization behind Climate Liability News (CLN), a dark money anti-oil and gas activist website set up to promote climate lawsuits, may be violating Maryland state law, according to the *Daily Caller*. A complaint filed by attorney Cleta Mitchell alleges that CLN’s parent organization failed to register with its home state and asks state officials to investigate the organization and consider fining the group and its directors for violating state law.
Climate Liability News is a project of Climate Communications and Law (CCL), a non-profit incorporated in Washington, D.C., onApril 26, 2017. The complaint provides evidence that CCL’s corporate status was revoked by D.C. as of May 19, 2019, but says CCL filed to have its status reinstated earlier this month after the revocation was brought to its attention.
Though CCL is incorporated in D.C., its business address is located in Frederick, Maryland, and a November 2018 filing with the IRS states that it conducts business in Maryland. Mitchell notes in her complaint:
“Maryland law requires all business entities, including non-stock corporations, doing business in the state of Maryland to register with the Department of Assessments and Taxation…Any corporation formed under the laws of a jurisdiction other than Maryland must register as a foreign business in the state of Maryland prior to doing any interstate or foreign business in Maryland…No such registration has been filed by Climate Communications & Law.” (emphasis added)
The complaint calls on the Maryland Secretary of State and the Director of the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation tofine CCL for failing to register and to “initiate proceedings for misdemeanor violations of Maryland law against the individual directors of the organization, Kert Davies, Richard Wiles, and Alyssa Johl,” which could result in individual fines.
Davies, Wiles, and Johl are all central figures of the climate liability campaign against energy companies through CCL and affiliated groups. Davies, for instance, runs the shadowyClimate Investigations Center and has spent over 20 years digging through energy company files in hopes of finding evidence of something that could lead to legal action. Davies also participated in the infamous January 2016 strategy session hosted by the Rockefellers where activists laid out their plans to expand the #ExxonKnew controversy into legal action against the broader oil and gas sector.
Wiles and Johl are the leaders of the Center for Climate Integrity, another shadowy group that has engaged in a massive PR campaign to promote climate liability litigation. The Rockefeller-funded group has hosted panels promoting the lawsuits, released a report designed to pressure coastal cities into suing energy companies, purchased billboards advocating for climate litigation, and produced a podcast to amplify activists (including Kert Davies).
Wiles also hired a lobbyist in Florida to arrange meetings between public officials and the lawyers seeking additional plaintiffs for their climate lawsuits. The lobbyist told Ft. Lauderdale city officials that his client, Wiles, “was trying to collaborate with” the lawyers representing other cities in their climate liability lawsuits, according to emails obtained by the :{Florida Record:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:. Neither Wiles nor any representatives of his organizations are recorded attending any of the meetings arranged by the lobbyist. The lobbyist did not reply to the Florida Record’s multiple requests for comment on the discrepancy of being hired by one group to lobby for another.
The complaint against CCL is not the first evidence that has surfaced of climate litigation activists appearing to sidestep state laws. The *Washington Free Beacon* reported last year that a representative ofSher Edling,a law firm representing multiple plaintiffs in climate liability lawsuits against energy producers, asked Miami Beach officials to move their conversations offline, specifically to prevent their communications from being made public.
Emails obtained [FOIA? FEES?] by the Free Beacon show Sher Edling’s Charles Savitt emailing two Miami Beach officials to schedule an appointment, adding, “Given state law, let’s talk rather than me send you anything.” That email was followed by an even more explicit message: “Given public records laws it is much better for us to talk on the phone.”
wow bizarroworld rubber glue ~ lawsuits:
https://:{eidclimate.org:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/an-orchestrated-campaign/
no date no name mucho italics
Lawsuits that focus on climate liability—suing companies to make them pay for climate change damages—are part of a long-running strategy by anti-oil and gas activists. However, this campaign is far from a grassroots effort. It’s funded and directed by wealthy donors, and its activists are well-connected with scholars, journalists and politicians who subscribe to the “keep-it-in-the-ground” philosophy.
Well-devised and generously funded environmental campaigns are nothing new. But from the very beginning, the climate litigation campaign has been different. This campaign started with an argument that ExxonMobil had known about climate change long before the public and even the United States government but had tried to cover up this knowledge and mislead the public. This “Exxon Knew” argument was thoroughly debunked and failed in the courts. Yet the #ExxonKnew campaign had a lasting effect and expanded beyond focusing solely on ExxonMobil. It has grown into a well-funded and highly-coordinated collection of activists, politicians, lawyers, academics and pay-for-play journalists, and they have created an echo chamber not just as a vehicle for advocacy, but also to prod government officials to open investigations into oil and gas companies, whom they believe they can harass into obsolescence.
The key goal of the #ExxonKnew campaign according to the agenda of a meeting held at the Rockefeller Family Fund is, “To establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”
To meet this goal, activists have targeted the company and the entire industry in various ways to create and amplify the #ExxonKnew narrative and obtain internal company documents. Activists partnered with friendly state attorneys general to investigate the company and make use of their vast subpoena powers to gain unprecedented access to internal company documents and attempt to build a legal case. The NY AG is one of the few AGs to continually investigate for years and ultimately filed a lawsuit—under a completely different legal theory than when the investigation was opened. Activists also partnered with lawmakers in Congress who initiated additional investigations. Finally, activists recruited municipalities around the country to file nuisance lawsuits against a handful of energy companies to further increase pressure on the industry.
Activists’ Playbook
The origins of the climate litigation campaign go back more than a decade, but activists began forming a unified strategy—the #ExxonKnew campaign—during a June 2012 conference in La Jolla, California. At the conference, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute held a strategy session on how they could develop a legal campaign against energy companies that mirrored successful lawsuits against big tobacco companies. According to the activists, success hinged on obtaining internal company documents from ExxonMobil and using them to craft a narrative that misled the public about their knowledge of climate change in a long shot attempt to create liability for the company.
Attendees included top environmental campaigners, lawyers with a history of suing the oil and natural gas industry and lawyers who were involved in successful lawsuits against major tobacco companies.
The workshop attendees identified how strategic litigation could bring internal company documents into the public domain, which activists could then use to develop new narratives against the targeted companies. Their goal from the beginning was to use litigation to obtain internal company documents that could be used to discredit the industry in the eyes of the public according to a summary report that the workshop attendees published:
“One of the most important lessons to emerge from the history of tobacco litigation is the value of bringing internal industry documents to light.”
The first suggested means of obtaining internal documents was through legal avenues—including recruiting friendly state attorneys general to launch investigations under racketeering laws.
“State attorneys general can also subpoena documents, raising the possibility that a single sympathetic state attorney general might have substantial success in bringing key internal documents to light.”
Phase 1:Environmental activists begin finding their “sympathetic state attorneys general”
As documents made available through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have shown, activists present at the La Jolla conference have been aggressively meeting with state attorneys general and encouraging them to launch a campaign against ExxonMobil, just as they said they would in 2012.
One log of correspondence shows that Lee Wasserman with theRockefeller Family Fundcontacted the NY AG frequently in early 2015 regarding the “activities of specific companies regarding climate change.” The Rockefeller Family Fund has bankrolled groups like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and InsideClimate News, all of which have played prominent roles in attacking energy companies over climate change.
In a July 21, 2015, email to a fellow activist, Peter Frumhoff with the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “we think there’ll likely be a strong basis for encouraging state (e.g. AG) action forward, and in that context, opportunities for climate scientists to weigh in.”
Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica emailed the Maryland Attorney General’s office in November 2015, offering to brief him on “the potential consumer related complaints and other authorities re: ExxonMobil.”
In a July 2016 forum hosted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, climate activists including Naomi Oreskes and several representatives from the Union of Concerned Scientists admitted they had been meeting with state AGs who launched climate RICO investigations for over a year.
Phase 2: Groups publish pre-conceived “news” stories to give AGs a hook for investigations
The timing of the actions by the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists are important, because they preceded publication of major reports that suggest those actions were indeed part of a broader political campaign.
On September 16, 2015, InsideClimate News published the first article in its #ExxonKnew series, falsely alleging that ExxonMobil had reached definitive conclusions on anthropogenic climate change in the 1970s but hid their research from the public. A few weeks later, on October 9, 2015, the Los Angeles Times published another article that was nearly identical in focus and tone, written by students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Both InsideClimate News and the Columbia program received large sums of money from Rockefeller-linked foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund, who have funded nearly every aspect of the #ExxonKnew campaign.
InsideClimate News, in its cover letter for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize, described the Columbia team’s work as “completely independent” of theirs, but conceded that the Los Angeles Times’ story “corroborated our accounts.” However, two months before the Pulitzer cover letter was submitted, E&E News reported that both teams knew of each other’s pursuit of the same story.
Documents obtained in public records requests have also confirmed that InsideClimate News, far from an objective news source, was an active participant in the #ExxonKnew campaign all along. Prior to publication of one of its stories in September 2015, David Sassoon—InsideClimate News’ publisher—emailed an embargoed version to several staffers at Climate Nexus, a Rockefeller-backed PR firm. A Climate Nexus staffer then emailed a group of activists calling for government prosecution of climate skeptics, adding that the #ExxonKnew story would provide the “perfect news hook” for their effort to go after “deniers.”
The InsideClimate News and Columbia teams’ work attracted attention because these organizations had published previously unheralded documents, providing an obvious media hook, which was also a key tactic outlined during the La Jolla conference in 2012. Sassoon even told the Pulitzer committee that his team had “unearthed” the papers.
But many of the documents, reports, and memos cited in the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News reports were procured from ExxonMobil’s own public archives at the University of Texas, as well as peer-reviewed academic journals. However, the Rockefeller-backed entities had done their job: the public discussion was now on these “key internal documents,” as the La Jolla activists had envisioned it.
Within weeks of these reports’ publication, the most “sympathetic” state attorney general—Eric Schneiderman (D) of New York—announced he had opened an investigation into ExxonMobil’s statements on climate change. In the months that followed, attorneys general from Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands announced their own probes.
The same day that the NY AG issued its subpoena, InsideClimate News referenced a “person familiar” with Schneiderman’s investigation, who told the group that the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News reports made the issue “more ripe” for an investigation of ExxonMobil.
Less than a week later, in response to questions referencing the reports from InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, Schneiderman told PBS that “the public record is troubling enough” that “we decided we had to bring this investigation.”
Phase 3: With attorneys general in tow, activists seek to amplify campaign with “delegitimize” strategy
On March 29, 2016, Schneiderman, flanked by several other state attorneys general and former Vice President Al Gore, held a press conference announcing an “historic state-based effort to combat climate change.” During the press conference, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced that she would launch an investigation of ExxonMobil, basing her decision on information learned through the InsideClimate News and Los Angeles Times reports. But her comments suggested she had already determined ExxonMobil’s guilt before her investigation had even begun:
“Fossil fuel companies that deceived investors and consumers about the dangers of climate change should be, must be, held accountable. That’s why I too have joined in investigating the practices of ExxonMobil. We can all see today the troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew, and what the company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public.”
The #ExxonKnew activists, however, had played a key role behind the scenes prior to that press conference.
As *Reuters* reported in April 2016, the AGs present at the press conference “received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks.” Reuters went on to describe this as a “previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisors.” Those advisors included Peter Frumhoff from the Union of Concerned Scientists and Matt Pawa, who previously “litigated against Exxon in a global warming case,” according to Reuters. Frumhoff helped organize the 2012 La Jolla conference, while Pawa had been a key presenter on possible legal tactics.
When asked about the meeting, Lee Wasserman from the Rockefeller Family Fund said the coordination should be “considered a good thing—not a conspiracy.”
But that was not the only coordination. A leaked memo from a meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s offices in New York detailed a January 8, 2016, strategy session that brought together folks like Bill McKibben and Jamie Henn of 350.org, Kert Davies, Sharon Eubanks, Bradley Campbell of the Conservation Law Foundation, Carroll Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law, Naomi Ages of Greenpeace, and—once again—Matt Pawa.
The goals listed on the agenda included establishing “in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution,” and to “delegitimize [ExxonMobil] as a political actor.” They would also consider which strategies would be ideal for “creating scandal.”
Phase 4: The truth comes out, but the climate litigation campaign continues
In June 2016, facing public backlash and concerns about threats to the First Amendment, the Virgin Islands’ AG withdrew his subpoena alleging that ExxonMobil knew about climate change. In October 2016, a federal judge issued a discovery order to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to determine whether “bias or prejudgment” influenced her decision to initiate a “bad faith” investigation into ExxonMobil. The judge referenced Healey’s remarks at the press conference with Al Gore, and how her comments suggested she had prejudged the outcome of her investigation. In November, the judge extended that discovery order to include Schneiderman.
Emails obtained under Freedom of Information requests have also shown that many of the state AGs invited to the March 29, 2016, press conference with Schneiderman and Al Gore actually refused to join the #ExxonKnew campaign, over concerns about its scope and intent.
David Kaiser of the Rockefeller Family Fund and Valerie Rockefeller Wayne of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund appeared on *CBS This Morning* in December 2016 and confirmed what InsideClimate News and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism had repeatedly denied: they funded those groups with the explicit purpose of writing the original #ExxonKnew pieces.
When asked about the Rockefellers funding the #ExxonKnew reports a few months earlier, Lee Wasserman from the Rockefeller Family Fund told :{Reuters:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: that their support was more general in scope:
“We supported public interest journalism to better understand how the fossil fuel industry was dealing with the reality of climate science internally and publicly…No specific company was targetedin our push to drive better public understanding and better climate policy.”
But Kaiser and Wasserman then admitted the exact opposite, writing in the :{New York Review of Books:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in December 2016:
“With help from other public charities and foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), we paid for a team of independent reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to try to determine what Exxon and other US oil companies had really known about climate science, and when. Such an investigation seemed promising because Exxon, in particular, has been a leader in the movement to deny the facts of climate change.”
That same month, Kaiser and Wasserman finally disclosed in a separate column that they met with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and pressured him to launch an investigation:
“…the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) informed state attorneys general of our concernthat ExxonMobil seemed to have failed to disclose to investors the business risks of climate change. We were particularly encouraged by Schneiderman’s interest in this matter,because New York’s Martin Act is arguably the most powerful tool in the nation for investigating possible schemes to defraud.”
Today, the #ExxonKnew campaign continues, but thewealthy donors and environmental activists who manufactured the controversy have little to show for their years of work.
Perhaps frustrated by the lack of progress from the state attorneys general, the La Jolla activists have adjusted their strategy. They have convinced several cities and counties, mostly in California, to sue energy companies over alleged “damages” from climate change. But that new tactic may be backfiring: the municipal plaintiffs are suing for damages that they downplayed to their own investors, raising questions about possible securities fraud. Several of the plaintiffs misrepresented evidence and were called out by a federal judge. New York City is suing oil and natural gas companies for causing climate change, even as it uses oil and natural gas to mitigate climate change. [WAIT, WHAT?]
KPFA 4/8/22 rus? 80% us POLL WANT REDUCE PLASTIC
heated 320
it took Maine Governor Janet Mills 12 days since the first case of novel coronavirus hit to implement the type of restrictive social distancing policies scientists overwhelmingly recommend to halt disease spread, including the closure of nonessential businesses.
It took her only five days, however, to **delay the state’s ban on single-use plastic bags**, using a scientifically questionable theory that reusable bags pose an outsized risk of spreading COVID-19.
Since Mills’ March 17 order, reusable grocery bags in Maine have become taboo. City officials are now discouraging shopping from bringing them to the store, claiming they will threaten grocery story workers. “According to current research and understanding, COVID-19 can survive on various surfaces for hours and in some cases days,” Portland City Manager Jon Jennings said in a news release last week.
And though Mills was the first state governor in America to give credence to this theory, she hasn’t been the last. Over the weekend, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu outright prohibited shoppers from bringing reusable bags to stores. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker did the same on Wednesday. “From now on, reusable bags are prohibited and all regulations on plastic bag bans are lifted,” he said.
This, however, is likely just the beginning of the plastic industry’s war on reusable bags. Because as the pandemic has picked up steam in America, so too has the industry’s push for policy and culture shifts to encourage single-use plastics, and ban reusable alternatives. Their allies in the news media, oil and gas industry, and conservative think tank world are all quickly lining up behind them—and together, they’re putting pressure on the public and the federal government get on board.
Last week, the Plastics Industry Association asked the Department of Health and Human Services to make a national pronouncement supporting single-use plastics and advocating against reusable grocery bags, claiming they will worsen the pandemic. “Study after study after study have shown that reusable bags can carry viruses and bacteria, spread them throughout a grocery store, and live on surfaces for up to three days,” they claimed.
But those three studies don’t actually say what the industry claims. Taken together, they do not provide sufficient evidence that reusable grocery bags pose a greater threat to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic than single-use plastic grocery bags.
Let’s go through them one by one.
1) The 10-year-old American Chemistry Council-funded study that looked at 84 reusable bags in two states and found no disease-causing bacteria
The first piece of research that the plastic industry says strongly suggests a correlation between reusable grocery bags and coronavirus spread was this 2010 study funded by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group which represents plastics interests. Conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona, it was published in the journal Food Protection Trends in 2011.
Analyzing just 84 reusable bags collected in California and Arizona, the studies authors concluded that “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half.” They did not, however, find any pathogenic bacteria or strains of E. Coli that actually make you sick. As Consumer Reports noted at the time, “They only found bacteria that don’t normally cause disease, but do cause disease in people with weakened immune systems.”
“A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study,” Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumers Union, said in the article. “These bacteria can be found lots of places, so no need to go overboard.”
The reason there was bacteria on the bags was because people didn’t wash them. If people washed the bags, the study said, 99.9 percent of all bacteria was destroyed.
2) The study that looked at 30 reusable bags and said essentially the same thing
The second study, published in the international journalFood Controlin 2019, found microbes capable of causing food-borne illness on the bags. This time, half the bags tested had coliform bacteria on them and some even had E. coli.
This makes sense, again, because the bags had a bunch of food in them, and were not washed or sanitized. As Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist told Bustle at the time, “Reusable shopping bags, like anything, can accumulate micoorganisms from the environment. Unless the bag is visibly soiled, most of the risk is not worth worrying about.”
Of course, this means coronavirus could be on your bag, because coronavirus can live on plastic surfaces for up to 3 days. But neither of these studies indicate that it has any greater risk of being on your reusable bag than, say, your money, your phone, or your hands, which also get a lot of use at the grocery story. Nor do they indicate that reusable bags made of plastic have a greater risk of holding the virus than single-use plastic bags, which could be infected with pathogens during transportation, manufacturing, or handling.
Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University, told the Wall Street Journal something similar, when talking about how companies like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts have stopped filling customers’ reusable cups out of fear of coronavirus. “It’s drawing a pretty long bow to believe this will be meaningfully impactful,” he said. “It’s an incredibly low likelihood that the cup would be the primary vehicle for transmission to occur.”
The article added: “Coronavirus can survive for a period outside the body and is transmitted through droplets like those generated by a cough or a sneeze. If a cup is infected, its owner probably is too, said Mr. Wolfe, making handing over cash and touching door handles potentially just as risky.
“You’d have a better impact if you told customers with active coughs not to come in, or to use hand sanitizer before approaching the coffee stand,” he said.”
3) The study that looked at one reusable bag that someone had literally vomited next to in a bathroom and then gave to a group of children.
Yeah, honestly, like I can’t even go there with this one. You can read about that study here.
Also, coronavirus is not a norovirus. It is literally not the same thing.
No evidence, no problem
There is certainly a chance that coronavirus could live on our reusable grocery bags if those bags come in contact with an infected person—particularly if those bags are made of plastic. A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the novel coronavirus ismoststable on plastic surfaces.
But that also includes single-use plastic surfaces, said Aaron Bernstein, the director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment. “This suggests that relying on plastic bags may be the best way to ensure the virus persists in the environment and facilitates spread of the disease.”
Clearly, there is still a debate to be had over the efficacy of plastic bag policies for coronavirus—especially since plastic bag bans in themselves are attempts to address climate change and ocean pollution, two other pressing global crises. It would be foolish to prematurely stop an attempt to address two global crises without a baseline sort of consensus that it would even remotely help the other.
The right and its allies, however, appear to have made up their minds.Energy in Depth,a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute, wrote an article claiming coronavirus will spread without more single-use plastic bags. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journalhave written editorials in support of reversing bag bans. Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative anti-climate group, is taking out ads on Facebook claiming that plastic bag bans help spread the coronavirus infectioN.
[graf twt]
it makes sense why so many right-leaning interest groups would come together on this issue. Before coronavirus, single-use plastic products were falling out of favor, as studies showed they were exacerbating climate change and destroying the ocean. Now, the industry is hoping COVID-19 will make everyone forget all that.
“As the coronavirus spreads across the country, single-use plastics will only become more vital,” Plastics Industry Association President Tony Radoszewski said in a statement last week. “We live longer, healthier, and better because of single-use plastics.”
Bernstein, however, is hoping that we remember something else. “In a crisis, we need science to guide us,” he said. “And that means science done by credible investigators who are supported by organizations without a vested financial interest in a specific outcome of their research.”
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wash exam bedad quotes dhs rept but does not link to it (i can find nowhere online) also cited by EID (nope, eid links to WT)
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY WARNS OF ECO-TERRORISM THREATS ON PIPELINE
BY NICOLE JACOBS APR. 19, 2017 1
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a new report warning that the $900 million Diamond Pipeline — which will carry crude oil from Cushing, Okla., to a refinery in Memphis, Tenn. — could be the target of eco-terrorism attackssimilar to those against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The DHS report explains,
“DHS and the authoring fusion centers assess the most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline construction project or associated entities is from environmental rights extremists motivated by resentment over perceived environmental destruction.” (emphasis added)
The report also states,
“While most opposition activity related to pipeline construction remains nonviolent and lawful protest activity, some violent extremists may take advantage of lawful gatherings to attempt to threaten, incite, or commit violent acts against public safety officers or facility staff.”
As EID recently explained, #NoDAPL-style protest camps have been set up in multiple states to oppose pipeline and oil and natural gas infrastructure projects. Many of the same #NoDAPL protesters who left behind big environmental messes and added to already burdened municipal budgets that taxpayers are forced to pay for in North Dakota are now traveling to these copycat camps.
A #NoDAPL camp in North Dakota. Source: NPR
DHS acknowledged in the report that the agency “is concerned negative perceptions about enforcement against DAPL opponents could inspire likeminded individuals to seek out reprisal violence against similar targets” and that these attacks would “likely be simple and designed to damage physical infrastructure or equipment by sabotage or arson” targeting “law enforcement, private contract security guards, or construction personnel,” as was the case in previous attacks against pipelines.
The DHS report explains that “environmental rights extremists have a long history of using arson attacks to inflict economic damage and disrupt projects or infrastructure they believe present a danger to the environment.” The multiple arson attacks against DAPL detailed in the report are listed below.
- “On 1 August 2016, unknown individual(s) set fires in Iowa’s Jasper County targeting heavy machinery at three construction sites associated with DAPL, resulting in over $1 million in damages to equipment, including a bulldozer and a track hoe, according to media reporting. According to media reports citing local law enforcement, the fires damaged the vehicles’ engine and cab compartments, likely resulting in a total loss of the equipment. There have been no arrests or claims of responsibility for the attacks, which were the first local criminal incidents related to the project.”
- “On 15 October 2016, unknown individual(s) committed a fourth arson against DAPL construction equipment in Jasper County, according to local news reports. According to media reporting citing local law enforcement, there have been no arrests. The attack occurred in the same area as one of the August arsons and involved similar tactics, possibly suggesting it was related to the earlier arsons. The arson resulted in over $2 million worth of damage. In both the August and October attacks, the targets’ proximity and relationship with DAPL, and the tactics, techniques, and procedures used suggest this incident was plausibly carried out by environmental right extremists. “ (emphasis added)
The report explains that although other methods such as homemade bombs or improvised explosive devices (IED) are not frequently used in attacks against pipelines, these types of weapons were recovered from #NoDAPL camps. From North Dakota’s :{Valley News:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px"):}::
“Law enforcement say they are investigating the use of homemade explosives at a Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest. They have recovered weapons and are investigating whether or not they are related to injuries a female protester suffered.”
…
“Law Enforcement received information that protesters were using one-pound propane cylinders as explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation with support from Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms recovered three of these propane canisters from the site of the explosion.
Investigators also collected rocks and glassjarsconsistent with the design of Molotov cocktails that were used as weapons against law enforcement.” (emphasis added)
https://www.valleynewslive.com/content/news/Propane-cylinders-recovered-at-explosion-site-of-DAPL-protest-402544435.html
Homemade explosive device recovered from #NoDAPL camp. Source: *Valley News*
While this report focuses specifically on one pipeline, its cautionary message can be applied to any of the projects currently facing opposition from extremists involved in the Keep It In The Ground movement (KIITG), who have a goal to stop all fossil fuel development by any means necessary. Whether or not these copycat camps leave a path of environmental destruction like they did in North Dakota or are successful in harming local contractors’ equipment with their well-documented tactics remains to be seen.
There are some certainties in the wake of what occurred in North Dakota, however: there will be extremists among the peaceful protesters and the local communities in their path will carry the financial burden of all of the protesters’ actions.
TAGS:
Department of Homeland Security, Diamond Pipeline, eco-terrorism, Energy In Depth, nodapl, pipelines
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ref
https://www.valleynewslive.com/content/news/Propane-cylinders-recovered-at-explosion-site-of-DAPL-protest-402544435.html
Propane cylinders recovered at explosion site of DAPL protest
Posted: Nov 22, 2016
:{:{
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odd no byline?]
:{:{
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MORTON COUNTY, N.D. (Valley News Live) – Law enforcement say they are investigating the use of homemade explosives at a Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest. They have recovered weaponsand are investigating whether or not they are related to injuries a female protester suffered.
Law enforcement say around 3:00 a.m. November 21, protester activity had de-escalated near the Backwater Bridge, but they noticed two males and a female using a barricade to hide their activity.
Officials say they gave repeated orders for the three people to come out from behind the barricade and they attempted to force them out with “less than lethal” bean bags and sponge rounds. It was then the officers noticed the protesters approach and roll multiple metallic cylinder objects.
“The subjects were given opportunities to retreat back, but it became obvious that they were tampering with the vehicle or planting a device,” said Highway Patrol Lieutenant Tom Iverson. “Their strange mannerisms led law enforcement to believe they were there for a purpose with a calculated effort to either cause harm or breach the line.”
Lt. Iverson says after the cylinders were rolled, law enforcement witnessed an explosion. Several protesters ran to the area, pulled a female from under the vehicle, and fled the scene.
Law Enforcement received information that protesters were using one-pound propane cylinders as explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation with support from Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms recovered three of these propane canisters from the site of the explosion.
Investigators also collected rocks and glass jars consistent with the design of Molotov cocktails that were used as weapons against law enforcement.
Meantime, a news conference and vigil were held in Minneapolis on Tuesday. In a news release from the American Indian Movement (AIM), they say Sophia Wilansky, 21, of New York, was hit in the arm with a concussion grenade and she was airlifted to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.
Wilansky underwent surgery Monday, and is currently in recovery.
"This latest escalation in excessive police force and violence against peaceful water protectors just shows what the state is willing to do to protect the interests of oil companies. A young woman almost lost her arm today so that Energy Transfer Partners can build their dangerous pipeline on Indigenous lands," said Alex Lundberg, of Minneapolis, and a friend of Wilansky.
Lt. Iverson says they are investigating whether or not the explosives mentioned above are linked to a woman who claims to have suffered injuries at a protest.
“We are aware of the information about the woman on social media who has claimed she sustained injuries to her arm due to law enforcement tactics. The injuries sustained are inconsistent with any resources utilized by law enforcement and are not a direct result of any tools or weapons used by law enforcement,” said Iverson. “This incident remains under investigation by the North Dakota BCI and ATF. Additional details will be released as the investigation progresses.”
Law enforcement also address the use of water on protesters, saying the fire department trucks were initially brought in to put out several fire set by protesters. They made the following statement about the use of water:
“Law enforcement used CS gas to control the protestors but wind conditions caused it to be ineffective. Law Enforcement commanders had to assess the violent acts of protestors and determine how to maintain the safety of officers. Those commanders made the decision to use water and warned the protestors repeatedly that water would be used and gave them opportunity to disperse.
Instead of dispersing, agitators yelled at law enforcement, “Hit me! Hit me!” and many were running directly toward the water. The water was used once protesters attempted to tow away the remaining burned truck and comments being yelled by protesters included, “We are willing to die for this,” and “We get paid for this.” The protesters were also taunting officers saying, “You are outnumbered.” This led law enforcement to believe the protesters were preparing to overrun the barricade [made of? put there when/ why?]
on the north side of the bridge. Because of this threat and that other law enforcement tactics were not effective, water was the chosen less-than-lethal tool to use to hold back protesters.”
Follow www.valleynewslive.com for updates to this developing situation.
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note forbes suggests legit?!
:{
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California officials who are suing large energy companies are telling two contradictory stories while taking part in a targeted effort featuring state attorneys general, private lawyers and Rockefeller money, a Texas judge has found.
On April 24, Tarrant CountyDistrict Judge R.H. Wallace, Jr. signed off onproposed findings of factand conclusions of law, changing little from what Exxon is claiming – that lawsuits from California cities and counties are the product of an alleged conspiracy and assert that near-certain, climate change-caused doom is coming, even though previous bond offerings made to potential investors say such catastrophes can’t be predicted.
The judge’s filingwas obtained by Energy In Depth, a research program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
“While the California municipalities alleged in their complaints against the energy companies that the impacts of climate change were knowable, quantifiable and certain, they told their investors the exact opposite,” Wallace's filing says.
“These contradictions raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose.”
The California counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond and Imperial Beach have filed suit against several energy companies - including Exxon, Chevron and BP - over climate change. The company is also being targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
Exxon took the fight to Texas in January by asking that it be allowed to depose the officials who filed these cases, as well as Hagens Berman lawyer Matt Pawa. The firm is representing some of the plaintiffs on a contingency fee.
The depositions could lead to a lawsuit alleging the California cases were brought in bad faith.
Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, Exxon argued. For example:
San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."
At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, an attorney representing Colorado governments in climate change cases noted that the bond offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.
But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims,which was noted by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney who attended the event.
The California cases came five years after a “playbook” was discussed at a 2012 conference in La Jolla, CA. It is being carried out by Pawa, the AGs of New York and Massachusetts and the California local governments, Exxon said.
The judge’s findings of fact agree.
“During the conference, participants discussed strategies to ‘[w]in [a]cess to [i]nternal [d]ocuments’ of energy companies, like ExxonMobil, that could be used to obtain leverage over these companies,” the filing says.
“The conference participants concluded that using law enforcement powers and civil litigation to ‘maintain[] pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.’ One commentator observed, ‘Even if your ultimate goal might be to shut down a company, you still might be wise to start out by asking for compensation for injured parties.’"
In 2016, Pawa met with members of the philanthropic Rockefeller Family Fund. The draft agenda said the goals of his campaign included convincing the public that Exxon is a corrupt institution that “has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” as well as forcing public officials to distance themselves from the company by refusing campaign donations and rejecting requests for meetings.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund recently awarded a $200,000 grant to the Niskanen Center, which is representing the City of Boulder in its lawsuit against Exxon and another company.
“The draft agenda notes that participants planned to use ‘AGs’ and ‘Tort()’ suits to ‘get() discovery’ and ‘creat(e) scandal,’”
OCR ERROR?] the judge’s filing says.
Those AGs attempted to hide their coordination with Pawa, the judge says.
"At the press conference, Attorney General Schneiderman discussed the need to regulate the energy industry's speech on climate change, just as Potential Defendant Pawa had urged at La Jolla and at the Rockefeller meeting," the filing says.
The judge also found that this effort was done to chill Texas-based free speech (Exxon’s statements public statements about climate change), so jurisdiction is proper in his court.
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/rex-tillerson-has-been-misleading-public-about-dangers-fracking-years
...
. It worked. With help from sympathetic (and largely conservative) media outlets and a barrage of propaganda from industry front groups like “Energy in Depth,”the industry was able to brand the victims as liars and charlatans. “Their water was always like that” became a meme—a “sciencey” explanation that let the industry off the hook and blamed the victims. Each new case got the same treatment, and with oil industry PR money behind it, much of the nation believed it.
Central to the oil industry’s branding of fracking as a clean source of energy is the claim that “there’s never been one case of water pollution from fracking.” Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exon (and now Secretary of State) looked straight into the camera and proclaimed in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2013 that after “a million data points,” there had “never been a verifiable case of fracking polluting drinking water.” The claim was patently false. At that point we knew aquifers had been polluted in Dimock Pa, Pavilion Wyoming and Parker Country Texas. Texas, Colorado, Wyoming resulting in dozens of water wells being polluted. Testing in all three cases pointed to gas extraction.
In fact, there are documented cases of fracking contaminating drinking water as early as the 1980s. An EPA report from 1987 showed that “fracturing the Kaiser gas well on Mr. James Parson’s property, fractures were created allowing migration of fracture fluid from the gas well to Mr. Parson’s water well.” Industry itself admitted that fracking polluted the well. During the 1990s when modern fracking technologies were being pioneered in Texas, widespread instances of pollution were acknowledged by Texas regulators.
But with enough people in positions of power and influence repeating it, the claim that there had never been a single case of fracking polluting drinking water became a “fact.” Media figures, oil industry officials, politicians, state regulators and gas and oil PR teams repeated the same story line: Fracking has been around for seventy years and there’s never been one documented case of pollution.
There were numerous problems with this story. First, modern slick-water fracking combined with horizontal drilling is a relatively new technology. Comparing the “stimulation” of old vertical wells to modern fracks with pressures up to 15,000 PSI and hundreds of chemicals is like comparing a 1960s rotary phone to today's iPhone.
Also left out of the not-one-case story is a clever sleight of hand with the definition of fracking. The oil industry defines “fracking” as only what happens in the horizontal section of pipe thousands of feet underground. According to this reasoning, the only way fracking can pollute drinking water is by migrating through thousands of feet of solid rock. Pollution from the vertical part of the well—where most leaks occur—or surface activity is not in this technical definition pollution from fracking.
Of course, most people understand fracking as the whole process of transporting equipment and chemicals to the site, drilling the well, extracting the gas and transporting it to market. Oil industry PR people are perfectly willing to use this confusion to their advantage. They can cite scientific papers claiming that “there has never been a case of fracking polluting drinking water,” and let the public believe they are referring to the common-sense definition of fracking as the entire industrial process.
Industry leaders like Tillerson know all this, of course. But they just keep repeating the same misleading claim. If enough “experts,” authority figures and media personalities keep repeating it, the big lie becomes a fact in people’s minds. And once it’s embedded, these everyone-knows-it facts are very difficult to dislodge.
An important part of the oil industry drive to control perceptions of fracking is demonizing its critics. Victims are portrayed as greedy fraudsters. Environmentalists are portrayed as hysterical, hypocritical busy bodies inventing scandals about a clean energy technology they should be celebrating. Filmmakers like Josh Fox, whose film “Gasland” shined a spotlight on cases of pollution associated with fracking, were subjected to withering character assassination campaigns.
The IPAA, the oldest petroleum industry association in the nation, funded a film a film to discredit “Gasland” called “Truthland.” It was a shiny spin piece that painted any case of water contamination as naturally occurring. The best known of these fracking-denial films is “FrackNation” by Phelim McAleer. McAleer has made a career out of making films depicting environments as hypocritical elitists and pollution victims as frauds and liars. A darling of conservative news outlets, McAleer has been one of the most effective proponents of fracking-has-never-contaminated-drinking-water meme. Other media figures like Alex Epstein and Ezra Levant have cashed in by writing Ann Coulter-style books popularizing oil industry talking points. Levant is famous in Canada for his shouting-head attacks on oil industry critics.
IPAA also fired up their own PR “news” outlet, Energy In Depth. In a memo announcing the new media group, IPAA stated the group’s goal; “EnergyInDepth.org: a state of the art online resource center to combat new environmental regulations,”. The venture was funded by major gas and oil interests including; BP, Anadarko, Marathon, EnCana, Chevron, Talisman, Shell, Halliburton and Schlumberger and Energy in Depth remains one of the main purveyors of the gas industry’s talking points regarding water, fracking and pollution.
When a reporter or member of the public asks if fracking pollutes drinking water, they’re likely asking if any part of the entire process contaminates drinking water. That’s logical since the entire process will be used as the nation moves forward with the planned fracked gas revolution. When the question is answered with a resounding, seemingly convincing ‘NO’, the reporter or citizen thinks no water has ever been contaminated by any part of the fracking process.
While industry has gotten away with this ruse for a decade, hundreds of cases of water contamination have become known. After a long fight, The Scranton Times got Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to count the number of letters it sent to residents confirming incidence of water contamination during their fracked gas boom. That number was 243. The Associated Press found at least four states had recorded water contamination also. One troubling fact keeps us from knowing how many cases have actually occurred. When a homeowner settles their case with the operator, they are required to sign a silence agreement that disallows them from sharing any facts about their case. Not only do we know hundreds of cases of water contamination related to the fracking boom have occurred, as it is today, we can never know how many cases there really have been.
==
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final report on the drinking water impacts of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) has provoked howls from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which blasted EPA analysts as “science deniers” pushing “fake news.” But the editorial’s deeply flawed reasoning is the latest evidence that the Journalis in denial when it comes to scientific findings that conflict with its pro-fossil fuel agenda, whether they relate to fracking or climate change.
In the December 18 editorial, the Journalmisrepresented the changes the EPA made to its draft version of the report, which was released in June 2015:
After being barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities, the EPA in its final report substituted its determination of no “widespread, systemic impact” with the hypothetical that fracking “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” and that “impacts can range in frequency and severity” depending on the circumstances.
[...]
The EPA now asserts that “significant data gaps and uncertainties” prevent it from “calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts.”
In reality, all of the findings the Journalpointed to in the final version of the report were also present in the draft version. The draft version stated that “there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources,” identified “factors affecting the frequency or severity” of those impacts, and acknowledged that "data limitations" prevent the agency from having "any certainty" of how often fracking has actually impacted drinking water.
The one change the Journalcorrectly identified was that in the final version of the report, the EPA rescinded its draft conclusion that there was no evidence fracking has “led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.” But contrary to the Journal’sclaim that the EPA disavowed that finding because the agency had been “barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities,” it was actually changed after the EPA’s scientific advisory board, which evaluates the agency’s “use of science,” pointed out that the draft conclusion wasn’t supported elsewhere in the report:
The [Science Advisory Board] has concerns regarding the clarity and adequacy of support for several major findings presented within the draft Assessment Report that seek to draw national-level conclusions regarding the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources.
[...]
Of particular concern in this regard is the high level conclusion statement on page ES-6 that “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” The SAB finds that the EPA did not support quantitatively its conclusion about lack of evidence for widespread, systemic impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources, and did not clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water), the scale of impacts (i.e., local or regional), nor the definitions of “systemic” and “widespread.” The SAB observes that the statement has been interpreted by readers and members of the public in many different ways. The SAB concludes that if the EPA retains this conclusion, the EPA should provide quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion that hydraulic fracturing has not led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.
EPA Deputy Administrator Tom Burke recently confirmed that the EPA chose to remove the “no widespread, systematic impacts” language after receiving feedback from the science advisory board, and “Burke said the EPA opted to remove the phrase because it ‘could not be quantitatively supported’ and it ‘showed that sentence did not clearly communicate the findings of the report,’" as American Public Media reported.
The Journalfurther claimed that “the EPA’s faulty construction of a monitoring well caused contamination” in Pavillion, WY, citing that situation as an example of how “any technology has the potential to inflict some damage” if mismanaged. However, that claim – which has been pushed by a fossil fuel industry front group – has been debunked by experts at Stanford University, as the Casper Star-Tribunereported: EID
Industry critics once argued samples from the EPA’s groundwater monitoring wells should be discounted because of faulty construction. But the compounds found in those monitoring wells are more commonly associated with fracking—not the cements used to encase a well, [Stanford researchers Dominic DiGiulio and Robert Jackson] say.
The Journalconcluded its editorial by asserting that it is “ironic” that liberals who “denounce anyone who cites uncertainties about carbon’s climate impact as ‘deniers’” are now “justifying their opposition to fracking based on scientific uncertainties.” As quite possibly the most frequent purveyor of climate science misinformation in the entire media landscape, the Journalhas rightly received substantial criticism for its climate denial. The difference, of course, is that there is near-universal scientific consensus that carbon pollution is warming the planet, whereas both the draft and final versions of the EPA report show that no such consensus yet exists about the impacts fracking has had on drinking water resources.
Such false equivalency only goes to show that the Journal editorial board is in denial about both climate change and fracking.
=-==
ref see below
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks
ref
https://www.desmogblog.com/%E2%80%98energy-depth%E2%80%99-was-created-major-oil-and-gas-companies-according-industry-memo
==
CF Correction: epa blew frack call b/c bound by superfund regs? nb desmog role
Back in 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a startling announcement, shaking up the battle over fracking in one of the nation’s highest-profile cases where drillers were suspected to have caused water contamination.
Water testing results were in for homeowners along Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, where for years, homeowners reported their water had turned brown, became flammable or started clogging their well with “black greasy feeling sediment” after Cabot Oil and Gas began drilling in the area. The EPA seemed to conclude the water wasn’t so bad after all.
“The sampling and an evaluation of the particular circumstances at each home did not indicate levels of contaminants that would give EPA reason to take further action,” EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a press release.
The drilling industry crowed. “The data released today once again confirms the EPA’s and DEP’s [Department of Environmental Protection] findings that levels of contaminants found do not possess a threat to human health and the environment,” Cabot said in a statement.
“It’s obviously very good news for the folks who actually live there and pretty squarely in line with what we’ve known up there for a while now,” Energy in Depth told POLITICOPro. “It’s not very good news for the out-of-state folks who have sought to use Dimock as a talking point in their efforts to prevent development elsewhere, but I’m sure they’ll be working hard over the weekend to spin it differently, notwithstanding the pretty clear statement made by EPA today.”
Now, a newly published report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry(ATSDR), part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), puts EPA’s testing results into an entirely new light.
The water was not safe to drink after all, the ATSDR concluded, after a lengthy review of the same water testing results that EPA used back in 2012.
“ATSDR found some of the chemicals in the private water wells at this site at levels high enough to affect health (27 private water wells), pose a physical hazard (17 private water wells) or affect general water quality so that it may be unsuitable for drinking,” the ATSDR’s health consultation—launched in 2011 and published May 24—concludes.
The new report lists 10 contaminants, including arsenic, lithium and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether, that are “chemicals of health concern,” at the levels found in Carter Road wells, found that five homes were at “immediate risk of fire or explosion” because of methane in their water and another dozen showed lower, but still worrisome, levels of methane and found that the water was laced with elevated levels of metals, salts and total dissolved solids.
The underlying data isn’t new to the residents of Carter Road. The EPA provided it to them individually back in 2012, which is why the EPA’s announcement that the water was safe was so baffling at the time.
“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet—I’m over the thresholds—and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” Nolan Scott Ely, one of the Carter Road homeowners, told ProPublica when EPA made its announcement. “I’m confused about the whole thing … I’m flabbergasted.”
Opposite Conclusions?
So how could two different agencies look at the exact same data and come to opposite conclusions?
“Although the same data set was used, the EPA as a regulatory agency specifically looked at whether or not it was required to take action under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as Superfund, which governs responses to environmental emergencies,” StateImpact, a National Public Radio project, explained. “The ‘health consultation’ looked at the entire data set from a public health standpoint, assessing whether or not it was safe to drink the water.”
In other words, EPA’s findings, which seemed to show that the water was “safe” and which were promoted by drillers as proof that nothing was wrong in Dimock, instead represented a very carefully parsed legal finding that the water did not reach Superfund levels of contamination for the specific substances EPA focused on.
And the EPA’s 2012 findings had left out some of the very contaminants that had caused locals the most concern—including the natural gas or methane, itself. “EPA’s investigation does not include an evaluation of the risk posed by elevated levels of methane—which continue to exist in some homes in Dimock—and which, at extreme levels and if unaddressed, can lead to explosions,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Kate Sinding wrote in a blog post at the time.
The EPA’s strained official interpretation of the data perhaps shows why EPA staff remained concerned even after the agency dropped its Dimock investigation in July 2012, just months after its testing results had been announced in March and April.
In 2013, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that EPA’s own staff had disagreed with the agency’s public statements that the water shouldn’t be considered hazardous. An internal EPA Powerpoint presentation, later obtained and published by DeSmog, showed that agency scientists had concluded that the drilling and fracking process “apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.”
The ATSDR’s new report very specifically notes that it does not look at whether the water hazards stem from drilling or pre-date Cabot’s arrival in the area. In part, that’s because of a lack of pre-drilling testing for gas and other common fracking-related chemicals in the water. “It is important to note that methane was not assessed in residential water wells prior to the initiation of natural gas drilling activities in the Dimock area,” the ATSDR wrote.
Cabot Oil and Gas emphasized their belief that methane in the water was “naturally occurring” and pre-dated their arrival in a statement provided to StateImpact. “This data is consistent with thousands of pages of water data collected by both Cabot and the Pennsylvania DEP and does not indicate that those contaminants detected have any relationship to oil and gas development in Dimock,” Cabot said.
The ATSDR report does often note when substances discovered in the Carter Road water are known to be associated with hydraulic fracturing or drilling industry activities, but does not reach any conclusions about whether the chemicals came from Cabot’s operations.
“It’s not their job to look at who caused whatever contamination there is,” Bryce Payne, a Pennsylvania environmental scientist, told E&E News. “It’s their job to see if there are health implications. They did that and concluded there are health implications.”
The new report is also limited to data from four years ago—and conditions have changed, the ATSDR noted, in part because a state moratorium on fracking along Carter Road was briefly lifted after the EPA dropped its investigation and locals quickly reported more changes to their water, including higher levels of methane.
Cabot Oil Settles
In August 2012—right around the time that EPA abandoned its investigation—Cabot Oil and Gas announced it had settled the vast majority of lawsuits against it by Carter Road residents for an undisclosed amount of money and under terms that barred the plaintiffs from speaking negatively about their experiences with the company.
This March, a federal jury handed down a $4.24 million verdict to the remaining two Carter Road families, concluding that the water was in fact contaminated because of the negligence of the drilling company. Cabot has begun the process of appealing that verdict.
But while the legal filings and agency reports continue to stack up, the problem on Carter Road remains the same as it has for many years now.
While those who settled with Cabot had water treatment systems installed by the company, locals familiar with those systems say that even the treated water seems too contaminated to drink and the water treatment systems break down frequently.
The ATSDR’s report provides recommendations that water should have been treated to address dangerous contamination levels—but those recommendations are not binding and the agency noted that while the state government collected samples more recently, the ATSDR did not have access to the newer data.
Community organizers are still calling for the federal government to resume an active role, arguing that the groundwater remains undrinkable.
“We’re demanding that they reopen the investigation,” Craig Stevens, a local organizer, toldDeSmog after the March verdict was announced, “and also get water to these people.”
http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/03/dimock-water-unsafe-fracking/
http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/marcellus/2012/07/Endocrine-Disrupters-and-All-That.pdf
ENDOCRINE DISRUPTERS, PLASTICS, DIOXIN AND DEATH —
WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT?
Fear Profiteers, 45
===
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
Director at FTI Consulting Strategic Communications
Washington D.C. Metro Area
Writing and Editing
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FTI Consulting Strategic Communications
Previous
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, University of Notre Dame
Education
Trinity College, Dublin
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Summary
Communications professional working in the oil and gas industry with extensive on-the-record experience, including print, TV, and radio. Accomplished speechwriter/ghostwriter.
Experience
FTI Consulting Strategic Communications
Senior Director, Energy and Natural Resources
FTI Consulting Strategic Communications
April 2013 – Present (3 years 2 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area
At FTI Consulting I serve as the Team Lead and spokesperson for Energy In Depth, a research and education program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. http://energyindepth.org/
Press Secretary/Speechwriter
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
September 2010 – January 2013 (2 years 5 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area
University of Notre Dame
National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Notre Dame
August 2008 – May 2009 (10 months)
Education
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin
Ph.D., English
University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame
B.A., English/ Music
Volunteer Experience & Causes
Mentor
Southeast White House Mentoring Program
September 2013 – Present (2 years 9 months)Children
Causes Katie cares about:
Arts and Culture
Environment
Politics
Publications
:{ "The Tone of Defiance": Music, Memory, and Irish Nationalism
Memory Ireland.}:
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
:{How fracking has helped the US lead on climate
The Hill}:
December 2015
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
As GHGs Plummet Thanks to Natural Gas, Ban-Fracking Groups and Elected Officials Peddle Misinformation about Methane
Energy In Depth
January 2016
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
EPA Advisors Contradict Themselves on Landmark Fracking Study
Energy In Depth
January 2016
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
:{ VIDEO: Drill Our Way to Lower Gasoline Prices, Mr. President? Yes We Can.
Energy In Depth}:
January 2016
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
Report: Earthquakes Linked to Less than One Percent of All U.S. Injection Wells
Energy In Depth
November 2015
Authors:
Katie Brown, Ph.D.
EPA’s crumbling case for new regs on fracking
The Hill
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Katie Brown, Ph.D.
--
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Halie Bishop
--
Michael Morrison
Director of Digital Media at Institute for Energy Research
Roy Brown
George Nishikawa
MPA/MSES Candidate at Indiana University SPEA
Matthew Dempsey
Managing Director at FTI Consulting
Christian Moran
Steve Everley
Managing Director at FTI Consulting
Michelle Williams
Counsel at Clifford Chance LLP
Kelly Lungren
Chief of Staff at United States House of Rep
==
- Most of the PR push-back on Gaslandappears to be coming from an oil and gas lobby group calling itself "Energy In-Depth"whose anonymous website lists other oil and gas lobby groups, like American Exploration and Production Council, the Indiana Oil and Gas Association and the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, as their members.
While the members ofEnergy in Depth might be listed, who is actually running the day-to-day operations and mounting the attack on Gasland is a bit of mystery.
No contact information, phone number, mailing address or anything else telling us who is organizing the group can be found on the website.
A little digging, finds that the website is registered to a Washington, DC public relations firm called FD Americas Public Affairs (formerly FD Dittus Communications).
FD's clients include other oil and gas lobby groups with one in particular that stands out, the American Energy Alliance, run by former Republican staffers Eric Creighton, Kevin Kennedy and Laura Henderson. The Energy Alliance ran an "Energy Town Hall" bus tour last summer attacking the Obama administration's Clean Energy and Security legislation.
As FD explains on their website:
We have managed successful public affairs campaigns for clients on complex energy policy issues such as climate change, increased energy exploration and production, carbon capture and storage, electricity deregulation, natural gas prices, renewable energy development, and business and consumer energy efficiency.
An email that was forwarded to me gives a little further information on who's behind the PR push.
The email was sent by the Senior Public Affairs Representative for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation - one of the world's largest independent oil and gas companies - saying that the company is "actively engaged with groups like America's Natural Gas Alliance, Energy In Depth and the American Petroleum Institute to educate the public, government officials and other stakeholders about the errors in the film, and the truth about natural gas."
In public relations, it is always a bit of a tricky decision about when to begin countering your opponents' message. If you hit back too early, you may give the story "oxygen" and inflame a controversy that may have gone away if ignored. But if you wait too long to counter your opponent you risk jumping in too late and losing the war of words. The trick is to watch for the tipping point.
Looks like the tipping point for Gasland's opponents was last night's HBO screening, so watch out because we're all about to subjected to more spin than the teacup ride at Disneyland.
===
==
Halliburton goes after fracking critics; hires tobacco-linked PR firm
24 Feb., 2011
WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (HalliburtonWatch.org) -- Last week, Desmogblog outed Halliburton and other oil/gas companies, who together set up "Energy in Depth", an industry front group that claims to represent "small and independent" operators.
EID's web site was registered by a PR firm experienced in working for companies engaged in scientific deception (e.g. Big Tobacco). EID was set up to fight back after investigative journalists began to expose problems with hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") -- notably ProPublica, as well as the producers of the Oscar-nominated documentary,"Gasland," Also: read how the industry has blocked federal regulations.
http://energyindepth.org/
Registrant Contact Information:
Name: Dittus Communications, Inc.
Organization: Dittus Communications, Inc.
Address 1: ATTN insert domain name here
Address 2: care of Network Solutions
City: Herndon
State: VA
Zip: 20172
Country: US
Phone: +1.5707088780
Email: 
Registrant Contact Information:
Name:Chris Tucker
Organization: FD Dittus Communications
Address 1: 2320 Wisconsin Ave NW
Address 2: APT 305
City: Washington
State: DC
Zip: 20007
Country: US
Phone: +1.2023468825
Email: 
@fd.com
===
http://www.prwatch.org/node/11943
efore Gus Van Sant's latest film Promised Land even premiered, the energy industry was up in arms, gearing up to counter the film's apparent anti-fracking stance with a barrage of "community" responses (read: thinly veiled corporate PR). James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features the distributor of the film, expressed shock about the attacks on Promised Land: "We've been surprised at the emergence of what looks like a concerted campaign targeting the film even before anyone's seen it." With blogs, astroturf websites, Facebook pages, internet ads, and theater ad buys in advance of the movie, the industry is working hard to spin the conversation in a more fracking-friendly direction.
The film chronicles the story of a gas industry salesman, played by Matt Damon, and his attempt to convince the residents of a rural Pennsylvania town to agree to fracking development. The questions raised by actors in the film mirror the debates taking place in communities across the country. What type of chemicals are used in fracking? What is the effect of fracking on air and water? While the industry may make a few struggling families rich, what is the cost for the community as a whole?
Conveniently, the fracking industry has launched a number of websites to answer these questions for you.
Energy in Depth Launches "Real Promised Land" Site
The fracking industry was caught unprepared by the brilliant, 2010 documentary Gaslands by Josh Fox, whose indelible images of tap water bursting into flames introduced fracking to the American public. Having learned their lesson, the industry was not eager to repeat its mistakes.
Before it was even released, Energy in Depth (EID) took issue with the new movie, which is not a hard-hitting documentary like Gaslands and has more romantic content than factual content. Through a new website titled RealPromisedLand.org, EID rolled out "real stories" from "real Americans" about their positive experiences with fracking. Videos from Ohio, Colorado, Texas, and Pennsylvania highlight seemingly ordinary citizens who have benefited from fracking development in their area. On their glossy Facebook page you can learn that: "the natural gas industry takes all the safety measures possible in order to protect the earth and water from any contamination" and other tall tales.
The website does not disclose that EID was launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America to serve as the PR mouthpiece for the gas industry. As CMD has documented, EID is funded by the likes of Shell, BP, Chevron, and XTO Energy, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil. EID has also privately described itself, in a memo, as the "online resource center to combat new environmental regulations."
Industry Buys Ads for PA Movie Theaters
srcwatch:
Energy in Depth (EID) is a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) and dozens of additional industry organizations for the purpose of criticizing the documentary "Gaslands", their latest attempt being a documentary produced by a political attack ad agency for EID, the ironically titled "Truthland" [5] which was exposed as a gas industry infomercial as soon as it was released. The domain for the website promoting the film —Truthlandmovie.com — is owned by gas driller :{Chesapeake:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: Energy.[6]
EID attacks grassroots opposition to fracking as part of a conspiracy, and denounce specific legislation, such as legislation proposed by Colorado U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette to regulate underground hydraulic fracturing fluids.
Hydraulic fracturing of underground geological formations, commonly called "fracking," was invented by the Halliburton Company. It is done to increase the amounts of oil and gas that can be extracted from existing wells. The companies that specialize in shale gas development have been the target of various investigations for tending to overstate the extent of their resserves.[1] Accordingly, EID was formed to counter critics of the industry's financial and environmental practices. [2]
Energy in Depth (or EID) attempts to paint grassroots opposition to shale gas fracking as being part of aconspiracy of NGOs. How such a conspiracy applies to grassroots opposition in Quebec, Bulgaria, France and the UK is not clear - since the conspiracy theory of opposition exists primarily in Energy In Depth's Power Point presentation.[3]
Energy in Depth hires locals as bloggersand PR types with varying degrees of crediblity and effectiveness, such as Tom Shepstone, formerly an accredited land planner, now "political organizer" for EID in New York. [4] ^MIRROR
Energy in Depth tends to wrap its arguments in the flag, having denounced DeGette's proposed fracking legislation as an “unnecessary financial burden on a single small-business industry, American oil and natural gas producers.” In June, 2009, Energy in Depth started a multimillion dollar lobbying and public relations campaign aimed at derailing public health legislation that would require the disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking fluids. In addition to a Web site, EID's campaign includes a Twitter feed, a Facebook group, a YouTube channel and an aggressive advertising campaign.
Energy in Depth trumpets the economic benefits of shale gas industrialization - which have been grossly overstated, most recently in New York.[5] When, in New York, dry gas from shale is not currently economic. [6]
Energy in Depth is, in a sense, one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the gas industry's avowed "counter-insurgency" to attempt to discredit grass roots environmental activists; even to the extent of employing ex-military "psy-ops" specialists. :{Industry Use Psy-Ops On Critics:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:. The simplest tactic of which is to make ad hominem attacks on :{grassroots activists:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:.
Energy in Depth have been featured speakers at gas industry conferences explaining how to counteract grass roots opposition with what it describes as fracking :{"Counter Insurgents":(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: In this regard, Energy In Depth is part of a subculture of gas industry consultants that specialize in dealing with local opposition to fracking, via paid $hils
Contents |
Funders
Energy in Depth is funded by the El Paso Corporation, XTO Energy, Occidental Petroleum, BP, Anadarko, Marathon, EnCana, Chevron, Talisman, Shell, API, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Halliburton, Schlumberger and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.[7]
Website domain
The website for Energy in Depth was registered on February 23, 2009 by the PR firm Dittus Communications.[8] Dittus, which is now known as FD Americas Public Affairs, boasts on its website that "energy clients have formed the backbone of FD Americas Public Affairs’ clientele for more than a decade." Clients have included Alabama Power, American Energy Alliance, Center for Clean Air Policy, Consumer Energy Alliance, FutureGen, Georgia Power, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Institute for Energy Research, Salt River Project and U.S. Department of Energy.[9]
Background on health and safety hazards
The chemicals companies use in their fracking fluids are considered trade secrets and have traditionally been undisclosed.
Under the Bush administration, fracking was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.[10]
Fracking has resulted in the documented contamination of groundwater wells and other environmental and public health hazards. In December, 2008, the Web site "OMB Watch" reported that
Among the reports of damage to environmental and public health resulting from hydraulic fracturing are more than 1,000 cases of documented water contamination in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In addition to contamination from the below-ground drilling, leaks and spills from trucks and waste pits are also causing problems. Tracking the contamination is especially difficult because drillers refuse to disclose the chemicals being used. Despite the secrecy, some information on the chemical mixture has been pieced together. Among the identified chemicals are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene.
OMB Watch further reported that a Colorado nurse suffered multi-organ failure after being exposed to a gas worker who had been brought into the hospital soaked with fracking fluid:
The health risks from fracking chemicals was made clear in the summer of 2008 when a Colorado nurse almost died from exposure while treating a gas field worker whose clothing had been doused with the chemicals. Despite the nurse suffering from heart, lung, and liver failure, plus kidney damage and blurred vision, the drilling company refused to reveal to her doctors the "proprietary" chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. While the nurse eventually recovered, she was never told to what she had been exposed.[11]
Personnel
On its website, Energy in Depth lists[12] its press contacts as being:
It also lists its "policy contacts" as being:
Contact information
Energy in Depth
Web site: http://www.energyindepth.org/
(No physical address is given on its Web site)
General phone number: (202) 346-8825 (NOTE: This is the same phone number as the Institute for Energy Research)
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ The Shale Game by Deborah Rogers [1]
- ↑ Alexandra Kougentakis, Brad Johnson What The Frack? Gas Industry’s Multimillion-Dollar Campaign Demonizes Hydraulic Fracturing Bill, Think Progress; The Wonk Room. June 12, 2009
- ↑ Energy in Depth [2] Houston conference, 2011
- ↑ New York EID [3]
- ↑ Frackonomics
- ↑ Shale Gas Frackonomics [4]
- ↑ Barry Russell, Independent Petroleum Association of America President and CEO Hydraulic Fracturing Under Attack, memo/newsletter to IPAA members, June 5, 2009
- ↑ "energyindepth.org", Joker.com., accessed June 2009.
- ↑ FD Americas Public Affairs, "Energy and Environment", FD Americas Public Affairs website, accessed June 2009.
- ↑ Alexandra Kougentakis, Brad Johnson What The Frack? Gas Industry’s Multimillion-Dollar Campaign Demonizes Hydraulic Fracturing Bill, Think Progress; The Wonk Room. June 12, 2009
- ↑ Brian Turnbaugh Gas Drilling Threatens Public with Undisclosed Chemicals, OMB Watch, December 2, 2008
- ↑ Energy in Depth, "Contact Us", Energy in Depth website, accessed June 2009.
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Categories: Front groups portal | Water | Energy | Front groups | Grassroots | Astroturf | Public relations | Advertising | Oil industry
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/“energy-depth”-–-reporters’-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks
http://www.prwatch.org/print/11921
Published on PR Watch (http://www.prwatch.org)
Home > “Energy In Depth” – A Reporters’ Guide to Its Founding, Funding, and Flacks
Posted by LISA GRAVES [1] on December 28, 2012
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“Energy In Depth” – A Reporters’ Guide to Its Founding, Funding, and Flacks [2]
What is Energy In Depth, really? EID describes itself as "a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out" about hydraulic fracturing, widely known as "fracking." It's a website created by a trade group for the gas industry -- the "Independent Petroleum Association of America" (IPAA) -- and a public relations firm.
In short, IPAA/EID is a PR operation for the industry's multi-billion dollar financial interests in "unconventional" drilling for what is popularly known as "natural gas." Although this expanded drilling is often described as essential to our "national security," the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch has shown that the industry is increasingly exporting [3] gas to be sold in other countries [4]. IPAA/EID's PR efforts pay special attention to the "Marcellus shale" gas that lies deep beneath the surface in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and neighboring states, which constitutes a lucrative market for multi-national firms and their domestic counter-parts to exploit.
IPAA/EID's "about" page says its "supporting members" are state associations of gas producers. It displays their logos, instead of the global corporations that launched it.
What the logos cloak -- in classic PR sleight of hand -- are the larger interests behind the IPAA/EID operation.
It has been described by some in the press as merely a "pro-drilling group" (in contrast with "anti-drilling" groups or citizens), but here's how IPAA described EID in a leaked internal memo from 2009, obtained by**DeSmogBlog** [5] last year. IPAA privately told its allies that EID was its new "online resource center to combat new environmental regulations," created with funding from Shell, BP, Chevron, and more.
In other words, IPAA/EID is more accurately described as a front group launched by global gas companies in order to fight a public relations battle against new environmental protections on fracking.
Behind IPAA/EID: Some of the Biggest Corporations in the World
The leaked IPAA memo reveals that the EID campaign was created through the "financial commitments" of some of the biggest companies (with some of the worst environmental records) on the planet. To wit:
- Shell, which is the second largest company in the world in terms of revenue, with income of almost a half a trillion dollars in 2011: $470 billion, just behind Exxon. Royal Dutch Shell is a Dutch company registered in London. In 2010, Shell bought "East Resources," [6] which had gas holdings in Pennsylvania and nearby, for $4.7 billion. Shell's environmental record includes the largest fresh water spill of oil in the world (in 1999 in Argentina), a major oil spill near Alaska in 1988, and numerous spills in the Niger delta in Africa. (East Resources' founder, Terry Pegula, and his wife gave [6]at least $300,000 to Tom Corbett's campaign for governor of Pennsylvania.)
- BP, which is the sixth largest company in the world in terms of revenue, with revenue of $375 billion in 2011. BP is a British oil and gas company, which took over two US companies, Amoco and ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Company) about a decade ago. Last month, BP and three of its employees were indicted on criminal charges, including manslaughter and obstruction of Congress, in connection with the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and it also agreed to pay a $4 billion fine related to the disaster. (And, although many are unaware of it, BP's decisions also made the Exxon Valdez [7] disaster worse.)
- Chevron, which is a U.S. company that is the tenth largest in the world in terms of revenue, with income of $253 billion in 2011. Last year, Chevron obtained gas leases for over a million acres, plus hundreds of thousands of acres of development rights, from smaller companies like Chief Oil & Gas [8]. Chevron and other companies have been sued for damaging our environment through the use of the MTBE gasoline additive that has contaminated water and soil. (Chief's CEO, Trevor Rees-Jones, has been active in politics, giving at least two million dollars [9] to Karl Rove's Crossroadsoperations.)
Another corporation whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID is XTO Energy, which became a subsidiary of ExxonMobil in 2010. XTO was a billion-dollar Fortune 500 company that became the largest producer of natural gas in the US after it acquired Hunt Petroleum for $4.2 billion in 2008. ExxonMobil is the largest company in the world, with revenue of $486 billion in 2011. (Exxon's environmental record includes the notorious Exxon Valdezdisaster, and it has spent millions of dollars over the years funding groups that front industry propaganda, as documented by Greenpeace.)
Other corporations whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID include two Canadian gas companies, EnCana and Talisman, plus Occidental Petroleum (California's largest gas producer) and Marathon (now Marathon Oil Corporation, which also has major interests in gas).
Other IPAA/EID funders include Schlumberger, the world's largest petroleum field services company, which began long ago as a French firm but has been headquartered in Texas for many years. The IPAA memo also listsHalliburton, one of the world's largest oil field services companies, which helped pioneer "proprietary" fracking fluids and whose Energy Services Group is involved in supporting fracking activities. (Halliburton recently settled a criminal corruption case alleging bribery by its then-CEO, Dick Cheney, and a former subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), in connection with its natural gas operations in Nigeria.)
IPAA/EID was also launched with the financial support of the American Petroleum Institute (API), a non-profit trade group that represents many of these same interests. API had revenue of over $181 million in 2010 from "membership dues" from corporations and other sources, and it spent one-third of its income on the Edelman PR firm. According to its IRS Form "990," API gave nearly $200,000 to IPAA for "energy education" between 2008 and 2010.
Another IPAA/EID funder mentioned in the IPAA memo is Anadarko Petroleum Company, which has gas wells in Pennsylvania and Texas. Anadarko owned a 25% stake in the Deepwater Horizon, with BP, Halliburton, and others.
Anadarko made the news on fracking last year after its Public Affairs Manager, Matt Carmichael, promoted the use of military "psyops" in Pennsylvania communities to combat "an insurgency" of citizens concerned about fracking (as recorded [10] by Sharon Wilson of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project). IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker tried to spin [11] those comments by claiming they were meant as a joke, despite all evidence to the contrary. Carmichael is a former senior communications guy [12] for KBR, which was a subsidiary of war contractor Halliburton.
None of these major for-profit companies or API -- the financial underwriters that launched IPAA/EID -- are listed on the campaign's website or in its description of its supporters.
IPAA/EID Targets the Park Foundation While Keeping Its Corporate Funders Secret
IPAA/EID has been on the attack against critics of the fracking that is so lucrative for its secretive financial backers.
Here's a recent example of its disinformation: the Capital Research Center (CRC) -- itself part of the CEO-fueled echo chamber -- quoted EID's flack Tom Shepstone this month implying that the Park Foundation spent more than $17 million helping to oppose fracking in just one year. Wrote CRC: "In 2009, the Park Foundation had net assets of $246 million and spent $23 million, which included $17.6 million in grants and contributions to green groups opposed to fracking, according to Shepstone," a Pennsylvanian whose official title is "Campaign Director" for EID's "Northeast Marcellus Initiative."
But, as reported [13] earlier this year, the Park Foundation's public filings show that only a fraction of that amount was spent on grants for projects to educate the public about fracking. The total for 2009 was approximately $700,000, which is 1/25th of what Shepstone claimed. In contrast, the industry's biggest trade group, API, spends over a $180 million a year on its entire budget, including tens of millions of dollars on PR.
This is not the first time Shepstone has had trouble with numbers. In 2000, a court approved his federal bankruptcy after he and his wife racked up more than $725,000 in debt as compared with their assets -- described as a house on five acres (valued at $125,000), a new car loan for a Chevy S-10 Blazer, and $200 worth of clothes, although he attested that they made almost $90,000 annually a few years earlier -- with some personal debt including some debt related to his businesses, described as "Shepstone Management Corp." in Honesdale and "North Country Farm and Gardens Corp.," at 160 Roosevelt Highway in Waymart. They were also subject to an IRS tax lien for more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes attributed to "Tom Shepstake" and his wife in 1996, a claim that was later settled. Americans do, of course, have the right to declare bankruptcy when their financial calculations go awry and get a second chance, like Shepstone.
CRC used Shepstone's recent math on Park to buttress the absurd thesis that "Environmentalists often depict themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting the power of entrenched special interests. But the case of the Marcellus Shale -- and the untold energy resources that could be recovered safely by new drilling technology such as fracking -- pits 'the little guy' against powerful 'green' forces such as the Park Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council."
Like IPAA/EID, CRC keeps many of its big funders secret, although foundation filings show that its funders have included the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the family foundation of the CEO of the multi-billion dollar Koch Industries -- which in turn is led by Charles and his brother David Koch and is one of the richest privately held gas, oil, and chemical companies in the world. Koch Industries has reaped undisclosed profits from ventures benefiting from expanded fracking, such as from the lower cost of the natural gas used as a feeder to make its fertilizer by Koch Nitrogen, one of the Koch companies.
Only in the distorted worldview of CRC does an industry made up of some of the most profitable corporations in the history of the world -- ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and more -- get portrayed as "the little guy" fighting for fracking against a putative Goliath in the form of the Park Foundation.
In contrast to Shepstone's dramatically inflated figures, "[s]ince 2008, the foundation has given at least $2.8 million to groups and publications fighting shale drilling," according to EnergyWire. That cumulative spending is less than a quarter of what Shepstone claimed the Park Foundation spent in one year alone.
But such efforts to discredit the growing grassroots movement of citizens concerned about fracking -- such as by insinuating that it's all about "buckets of money" from Park, according to Shepstone -- are particularly deceptive when made by operations like CRC and IPAA/EID, which don't disclose the identities of their major funders such as the for-profit businesses that paved the way for EID's campaign.
Uncloaking the Revenue Stream of IPAA's PR Machine
Because EID was created as an operation within the IPAA, it does not file its own IRS Form 990 tax form, and so its true revenues and expenses are hidden from public view.
What is known is that, in 2010, IPAA had revenue of more than $8 million ($8,714,606) and spent almost the same. This revenue and expense rate is relatively consistent with the two preceding years.
IPAA is described as a trade association organized under 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code. It shares space and staff with its "IPAA Educational Foundation" (IPAAEF), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which means that in general contributions to the latter can be counted as a charitable tax deduction by its donors. IPAAEF has annual revenue of almost a half million dollars a year, and it reports paying a "management fee" to IPAA of a little more than $200,000 a year. IPAAEF describes its activities as including grants to fund students "as interns at petroleum companies." According to its Form 990, one of IPAAEF's main activities each year appears to be its "Wildcatters Ball," which cost $227,270 in 2010. IPAA also hosts an annual golf tournament that costs almost $200,000.
IPAA has assets worth over $8 million, as of the end of 2010. It invested about $6.5 million of this in publicly traded securities. It did not disclose the identities of these stocks or bonds and whether any of its investments are related to the gas industry. In 2010, it reported investment income of about $215,000.
IPAA was also listed in a publicly filed licensing agreement [14] in 2002 between the FBR Family of Funds and the "IPAA Energy Index." According to that agreement, "the FBR/IPAA Energy Index Fund is a series of a registered open-end management investment company whose objective is to track the price and yield performance of publicly-traded common stocks of companies represented by the IPAA Energy Index. The Fund is a no-load mutual fund, and its assets are invested by FBR Fund Advisers, Inc." There is little public information about what happened under that agreement or whether or not IPAA has other relationships with investment funds or groups speculating on fracking. It has showcased presentations on capital investment in fracking featuring information from investment bankers like Goldman Sachs.
As a non-profit organization, IPAA's tax benefits under the federal tax code are predicated on it not being "organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which [can] inure[] to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual." There is no public information indicating whether or not any of its employees invested in the FBR Fund or other energy funds, stocks or other investment vehicles, or whether it has any policy barring its employees from such investments or land speculation in fracking regions. It has no published conflict-of-interest policy on this issue, but there is no legal requirement that it adopt one (other than for conflicts involving payments from the non-profit entity to people related to principals in the organization).
In 2010, IPAA received $3.8 million from membership dues and most of the remainder of its $8 million budget from program fees for nearly two dozen conferences a year. IPAA's annual dues for gas companies are calculated on a sliding scale based on the "Barrel of Oil Equivalents" (BOE) and range from $4,000 to $60,000 per year depending on whether a company's BOE is under 750,000 or more than 50 million BOE. By reference, Anadarko Petroleum, a funder of IPAA/EID that is described as one of the world's largest oil and gas exploration firms, "had production of 206 million BOE" as of 2008.
Companies that pay these dues can deduct 65% of them as business expenses; 35% of the dues are considered lobbying expenses. In 2010, IPAA reports that it spent $1.3 million on lobbying and political expenditures. IPAA also has a related "527"-type organization involved in political campaigns, called the "IPAA Wildcatters Fund," which had $542,639 in receipts in the run up to the 2012 elections. IPAA also told the IRS in 2010 that it had "joined forces with the Business Industry Political Action Committee," whose slogan used to be "Electing Business to Congress" and is now "Powering Business Political Success."
Who Leads IPAA/EID and for How Much?
The portion of IPAA's annual revenues or expenses that fund its EID campaign is not disclosed.
What is known is that in 2010, IPAA paid its president, Barrett (Barry) Russell, more than one-half million dollars in total compensation ($511,000 and a promise of health insurance for him and his wife for life). Russell was elected president of the IPAA in 2000. He also has seat on the board of theBusiness Industry Political Action Committee and the National Energy Education Development Project. He's been [15] IPAA's "chief legal and financial officer since 1988 and an officer of IPAA's educational foundation since its inception." He previously worked for the EPA, and he also worked for consulting firms, such as Booz, Allen and Hamilton, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.
IPAA paid another nearly one million dollars in total compensation for its next five highest paid employees combined (who each earn over $200,000 a year). This list includes Lee Fuller and Jeff Eshelman, who are specifically listed on the EID website as part of the EID team.
Fuller, a chemical engineer, is IPAA's Vice President of Government Relations, and he is listed on the website as EID's "Executive Director." He began working for [16] IPAA in 1998 after working as a lobbyist for the gas industry for 12 years following an eight-year job staffing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, where he handled rules on drilling fluids, wells, and Superfund sites. Eshelman is also a Vice President for IPAA and has served as its spokesman for a number of years.
In 2010, these and other IPAA executives got big raises, including a raise of more than $60,000 [17] for the president. The salary increases for other IPAA executives that year ranged from $21,000 per year to $53,000 per year.
There is no information in IPAA's 2010 public tax filings about what the 13 other staffers listed on its EID campaign website are paid per year because only the top highest paid staffers are required to be disclosed (and also some of the EID team are recent hires). There also appears to be no publicly posted conflict-of-interest rule in this field that would require the disclosure of any fracking-related stock or real property holdings that would benefit from limiting restrictions on fracking by any IPAA/EID team member.
Shining a Spotlight on the IPAA/EID Marcellus Team
According to the leaked memo [5] from IPAA, EID's reason for being is to serve as a "major initiative to respond to . . . attacks" on fracking and amplify "coordinated messages." Although IPAA/EID's reach is nationwide, one area where it appears to be particularly aggressive is Pennsylvania, through the blogging and outreach of Tom Shepstone.
Shepstone is described as the Campaign Leader of the EID Marcellus team. Before joining IPAA/EID, Shepstone worked primarily as a consultant writing reports for towns about land planning, at taxpayer expense. Even before he became the gas industry's campaigner in the region, he was apparently recommending industry-friendly land use rules [18], such as including a so-called "right to mine" in recommendations, expressly urging towns not to interfere with the development of natural gas, and not including recommendations for extra setback distances from property lines for industrial activities versus other structures. Shepstone was previously an IACP certified planner, which has conflict-of-interest rules, but he has said that he stopped paying dues and was not dropped by the American Planning Association.
In the period between his bankruptcy and his public association with IPAA/EID last year, Shepstone was often quoted in the press with the description "local businessman." He also wrote online comments praising right-wing diatribes. For example, he gave the highest review to the book, "The Red Decade: the Classic Work on Communism in America During the Thirties," which he said provided "[g]reat insights for those who recognize we are reliving the 1930s," and showed how those with a "liberal/leftist" mindset are prone to be "manipulated by totalitarian thugs."
In another public review, Shepstone gave the highest marks to "The Liberal Mind: the Psychological Causes of Political Madness," which he said would help readers "completely understand how Obama thinks" and explains the president as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton "in their totality." He also claimed that reading this and Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" -- a favorite boogeyman of right-wing talk show hosts -- would help "predict" President Obama's actions. The "Liberal Mind" book endorsed by Shepstone actually claims repeatedly that embracing progressive values is a mental disorder that is "the product of psychopathology," which undermines "the ability of families to raise children to be self-reliant" and "threatens to destroy the West's greatest achievement: the American dream of civilized liberty."
Given Shepstone's warm embrace of such fringe views, it is not entirely surprising that the IPAA/EID Marcellus website for the campaign he leads takes pains to try to score right-wing points in claiming that "the shale 'revolution' in the United States is impacting our 'friends' in Russia and Iran." It is also unsurprising that some of Shepstone's writings for IPAA/EID refer derisively to his fellow citizens exercising their fundamental First Amendment rights. To take a few recent examples of the tenor of his remarks, he put down an advocate asking serious and legitimate questions about the consequences of fracking in the community as an "aging activist seeking relevance in a modern world" and he also derided a community protest of 150 citizens as "a pathetic failure."
But, beyond his apparent animosity toward progressives and other concerned Americans, it is Shepstone's claims that are particularly astonishing. Here's a sampling of his disinformation sound bites:
- "Hydrofracking Improves Water Quality!" – When Shepstone made this claim at a public meeting, he was met with a spontaneous
[19] in disbelief, but he claimed it was true because more wells will be tested due to fracking than are currently monitored. In claiming fracking improves water quality, Shepstone conveniently ignores the millions of gallons of fresh water contaminated in the process of fracking each well, resulting in waste water whose "brine" is not even recommended for use on roads because of the risk of ground water contamination. He also ignores concerns that the water may become contaminated with dissolved radium due to the radioactive uranium rock in the region, requiring additional treatment, among other concerns that have been raised across the country about the potential for contamination of America's precious aquifers and the spoiling of Americans' wells. - "Natural gas produces water rather than depleting it" – Shepstone made this claim apparently based on the fact that burning methane gas or heating wet gas releases water vapor, and water is a heavier molecule than methane, but his claim ignores the fact that millions of gallons of fresh water are being pumped from aquifers and rivers to be spoiled with each fracking well, and the industry is banking on drilling thousands and thousands of such wells in the region.
- "There is no evidence the development of this resource will damage the environment . . . but plenty of evidence the farm and the woods can be saved with it" – This Shepstone claim is predicated on the notion that rural land can require money for property taxes to maintain, which he says gas leasing revenue will aid, but his claim ignores the effect of industrialization on farms, parks, and rivers, which has been documented by Oscar-nominee Josh Fox and others. Shepstone's claim also ignores other documented environmental hazards from fracking, including the
[20] and other carcinogens associated with fracking (as documented in the video at the link). - "Hydraulic Fracturing Is An Open Book" – Shepstone pushed the idea that fracking fluid "is an open book" because some of the chemicals in it have been revealed, even as he sought to minimize concerns about what secret chemicals are in dozens of pounds of ingredients used in each well that companies keep secret under the claim that they are "proprietary," chemicals he says are basically harmless jellies. Because the blend of secret chemicals is proprietary and varies by manufacturer he cannot actually prove his assertion, but that's no deterrent. He also fails to mention that IPAA has lobbied to keep such chemicals secret by opposing the closing of the "Halliburton loophole," [21] -- legislation that was mentioned in the IPAA's leaked memo discussing the need for its EID campaign. (Similarly, the American Legislative Exchange Council [22] (ALEC) has also pushed for so-called state "disclosure" rules sought by Exxon [23] to keep certain chemicals used in fracking secret from the public, as reported by the New York Times.)
These are just some of Shepstone's many claims on behalf of IPAA/EID. Curiously, but on a much more minor note, he has also written online comments pushing pro-fracking claims sometimes citing as his location towns other than where he actually resides in Pennsylvania.
Shepstone is not the only writer/speaker for IPAA/EID in Pennsylvania; he's just its most visible one. And, his trade group's pro-fracking campaign has many components in its efforts to persuade the public and discredit critics of fracking. For example, IPAA/EID has disseminated attacks on Fox's Oscar-nominated documentary, "Gasland," and his latest film, "The Sky Is Pink." IPAA/EID is also currently promoting its "Truthland" video, complete with a stand-alone website that lists both the EID and IPAA logos as if they were separate entities.
The IPAA/EID Glass House
Still, there is no doubt that Shepstone and IPAA/EID seem obsessed with both Fox and the Park Foundation. Well before Shepstone's most recent spinning of the foundation's grant numbers in a way that inflates the amount of grants for projects on fracking by combining it with the amounts in support of environmental organizations and other groups, Shepstone was attacking Park and its directors in others ways.
At one point, he even made the baseless claim that the foundation was wrongly engaged in "significant political activity," which he defined as "funding opponents of hydro-fracking." Although both his math and his analysis of federal tax law are way out of whack, one of the flaws is his contention that supporting research and public education about the risks of fracking is somehow impermissibly "political," while he ignores the manifold activities by pro-fracking non-profit entities [24] on his side attempting to prevent new laws -- which is one of the very objectives mentioned in the leaked IPAA memo. In his attacks on Park and its grantees (which operate under 501(c)(3) rules allowing for a small percentage of lobbying or which may have separate 501(c)(4) arms to allow for more lobbying and different rules for prospective donors), Shepstone is simply not a credible source for reporters or others on U.S. tax and lobbying laws.
Moreover, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy, Shepstone attempts to discredit research he claims is supported by an organization that has no financial stake in the outcome of such research, while regularly echoing industry-friendly research and claims shaped by the very interests that have the most to gain from distorting information, the industry he really serves. Meanwhile, investigators have uncovered yet more instances of purportedly independent studies by academics connected to the for-profit fracking industry, as with reports [25] that a University of Texas professor, Robert Chase -- whose studies claimed that "fracking was safe for groundwater" -- had allegedly "pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer."
Shepstone has even attempted to defend his own bias by asserting that he held the same views about fracking before he started working on behalf of the industry. Such views are not created in a vacuum, however, and were likely shaped by the natural gas industry's PR machine for which he now works.
In his effort to smear Park and those concerned with fracking, Shepstone sidesteps the proliferation of non-profit groups that peddle pro-fracking claims [26], as exposed by Dory Hippauf [27]. Beyond IPAA/EID, these include API (which has launched front groups called "Energy Citizens" and "EnergyNation"), the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Ohio Shale Coalition, America's Natural Gas Alliance, the Center for Liquified Natural Gas, energy Tomorrow, EnergyfromShale.org, energyNow!, EnergyAnswered, LNGfacts.org, SecureOurFuels.org, Oilindependents.org, the Consumer Energy Alliance, Vote4Energy.org, theAmerican Energy Alliance (AEA), the Institute for Energy Research (IER), and others.
Some of these groups work together on campaigns. AEA, for example, joined in a bus tour with David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to influence voters about fracking under the jobs frame frequently spouted by Shepstone. Due to inadequate public disclosure requirements, however, it is difficult to know who helped fund that tour besides Koch through his financial support for AFP, which he helped found and helps lead. This is just one of many ways pro-fracking groups coordinate and amplify common messages. They have even had overlapping public relations staff, as with IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker, a former GOP congressional staffer who has been described as a Senior Vice President at Financial Dynamics, as the "managing director of FTI Consulting and as team lead for Energy In Depth." For a time, Tucker was publicly listed as handling communications for both IPAA/EID and IER, "using the same phone number for both," according to DeSmogBlog's research.
Of course, according to the leaked IPAA memo, one of the goals for EID was "coordinated messages."
But, Shepstone is relatively silent on such matters and on how his public messages help facilitate that goal.
Because entities like IPAA/EID, AEA, API, and AFP are not required to disclose their expenditures with the kind of detail that a grant-making foundation is, it is simply not possible to calculate the true amount of money these various non-profit groups are spending advancing the positions of the gas industry. Although their cumulative budgets amount to well over two hundred million dollars a year, the portion funded to support fracking or attack those concerned about fracking is unknown.
But it is clear that the Park Foundation is not a for-profit corporation that would benefit financially from the success of efforts to raise awareness about the risks of expanded fracking. Conversely, the multi-billion dollar corporations and/or some of the wealthy CEOs whose foundations fund organizations like IPAA/IED, CRC, and AFP do have a financial stake in advancing fracking with the least amount of regulation possible, regardless of what may be in the best interests of the public in protecting American families' health and their access to safe drinking water and clean air in the decades ahead.
After all, fracking is big business, as IPAA/EID's Shepstone regularly stresses.
The Center for Media and Democracy has received project grants from the Park Foundation that have allowed it to provide greater documentation of fracking issues, but this report was not funded or reviewed by the foundation. The analysis in this report reflects CMD's independent assessments as an expert critic of the techniques used in the field of public relations and propaganda. For nearly two decades, CMD has been a leading investigator of corporate-funded PR campaigns that affect our environment. Its most recent award-winning investigation is ALECexposed.org.
The author of this report, CMD's Executive Director Lisa Graves, received her J.D. from Cornell Law School, in Ithaca, New York. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, as the Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Courts, and as an adjunct professor of law, among other posts.
- News [28]
PR Watch is published by the Center for Media and Democracy. © Center for Media and Democracy 2013.
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Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks
Links:
[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35268/lisa-graves
[2] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks
[3] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9130us2m.htm
[4] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11897/fracking-foreigners-new-report-feds-backs-natural-gas-exports
[5] http://www.desmogblog.com/%E2%80%98energy-depth%E2%80%99-was-created-major-oil-and-gas-companies-according-industry-memo
[6] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=East_Resources
[7] http://www.gregpalast.com/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well/
[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Chief_Oil_and_Gas
[9] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/american-crossroads-shadow-rnc.html
[10] http://www.texassharon.com/psyops/
[11] http://www.cnbc.com/id/45208498/Oil_Executive_MilitaryStyle_039Psy_Ops039_Experience_Applied
[12] http://www.desmogblog.com/gas-fracking-industry-using-military-psychological-warfare-tactics-and-personnel-u-s-communities
[13] http://www.eenews.net/public/energywire/2012/03/12/1
[14] http://www.secinfo.com/dujPe.33w.c.htm
[15] http://www.ipaa.org/about-ipaa/board-of-directors/barry-russell
[16] http://www.aiche.org/profile/lee-fuller
[17] http://wonkette.com/442001/welcome-to-poverty-everyone-you-need-household-income-of-68k-to-live
[18] http://www.wearepowershift.org/blogs/township-planning-consultant-fracker-tom-shepstone
[19] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl_5lOVoaVQ
[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov5nkkRDfGQ
[21] http://www.polluterwatch.com/category/freetagging/independent-petroleum-association-america
[22] http://www.ALECexposed.org
[23] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/us/alec-a-tax-exempt-group-mixes-legislators-and-lobbyists.html?ref=politics
[24] http://checksandbalancesproject.org/2012/12/12/report-fossil-fuel-front-groups-on-the-front-page/
[25] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/30/gas-industry-buying-academics
[26] http://blog.shaleshockmedia.org/2012/10/23/frackin-front-groups-and-pr-campaigns/
[27] http://commonsense2.com/2011/12/naturalgasdrilling/connecting-the-dots-the-marcellus-natural-gas-play-players-part-1/
[28] http://www.prwatch.org/news-types/news
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