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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: Casey Means and the MAHA takeover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 08/28/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local news vacuum enables corporate narrative control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Both alarm and concern were expressed Saturday in response to new reporting about a charitable group with close ties to the U.S. Supreme Court that has been soliciting and accepting donations from corporate interests and far-right activists with cases before the Court.

The New York Times exposé focused on the activities and fundraising of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a nonprofit that claims its mission is "dedicated to the collection and preservation" of the Court's history.

While the group refused to disclose its donors to the Times, reporters from the newspaper determine that much of the funding came from powerful companies like Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, and Facebook as well as anti-abortion activists like Rev. Rob Schenck.

According to the newspaper:

:{The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors—and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.

At least $6.4 million—or 60 percent—came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court,}: according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

In the case of Chevron, the oil giant actively gave to the society even as it had a pending climate litigation working its way through the court.

In response to the new revelations, public interest attorney Steven Donzinger, who was himself targeted by Chevron for his work aimed at holding the company to account for its polluting activities in Ecuador, said the implications were "horrifying."

"Why are these conflicts allowed?" asked Donzinger.

Others quoted by the Times said the effort by people like Rev. Schenck, who admits to using the charitable group as a way to get other anti-abortion activists closer to the justices, creates a clear conflict of interest.

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who once served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration and counts himself a donor to the Historical Society, told the newspaper was so "horrified" by Schenck's behavior that he may no longer give.

"It's disgusting," Fried said. "Many of the people who contribute have the same reasons I do. You go to a cocktail party and support a good cause. But it turns out that for some people it's not that innocent."

While the Times notes that the Historical Society is "ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government," the reality is that "the two are inextricably intertwined," with court justices serving as chair of the board and hosting gala events where exclusive access is reportedly part of the allure.

The left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the reporting raises "significant questions" about the group which has "raked in millions—a significant chunk of it from groups with cases before the Court" over the last two decades.

Fix the Court, which acts as a watchdog organization for the U.S. Supreme Court, said the justification for the Historical Society's existence just doesn't hold water.

and Gabe Roth, the group's executive director, told the Times that if money was an issue for funding such a project it would be the best solution—one free of ethical concerns—for Congress to simply appropriate the money needed to maintain the history of the Court.

richmond st'd chev newspaper

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

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

no lnx table grfx

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

[ brk windows london? ]

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams July 19, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the report:

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

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

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

According to the report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[[why only one of big 4 out front?

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

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

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

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

[no lnx]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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some lnx

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

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

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

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

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

ref

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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report

executive Summary :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

following policy issues:

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

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

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

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

alleviate pressures stemming from demand for oil and gas.

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

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

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

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

no lnx gfs

...The money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cn seems legit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Angel-CLA-2018.pdf

Cabinda and The Company: Chevron-Gulf,

the CIA, and the Angolan Civil War

Austin Angel

History

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Michael Kithinji

The history of Gulf Oil and later Chevron-Gulf1 operations in

Angola is a complex story of split alliances, nation-controlling wealth,

and the follies of organizational nearsightedness in times of conflict. The

involvement of Chevron-Gulf in Angola and the machinations of the

CIA would pull the two organizations inexorably into a miniature Cold

War against each other, with the political future of Angola caught in the

crossfire.

An examination of this conflict offers a glimpse into the

Gordian knot of mineral extraction ethics in developing countries and

the impossibility of remaining neutral as a large business in a nation at

war. It also displays the consequences of rigidly applying global

strategic objectives across every conflict without stopping to examine

the real situation on the ground.

Chevron-Gulf’s history in Angola...

. The commandos planned to frame UNITA in an attempt to mask South African action against an American oil company and to make UNITA appear more militarily capable in northern Angola. South African involvement was revealed after the interrogation of SADF Captain Wynand Du Toit at the hands of MPLA soldiers and Cuban “doctors.”19 This attack against an American civilian installation20 occurred despite the fact that at the time the CIA had a working relationship with South Africa. Stockwell revealed this in a 1987 lecture: “We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them...We had in fact formed four mercenary armies [in northern] Angola.”21

Although no US government official save Stockwell would ever formally admit to such a relationship, a 1986 US Congressional sanction preventing military support for South Africa specifically excluded intelligence and covert action support from the ban, heavily implying that such support existed or could exist.22 In declassified documents related to the Angolan Civil War,the CIA concluded that the MPLA was funding the Cuban soldiers present in the country directly using hard currency payments from Chevron-Gulf to the MPLA.23 The CIA would make that conclusion on April 22, 1985--

...

the timing is extremely questionable given the CIA’s clandestine relationship with South Africa and UNITA at the time. In addition, the CIA had attempted in 1975 to halt Gulf Oil’s payments to the Bank of Angola through legal action in the United States, but feared what legal precedent such a case would set regarding future oil concessions in Cabinda.25 A military sabotage, however, would set no such precedent. It is worth noting as well that in 1987 the CIA concluded that UNITA would be reticent to attack Chevron-Gulf directly for fear of American casualties after Operation Argon had failed.26 Throughout the entire conflict, Chevron-Gulf and the state-owned Sonangol worked very closely together. Mitro stated “Gulf was one of the few--if not the only--company that stayed active throughout the entire civil war, and that was viewed as a sign that they were interested in Angola for the long term. Some of Sonangol and the government’s officials had worked for some time in Gulf or Chevron...they knew [each other], their policies, their people.” After the passage of the Grassley Amendment, the MPLA government asked Chevron to sell a portion of their oil holdings to an Italian oil company in order to diversify Angolan income sources in the event that the American company was ordered to leave Angola entirely. Chevron...

"...they begun to realize that their presence represents...a political presence as well. They wish they could avoid that, but they can’t [sic]...they are only beginning to learn this. Officially they always wanted to be neutral. But in most cases it is almost impossible to be neutral by the nature of [their] presence. [If you are operating in the West] you are one of thousands of competing companies. But when you are an oil company in a developing country, you are the [entire] economy. Your very presence [means] taking on the role of a government.”

In attempting merely to do business in Angola, Chevron-Gulf became embroiled in a proxy war that involved at least five nations and found themselves funding an enemy of their own country’s government. Their involvement was not a sideshow, or a minor concern; rather, it was the central reason that the MPLA was able to maintain its war effort despite opposition from South Africa, UNITA, and the United States. The company emerged from the war, along with the MPLA, as one of the most embedded institutions in the country. Meanwhile the CIA’s alliance with UNITA, based solely on circumstance, led to massive US involvement in the conflict and turned 

:{

}:

a minor civil war into a proxy war with US players backing both sides of the war.The MPLA currently rules Angola. The assassination of Jonas Savimbi in 2002 ended UNITA’s guerilla war. Chevron-Gulf is still the largest private corporation operating Angolan oil fields and still provides the majority of Angolan wealth.28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLA

The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, for some years called the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party (Portuguese: Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho, MPLA), is a left-wing political party from Angola. The MPLA fought against the Portuguese army in the Angolan War of Independence from 1961 to 1974, and defeated the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) in the Angolan Civil War. The party has ruled Angola since the country's independence from Portugal in 1975, being the de facto government throughout the civil war and the ruling since its end.

Contents

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Formation:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Independence and civil war:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Human rights record:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Party organizations:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Foreign support:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Electoral history:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
  • :{6.1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Presidential elections:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
  • :{6.2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{National Assembly elections:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{7:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{In popular culture:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{8:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{See also:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
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Formation

On December 10, 1956, in Estado Novo-ruled Portuguese Angola, the underground Angolan Communist Party (PCA) merged with the Party of the United Struggle for Africans in Angola (PLUA) to form the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, with Viriato da Cruz, the President of the PCA, as Secretary General.^[2][3] Other groups later merged into MPLA, such as Movement for the National Independence of Angola (MINA) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Angola (FDLA).^[4]

...

The MPLA emerged victorious in Angola's 1992 general election, but eight opposition parties rejected the election as rigged. UNITA sent negotiators to the Luanda, where they were killed. As a consequence, hostilities erupted in the city, and immediately spread to other parts of the country. Tens of thousands of UNITA and FNLA sympathizers were subsequently killed nationwide by MPLA forces, in what is known as the Halloween Massacre, and the civil war resumed.^{[11][12][13][14]} The war continued until 2002, when UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed. The two parties promptly agreed to a ceasefire, and a plan was laid out for UNITA to demobilize and become a political party. Over 500,000 civilians were killed during the civil war.^[15] Human rights observers funded by the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity during the civil war."^[16] Political scientist Rudolph Rummel estimated that the MPLA were responsible for between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in democide from 1975 to 1987.^[17]

Human rights record

The MPLA government of Angola has been accused of human rights violations such as arbitrary arrest and detention and torture^[18] by international organisations, including Amnesty International^[19] and Human Rights Watch.^[20] In response, the MPLA government hired Samuels International Associates Inc in 2008 to help improve Angola's global image.^[21]

Party organizations

At present, major mass organizations of the MPLA-PT include the Angolan Women's Organization (Organização da Mulher Angolana), National Union of Angolan Workers (União Nacional dos Trabalhadores Angolanos), Agostinho Neto Pioneer Organization (Organização de Pioneiros de Agostinho Neto), and the Youth of MPLA (Juventude do MPLA).

Foreign support

During both the Portuguese Colonial War and the Angolan Civil War, the MPLA received military and humanitarian support primarily from the governments of Algeria, the Bulgarian People's Republic, East Germany,^[22] Cape Verde Islands, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,^[23] the Congo, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, the Mozambican People's Republic, Nigeria, North Korea, the Polish People's Republic, China, the Romanian Socialist Republic, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia,^[24] the Soviet Union, Sudan,^[23] Tanzania,^[25] Libya^[26] and SFR Yugoslavia. While China did briefly support the MPLA,^[27] it also actively supported the MPLA's enemies, the FNLA and later UNITA, during the war for independence and the civil war. The switch was the result of tensions between China and the Soviet Union for dominance of the communist bloc, which almost led to war.^[28][29]

Electoral history

In the 1992 election, MPLA-PT won 53.74% of the votes and 129 out of 227 seats in parliament; however, eight opposition parties rejected the 1992 elections as rigged.^[30] In the next election, delayed until 2008 due to the civil war, the MPLA won 81.64% of the vote and 191 out of 220 parliamentary seats.^[31] In the 2012 legislative election, the party won 71.84% of the vote and 175 of 220 parliamentary seats.^[32]

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

fOOTNOTES:

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

==

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

NO LNX grfx

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

By Sharon Kelly on Mar 22, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lobbying One Message While Advertising Another

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Influencers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.alternet.org/environment/chevron-has-avoided-justice-environmental-crimes-ecuador-and-us-can-canada-hold-it

April 17, a court in Toronto will hear the latest round of arguments in the epic legal battle between Chevron and the Ecuadorian villages that the oil company systematically contaminated for decades.

This latest chapter opens with the country’s second-biggest oil company performing the legal equivalent of the comedy trope known as “Behind a Stick,” when one or more characters attempt to hide using a much-too-thin object. In the case pending before the Ontario Appeals Court, the fat man is Chevron, and the stick is its subsidiary, Chevron Canada, which Chevron believes it can stand behind without being seen—or at least without being held liable for its crimes.

The company is claiming that, in terms of liability, neither it, nor its estimated $15 to $25 billion in Canadian assets, exists. Only Chevron Canadaexists, and any appearance of a relationship between the California-based Chevron and Chevron Canada, its wholly owned subsidiary in the Great White North, is purely coincidental.

One court in Canada has agreed with Chevron that it can’t be seen standing behind Chevron Canada. On Tuesday, the Ecuadorians will begin arguing their appeal.

The story of how Chevron came to be hiding behind a legal coat rack in a Toronto courtroom famously begins a half-century ago in northern Ecuador, where the company devastated an area of rainforest the size of Rhode Island, leaving behind an estimated 1,000 toxic waste pits and a health emergency known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

Less known are the many turns the story has taken since the Ecuadorian Supreme Court in 2013 upheld a $9.5 billion damages award.The biggest class action judgment in historyseemed to herald the arrival of a new paradigm for communities around the world seeking redress for pollution caused by strip-dump-and-split oil and mining companies.

But Chevron and the industry understood the power of this precedent, and announced that it could not stand. As a Chevron lobbyist told Newsweek, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

After losing in Ecuador, where Chevron had insisted the trial be held, it counter-sued in New York, arguing that the Ecuadorian award was based on fraud. The company’s central witness was a corrupt Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, whom the company paid $2 million dollars and coached for nearly two months prior to his taking the stand. Guerra testified that the Ecuadorians’ legal team had bribed Ecuadorian courts and ghostwrote the final decision. Guerra has since admitted he perjured himself, while a forensic report has disproved the ghostwriting allegation.

The Ecuadorians then looked north, where Chevron has billions invested in tar sands, refineries, and other infrastructure. When they filed to collect damages from Chevron Canada, the parent company countered with a string of actions to block the suit from proceeding. In the last few years, the Ecuadorians have been on a roll, winning three consecutive unanimous appellate decisions. These have been won against one of the best-funded legal efforts in history: Chevron has spent an estimated $2 billion to hire 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to target the villagers and their legal representatives since the case began.Based on Guerra’s tainted testimony, a U.S. district court judge named Lewis Kaplan ruled that the Ecuadorians could not enforce their award on U.S. soil. (They couldn’t collect it in Ecuador, either, as Chevron dumped its remaining assets in the country during the original trial.)

Which brings us to Chevron’s current “behind a stick” routine. Last year, Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice accepted Chevron’s technical argument that they and Chevron Canada are distinct legal personages with distinct assets, and that one cannot be held responsible for the other, even though they are part of the same ownership hierarchy.

“To understand the absurdity of the argument, imagine a couple gets divorced,” says John Phillips, a Canadian adviser to the Ecuadorian legal team. “If the husband set up holding companies for his assets, which he owns to the seventh level, do you think any court would hesitate for one second to distribute those assets?”

The implications of next week’s decision extend beyond Ecuador, where villagers are still waiting for the funds needed to remediate their forests and rivers. On Tuesday, the aboriginal rights specialist Peter Grant will argue that letting Chevron skate on a legal technicality will disempower other indigenous communities around the world, including those of Western Canada, which the industry has crisscrossed with pollution-spewing wells and leaking pipelines. In recognition of their shared interests, Canada’s Assembly of First Nations last year signed an historic political accord with the indigenous people of northern Ecuador.

The industry understands the magnitude of these stakes very well, of course. Which is why Chevron has spent billions rather than concede a penny to villagers and farmers living in a toxic zone without access to clean water. “If the Superior Court decision stands, other corporations will think they can walk away from potentially catastrophic environmental liabilities by setting up subsidiaries to insulate themselves,” says Phillips, the Canadian adviser to the legal team, which is led by the Amazon Defense Coalition of Ecuador (FDA), the NGO group that brought the case and is responsible for the recovery of funds. The FDA is also bringing up a delegation seven indigenous leaders and other community leaders from Ecuador to attend the Canadian court hearing alongside Phil Fontaine, the former National Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations who toured the impacted area last September.

The fate of Chevron’s scorched-earth retaliation strategy will be determined by events next week in Toronto.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and a writing fellow of the Independent Media Institute. His most recent book is The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America (Skyhorse Publishing).

https://www.ecowatch.com/chevron-lawsuit-california-climate-science-2551250987.html

Chevron Presents on Climate Science While Oil Companies Move to Dismiss Landmark Case

This was a big week for the suit brought by San Francisco and Oakland against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies for the costs associated with adapting to climate change.

First, the five companies in question—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the case, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had dismissed similar cases in the past because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not private companies, is responsible for setting and enforcing carbon dioxide levels, Forbes reported.

But they didn't file in time to avoid participating in Wednesday's historic climate science tutorial. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who is currently hearing the case, ordered both sides to answer a series of questions about climate science in a two-hour presentation each.

Chevron was the only company whose lawyer actually presented at the tutorial. The other companies did not present as a show of their opposition to the court's jurisdiction, Alyssa Johl, an attorney and the founder of Climate Rights Collective, reported in a live tweet of the tutorial.

Alsup, however, did not let the other companies off the hook, but gave their lawyers two weeks to file statements detailing any differences they had with the testimony of Chevron's lawyer.

...

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trump inaugr slush fund

75

502 1502 ORG

CHEVRON PRODUCTS COMPANY

$500,000 1/12/2017 PO BOX 6042 SAN RAMON CA 94583 Chevron is deeply entangled with the Russian oil industry. Chevon has multiple contracts with Rosneft, several joint ventures in Russia, and funded $800 million of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-drilling-2524505765.html

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?423076-2/refinery-town

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http://trofire.com/2014/03/21/chevron-seeking-millions-fees-evading-justice-polluting-rainforest/

donziger

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https://kpfa.org/event/steve-early-gayle-mclaughlin-andres-soto/

:{:{“Refinery Town }:is based on one city’s experience, but it reflects the lessons of grassroots organizing elsewhere…This timely book offers ideas and inspiration for making change where it counts the most–—among friends, neighbors, and fellow community members.”

— Senator Bernie Sanders}:

Labor Activist Steve Early documents how a largely non-white working class community of 110,000 people spawned a vibrant culture of resistance to corporate power after more than a century of political dominance by the Chevron Corporation. Richmond, California – long a proto-typical company town with one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country, with deindustrialization, poverty, joblessness, substandard schools and housing, drug trafficking, street crime, gang violence and wild corruption in City Hall resulting in mismanagement and near bankruptcy – transformed itself over a decade into a progressive city via multi-faceted municipal reforms.  These were led by labor and community activists, environmental justice campaigners, police reformers, and gay rights activists who formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance, “an unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” who worked with incomingMayor Gayle McLaughlin.Richmond became the largest U.S. city run by a Green mayor plus an ally of peasant farmers in Ecuador, which had also battled Chevron.

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content post 2/14

aug 2013

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/chevron_to_pay_2_million_for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_Richmond_Refinery

http://grist.org/climate-energy/a-year-after-a-refinery-explosion-richmond-cali-is-fighting-back/

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Chevron-guilty-of-refinery-criminal-charges-4707675.php?cmpid=twitter

As part of the deal, Chevron agreed to pay $2 million in fines and restitution and accept additional oversight and inspection of its operations during a 3 1/2-year probation period, authorities said.

The misdemeanor charges, alleging violations of California's health and labor codes, were filed Monday by the Contra Costa County district attorney and the state attorney general after an investigation of the fire in a crude oil processing unit on Aug. 6, 2012.

In a prearranged deal, an attorney for the company immediately entered pleas of no contest before Superior Court Judge William Kolin in Martinez, said Deputy District Attorney Steve Moawad.

http://www.eastbaytimes.com/west-county-times/ci_23798674/chevron-pleads-no-contest-criminal-charges-stemming-from

Chevron committed six violations of labor, health and safety standards, according to the complaint. The violations included failure to "correct deficiencies" in equipment, negligent emissions and failure to prevent employees' exposure to hazardous conditions.

Chevron pleads no contest to criminal charges stemming from Richmond refinery fire

By Robert Rogers and Malaika Fraley

Contra Costa Times

POSTED:   08/05/2013 11:25:36 AM PDT | UPDATED:   3 YEARS AGO

Aug 10:

Chevron refinery fire one year later: Fallout, impact show no signs of waning

MARTINEZ -- Chevron will pay $2 million in fines and restitution after pleading no contest Monday to six misdemeanor criminal charges stemming from a fire at its Richmond refinery last year.

Chevron attorneys accepted the terms, including 3 1/2 years of probation, $1.28 million in fines, and more than $720,000 in restitution payments to three different agencies.

The penalties resulted from joint charges filed Monday in Contra Costa Superior Court by state Attorney General Kamala Harris and Contra Costa County District Attorney Mark Peterson. The terms of the plea had been agreed to by both sides before Monday's hearing.

TV news crews, along with the curious, gather on a hillside in Point Richmond to photograph the the fire in an oil unit at the Chevron refinery in

TV news crews, along with the curious, gather on a hillside in Point Richmond to photograph the the fire in an oil unit at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., Monday, Aug. 6, 2012. (D. Ross Cameron/Staff) (D. Ross Cameron/Staff file)

"This criminal case achieves our goals of holding Chevron accountable for their conduct, protecting the public, and ensuring a safer work environment at the refinery," Peterson said in a news release. Peterson also praised Chevron for its "commitment to do more than what is required by law" to prevent future accidents.

Chevron committed six violations of labor, health and safety standards, according to the complaint. The violations included failure to "correct deficiencies" in equipment, negligent emissions and failure to prevent employees' exposure to hazardous conditions.

The Aug. 6 fire knocked out the refinery's No. 4 crude unit and sent more than 15,000 people to area hospitals complaining of respiratory discomfort and other symptoms. Subsequent investigations have revealed that the fire was caused by a corroded pipe that failed, and that the pipe had been recommended for replacement several times during the previous decade.

In addition to the $1.28 million in fines, Chevron will pay restitution to Richmond BUILD, a local workforce development program, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Cal/OSHA and the state Attorney General's Office.

Chevron spokeswoman Melissa Ritchie issued a statement Monday saying "Chevron U.S.A. has resolved this matter by agreement with the offices of the Contra Costa County District Attorney and the Attorney General of the State of California." Ritchie added that the company is committed to improving safety at the refinery.

"We have reimbursed community members and local government agencies in Richmond and West Contra Costa County for medical and response-related costs," Ritchie said. "We are conducting a comprehensive inspection of our refinery."

Frank Pitre, of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, the law firm which is suing Chevron on behalf of the city, said it was too early to speculate on what impact if any the criminal case will have on the city's suit.

"What I can say is this is the same company that just last Friday issued a press statement calling Richmond's lawsuit meritless, yet at the same time was negotiating a settlement to resolve criminal charges against them," Pitre said. "The hypocrisy is astounding."...

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foia/slapp donziger

Sludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers

For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon

By Alexander Zaitchik August 28, 2014

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sludge-match-chevron-legal-battle-ecuador-steven-donziger-20140828#ixzz3Yv9f8Muk

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Chevron Whistleblower Videos Show Deliberate Falsification Of Evidence In Ecuador Oil Pollution Trial

http://desmogblog.com/2015/04/09/chevron-whistleblower-videos-show-deliberate-cover-oil-pollution-ecuador

Chevron has already lost the lawsuit filed against the company by a group of Indigenous villagers and rural Ecuadorians who say Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, left behind hundreds of open, unlined pits full of toxic oil waste it had dug into the floor of the Amazon rainforest.

That hasn’t stopped the oil titan from attempting to retry the case, though, in both the court of public opinion and a New York court, where it counter-sued the Ecuadorian plaintiffs under the RICO Act, claiming their original lawsuit was nothing more than extortion.

But new videos released by an anonymous Chevron whistleblower undermine the company’s entire defense in the original suit as well as its RICO counterattack.

Chevron’s defense in the Ecuador pollution case hinges on the company’s assertion that, before leaving the country when its partnership with state-owned Petroecuador ended in the early 1990s, Texaco remediated a portion of the 350 drill sites and more than 900 associated waste pits, as per its agreement with the Ecuadorean government.

The Ecuadorian plaintiffs argue that, as the sole operator of those drilling operations, Chevron/Texaco is liable for the carcinogenic oil contamination of watercourses, soil and groundwater that leached out of the waste pits and overflowed into local streams and rivers. After inheriting Texaco’s liability, Chevron countered that it had fulfilled its obligations per the terms of its partnership and that the plaintiffs’ real target should be Petroecuador, which Chevron blames for the pollution.

In 2011, Chevron lost the court battle in Ecuador — the venue Chevron itself chose — and was ordered to pay $9.5 billion to clean up its oil pollution in the Amazon. But Chevron had already infamously vowed “We will fight until hell freezes over and then fight it out on the ice,” and the company has been true to its word. Only now has evidence emerged to show just how dirty Chevron was fighting.

“These videos prove Chevron knew full well their ‘remediated’ sites were still contaminated before the trial in Ecuador had even finished,” Amazon Watch’s Paul Paz said in a statement to DeSmogBlog. “Rather than admit that and help people who would be affected, they hid what they knew and denied it to the courts and to the world. Worse than that, they went on to blame the very same people affected by their waste as making it all up to extort money from Chevron.”

One video from March 2005, when the trial in Ecuador was ongoing, shows Chevron contractors examining a core sample and finding petroleum at a well site that Texaco claimed to have remediated. When a worker named Dave tells a Chevron employee named Rene about the discovery, Rene jokingly chastises the worker, saying, “Nice job, Dave. Give you one simple task: Don't find petroleum.” (Skip to the 1:40 mark in the video below.)

By Mike Gaworecki • Thursday, April 9, 2015

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D000000015

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2014 yay

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/11/12661/richmond-voters-beat-chevrons-corporate-coup-d-etat

In Richmond, CA, three seats on the City Council were up for election; the city also stood to elect a new mayor. Nothing unusual in this, perhaps, was it not for Chevron's $3.1 million dollar campaign to highjack the elections, which was first revealed by journalism student and former Center for Media and Democracy reporter, Harriet Rowan in the Berkeley publication *Richmond Confidential*.

Through different independent expenditure groups, the energy behemoth launched an ad blitz targeting progressive candidates, including billboards, TV, radio and even talking door literature. At the ballot box, however, Richmond voters proved that democracy can triumph over corporate cash. Despite being outspent 20-to-1, the three Green Party and Democrat candidates targeted in Chevron's smear campaigns -- Jovanka Beckles, Eduardo Martinez, and outgoing mayor Gayle McLaughlin -- were all elected to City Council. In a further rejection of Chevron's agenda, Tom Butt, who as a council member had taken a hard line against the company, was elected mayor.

"I think this election is a great example that money isn't always the deciding factor, and that it is possible for grassroots organizing on the ground to defeat big money," says Rowan.

Chevron's Rap Sheet

Last year, the city filed a lawsuit against the company following a disastrous fire in August of 2012 at its Richmond refinery that sent 15,000 people to the hospital over the weeks that followed, and also caused property values to drop dramatically. "It's [not about the money, it's] wanting to have some assurance that Chevron has taken the lessons learned to heart and that they have changed their culture of safety," Tom Butt said at the time.

The fire was not an isolated incident. In fact, Chevron has a long and troubled history in Richmond where "some of the company's worst sins have taken place," says Good Jobs First, nonprofit research group promoting corporate and government accountability. The Chevron rap sheet includes a 1989 refinery fire that left three workers severely burned, a $540,000 fine imposed by EPA for polluting the San Pablo Bay, and attempts to bypass monitoring equipment and release pollutants into the air that drew a federal investigation in 2012.

In the 1990s Chevron had a desk in the city managers office. For a long time, Richmond City Council members, colloquially known as "The Chevron Five," consistently voted for Big Oil interests. The era of corporate deference came to an end in 2008 when three of them were voted out of office, and progressives gained control of City Hall. Since then, and in the wake of Citizens United, the company has ramped up its efforts to hand pick rubber stamp politicians.

In 2012, a political action committee calling itself Moving Forward - allegedly a "coalition of labor unions, small businesses, public safety and firefighters associations" - poured $1.2 million into the City Council elections. All the money, however, came from Chevron. This time round, the company upped the ante threefold, but to no avail as voters saw corporate spin for what it was. Incidentally, Nat Bates, whom Moving Forward endorsed for mayor, was part of the infamous Chevron quintet.

This weekend, former Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and Harriet Rowan will be on Bill Moyers & Company to discuss Chevron's assault on democracy. Check your local listings. You can also watch the show online.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/11/12661/richmond-voters-beat-chevrons-corporate-coup-d-etat#sthash.V9HGcpp4.dpuf

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11/14

Big Oil’s influence on corporate media has American news outlets shamefully shirking climate coverage. But oil companies won’t be satisfied by merely controlling the national news. In the poor Californian city of Richmond, where Chevron wants to upgrade a polluting refinery that is wont to explode, the oil giant has started an online newspaper.

The *Richmond Standard* is a hyperlocal journalism site launched in January with the hallmarks of a typical Patch site (before said service was dumped by AOL): minimally reported stories about local crime, public meetings, and sports, told with the inverted-pyramid style of traditional news writing.

But the Standard is not your typical, well-intentioned but underfunded local reporting initiative; it’s a Chevron propaganda rag that’s run and written by the company’s flacks. *The San Francisco Chronicle* delves into the ethics of such an initiative:

The idea of the nation’s second-largest oil company funding a local news site harkens back to an era of journalism when business magnates often owned newspapers to promote their personal financial or political agendas. Now that mainstream newspapers are struggling to survive, online news sites are testing ways to fund their operations, said Edward Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

But the idea of a company sponsoring news in a community where it operates still poses problems, he said.

“The tradition of press independence — even though in many times it’s more aspirational than real — is nevertheless a cornerstone principle,” Wasserman said. The Standard “is a different model. It’s clearly meant as a community outreach effort, so it’s born in an ethically challenged area.”

The Standard claims to be Richmond’s first “community-driven daily news source” since prior to 1990, yet Wasserman’s school runs Richmond Confidential — a rival site that frequently covers Chevron. The Standard has a “Chevron speaks” section, which has so far been used to introduce the website (which it says could “blaze the trail for a new model of corporate-sponsored, community-generated news”), and tocriticize negative press coverage of its plans to upgrade the refinery. But the positive coverage of Chevron and its refinery also spills into the “News” section.

Chevron’s San Francisco-based PR consultants poached colorful crime reporter Mike Aldax away from the San Francisco Examiner late last year, hiring him to work as an account manager and to write Richmond Standard’s articles. A Chevron spokesperson described the writer as “independent,” but a recent tweet reminds us that Aldax’s loyalties lie with his client:

“Richmond residents are not going to be fooled — they know where we’re coming from,” Aldax said. “The onus is on me to provide information that’s factual and accurate.”

Note that Aldax doesn’t say anything about “balance.” As theChronicle points out, Aldax didn’t quote activists who oppose the refinery upgrade in a recent story about the project’s “robust” environmental impact report.

Perhaps we can look forward to more such ventures in other communities where Chevron operates. The *Ecuador Standard*, anyone?

Source:New Chevron website covers Richmond news, San Francisco Chronicle.

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/askchevron-the-hashtag-that-roared-and-paid/

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fedsoc repost of nat rev?

Kevin D. Williamson comments at NRO:

Chevron, which some years back was presented with a multi-billion-dollar judgment related to pollution claims in Ecuador, has been engaged in a years-long battle against a coalition of lawyers, environmental groups, and activists, and its defense has been an interesting one:Not only has Chevron rejected the specific claims against it, it has maintained that the case is the result of a criminal conspiracyinvolving those same lawyers and environmentalists, corrupt judges, bribery, and more. The company’s general counsel, Hewitt Pate, said today: “The case against Chevron was the result of fraud, bribery, and other crimes, and its aim was extortion.”

The story might have struck many as too implausible even for a B movie, but a U.S. district court today issued a remarkable opinion confirming that the judgment against Chevron is indeed the result of fraud. (The complete, 500-page opinion is here.) District Judge Lewis Kaplan writes:

This case is extraordinary. The facts are many and sometimes complex. They include things that normally come only out of Hollywood — coded emails among [lead plantiffs' attorney Steven] Donziger and his colleagues describing their private interactions with and machinations directed at judges and a court appointed expert, their payments to a supposedly neutral expert out of a secret account, a lawyer who invited a film crew to innumerable private strategy meetings and even to ex parte meetings with judges, an Ecuadorian judge who claims to have written the multibillion dollar decision but who was so inexperienced and uncomfortable with civil cases that he had someone else (a former judge who had been removed from the bench) draft some civil decisions for him, an 18-year old typist who supposedly did Internet research in American, English, and French law for the same judge, who knew only Spanish, and much more.

The questionable conduct ranges from the spectacular to the banal: There were bribed judges, to be sure, but there were also articles in The Huffington PostandPoliticoauthored by former Andrew Cuomo and DNC aide Karen Hinton, who, according to court documents, as a public-relations consultant had attempted to negotiate for herself a “success fee” of “at least 5 percent” of fees related to settlement of the case, along with a $10,000-a-month retainer and expenses. Writing in *Politico*, Hinton asked: “I do advocacy work. So why am I accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy? . . . Chevron has charged that the Ecuadorian ‘conspirators’ and their ‘co-conspirators,’ like me, lied, manufactured evidence about the contamination, and committed fraud.”

According to Judge Kaplan’s opinion, that’s about right.

What’s notable here is that Chevron’s complaint is under the RICO law, meaning that it implies the existence of an ongoing criminal organization. What we have here, if the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is correct, is the new face of organized crime, and one of the most spectacular attempts at extortion in recorded history.

I’ve been following the case for a while and will have more to say when I’ve gone through the documents, but the decision is a very bad one for everybody who had a part in the case — from prestigious law firms to environmental groups – especially those with a financial interest in its outcome. Setting aside the legal reasoning and looking only at the findings of fact in the case, a great many reputations will need reconsidering.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that Chevron has occasionally advertised in National Review, and has in the past donated to the National Review Institute.

AlterNet [1] / By Aaron Cantú [2]

Judge Rules Chevron Will Not Have To Pay Billions For Environmental Destruction

March 7, 2014 |

After securing the largest award in the history of environmental litigation, a ruling this week in a federal U.S. court has severely dampened possibility that Chevron will pay $9.5 billion in compensation to Ecuadoran farmers and fishermen most affected by twenty years of unrestrained ecological desecration in the Amazon rainforest.

United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the U.S. oil company was able to prove that the 2011 Ecuadoran ruling for indigenous peoples living in the forrested northeastern corner of the country was secured through fraud. The judgement is a blow to those who have been at the mercy of Chevron's massive oil-producing efforts for decades.

After striking oil in the northeast corner of Ecuador in 1967, Texaco (which merged into Chevron in 2001) struck a partnership with Petroecuador that would eventually lead to 220,000 barrel-a-day production between 1972 and 1992 in an area dubbed "Lago Agrio." As Texaco sucked and slurped up petrol from the ground at a maddening pace, it left an unparalleled trail of degredation deep inside the Amazonian rainforest, home to one of the world's most diverse, and fragile, biospheres.

In its twenty year reign of ecological destruction, Texaco spilled 16 million gallons of crude into the Amazon river--over three times as much spilled by BP into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010--and left "hundreds of toxic waste pits...and an estimated 18 billion gallons of waste, or 'produced,' water, which some tests have shown to contain possibly cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at levels many times higher than those permitted in the US," according to the LA Times [3]. The water sources contaminated by oil production were also those used by local indigeous groups for drinking, bathing and fishing.

In 1993, a group of lawyers representing Lago Agrio indigenous groups most affected by the pollution brought litigation against the oil conglomerate. The suit was kicked around federal trial and appeals courts in the U.S. for ten years before being sent back to an Ecuadoran court, where, in 2011, a judge ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion to the farmers and fishermen represented on the plaintiff side.

Kaplan's new ruling, the result of a countersuit filed by Chevron against the Amazon dwellers in the wake of the 2011 verdict, rests on allegations brought by Chevron that the lead attorney for the the plaintiff engaged in "repeated acts of fraud, bribery [and] money laundering" (a laughable charge coming from the second largest oil company in the United States) sends a message to those whose livelihoods have been uprooted by coporate malfeasance: Money and influence will always enable the rich and powerful to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat.

Han Shan, a U.S. spokesman for the plaintiffs, issued the following statement on Kaplan's judgement:

While the Ecuadorans respect the rule of law in all countries, they do not accept this court’s jurisdiction nor this ruling. The affected communities long ago gave up hope that a U.S. court would provide them relief from Chevron’s contamination, which has taken their loved ones, poisoned their lands, and imperiled their cultures.

However, there remains hope for successful verdicts for the Ecuadoran plaintiffs in other litigation pending against Chevron in Brazil, Argentina and Canada. A Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in December that "the 47 villagers have the right to pursue Chevron’s Canada assets," according to Bloomberg News [4]. The other cases are pending.

See more stories tagged with:

chevron [5],

oil [6],

petroleum [7],

indigenous [8],

ecuador [9],

Lago Agrio [10]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/judge-rules-chevron-will-not-have-pay-billions-environmental-destruction

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/aaron-cantu-0

[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/20/opinion/op-feige20

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-04/ecuador-judgment-against-chevron-ruled-a-fraud-by-u-s-.html

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chevron

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oil-0

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/petroleum

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/indigenous

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ecuador

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/lago-agrio

[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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Or not: Chevron Appalachia deemed the last option an appropriate gesture of goodwill for the residents of Greene County, Pa., where a natural gas well exploded into flames last week. In a letter to 100 residents dated last Sunday -- proof that Chevron employees will work even on the Lord’s Day to ensure that those wronged by their explosions can still enjoy a delicious cheesy treat -- the Chevron Community Outreach Team acknowledged the accident and enclosed a gift certificate redeemable at Bobtown Pizza for a “Special Combo Only.” To those Greene County residents who perchance desired mozzarella sticks: Better luck next time.

THIS STORY CONTINUES