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Author Topic: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery  (Read 3395 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #30 on: February 19, 2016, 06:28:33 pm »
Koch Brothers Plotting Multimillion Dollar War on Electric Vehicles   

Lorraine Chow | February 19, 2016 2:45 pm

SNIPPETS:

Death to the electric car?    Charles and David Koch are reportedly backing a new group that will use millions to promote petroleum and fight against government subsidies for electric vehicles.

In an effort to strike back at record-breaking EV sales, the fossil fuel industry is allegedly funding a new organization that will spend $10 million a year to push petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies on EVs, refining industry sources told the Huffington Post.


Elon Musk
✔  ‎‎@elonmusk 

Worth noting that all gasoline cars are heavily subsidized via oil company tax credits & unpaid public health costs.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf


http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/19/koch-brothers-war-on-evs/


Comment by renewableguy

Fossil fuels is scared sh--less.

Agelbert reply:
Yep.

Amory Lovins knows the score. The fossil fuel industry is a wounded beast. It's days are numbered.

QUOTE
Over the past 40 years, Americans have saved 31 times as much energy as renewables added. Those cumulative savings are equivalent to 21 years’ current energy use.  They’re simply invisible: you can’t see the energy you don’t use. But globally, it’s a bigger “supply” than oil, and inexorably, it’s going to get much, much bigger.

Oil companies worry about climate regulation, but they’re even more at risk from market competition. The oil that’ll be unburnable for climate reasons is probably less than the oil that’ll be unsellable because efficiency and renewables can do the same job cheaper.

An oil business that sputters when oil’s at $90 a barrel, swoons at $50, and dies at $30 will not do well against the $25 cost of getting U.S. mobility—or anyone else’s, since the technologies are fungible—completely off oil by 2050. That cost, like the $18 per saved barrel to make U.S. automobiles uncompromised, attractive, cost-effective, and oil-free, is a 2010–11 analytic result; today’s costs are even lower and continue to fall.

In short, like whale oil in the 1850s, oil is becoming uncompetitive even at low prices before it became unavailable even at high prices.
UNQUOTE

As Oil Prices Gyrate, Underlying Trends Are Shifting To Oil's Disadvantage
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #31 on: February 19, 2016, 07:44:36 pm »
Bill McKibben: It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing

Bill McKibben, TomDispatch | February 19, 2016 9:18 am

Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth 8 and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now—entirely legally—is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.

Quote

As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now—entirely legally—is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.

Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.

As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered … Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”

So here’s what happened.
Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.

But in public? 
There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.


Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full steam ahead in developing a fossil fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. “It is highly unlikely,” he said, “that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.” Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong—as wrong as a man could be.

Sins of Omission


In fact, Exxon’s deceit—its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years—may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, “hottest year ever recorded” has become a tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work.

But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch Brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country.

The company’s sins—of omission and commission—may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to investigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that’s illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman’s got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harrisand maybe—if activists continue to apply pressure—from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence.

Here’s the thing: all that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal—dangerous, stupid and immoral, but legal.

On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years.

For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going
to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact.”

Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed   , hard to estimate and in any event entirely manageable.    His language was striking. “We will adapt to this.    Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.”

Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”

Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S., when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah and just before Hurricane Sandy.

He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”

In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend—somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton—wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.

But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon—which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.  

Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.

The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.

 
The Never-Ending Big Dig

Even that’s not the deepest problem.

The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan.
The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons—$4 million a day, every day.

As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.

But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more.

About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet—an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.

At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now.

Quote
That’s why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn.

We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying precisely the kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up and—what do you know—an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn.

Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas—other than what Tillerson once called “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire”—is this: in recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil.

Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the Earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas.

In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5 percent of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17 percent. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors.

That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the twentieth century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future   , that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens.   


Can Exxon Be Pressured?  ???

Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem … well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6 percent of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through … oh, never mind.

What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath.

But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too.

At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate News published some revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event—a reckoning for the crime of the millennium.

But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change and fossil fuels—everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his state of the state address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions.

Quote
“This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.”

The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-Earth-anymore would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?  ???

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/19/exxon-climate-change-crime/3/


The Fossil Fuelers   DID THE Climate Trashing, human health depleteing CRIME,   but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID   DOING THE TIME or     PAYING THE FINE!     Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #32 on: February 23, 2016, 10:18:01 pm »

Three U.S. House Reps call for DOJ to investigate Shell climate probe 

Staff Writers  February 23, 2016   
 
Three U.S. House Democrats are calling for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether Shell Oil misled the public about climate change.

According to the L.A. Times, U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California, Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont and Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania sent a letter earlier this week asking the DOJ to investigate whether Shell “intentionally” hid information about climate change and engaged in a “misinformation” campaign.

Quote
The letter also suggests that Shell, ExxonMobil and potentially other energy firms were involved in a conspiracy to obscure the impact of climate change.

The letter cites an L.A. Times investigation published in December that claims Shell redesigned a $3 billion North Sea platform to allow the facility to operate amid rising sea levels.

A Shell spokesman told the paper that Shell has included information about climate change and the challenges it poses in its publications, including its annual reports and Sustainability Report, for over 10 years.

“Recognizing the climate challenge and the role energy has in enabling a decent quality of life, we continue to pursue and advance constructive dialogue on this topic as the challenge is one for all of society,” the spokesman told the L.A. Times.

In October, Lieu sent a letter to the DOJ asking it to determine if Exxon misled the public about climate change and violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

Citing investigations conducted by the L.A. Times, Inside Climate News and Columbia University’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, Lieu also asked the DOJ to determine if Exxon violated shareholder protection, public health, truth in advertising, consumer protection and other laws.

Exxon has denied any wrongdoing and said it has provided  “continuous and publicly available climate research” that refutes claims that the firm deliberately suppressed data.” 

“These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time which, in fact, mirrored global understanding,” Exxon vice president of public and government affairs Ken Cohen said in response to Lieu’s letter.


Exxon confirmed in November that it received a subpoena from the attorney general of New York relating to climate change documents.

Exxon added that it has included information about the business risk posed by climate change for many years in its 10-K, Corporate Citizenship Report and in other reports to shareholders.  ;)

The New York Times reported that month that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been investigating the company for about a year and may be looking at information dating back to the 1970s.

Schneiderman is reportedly investigating whether Exxon misled investors by failing to disclose the potential impact climate change could have on its business.

The New York Attorney General’s Office has not commented on the matter.

http://petroglobalnews.com/2016/02/california-congressman-call-for-shell-climate-probe/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #33 on: March 03, 2016, 02:31:33 am »
Did he know too much? It's not hard to MAKE somebody drive into a wall with a vehicle that does the job and drives away.
 

Indicted ex-Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon dies in car wreck

Staff Writers  March 2, 2016   
 
Ex-Chesapeake CEO and early pioneer of the American shale industry was killed in a single car accident in Oklahoma City today, one day after he was indicted for conspiracy to rig lease bids.

According to Capt. Paco Balderrama of the Oklahoma City Police Department, McClendon, 56, crashed into an embankment while traveling at a “high rate of speed” in Oklahoma City just after 9 a.m.

Quote
“He pretty much drove straight into the wall,”
Balderrama said.

McClendon’s 2013 Chevrolet Tahoe was immediately engulfed in flames.

He stepped down from Chesapeake Energy in 2013, a company he co-founded in 1989.

An federal grand jury indicted McClendon yesterday on conspiracy charges for his alleged involvement in fixing Oklahoma land lease bids.

“His actions put company profits ahead of the interests of leaseholders entitled to competitive bids for oil and gas rights on their land. Executives who abuse their positions as leaders of major corporations to organize criminal activity must be held accountable for their actions,” Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division Bill Baer said.

McClendon was one of the highest paid executives in the United States for many years. In 2008, his pay package was $112 million. The following year, Chesapeake offered him a five-year retention contract, including a $75 million bonus.

He was a part owner of the NBA team, Oklahoma City Thunder.

 After he left Chesapeake Energy, McClendon founded American Energy Partners in 2013 and served as its CEO.

“Aubrey’s tremendous leadership, vision, and passion for the energy industry had an impact on the community, the country, and the world.  ::)  We are tremendously proud of his legacy  and will continue to work hard to live up to the unmatched standards he set for excellence and integrity,”  ::)  American Energy Partners    said in a statement.

http://petroglobalnews.com/2016/03/indicted-ex-chesapeake-ceo-aubrey-mcclendon-dies-car-wreck/


Agelbert NOTE: For those who may find the tone of my post "inappropriate and offensive", here is some background on McClendon's "unmatched standards of excellency and integrity"...

SNIPPET:

Quote
March 2, 2016

The indictment was filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma.

It alleges that McClendon “orchestrated” a conspiracy between “two large” oil and gas companies from December 2007 to March 2012 to collaborate on bids for oil and gas leases in northwest Oklahoma.

The conspirators allegedly decided who would place the winning bid ahead of time, with the winner then allocating an interest in the lease to the other company.

McClendon also allegedly instructed his subordinates to execute the conspiratorial agreement, including withdrawing bids on leases and agreeing on how the stakes in the leases would be divided between the two companies.

“His actions put company profits ahead of the interests of leaseholders entitled to competitive bids for oil and gas rights on their land.  Executives who abuse their positions as leaders of major corporations to organize criminal activity must be held accountable for their actions,” Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division Bill Baer said.

McClendon left Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy in January 2013 and currently serves as the CEO of American Energy Partners.

Each violation of the Sherman Act carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals.

McClendon has denied any wrongdoing. 

http://petroglobalnews.com/2016/03/feds-indict-aubrey-mcclendon-for-rigging-oklahoma-lease-bids/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #34 on: March 03, 2016, 03:32:44 pm »
Aubrey McClendon’s car will tell whether he killed himself

SNIPPET:

Quote
Aubrey McClendon left a mystery: Did he deliberately drive his 2013 Chevrolet Tahoe SUV into a bridge support at high speed? Or did something else that he couldn’t control, such as a heart attack or other emergency, cause the crash?


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/aubrey-mcclendon-s-car-will-tell-if-he-killed-himself-182023313.html#
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #35 on: March 16, 2016, 09:32:47 pm »
Agelbert NOTE: More evidence that the fossil fuel industry is "responsible" and always "behaves ethically" towards its employees who are considered, as MKing the fossil fueler will be quick to tell you, the  "salt of the earth"...



Four oil and gas firms  owe $1.6 million in back wages, Feds say

Staff Writers March 16, 2016

The U.S. Department of Labor said Monday it has identified $1.6 million in back wages owed to oil and gas workers at four different firms.

The DOL said investigations of Jet Specialties Inc. of Boerne, Texas, Frank’s International LLC and Stream-Flo USA LLC, of Houston and Viking Onshore Drilling LLC, of Odessa, Texas found violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime provisions.

The four companies have more than 2,500 employees combined and owe employees a combined $1.6 million in back wages.

According to the DOL, Jet Specialties considered salaried employees exempt from overtime requirements, failed to pay an overtime premium regardless of how many hours employees worked and failed to include bonus payments workers received as part of their regular pay rates when calculating overtime.

Frank’s International failed to “pay proper overtime” after not including bonus payments in workers’ regular pay rates when computing overtime, and Stream-Flo USA paid nonexempt workers flat salaries without regard to how many hours they worked.

Investigations of Frank’s International and Stream-Flo USA began in the Northeast and expanded to other U.S. locations, the agency said.

Affected employees for both companies live in Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

Viking Onshore Drilling failed to include bonus payments in workers’ regular rates when determining overtime pay, according to the DOL.

Investigators found violations related to Viking Onshore Drilling operations in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

“We continue to find unacceptably high numbers of violations in the oil and gas industry. We must ensure that employers pay workers the hard-earned wages they have rightfully earned,” regional administrator for the Wage and Hour Division in the Southwest Betty Campbell said.
 
Company Name                     Back Wages   Employees Affected      
Jet Specialties Inc.                     $866,871              321      
Frank’s International LLC            $555, 351           1,760      
Viking Onshore Drilling LLC          $167,646              411      
Stream-Flo USA LLC                      $75,414               29   

http://petroglobalnews.com/2016/03/four-oil-gas-firms-owe-1-6-million-back-wages-feds-say/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #36 on: June 27, 2016, 07:47:08 pm »
Our Opinion: Stifling renewables

Posted: Friday, June 24, 2016 12:00 am

Some N.C. politicians say they oppose tax credits and subsidies because they don’t think the government should be picking winners and losers in private industry. But they are clearly doing just that in regard to the state’s energy future. 

Bills in the N.C. House and Senate would deliver a knockout punch for solar and wind power development in North Carolina.

House Bill 763  :evil4: , which cleared the Senate on Monday, would render most of eastern North Carolina off limits to wind farms, supposedly to protect current and future military bases

This economically disadvantaged area of the state, which is uniquely suited to wind farms, stands to lose two wind projects currently in the pipeline that total $700 million in investment.


The permitting process in place already allows the military to weigh in on potential projects.

Senate Bill 843 would require wind and solar farms to get a state permit and build a 1.5-mile buffer from neighboring property lines, including a landscape buffer for solar farms.

Compare that to setbacks for facilities that are clearly noxious: 200 feet for hazardous waste landfills and 500 feet for swine waste lagoons. The setbacks currently proposed for natural gas fracking wells are 650 feet from an occupied building and 200 feet from surface waters. The bill also requires renewable energy developers to guarantee millions of dollars to cover future costs of decommissioning, or removing the energy project at the end of its lifetime.


                             



Sen. Bill Cook (R-Beaufort) said SB 843 stemmed from concerns he’d heard from coastal residents about environmental damage from wind and solar farms. Cook contends that solar farms permanently ruin farmland through land clearing, storm runoff, soil erosion and herbicide use. Hmm. Sounds like the same problems you encounter with an actual farm.



The state currently ranks third in overall solar capacity, thanks in large part to the renewable energy portfolio standard passed in 2007, which requires large utility companies like Duke Energy to provide increasing amounts of energy from renewable sources.

Some GOP legislators have been trying to repeal the renewable energy portfolio since 2013. House Bill 332 would freeze at 6 percent the percentage of renewable energy that utility companies are required to provide. That percentage was scheduled to increase to 12.5 percent by 2021. Last year, the legislature ended the tax credit program for renewable energy development.

State lawmakers are using every tactic to suppress this burgeoning industry, which added 3,000 jobs in the state last year, and invested $12 billion since 2007. The cost of solar has dropped significantly, and its addition to the power grid will eventually lower utility bills for everyone.

SB 843 is titled Renewable Energy Property Protection  , and HB 763 is called the Military Operations Protection Act  ::), but the real purpose of both is protecting big energy.

Quote
Meanwhile, the legislature   has done little to protect people or property in its rules for fracking or its oversight of coal ash clean-up

Renewable energy companies can and will go elsewhere if the state creates a hostile environment. But the real losers will be the citizens of North Carolina.

They will pay higher power bills, and watch as the state’s air, land and water are further degraded by dirty energy sources like coal, nuclear and natural gas.

http://www.greensboro.com/opinion/n_and_r_editorials/our-opinion-stifling-renewables/article_e342d5ff-07c5-5671-9bc2-5a39f06b86ee.html
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #37 on: July 16, 2016, 04:52:16 pm »
'Pence is going to help Trump with voters who can't decide if they're more worried that gay people will get a wedding cake or healthcare'.

Presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald Trump announced Friday that he has chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate.

Gov. Pence is famously—or infamously—right-wing, and a particular darling of far-right Evangelical voters.

Pundits surmised that Trump is attempting to sway the conservative Christian portion of the Republican party, which had previously rallied behind Ted Cruz.

Progressives decried the decision. Leftists pointed out Pence's plethora of policy stances and decisions that have threatened civil rights, women's health, the environment, and the welfare of the most vulnerable since he was elected to Congress in 2000 and then as Indiana's governor in 2012.

Science Denier

"Look, I don't know that [climate change] is a resolved issue in science today."—Gov. Mike Pence, 2014

Regarding Pence's climate stance, Greenpeace listed the many times in which Pence acted against the climate and for the oil and gas industry:

    As a Congressman, Pence consistently voted true to his climate denial, voting to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, to reverse President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act, and against enforcing limits on global carbon dioxide emissions. He was also a vocal critic of the Clean Power Plan, insisting in a letter to President Obama that Indiana would not comply.
    Pence joined his fellow House Republicans in opportunistically using the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to call for energy independence built on access to all of our domestic resources, including more offshore drilling. (Never mind that Deepwater Horizon was an offshore drilling rig in U.S. waters.)
    During his tenure as governor, he has overseen the expansion of the Whiting Refinery to process increasingly risky forms of fossil fuels, particularly petcoke and tar sands coming in from Canada. It is the 3rd largest tar sands refinery in the country, and its processing of petcoke, a byproduct of tar sands extraction that is cheaper and way dirtier than coal, has tripled in recent years.

Pence has also expressed doubt regarding evolution. "Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that's in them," he said on MSNBC in 2008.

In the late 1990s, long after scientists had conclusively shown that cigarette smoking was linked to lung cancer, Pence dismissed such claims as "hysteria."

Attacked Women's Rights

In March, Pence signed into law what reproductive rights activists characterized as "one of the worst anti-abortion bills in the country." As Common Dreams reported:

    The law, which Pence said he signed "with a prayer," makes Indiana the second state in the nation, after North Dakota, to ban abortion in cases where a fetal anomaly is detected.

    It also mandates the burial and cremation of miscarried or aborted remains; restricts fetal tissue donation; and requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or to have an agreement with a doctor who does.

Civil rights groups subsequently sued the state over what they described as a "cynical, deceptive attempt to ban abortions."

Pence also joined many right-wingers in attacking Planned Parenthood in response to a fake video purporting to show the group selling bodily tissues. (The filmmakers were eventually indicted for tampering with government records.)

Legalized Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination

Last year, Pence signed into law the so-called "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" that gave "legal cover, under the guise of 'religious liberties,' to any businesses or individuals who wish to violate anti-discrimination laws," as Common Dreams reported.

As Rolling Stone's Jeb Lund wrote:

    Pence and Indiana Republicans capitalized on a decades-long manipulation of "religious freedom" as an excuse to exclude and punish groups they see as immoral or repugnant, leveraging religion's perquisites to create a bubble of legitimated pre-Civil Rights Era prejudice (and tax avoidance). Only Pence and company went too far: Indiana's RFRA didn't just protect religious intolerance from government interference but actually empowered business to discriminate against immoral other folk without risk of civil rights lawsuits. Only, when pressed even to answer yes or no as to whether Pence had just signed a bill that legalized religious discrimination of gays, he sputtered and retreated. Typically, the Onion did the best job of anyone when it came to nailing him to a wall.

Tried to Privatize Social Security

"Governor Pence has a long history of fighting to cut and privatize Social Security," writes Nancy Altman, co-director of the progressive group Social Security Works. Altman released the following statement in reaction to Trump's choice of Pence for VP:

    In 2005, [Pence] was the leader of a group of House Republicans who criticized George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization plan for not being extreme enough! He supports raising the retirement age and other cuts to Social Security benefits. This despite the fact that the nation is facing a looming retirement income crisis, which is likely to be harshest for younger Americans.

    Pence has shown his desire to dismantle Social Security brick by brick, or even faster. He insultingly calls our Social Security system an “entitlement” rather than the earned benefit that it is. This attitude towards Social Security, the people’s pension, fits in perfectly with Donald Trump’s outrageous claim that Social Security is an illegal Ponzi Scheme. This name calling is an insult to every worker and Social Security beneficiary. It is an insult to all of us.

Iraq War Propagandist

Igor Volposky, deputy director of the Campaign for America's Future Action Fund, dug into congressional records and discovered that during his tenure in the House of Representatives, Pence had served as "Bush's chief war propagandist" when it came to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"Before he became governor of Indiana and a candidate to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential nominee, Mike Pence was a congressman, and he voted for every free-trade agreement that came before him," the Washington Post wrote.

Pence's stance has apparently already hurt his state's workers: "This year, Pence urged an Indiana manufacturer, Carrier Corp., to reconsider a decision to move 1,400 jobs from Indiana to Mexico. The company is continuing with the plans but agreed to repay some state and local tax incentives," the Post reported. "After meeting with the company, Pence said he did not want to give Indiana workers 'false hope' that the jobs would stay in their state."

Anti-Immigrants

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) executive vice president Rocio Saenz condemned Pence's record on immigration in a statement released Friday:

    [Pence's] positions on immigration are anti-immigrant and anti-family. If Donald Trump wasn’t enough to alienate Latino voters, a Trump/Pence ticket will be the ultimate deal breaker for one of the fastest-growing demographics.

    His latest attack against immigrants and their American children came when he joined 25 other Republican governors in a lawsuit that blocked Obama’s executive initiatives on immigration, DAPA and DACA that would have shielded approximately five million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

    Governor Pence is not a friend of the immigrant community.

And in response to Trump's decision, Twitter erupted on Friday with comments both decrying and quipping about Trump's choice.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/15/anti-women-anti-immigrant-anti-lgbtq-crusader-trump-finds-perfect-match-pence-vp

Definitely a marriage of convenience designed to deliver the powerful religious know-nothing vote.

It's a big **** (typical Trump behavior?), and bound to have lots of fall-out.

Begs, the question, "Whose idea was this?"

Maybe Newt Gingrich told him to do it. I don't think it was The Donald's idea.

Pence is, ABOVE ALL, a Koch Brothers TOOL. He has his head so far up the fossil fuel industry descending colon that he peddles the BULLSHIT that global warming is a "myth".

Pence  enjoying a day at the beach. 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #38 on: July 26, 2016, 12:29:47 am »
July 25, 2016

DENIER ROUNDUP by 

Agelbert NOTE: The Fossil Fuel Industry CORRUPTED Gooberment is DOING WHAT THEY DO to defend Profit over People and Planet.   


Quote
ICYMI: FBI Infiltrates 350.org, API Infiltrates RNC/DNC, And More

There was a lot that happened last week, and a lot of stories we didn’t get to. So to start off the new week, let’s quickly go through some of the great content you might have missed:

First, there’s Lee Fang and Steve Horn’s piece in The Intercept about how local and federal law enforcement agencies went undercover into fracking protest groups, including local branches of 350.org. Emails obtained through FOIA requests show law enforcement working closely with the corporations whose activities were being protested. Of course they didn’t find anything criminal in the peaceful protests, just like the FBI’s past investigation into Keystone XL protests turned up nothing to justify the surveillance of private citizens meeting peacefully to express themselves.

Next there is the Alex Emmons piece, again in The Intercept, about how the Washington Post and The Atlantic push the limits of ethical journalism by hosting panel events sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute at the RNC, where climate deniers went basically unchallenged when repeating myths (like they did on regular programming on Fox News). There are similar, API-sponsored events planned for the DNC, and as reporting in The Intercept earlier this month showed, Politico and The Hill are also cashing in on the sponsored content gravy train.

Meanwhile, the congressional speeches documenting the Koch and Exxon #WebofDenial have been annotated for future reference. And eight of the senators who spoke also penned a letter in response to the #WebofDenial groups that criticized the effort, asking those groups to reveal their funders to prove that they really do, as the web of groups claim, “represent many, many millions of Americans.” The senators suspect the groups really just represent the “many, many millions” of dollars funneled through “identity scrubbing” organizations like Donors Trust that conceal just how much the Kochs or ExxonMobil dole out.

Speaking of ExxonMobil, the Union of Concerned Scientists pushed back on fossil-fuel-funded Lamar Smith’s unconstitutional and McCarthy-based subpoena of the #ExxonKnew investigators with an op-ed in the New York Times, while NCSE wrote a blog of their own on the issue. Dana Nuccitelli at the Guardian laid out the tobacco court case parallels, while Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pushed back on Smith and Exxon in a tweetstorm so intense it generated press.

Though maybe the fossil fuel and tobacco narrative isn’t exactly what we thought it to be after all. Documents unearthed by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and published on their Smoke and Fumes page suggest that the oil industry didn’t actually use the tobacco industry’s playbook. Instead, it looks like Big Oil wrote the PR playbook back in the 1950s, then tobacco picked it up and followed! According to CIEL president Carroll Muffett, having done PR work for the oil industry “was a pedigree the tobacco companies recognized and sought out.”

So what did we learn last week, besides that The Intercept is doing great investigative journalism? Well for one thing, if you’re the conductor of the fossil fuel gravy train, you can buy panels at political events to blur the line between news and advertisements. 

Oh, and that suspiciously well-groomed protester who just showed up? He might be a narc. Because infiltrating advocacy organizations that are expressing their rights to assemble and free speech without any evidence of any wrongdoing is apparently just fine when corporate profits are at stake.

But if a non-profit organization requests the investigation of a corporation’s decades-long history of potential fraud  ...well then you’re a threat to free speech  ::), and a congressperson riding the gravy train might just subpoena your organization


In other words, go up against the fossil fuel gravy train, and you might get railed. 


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #39 on: July 27, 2016, 03:39:20 pm »
New York, Mass. AGs Reject Subpoena Request   

The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts said they will refuse to comply with a congressional subpoena for records on their investigations into ExxonMobil. A letter from New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s council called the July 13 subpoena from Lamar Smith  , Chairman of the House Science Committee, “an unprecedented effort” to target the ongoing investigations.

Massachusetts AG Maura Healey’s council issued a similar letter, calling the subpoena an “unconstitutional and unwarranted interference.” Smith, who had set a deadline of today for all subpoenaed parties to respond, said he was “disappointed that Schneiderman and Healey refused to comply.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxon-mobil-climatechange-idUSKCN1062GX?il=0

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #40 on: July 27, 2016, 08:37:07 pm »
New York, Mass. AGs Reject Subpoena Request   

The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts said they will refuse to comply with a congressional subpoena for records on their investigations into ExxonMobil. A letter from New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s council called the July 13 subpoena from Lamar Smith  , Chairman of the House Science Committee, “an unprecedented effort” to target the ongoing investigations.

Massachusetts AG Maura Healey’s council issued a similar letter, calling the subpoena an “unconstitutional and unwarranted interference.” Smith, who had set a deadline of today for all subpoenaed parties to respond, said he was “disappointed that Schneiderman and Healey refused to comply.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxon-mobil-climatechange-idUSKCN1062GX?il=0

Smith...another rat bastard. His extremely gerrymandered district happens to include my neighborhood. You get Bernie, I get Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith. Texas voters are such idiots, I'm tellin' you. It wasn't always quite this bad.


True. But we can't go back to the past and the future looks very, very bad.

In that video about Monsanto, one of the charges (that they were found guilty of) in Alabama was "Outrage". Unlike the use of that word in the common vernacular, this is a legal term.

I think the entire elite political and corporate structure in the USA at present is guilty of this.   
 
 





 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #41 on: August 05, 2016, 07:00:08 pm »
08/03/2016 01:58 PM       

Germany Says NO to Fracking
SustainableBusiness.com News

Faced with a barrage of oil companies lobbying to begin fracking, Germany basically banned it!  

They didn't ban it outright, but the rules are so tough that only conventional natural gas drilling is allowed, not miles-deep fracking from shale. State governments will decide whether to allow any drilling at all, but it is not allowed in areas that could affect water supplies. In 2021, lawmakers will review the rules.

On the same day, Berlin voted to divest from all fossil companies in its pension fund. It joins a growing list of cities: Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, Seattle, Portland and Melbourne.

Renewable energy now provides about 31% of Germany's electricity after a surge of offshore wind installations last year. The goal is to reach 40-50% by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

Germany Renewables Ownership 

The country still relies on coal for 44%  :P, but that's dropping every year even with Germany's decision to stop producing nuclear power by 2022 - which supplies 18% of electricity.

Sadly, the confluence of events that have hit Germany, and Europe generally, have considerably softened its leadership on renewable energy.  :'(

In 2011, Europe was a magnet for clean energy investment with 45% of the world's total, but it's now down by more than half - 18% of world investment, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

After showing the world it could quickly ramp up solar through generous subsidies (feed-in tariffs), it disrupted the progress by pulling back on them. Their world-leading companies closed or were acquired and a third of solar jobs are gone in Europe. Because wind subsidies are still strong, they had a banner year in 2015, but that could change given the Brexit vote.

Because of its leadership, Europe met its 2020 climate target in 2014, but the next milestones may be harder to reach.   :(

Read our article, Germany's Contradictions

Learn More: A Clash of Green and Brown: Germany Struggles to End Coal:

 
Website: e360.yale.edu/feature/a_clash_of_green_and_brown_germany_struggles_to_end_coal/2891/


http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/26653

Agelbert NOTE: Where are almost all the profit over planet, polluting greedball oil companies lobbying Germany to Frack based? ??? 


SEE SHORT VIDEO BELOW:
Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment


Quote
Published on Jun 3, 2016

A true tale of corruption and greed, Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment, a book by Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter, exposes how more than 100 years of political influence peddling facilitated the control of our energy system by a handful of corporations and financial institutions.


It provides the public policy backstory and the history of deregulation that has turned our communities into sacrifice zones.

But, even in such dire circumstances, Hauter is hopeful. People who are sick, tired and fed-up are standing up to the corporations and forcing their policymakers to take action. Frackopoly chronicles the power generated by an exciting grassroots movement that is not only fighting to ban fracking — it is helping to take back our democracy.

Take action: frackopoly.org
Learn more: wenonahhauter.org

Category
Nonprofits & Activism

License
Standard YouTube License

 






He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #42 on: August 28, 2016, 02:58:53 pm »

Agelbert NOTE: You've all heard that old rhyme about love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage.

Some things just go together. Da Oil Bidness and Crime are one of those 'things' that ALWAYS go together. 

When you think about fossil fuel corporations, it is prudent to assume that criminal behavior is integral to their corporate modus operandi.

Oil and Crime have a love affair over a century old. The crimes are not limited to 'externalizing' the pollutants produced during exploration, exploitation, transportation and refining to we-the-people. The 'business model' of fossil fuel corporations make the Cosa Nostra look like pikers in comparison.

The following news item is merely the tip of the turberg, so to speak. 

ITF Slams North Sea Oil’s ‘Secretive Corporate Structures’

August 24, 2016 by gCaptain

The International Transport Workers Federation is slamming offshore oil companies operating in North Sea after a report claimed that many are using a complex web of companies to move money and avoid paying taxes.

The ITF says the new report released today, Offshore Oil, Offshore Tax, has lifted the lid on the secretive corporate structures and aggressive tax minimisation schemes used by Chevron and other major North Sea oil producers, including Nexen, the Chinese Government controlled oil producer.

Steve Cotton, ITF General Secretary, said the report laid out in detail the secretive corporate structures used by Chevron and now copied by other oil companies. 

“The concerns emerging this week about the secretive corporate structure of Nexen are rife within the oil and gas sector. The public would be shocked to see how Chevron uses a complex web of companies to route money through the Netherlands, Bermuda and other tax havens. It has over 200 active subsidiaries in Bermuda alone.

“This at a time when there has been a dramatic reduction in tax revenue from the North Sea. In the mid 1980’s, taxes on North Sea oil production accounted for nearly 9% of all tax receipts collected by the UK Government – today it is just 0.7%.

“While production has fallen, tax revenues have fallen much further, due to tax cuts and aggressive tax minimisation schemes.

“To put this revenue slump in context British motorists paid six times more tax on petrol ($26.9 billion in 13/14), excluding VAT, than the oil and gas industry paid on all taxes covering North Sea oil production ($4.4 billion in 13/14).      



“It is well documented that both Shell and BP are using similar corporate structures to reduce their tax in the UK. Both BP and Shell  in 2014 paid no UK corporate tax.

“I think the public will demand action from our political leaders to get to the bottom of what this report has found. The UK Parliament needs to establish an inquiry to investigate the corporate structures used by the oil companies operating in the North Sea and the impact they have on security, taxes and royalties,” Mr Cotton said.

Unite, the largest union in the North Sea oil fields, Scottish Secretary Pat Rafferty said: “The UK government needs to investigate and step up action to clamp down on any inappropriate tax loopholes being exploited by Chevron to make sure UK taxpayers aren’t taken for a ride and it pays its fair share,” he said.

Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell MP who has been briefed on the report said: “This thorough new research blows open the complex tax avoidance measures undertaken by a major multinational. Anyone concerned with ending the scourge of tax avoidance needs to pay careful attention to its findings. It’s time to put a stop to these complex company structures that rip off taxpayers and place extra strains on public services across the globe.”  

https://gcaptain.com/itf-slams-slams-north-sea-oils-secretive-corporate-structures/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #43 on: October 15, 2016, 01:59:51 pm »
The battle goes on.

RE


http://grist.org/briefly/a-journalist-arrested-for-filming-a-dakota-access-protest-could-face-more-prison-time-than-edward-snowden/

Briefly
Stuff that matters


Dakota Access
A journalist arrested for filming a Dakota Access protest could face more prison time than Edward Snowden.


Ten activists were arrested on Tuesday for shutting down tar-sands oil pipelines. Among them was Deia Schlosberg, producer of the documentary How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change.

Schlosberg reportedly faces three felony conspiracy charges. If convicted, she could be sentenced to 45 years in prison. To put that in perspective:

Neil Young, Mark Ruffalo, and other celebrities called for the charges to be dropped on Thursday, arguing that Schlosberg was not participating in the protest but documenting the event as a filmmaker. That’s right, folks: In the eyes of the legal system, spilling the NSA’s secrets is less reprehensible than doing a journalist’s job.

In February 1979, John Trudell led a march in Washington, D.C. to draw attention to Indian difficulties.

He had been warned against speaking out but John was and activist and the FBI hated him.  The FBI does not have a red man's soul in any way.  On the steps of the FBI building John spoke out on the agency's harassment of Indians.  Less than 12 hours later John's wife, Tina and his three children, were burned alive in their family home in Duck Valley, Nevada along with Tina's mother.


The hatred in Washington for the Indians goes long and deep.  The hatred was institutionalized long ago and for most people monkey see monkey do explains everything that they do; so the hatred festers as it is imitated by new occupants of the bureaucracy as generations pass.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Re: Fossil Fuel Skulldugggery
« Reply #44 on: November 12, 2016, 01:13:10 pm »
How is This Allowed?!  ???  >:(  Wild Buffalo Rounded Up and Kept Without Food or Water to Protect Dakota Access Pipeline Construction Site

fight to defend the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which is home to more than 8,000 members of the Sioux tribe, against the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline has been waging for months. Protestors from all across the U.S. have stepped in to help defend the Native American people whose homes and livelihoods are being threatened by the impending  pipeline. These brave souls have been subject to brutal treatment and ruthless threats from officials and proponents of the pipeline, but people aren’t the only ones suffering.

This video shows a group of wild buffalo that has been corralled and isolated inside a razor wire wall that is surrounded by a deep trench.  In a post on Facebook, Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) wrote, “It has been reported that wild buffalo are being corralled and held behind razor wire fencing without food or water near the Dakota Access Pipeline – and that there have been threats of killing the buffalo by the construction company.”

The ALDF is currently investigating the legality of the treatment of these animals. If seeing this makes you angry, we encourage you to learn more about what is happening at Standing Rock and share this and other stories with everyone you know to raise awareness. We cannot ignore this blatant disregard for the basic rights of people, and animals, that is occurring all in the interest of building a profit-generating oil pipeline.

To learn more about the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and find out how you can help, click here.
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/wild-buffalo-rounded-up-food-or-water-to-protect-dakota-access-pipeline/



He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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