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Author Topic: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus  (Read 23010 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #210 on: October 11, 2021, 02:22:58 pm »
The Real News Network

This story first appeared in Jacobin on Oct. 6, 2021.

SNIPPET:

[Judge Loretta Preska’s] conduct had been a focal point of the trial ever since she was, against local rules, handpicked to oversee the case by judge Lewis A. Kaplan, the 🦖😈 Chevron-invested former tobacco industry lawyer who had blocked the judgement against the 🦖😈 company and launched the contempt case.

Read more:
https://therealnews.com/the-1s-hand-picked-judge-throws-the-book-at-steven-donziger

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: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #211 on: October 14, 2021, 02:01:29 pm »
 

October 14, 2021


Private Equity Buying Up The 'Dregs' Of 🦖 Big Oil

Over the past decade, opaque private equity firms have quietly bought up a substantial portion of the oil and gas industry, creating the conditions for false progress, and even regression, in the transition to a clean energy economy, the New York Times reports. Since 2010, private equity has invested at least $1.1 trillion into the energy sector — double the market cap of Exxon, Chevron, and Shell combined — with just 12% going to renewable energy.

The acquisitions are driven in part because "oil majors [are] feeling the heat," Alyssa Giachino of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project told the Times. Companies are eager to get oil and gas operations, and their climate pollution, off their books, while "private equity is quietly picking up the dregs, perpetuating operations of the least desirable assets.” With their hyper focus on profit and often without the considerations of reputational risk that keep traditional oil companies from polluting with abandon, private equity firms have become some of the country's biggest methane polluters — a problem only exacerbated when firms use weak disclosure requirements and complex bankruptcy and restructuring proceedings to evade cleanup requirements. “And when these largely anonymous firms collapse," Ludovic Phalippou, a financial economics professor at Oxford's Saďd Business School, noted, "you don’t even know who to be angry at, because you don’t even know who they are.” (New York Times $)

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: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #212 on: October 24, 2021, 09:42:51 pm »


By Andrea Germanos - October 22, 2021

Photo: Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)

Leaked docs reveal 🦖 fossil fuel-soaked nations lobbying to 😈 sabotage climate action

They are using every opportunity to protect their 🦖 corporate interests and continue with business as usual while the planet burns.”

SNIPPETS:

Just ahead of a key United Nations climate summit, a major leak of documents reveals that some fossil fuel-producing nations are encouraging authors of an upcoming U.N. report to omit an assessment that the world must transition away from oil, gas, and coal to tackle the planetary emergency.

“This is an insight into how a small group of coal, oil, and meat producing countries continue to put the profits of a few polluting industries before science and our planet’s future,” Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan said in a statement Thursday.

“Rather than phasing out fossil fuels and unsustainable meat production,” she said, “they are using every opportunity to protect their corporate interests and continue with business as usual while the planet burns.”

The comments in question, including from Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Australia as well as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), were in response to a draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group 3. ... ...

The documents show that a small group of nations opposed to ambition action is instead pushing carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies—both of which critics say are dangerous false solutions pushed by industries looking for ways to continue their profit-making. From Unearthed:
Quote
Australia; Saudi Arabia; Iran, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); and Japan all make variations of this argument, despite the fact that, according to the Global CCS Institute, there is currently only one power station in operation in the world that successfully captures some of its carbon emissions.

Full article:
https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/10/22/leaked-docs-reveal-fossil-fuel-soaked-nations-lobbying-to-sabotage-climate-action/

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: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #213 on: October 25, 2021, 02:58:42 pm »



October 22, 2021 By Derek Royden

The 🦖👿 persecution of Steven Donziger

“Why am I the one being locked up? I helped hold [ Chevron] accountable.”

SNIPPETS:
I have been attacked and demonized for years by Chevron in retaliation for helping Indigenous peoples in Ecuador try to do something to save their cultures, their lives, and our planet in the face of massive oil pollution. That’s the context for why we are here today,” Donziger told the court after his sentencing this month.

The United States District Judge who sentenced Donziger, 🦖 Loretta Preska is a leader of the 🐘 rightwing Federalist Society in New York state, which receives financial support from Chevron.  The group is dedicated to putting right wing judges on the bench and the support of companies like 🦖 Chevron ensures that those elevated by the group will put the interests of big business before the interests of ordinary people like those in Ecuador still suffering the consequences of the corporation’s plunder of their resources.

As reported by Branko Marketic in Jacobin, this is far from the first time that Preska has had a seeming conflict of interest in a case she presided over. In 2012 she was the judge in the trial of Jeremy Hammond, who was accused of hacking the private security company Stratfor, among other targets. Despite her husband being a Stratfor client whose data was hacked, Preska refused to recuse herself from the case. She sentenced Hammond to 10 years after having him held in pretrial detention during the year-long trial.

It has also been proven that Lewis Kaplan had investments in Chevron through mutual funds, as shown by financial disclosure forms.

It should be noted that Donziger’s story has been covered in a much different way in much of the business press, with one story in Forbes Magazine I found ignoring Guerra’s admissions and concluding Donziger was little more than a shakedown artist rather than a tireless human rights lawyer seeking to redress inexcusable negligence of and injustice created by a 🦖👿 faceless corporate entity. ... ...


The influence 🦖👿 Chevron has been able to wield over U.S. courts in their scorched earth campaign against Donziger is a worrying sign on many fronts. In terms of climate change, it begs the question: If a fossil fuel company can’t be held to account for the very obvious harms they’ve deliberately caused in the past, what chance does the environmental movement and civil society generally have to rein them in and prevent even greater, globalized catastrophes in the future?

Full article:
https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/10/22/the-persecution-of-steven-donziger/

Quote
Jim K
One of the aspects of this case, not in the article, is that when 🐍 Judge Kaplan (a former tobacco lawyer) brought the criminal contempt charge against Mr Donziger, the US Attorney/DOJ refused to prosecute the case (official reason was they "didn't have the manpower"), so Judge Kaplan assigned a law firm (that had Chevron as a client) to be 🐍 special prosecutors for the case.

Also, 🐍 Judge Preska was assigned to hear the case, not through the normal random rotation, but specifically chosen by Judge Kaplan. Neither Judge Kaplan (in the RICO case) nor Judge Preska (in the contempt case) allowed the case to be tried by a jury; in fact the prosecutors and Judge Preska agreed to making the maximum sentence for the contempt charge to be no more than 6-months, because if it had been more than that, a jury trial would have been required.

Historically, the largest sentence for an attorney convicted of criminal contempt of court has been 90-day of home monitoring (house arrest). Steven Donziger has now spent over two-years under ankle-bracelet home monitoring (787-days on the day of his sentencing on October 1st) and remains confined to his apartment while he's appealing Judge Preska's 👿 ruling not to allow him out on bail while the appeal of his contempt conviction is pending.

agelbert > Jim K
👍 Thank you for that important information. 🗽 Steven Donziger ✨ is a man of integrity.

Big 🦖 Oil has been 😈 corrupting US Government foreign policy AND the Judiciary system for more than a century. We all need to recognize that Mens rea is their practiced Social Darwinist Criminal modus operandi.

They cannot be reformed.

If we do not Bankrupt Big Oil out of business so they can no longer corrupt our government, we are Catastrophic Climate Change toast. 🥺
« Last Edit: October 25, 2021, 07:06:01 pm by AGelbert »
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: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #214 on: October 29, 2021, 06:31:07 pm »

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October 29, 2021


Big Oil CEOs Zoom Into Congress To Deny Their Industrial Climate Denial, But It’s A GOP Question That Might Prove Perjury


Yesterday six heads of oil companies and lobby groups testified virtually before Congress in a marathon, all-day hearing in which they, and Republicans, provided examples of how their disinformation has shifted from denial that they’re causing the problem to denial by suggesting their polluting products are actually part of the solution. 

The comparison to the tobacco industry hearings, where executives perjured themselves about the risks of smoking, were explicit and frequent, and clearly the CEOs had trained with lawyers to avoid (being investigated for) lying under oath

Which means that while the 10am-5pm hearing was full of dramatic moments, despite the CEO’s best attempts to stay on-script and not actually know anything about the companies they run, the biggest news came at the very end: Oversight Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York will issue subpoenas to obtain documents the companies refused to voluntarily hand over in advance of the hearing. 

In announcing the subpoenas at the end of the hearing, Rep. Maloney, over the objections of Republicans who praised how the companies had voluntarily sent over 100,000 pages, pointed out that most of those pages were useless printouts from their websites, or emails of press releases and other spam the companies turned over in obvious hopes of flooding the Committee with useless garbage. 

Which, coincidentally, also seemed to be their strategy for the hearing.

So there may not have been an obvious moment in which CEOs committed a perjury as obvious and straightforward as the tobacco CEOs. (Which means that we were wrong to suggest the CEOs would wiggle out of their commitments to attend, but right to suggest that lawmakers should get those subpoenas ready to go!) 

But while the Democratic lawmakers presented the CEOs with detailed, well-researched questions about their pollution of the communities in real life and information pollution online, it may end up that the most damning question of the day was supposed to be an easy one. It came from a Republican, and it was one of the only yes or no questions that the CEOs actually answered.   

Rep. Comer tried to reverse-gotcha, and asked the four oil executives if they’d approved any climate disinformation campaigns in their time as CEOs, which of course they all disavowed (hmm, wonder if there’s any reason he didn’t ask API or the Chamber’s leadership?)

But if the legally-enforceable Congressional subpoenas show that the companies are still funding climate change disinformation, or if the company’s misleading ads are in fact considered disinformation campaigns, those simple, declarative answers, basically the only direct ones offered all day, would be proof of perjury, and an irony so rich Republicans would try and give it a tax cut.

When giving opening statements, the CEOs rarely looked up from their carefully crafted scripts that ducked responsibility for the climate crisis and positioned themselves as saviors. Throughout the hearing they remained committed to their talking points, though body language cues like a sudden furious blinking as though they’re trying to signal to “S.O.S.” seemed to signal the occasional discomfort with the tough questions from Democratic lawmakers. 

Fortunately for the CEOs, they got a chance to relax once it was the GOP’s turn to lob them some softballs. Republicans like Rep. Comer went beyond that and even defended the polluters and attacked Democrats for daring to inconvenience these CEOs, then pretended to care about inflation and the well-being of the working class by inviting a pipeline welder who was laid off work on the Keystone XL pipeline.

But Comer apparently couldn’t be bothered to actually listen, as he later asked Mr. Crabtree a question about when he lost his job that he had already addressed in his opening statement. Given Rep. Jim Jordan’s history of ignoring people he’s supposedly protecting, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that he asked Crabtree for a third time when he was laid off. The answer was, once again, just three hours after Biden’s announced cancellation of the pipeline. 

One Republican was disgusted that Democrats were asking the CEOs to pledge not to fund climate disinformation, which apparently is something Republicans support. Two Republicans said the CEOs deserved an apology, and a third, GOP Rep. Herrell, would offer such, as well as a “thank you,” something that Rep. Jim Jordan echoed, as did Rep. Gibbs, and at least two other fossil-fueled Republicans as the day went on. Rep. Higgins, who’s gotten over a hundred thousand dollars from the industry, was particularly incensed. 

When it came to questions from Democratic lawmakers though, all questions were directed to the CEOs. Chairwoman Maloney started by hitting Exxon for its advertorials downplaying climate change, which CEO Darron Woods simply asserted that if you read the full context it actually was consistent with the science, despite Maloney describing in detail how even Exxon’s own scientists contradicted those ads. 

Throughout the day, Woods would repeat variations on that theme, defending the company by claiming statements were consistent with the science of the time, even though Exxon’s internal documents prove they knew that wasn’t the case. “Historically untrue,” tweeted disinformation researcher Robert Brulle of Brown University. 

When it was Rep. Ro Khanna’s turn at the mic, he got the Exxon CEO to admit that fossil fuels cause climate change, and pointed out that former CEO Lee Raymond said exactly the opposite of that, decades after their own scientists made the consensus clear. But Woods refused to say that Raymond was wrong at the time, and instead insisted that it was consistent with the context. Rep. Khanna tried to get him to admit that it was a mistake, and Woods would not admit even that much. 

Khanna then asked about the importance of electric vehicles in decarbonizing, which Shell and BP have both indicated they think is important. API, however, opposes electric vehicle tax credits, so Khanna asked if they would be willing to ask API to stop those advertisements. 

They all refused to tell API to stop that opposition, which they supposedly don’t support, except of course in the literal sense that they financially support API. 

They also refused to commit to an independent audit to determine if their companies were funding climate disinformation organizations or even a pledge not to fund climate denying organizations, even though they all claim to care deeply about the climate crisis. 

While the CEOs claim they support market mechanisms for reducing emissions, they were uniformly incapable of giving a direct number (or even a range) for what price-per-ton a carbon tax should be set at, though Exxon’s CEO suggested that to justify carbon capture it’d need to be at least $100/ton. 

They also had no idea how much American taxpayers subsidize their industry (which ranges from $20 billion to $650 billion, depending on what you count as a 'subsidy') and apparently didn’t know their own internal budgets well enough to say how much public support they get. “I can’t answer your question directly,” BP’s CEO responded, which might as well have been the only answer any of them gave, given their evasiveness and training to avoid repeating the tobacco industry’s perjury. 

Maryland Rep. Haskins pointed out that “the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent commercial speech” and again, the CEOs were unwilling to say anything concrete acknowledging that companies shouldn’t lie — relevant given Exxon’s invocation of the First Amendment in its defense against litigation accusing it of false advertising. 

Later, Rep. Sarbanks, also of Maryland, pulled up lobbying records for the companies, of which the CEOs were similarly ignorant. None seemed aware of the fact that despite their supposed commitment to the Paris Agreement and climate action, they rarely, if ever, lobbied for it. Instead, they’d pushed heavily on corporate tax cuts and other real priorities. According to a report the Committee released, only 0.4% of their $452.6 million on lobbying since 2011 was about the carbon price they supposedly support. (Now, at this point we were definitely wondering how much these CEOs DO know about the companies they supposedly run, but of course, we're not Very Important Titans Of Industry who need plausible deniability.)

Rep. Rashida Tlaib also asked detailed questions, asking the CEOs and then educating them, (since they of course knew nothing) about the various Alaskan, Coloradan, and other front groups like Energy Citizens that API, Exxon and the others funded in recent years. “Lies, plain and simple” she called it. 


Then she pointed out that Chevron owes over $50 billion in settlement fees for all the people and ecosystems harmed by its pollution, and pointedly asked “When are you going to write the checks?” Mr. Worth, of course, demurred. “I’m not exactly following…” he said, in response to how Chevron had successfully paid to put a lawyer in jail after he fought for Indigenous communities suffering the harms of industry pollution. 

Rep. Katie Porter traded her legendary white board for a jar of M&M’s, using them to portray Shell’s massive investments in oil, gas and chemicals, and paltry expenditures on clean energy. She then turned to API’s Sommers, getting him to admit that developing wells takes time, undercutting the GOP’s argument that the Biden agenda is already having impacts. Porter then used a "swagger waggon" full of rice to show how many acres of land they’ve leased to drill on, yet haven’t done anything with (nearly 14 million), further undercutting their argument that recent political moves have constrained oil production. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought it was a “wonderful opportunity” to speak with the oil CEOs, given their influence watering down the ongoing budget reconciliation negotiations, quoting Sommers on CNN saying they’re “leaving everything on the field” to oppose the legislation. Turning to Exxon CEO Woods, AOC asked about Keith McCoy, the Exxon advisor caught in a sting bragging about their lobbying influence, and concluded by telling them that “some of us have to live in the future you are setting on fire.”

Rep. Cori Bush didn’t pull any punches, either, asking the executives about the disproportionate impact of fossil fuel facilities on communities of color, if most oil CEOs were Black or white, and asked Shell’s CEO how she felt about the company’s reports showing that Bangladesh “a country of 90 million Brown people” would have to be abandoned, and if Black and Brown communities were “expendable.” 

Not getting any good answers, Bush ended her time by calling the environmental injustices their companies commit “a striking example of White supremacy” and calling on the CEOs to resign (like the tobacco executives before them). 

It wasn’t the end of the hearing, but it might as well have been — particularly as the resignation call was echoed by the last speaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar.

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: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #215 on: October 31, 2021, 07:04:31 pm »

April 2, 2020

The LIES of oil companies about Climate Change since 1959 | Drawing Story

Sustainability Illustrated 37.7K subscribers

Everything you've ever wanted to know about the oil industry and climate change! This video is the true story of what the oil industry knew about climate change and what they did about it between the 1950s and today.
0:00 Intro
1:05 1960s

4:02 1970s
7:05 1980s
9:39 1990s
13:38 2000s

This video was created in collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Franta, a researcher at Stanford University investigating the history of fossil fuel producers and climate science. Several of his articles were used as references for this video:

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. 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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Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #216 on: November 10, 2021, 05:39:05 pm »

November 10, 2021

Union of Concerned Scientists

Congress must hold Big Oil accountable for decades of deception

Dear Anthony,

This year’s international climate negotiations are still under way and the message from my colleagues there on the ground has been clear: current plans to cut emissions are still falling short of the kind of investment science tells us we need to limit the worst effects of climate change.

Here in the United States, Congress is still working to pass our biggest investment in climate action ever—the Build Back Better Act. Even as we continue to push hard to pass this critical investment, it’s hard not to think about the obstacles that prevented us from acting earlier, at a time when we could have prevented the devastation we’ve seen in recent years.

The fossil fuel industry has spent decades—and billions of dollars—to prevent climate action from happening.


And while the industry has long been able to avoid accountability for its actions, the tide is beginning to turn. States and municipalities across the country are bringing lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations to make them pay their fair share of the costs of addressing climate change.

And just last month, top fossil fuel industry executives were called before Congress to answer for their decades of climate deception. We must continue to hold these corporations accountable and ensure they don’t continue to stand in the way of the further investments we need to close the gap between our current climate commitments  and what’s needed to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. —Katy

The more we know about Big Oil’s ongoing climate deception, the better we can hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their harms. That’s why it’s crucial that this hearing be just the first step. Congress must continue to investigate the industry’s history of climate disinformation and ongoing anti-climate campaigns. Tell your US representative to keep the heat on and investigate Big Oil’s climate disinformation.

November 10, 2021

Agelbert Rant to Congress:

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform's October hearing on fossil fuel industry disinformation should be just the first step in investigating what oil and gas companies, and their trade organizations, have done to block climate progress and endanger the public. Atomic Scientist Edward Teller warned them a long time ago that they had to stop their CO2 producing business model. On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming. Yet, instead of beginning the transition to clean renewable energy, they formed a Conspiracy to deliberately put in doubt the scientifically irrefutable FACT that increased CO2 would result in Catastrophic Climate Change.



That said, the Hydrocarbon Industry's 62 year old disinformation campaign is NOT their worst crime, though it is certainly a felony. Beyond their greatest crime (i.e. wanton human health damaging biosphere pollution for short term profit), their greater crime is Corrupting State and Federal Government officials into blocking climate progress involving, but not limited to, Conspiracy to Defraud the Public of the United States through coerced "Subsidies" under the color of "National Security" (see Orwell).


The result of this dastardly crime continues to be SECURITY for the Hydrocarbon "Industry" ("Mafia" is a more appropriate description of their buy em' or bop em' modus operandi) and INSECURITY for the United States. Oil shocks, as anyone who can add and subtract knows, increase security for Big Oil and National Insecurity for the United States.

     
These Big Oil Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Criminals, and their quislings in  government, must be prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law AND have their assets confiscated.

If you do not act to prevent Big Oil from continuing their Mens rea modus operandi CRIMES of BRIBING politicians with a portion of the money YOU CONTINUE to allow them to coerce out of we-the-people through Climate AND Democracy Destroying "Subsidies", these Social Darwinist, Profit over planet, biosphere polluters will NOT STOP their "Business model" dictated crimes! What is it going to take for you politicians to figure out that Big Oil "Business as Usual" is a death sentence for our environment AND our democracy? We need fossil fuels like a dog needs ticks!


The Hydrocarbon Hellspawn DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. 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! PROSECUTE them or they will continue laughing all the way to the bank with their Government Hand Out "Subsidies" while they gleefully destroy our biosphere.

They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. Proverbs 28:4
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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Hydrocarbon Hellspawn in Charge
« Reply #217 on: November 19, 2021, 01:56:36 pm »
Agelbert NOTE: All graphics are my doing. Feel free to pass them on with, or without attribution. The biosphere you save may be your own. I learned by hard experience to keep copies of every graphic I make. So, if the fossil fuelers hack a graphic so it cannot display, as they have done here in the past, I will just make another one exactly like the one they hacked.



November 18, 2021 By William Rivers Pitt ✨, Truthout

From Glasgow to Gulf of Mexico, Fossil Fuel Industry Shows Us Who’s in Charge

SNIPPETS:

There is a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s bleak masterpiece Apocalypse Now that came to mind in the aftermath of the Glasgow climate conference and Wednesday’s 🦕🦖 big oil lease 😈 shindig for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico. ... ...

“Hey soldier,” he asks one hollow-eyed troop, “do you know who’s in command here?” The soldier stares at him a moment and replies, “Yeah,” before turning back to the darkness. ... ...


In Glasgow, representatives from 200 countries came together to give speeches and praise each other for taking action, but in the end, they could not bring themselves to say, “Coal is bad.” Clearly, someone else was in charge. ... ...

Biden ran hard on salvaging the environment , and his administration says it tried to stop this sale, but there it went anyway: Lease Sale 257 generated $191,688,984 in high bids for 308 tracts covering 1.7 million acres in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico[/color], according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). “ExxonMobil Corporation submitted the highest number of total bids at 94 and Chevron U.S.A. Inc submitted the largest value of total high bids at $47,128,011, lease sale 257’s final notice of sale information package shows,” reports Rigzone. “Other companies participating in the sale included Shell Offshore Inc, BP Exploration & Production Inc and Equinor Gulf of Mexico LLC.” ... ...

 In effect, the oil industry just paid top dollar to the U.S. government for the privilege of building profitable suicide machines in the dying waters of the Gulf.


The infrastructure bill contains billions in fossil fuel subsidies, even as it was stripped of all meaningful climate policy.

Full article:
https://truthout.org/articles/from-glasgow-to-gulf-of-mexico-fossil-fuel-industry-shows-us-whos-in-charge/
« Last Edit: October 16, 2022, 04:57:53 pm by AGelbert »
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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Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #218 on: December 10, 2021, 05:36:09 pm »
bribe (brīb)
n.

1. Money or some other benefit given to a person in power, especially a public official, in an effort to cause the person to take a particular action.

2. Something offered to induce another to do something: tried to use dessert as a bribe to get the child to cooperate.

v. bribed, brib·ing, bribes
v.tr.

To give, offer, or promise a bribe to.
v.intr.

To give, offer, or promise bribes.
[Middle English, from Old French, piece of bread given as alms.]

brib′a·ble adj.
brib′er n.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bribed


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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Big Oil’s new strategy: Profit today, fight again tomorrow

Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the 🦖 oil and 🦕 gas industry remains 🐍 formidable.

By Naomi Oreskes ✨ and Jeff Nesbit 👍 -December 11, 2021

SOURCE The Revelalor

This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this, in part, by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.

Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?

The John D. Rockefeller myth

Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell’s reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell’s findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.

Standard Oil postcard from 1914. Scanned by Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0)

David had slain Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s owner, lost. The good guys won — or so it seemed.

In fact Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting — massively — from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil’s 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn’t compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire.

Say it ain’t so, Dr. Seuss!

One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso :o (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market “Flit,” a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren’t told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.

When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was as ubiquitous as “Got Milk?” is today.

At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn’t appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn’t come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters — strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books — energetically extolled Flit’s alleged benefits.

Geisel later said the experience “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.” The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun.

Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren’t about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate “advertorials” appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America.”

Controlling climate science

Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies’ own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by 😈 lying about the danger of their products, 😈 blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today’s climate emergency.

Less well known is how oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change.

The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil’s scientific participation gave them an insider’s view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.

The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that?

The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry’s internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It’s been effective.

The industry’s scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry’s extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea-level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring.

Don’t call it methane, it’s ‘natural gas’

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane — which marketing experts cleverly labeled “natural gas” — as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a “clean” fuel that’s needed to bridge the transition from today’s carbon economy to tomorrow’s renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP’s plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the 🦖 company and other 🦕🦕🦖🐍 oil majors frequently invoke “low carbon” instead of “no carbon.”

Except that methane gas isn’t clean. It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.

Flaring at oil and gas wells release methane into the air. Photo: WildEarth Guardians, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed “natural gas” as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry’s ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysisby the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can’t meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can’t solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise.

There’s little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers.

But the oil and gas industry doesn’t need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: Win today, fight again tomorrow.

A spider’s web of pipelines

Here’s a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the [size 24pt]🦖[/size] Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades  of future fossil fuel dependency.

FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop.


Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners’ properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrett — are almost certain to rule in the industry’s favor.

Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump’s arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about “flooding the zone” at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider’s web.


Dakota Access Pipeline being installed between farms, as seen from 50th Avenue in New Salem, North Dakota. Photo: Tony Webster, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas “infrastructure” as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century.

In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.

Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies . But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly — regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future , it’s time to recognize that 🦖🐘🦕🐍 they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.

https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/12/11/big-oils-new-strategy-profit-today-fight-again-tomorrow/

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. 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! 
« Last Edit: December 13, 2021, 11:42:11 am by AGelbert »
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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Exxon Mobil: The Most Evil Business in the World
« Reply #220 on: January 07, 2022, 08:09:42 pm »
Exxon Mobil: The Most Evil Business in the World


304,966 views Dec 29, 2021

Agelbert NOTE: The above video tells it like it is. It was only recently that I learned that the 🦖 Exxon trading name "Esso" was dreamed up by the hydrocarbon hellspawn as code for "S" "O" (i.e. 😈🦖 Standard Oil).

The story of fossil fuel consumption growth is a story of technologies used, misused and moulded by the corporations that control them; of capitalist expansion, particularly after the second world war; and of government complicity -- Simon Pirani

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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Re: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #221 on: February 02, 2022, 10:28:03 pm »
               
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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Re: Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Mens Rea Actus Reus
« Reply #222 on: February 08, 2022, 04:50:00 pm »
Agelbert MESSAGE: To those clever Morally Bankrupt, Social Darwinist, Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Bought and Paid fors having "fun" trying to make the truth filled graphics in the gallery inaccessible to readers here:

You now have my attention.



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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February 19, 2022 Environment by Ashley Curtin

New study confirms clean energy commitments from oil giants are nothing more than greenwashing

SNIPPET:

"🦖 Oil and 🦕 gas companies talk like they  care about the climate , but they keep drilling and polluting with complete disregard for the damage they cause."

Read more:
https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/02/19/new-study-confirms-clean-energy-commitments-from-oil-giants-are-nothing-more-than-greenwashing/

« Last Edit: February 20, 2022, 06:20:15 pm by AGelbert »
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February 28, 2022




Supreme 🐘🦕😈🦕🦖🐍 Court Hears Moot Climate Case To Dismantle Federal Gov’t Ability To Regulate

Remember when multi-shirting white nationalism peddler turned Presidential strategist 😈 Steve Bannon said the Trump administration would bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state?” Many were skeptical that the administration would be successful at undoing 130 years of governance, and indeed, it may seem like it failed.

That undoing might be underway today, as the Supreme Court hears West Virginia v. EPA, a case The Federalist Society the Supreme Court 🦖 justices appointed by 🦖🐘 presidents who lost the popular vote could use as a vehicle to fulfill Bannon’s promise, and effectively destroy the federal government’s ability to protect the public from any manner of threat, from climate change and more traditional pollution, to bad pharma, financial scams, and food safety inspections.

Because for the past century and half or so, and specifically since the Court decided Chevron v. NRDC in 1984, federal courts recognized a degree of deference in the relationship between Congress passing laws and the executive branch then developing regulations to enforce those statutes. The creation of those regulations requires lots of careful consideration by subject matter experts, like scientists, to set how strict a pollution limit should be, for example, or how low the risk of a side-effect should be for a medication to be approved and sold. Congress more or less sets a goal, and the federal government figures out how to meet it. And when things end up in court, the deference goes to federal agencies, since they’re staffed with the experts who know the issue best. 

But now, the Supreme Court has decided to take up a case against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which never went into effect. The Trump administration tossed the proposed plan, and the Biden administration is content to leave it dead, because we met the emission reduction goals addressed in the proposed plan without it ever going into effect. Why is the Court taking a case about a law that never was and never will be?

Unfortunately, the likely reason is because a majority of the justices intend to use it to achieve a decades-long plan by conservative, industry-funded legal lobbyists, to achieve what Bannon never could: a deconstructing of the administrative state.

The Supreme Court hears argument today, and the justices will decide in the next few months whether, or more likely how extensively, to incapacitate the federal government’s ability to protect the public. A majority of the justices could choose a path where unless Congress explicitly legislates, for example, that CO2 emissions should be below X million (billion) tons per year, or that it is illegal to sell a specific combination of herbal supplements as a medication that claims to cure COVID or Parkinsons or any other ailment or disease, regulatory bodies like the EPA and FDA wouldn’t be able to do much, if anything, about it.
 
That’s the short version. The long version?

…how much time ya got?

Because there’s lots of reading you’ll need to do to understand the whole ugly story. Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists has an  op-ed in Scientific American, if you want a science take. On the law side,  Vox has a great explainer on the moot case, Richmond Law Professor Noah Sachs  educated us about the possible consequences in the American Prospect, and  Pamela King covered how Justice Kavanaugh (who  lied to Congress, almost certainly committed sexual assault, and still hasn't explained  who paid off his credit card debt) should recuse himself from the case (but obviously won’t), and  Jennifer Hijazi covered the amicus brief filed by Democratic lawmakers.  Karen Sokol explained it concisely at Slate, and Elie Mystal doesn’t mince words about it at The Nation:  Supreme 🦕👿 Court vs. the Earth. Meanwhile,  Sierra ClubNRDC, and  EDF all have blog posts running down the high stakes of the case.

But it’s a piece by  Andrew Perez in the Daily Poster that we’ll focus on, because Perez focused on the fact that beyond Bannon, this assault on the government’s ability to protect the public from profiteers, has been fueled for decades by the Koch empire.

The Koch network’s chief political arm, 🐘🦖 Americans for Prosperity, led campaigns supporting the confirmation of all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. Barrett’s confirmation was a particularly significant win for the fossil fuel industry — she has familial ties to Shell Oil, and refused to recuse herself in a case involving that oil giant.



Several more 🦖 Koch-funded dark money groups have filed similar amicus briefs in the case. That includes the Cato Institute, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

This is essentially the 🦖end game of decades of covert lobbying and legal disinformation, a culmination of hundreds of millions of dollars of PR spending, front group think tank reports, academic-center white papers and good old fashioned dirty politics

Unfortunately, with the Supreme Court solidly in the hands of 🦖😈 polluters, there’s little we can do.


Aside from, of course, stacking the courts with enough uncompromised judges to rule in the public’s best interest, instead of polluters’.
 

And if you think court-packing sounds radical, just wait until you see the changes that result from the decision this Court makes.

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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