The way natural gas promoters talk about their pet fuel, you’d think it was green as clover and safe as baby oil. After the deadly San Bruno, California, gas line explosion, however, hawkers like natural…
Archive | Author: Judy Dugan
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Nigeria=Mexico?
Mexico’s huge national oil company, Pemex, has shut down a large chunk of its natural gas fields because of the apparent kidnapping of dozens of employees and contract workers by drug gangs that are also…
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Oops, there’s oil on the water after all *(or not)
The new oil platform fire or explosion in the Gulf of Mexico looks minor in comparison to the BP spill, but there are sure some loud echoes in how it’s being handled. When word first…
CEO Confession: Clean Air Wastes Profit
Right: Valero’s Amarillo refinery blast in February The chief funders of California’s anti-regulation Proposition 23 on the November ballot are a pair of Texas-based refiners, Valero and Tesoro. Each of them has two refineries in…
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BP’s tax-subsidized cleanup
You think you’re done being mad at BP? You’re over the fact that it’s still getting piles of U.S. taxpayer subsidies, including subsidies on what it promised to pay for the cleanup? Jim Hightower, the Texas populist and scourge of misbehaving corporations, tells us that BP isn’t just hiring out-of-work Florida Pandhandle folks–it’s using semicamouflaged prison labor, and the scary fellas come with a subsidy of $2,500 per head.
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Coal’s Anonymous Dirt
Big Coal is planning an anonymous campaign blitz against elected officials (in Kentucky in this case) who dare to favor any restrictions on coal. That’s according to an internal coal company memo obtained by Kentucky’s Lexington Herald newspaper. This is only a tiny piece of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to let corporations pour unlimited anonymous money into political campaigns. How many of these memos do we not know about?
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BP’s CEO Crisis Lurch (Again)
“When he abruptly resigned as chief executive of BP PLC [he] left the company in disarray. The giant energy producer was struggling with
a legacy of accidents and spills in the U.S.” Nope, that’s not about the swift booting of Tony Hayward by the BP board on Tuesday. It’s from a 2007 Bloomberg story on the last crisis change in leadership at BP.
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BP: How many faked photos?
OK, BP has confessed the Photoshop fakery that made its crisis control room look a lot busier by making blank monitors look live. BP blamed it on a free-lance photographer working for them–though as blogger…
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Big Oil’s Boondoggle Machine
Given the fury directed at BP in Congressional hearings on the Gulf oil spill, you’d think the time was ripe to cut the oil industry’s ridiculous subsidies–amounting to at least $40 billion per decade, according…
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Beware BP spin on size record
7-01-2010 by dugan BP’s devastating oil spill may now be the largest accidental spill in modern history, bigger than the estimated 140 million gallons spewed by the 1979-80 Ixtoc spill off the coast of…
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Fossil Fuel Fiascos-in-Waiting
6-24-10 by dugan BP is touting restoral of its robot-damaged "cap" (which looks like a giant hat for the Tin Man) to corral a large fraction of the company’s Gulf oil spill, but is…
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Big Oil’s New Ballot War
06-23-10 by dugan Californians are getting sick to death of corporate-sponsored ballot initiatives. And they’re catching on to who’s behind the slogans, voting down two deceptively marketed initiatives on the June ballot that were…
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Chevron’s Protection Racket
06-23-10 by dugan The latest round of state political contribution reports show that Chevron has given another $250,000 to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s huge political slush fund, the "California Dream Team." That makes a…