Tracking the politics of pollution, climate change and emerging green technologies.
If the oil industry wasn’t able to spend 175 million dollars sweet talking, wining and dining Members of Congress, who can imagine the havoc society would face: increased oversight of offshore drilling operations, pollution limits, regulation of refinery supply. The horror, the horror.
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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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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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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In a scene most evocative of the infamous Big Tobacco hearing in 1994 when tobacco executives lined up and testified under oath that nicotine was not addictive, the oil executives have responded disappointingly to a…
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3-31-10 by dugan After President Obama announced Wendnesday that he’s opening large swath of U.S. coastline to oil and gas drilling, and the government announced that domestic oil supplies had risen, the price of…
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3-29-10 by dugan Just as the oxymoronic American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity launched a new campaign telling us that coal is sooo much cheaper than natural gas (coal’s chief, and cleaner, competitor), the admirable…
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3-5-10 by dugan I guess its’s fitting that it took a New York newspaper to inform Californians that a couple of giant Texas oil refining companies are bankrolling a ballot initiative to kill the…
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3-2-10 by dugan While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil…
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01-11-10 by dugan Why be obsessed with the price of gasoline? Easy. High energy prices, including prices at the pump, will slow and even reverse economic recovery. Every 10-cent a gallon increase in the…
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If you had to choose between oil and water, one or the other, which would you choose? Living without oil or natural gas wouldn’t be fun, but you wouldn’t live at all without drinkable water….
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12-8-09 by dugan On the other fossil fuel front, Sen. Robert Byrd, the coal industry’s best ally in Washington for decades, is standing up against its current scare campaign in West Virginia, and its demand…
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11-24-09 by dugan California doesn’t have many bright spots lately, what with a new $21 billion hole in its budget, more than 12% unemployment and a hapless state Legislature. But its prospects looked up…
