Report
A new report by Oil Watchdog finds that Valero Energy reaped over $4.5 billion in refining profit while gouging California motorists since it bought its second California refinery in 2002. The oil refining giant, which is also the largest funder of Proposition 23, averaged 37% higher margins on each barrel of oil it refined in California than at refineries it owns elsewhere in the country, according to data published in company financial reports.
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BP executives can’t seriously believe that this time they’ll get safety right. The company’s penny-pinching “safety be damned” culture is too entrenched to reverse–especially if you put the old vice-president of excuses in charge of the new plan.
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There’s a name that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch. Koch-heads now on the radar include Carly Fiorina, the Tea Party and Proposition 23.
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When Californians angry about oil companies’ attempt to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas emission cap went to confront the oil refiner behind Prop 23’s power play, they found the Tea Party in their way. What’s…
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It’s amazing how oil companies stay so completely on message. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry mouthpiece, is pushing the same deceptive “jobs, jobs, jobs” message as the Texas oil companies backing Proposition 23…
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.
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…
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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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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…
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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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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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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“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.
