12-21-07 by dugan My earlier doubts about Chevron’s ballyhooed investment in a Galveston biodiesel plant were too mild. After garnering a bunch of admiring news stories, including in the New York Times, Chevron is…
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Archive | Tag: media critique
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Child of ‘The Yes Men’ Strikes
12-04-07 by dugan "Hoaxers Target Big Oil." That’s an irresistible headline in OilWatchdog’s plush consumer-financed corporate headquarters. The story in the sober British Guardian newspaper was straight-faced, about a fake promise appearing on…
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Exxon’s Alabama Cesspool
11-19-07 by dugan When a big story happens away from the eye of Big Media, the bare bones that get told often omit the really interesting political realities and motivations. Earlier this month, a…
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Oil’s Embrace of Enron’s Style
10-25-07 by dugan As Shell announced its 3rd quarter results (down a little because U.S. refining profits finally fell below pirate level), chief financial officer Peter Voser broke some new ground. He became the first…
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Chevron’s Titan-ic Bungle
10-15-07 by dugan "It’s not what you say but what you do that matters." Oops, Chevron must not have heard its mother say that. Check out this savage AdWeek column by Joan Voight on…
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Chevron’s Late-Night “Sco-o-ore!”
10-12-07 by dugan It’s easy to smell a rat when Chevron and other oil companies seem to be getting a subsidy on the backs of California consumers. It’s often hard to tell how the…
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Ethanol Glut’s Other Villains
10-4-07 by dugan Chevron, BP, Exxon and friends talk a big game on renewable fuels, but it’s like Silicon Valley vaporware: all buzz, nothing in production. That’s the other half of the story on…
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Iraqi Three-in-One
09-04-07 by dugan The media’s Iraq focus this week is on Gen. David Petraus’s predictable one-hand, other-hand report on the progress of the "surge." Yet there’s little Western-media reporting from Dubai and Istanbul,…
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Decoding Gasoline Prices
08-23-07 by dugan "Insider" sends along a copy (pdf) of a preliminary report on gasoline pricing by the Washington State Attorney General. Part 1 doesn’t quite get to the bottom of the large…
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Just Can’t Spend It All
07-31-07 by dugan "With the world thirsty for more oil and cleaner fuels, Exxon Mobil and other oil firms have been spending billions to buy back their shares." A great sentence, but not my…
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Big Oil vs. OilWatchdog
06-04-07 by dugan It’s the most exciting debate since… Paris Hilton’s Prison Sentence? Read me taking on Tom Tanton of the Exxon-funded Institute for Energy Research, in the LA Times’ Opinion section “Dust-Up" online. We…
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‘Aspirational Goals’=Delay, Deny
06-01-07 by dugan President Bush’s big media splash for his greenhouse gas speech Thursday is getting—belatedly—the thrashing it deserves. Check out columnist Dan Froomkin in Washingtonpost.com today: [Bush] put forth a new proposal on climate…
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Chevron’s Big BioDiesel Greenwash
5-29-07 by dugan Folks, here’s the announcement you definitely won’t hear today: Chevron Corp., with the unveiling of a large Galveston Bay biodiesel plant today, also announced the launch of “Chevron Clean D,” a branded…