Oil Watchdog

Santa Monica, CA — Monday night’s explosion and hours-long fire at Chevron’s large oil refinery in Richmond, Ca., released toxic chemicals including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide in unknown amounts, sending hundreds of local residents to local hospitals with breathing and eye complaints. Yet the state agency with the most expertise in regulating such toxins, the Department of Toxic Substances Control, claims it has little to no oversight of dangerous substances produced in refinery accidents, said Consumer Watchdog.

The word “fracking” exploded into the American vocabulary just a few years ago. People from Pennsylvania to Wyoming found chemicals creeping into their drinking water; some could light flammable gases straight from the faucet (video).as oil companies injected chemical-laced water deep underground to fracture gas-bearing rock. But in California, a narrow industry definition of fracking and the inattention of regulators kept the state mostly out of the conversation.

The energy investigators who nailed Enron for energy price manipulation that nearly bankrupted California just took aim at oil refining giants including Chevron and BP. May the refiners’ gasoline-price schemes now come crashing down in an Enron-style heap. We’ve known for years that California and West Coast refiners find endless ways to shut down some [...]

This California license plate, “Gas Pain,” might be the sly joke of a gastroenterologist, but it’s not on a Mercedes. So let’s stipulate that it means pain at the pump, with a gallon of regular gas stuck for months at around $4.40. This kind of price is as usual fueled by investor speculation and an [...]

The reviled “jobless recovery” of the U.S. economy won’t improve much in 2012, say the usual forecasters. But oil company executives and market speculators can break out the champagne now as the price of crude oil starts the year with a huge jump. It’s not about Iranian threats or rising demand, it’s about speculative profits.

OilWatchdog and other critics of commodity speculation have long said that rampant speculation in oil futures markets  has hurt families, cost jobs and kept the U.S. economy teetering on the edge of recession. Energy analyst Marc Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America, in a nailed-down new study. finds that speculators are adding about $600 to [...]