Oil Watchdog

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 California and the last thing they want, from a profit standpoint, is regulation of greenhouse gases or any concerted attempt [...]

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?

Ahead of tomorrow’s anticipated release of BP’s second-quarter financial statements–and of the massive losses–BP is expected to appoint Managing Director Bob Dudley to replace Tony Hayward as CEO during tonight’s board meeting in London. Hayward is rumored to be leaving his post with $18.5 million–the equivalent of a year’s salary and a guaranteed pension. (On [...]

$20 Billion for "Clean Coal"? by Khan Shoieb Senators John Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and George Voinovich (R-OH) have reportedly come out with a bill that would give massive subsidies to the coal industry over the next decade and might be packaged into upcoming energy legislation in the Senate. According to CQ: [The Senators] unveiled a [...]

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 Mexico, which eventually slimed 170 miles of Texas beaches. It’s smaller only than the deliberate spillage by Iraq into the [...]

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 wholly owned by a power company and an auto insurance company. But here it comes again. A ballot initiative mostly [...]