Oil Watchdog

Blog Post

BP Safety Chief: Big Talk, but What Else?

Posted by Judy Dugan

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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Blog Post

Fiorina Joins the Koch-heads. Ka-Ching!

Posted by Judy Dugan

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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Blog Post

Big Oil Behind The Tea

Posted by Jamie Court

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 an angry populist movement that’s supposed to represent real people doing defending oil companies? It’s a question the New York [...]

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Blog Post

Big Oil’s ‘jobs’ echo chamber

Posted by Judy Dugan

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 on the California ballot. Both are saying that any shift toward greener energy that costs the oil industry a dime [...]

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Oil industry gusher: lobbying expenses

Doug Heller

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.

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Natural gas: Not safe, and not all that green

Judy Dugan

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 gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens have gone silent. No more calls to action and pleas to phone your member of [...]

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Blog Post

Nigeria=Mexico?

Posted by Judy Dugan

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 stealing and selling oil and gas. It’s a situation increasingly similar to oilfield battles  in Nigeria, where a corrupt government [...]

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Blog Post

Oops, there’s oil on the water after all *(or not)

Posted by Judy Dugan

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 trickled out about Thusday’s platform accident off the Louisiana coast, there were swift assurances from the owner that no oil [...]

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CEO Confession: Clean Air Wastes Profit

Judy Dugan

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 [...]

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