Insider news and analysis from America's top consumer advocates     Oil Watchdog is a project of Consumer Watchdog

 

Carbon trading. Oh, yawn. Too weird and complicated. MEGO. Leave me alone. But wait a minute: A new website, Carbon Watch, could change your mind about keeping up with cap and trade. It's a joint project of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS's "Frontline," and aims to put the central battle on global warming in terms that engage all of us.

Chevron keeps throwing money against the lawsuit by Ecuadoran peasants whose land and water were spoiled by oil drilling's toxic leftovers. But the U.S. oil giant lost again in a Supreme Court ruling yesterday refusing to force Ecuador's national oil company to join the suit and share the liability. The ultimate bill to Chevron shareholders may be as much as $27 billion, which makes me wonder why the company's stock rose yesterday.

Chevron's evasions about its "upgrade" of a Northern California refinery to process dirtier, heavier oil got in well-deserved trouble with a state judge recently, thanks to unrelenting pressure from people who live near its already-dirty Richmond refinery (see poster below). Areas with less-organized citizens--including rural Mississippi and northern South Dakota--risk being mowed down by the oil industry's shift to tar-like heavy oil, for instance from Canadian tar sands.

The best use of biofuels like ethanol is not in the tank, but in making electricity to fuel all-electric cars, says a new study in Science magazine (free abstract, subscription pdf). I expect that's right from a pure science view, but let's start by using biofuels directly in hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles--what OilWatchdog suggests in its "Road to Cleaner and Cheaper" report. 

 Instead of just making fun of Chevron's fake environmentalism, what if someone made them tell the truth? Jeff Grubler of InsaneReagan actually did it, producing the biting "Honest Chevron" series:

05-27 update: The NRDC has agreed to remove itself from the "advisory committee" for the pro-oil sands study described below and at least dispute the study's findings. An e-mail sent this morning by an NRDC attorney said: "Just to let you know that NRDC is off the Advisory Committee on all electronic versions of the report. We are working on a public criticism of the report which we were doing in any case and a formal withdrawal from the Advisory Committee."

What do the coal industry and the tar sands of southwestern Canada have in common? Good friends in high places, gigantic lobbying budgets and greenwashed slogans (like "clean coal"). Both industries are pushing a national-security argument that filthy, destructive fuels produced in North America are better than buying oil from OPEC. It's a false choice, forcing the argument away from conservation, efficiency and renewable power.

Organized protest has come a long way from crude cartoons and thrown-together "white papers." For tomorrow's annual meeting at Chevron's San Ramon, CA, headquarters, a loose environmental and activist coalition has produced an alt-version of the annual report and (even more fun) its own take (pdf) on Chevron's greenwashed "Will You Join Us" ads.  Protests expected, too.  Here's the gorgeous website, with a slideshow of the fake ads, the alternative annual report, and info about tomorrow's events. Festivities begin at 7 a.m.

Try this:  Go to YouTube and search for "Chevron 60 Minutes," The first three results look like the image above. Two of them are a real and tough "60 Minutes" report on Chevron's liability for toxic pollution of the Ecuadorean Amazon by Texaco, which Chevron took over. The top search result, though, is a 14-minute Chevron production, mimicking the "60 Minutes" report. Chevron is never ID'd as the video's producer, and former CNN reporter Gene Randall offers no hint that Chevron employed him. Even the video's tag at the bottom says just "TexacoEcuador."

We at OilWatchdog have been relentlessly critical of Chevron's faux-green ad campaigns (here, here, here and here.) Today, in an OpEd in the L.A. Times, a smart, dogged critic of the oil indsutry, Antonia Juhasz, offers the dollars and cents of Chevron's fraud. She's so effective because she gives Chevron every benefit of the doubt, even though the company keeps its renewable energy spending as secret as its refinery production. Juhasz, author of the excellent new history and critique, "The Tyranny of Oil," (excerpt here) had as much luck with Chevron's PR department as reporters asking for the meeting calendar of Vice President Cheney: 

Chevron tries harder. Nope, not to cut fuel prices or compete to be first in renewable energy. For Chevron it's all about hearts and minds, as another full-page color ad in the LA Times reminds me this morning. This craven greenwashing blurs Chevron's real-world behavior, including threats and power plays aimed at curbing large-scale reductions of global warming emissions.