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.
Continue reading...Saturday, April 7, 2012
Activist Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica, calls it capitulation. "After you get bonked on the head by $4 and $5 gasoline enough times, maybe it doesn't hurt as much," Court said.
Continue reading...Wednesday, August 31, 2011
"There's an old saying in [the] gasoline [industry]," Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica, Calif., said Monday. "Prices go up like a rocket and down like a feather. There is a higher disconnect between the actual price of oil and the price of gasoline." Gasoline prices have been viewed as the "last bastion of competition," Dugan said, "but in this case that appears to have failed." Still, gasoline prices in the state vary significantly.
Continue reading...Monday, April 11, 2011
California-based nonprofit, Consumer Watchdog, recently provided a clue to where the "missing" gasoline may have gone. Recently, Judy Dugan, a petroleum market commentator for Consumer Watchdog, noted that the shares of oil refiners jumped in price last month "on bets that Japan would soon have to import a lot more heating oil and gasoline because of refinery fires and quake/ tsunami damage."
Continue reading...Thursday, March 10, 2011
Consumer Watchdog's Jamie Court discusses why the spike in gas prices - especially in California - has nothing to do with civil unrest, and everything to do with profiteering.
Continue reading...Wednesday, March 9, 2011
On KFMB-TV Channel 8 in San Diego, CA, Judy Dugan from Consumer Watchdog says rising gas prices are a form of highway robbery.
Continue reading...Tuesday, March 8, 2011
While skirmishes in Libya and uncertainty in the Middlie East are nice cover for outrageous gasoline prices, the fact is the same old suspects are making a killing from sky-high gas prices approaching $4 dollars per gallon in California: big oil companies and greedy speculators.
Continue reading...Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The panel named by President Obama to investigate the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout on Tuesday rejected a call by a consumer activist group for the resignation of its chief counsel, Fred H. Bartlit Jr. The group, Consumer Watchdog, said that the panel should dismiss Mr. Bartlit because his law firm, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, once represented Halliburton, one of the companies involved in drilling the BP well.
Continue reading...Wednesday, October 27, 2010
I had lunch in the Chamber of Commerce's AIG-sponsored "Hall of Flags" today, where BP compensation fund administrator Kenneth Feinberg told the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform that the legal system is working just fine.
Continue reading...Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Washington, DC -- Consumer Watchdog asked President Obama to force BP Fund Administrator Kenneth Feinberg to withdraw from a keynote address Wednesday at a Chamber of Commerce group dedicated to eviscerating spill victims’ legal rights, and to fire Feinberg if he refuses.
Continue reading...Monday, October 18, 2010
Consumer Group Calls On Pension Funds to Divest From Prop 23 Backers Tesoro, Valero Santa Monica, CA – Consumer advocates revealed an investor slide presentation by Texas-based oil company Tesoro explaining that oil refiners keep gasoline supplies especially tight on the West Coast to keep profits high through higher pump prices. The slides were included in a letter from Consumer Watchdog to California’s large public pension funds, known as CalPERS and CalSTRS, calling on the funds to divest from Tesoro and another refiner, Valero, which are the chief sponsors of Proposition 23 on the November ballot. The Investment Committee of CalPERS is meeting in Long Beach today.
Continue reading...Wednesday, October 13, 2010
New York, NY -- A national consumer group is running a 30 second commercial on a Times Square Superscreen that challenges Koch Industries, "the largest oil company you've never heard of," for its record of environmental degradation, political influence, Tea Party funding and climate change denial.
Continue reading...Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Top Prop 23 Funder Doesn’t Want Greentech Competition To Get in Way of Profiteering Santa Monica, CA – A new report by Consumer Watchdog's OilWatchdog.org project finds that Valero Energy reaped over $4.5 billion in refining profit while gouging California motorists since it bought its second California refinery in 2002. The oil refining giant, which is also the largest funder of Proposition 23, averaged 37% higher margins on each barrel of oil it refined in California than at refineries it owns elsewhere in the country, according to data published in company financial reports.
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Tuesday, August 7, 2012
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