Tag: big oil
Internet Slays Joe Manchin Over Dumb Comments That Fossil Fuels Can Produce Clean Energy

Internet Slays Joe Manchin Over Dumb Comments That Fossil Fuels Can Produce Clean Energy

United States Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) on Wednesday claimed that oil can be used to generate clean power as the nation transitions to renewables sources of energy.

"For us to be strong, to be the superpower of the world, we should develop here in North America a North American energy alliance with Canada and basically Mexico and the United States as one continent basically that could be the energy hub," Manchin told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe.

"We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can make sure that we produce the cleanest resources basically from fossil but also be able to segue into a cleaner environment with the technology and investments that it'll take to transition," Manchin continued.

"I think we can do both, but we have to maintain. You can't do just one and not the other and think we're gonna be fine. And that's what we're running into – the conundrum here. We should be ramping up production," Manchin added. "We should be out there doing everything we can to maintain our independence but be able to backfill everywhere we can. And if we don't get Europe up and loaded for next winter, for the summer when they've depleted all their reserves, there's gonna be a big problem coming."

Manchin – a wealthy coal magnate who drives a Maserati and lives on a yacht while representing one of the poorest states in the country – is a lone voice among the Democratic Senate caucus when it comes to retrofitting the American energy grid to tackle climate change. He killed President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan in part because of its provisions that called for investments in renewables. Manchin also refuses to consider amending the filibuster, which Republicans used to obstruct the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Twitter blasted him for touting the very industry that is padding his pockets and poisoning our biosphere.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

WATCH: Biden Outlines Major Initiative Against “Existential Threat” Of Climate Change

WATCH: Biden Outlines Major Initiative Against “Existential Threat” Of Climate Change

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In a speech Wednesday outlining his new executive actions aimed at confronting the "existential threat" of the climate crisis, President Joe Biden said he plans to ask the Democrat-controlled Congress to pass legislation eliminating the tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies the federal government continues to hand Big Oil even as the planetary emergency wreaks havoc in the U.S. and across the globe.

"Unlike previous administrations, I don't think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil to the tune of $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies," said Biden. "I'm gonna be going to the Congress and asking them to eliminate those subsidies."

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EPA’s Scott Pruitt: The Great Disruptor

EPA’s Scott Pruitt: The Great Disruptor

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

On January 17, a congressional hearing to confirm Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s chosen appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, was held in Washington, D.C. Now, anybody who knows anything about fracking or oil well drilling knows that wherever there’s a roomful of well-dressed executives, oil probably ain’t far behind. So, I figured there was going to be a lot of oil people in that room just listening to themselves talking to each other. I also thought they needed a little education from someone who knows a lot about oil from a somewhat different perspective: namely, me.

Wearing a BP (British Petroleum) jumpsuit and a white hard hat, with a black rubber hose slung over my shoulder, I entered the confirmation hearing. I used yellow crime tape to mark off my dirty oil claim, and then I attempted to set up a fracking operation within the hearing.

While I succeeded in disrupting the congressional hearing of Scott Pruitt to become the head of the EPA, I didn’t get very far. I was arrested and taken to jail while Pruitt went on to be confirmed to lead the very agency he has spent years trying to dismantle.

A few days after Pruitt’s February 17 confirmation, over 6,000 pages of his emails were made public. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the new head of the EPA has been working hand-in-glove with big oil and gas producers, electric utilities, and political groups with links to the billionaire Koch brothers to gut environmental regulations.

For me, this affront is personal. I am a fourth-generation shrimper, born and bred in a small Texas fishing village. For the last 25 years, I have been tracking the comings and goings of the oil and petrochemical industries impacting my small Calhoun County.

In 1989, Calhoun County was number-one in the country, as documented by the EPA Toxic Release Inventory, for industry generated toxic waste. My county had half the toxic waste in Texas—more specifically, in a landfill near Lavaca Bay. A couple of years later, Matagorda Bay (adjoining Lavaca Bay) was considered the largest underwater mercury Superfund site in the United States. Alcoa’s personal internal documents reported approximately 1,200,000 pounds of mercury was “lost” to the environment.

In 2001, Texas A&M studies documented DNA damage in the local oysters and the cattle downwind of our petrochemical industry. In the interim years, an entire community was bought out by a petrochemical giant, and my own fishing community that once supported five fish houses and 120 shrimp boats was reduced to two shrimp boats and zero fish houses.

The devastation wasn’t limited to Calhoun County. Similar sacrificial communities on the Gulf Coast have been inundated by the chemical and oil industries.

Try to wrap your mind around these sobering facts: Occupational Safety and Health Administration reported 4,800 Americans are killed every year by industrial accidents, and another 55,000 die from occupational diseases. In addition, the U.S. has about 90 facilities—including chemical factories, refineries and water-treatment plants—that in a worst-case scenario, would pose risks to more than one million people. About 400 other facilities could pose risks to more than 100,000 people.

Now, this is a lot of trust to place in an EPA head who doesn’t see the value of regulations and who used most of his energy as Oklahoma’s attorney general fighting the very agency he is now leading. He repeatedly sued the EPA during the Obama administration, challenging the agency’s legal authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants, and the quality of wetland and other waters. He has proudly described himself as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

I have no illusions about Pruitt doing the right thing. I may have disrupted his hearing, but he has consistently used his power to disrupt and destroy our communities and the environment. Thanks to all the senators who are beholden to Big Oil, Pruitt is now poised to do even more damage. It will take a lot more citizen disruptors to stop him. Who’s with me?

Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimper, environmental activist and peace advocate from the Texas Gulf Coast.

IMAGE: Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Some Conservative Institutions Cannot Deny Climate Change

Some Conservative Institutions Cannot Deny Climate Change

MOBILE, ALABAMA — There has been no need to unpack the winter clothes this year because we haven’t had winter. My second-grader goes to school every morning wearing a cardigan, but she greets me in the afternoon in short sleeves.

Here on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, we’ve had an endless spring of balmy, sunny weeks that were punctuated by a couple of days of January frost. On Christmas Day, Mobile recorded a historic high temperature of 80 degrees, which broke the record of 79 degrees that was set the year before, according to the National Weather Service.

So it goes across planet Earth. Last year was the hottest year on record, beating the record set in 2015. And 2015 topped the record set in 2014, according to NASA. Scientists say that this is the first time that temperature records have been broken three years in a row.

Down here, the sunny days are pleasant enough, but they portend calamity. There is no greater threat facing humankind than global warming. For all the time spent worrying about jihadist terrorists and Mexican criminals, they don’t constitute an existential threat to humanity. Climate change does.

The scientific consensus is clear: Soaring temperatures, caused by human activity, have dire consequences. Among those are more frequent extreme weather events, including droughts, flooding, wildfires, and severe storms. The United States has already experienced flooding and droughts, from the Gulf Coast to California, that foretell things to come.

But poorer countries, as seems to be their fate, will fare even worse, even though the wealthier countries — with their automobiles, air conditioning, and jet planes — have done the most to warm the planet. Droughts will likely be more severe in countries such as Ethiopia; the Maldives and the Marshall Islands may be swamped by rising sea levels and cease to exist, scientists say.

Of course, President Donald Trump has famously said that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. But the real danger that Trump represents comes not from his unhinged declarations, but from the policies that will characterize his administration. He has announced his intention to overturn several Obama-era environmental regulations, including one that bans new coal mining leases on federal lands.

Worse still is his stewardship of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump has named Scott Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic who wants to destroy the EPA, as its director. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt was in league with fossil-fuel giants whose goal was to defy every conceivable government regulation so they could pillage the planet as they pleased, recently released emails show. That includes the billionaire Koch brothers, who have done much to bend politics to their laissez-faire liking.

Pruitt and his allies would have you believe that the science on climate change is still in doubt, that the clamor over climate change is just noise from a group of leftist malcontents. Really? Consider the consensus from two groups that are hardly known for their liberal leanings.

The first is the property and casualty insurance industry, which conducts research to try to limit its losses from property damage. Last year, the Center for Insurance Policy and Research cited a study that found that “extreme weather events (such as prolonged droughts, hurricanes, floods, and severe storms) led to $560 billion in insured losses from 1980 to 2015. Experts predict climate change will continue to intensify the frequency and severity of these types of weather-related events.”

The second group that defies characterization as a bunch of tree-hugging leftists is the Department of Defense, which has described climate change as a “threat multiplier.” According to the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, “The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the world.”

When poorer countries are devastated by climate change — when droughts are frequent and severe and water and food are scarce — people will leave, seeking refuge in wealthier countries. The tides of refugees will not be held back, no matter how many walls we build.

That’s no hoax.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

IMAGE: Greenpeace