BP’s Deepwater Horizon cover-up aided by Bush State Department

That’s the official line, and I could have swallowed it — except for a message I received from a very nervous source floating in the Caspian Sea. The source told me he’d been an eye-witness to the BP/Transocean oil rig blow-out — not the one in the Gulf, but an IDENTICAL blow-out in the Caspian that happened just 17 months before its Gulf companion exploded.

The hunt for the truth took me to Baku, Azerbaijan, in Central Asia (and detention by the dictatorship’s not-so-secret police), meetings with MI-6 sources in London, and beaches on the Gulf Coast and in the Arctic. Watch this video from my investigation for Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches. It ran world-wide…except in the USA.

If you don’t know about the earlier blow-out, it’s because BP didn’t tell you, didn’t tell anyone but its drilling partners Exxon and Chevron — and in a top secret cable, George W. Bush’s State Department. The oil company chieftains kept the devastating information tightly concealed — even though US law required they report such rig failures to the US Department of Interior.

If BP had reported the disaster to Interior, the 11 men would be alive today, because Interior’s experts had tried to stop BP from drilling in the unstable deep waters of the

— source gregpalast.com | Greg Palast | Apr 19, 2021

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Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right

Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025. 8 percent of the 2020 subsidy reflects undercharging for supply costs (explicit subsidies) and tax breaks another 6%. Rest for undercharging for environmental costs. The U.S. government will provide approximately $730 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel companies this year, a figure that is expected to increase to $850 billion by 2025. EU lawmakers last month voted to continue providing subsidies to fossil fuel companies until at least 2027. Efficient fuel pricing in 2025 would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 36 percent below baseline levels, which is in line with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees, while raising revenues worth 3.8 percent of global GDP and preventing 0.9 million local air pollution deaths.

— source imf.org | Sep 24, 2021

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Methane emissions are 70% higher than reported

Methane emissions from the oil, gas, and coal industries are 70 percent higher than official government estimates around the world, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest methane report released Wednesday. As demand for energy rebounds from its COVID-19-induced slump in 2020, the report highlights the need for improved methane monitoring and plugging leaks — fast.

Oil and gas companies churn out around 40 percent of human-produced methane. The invisible, odorless gas issues from pipelines, oil and gas wells, and the lines that shuttle gas into homes. Using the latest data from satellites and other measurement efforts, the IEA, a Paris-based energy watchdog, uncovered significant discrepancies between government figures and the reality of methane leaks.

Tackling methane is one of the best ways to keep global warming in check, the report says, and with gas prices hitting record highs, oil and gas companies could even profit by

— source grist.org | Lina Tran | Feb 24, 2022

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How Big Tech Helped Big Oil Automate the Climate Crisis

When it comes to increasing profitability through automation, the orbits of Big Tech and Big Oil have merged, and household names such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have led the way. They’ve done so under the umbrella of their lesser-known subsidiaries Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Both Microsoft and Amazon had a major presence at the recent CERAWeek conference in Houston, considered one of the biggest annual convenings of oil and gas industry thought leaders in the world. Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, even spoke at the event. Let’s listen a little bit what he had to say.

ANDREW JASSY: A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners. And these are companies like Shell, and BP, and ConocoPhillips, and Halliburton and Woodside. You know, we have a pretty broad group.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Tech companies often bill themselves as pioneers in the use of renewable energy and clean technology. But a far different reality arises in recent reporting by Gizmodo reporter Brian Merchant. Brian

— source https://therealnews.com/stories/how-big-tech-has-helped-big-oil-automate-the-climate-crisis | Apr 1, 2019

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‘Monstrous’ Methane Plume Seen From Space Highlights Invisible Fracking Dangers

Environmental justice advocates on Wednesday pointed to a methane plume so large it was seen last month from space via satellite as the latest evidence that emissions of the potent fossil fuel must be reined in.

As Bloomberg reported Monday, the geoanalytics firm Kayrros SAS detected the plume of the invisible greenhouse gas, which spanned 56 miles and covered several parishes across Louisiana, on January 21.

The methane plume is the largest concentration of the gas seen via satellite in the U.S. since last October.

The firm said a plume of such size suggested an emissions rate of 105 tons of methane per hour. []–A release that lasted more than an hour at that rate would have had the same short-term environmental impact as yearly emissions from nearly 2,000 cars, Bloomberg reported.

— source commondreams.org | Julia Conley | Feb 16, 2022

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Ford and GM knew about climate change — and covered it up for decades

Exxon knew, Shell knew, coal knew — is it any surprise that top auto manufacturers knew, too?

A new investigation from E&E News revealed that Ford and General Motors knew as early as the 1960s that car emissions caused climate change. Scientists at both companies were “deeply and actively engaged” in research linking their products to global warming, according to Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, which obtained hundreds of company documents for the report. And yet despite this information,GM and Ford spent decades eschewing electric vehicles and doubling down on gas-guzzling SUVs. They financed climate denial groups who worked to block international climate agreements and opposed stricter U.S. emissions standards.

E&E News’ five-month-long investigation into the automakers’ knowing climate culpability is the latest in a long list of corporate environmental cover ups. In 2015, reporting

— source grist.org | Joseph Winters | Oct 27, 2020

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The Dirty Dozen Documents of Big Oil’s Secret Climate Knowledge

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” said ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy. “Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that.”

These are the words McCoy was caught saying on a secretly recorded video released by Unearthed, Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative journalism arm, and the British Channel 4 News this summer exposing how the oil giant and lobby groups such as the American Petroleum Institute seed doubt about climate change and undermine legislation to stop global warming.

These revelations quickly spurred calls for Congress to investigate Exxon’s and other fossil fuel companies’ efforts to obstruct climate action. On July 26, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent a letter to McCoy requesting his voluntary appearance before the committee. And on October 28, Congress questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron,

— source desmog.com | Paul D. Thacker | Oct 29, 2021

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The propaganda used to ‘justify’ war against Saddam aims only to distract from the real prize: Iraq’s rich reserves of oil

On November 7, the day before the United Nations Security Council voted on a resolution that made an American and British attack on Iraq more than likely, Downing Street began issuing warnings of imminent terrorist threats against the United Kingdom.

Cross-Channel ferries, the London Underground and major public events were all said to be “targeted”.

The anonymous Government sources described “emergency security measures” that included a “rapid reaction force of army reservists” and a squadron of fighter jets “on constant standby”. Plans were being drawn up to “evacuate major cities and deal with large numbers of contaminated corpses”. Police snipers were being trained “to kill suicide bombers” and anti-radiation pills were being distributed to hospitals. By November 11, Tony Blair himself was telling the British public to be “on guard” against an attack that could lead to “maximum carnage”.

Curiously, the national state of alert for a likely attack, colour-coded amber, which such a grave warning would require, was never activated. It remains on “black special”,

— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 3 Dec 2002

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When governments are captured by fossil fuel industry

Honest Government Ad | We Make Everything Good Sh!t

Naomi Hogan
Stephen King

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French Oil Company Total ‘Knew About Global Warming Impact in 1971’

French oil giant Total knew that its fossil fuel extraction could contribute to global warming as early as 1971 but stayed silent about it until 1988, according to a new study. Research published today in the journal Global Environmental Change, based on internal company documents and interviews with former staff, found that personnel “received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global warming from its products by 1971”. Total – which this year rebranded as TotalEnergies – “became more fully informed” about climate change in the 1980s and “began promoting doubt regarding the scientific basis for global warming by the late 1980s”. The company publicly accepted climate science in the 1990s but promoted “policy delay or policies peripheral to fossil fuel control”, the authors found. The research – which has sparked the hashtag #Totalknew on social media – follows similar revelations about ExxonMobil and Shell in recent years which exposed how companies were aware of the impact of their emissions on the climate as early as the 1980s.

— source desmog.com | Oct 20, 2021

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