OMNI
FOSSIL FUELS
NEWSLETTER #7,
POWER OF THE
FF INDUSTRY
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and ECOLOGY
(#1
August 5, 2012; #2, March 15, 2013; #3, Jan. 4, 2015; #4 (Divestment #1) June
13, 2015; #5 (Divestment #2) July 6, 2016; #6 (pipeline) October 4, 2016)
What’s
at Stake: POWER OF THE INDUSTRY NOT
ONLY v. DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN NEEDS, BUT v. SURVIVAL OF ALL SPECIES
“Climate
disaster has put a spotlight on the need for human society to evolve beyond
dependence on petroleum, but our very capacity to decide on that—or
anything—remains at risk as long as the [oil and gas] industry is still ranging
like a ravenous predator on the field of democracy.” Rachel Maddow, Blowout (p.365). Try
rephrasing Maddow’s statement and I’ll print with permission. What is she saying? There can be no change in US or Russian FF capitalism
because the FF industry is too strong, and the FF industry will exist so long
as there are FF?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
This newsletter gathers a few articles on several
ways to end FF political power, particularly ending subsidies and investments,
but also boycott, blockade, and
sanctions.
Charles Glass.
“Andrew Bacevich and America’s Long Misguided War to Control the Greater
Middle East.”
Rachel Maddow, Blowout:
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive
Industry
on Earth
Joe Alexander.
End Public Subsidies to
FF Companies
Dominique Thomas. Making FF
Companies Pay for their Mendacity and Theft
Fossil Fuels Newsletters #5 and #6
CONTENTS
ANDREW BACEVICH
AND AMERICA’S LONG MISGUIDED WAR TO CONTROL THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST
by Charles Glass, April 23 2016,
6:28 a.m.
THE
CONVICTION that invasion, bombing, and special forces benefit
large swaths of the globe, while remaining consonant with a Platonic ideal of
the national interest, runs deep in the American psyche. Like the poet Stevie
Smith’s cat,
the United States “likes to gallop about doing good.” The cat attacks and
misses, sometimes injuring itself, but does not give up. It asks, as the U.S.
should,
What’s the good
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Nothing undermines the American belief in
military force. No matter how often its galloping about results in resentment
and mayhem, the U.S. gets up again to do good elsewhere. Failure to improve
life in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya stiffens the
resolve to get it right next time. This notion prevails among politicized
elements of the officer corps; much of the media, whether nominally liberal or
conservative; the foreign policy elite recycled quadrennially between
corporation-endowed think tanks and government; and most politicians on the
national stage. For them and the public they influence, the question is less
whether to deploy force than when, where, and how.
Since 1979, when the Iranians overthrew the
Shah and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. has concentrated its
firepower in what former U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich calls the “Greater Middle East.” The region
comprises most of what America’s imperial predecessors, the British, called the
Near and Middle East, a vast zone from Pakistan west to Morocco. In his
new book, America’s War for the Greater Middle
East, Bacevich writes, “From the end of World War II until 1980,
virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in that
region. Within a decade, a great shift occurred. Since 1990, virtually no
American soldiers have been killed anywhere except the Greater
Middle East.” That observation alone might prompt a less propagandized
electorate to rebel against leaders who perpetuate policies that, while killing
and maiming American soldiers, devastate the societies they touch.
Bacevich describes a loyal cadre of
intellectuals and pundits favoring war after war, laying the moral ground for
invasions and excusing them when they go wrong. He notes that in 1975, when
American imperium was collapsing in Indochina, the guardians of American exceptionalism renewed their
case for preserving the U.S. as the exception to international law. An article
by Robert Tucker in Commentary that year set the ball rolling
with the proposition that “to insist that before using force one must exhaust
all other remedies is little more than the functional equivalent of accepting
chaos.” Another evangelist for military action, Miles Ignotus, wrote in Harper’s two
months later that the U.S. with Israel’s help must prepare to seize Saudi
Arabia’s oilfields. Miles Ignotus, Latin for “unknown soldier,” turned out to
be the known civilian and Pentagon consultant Edward Luttwak. Luttwak urged a
“revolution” in warfare doctrine toward “fast, light forces to penetrate the
enemy’s vital centers” with Saudi Arabia a test case. The practical test would
come, with results familiar to most of the world, 27 years later in Iraq.
The Pentagon, its pride and reputation
wounded in Vietnam as surely as the bodies of 150,000 scarred American
soldiers, was slow to take the hint. The end of compulsory military service
robbed it of manpower for massive global intervention. Revelations of war
crimes and political chicanery from the Senate’s Church Committee and the Pike
Committee in the House added to public disenchantment with military adventures
and intelligence meddling in other countries’ affairs. It would take years of
effort to cure America of its “Vietnam Syndrome,” the preference for diplomatic
before military solutions.
In the Middle East, President Gerald Ford saw no reason to rescind his
predecessor’s policy, the Nixon Doctrine of reliance on local clients armed by
the U.S. to protect Persian Gulf oil for America’s gas-hungry consumers.
Nothing much happened, though, until one of the local gendarmes, the Shah of
Iran, fell to a popular revolution and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
CHANGE
CAME with the Carter Doctrine,
enunciated in the president’s January 1980 State of the Union address: “An
attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be
regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,
and as such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including
military force.”
Carter’s combative national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote
later, “The Carter Doctrine was modeled on the Truman Doctrine.” Bacevich
comments that the Truman Doctrine of ostensibly containing the Soviet Union
while absorbing the richer portions of the decolonizing French and British
Empires “invited misinterpretation and misuse, with the Vietnam War one example
of the consequences.” Carter’s doctrine, modified but not rescinded by his
successors, led to similar consequences in Afghanistan and Iraq.
George W. Bush took the Carter Doctrine to
fresh lengths when he made the case, prepared for him by national security
adviser Condoleezza
Rice, for preventive war in a speech at the
U.S. Military Academy on June 1, 2002:
“If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”
Bacevich quotes the Nuremberg court’s
view of preventive war: “To initiate a war of aggression is the supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” After the failures to impose
order in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Barack Obama rather than abandon the
policy merely moved its emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan without achieving any
military or political objectives. MORE
Charles Glass, former
ABC News chief Middle East correspondent, recently published Syria Burning: A
Short History of a Catastrophe (Verso).
Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most
Destructive industry on Earth. Crown,
2019.
Publisher’s Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •
Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All
In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in
Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his
iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to
a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation
of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace
of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a
floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem,
there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its
crooked source: the unimaginably
lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry.
With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us
on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence
of Big Oil and Gas along the way,
and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the
2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have,
paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by
spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most
important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star
turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened
democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers,
and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is,
according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a
gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.”
Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop
subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and
to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its
enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either
wins this one or disappears.”
“At its heart, this book is a tale
of two countries, the United States and Russia, and how, as Maddow sees
it—individually and together—they have been warped by a rapacious fossil fuel industry. . . . Fulminating comes
easy to Rachel Maddow. What sets her apart from other serial fulminators is
that she does it with facts—and sardonic wit.”—The Washington Post
“All fans of Maddow, and even her detractors, will learn something new from
this highly readable yet impressively detailed book. Anyone interested in the
covert deals that change the nature of the global environmental and political
landscape will devour. A must-have for all collections.”—Library
Journal (starred review)
“Radiates zing, intelligence, and black humor. Much like its author.”—InStyle
“[Maddow] may be a popular, progressive news-and-commentary anchor on MSNBC,
but it’s not to be forgotten that she holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford
and seems to devour whole libraries of data before breakfast each day. . . .
Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow’s indictment of a corrupt industry finds
readers—and it deserves many.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Known for her intense inquiries into complex subjects, Maddow brings her
laser-like intuitiveness and keen and wily perception to Big Oil, that stalwart
of global economics, and the shadowy nexus of commerce and politics. Maddow
likes murky, the murkier the better, and her examination of the intricacies of
off-shore drilling, transnational pipelines, and hydraulic fracking is as deep
as the coveted wells themselves. . . . Like trailblazing journalists before
her, Maddow exposes both the slapdash and sinister practices underlying
geopolitics and energy policies and revels in peeling back the layers of
malfeasance to stoke righteous outrage.”—Booklist (starred
review)
WORLD
SUBSIDIES TO OIL COMPANIES
ALEXANDER JOE / AFP.
World's
Banks Have Given $2.7 Trillion to Fossil Fuels Since Paris Agreement Begun,
Study Shows. Oil Change International. Mar.
18, 2020 01:29PM EST
INSIGHTS + OPINION
The
Canadian banks are the biggest bankers of tar sands and they all lack policies
restricting their financing to this subsector. A new report reveals that the
business practices of the world's major private-sector banks continue to drive
us toward climate disaster.
https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/worlds-banks
Financial companies are
increasingly being recognized — by their clients, shareholders, regulators, and
the general public — as climate actors, with a responsibility to mitigate their
climate impact. For the banks highlighted in this report, the last year has
brought a groundswell of activism demanding banks cut their fossil
fuel financing, at the same time that increasingly extreme
weather events have further underscored the urgency of the climate
crisis. Nevertheless, the
report reveals that the business practices of the world's major private-sector
banks continue to drive us toward climate disaster.
Adding up lending and
underwriting from 35 private-sector banks to the fossil fuel industry, this
report finds that Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. banks have
financed fossil fuels with $2.7 trillion since the Paris
agreement was adopted (2016-2019), with financing on the rise
each year. The report finds that fossil fuel financing continues to be
dominated by the big U.S. banks —
JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America — together, these
four banks account for a staggering 30 percent of all fossil fuel financing
from the 35 major global banks since the Paris agreement was adopted.
Also examined are the banks'
support for 100 top fossil fuel companies that are expanding fossil fuels,
given that there is no room for new fossil fuels in the world's carbon budget.
Banks continued to support these companies with $975 billion in the last four
years. Despite the urgent need to immediately halt all fossil fuel expansion,
financing for these top 100 expanders skyrocketed 40 percent from 2018 to 2019.
The report card also assesses
bank policy and practice around financing in certain key fossil fuel
subsectors, with league tables and policy grades on:
· Tar Sands Oil: The
biggest bankers of tar sands — the Canadian banks, led by TD and RBC, plus
JPMorgan Chase and Barclays — all lack policies restricting their financing to
this subsector.
· Arctic Oil and Gas: 2019 saw a slew of bank policies restricting financing
primarily for project financing in the Arctic. But overall, bank financing to
top Arctic oil and gas companies has gone up every year since Paris
· Offshore Oil and Gas: This year's report looks not just at ultra-deepwater oil and
gas, but rather all offshore oil and gas, where the biggest bankers since Paris
are JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and BNP Paribas.
· Fracked Oil and Gas: Fracking financing is dominated by the U.S. banks: JPMorgan
Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citi. Only a handful of banks, all
European, have begun to place significant restrictions on financing for fracked
oil and gas.
· Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)?: Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are the world's
biggest bankers since Paris of top companies building LNG import and export
terminals, but Mizuho was biggest in 2019.
· Coal Mining:
China Construction Bank and Bank of China are the biggest bankers of coal
mining, while French banks Credit Mutuel and Credit Agricole have the strongest
policy scores.
· Coal Power:
This is the area where bank policy scores are strongest overall; yet funding
for top coal power producers is not dropping rapidly enough. Financing is led
by ICBC and Bank of China, with Citi as the top non-Chinese banker of coal
power.
In this new decade, the climate
emergency is clearer than ever, with emissions cuts of almost 5 percent
necessary by 2030 if we are to have a coin-flip chance of limiting global warming
to 1.5°C. To align their policies and practices with a world that limits global
warming to 1.5°C and fully respects human rights, and Indigenous rights in
particular, banks must:
· Explicitly acknowledge
the central role of the fossil fuel industry as the major driver of
climate breakdown, as well as the banks' own role in financing this sector.
· Prohibit all financing for all fossil fuel expansion
projects and companies expanding
fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure (such as plants and pipelines).
· Commit to phase out all financing for fossil fuel extraction
and infrastructure, on an explicit timeline that is
aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
· Phase out financing for existing projects and
companies active in tar sands oil, Arctic oil and gas, offshore oil and gas,
fracked oil and gas, liquefied natural gas, coal mining, and coal power, with ending financing for expansion of these
subsectors as an urgent first step.
· Fully respect all human rights, particularly the
rights of Indigenous peoples,
including their rights to their water and lands and the right to free, prior,
and informed consent, as articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.156 Prohibit all financing for projects and companies that
abuse human rights, including Indigenous rights.
Click to download the full report.
Reposted
with permission from Oil Change International.
· The City of Angels Funds Some Hellish Fossil Fuel Projects ...
›
· European Investment Bank Will Stop
Funding Fossil Fuel Projects by ... ›
· Global Banks, Led by JPMorgan Chase, Invested $1.9 Trillion in
... ›
· Study: global banks 'failing miserably' on climate crisis by
funneling ... ›
· FOSSIL FUEL FINANCE REPORT CARD 2019 ›
· BANKING ON CLIMATE CHANGE: FOSSIL FUEL REPORT CARD ... ›
US SUBSIDIES TO OIL COMPANIES
'90s leases
let oil firms drill royalties-free. Reprieve left in law costs public billions, GAO finds by HIROKO TABUCHI THE NEW
YORK TIMES 10-25-19 Today at 7:11 a.m. [
Reprinted in NADG (10-25-19) page one alongside an
article about out of control fires in CA:
“Thousands Told to Flee as Wind Fuels Wildfire” by Jocelyn Gecker and
Noah Berger (AP). The NADG is doing its
job today, and though it did not make a connection between the two articles, it
did place them side by side –Dick]
Oil
and gas platforms clutter the horizon in the Gulf of Mexico south of Port
Fourchon, La., in January 2018. Thanks to a poorly written provision by federal
lawmakers in 1995, some of the world’s largest oil companies have avoided paying
at least $18 billion in royalties for fuels extracted in the Gulf since 1996.
The
U.S. government has lost billions of dollars of oil and gas revenue to
fossil-fuel companies because of a provision in a decades-old law, a federal
watchdog agency said Thursday, offering the first detailed accounting of the
consequences of a misstep by lawmakers that is expected to continue costing
taxpayers for decades to come. [??
“poorly written,” “a misstep,” or another example of the power of the ff
companies, as recounted in Maddow’s Blowout? And sadly this happened during Bill
Clinton’s presidency when the Democratic Party had turned increasingly pro-corporate, often indistinguishable from
the Republicans.]
The
provision dates from an effort in 1995 to encourage drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico by offering oil companies a temporary break from paying royalties on the
oil produced. However, the rule was poorly written -- and the temporary
reprieve was accidentally made permanent on some wells.
As
a result, some of the biggest oil companies in the world -- including Chevron,
Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil -- have avoided paying at least $18 billion in
royalties on oil and gas drilled since 1996, according to a new report from the
Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress.
The
companies, which hold government leases to drill in the Gulf, continue to
extract oil and gas from those wells while not being required to pay royalties,
a right the industry has gone to court to defend.
A
spokesman for the industry group the American Petroleum Institute, which
represents many of the companies affected, said courts had "ruled there
was nothing ambiguous about the 1995 act." The companies "took
Congress at its word," said the spokesman, Ben Marter, and any attempts to
revisit the issue would be "engaging in a dangerous game of
bait-and-switch."
The
mistake cuts into federal coffers. Royalties from offshore oil and gas are a
significant source of revenue, pulling in almost $90 billion from 2006-18,
according to the agency. MORE https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/oct/25/90s-leases-let-oil-firms-drill-royaltie/
Dominique Thomas. MAKING FF COMPANIES PAY FOR THEIR
CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
Exxon in the hotseat
|
9:55 AM (37
minutes ago) |
|
||
|
||||
Dick,
This week, we saw two tremendous
signs that the tide is turning against the fossil fuel industry for good.
In New York, State Attorney General
Tish James brought ExxonMobil to court on charges of shareholder fraud, and over 50 of us rallied outside in solidarity.
A day later, former ExxonMobil researchers and scientists appeared before
Congress to explain the company’s role in deceiving
the public for decades about climate change.
These are huge steps towards holding
Big Oil accountable for the damage they’ve done to our communities and climate
— but we still have a long way to go. Sign this petition now to keep
the momentum alive and send a clear message to world governments: it’s time to
make corporate polluters pay.
We don’t share equal responsibility for or vulnerability to the
climate crisis. Just 100 companies cause 71% of all emissions. And 70%
of global emissions come from a single dirty source: fossil fuels.
The climate crisis is a crisis of
economics, and it’s time for the false narrative of energy access limited to
coal, oil, and gas to end. The rich may be responsible for worsening storms and
devastating oil spills, but it’s the poor — in the Global South, in Indigenous
nations, and in communities of color — who are paying the price. While we
struggle to survive displacement and disease caused by corporate greed, the
rich are only getting richer.
We can’t confront the climate crisis
without also confronting our corporate-run economy. Act now and tell world
governments it’s time to make Big Polluters pay for their destruction of people
and the planet.
Forward,
Dominique
350.org is
a global movement that fights for a just and equitable world by stopping the
fossil fuel industry from continuing to destroy our climate.
Keep 350.org strong by chipping in right now:
Put following at end
KEEP FOSSIL
FUELS IN THE GROUND CAMPAIGN, NEWSLETTER #5,
FOCUS ON FOSSIL
FUELS DIVESTMENT #2, JULY 6, 2016.
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/07/anti-fossil-fuels-newsletter-5.html
Contents of Fossil Fuels Newsletter #6, October
4, 2016
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/10/fossil-fuels-newsletter-6.html
Lay,
Pipeline Opposition Fundraiser
Fossil
Fuels Against All Creation
Michael Klare, In the
Grasp of Fossil Fuels
McFarlin, FF Assault on
the Planet
Resistance to Diamond
Pipeline Crossing Arkansas
Tomlinson, All You Need to
Know and More
Resistance to Dakotas Pipeline and
Oil Pipelines
The
Standing Rock Sioux and Supporters vs. Dakota Access Pipeline
Ward, Thousands of Native
Americans Are Leading the Climate Battle
Klein, Blockades in This Changes Everything
Pope Francis Defender of
Creation
Obama and Clinton, Speak
up
Holding Exxon Accountable
for Pipeline Harms and Lying
Water: Oil Spills and Other Sources of Water
Pollution and Scarcity
END FOSSIL FUELS NEWSLETTER #7
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