Category Archives: big oil

Refineries Shut Down All Over The Country – Is this a coincidence

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Come on. 4 refineries in a 4 state region are effected at the same times by “disasters” that would be easy to contrive. In 2 of the biggest markets in the country, the Great Lakes Region and California. Can that be an accident? Looks highly suspicious to me. One thing is for sure everybody is loving those rising gas prices besides the drivers and President Obama. Maybe that is what they are after, defeating Barack Obama and electing one of their own, Mittens Romney.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/fire-is-latest-pollution-1494592.html

Fire is latest pollution problem at Chevron plant

National / World News 12:06 p.m. Thursday, August 9, 2012

By JASON DEAREN

The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — A massive Chevron oil refinery fire that sent hundreds of people rushing to hospitals and is pushing West Coast gas prices higher was just the latest pollution incident at the facility that records show has increasingly violated air quality rules over the past five years.

The refinery is one of three such facilities near San Francisco that rank among the state’s top 10 emitters of toxic chemicals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory.

Chevron’s Richmond refinery — the scene of Monday’s fire that shrouded the area in black smoke — has been cited by San Francisco Bay area regulators for violating air regulations 93 times in the past five years.

The number has increased from 15 violations in 2007 to 23 in both 2010 and 2011. The refinery is also the state’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to state regulators.

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Go there and read. State Fair starts today so I may be gone  for a couple of days. More tomorrow.

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The Hottest Year Ever Recorded By Science – I was gona continue the solar meditation

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And in away this is a solar earth issue, just not one that involves pollution free power generation. It has always amazed me how good a source of news Rolling Stone has become. It was the home of Hunter S. Thompson too.

http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/3_215_high_temperature_records_broken_or_tied_in_the_us

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is

July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

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Go there and read. More next week.
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The Keystone XL Pipeline Is A Very Bad Idea – So why is the Springfield Chamber of Commerce backing it

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I have no idea how much Keystone and the Koch brothers gave to the Springfield, IL Chamber but it must have been a bunch because they hired someone to coordinate their support for the project. The first I knew of it was an Editorial published in what is left of the State Journal Register. So this posting and the next are in part my preparation for writing a counter Editorial.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rkistner/a_native_people_fight_a_dantes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+switchboard_rkistner+%28Switchboard%3A+Rocky+Kistner%27s+Blog%29

Rocky Kistner’s Blog

In Canada’s Tar Sands, a Dante’s Hell Threatens People Nearby and Across the Globe

In Canada’s western province of Alberta, Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s community—the Lubicon Lake Nation—has endured a withering toxic tar sands oil assault, an Armageddon against nature few Americans are fully aware of. Here in the once pristine sub-Arctic, tar sands mining operations level vast swaths of boreal forests near native lands, as pipelines burst and spew corrosive chemical-laced tar sands oil into rivers and lakes.

The Lubicon are used to living in harmony with nature. But tar sands mining has brought a deadly discordance to their environment. Melina has watched family and friends battle unheard of cancers and respiratory ailments; she’s listened to local fishermen and hunters complain about unusual lesions and tumors festering in their catches and prey. She’s reacted in disbelief as her government has sponsored airborne sharpshooters to gun down mighty Canadian wolf packs—a zero sum game that is killing one species to try to save another—as dwindling herds of caribou flee their disappearing forest homes and may be gone forever in the not so distant future.

For members of the Lubicon Lake Nation, it is a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Their verdant land of abundant wildlife is metastasizing into pock-marketed battlefields of a thousand Verduns. Melina and other community leaders have not sat idly by as the environmental carnage unfolds around them. She has testified before Congress, spearheaded Greenpeace protest actions, and worked tirelessly to get the word out about the devastation in her community.

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Go there and see the video. Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Oil Stocks By Mike Nadel – Good advice from a good guy

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I do not normally boost someone else’s net contributions just because I think the author is cool. Had he not written about oil stocks I probably wouldn’t either, but it is the summer. Because I was getting alittle burnt out on all the serious blogging I have done for 5 years, I gave myself permission to post whatever I wanted too and boringly I have stuck to energy conservation, the residential market and all things environmental. So today is a really “what the hell” kinda day. Enjoy.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/708101-time-to-slide-into-oil-stocks

Time To Slide Into Oil Stocks

??By Mike Nadel

The last time I filled my car’s tank, I paid less than $3 a gallon. As my wife will attest, I was more than a little giddy. “Two-ninety-seven!?!? You gotta be kidding me!!! This is incredible!!!” Hey, we all have to find life’s little thrills wherever we can, right?

The price of crude oil, the source of gasoline, is determined by numerous factors: supply and demand, the Middle East unrest, natural and unnatural disasters, Wall Street speculators, economies in the U.S., Europe and emerging markets, etc.

Crude oil reached $110 per barrel on February 24 and was still over $100 per barrel two months later. It has been on a fairly steady decline since, hitting $80 per barrel on June 22 – its lowest level in two years – before rebounding into the mid-80s. So what’s next?

I certainly am no oil-price-trend expert… and even if I were, I wouldn’t listen to myself. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that alleged experts were predicting $5 gas by Memorial Day and maybe even $6 by the Fourth of July? Still, when it comes to forecasting oil prices, “Up” usually is a reasonable guess – especially after it has been down.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Carbon Sequestration The Way It Should Be Done – I am not a huge fan of this but

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The method they are using here is preferable to simply drilling a well anywhere and trying to bury it in the ground. The oil in spent fields never will get out and there was plenty of pressure, so this at least seems safe.

http://www.cbs19.tv/story/18856255/doe-notice-advances-development-of-indiana-gasifications-co2-pipeline

DOE Notice Advances Development of Indiana Gasification’s CO2 Pipeline

Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.

SOURCE Indiana Gasification

Transporting CO2 to Gulf States Could Boost U.S. Oil Production by 20 Million Barrels a Year

ROCKPORT, Ind., June 22, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Indiana Gasification welcomed today’s Federal Register publication by the U.S. Department of Energy of an amended notice of intent (NOI) to include an approximately 440 mile CO2 pipeline in the environmental impact statement (EIS) required for DOE financial backing of IG’s state-of-the-art clean fuels facility.

The DOE publication marks the most recent regulatory development in support of the plant, which will be the cleanest coal-fired facility ever built in the United States. In the last two months, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has filed a proposed clean air permit with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and issued a draft Clean Water Act permit.

In the Notice of Intent, the Department of Energy acknowledges that the proposed project with the CO2 pipeline qualifies for financing under the 2008 appropriations act providing authority for industrial gasification activities. Further, the DOE has determined that the project meets two goals of the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program, encouraging the commercial use of new or significantly improved technology and achieving substantial environmental benefits.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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XL Pipeline Will Not Help The US – And when a 16 yr. old girl points it out

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They TRASH her. I posted this mainly because her points are valid. But read the comments. These are seriously brutal comments, by trolls, aimed at a 16 year old girl. This is what the energy business has sunk too.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/06/keystone_xl_pipeline_wont_bene.html

Keystone XL pipeline won’t benefit American families or the environment

Published: Sunday, June 17, 2012, 5:00 AM     Updated: Sunday, June 17, 2012, 12:35 PM

By Emilie Winn

As a 16-year-old high school student, I am deeply concerned about the long-term effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on my and subsequent generations. This pipeline would transport tar sands 2,000 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Producing synthetic oil from tar sands generates around three times the amount of greenhouse gases as regular oil production. TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline proposal, was ordered by the government to dig up 10 sections of the Keystone I pipeline after testing showed that the steel used was possibly defective. The company plans to use steel from the same manufacturer for the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, the Keystone I pipeline has seen 12 spills in a single year. The idea of this level of error at a much higher magnitude is horrifying.

One of the most cogent claims made about the proposed pipeline was the number of jobs it would create, which many supporters estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Yet data from the U. S. State Department and TransCanada itself has shown the project would provide up to 6,500 jobs during production and leave only hundreds of permanent jobs. The effect Keystone XL would have on unemployed Americans has been largely fictionalized. For the Keystone I pipeline in South Dakota, a shockingly low 11 percent of construction jobs were taken by South Dakotans. The majority of jobs that such projects create are taken by immigrants willing to do menial labor for low pay. And the vast majority of jobs are temporary.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Video About How The Planet Can Be Saved – Environmental claymation

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Here we go again . I am going to try to share a video from a cool website I found. You all know how bad I am at this so do not hold your breath.

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/08/the-healing-power-of-new-energy-friday-fun/

The Healing Power of New Energy (Friday Fun)

June 8, 2012 By
Here’s a fun video in support of clean energy and a healthy planet that I ran across on NewEnergyNews recently:

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Well for now I failed but if you go to the New Energy News link you can see it.

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Go there and see the video from The Colbert Report. More tomorrow.

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Oh If This Were True – Humans voluntarily give up fossil fuels

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How cool would the world be if we actually stopped raping the Earth and started responsible stewardship instead. But I am suspicious around humans, so we will just have to see.

http://www.wheels.ca/news/peak-oil-are-we-looking-at-it-all-wrong/

Peak oil: Are we looking at it all wrong?

By as early as 2015, global demand for oil will begin to decline, some scientists say. Not because we’ll have run out of the fossil fuel, but because we just won’t need as much of it.

Published May 31, 2012

I don’t know about you, but when I’m skimming around on the Web and I catch sight of the phrase “Scientists now say” or “Some analysts find” I usually just click right on by. Because that article is going to be a bummer. Those analysts will find that the U.S. educational system is actually removing knowledge from children’s minds, and those scientists will turn out to say that pizza consumption is related to early-onset dementia. So I keep going until I find something about psychic twins or a baby raised by goats.

But it’s a good thing I broke with tradition when I came to the New Scientist article “Dump the pump: When oil will lose its luster.” Guess what these scientists and analysts now find? You know that whole problem with oil, how eventually it’s going to run out and trigger a global depression and maybe a breakdown of civilization and is it really such a good idea to bring children into this crazy world? Well don’t sweat it, everything’s going to be totally fine. It’s all going to be one hundred percent a-okay.

All right, that might be a somewhat simplistic rendering of the argument. What the scientists and analysts are arguing – and presenting evidence for – is that although we’ve been worrying this whole time about peak oil supply, the operative force will actually be peak oil demand. Due to a variety of factors – the article focuses mainly on advances in automotive fuel efficiency – global demand for oil is only going to keep increasing for a few more years, after which it will begin to decline and will continue on a downward path.

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I just printed the premise. Go there and read the rest. More Next week.

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The Big Fix Gets It Right – Thus gets no attention

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The American sheeple have grown tired of Reality TV that is not manufactured. If you show the American people the truth they stampede in the opposite direction because they have been taught that the truth entertains not that the truth shall set you free. First I give you the movie site and then the best review I could find. I know this has been out for awhile and I apologize for my tardiness. Part of the problem is I have spent a fair amount of time on the Gulf Coast, living in Tampa and New Orleans. As a result I have been frequent visitor to St. George Island. So I many times do not trust my emotional response to events there. Still this is important.

http://www.thebigfixmovie.com/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/big-fix-cannes-2011-review-189062

The Big Fix: Cannes 2011 Review

8:39 AM PDT 5/17/2011 by Kirk Honeycutt

The Bottom Line

A gloomy but perhaps realistic depiction of the forces of corruption and deceit that produce environmental catastrophes.

CANNES — The Big Fix from Josh Tickell (Fuel) and his wife and co-director Rebecca Tickell is the latest doom-and-gloom environmental documentary although this one takes alarming leaps from a single environmental catastrophe into fantastic realms of worldwide conspiracies, corporate malfeasance and political corruption. Which is not to say the filmmakers got anything wrong. Anyone with an open mind and some attention paid to events of the past few years will have little trouble seeing that the fix was in when the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico last year — and this fix will still be in when the next catastrophe happens.

The problems with The Big Fix though are threefold: One, judging by the poor attendance of journalists and film critics at the film’s Palais press screening, few people other than fellow activists are seeing to these doom-and-gloom movies anymore. Two, little here is really new as much of the Tickells’ findings have been reported elsewhere, even by some of those they interview, especially Jeff Goodell, who spent months in the Gulf for his well-researched Rolling Stone article.

Finally, the Tickells describe a “fix” is so vast and powerful, the film can only throws its hands up over any realistic solution other than to install solar panels to heat up your toxic household water.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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War Over Oil – Heh it even sounds sexy

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Right now we are involved in the largest war games ever held in the middle east in Jordan with 20 or so other nations participating. Isn’t that grand? And to top it off the President of Israel thinks the plan is worked out. This is so wrong in so many ways I lost count at 100. What a pitiful waste for so much promise in Obama.

http://www.infowars.com/u-s-ambassador-to-israel-plan-to-attack-iran-ready/

U.S. Ambassador to Israel: Plan to Attack Iran “Ready”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 16, 2012

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shaprio, told a closed conference in Tel Aviv that the United States has completed preparations for a military strike on Iran. His comments were recorded by a reporter and aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Wednesday night.

It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically, and through the use of pressure, than to use military force,” Shapiro said. “But that does not mean that option isn’t available. Not just available, it’s ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

Shaprio’s comments were not intended for public consumption, the Times of Israel reports.

The finalized attack plan arrives as Israel and the United States prepare for joint military exercises in the United States. “The exercises, to be held in the coming months, will strengthen the relationship between the IAF and the US Air Force as they practice carrying out joint operations,” the Jerusalem-based online newspaper reported. “Israeli and US air defense forces are also to take part in a major joint drill later this summer in Israel to simulate a massive attack. Thousands of US soldiers are expected to arrive in Israel for the drills.”

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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