Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is seriously considering abandoning efforts to remake the nation’s biofuel laws after wading deep into an issue that divides some of his core constituencies, according to three sources familiar with the administration’s thinking. Advisers have urged Trump to instead let Congress tackle the biofuel reforms, but use the threat of administrative action to help rival lawmakers come together and solve the intractable issue. The U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has created reliable demand for corn farmers in the nation’s heartland, but merchant refiners like Valero Energy Corp say the costs to comply with...

From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department, comes this pronouncement from the guy who popularized the gas-guzzling CO2 belching Hummer military vehicle for his own LA commutes. His self-awareness must be zero. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sunday he is going to sue big oil companies for “first-degree murder.” During a live recording of a Politico podcast, Schwarzenegger said he was talking to several private law firms about taking on oil companies in court. The Hollywood actor compared oil to the tobacco industry, and said both are “knowingly killing people all over the world.” Schwarzenegger said the...

Big Oil is due for a disruption. The world’s most important industry has been carrying on without any significant changes in its day to day routine for far too long. But now, the new tech on the block has its sights set on the multi-trillion-dollar oil and gas sector. It’s official: Blockchain technology has infiltrated Big Oil. The hype behind blockchain has reached a full-blown frenzy. And for good reason. The technology, which creates secure ledgers for digital transactions and rapidly accelerates the pace at which transactions can be made, has the potential to disrupt every major industry: real estate,...

Energy Secretary Rick Perry characterized the recent boom in natural gas exports as a development the U.S. can use to spread freedom all over the world. Shipping the country’s vast reserves of natural gas to far-flung parts of the world is akin to “exporting freedom,” Perry told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria” in an interview Wednesday from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We’re exporting to our allies in Europe the opportunity to truly have a choice of where do you buy your energy from. That’s freedom. And that kind of freedom is priceless,” he said of U.S.’ fossil...

Today, New York City took the climate advocacy fight to the fossil fuel industry's doorstep. NYC mayor Bill de Blasio officially announced that the city will be the first to divest all its pension funds – a total of $191 billion – from fossil fuels. That means roughly $5 billion in fossil fuel investments will be taken away from fossil fuel companies, which is reportedly the largest of any municipality to date. At the same time, the city has launched legal action against five major oil organizations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. Arguing that they played a...

Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and her post-doctoral fellow, Geoffrey Supran, are co-authors of a new, highly controversial study claiming that energy giant ExxonMobil purposefully misled the public on the dangers of climate change. Usually, scientists at least try to hide their biases and political motivations in their published research, but Oreskes's hatred of the fossil fuel industry is evident here. In fairness to Oreskes, it's worth pointing out she's just a historian of science, not an actual scientist, which Mark Twain might say is like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. Oreskes and Supran assert that at...

The U.S. Supreme Court just refused a lawyer’s appeal trying to force Chevron to pay almost $9 billion for pollution in Ecuador. Earlier court ruled the decision against Chevron was obtained through corruption actions. Reuters reported on June 19, that the court’s decision not to take the case leaves earlier district and appellate court victories standing for the nation’s second largest oil company. Chevron’s court victories were previously ignored by the liberal news media years after CBS promoted the attack. "Today's decision is an important step toward bringing this illegal scheme to a final conclusion," said R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron's...

Some 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in Alaska, marking the biggest onshore discovery in the U.S. in three decades. The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices. The new discovery was made in just the past few days in Alaska’s North Slope, which was previously viewed as an aging oil basin. Spanish oil giant Repsol and its privately-held U.S. partner Armstrong Energy announced the find on Thursday, predicting production could begin as soon as...

The Los Angeles Times thinks California’s next attorney general must place the investigation into Exxon Mobil’s climate change research at the top of their “to do” list. Whoever becomes California’s next attorney general will have to address the probes and allegations that Exxon lied to the public and investors at the seriousness of man-made global warming, the LA Times editorial board wrote Friday.

Our ongoing coverage of the Chevron Shakedown has taken us down a long and twisting road over these past few years. The prime mover in the United States behind the attempted, fraudulent theft of billions of dollars from the energy giant was New York attorney Steven Donziger. He’s had a run of bad luck since Chevron decided to fight back and exposed the fraud and corruption running rampant in Ecuador’s courts. In August we saw an earlier court decision which reaffirmed the initial finding that Donziger’s case was based on fraud and racketeering. Despite the overwhelming evidence, Donziger attempted to...

Donald Trump’s idea to build a wall along the southern border of the U.S. has been called everything from controversial to harebrained, but—to the likely dismay of some of the oil majors—it’s now officially part of the Republican Party’s platform. As it turns out, the idea has been on the GOP table for a while, and Trump was just the man to voice it loudly and persistently enough. Trump’s wall is on the agenda, should he become president. A wall stopping people and vehicles from illegally crossing into the U.S. may appear to be a simple and effective solution to...

The collapse of oil prices has killed off any appetite that the oil industry had for megaprojects that cost tens of billions of dollars. With scarce resources, oil companies have shifted their focus, pouring resources into short-cycle projects, which often means shale drilling. Liam Denning over at Bloomberg Gadfly put some numbers to the phenomenon, using data from Oslo-based Rystad Energy. The data is revealing, painting a portrait of an industry that has scaled down the size of new oil projects. Intriguingly, the focus on smaller oil fields began before the plunge in oil prices, although the price crash is...

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There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals cared a lot about working-class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — e.g., raising the minimum wage — but at least their hearts were in the right place. Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. Radical environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. These leftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these...

Hillary Clinton owes Bernie Sanders’ campaign an apology, the campaign said Friday. Clinton on Thursday accused Sanders’ camp of “lying,” alleging that his campaign has been claiming Clinton accepts money from the fossil fuel industry — a statement she forcefully rejected when confronted by an environmental activist. “I think she probably owes the senator an apology for that because the senator is not lying about her record,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBC. “He’s talking about her record. He’s talking about her practices. She obviously doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it lying because you don’t like it.”...

If you still own shares in solar energy it’s probably a sign that you’ve been in the sun too long: the sector is tanking – and deservedly so – as reality dawns that this is a Potemkin industry, an Enron of a con-trick, whose survival depends not on the energy it generates but on the subsidies it squeezes from the taxpayer. Consider Exhibit A: the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. This $2.2 billion project, heavily backed with federal grants by the Obama administration, is absolutely brilliant at killing birds. According to some estimates it accounts for...

According to a March 11 Bloomberg article, the Russian government is considering changes in the tax regime for the Russian oil and gas industry in order to bolster government revenues. Should Vladimir Putin consider nationalizing this industry as one of the alternatives? Possibly—if the U.S. shale revolution represents a paradigm shift that will result in sub-$50-$60 crude prices and substantially lower natural gas prices well into the future. Should this be the case, without significant changes in its approach to generating revenue from this industry—which historically has funded ~50 percent of the government’s budget—it seems the Russian government could consign...

Take a look at this abstract from the journal Progress in Human Geography: ………………………………………………………………………Glaciers, Gender, and Science:A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY: framework for global environmental change research Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, Jaclyn Rushing ABSTRACT Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging...

Just one day after the DOJ unveiled its had indicted Chesapeake Founder and former CEO Aubrey McClendon on federal charges of conspiring to rig bids for oil and natural gas leases, moments ago the Oklahoma Police announced that he was found dead in a car accident, when while traveling in a 2013 Chevy Tahoe at a high rate of speed he crashed while driving on a two-lane highway and was engulfed in flames. FORMER CHESAPEAKE CEO MCCLENDON DEAD AFTER CAR ACCIDENT: CNBCOKLAHOMA CITY POLICE SAY AUBREY MCCLENDON DEADMCCLENDON WAS GOING FASTER THAN SPEED LIMIT: POLICEMCCLENDON WAS ALONE IN 2013 CHEVY...

Washington could become the first state in the nation to impose a direct tax on carbon emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas. A ballot measure before the state Legislature would create a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of fossil fuel emissions burned in Washington, while reducing taxes. ...