Free Republic

Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo is getting ready to introduce a bill repealing the gas tax in exchange for a carbon tax. It seems rather odd the Miami Republican wants to chart this path, especially after the House GOP overwhelmingly denounced the notion of a carbon tax last week, but Curbelo isn’t backing down from his proposal. He told Miami Herald his proposal is just a “first step” in the discussion. When you ask this question in a vacuum, is any tax detrimental to economic growth? It’s usually going to be yes…But when you put it in context and you...

“I like you. You and me, we’re going to be best friends.” It is early January, and Eric Schneiderman is sitting in his 25th-floor office above Lower Manhattan, doing his best Donald Trump impression, puckering his lips into a duck face, scrunching up his nose and lowering his voice into something that resembles the president’s outer-borough growl. Schneiderman is recalling his meeting with Trump in 2010. Back then, Schneiderman was running for attorney general of New York, and Trump was still in his pre-birther, reality TV host phase. Trump had donated money to one of Schneiderman’s opponents in the Democratic...

Hundreds of small, independent producers might soon be swallowed up by today’s unprecedented oil and gas boom in southeastern New Mexico. As industry titans like ExxonMobil and Concho Resources pump billions of dollars into previously untapped sections of New Mexico’s century-old oil patch, the state’s small- and medium-sized producers are struggling on the margins to keep running aging wells based on outdated technology. Those companies, which have flourished for decades in New Mexico’s side of the Permian Basin, don’t have the resources to invest in the modern drilling technology needed to dig into the oil-rich, hard shale-rock formations where the...

First they tried suing the utility companies. Then they tried suing the automakers. They even tried suing oil companies on behalf of an Alaskan village in danger of being inundated by oil-fueled rising sea levels. Each approach ended when courts said that the judiciary branch wasn’t the right place to address human-induced global warming, a problem so big it requires a coordinated international response that only legislators can implement. Now private plaintiff lawyers and their allies in government are trying a new strategy: Suing under state-law theories of public nuisance. San Francisco and several other California cities and counties have...

Apparently all of that “anti-imperialist” rhetoric from Caracas was just a farce for public consumption. As Venezuela’s economy implodes amid skyrocketing inflation and crippling shortages of practically everything, Socialist strongman Nicolás Maduro (shown) has a new plan to prop up his imploding regime: annex two thirds of neighboring Guyana’s territory and almost one third of its population. The area eyed by Maduro’s autocracy is especially noteworthy now that potentially lucrative oil deposits have been discovered offshore. Unsurprisingly, a powerful alliance of the region’s socialist strongmen and their allies has sided with the regime in Venezuela. Talk of war is escalating....

When the compact figure of Vladimir Putin strode onto the world stage after his success in the 2000 presidential elections, a tremor of anxiety passed through the collective body of Western leaders. Gone was the boozy, bumbling, free-wheeling Boris Yeltsin, clown-prince of post-Soviet Russia who had unaccountably found himself in the box seat at the historic moment when his country was rolling up the Communist empire. The new leader of the new Russia was his polar opposite. A former KGB colonel, Putin was the identikit Soviet-style apparatchik: hard-eyed, unsmiling, tightly disciplined. And he had a black-belt in judo to prove...

WASHINGTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. and other large oil companies are backing a carbon tax proposal put forward earlier this year by a group of former Republican leaders including James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and a Houston attorney. The Climate Leadership Coalition, a group that includes Baker, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former Secretary of State George Shultz, announced a list of "founding members" Tuesday that includes Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Total, General Motors and Johnson & Johnson. "We support @TheCLCouncil as a founding member and are working to support its policy development process," Exxon...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested Exxon Mobil is "crazy" in response to a report that the oil giant is seeking a waiver to resume projects in Russia. "Are they crazy?" McCain tweeted Wednesday with a link to the Wall Street Journal's report.

A liberal activist desperate to take down President Donald Trump paid thousands of dollars for what turned out to be forged documents, revealing a willingness among Trump’s critics to believe almost anything that might hurt his presidency. The Israeli flew to Rome in January to meet with an Italian businessman who promised him a set of potentially explosive documents on Trump in exchange for $9,000 in cash, reports Buzzfeed News. The documents appeared to prove ExxonMobil had secretly bribed the president to nominate Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, and the man eagerly passed them on to Democrat operatives...

Rex Tillerson oversaw a major shift on climate change as chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp. as the nation’s largest oil company accepted the scientific consensus that humans are contributing to a warming planet. Tillerson, whom President-elect Donald Trump this week tapped to be his secretary of State, took charge as Exxon Mobil's top executive in 2006. ADVERTISEMENT Just a year later, Exxon shifted from its public position of doubting climate change to declaring that there is “no question” that human activity was the source of carbon dioxide emissions contributing to the phenomenon.

Exxon Mobil Corp, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, on Friday reported a 38 percent drop in quarterly profit that still beat Wall Street’s expectations as cost cuts partly offset declining crude oil prices. Shares of Exxon were down 1.9 percent at $85.30 in afternoon trading. The company reported third-quarter net income of $2.65 billion, or 63 cents per share, compared with $4.24 billion, or $1.01 per share, a year earlier. Analysts on average expected a profit of 58 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. …

So you’re a global warming skeptic, author, philosopher and think tank creator who champions the use of fossil fuels. Then you get subpoenaed by the Massachusetts attorney general over your think-tank’s supposed ties to ExxonMobil — the claim being that the oil giant allegedly attempted to cover up global warming science. And how did Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” respond to Maura Healey’s subpoena on Wednesday? " F---- Off, Fascist"

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is now the latest state prosecutor to start investigating conservative groups with supposed ties to ExxonMobil, after she issued a subpoena for 40 years of internal company documents and communications with a handful of think tanks. Healey’s office subpoenaed Exxon as part of a multi-state effort among liberal attorneys general to investigate Exxon for allegedly trying to cover up global warming science. Healey charges that the oil giant lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The...

California congressmen wrote a letter to state attorney general Kamala Harris claiming the freedom of speech “is not designed to protect fraud and deceit” of the likes being spread by oil company ExxonMobil about global warming.Nineteen Democratic lawmakers told Harris her “investigation as to whether ExxonMobil lied about the truth of climate change and misled investors does not constitute an effort to silence speech or scientific research.“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not protect companies from defrauding the American people or improperly disclosing information to their shareholders,” lawmakers, including California Reps. Maxine Waters and Ted Lieu,...

The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands is targeting dozens of conservative and libertarian organizations in a racketeering lawsuit against climate change skeptics that has been widely described as an effort to silence political opponents. In a subpoena issued in March, the office of USVI attorney general Claude Walker demanded from Exxon Mobil copies of communications between the oil company and 90 different political and policy organizations “and any other organizations engaged in research or advocacy concerning Climate Change or policies.” The subpoena was part of a national, coordinated legal campaign by state attorneys general and left-wing advocacy groups...

<p>DALLAS (AP) -- Exxon Mobil produced its weakest quarter in more than 16 years as lower oil prices pushed its profit down by 63 percent.</p> <p>Revenue tumbled 28 percent, and the oil giant lost money in its vaunted exploration and production business despite a 2 percent increase in production. It made more money, however, in chemicals.</p>

Sometimes we wonder if we’re still living in the land of the free. Witness the subpoena from Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, demanding that the Competitive Enterprise Institute cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors. Mr. Walker is frustrated that the free-market think tank won’t join the modern church of climatology, so he has joined the rapidly expanding club of Democratic politicians and prosecutors harassing dissenters. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started the assault last autumn with a subpoena barrage on Exxon Mobil. His demand...

Exxon Mobil has been rate AAA by S&P since 1930 according to Bloomberg. Today that ended as the global crude explorer with sales that dwarf the economies of most nations was cut to AA+ (Outlook stable). Having been put on notice in February (negative watch), citing concern that credit measures would remain weak through 2018. Credit measures will be weak for a AAA rating due, in part, to low commodity prices, high reinvestment requirements and large dividend payments, S&P says. Maintaining production and replacing reserves will eventually require higher spending, S&P says. Greatest business challenge is replacing co.’s ongoing production, S&P says....

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the agenda from a January 9 meeting of prominent climate change groups and the Rockefeller Foundation, whose purpose was to discuss ways to destroy ExxonMobil through legal action, divestment efforts, and political pressure.

A lockdown is in effect at the ExxonMobile refinery in Baytown after a security breach. Company officials say around 7:30am, a person went inside the plant without permission. "We take matters of this nature very seriously and are working closely with Baytown Police Department," says Todd Spitler, spokesman for Exxon Mobil.