Replies to post #494138 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[jbsliverer]

Oil & gas industry campaign contributions in the U.S. 2019/20, by beneficiary
Published by Statista Research Department, Aug 25, 2023
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1179621/us-oil-and-gas-industry-campaign-donations/

Donald Trump was the largest recipient of campaign donations by the oil & gas industry in the 2019/2020 presidential election cycle. As the incumbent president, Trump's campaign received nearly 3.8 million U.S. dollars from oil & gas affiliated companies and individuals. Of the top five beneficiaries, only one was a Democratic Party member - presidential candidate, Joseph Biden. In total, U.S. oil & gas lobbying spend for the Republican Party reached 63.6 million U.S. dollars during that election cycle.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips?cycle=2016&ind=E01


Sen. Whitehouse Opens Bombshell Budget Hearing on Big Oil Avoiding Accountability for Climate Change

An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021
The FTC just found evidence that American oil companies colluded with the Saudi government to hike gas prices, costing the average family $3,000 last year. The question is, what can we do about it?
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused
MATT STOLLER
MAY 03, 2024
I’m at the Google antitrust closing arguments, and I’ll have some thoughts on that soon. But today’s piece is about some bombshell evidence that just came out on a giant post-Covid conspiracy in the oil industry. And I do mean giant, because there’s now evidence that price-fixingp in the oil industry alone may single-handedly be responsible for a little over a quarter of the total inflationary increase in 2021.

Let’s dive in.

Last Sunday, I wrote a piece alleging that U.S. shale oil producers colluded with the Saudi government from 2021-2023 to drive up gas prices. That essay was based on some reporting I had done, as well as a complaint from a savvy Kansas City class action law firm, Sharp Law, with special expertise in oil. The theory was that American producers, after a bitter price war from 2014-2016, got tired of competing on price with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or the OPEC oil cartel, and at some point from 2017-2021, decided to join the cartel and cut supply to the market. This action had the affect of raising oil prices, costing oil consumers something on the order of $200 billion a year.

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released evidence confirming that collusion played a serious role in hiking oil prices at that time. Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield, a leader in the fracking field, “exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output.” Sheffield was explicit about his goal, saying that “if Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,” he said, adding: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.” He talked to shareholders, publicly threatened rivals, and ultimately achieved output cuts across the industry regardless of price. “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel,” he said, “the independent producers are going to be disciplined.

By 2021, as the economy roared back from Covid, the independents had joined OPEC. “I don’t think the world can rely much on US shale,” Sheffield said. “It’s really under OPEC control.”.....................



Trump moves ahead with selling public land to fossil-fuel industry amid coronavirus and oil price freefall
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/trump-fossil-fuel-coronavirus-oil-price-fall-us-public-lands-a9493101.html
Louise Boyle
New York
Thursday 30 April 2020 18:56 BS

................................................................Melyssa Watson, executive director of the Wilderness Society, told The Guardian: “From rolling back EPA’s pollution standards, to pushing for more oil and gas drilling and stifling the public review process, the federal government is fast-tracking rollbacks that deserve public scrutiny."

Last month, Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, announced a rollback on the Obama administration’s emissions standards for vehicles, despite the decision meaning that millions more tonnes of CO2 will be added to the global warming crisis.

The EPA also said last month that it would suspend the enforcement of environmental regulations that punish polluters during the coronavirus outbreak and allow industries to self-monitor.

At the time, the Natural Resources Defense Council tweeted: “This is an open licence to pollute. The administration should be giving its all toward making our country healthier right now. Instead it is taking advantage of an unprecedented public health crisis to do favours for polluters that threaten public health.”

Associated Press contributed to this report

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Trump Administration’s Bad Deal for Public Lands
https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2020/10/07/trump-public-lands-deal-426773

Opinion by JAYNI HEIN and MAX SARINSKY
10/07/2020 04:30 AM EDT
Jayni Hein is the natural resources director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.
Max Sarinsky is an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law

As wildfires exacerbated by climate change ravage the western United States, the Trump administration is fueling future climate disasters by continuing to hand over pristine public lands to private fossil fuel developers at breakneck pace.

That would be bad enough, but this fire sale of public lands is happening at arguably the worst possible moment for the American taxpayer: Global energy prices are at record lows, which means oil and gas developers are unwilling or unable to pay a fair price for access to these lands.

A normal approach to a decline in prices is to delay selling an asset until demand, and prices, recover. So a rational administration would look at the decline in demand for oil and gas leases and see it as an opportunity to hit pause and come up with a fiscally and environmentally smarter way to manage these lands.

Instead, the Trump administration is rushing ahead with these lease sales, locking in more harmful greenhouse gas emissions while failing to earn a decent return for American taxpayers...................................

.....................................These giveaways have become the norm for the Trump administration. In one extraordinary example, it allowed a single company to obtain over 113,000 acres of federal land — the size of over 80,000 football fields — for under $190,000, less than the median price of an American home. The Trump administration offered more acres for lease in its first two years than were offered under President Barack Obama’s entire second term. Last year, the Trump administration offered 1.6 million acres, seven times the amount offered in 2016.

By leasing so much public land and granting developers a 5- to 10-year option to drill, the administration not only deprives the public of the land’s other beneficial uses — such as conservation, recreation and renewable energy development — but also ties the hands of future administrations to enact responsible climate policies.

This recklessness is reminiscent of an era at the turn of the 20th century deemed the “Great Barbecue” for the buffet of federal mineral, grazing and forest lands offered to settlers and prospectors for paltry fees, ultimately leading to rapid and wasteful resource exploitation. Congress and regulators eventually adopted a more rational conservation policy, resulting in the establishment of agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management that are directed to manage public lands for public benefit.

Today’s flurry of bargain fossil-fuel lease sales could be called a second “Great Barbecue” for creating the conditions for producing the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that fuel climate change. Already, U.S. public lands would rank fifth in the world for greenhouse gas emissions if they were their own country. Continuing to produce large amounts of federal coal, oil and gas contradicts what climate science says we must do to prevent catastrophic climate damages: transition rapidly away from producing and burning fossil fuels..............................................................

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Saudis take 100% control of America's largest oil refinery
https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/01/investing/saudi-arabia-buys-largest-oil-refinery-port-arthur/index.html
by Matt Egan @MattEganCNN
May 1, 2017: 1:53 PM ET
Code: 6 | Message: The usage license for this video player has e


Saudi Arabia Now Controls the Largest Oil Refinery in North America
The move is a huge boon to Aramco before a big IPO, experts say.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/03/saudi-arabia-now-controls-the-largest-oil-refinery-in-north-america-energy-middle-east-aramco/

By Robbie Gramer, a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
MAY 3, 2017, 10:01 AM
The Port Arthur refinery in Texas is North America’s largest oil refinery, and as of this week Saudi Arabia controls all of it. With the stroke of a proverbial pen, Saudi’s state-owned oil giant Aramco took on 100 percent ownership of the port, cementing its access to the lucrative U.S. energy market at a critical time.

Industry experts say this week’s deal is Aramco’s latest power play before its highly anticipated IPO next year. But it also unveils a wider Aramco strategy no other state-owned oil giant has pursued yet: buying up downstream refineries worldwide to ensure steady consumer access regardless of prices.................................




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[fuagf]

The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial

"The Real Reasons for High Oil and Gas Prices
"Four Ways Trump Plans to Raise Energy Costs for American Consumers"

Related:

* Trump's FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175923384
* Denial of climate change is the junk science driven farce.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175651888
* Cigarette companies, Dupont, oil companies. They all knew.
Yep, Dark Waters is spellbinding. Worse is the problem still exists to degree. And though the film's story
took place in W Virginia guess which state is foremost in some interested individuals' minds here.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175117940
Research shows that company modeled and predicted global warming
with ‘shocking skill and accuracy’ starting in the 1970s
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175401041

The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining
the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.


President Trump at a White House event on April 8 at which he signed an executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy.” Eric Lee/The New York Times

By David Gelles
Published May 19, 2025Updated May 20, 2025

When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/climate/social-cost-carbon-trump.html?searchResultPosition=1 .. as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.

But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.

[ Insert: Trump is weakening the nation's defenses to global warming just as he weakened the country's defenses to infectious disease before Covid hit. See: spartex, Your recall is extra-selective. How about Trump's playing the danger down, and his disinfectant solution. How about the fact the first vaccine out was not a result of Warp Speed. And the fact Trump had very little to do with Warp Speed except giving the go-ahead.
[...]The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter
[...]"In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174722438
And more recently Trump has further weakened USA defense against disease by:
What Robert F. Kennedy Jr's Appointment Means for Public Health
Syra Madad explains the public health risks of President-elect Donald Trump's
appointment of RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/what-robert-f-kennedy-jrs-appointment-means-public-health ]

The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.

By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,” he said.

At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.

The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.

Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.

Mr. Trump dismisses the threats posed by climate change, suggesting that rising seas would create more “oceanfront property .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/12/us/harris-trump-election .” He blames “climate lunatics” for environmental regulations that he says have been a drag on the U.S. economy.

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump declared a national energy emergency, something that experts dispute because the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Mr. Trump has cited the emergency as justification for speeding approvals for oil, gas and coal projects and expanding logging in national forests.

Some agree that reforms to the nation’s environmental regulations were overdue. Complex and lengthy processes to get permits to build pipelines, transmission lines and drilling projects have also meant significant delays for wind farms, solar projects and other clean energy, said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University.

“Permitting as whole in the United States is just a mess,” he said.

But the president has gone much further than just trying to speed up permits. He’s made the American government a global outlier in its denial of science.

“It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

[Insert video:]

IMAGE - Elon Musk at a White House cabinet meting on April 30. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
[Waste of space (WOS)]

At the most basic level, the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s ability to monitor a rapidly changing climate.

Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/climate/national-climate-assessment-authors-dismissed.html .. who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.

In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”

NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting effort spearheaded by the billionaire Elon Musk, has proposed closing a NOAA observatory in Hawaii that has been continuously monitoring greenhouse gas levels since 1958.

The data collected there were used to create the Keeling Curve, a well-known graph that showed the sharp recent rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The data from Hawaii and other NOAA monitoring stations are shared with scientists around the globe and inform international climate negotiations.

“The lack of scientific data collection is going to harm our ability to understand the natural and physical world,” said Brandon Jones, president of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s also going to impact our ability to provide early warning systems for severe storms or the next wildfire. It’s going to have an impact on lives.”

A spokesman for the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, defended the cuts, saying that the agency was exploring new ways to collect data and did not expect disruptions to weather forecasting.

The capacity to respond


Debris in Monette, Ark., after a tornado on April 3. Brad J. Vest for The New York Times

Mr. Trump is also reducing the federal government’s response to disasters, a function that dates to 1803 .. https://www.fema.gov/about#:~:text=ourselves%20each%20day.-,History%20of%20FEMA,the%20Department%20of%20Homeland%20Security. .

Instead, the White House is trying to shift responsibility to the states. The administration has canceled a FEMA program aimed at making communities more resilient before disasters hit, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” And it said FEMA staffers would no longer go door to door to help survivors after a catastrophe.

In a statement, a spokesman for the National Security Council said that when disasters strike, states must have “an appetite to own the problem.”

“The Trump administration is reforming a broken disaster relief system that has repeatedly let Americans down,” said Kush Desai, an administration spokesman. “Instead of doling out blank checks, the administration is working with state and local governments to proactively make investments and enact common sense policies that prioritize disaster preparedness and resilience.”

As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. There were just three billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 1980, but that total increased to 27 last year, according to data collected by NOAA. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.

Daniel Kaniewski, who served as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator during the first Trump administration, said it made little sense to cut programs that help harden communities against extreme weather.

“The longer we go without these programs, the more risk will accrue to these communities and the nation,” said Mr. Kaniewski, who is now a managing director at Marsh McLennan, an insurance broker and risk adviser. “And soon enough, we’ll all bear the consequences.”

Going into hurricane season, FEMA is being run by an acting administrator with no experience in emergency management .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/us/politics/fema-cameron-hamilton.html . As of May 8, the agency had available about half as many staff members trained to respond to disasters as it did at the same time last year, according to agency documents. That follows months of downsizing at FEMA through resignations and layoffs.

FEMA has recently denied some requests for assistance .. https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/sarah-huckabee-sanders-fema-trump-arkansas-rcna203546 .. from Arkansas, where a series of tornadoes in March was followed by a second round of destructive weather, including flooding and hail. It also rejected requests from several counties in West Virginia where February floods caused extensive damage; Washington State, which was battered by windstorms; and North Carolina, which is still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, which destroyed 1,000 homes last year.

Jonas Anderson, the mayor of Cave City, Ark., population 1,994, where a tornado destroyed more than 20 homes and many local businesses, said FEMA’s denial of community assistance was “shocking and disappointing.”

“It’s pretty rough on people,” Mr. Anderson said.

Slashing regulations


Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator. Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/climate/epa-zeldin-rollbacks-pollution.html .. to end those functions. The administration is shredding the E.P.A.’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Mr. Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”

But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems and premature deaths.

Sensing an opening, two major chemical industry trade groups, have asked the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, for a complete exemption .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/climate/chemical-industry-trump-pollution-exemption.html .. from limits on hazardous pollution.

“Rolling back regulations will have a catastrophic effect on health in America,” said Harold Wimmer, the chief executive of the American Lung Association.

Throttling the energy transition

Mr. Trump has made no secret of his hostility toward wind power, along with most of the clean energy technologies that would help the country pivot away from oil, gas and coal and reduce the emissions driving climate change. Last month, his administration shocked many observers by ordering work to stop on a wind farm off the coast of Long Island where construction was already underway.

“To stop a project that already has all its federal permits is fairly unprecedented, especially at a large scale, like this,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs for Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to promote development in the area around New York City.

After intense lobbying by Gov. Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, the administration relented this week and allowed the project to go forward. But the developer had lost an estimated $50 million a week during the monthlong freeze.


Wind turbine components at the New London State Pier in Connecticut on last month. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press

[ Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that 94% of the global carbon budget for 1.5C has now been used up, as cumulative emissions since 1850 have reached 2,607bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2).
p - While developed countries have used the majority of this budget, the analysis shows that China’s historical emissions reached 312GtCO2 in 2023, overtaking the EU’s 303GtCO2.
p - China is still far behind the 532GtCO2 emitted by the US, however, according to the analysis.
p - Indeed, China is unlikely to ever overtake the US contribution to global warming, based on current policies, committed plans and technology trends in both countries. This is even before accounting for the potential emissions-boosting policies of the incoming Trump presidency.
P - In addition, China’s 1.4 billion people are each responsible for 227tCO2, a third of the 682tCO2 linked to the EU’s 450 million citizens – and far below the 1,570tCO2 per capita in the US.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-have-now-caused-more-global-warming-than-eu/
Per capita Australian emission of greenhouse gases is also higher than China's.
China's, i've read, are roughly the world average. ]

The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.

Some Republicans are trying to preserve the tax credits, saying that they have helped drive investment in manufacturing.

“A lot of these members have billions and billions of dollars invested in their districts,” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group.

Alone in the world

The American retreat from climate action has made the United States a global outlier. Nearly every other government has recognized that a hotter planet poses a profound threat to humans and ecosystems. Not the Trump administration, which made the United States the only nation to formally withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit planetary warming.

Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.

Average global temperatures last year were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that nations had been working to avoid. Every fraction of a degree of additional warming raises the risk of severe effects and possibly irreversible changes to the planet. Nations must make deep and fast cuts to pollution to avoid a grim future of increasingly violent weather, deadly heat waves, drought, water scarcity and displacement, scientists have said.

But at this perilous moment, the United States is virtually alone in the world in rejecting climate science.

“Here we see a government that is taking a hatchet to the scientific enterprise,” Ms. Cleetus said. “It’s the kind of destruction that will have implications for a while to come.”

Trump’s Moves on Climate and the Environment
The New York Times is tracking the Trump administration’s actions in its first 100 days.
This link is set up to show the ones that focus on climate, but
you can explore other categories, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/trump-agenda-2025.html?categories=Climate

David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/climate/trump-climate-denial.html