[✔️] October 28, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Oct 28 09:53:27 EDT 2021
/*October 28, 2021*/
/
//[Congressional hearings begin today at 10:30 ET
//https://oversight.house.gov/legislation/hearings/fueling-the-climate-crisis-exposing-big-oil-s-disinformation-campaign-to
]/
**
*Fossil fuel companies are sponsoring some of the Beltway's most-read
newsletters in an attempt to win influence in Washington, DC.*
Molly Taft and Emily Atkin
Oct 27. 2021
- -
The statements use a misinformation technique called “paltering,” said
John Cook, a climate change communication researcher at Monash
University. The term refers to the practice of saying things that are,
on their own, literally true—but create a misleading overall impression.
“Paltering is commonly used in greenwashing, a form of climate
misinformation where companies attempt to distract from their polluting
behavior,” Cook said. “A company boasting about capturing CO2 when their
core business is emitting CO2 into the atmosphere through burning fossil
fuels is a textbook example of greenwashing.”
Exxon is technically working to reduce emissions by using and investing
in carbon capture, a climate solution. But carbon capture is only
effective if paired with ambitious reductions in actual emissions—and
Exxon, the world’s fourth largest climate-polluting fossil fuel company,
is planning to increase its oil and gas output over time. Exxon also
doesn’t use carbon capture to reduce emissions; it sells the captured
carbon to businesses that use it to produce more oil. The company is
also aggressively lobbying against climate policy and a lobbyist was
recently ensnared in a sting talking about its tactics.
But Exxon needs the public to believe it is addressing climate change in
order to increase its social license to operate—particularly right
before a potentially damaging hearing on the subject, said Robert
Brulle, an environmental sociologist and visiting professor at Brown
University. “As threats [to the oil industry] increase, these
[greenwashing] efforts increase,” he said. “This is an old cycle.”
Indeed, a joint analysis conducted by HEATED and Earther found that oil
company advertising has exploded in DC-based newsletters in the lead-up
to the hearing being put on by the House Oversight Committee looking
into what the committee calls “the fossil fuel industry’s long-running,
industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil
fuels in causing global warming.”
Moreover, most of the advertisements contain misinformation about the
oil companies’ climate efforts, making this yet another chapter in a
decades-long story. The results show that lawmakers, lobbyists, policy
professionals, and industry insiders—those involved in shaping
on-the-ground climate policy—have been barraged with propaganda from
fossil fuel interests with their morning news over the past five months
as lawmakers debate crucial climate legislation and accountability
measures. And some of these ads are purposefully designed to make them
look like the original reporting contained in the newsletters, meaning
audiences may not even realize they’re absorbing climate misinformation...
- -
The responses appear to misunderstand the issue being raised. No one has
claimed Big Oil’s ads influence the reporting at these news outlets. The
issue is that news outlets are using their own quality reporting to sell
advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation on their platforms
and making a lot of money from it.
Climate Power said that according to their media buyer, a week of
sponsoring the Punchbowl newsletter costs more than $100,000. While
energy and climate newsletters are cheaper to sponsor than bigger
political heavy hitters—POLITICO Playbook and Axios can be above
$300,000 for a week of sponsorships—they can still cost “tens of
thousands of dollars per week,” Climate Power said in an email.
When asked questions about the cost of newsletter sponsorships, how far
in advance sponsorships are booked, and specific numbers of the
newsletter’s audience, Bosserman said POLITICO couldn’t share that
information; Brignoni did not respond to those questions as of press time.
We’ve reached out to Exxon, Chevron, and API about their sponsorship of
these newsletters and what they hope to accomplish. As of press time,
none responded. But perhaps they’ll be asked on Thursday.
https://gizmodo.com/big-oil-uses-newsletter-ads-to-spread-misinformation-ah-1847946590
/[ powerfully different view - giving up on politicians with an animated
video ]/
*We’re Facing a Climate Disaster. Why Is Greta Thunberg Hopeful?*
Greta Thunberg - October 27, 2021
“All political and economic systems have failed, but humanity has not
yet failed.”
- Animated cartoon --
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000008010161/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis.html
/[ Criticizing Australia's coal policy in a sarcastic video ]/
*Honest Government Ad | COP26 Climate Summit*
Oct 27, 2021
thejuicemedia
The Australien Government has made an ad for the COP26 UN Climate
Summit, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyKmqEdgR4
/[ Almost like a tide ] /
*Chicago is at risk as climate change causes wild swings in Lake
Michigan water levels*
WED, OCT 27 2021
KEY POINTS
-- Heavier rainfall and more frequent droughts are now causing extreme
swings in the water levels of Lake
-- Michigan and the Chicago River, wreaking havoc on the city and
prompting urgent action to find a fix.
-- Record lake water levels in the winter of 2020 hampered the city’s
flood prevention system, contributing to flooding downtown. This could
become the new normal going forward.
-- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is evaluating infrastructure
upgrades, taking climate change into account.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/27/chicago-and-great-lakes-hurt-by-climate-change-need-infrastructure.html
/[ Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation ]/
*‘Dangerous and delusional’: Critics denounce Saudi climate plan*
The kingdom announced plans to fight global warming, but acknowledged it
will continue to extract and export its vast petroleum reserves.
By Robert Kennedy - Published On 26 Oct 2021
Under pressure to decarbonise, Saudi Arabia has announced a raft of
measures to deal with the intensifying climate crisis, but critics say
the moves are just a smokescreen to keep fossil fuels propelling its
economy.
After holding the “Middle East Green Initiative” over the weekend, Saudi
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a series of plans to address
the dangers of global warming, overwhelmingly caused by rich nations
over the past three centuries.
The initiatives included achieving “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions
by 2060, planting 50 billion trees in the Middle East in the decades to
come, and launching a $10.4bn clean energy project for the region.
The pledges, however, came days after Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest
oil producer, announced it planned to raise crude production from 12
million barrels a day to 13 million barrels by 2027 – a move scientists,
energy experts, and activists say goes directly against what is needed
to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
All hydrocarbons must remain in the ground starting now, climate
researchers say.
Saudi Arabia has justified the contradictory moves of reducing its own
carbon emissions while still taking oil out of the ground and selling it
worldwide as part of a plan to create a “circular carbon economy“.
This envisions continuing to extract carbon-filled fuel out of the earth
while employing new technologies to capture, store or sell its emissions
– essentially an offset scheme.
The Saudis and other traditional energy producers say it is unrealistic
simply to turn off the oil-and-gas taps at the moment as fossil fuels
will be needed for decades to come during the transition to renewables.
- -
It isn’t difficult to understand why the kingdom would be reluctant to
act fast and decisively on walking away from hydrocarbon production.
Saudi Arabia possesses about 16 percent of the world’s proven petroleum
reserves. Estimates indicate the oil and gas sector accounts for about
87 percent of budget revenues, 42 percent of gross domestic product, and
90 percent of export earnings...
- -
Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, was more
direct when asked by Al Jazeera about Saudi Arabia’s “circular carbon
economy” plan.
“It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and
combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of
the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that
don’t exist yet,” said Archer.
“These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is
ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.”
Highlighting the dire warnings in the latest report by the United
Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change, he said the only way to
rapidly decarbonise to avert catastrophic consequences of global warming
is to ban new fossil fuel developments and invest massively in renewable
energy and public infrastructure projects.
“Anything short of that isn’t just greenwashing, it’s dangerous and
delusional,” said Archer.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/26/green-or-greenwashing-saudi-arabias-climate-change-pledges
/[ Openly naming the top 12 bad guys ]/
*The dirty dozen: meet America’s top climate villains*
Georgia Wright, Liat Olenick and Amy Westervelt
Wed 27 Oct 2021
Few are household names, yet these 12 enablers and profiteers have an
unimaginable sway over the fate of humanity
For too long, Americans were fed a false narrative that they should feel
individually guilty about the climate crisis. The reality is that only a
handful of powerful individuals bear the personal responsibility.
The nation’s worst polluters managed to evade accountability and
scrutiny for decades as they helped the fossil fuel industry destroy our
planet. The actions of these climate supervillains have affected
millions of people, disproportionately hurting the vulnerable who have
done the least to contribute to global emissions.
Working- and middle-class people must stop blaming themselves for the
climate crisis. Instead, it’s time to band together to seek justice and
hold these profiteers accountable. Only in calling out their power and
culpability is it possible to reclaim the world that belongs to all of
us, together.
*
**Mike Wirth**
**THE WOKE-WASHER**
**Chairman of the board and CEO of Chevron*
Mike Wirth captains Chevron, a notorious corporate polluter responsible
for one of the highest total carbon emissions of any private company
worldwide.
Under Wirth’s direction, Chevron has pursued several greenwashing
tactics to downplay the company’s environmental impact. A coalition of
environmental groups filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint against
Chevron earlier this year saying it misled the public by claiming
responsibility only for carbon emissions associated with refining and
transporting oil, not the total emissions created by the product it sells.
Wirth also sits on the board of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil
industry trade group with a long track record of spreading climate
denial and delaying legislative efforts to curb carbon emissions.
In his own words: “Let them plant trees.”
*Darren Woods**
**THE RINGLEADER**
**Chairman of the board and CEO of Exxon*
ExxonMobil is publicly known as one of the first oil companies to become
aware of climate change more than 40 years ago. Still, Exxon spent
millions of dollars spreading climate denial while simultaneously
contributing the fourth largest amount of carbon emissions of any
investor-owned company in the world.
Woods, who’s been with the company since 1992, makes over $20m a year.
And though he expressed support for the 2015 Paris agreement to
substantially reduce global pollution, leaked documents showed his plan
for the company to increase its emissions by 17% through 2025.
Earlier this year, Exxon lobbyists were also captured on video revealing
the company’s efforts to obstruct climate legislation in Congress. Woods
later tried to distance himself and the company from the lobbyists,
saying they “in no way represent” Exxon’s position.
In his own words: Woods once called carbon reduction standards “a beauty
match, a beauty competition”.
*Jamie Dimon**
**THE ENABLER**
**CEO of Chase Bank*
Billionaire Jamie Dimon is top dog at JP Morgan Chase, which has
provided $317bn in fossil fuel financing – 33% more than any other bank
– since the Paris agreement was adopted in 2015. Under Dimon, Chase has
also funneled more than $2bn into tar sands projects between 2016 and 2019.
When Chase’s managing director, Greg Determann, was asked early this
year if the company would still lend to oil and gas companies despite
the worsening climate crisis, Determann replied: “‘Mr Dimon is quite
focused on the industry. It’s a huge business for us and that’s going to
be the case for decades to come.”
In his own words: “The solution is not as simple as walking away from
fossil fuels.”
*Larry Fink**
**THE FINANCIER**
**CEO of BlackRock*
As the chief executive of BlackRock, Fink oversees one of the world’s
largest fossil fuel investment portfolios, with $87bn behind the industry.
And though Fink has made sweeping climate promises and even wrote an
op-ed about achieving a “net-zero” world, his company has profited off
deforestation – a major cause of rising emissions – more than any other
company globally.
Fink has also pushed BlackRock to vote against pro-climate action
shareholder resolutions – all while angling for money from the federal
government that should go to climate projects.
In his own words: “Without global action, every nation will bear
enormous costs from a warming planet, including damage from more
frequent natural disasters and supply-chain failures.”
*Charles Koch**
**THE KINGPIN**
**Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries*
Alongside his now-deceased brother David, Charles Koch has a lengthy
résumé of climate malfeasance. The multibillionaire is the longtime head
of Koch Industries, a refining, petrochemical and pipeline company
labeled by Greenpeace as a “kingpin of climate denial”.
The Kochs, and particularly Charles, moved early to politicize climate
change. Charles founded and funded the Cato Institute, a libertarian
thinktank known to coordinate and distribute climate denial, which
became the first organization to stoke the ideological divide on the
climate crisis. Koch Industries went on to spend nearly $150m financing
climate denial groups between 1997 and 2018 alone.
Since his brother’s death, Charles has attempted to backtrack on his
legacy of sowing hyper-partisan division. But according to OpenSecrets,
Koch Industries is the top spender ($5.6m) on annual lobbying on oil and
gas so far this year.
In his own words: “Boy did we screw up. What a mess!”
*Mitch McConnell**
**THE OBSTRUCTIONIST**
**Senate minority leader*
Mitch McConnell only admitted to believing in human-caused climate
change in 2020. He is also the chief architect of ongoing Republican
obstructionism. Under President Obama, whose climate actions he smeared
as a “war on coal”, McConnell used the filibuster to block even tepid
climate reforms supported by a majority of Americans.
Under Trump, McConnell nuked the judicial filibuster in order to put
three anti-science, pro-corporate justices on the supreme court,
including Amy Coney-Barrett, who maintains deep family ties to big oil
(her father worked at Shell for decades). And now, McConnell is ensuring
that 100% of Republicans will vote against all of Biden’s climate agenda.
McConnell is also heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry, to the
tune of more than $3m over the course of his infamous career.
In his own words: “I’m not a scientist.”
*Joe Manchin**
**THE SABOTEUR**
**US senator*
Today, Joe Manchin is most famous for being a swing vote for important
legislation, but the real story is how the fossil fuel industry made him
mega-wealthy through two coal companies he founded in the 1980s.
While even coalminers in his home state of West Virginia support a Green
New Deal, Manchin uses his position to hold climate legislation hostage
on behalf of the fossil fuel industry – which he is currently doing by
threatening to vote against Biden’s Build Back Better climate agenda.
The Exxon lobbyists caught on tape earlier this year specifically
identified Manchin as “their guy”, and said they meet with him several
times a week.
According to OpenSecrets, Manchin takes more money from the fossil fuel
industry than any other Democrat.
In his own words: “If you’re sticking your head in the sand, and saying
that fossil [fuel] has to be eliminated in America … and thinking that’s
going to clean up the global climate, it won’t clean it up at all. If
anything, it would be worse.”
*Mark Zuckerberg**
**THE PROPAGANDIST**
**Facebook founder and CEO*
Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $120bn, shows a consistent willingness to
profit off the spread of climate denial on behalf of the fossil fuel
industry. In April 2021, Zuckerberg told Congress climate misinformation
was “a big issue”, yet Facebook has done little to rein in climate
denial or challenge the fossil fuel industry.
Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. It’s been lawless for
years | Matt Stoller
Last year, pro-fossil fuel Facebook ads were viewed 431m times. In just
the first half of 2020, ads on Facebook calling climate change a hoax
were viewed at least 8m times in the United States alone.
In 2019, an article falsely attributing climate change to Earth’s solar
orbit went viral, accumulating millions of views without intervention by
the company. And this year, one report found that in just the first two
months of 2021, Facebook spread climate denial to over 25 million
people, including posts about wind turbines being to blame after Texas
froze over in February.
Meanwhile, Facebook has muzzled actual climate scientists trying to
share peer-reviewed research.
In his own words: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking
stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”
*Rupert Murdoch**
**THE TYCOON**
**Founder of News Corp*
The father of international media conglomerate News Corp and the CEO of
Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets, Australian
American tycoon Rupert Murdoch has overseen his companies’ rampant
spreading of misinformation and climate denial for decades, netting him
over $23bn.
Although Murdoch has claimed his company does not support climate
denial, his news outlets have published article after article sowing
doubt in climate science. Meanwhile, as of 2019, more than 80% of
climate coverage on Fox News was steeped in denial, according to an
analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen.
In his own words: “Climate change has been going on as long as the
planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it.”
*David MacLennan**
**THE DESTROYER**
**CEO of Cargill*
Rainforests are the most important climate regulators in the world. But
Cargill, a global food corporation helmed by MacLennan, has a profit
model based on rainforest destruction caused by soy and beef production,
particularly in the Amazon.
MacLennan has been in charge of the company’s global strategy since
2013. He was calling the shots when, in 2019, former congressman Henry
Waxman called Cargill the “worst company in the world”, referring to its
track record on deforestation.
Thanks to public pressure, Cargill did recently declare a moratorium on
buying agricultural products from illegally cleared rainforest, but
there is evidence that under Maclennan’s leadership, the company is
already ignoring its own commitment.
In his own words: When asked why Cargill wasn’t eliminating
deforestation from its supply chain: “The supply chains in Brazil are
very complicated.”
*Richard Edelman**
**THE FABULIST**
**CEO of Edelman PR*
Edelman heads the global communications firm Edelman PR, which made tens
of millions of dollars over the years by working with fossil fuel
companies. His firm has created multi-pronged PR, advertising and
lobbying campaigns with ExxonMobil, TransCanada, the American Petroleum
Institute and Shell – prompting high-profile clients and executives to
leave over the firm’s work pushing climate denial.
In 2015, Edelman announced that the firm would stop accepting climate
denier assignments, but he has since claimed that the firm’s work for
Shell, ExxonMobil and more don’t technically qualify as climate denial.
Tax filings show that since that 2015 announcement, the firm has raked
in $12m for its work with the American Fuel and Petrochemical
Manufacturers alone, whose most recent focus has been increasing
criminal penalties for pipeline protesters.
In his own words: “I’m proud of what our firm is doing to build a house
of trust through our mission, values, and actions.”
*Ted Boutrous**
**THE SMOOTH TALKER**
**Partner of Gibson Dunn law firm*
As Chevron’s lead attorney and the main spokesman for all the oil
companies in some two dozen climate liability cases, Boutrous sets the
agenda in answering to the fossil fuel industry’s decades of lies about
climate change. His argument before the courts hinges on the idea that
every person shares equal blame for the climate crisis, and that it’s
“counterproductive” to hold the fossil fuel industry particularly
responsible.
Law Students for Climate Accountability rates Gibson Dunn among the
worst of the worst on its climate scorecard for having the
second-highest amount of fossil fuel litigation work of all 26 firms the
group evaluated.
In his own words: “Chevron is a great company and great client with a
strong culture of social responsibility.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/climate-crisis-villains-americas-dirty-dozen
- -
/[ from the past - this is an edit of an earlier dirty list from a
decade ago ]/
*The BEAST 15 Most Heinous Climate Villains*
Some of the bastards responsible for subverting public understanding of
climate change*
(broken link was
http://buffalobeast.com/the-beast-15-most-heinous-climate-villains/
purged from Archive.org)
A restored version privately recovered
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DOC0ySeXjtiqozS4eBchvZ_5eM5xqdELAqc2qW38wNA/edit?usp=sharing
/[ oops, from within the beast ] /
*The Climate Denial Is Coming From Inside Facebook's House*
An internal staff discussion details Facebook's loose policy to deal
with climate misinformation—and skeptics fighting in favor of the
controversy.
Brian Kahn - Oct 26, 2021
n the midst of the second-hottest October in human history, a question
popped up on an internal Facebook message board. “Policy for
Misinformation - Climate Change Denial?”
The question sparked a discussion, including with an employee arguing
that Facebook allowing climate denial posts to run unchecked on the
platform made sense because the science around a specific type of ulcer
once shifted. The post, available here, is part of a tranche of
documents released by whistleblower Francis Haugen’s legal team that
Gizmodo and other outlets have received access to. (You can see what
we’ve turned up so far.) The names of “low-level” Facebook employees are
redacted, so it’s unclear who specifically engaged in the debate over
climate change denial content. But the chats are illuminating in just
how hands-off Facebook has been with climate denial, and how even within
a company committed to net zero emissions by 2030, a laissez-faire
attitude about perpetuating denial still reigns in some corners.
The internal logs are from 2019, a year before Facebook opened its
climate science information center page for business. The initial post
features an employee asking what Facebook does to deal with misinformation:
I’m writing to find out if we have a policy regarding Climate Change
denial, specifically human involvement towards climate change. Is this
covered in our misinformation enforcement of inform treatments and
downranking? I’m wondering because this is science-based we think
differently about how this is treated to opinion-based fact checking...
- -
This is one of the countless examples of real-world harm already
occurring due to the climate crisis. The political system has failed to
come to grips with this damage in large part because misinformation has
made the necessary actions nearly unattainable. A separate internal
thread in 2019 seems to acknowledge this reality, with a post noting,
“If someone is using Facebook Search to deliberately sow doubt and slow
down the public response to the climate crisis, they are using our
service to jeopardize the lives of billions of people over the coming
decades. Is that an attack we are prepared for?”
Why would Facebook allow denial to exist—and in some cases flourish—on
its platform is perhaps an ad dollars and cents issue. But as the
October 2019 thread reveals, some within the company are also inclined
to teach to the controversy. A response to the initial post reads:
It seems problematic to treat scientific consensus as the definitive
truth for the purpose of suppressing content that disagrees with it.
Scientific consensus is occasionally overturned. It wasn’t too long ago
that everyone knew stomach ulcers were caused by stress and excess
stomach acid. The idea that they were caused by microbes was debunked in
1954. If Facebook had been around at that time, we might have faced
pressure to stop crackpots from spreading their debunked claims. ...
Today, however, we know stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria. ... The
Nobel Prize came after many years of pushing back against scientific
consensus.
“My immediate reaction is that this is the ‘skeptics as Galileo’ claim
that climate deniers have sometimes appealed to in an effort to position
themselves as the victim of authoritarian suppression of ideas,”
Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard research associate and director of Climate
Accountability Communication at the Climate Social Science Network, said
in an email. He went on to note that “climate scientists’ views are
based on decades of peer-reviewed evidence and reasoning. Climate
deniers’ views are not.”
Indeed, the Hal Turner post that sparked the discussion misrepresents
NASA’s findings and the preponderance of evidence that humans are
heating the planet by burning fossil fuels. Naomi Oreskes, a science
historian at Harvard who has written one of the seminal texts on climate
denial and also worked with Supran, said that Jurassic Park author
Michael Crichton actually deployed a similar argument “that scientists
had a consensus about eugenics. Therefore we should not believe what
they say today” about climate change. She wrote an opinion piece in 2005
rebutting Crichton, which rings true in light of the Facebook discussion
today. Just because “group X of scientists, decades ago, may have been
wrong about Y, does not mean that [a] different group, today, addressing
a different issue, are likely to be wrong now,” she wrote in an email.
The Facebook Climate Science Center popped up in 2020 in response to
some of the criticisms of how the company was dealing with climate
science on the site. The center provides people with facts about climate
change and was updated recently with quizzes and a $1-million influx of
cash to beef up fact-checking. But it does nothing to remove denial on
the platform.
“We combat climate change misinformation by connecting people to
reliable information from leading organizations through our Climate
Science Center and working with a global network of independent fact
checkers to review and rate content,” Facebook said in an emailed
statement. “When they rate this content as false, we add a warning label
and reduce its distribution so fewer people see it. We also take action
against Pages, Groups, and accounts that repeatedly share false claims
about climate science.”
https://gizmodo.com/the-climate-denial-is-coming-from-inside-facebooks-hous-1847939802
/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October 28, 2005*
October 28, 2005: The New York Times reports:
"A sudden interruption in oil supplies sent prices and profits
skyrocketing, prompting Exxon's chief executive to call a news
conference right after his company announced that it had chalked up
record earnings.
'I am not embarrassed,' he said. 'This is no windfall.'
"That was January 1974, a few months after Arab oil producers cut
back on supplies and imposed their short-lived embargo on exports to
the United States. Oil executives, including J. K. Jamieson, Exxon's
chief executive at the time, were put on the defensive, forced to
justify their soaring profits while the nation was facing its first
energy crisis.
"Three decades later, their successors are again facing contentions
that oil companies are making too much money and have failed to
expand production.
"Politicians and other critics are asking why the industry allowed
its refining capacity to tighten.
"Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, said yesterday that
its third-quarter net income jumped 75 percent, to $9.92 billion.
Its profit in the first nine months of this year - $25.42 billion -
already equals its full-year earnings for 2004. This year's sales,
which topped $100 billion in the last quarter, are expected to
exceed those of Wal-Mart.
"Another oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell, reported a 68 percent jump in
profits yesterday, to $9.03 billion. Chevron is expected to post a
profit of more than $4 billion today.
"This year is shaping up as an exceptionally lucrative one for the
oil industry, thanks to strong global demand, tight supplies and
high prices for oil and natural gas. While the idea that the Bush
administration was considering imposing a windfall profits tax was
knocked down yesterday by officials, longstanding resentments
against Big Oil are resurfacing and could end up imposing some
additional burdens on the industry.
"The sense that government should step in to curb the phenomenal
wealth and power often enjoyed by oil companies goes back to Exxon
Mobil's corporate ancestor from the late 19th century, the
Rockefeller oil trust known as Standard Oil.
"Today, Republicans and Democrats alike, aware of the politically
sensitive issue of high energy prices, are putting increasing
pressure on the oil and gas industry to return some of its profits.
The ideas include forcing the industry to invest in more refining
capacity, to increase inventories to cushion energy shocks, or to
provide money directly to the government program that helps
low-income people pay heating bills."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/business/28oil.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
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