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Bush Admin Appoints Exxon’s Lee Raymond To Solve America’s Energy Crisis
Michael, Groovy Green
Could November come any sooner? Not only will ExxonMobil announce third-quarter profits tomorrow, they’ve also got to be smiling from ear-to-ear about the recent appointment of former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond to lead an influential study to develop policy solutions to America’s energy crisis! How ironic is that? The genius behind this appointment is energy secretary Samuel Bodman – another Bush standout with obvious ties to Big Oil.
ExxposeExon – a fantastic site that keeps tabs on the big boys – is pushing a campaign to “directed at Secretary Bodman to urge him to pull the project out from under Lee Raymond and his cronies at the National Petroleum Council and give it to an independent body that is NOT the mouthpiece of Big Oil. Congress members are being alerted as well.”
Do your part! Follow this link to submit a letter to Bodman and encourage him not to assign this too-important task to a conflict of interest. Unbelievable.
(25 Oct 2006)
U.S. Drops Bid Over Royalties From Chevron
Edmund L. Andrews, NY Times
The Interior Department has dropped claims that the Chevron Corporation systematically underpaid the government for natural gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico, a decision that could allow energy companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
The agency had ordered Chevron to pay $6 million in additional royalties but could have sought tens of millions more had it prevailed. The decision also sets a precedent that could make it easier for oil and gas companies to lower the value of what they pump each year from federal property and thus their payments to the government.
Interior officials said on Friday that they had no choice but to drop their order to Chevron because a department appeals board had ruled against auditors in a separate case.
But state governments and private landowners have challenged the company over essentially the same practices and reached settlements in which the company has paid $70 million in additional royalties.
(31 Oct 2006)
Also posted at Common Dreams.
Energy Secretary announces $450 million for coal research
Samira Jafari, Lexington Herald Leader
U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced on Friday $450 million in grants over the next decade to further research into technology that would lessen the environmental impacts of coal use.
Called carbon capture and sequestration, the process involves capturing emissions, separating the carbon dioxide and sequestering it for commercial use or for injection back into the earth to flush out oil.
“Sequestration technology holds the key to the continued environmentally-responsible use of coal,” Bodman said.
The Department of Energy projects that coal sequestration could play a major role in meeting the Bush administration’s goal of reducing the intensity of greenhouse emissions by 18 percent by 2012.
(27 Oct 2006)
British Columbians in dark about ‘Enronization’ of energy
Geoff Olson, The Vancouver Courier
Once upon a time the rodeo capitalism of Enron could do no wrong-until 2000, when well-coifed clowns from the Houston-based energy trading company rode a bull market into the stands and scattered the rubes.
Enron may have collapsed in a heap of cooked books, but Squamish area rancher Tom Rankin insists that its business template for energy markets lingers, and that we’re being softened up for the “Enronization” of B.C.’s greatest public asset, our waterways. With the North American electricity industry being restructured to serve the U.S. market, he predicts things will end badly for British Columbian taxpayers, unless we put a stop to private purchase agreements for hydroelectric developments on hundreds of our waterways.
(20 Oct 2006)
