Consumer Watchdog – Cheaper, Cleaner Energy - Blog

You think you're done being mad at BP? You're over the fact that it's still getting piles of U.S. taxpayer subsidies, including subsidies on its cleanup payments? Think again. Jim Hightower, the Texas populist and scourge of misbehaving corporations, tells us that BP isn't just hiring out-of-work Florida Pandhandle folks--it's using semicamouflaged prison labor, and the scary fellas come with a $2,500 per-head subsidy.

Big Coal is planning an anonymous campaign blitz against elected officials (in Kentucky in this case) who dare to favor any restrictions on coal. That's according to an internal coal company memo obtained by Kentucky's Lexington Herald newspaper. This is only a tiny piece of the fallout from  the Supreme Court's decision to let corporations pour unlimited anonymous money into political campaigns. How many more memos are still secret?

"When he abruptly resigned as chief executive of BP PLC [he] left the company in disarray. The giant energy producer was struggling with a legacy of accidents and spills in the U.S." Nope, that's not about the swift booting of Tony Hayward by the BP board on Tuesday. It's from a 2007 Bloomberg story on the last crisis-fueled change in leadership at BP. If history tells the future, BP's culture of no-safety won't go away this time, either.

Ahead of tomorrow's anticipated release of BP's second-quarter financial statements--and of the massive losses--BP is expected to appoint Managing Director Bob Dudley to replace Tony Hayward as CEO during tonight's board meeting in London.

OK, BP has confessed the Photoshop fakery that made its crisis control room look busier by turning blank monitors into live shots. BP blamed it on a free-lance photographer working for them--though as blogger John Aravosis (who originally spotted the fake on BP's web site) noted, no professional would do such a crummy cut and paste. Now we find that there was at least one more like it...

by Khan Shoieb

Senators John Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and George Voinovich (R-OH) have reportedly come out with a bill that would give massive subsidies to the coal industry over the next decade and might be packaged into upcoming energy legislation in the Senate. According to CQ:
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Given the fury directed at BP in Congressional hearings on the Gulf oil spill, you'd think the time was ripe to cut the oil industry's ridiculous subsidies--amounting to at least $40 billion per decade, according to a well-researched New York Times story over the July 4th weekend. But there are tens of billions of dollars more in what amount to tax breaks--a boondoggle called "royalty relief." And it's all kept in place by lobbyists and lawyers.

BP's devastating oil spill may now be the largest accidental spill in modern history, bigger than the estimated 140 million gallons spewed by the 1979-80 Ixtoc spill off the coast of Mexico, which eventually slimed 170 miles of Texas beaches. It's smaller only than the deliberate spillage by Iraq into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War, though estimates on the amount of that spill range widely. But be alert: BP apologists may soon make optimistic comparisons between this spill and the Ixtoc gusher. 

BP is touting restoral of its robot-damaged "cap" (which looks like a giant hat for the Tin Man) to corral a large fraction of the company's Gulf oil spill, but is staying as silent as possible about its other big engineering feat--a gravel island it built off the Alaskan coast for the express purpose of evading federal rules for offshore drilling. It's the fisaco-in-waiting du jour, but the risks from oil and coal will be unending. The risks dwarf our little debates about land damage or bird risks from solar, wind and biofuels. It's time to readjust these debates.

Californians are getting sick to death of corporate-sponsored ballot initiatives. And they're catching on to who's behind the slogans, voting down two deceptively marketed initiatives on the June ballot  that were wholly owned by a power company and an auto insurance company. But here it comes again. A ballot initiative mostly funded by a pair of oil refining companies will be on the November ballot. It will be marketed as a job-preserving initiative. It's really an effort to kill California's landmark environmental law. It'll be bloody--though everything could change if one big oil company (BP?) came out against the initiative.