Cheaper, Cleaner Energy

Holding Big Oil Accountable

What If Chevron Ran An Honest Ad Campaign?

Oil Watchdog is a blog and resource library about the profiteering, power, and unscrupulous practices of the oil industry.

At our affiliated site OilWatchdog.org our bloggers are looking for the schemes the industry employs to rip-off its customers, harm the environment and hide their misdeeds. We report on connections between the oil companies and their so-called "independent" spokespeople and groups that always promote an industry view. We track the money oil companies move around to maintain political power and just about anything else that helps reveal the greed and arrogance of this industry.

We rely on data, experts and instinct. But our project is improved and expanded by our readers, who comment on blogs and articles, other bloggers and reporters who watch this industry from the outside and courageous whistleblowers who know the industry from the inside.

Recent Posts in Cheaper, Cleaner Energy:

Oil Watchdog: Run From Guys With Clipboards

Interesting that it took a New York newspaper to tell Californians that a couple of giant Texas oil refining companies are bankrolling a ballot initiative to kill the state's popular climate change/green energy law. The whole saga is much like Oklahoma oilman T. Boone Pickens' failed effort in 2008 to make California taxpayers subsidize his natural gas business. Except that Pickens was honest about paying for his own ballot initiative.

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Oil Watchdog: Sympathetic Hired Guns

 

While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil interests, large agribusiness and... senior citizens? Yes, the first member group that pops up on the website of Energy Citizens, an organization solely aimed at killing climate legislation, is a group called "The 60-Plus Association." It's a name that sticks in memory, because it's all over the member lists of anti-reform groups in the health care battle, sort of the anti-AARP. And I've run into them before.

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Oil Watchdog: Hot Fuel Fix in Deep Freeze

 

When a private club that is too cozy with corporations make the rules on consumer protection, guess what happens? The National Conference on Weights and Measures met last week voted to just dump years' worth of proposals and plans to fix the "hot fuel" ripoff.  It reminded me of the old Soviet trick of removing purged bureaucrats from ceremonial photos.

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Oil Watchdog: Who's Cooking Oil Prices?

 

The major oil companies all made less profit in 2009, but mostly because they could barely make a billion on refining and selling gasoline and diesel fuel, with demand running from down to stagnant. Yet they made plenty of billions on drilling and selling oil, which has more than doubled in price from around $30 a barrel (42 gallons) at the end of 2008 to around $75 a barrel on Monday. Yet global oil consumption was also down in 2009 from 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Does this make any sense at all?

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Oil Watchdog: $3.00 a Gallon Now, $4.00 When?

 Why be obsessed with the price of gasoline? Easy. High energy prices, including prices at the pump, will slow and even reverse economic recovery. Every 10-cent a gallon increase in the price of a gallon of gas means another $1 billion  less for consumers to spend on anything else. Drivers are spending $50 a month more on gasoline than they were a year ago, when prices bottomed out.No wonder the oil industry wants climate change legislation to go away.

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Oil Price fixing, Tax breaks and the Consumer