March 5, 2010 | Posted by Judy Dugan
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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March 2, 2010 | dugan
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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February 2, 2010 | dugan
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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February 1, 2010 | dugan
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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January 11, 2010 | dugan
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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Recent Articles:
Utilities paid for PUC event
By Thom Gabrukiewicz, ARGUS LEADER (S.Dakota)
May 17, 2009
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SGV Water Rate Hike Proposed
By Staff Reporters, KABC TV-7 (Los Angeles, CA)
April 24, 2009
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Big Water Rate Hikes On Tap For Some Valley Residents
By Alfred Lee, PASADENA STAR-NEWS
April 23, 2009
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Memo at Bakersfield Refinery: Shell Oil Is "Trying to Shut Down Our Plant"
Contact: Jamie Court, 310 392-0522 ext. 327, or Judy Dugan, 213 280-0175 (cell)
January 9, 2009
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The Players Club
By Phillip Matier & Andrew Ross, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
November 3, 2008
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