Our weekly update to unravel the industry and political spin around the energy debate
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
RUNNING ON EMPTY IDEAS
Koch Brothers front group Americans for Prosperity brought their latest attempt to distract Americans from the billions that oil and gas companies – like the one the Kochs’ own – receive every year in government handouts. Checks and Balance Project associate Cari Bohm was on the scene with to let AFP know that their smokescreen efforts aren’t working.
SORRY MITT BUT CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE
In an interview on CNN, President Obama oil and gas corporations to explain the difference between companies and people. Mainly, that many politicians fight to protect the $15 billion in corporate welfare Big Oil gets while programs that help everyday Americans, such as Medicare, are starving for government support.
PUBLIC HEALTH MISSING IN FRACKING REPORT
On Monday the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board’s (SEAB) Natural Gas Subcommittee to, “Improve environmental safety and performance from extracting natural gas from shale formations.” Initial reaction to the report is mixed and that’s no accident considering the split membership of the subcommittee. The seven-member committee is made up of scientists, researchers and experts who have ties to both the fossil fuel industry and the environmental community. But absent from the committee’s membership is someone from the public health community. This exclusion has become commonplace as communities from coast to coast try to get to the bottom of hydrofracking.
BIG OIL’S SUPER CONGRESS
The Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction has turned out to be a coup for Big Oil reports that eight members of the Super Congress have voted “to allow oil companies to keep more than $4 billion annually in taxpayer subsidies.” And protecting those handouts continues to be a top priority for Big Oil – during the last election cycle, the oil industry gave more than $13.6 million to members of Congress.
DID YOU KNOW?
ARE KEYSTONE’S JOB CLAIMS JUST SNAKE OIL?
Since pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline’s development in 2008, the jobs created by the pipeline continue to be inflated. reports that TransCanada first claimed in 2008 that 4,200 construction jobs would be created. Since then, the number has risen to 13,000 in 2010 and 20,000 in 2011. As the debate continues to grow so do the job claims by TransCanada.
COMING UP THIS WEEK
OIL SHALE BINGO
Reps. Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn will host a field hearing on everyone’s favorite science fiction topic – oil shale. We wanted to use this occasion to recognize the nearly 100 years of oil shale rhetoric that politicians and oil and gas industry representatives have subjected us to. And so the Checks and Balance Project is proud to present . If you have nothing better to do than follow Tipton’s and Lamborn’s hearing, be sure to download a bingo card and mark off every time someone uses one of the same, tired phrases that we’ve heard for a century to describe oil shale.
CONTACT
Twitter: @checksandbals | Email: [email protected]
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