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Emissions have dropped 5.5 percent, but they need to be cut more than that — every year — to prevent the most dangerous climate change threats 
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The SEC dropped a probe into whether Exxon Mobil misled investors about the risks that climate change and greenhouse-gas regulations posed to its business.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
WASHINGTON—Securities regulators dropped an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil Corp. misled investors about its accounting practices and the risks that climate change and greenhouse-gas regulations posed to its business. The Securities and Exchange Commission in a Thursday letter informed Exxon that it closed the probe and decided against trying to penalize the energy giant over its disclosures and how it valued oil and gas assets.
The letter was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Exxon in a statement confirmed the probe had ended, saying it began in January 2016 and involved more than 4.2 million pages of records. “After a thorough investigation, including a review of these documents, the SEC issued its closure letter,” company spokesman Scott Silvestri said in the statement. The SEC’s investigation began under former chairman Mary Jo White, who was picked by former President Barack Obama. It ended under SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a new leader appointed by President Trump. The decision ends what was a surprise foray by the federal regulator into questioning how a major oil producer valued its assets in a world of increasing climate-change regulations. An SEC spokesman declined to comment. Investigations by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts continue into how Exxon has accounted for the impact of climate change on its assets. New York investigators have alleged in court papers that Exxon appears to have used internal estimates to account for climate impacts that differed from public statements. Exxon has denied those charges and said its statements accurately reflect the “proxy cost” of carbon it uses in internal estimates. Before the probes began, Exxon was the only major oil-and-gas company that hadn’t written down the value of its reserves in the previous decade, an issue New York investigators had taken an interest in. In accounting terms, the value of such assets often falls when prices decline. Since the fourth quarter of 2016, Exxon has booked more than $3 billion of impairments. Under U.S. law, public companies must tell shareholders about risks or uncertainties that matter to shareholders’ investment decisions. Environmental groups and some activist investors have pushed the SEC to force companies to disclose more about how they weigh their exposure to climate change. The SEC advised public companies in 2010 that they should consider the impact of greenhouse-gas regulations, international agreements among governments to limit emissions, and the physical effects of climate change, such as severe weather. The SEC said all of those factors wouldn’t apply to every public company, and it declined to mandate any specific disclosures about climate change. Securities lawyers say the decision is specific to Exxon’s case and may not portend a change in terms of how the SEC reviews companies’ statements about climate change. Proving that a company suppressed the threat of climate change is difficult because the trend may not immediately—or anytime soon—affect its performance. “Given the time horizon over which climate change could have an impact, it’s challenging to prove that any risk or uncertainty is material to a company in the present day,” said Keith Higgins, a former SEC director and now chairman of the securities and governance practice at Ropes & Gray LLP.
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Although the United States has been stimulating well production with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)1 since the 1940s [1], high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) combined with horizontal drilling is a relatively recent [2, 3] development with potential to adversely impact human health [4], environment [5], and water resources [6], with uncertainty about impacts and gaps in the data on HVHF compared to conventional drilling techniques [7]. Part of protecting environmental and public health is identifying potential risks before licenses are issued and drilling operations proceed. To this end, two case studies, focusing on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures of California and New York, are analyzed in this paper. Both states have histories of strong environmental protection law and policy [8–10] and legally require an EIA to be conducted before development of HVHF sites [11, 12], an outgrowth of the 1969 federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). New York State conducted what appears to be a thorough EIA [13] and concluded that as there were too many gaps in the data on HVHF, fracking could not proceed. California’s EIA, which was less extensive, and did not consider health impacts [14], concluded that HVHF could proceed, relatively unabated. A comparison of these cases illustrates that the processes designed to ensure adequate identification, monitoring, and assessment of environmental impacts are prone to differences [15]—an outcome of the fact that laws governing HVHF in the US are not consistent across, nor controlled at, the federal level [16, 17].
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Explore the pipeline route, the effects it will have on surrounding communities and beyond, and a few of the alternatives to the fossil fuel-dependent economy of which DAPL is one small piece.
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Hear from the kids of Wilmington, California, who grow up in the shadow of oil wells. This video, second in the series of Stop Fooling California, tells the story of urban oil extraction in Los Angeles. Via pdeppisch
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Watch this video, in which an Australian politician sets a river on fire to protest nearby fracking operations.
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Source: Southern California air board puts new restrictions on urban oil fields - LA Times We have seen a spate of complaints about air quality near our urban oil fields here in southern California...
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http://www.legoblockshell.org/?ytv1 We love LEGO. You love LEGO. Everyone loves LEGO. But when LEGO's halo effect is being used to sell propaganda to childre...
PIRatE Lab's insight:
LEGO has been on a roll lately, partly thanks to a popular film that helped bring the 75-year old Danish company back to the forefront of popular culture. But Greenpeace thinks something is rotten in the state of Denmark! They've made this video to try to pressure LEGO into dropping its partnership with oil company Shell.
LEGO has responded to the Greenpeace video, basically saying "Hey, don't involve us in your dispute with Shell", to which Greenpeace countered with an open letter explaining why LEGO can't have its cake and eat it too when it comes to who they implicitly promote and support (they sell a lego set that is a Shell gas station) with their toys that are used by millions of children.
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From
grist
More than half of the wastewater injection wells being used by frackers in the state are within 10 miles of a recently active fault.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
The data from Ohio is quite concerning. Not being a tectonic expert, I am not sure of their data. But in quick overview, the stories that started emanating from the Buckeye State about two years ago certainly seem to suggest that messing with injection wells to the magnitude that modern dense tracking operations do is not a great idea.
But no need to worry. We here in California NEVER have earthquakes.
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Let’s call fossil fuels what they are: weapons of mass destruction. And they need to be neutralized.
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A Retro Report looks at the poor planning and technological challenges that contributed to the nation’s worst oil disasters, the 1989 Exxon spill and the 2010 BP blowout.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
While brief, this is a surprisingly accurate and fair summary of the Valdez spill vs Deepwater Horizon blowout.
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“In the overall global supply-demand picture, it is not going to wreck the train."
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From 14 to 23 November 2017, a Norwegian court will hear a case brought by Greenpeace Nordic and Nature and Youth against the Norwegian government over the granting of Arctic oil exploration licenses to 13 oil companies. The environmental NGOs argue that a 2015 oil licensing round allowing new drilling in the Barents Sea in the Arctic violates the Norwegian constitution and the Paris Agreement. Via EcoVadis
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From
qz
To stay sane, environmental activists have to live by the mantra, "you win some, you lose some." Earlier today (May 31), Reuters and Axios both cited sources saying president Donald Trump will likely pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement. Almost as if to make up for it, on the same day
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At his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Pruitt will be grilled on his cozy relationship to fossil fuel companies and his war on EPA regulations as Oklahoma attorney general.
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Colorado demonstration part of global protest movement https://twitter.com/RacingXtinction/status/730515331634987008 Staff Report As part of a global series of protests against the continued burning of fossil fuels, hundreds of Colorado activists gathered this week in Denver to protest a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood. Organizers counted about… Via Garry Rogers
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Here in California's thirsty farm belt, where pumpjacks nod amid neat rows of crops, it's a proposition that seems to make sense: using treated oil field wastewater to irrigate crops.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Indeed. This is the old mantra of folks: if you don't look for a problem, you won't see a problem/can't prove a problem exists.
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A bill that would temporarily ban the oil and gas drilling procedure known as fracking in California was approved at its first state legislative committee hearing on Tuesday.
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Facing criticism and legal trouble, companies working in the Bakken shale field said they would try to recapture more of the natural gas now burned as waste.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
A price on carbon would ensure that this pollution is at least generated for useful work/engines.
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LONDON (AP) - Oil company BP says it has made a "significant" discovery in the Gulf of Mexico in a well it co-owns with ConocoPhillips. BP said Wednesday that the find a...
PIRatE Lab's insight:
BP keeps on chugging along!
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