Tag Archives: chevron

The tax bill for many big polluters last year: $0

by Hudson6754 Posted on May 6, 2019

Adapting to our warming world is expensive. It costs a lot to build sea walls, cure disease outbreaks, and rebuild after floods. It takes money to invent better batteries, turn farms into carbon sinks, and replace polluting power plants with clean energy.

Instead of maybe taxing carbon emissions to pay for all this, the United States is giving tax breaks to the giant corporations profiting from fossil fuels. Several of the biggest of them paid no taxes last year, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, a nonpartisan think tank. It’s the first look at the effect of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Companies are still finding ways to avoid paying anything.

Last year, for instance, Chevron made $4.5 billion in profits. If it had paid the (newly reduced) corporate tax rate of 21 percent, it would have coughed up $955 million in taxes. That’s enough money to triple funding for ARPA-E, the U.S. energy research and development program that pays for moonshot inventions like wind-turbines on kites. Instead, Uncle Sam handed Chevron $181 million at tax time.

Power utilities and oil and gas companies account for 22 of the 60 biggest companies that paid no taxes last year, according to ITEP’s study. Some of the well-known names on the list include Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and Halliburton. The think tank didn’t crunch the most recent numbers for every company, just the biggest ones, but if you go back a few years, ITEP calculated that oil and gas companies avoided paying $27 billion in taxes from 2008 through 2015, while power utilities evaded $86 billion.

To be sure, there’s often a good reason for a tax break. Politicians use them to help get new industries — like the renewable energy industry — up on their feet. Duke Energy, for instance, got a tax credit of $129 million for renewable energy production in 2018. Economists call such credits and exemptions “tax expenditures.” It’s like the government is spending money because these tax breaks leave a hole in the federal budget.

The problem is that many of these subsidies outlive their usefulness.

“Unlike ARPA-E, which has to rationalize its existence and budget every year, these tax expenditures — and they are expenditures — just stay there even if they are no longer relevant,” said Matt Gardner, senior fellow at ITEP. “Are these tax breaks still useful? We want to be in a position where lawmakers are asking if they still make sense every year.”

And about ARPA-E’s budget. In the ten years of its existence, the program has yielded 1,500 inventions (of things like high-energy iron slurry batteries and clothes that automatically warm you up when it gets cold) and over 50 new companies. Nonpartisan groups say ARPA-E provides a good return on investment, and Republicans and Democrats come together to pay for it every year. But the Trump administration wants to cut its budget to zero.

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The tax bill for many big polluters last year: $0

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Obama’s Overtime Rule Is Perfectly Sensible and Deserves Judicial Deference

by HilarioConnibere Posted on November 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prepare to be fascinated. Last week I noted that a Texas judge had blocked the Obama administration’s new overtime rules. The basic issue here is simple: the law states that you’re exempt from overtime rules if you’re a “bona fide” executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) employee. But what does that mean? That’s up to the Department of Labor, which has always had a two-part test. First, you have to have the actual duties of an EAP employee. Second, there’s a salary floor: you have to make more than a certain amount. This is basically designed to keep employers from pretending that someone is an EAP even though they’re paying them peanuts.

The previous floor, set in 2004, was $23,660, or about $29,000 in 2014 dollars. The new rule raised that to about $47,000. The judge ruled that was too high. At $23,660, it made sense that no one under that level could possibly be a bona fide EAP. But at $47,000? Maybe they could.

Was the judge right? Jared Bernstein, who’s been deeply involved in this issue, writes today that he’s not. The basic problem is that the judge accepted the Bush administration’s number as gospel without considering the entire history of the salary floor. Adjusted for inflation, here’s what it looks like since 1940:1

The new level of $47,000 looks perfectly reasonable in historical context. In fact, it’s the 2004 number that looks way out of whack. But what if you use PCE instead of CPI as your inflation measure?

Now it’s the $47,000 number that looks like an outlier. Maybe the judge was right?

I don’t think so. As a matter of bloggy interest, we can certainly argue whether CPI or PCE (or some other measure) is “best” for measuring long-term inflation. However, they’re both widely used and perfectly acceptable in a broad sense. If the Department of Labor uses CPI, that’s a reasonable choice, which the court should give deference to under the Chevron rule. Beyond that, if DOL chooses to look at the historical record for the salary floor, rather than solely at the Bush administration’s number, that’s also reasonable and deserves deference.

Bottom line: the Labor Department set the salary floor in a reasonable way, backed by plenty of empirical evidence. (More empirical evidence than just the historical level of the salary test, I should add.) If anyone was out of line here, it was the Bush administration, not the Obama administration.

1The actual raw numbers are a little tricky to figure out. From 1950 through 1975, DOL used two different salary floors related to a “long test” and a “short test.” (Don’t ask.) As near as I can tell, the best fit to the previous floors is an average of the two, so that’s what I used. Bernstein has more on this here.

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Obama’s Overtime Rule Is Perfectly Sensible and Deserves Judicial Deference

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Fossil fuels will be heavily represented at this year’s U.N. climate talks.

by TiffinyLudwig Posted on October 31, 2016

That’s according to a new report by UNICEF, which found that nearly one in seven children in the world live in areas where outdoor air pollution is at least six times higher than international guidelines set by the World Health Organization.

The report also found that air pollution — primarily caused by fossil fuel burning, vehicle emissions, waste incineration, and dust — contributes to the deaths of about 600,000 kids under the age of 5 each year. The statistics are most dire in South Asia, where an estimated 620 million children live with dirty air.

Air pollution is especially harmful to children as their lungs are still developing and their respiratory tracks are more permeable than adults’. But as UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake points out, “Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs, they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains — and, thus, their futures.”

UNICEF is calling for countries to take several steps to minimize risk to kids, including reducing pollution, increasing access to health care, monitoring air pollution levels, and keeping polluting facilities away from schools and playgrounds.

“We protect our children when we protect the quality of our air,” Lake says. “Both are central to our future.”

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Fossil fuels will be heavily represented at this year’s U.N. climate talks.

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Chevron won’t have to pay for its own version of Chernobyl

by LeighFrayne Posted on August 8, 2016

Environmentalist Donald Moncayo shows his glove after conducting a test made on an affected field in Lago Agrio January 25, 2011. REUTERS/Guillermo Granja

Chevron won’t have to pay for its own version of Chernobyl

By on Aug 8, 2016Share

In 1993, Ecuadorians filed suit against American fossil fuel giant Chevron, arguing that the company was responsible for contaminating that land and sickening people through decades of drilling in the Lago Agrio oil fields. The suit dragged on for over two decades, and Monday, a federal U.S. court finally handed down its decision: Some 30,000 native Ecuadorians have lost out on billions of dollars in damages.

Though Chevron pulled its operations from Ecuador in the early 1990s, it left behind billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Lago Agrio region, poisoned water, and people suffering from cancer. The contamination was so great that it’s sometimes dubbed “the Amazon’s Chernobyl.”

In 2011, Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion in cleanup and damages, a fine that was later reduced to $9.5 billion. American lawyer Steven Donziger — who has worked the case for decades — moved the case to the U.S. in the hopes an American court would force Chevron to comply with the Ecuadorian judgment.

But a federal appeals court in New York upheld a decision on Monday that Donziger and his legal team obtained the Ecuadorian judgment through bribery, coercion, and fraud, and is therefore unenforceable.

Ecuadorians may seek justice outside the United States, in Canada and “other countries where litigation is underway to seize Chevron assets,” according to Karen Hinton, American spokeswoman for the Ecuadoreans.

For more on Lago Agrio, Steven Donziger, and the long fight against Chevron, check out this episode of Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing.

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Chevron won’t have to pay for its own version of Chernobyl

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Why Does the Supreme Court Matter to Environmentalists?

by BYUSamira6 Posted on March 13, 2016

One of the hottest issues in any presidential race usually has to do with the Supreme Court, the highest court in the U.S. The 9 justices who sit on the court hold the fate of the nation in their hands. They decide lawsuits, interpret the Constitution and can change the way society is forced to behave, simply by reaching a majority decision on a case that’s brought before them.

The President nominates justices, and the U.S. Senate votes them in or out. Once appointed, a Supreme Court justice serves a life term that ends only when the justice dies or voluntarily resigns. Because a justice can stay on the court for 30 or 40 years, many people believe that of the thousands ofdecisions a president makes during his or her tenure, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is among the most important.

Supreme Court decisions have determined whether and how the environment is protected for many decades. Here is a sample of some important decisions the court has made regarding the planet.

Endangered Species – Antonin Scalia, who recently died after 30 years as a justice, led the court’s conservative wing on limiting environmental groups’ ability to sue corporate polluters, protect public land and enforce federal water regulations.

Environmentalists use lawsuits to force polluters to obey state and federal laws on such issues as releasing toxic chemicals into the air or waterways or to protect endangered species. Scalia’s 1992 opinion in

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife

determined that Defenders (ergo, other environmental organizations) did not have “standing” to challenge endangered species protections. In other words, the Court essentially decided, in an

opinion written by Scalia

, that industry attempts to blockthe Endangered Species Act should be taken more seriously than environmental groups’ efforts to enforce it.

Clean Power Plan

– President Obama and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have issued a rule requiring states to develop plans to lower carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The

CPP

is an attempt to reduce greenhouse gases that cause climate change as well as limit soot and other fine particles that contribute to air pollution.

The current court has

blocked

the government’s ability to implement the plan because opponents have filed a lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit Court, which will hear arguments about the law pros and cons June 2. If the D.C. Circuit Court upholds the constitutionality of the plan, opponents could stillappeal to the Supreme Court, which could decide the plan is unconstitutional. The fate of the Clean Power Plan remains to be seen.

Mercury Pollution – Coal and oil-fired power plants emit mercury and other air pollutants. In fact, coal plants are the largest single source of mercury in our environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a federal rule aimed at reducing mercury emissions. That

rule was challenged

by twenty states that wanted the court to block the rule while the government decided how to calculate the cost of implementing it.

In a good move for the planet, Chief Justice John Roberts turned down their request and let the rule stay in effect while the costs are determined.

Citizens United

– In 2010, the Supreme Court decided in the

Citizens United Case

that corporations and labor unions can contribute unlimited amounts of money to candidates running for office. The Court also essentially gave permission to polluters todonate huge sums to sitting legislatorsin the hopes of influencing the votes they cast on new laws to protect the environment.

Here is one example of how Citizens United has played out. Richmond, California in the San Francisco Bay Area is the home of a Chevron oil refinery. Prior to Citizens United, perhaps around $100,000 would have been spent on local political races there. But in 2012, reports

Garnet Goes Green,

political action committees empowered by Citizens United poured $4 million into the races for three seats on the Richmond City Council. Of that, $2 million was contributed by Chevron.

Results? Two of Chevron’s three preferred candidates won their races in that year’s election.

Citizens United reaches far beyond the environment. The

U.S. Library of Medicine

, a division of the National Institutes of Health, has found that “corporations can now make unlimited contributions to election advocacy advertising…Candidates who favor public health positions may be subjected to corporate opposition advertising.” In other words, polluters can spend a fortune trying to defeat a candidate who wants to clean up the air or water or reduce the presence of toxic chemicals in everyday products.

“The ruling expands corporate rights to disproportionately influence the electoral process and thus health policymakers,” notes the National Library of Medicine. “The effects on public health may be catastrophic. For example, corporations could spend unlimited sums for advertising against candidates who support public health positions on issues such as taxation on sugar-sweetened drinks, air quality standards or access to reproductive services.”

The environment always seems to be under attack. Often, our only recourse is to sue to invoke protections afforded the planet by suchlaws as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act or

NEPA

, the National Environmental Policy Act.

The buck stops with the Supreme Court. However justices interpret the law, whether to protect the environment or protect the polluters, will reverberate across the planet for decades to come. The Supreme Court can be our last best hopeor our worst one.

Related

What Pres. Obama’s Clean Power Plan Actually MeansSupreme Court Overturns California Ban on Slaughtering Downed Animals

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Why Does the Supreme Court Matter to Environmentalists?

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Oil and gas execs deliver statement on climate action

by DeboraFitchett Posted on October 16, 2015

Oil and gas execs deliver statement on climate action

By on 16 Oct 2015commentsShare

In what is either a sign of the apocalypse or of par-for-the-course PR witchcraft, 10 of the largest oil and gas companies on Earth have voiced their support for a global climate deal. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative — a coalition including giants like BP, Shell, and Statoil — announced Friday that it recognized “the general ambition to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade” and that it will “collectively strengthen [its] actions and investments to contribute to reducing the GHG intensity of the global energy mix.”

In its statement, the member companies also declared “collective support for an effective climate change agreement to be reached at next month’s 21st session of the United Nations (U.N.) Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework on Climate Change (COP21).”

The elephant on the oil field, of course, is that the companies aren’t actually committing to doing anything. It’s one thing to voice support for a 2C goal and quite another to follow through on the goal’s implications, which include leaving up to 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves unburned.

Notably absent from the statement were U.S. oil and gas giants Chevron and ExxonMobil. The New York Times reports:

The American companies appear to disapprove of the European-led initiative, partly because the potential remedies — like carbon taxes or the trading of carbon-emission permits — that many experts say are necessary to successfully curb greenhouse gases would almost inevitably raise the price of their fuels.

“I’ve never had a customer come to me and ask to pay a higher price for oil, gas or other products,” John S. Watson, the chief executive of Chevron, told a meeting hosted in Vienna in June by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Rex W. Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s chief executive, has repeatedly said that he would support putting a price on carbon as long as it was “revenue neutral.”

Ah, the reliable platitude of revenue neutrality. Or as one might phrase it in the common tongue, “passing a tax onto customers so my shareholders don’t take a hit.”

The problem with Tillerson’s support of carbon pricing is that he can apply the revenue neutrality argument to anything, because it’s the same thing as saying he’ll uphold his fiduciary duties as chief executive. Get into coal instead of petroleum? Tobacco? Open up some bowling lanes? As long as it’s revenue neutral (or profitable), it’s fair game. Case in point: Shell recently halted its Arctic oil exploration efforts, but you’d be hard-pressed to demonstrate that its logic was environmental and not economic.

It’s also probably worth highlighting that the coalition is composed of oil and gas — not coal — companies, and it’s a lot easier to get behind climate action if you’re a coal competitor, since coal is our dirtiest energy source.

One thing is certain: We’ll see plenty more statements like this one emerge in the run-up to the Paris negotiations at the end of this year. Several energy analysts have recently argued that the fossil fuel industry is becoming an increasingly risky sector in which to operate, and a good handful of dirty energy producers and investors have already started to edge their way toward progressive energy alternatives.

Source:

Oil and Gas Companies Make Statement in Support of U.N. Climate Goals

, New York Times.

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

by GeoffreyMullaly Posted on June 5, 2015

Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

By on 5 Jun 2015 2:20 pmcommentsShare

The former chair of Shell is bummed about how the fight against climate change is going. But he’s got a different take on the issue than you might expect, given his CV.

“I find it distressing that 18 years after major oil companies such as Shell and BP acknowledged the threat of climate change and the need for precautionary action, and indeed began to put into place many of the steps needed, the world has made very modest progress in addressing this challenge,” said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who hasn’t been involved with the company since 2005. He’s since gone on to chair the mining company Anglo American PLC, and to serve on the board of directors for the consulting firm Accenture, as well as to work with the U.N. Originally trained as a geologist, Moody-Stuart was with Shell for 39 years.

In a speech at an event organized by Carbon Trust, a company that helps organizations reduce their emissions, Moody-Stuart said he also understood where the divestment movement was coming from. According to the British publication Responding to Climate Change:

In contrast to many senior fossil fuel executives he argued the growing divestment campaign was not “without some rationale”, recalling how oil and gas companies ditched coal assets in the 1990s.

“Given the inevitable continued demand for some forms of fossil fuels for some decades to come, divestment of all such holdings is probably not an economically sensible choice for most investors,” he said.

“Selective divestment or portfolio switching certainly is. As in all such choices, timing is critical.”

Oil execs past and present have had a lot to say about climate change lately. Though many oil companies have spent a lot of money to keep governments from enacting a price on carbon, certain players within the oil industry are beginning to strike a different chord. Or, a few different chords: Earlier this week, the CEOs of six major European oil companies, including Shell and BP, sent a letter to the U.N. calling for a price on carbon. But at the same time, Shell is trudging forward with its plans to drill in the Arctic. And many analysts suggested the letter might be more an attempt to nudge coal out of the global energy market — paving the way for more reliance on natural gas, a fuel that oil companies are heavily invested in — than a genuine effort to tackle climate change.

ExxonMobil has called for a carbon tax in past years, but it did not join this week’s letter to the U.N., nor did fellow American oil giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Exxon and Chevron have recently been resisting calls from shareholders to avoid tapping more expensive sources of oil in the Arctic, Canadian tar sands, and other unconventional locations. Asked why Exxon was not investing in renewables, CEO Rex Tillerson replied, “We choose not to lose money on purpose.” Ha ha.

So, yeah, oil companies are sort of all over the map on the whole climate-change-is-happening-but-we-can-make-it-less-horrendous-if-we-do-something-now issue. But the discord does seem to indicate that perhaps the ground is shifting. Even so, Moody-Stuart suggested that the momentum was not enough. He predicted the U.N. climate talks will yield some sort of deal later this year, but that it might be too loose to be useful. “This is progress and will doubtless be hailed as an agreement, although one can certainly question whether an agglomeration of diverse commitments can really be hailed as a global agreement,” he said.

Regardless, Moody-Stuart, 74, said, things aren’t changing that quickly. “I am going to be dead well before the end of the oil and gas industry.”

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

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Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

by SusanaPvzbtr Posted on June 3, 2015

Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

By on 3 Jun 2015 2:42 pmcommentsShare

As the world moves toward a climate change deal this December, the oil industry has dived into an all-out campaign to rebrand itself as the climate-friendly natural gas industry.

On Monday, six of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies wrote to the U.N., saying they stand ready to accept a price on carbon. This kind of market mechanism, they noted, could encourage “the use of natural gas in place of coal.” And if that were to happen, well, they wouldn’t complain.

In fact, most major oil companies have been focusing more on natural gas in recent years in anticipation of a global response to climate change — and they want us to know. “Total is gas, and gas is good,” the CEO of the French oil company said Monday. And on Tuesday, Shell’s CFO argued for leaving coal in the ground but not oil and gas. Both companies produce more gas than oil.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil and Chevron, two American companies that didn’t sign on to the European companies’ letter calling for a price on carbon, are also pushing gas as the future fossil fuel in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S.

But there’s a big problem with this rebranding effort: Many scientists and economists have found that a switch to natural gas won’t necessarily decrease our carbon footprint. It may, in fact, make it bigger. There are two reasons for this: the methane leaks that come hand-in-hand with natural gas drilling and transportation, and economics.

First, the methane leaks. The gas is 84 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame, but data on how much of it is leaking into the atmosphere from gas drilling operations remains sketchy. In the U.S., the EPA estimated in 2012 that 30 million metric tons were seeping out of pipelines and pumps annually. That accounts for a full 9 percent of the U.S.’s total climate change–causing emissions.

And even if the industry were to completely deal with its methane-leakage problem, a number of studies — some looking at the U.S., some looking at the entire world — have found that the economics of natural gas make it unlikely that the fuel would help the world cut emissions. Natural gas is cheap right now. As oil companies are eagerly pointing out, it’s often even cheaper (and always much cleaner) than coal, which currently accounts for 40 percent of the world’s energy. But natural gas is so cheap that it would also likely undercut the cleanest options, renewables. The low price would also encourage people to use more energy. We would essentially shift from burning coal and oil to burning natural gas — and investment in natural gas infrastructure would displace investment in clean energy and efficiency.

Meanwhile, world population will continue to grow and developing countries will continue to hook more of their citizens up to the grid. Energy production will balloon. And we’d be relying on a fuel that is, yes, cleaner than coal and oil, but that still generates a significant amount of CO2. In the end, many studies show, our carbon footprint wouldn’t be much different than if we just stuck with the less-than-great track we’re on.

So if these oil companies truly “stand ready to play [their] part” in stopping climate change, as they stated in their letter to the U.N., pushing natural gas is not the way to go about it. If they just want to knock their coal industry competitors out of the energy market — well, that’s something a bit different from addressing the climate crisis.

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Chevron wants to fund science class. What could go wrong?

by MereditKraker Posted on November 25, 2014

Chevron wants to fund science class. What could go wrong?

By on 24 Nov 2014commentsShare

Chevron’s Fuel Your School program allows K-12 teachers in participating districts to request a chunk of petro-change to implement classroom projects, particularly in STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math. In participating areas, the company contributes $1 toward projects and equipment for every fill-up of at least 30 liters (about 8 gallons) at a local Chevron station. That way, drivers can feel good about buying gasoline, and, in a horrifyingly ironic twist, kids can thank their elders for burning a fuel whose emissions are wrecking their future!

And what does Chevron get in return? A little air time with the kiddos! Check out the company’s propaganda video:

On its website, the megacorporation explains that it is interested in helping “prepare students for the growing number of technical jobs in the modern economy, including possible engineering positions at Chevron.” Ignoring the dubiousness of the “growing number of technical jobs” claim (have they heard of robots?), if Chevron is still hiring petroleum engineers by the time today’s elementary schoolers are looking for work, we’re probably fucked.

The good news? Teachers in Vancouver, B.C., say they want none of the dirty money. Last month, the North Vancouver and West Vancouver school districts both signed up for Fuel Your School, but many incensed teachers are opting out for moral reasons, according to North Shore News. 

“Even the name Fuel Your School, it’s about promoting the idea of an oil product,” said Martin Stuible, vice president of the North Vancouver Teachers’ Association. He also pointed out that accepting Chevron’s money excuses British Columbia’s government from some of its responsibility for funding education — and steers attention away from shortfalls in provincial funding.

Do we really want a company that continues to search for more oil when we’ve already found more than enough to fry us all to have any say in how science and math are taught to the generation charged with cleaning up the climate mess?

Big Oil already corrupts political outcomes with generous donations. To see that same fate befall educational outcomes would be heartbreaking.

Source:
Teachers put brakes on oil money for classrooms

, North Shore News.

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Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies’ Dirty Work

by QZZNannette Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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When big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron set their sights on a prime new oil reserve in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, the first phone call they make usually isn’t to the government office putting it up for sale. Instead, they ring up one of their contacts in a small, elite group of so-called “fixers,” a shady cabal of a few dozen well-connected billionaires who hold the strings on the market for the world’s most valuable commodity. The fixer gets a fat fee and a straightforward assignment: Do whatever you need to do to get us those oil rights.

Unlike the US, where oil rights are held by individual property owners and leased to mining companies, in most developing nations oil rights are held by the government, and getting them means having a personal relationship with the right ministers—and knowing how to grease their palms. Since the mid-1900s, oil companies have relied on fixers to do their dirty work, crisscrossing the globe with a Rolodex stacked with the calling cards of corrupt heads of state. In the end, we get cheap oil, oil companies get plausible deniability, and the leaders of some of the world’s most oppressive regimes get astronomically rich.

Ken Silverstein is a veteran journalist who has spent the last several years finagling his way into the traditionally hyper-reclusive world of oil fixers, gaining unprecedented access to many key players and amassing a portfolio of outrageous tales of bribery, exploitation, and obscene wealth. His book, The Secret World of Oil, hit shelves yesterday, and I spoke to him about how US companies continue to skirt anti-bribery laws in the high-stakes pursuit of oil.

Climate Desk: The oil companies that are using fixers, these are the companies that people are familiar with—Exxon, Chevron?

Ken Silverstein: In all the big oil companies, it would be rare for them never to use fixers in their deals. The bigger firms like Exxon have a lot of power and local knowledge and may handle this sort of thing on their own. But even Exxon, for part of the negotiations, is going to rely on a fixer. One of the reasons is that it’s a dicey game. It’s not always flat-out bribery, although in the old days it really was. The old model was that let’s say you were a company and you wanted a concession in Nigeria. Well, you’d go to Fixer A and give Fixer A, say, a million dollars, and Fixer A would go to his friends in the Nigerian government and wire half a million dollars into a few Swiss bank accounts—or just, you know, a suitcase full of cash. That was it. Fixer A kept his half million, the government officials had their half million, and the company got its oil concession. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward.

Well, that’s changed a lot, partly because the US and Europe have outlawed bribery. So it’s gotten dicier. There’s a senior Halliburton official who’s currently in jail, who was implicated in a massive bribery scandal that helped Halliburton win a multimillion dollar stake in Nigeria. Typically, though, the companies want one or two degrees of separation—you’re not going to have your senior vice president meeting with a government official who you need to pay off. You want an intermediary, a fixer who can handle that, who, if anything goes wrong, you can disown all knowledge of and the fixer gets dumped and blamed.

Ken Silverstein Courtesy Verso Books

CD: Is any of this legal, what the fixers are doing? It seems like it’s in a strange grey area.

KS: It’s illegal if you get caught. But you’d rarely be so stupid now as to wire money into an official’s account, you don’t do it that way. Here’s a real example from what Exxon did in Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s worst dictatorships sitting on untold amounts of oil. In some places where there is no corruption, there’s closed-door bidding and whoever makes the best offer wins. In a place like Equatorial Guinea that’s not the way it works. It’s whoever figures out how to give the president and his inner circle the most money, gets the contract. And sometimes it may be flat-out bribes, but Exxon doesn’t want to do that. What did Exxon do? They wanted land to build their compound, and to develop their project. And where did they buy the land? “Well, the president owns some land and it would be perfect for us.” And so they just overpaid by an enormous amount of money, and it’s clearly just putting money in the president’s pocket.

CD: Here, in Texas or North Dakota or wherever, you have a private landowner who owns the mineral rights and can sell them to whoever they want. But in the countries you’re talking about oil is owned to start with by the government. Does that lend the process to the kind of corruption you’re talking about?

KS: It’s a very highly politicized process to get access to that oil, so yes it absolutely does lend itself to corruption. And it also lends itself to reinforcing the power of these regimes that frequently are dictatorships. I want to cite Ed Chow, a former Chevron executive. He said: “In Texas I can convince landowners to lease me their mineral rights. They get a royalty check every month and the companies leave a small footprint on their land. What’s not to love? There’s no equivalent in places like Nigeria or Angola or Kazakhstan. You get the land, but you don’t provide a lot of jobs, you may be destroying the environment, and most of the profit goes to international capital. The companies don’t have a strong case to sell to local communities, so they come to not only accept highly centralized government, but to crave it. A strongman president can make all the necessary decisions. It’s a lot easier to win support from the top than to build it from the bottom.”

That’s precisely the environment where fixers thrive.

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Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies’ Dirty Work

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