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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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California may be a leader in climate policies, but much of its abundant oil reserves are nearly as carbon-intensive to extract and refine as Alberta tar sands crude. Many experts now say that reform of the state’s methods of producing oil is long overdue.
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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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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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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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Activists said a protester might need to have her arm amputated, and protesters and law enforcement are holding each other responsible.
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Ecuador has paid $112 million to energy company Chevron Corp over a four-decade-old contract dispute, even though it remains in
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is unrelated to the oil spill case still working its way through the courts.
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The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ordered Southern California Gas Co. late Sunday to stop cleaning the homes of Porter Ranch-area residents affected by the gas leak at the company's Aliso Canyon facility, concluding that the utility’s contractor was not properly trained o
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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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Oil companies who succeeded in weakening a California climate change bill massively increased their lobbying spending during the final chunk of the Legislature’s calendar, shelling out nearly $11 million to persuade lawmakers and to run a media campaign. Via pdeppisch
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In the country’s busiest oil patch, where the rig count has climbed by nearly one-third in the past year, drillers, service providers and trucking companies have been poaching in all corners, recruiting everyone from police officers to grocery clerks.
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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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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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By Bob Wing Oil has been a source of tremendous wealth for Los Angeles, but the city’s 1,071 active oil wells also pose serious health risks for the nearly 628,000 Angelenos who live near them. That’s why residents and environmental justice organizations ar
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"How Big Oil Bought the White House and Tried to Steal the Country" is the subtitle of a book that tells the story of a presidential election in which a candidate allowed money from big oil companies to help him win office and then rewarded them with plum appointments in his cabinet. Via pdeppisch
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As debate over Dakota Access pipeline rages, parsing out what's real, and what's not, isn't easy.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
The United States Army Corps of Engineers are moving to shut down public access to lands hosting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. About 5,000 protestors remain, protesting the oil pipeline that will go under a lake and river and adjacent (within 0.5 mile) to tribal lands. The governor wants the camp closed down as well.
Protestors want this final pipeline segment to be halted or relocated. Many others want the oil pipeline to go ahead. Amidst this contentious standoff, alternative versions of reality are burbling up. Again, the division across our society is manifest in this controversy and threatens to make a resolution that much harder to achieve. This article makes an effort to lay out some of the facts, but falls short of actually calling a spade a spade.
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More than 400 protesters clashed with police on a bridge north of a protest encampment near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian tribal reservation in North Dakota on Sunday night.
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One of the justifications for fracking is the use of natural gas as a bridging fuel between coal and a low-carbon future. However natural gas is mostly methane, which has strong global warming impacts in its own right. Natural gas therefore only provides climate benefits over coal if the leakage is no more than 2-3%.… Via Garry Rogers
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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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The DNV GL-led WIN WIN Joint Industry Project (JIP), which melds offshore wind with offshore oil and gas | Posted by Eric
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Hmmm...I'm not exactly sure how to read this one. It is great that we are seeing here and example of how alternative energy sources can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. But to do so to make oil and gas extraction more efficient seems a bit counter-intuitive to say the least.
One upside could be if this work helps further push down the cost of wind turbines, but somehow that doesn't seem to the be the primary outcome. The primary outcome seems to be more carbon in our atmosphere and ocean.
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