Fossil fuels are major contributors to climate change problems

From an Article by Corbin Hiar, E&E News, June 18, 2020

The public relations firm CRC Advisors criticized environmental groups for promoting climate policies that it said would hurt communities of color in an email that accidentally included the name of a client: Chevron Corp.

It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.

The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.

It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp.

The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with black protesters while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.”

“Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities,” wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.

The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.

The email ended with a revealing tagline: “If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”

Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email’s accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron’s public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry’s past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming.

Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.

“There’s no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is,” she said. “It’s hard for me to contain my fury.”

Chevron, a longtime CRC client whose shareholders recently called on the oil major to detail its lobbying on climate change, says it had nothing to do with the message.

“Thanks for the opportunity to clarify the situation,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.

‘A clerical error’ — (Are you kidding me? ADMIN)

The email received by an E&E News journalist on June 3 included quotes from two black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal.

They were Ken Blackwell, a Republican who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in the late 1990s and has gone on to stump for a wide variety of conservative causes, and Derrick Hollie, a former advertising executive.

The email portrayed CRC as playing a helpful role in distributing Blackwell’s and Hollie’s concerns with the climate plan and its effect on black communities.

Instead, the firm appears to have organized the campaign. Hollie, who said he doesn’t personally know Blackwell, revealed that CRC approached him with the idea.

“This was like, ‘Derrick, would you mind being a part of something that we’re working on?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they asked me to put together a quote,” Hollie said in a phone interview.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” he added. “I figured they were going to put it in an op-ed or something like that.”

Gage, the account executive at CRC, said in an email to E&E News that he had contacted journalists “on behalf of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Hollie regarding this issue and inadvertently attached a disclaimer from another client’s media list onto that email.”

“This was, in effect, a clerical error,” Gage said.

The Green New Deal is a conceptual resolution that calls for a sweeping public jobs program and asserts that the government should “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” in a decade’s time.

That would require overhauling the nation’s oil-dependent transportation system “to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” and invest in “zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail,” the proposal says.

Chevron hasn’t directly lobbied on the Green New Deal, but it has pressed members of Congress and the Trump administration about “Energy Transitions, technology, and climate change,” lobbying disclosures show.

Energy prices — another major focus of the CRC pitch — are also an issue Chevron has lobbied on.

“Radical policies like the green new deal that raise the cost of driving to work and heating our homes would target the African-American community and … would make us even more vulnerable and marginalized than we already are,” Blackwell said in the email sent by CRC. He is currently an adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign and senior fellow at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group.

Blackwell’s quote was partially featured in the headline of a June 4 story on the website of the conservative Daily Wire.

This story is to be continued tomorrow!

##############################

See also: Chevron’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Tweet Prompts a Debate About Big Oil and Environmental Justice, Ilana Cohen, InsideClimate News, June 20 2020

Here is Some Attitude and Important Facts on Fracking

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV, January 1, 2015

It’s a lie to call the people fighting fracking in Central West Virginia “environmentalists.” None of them belonged to environmental groups before fracking came along (myself excepted, more about that below). They are property owners, perhaps a little better educated than average, and most of them have been out in the world at some time in their lives to see what it’s like elsewhere. We chose to live here, connected to the biological world, in peace and serenity.

What we are going to lose is our families’ health and property – neither of which is ever counted as a cost of fracking. It is “suck it up fellow, you don’t know what you are talking about,” if there is any reply at all to our complaint.

It is not hard to see what happens as a result of fracking – take a tour nearby and have a look, if you have the courage. Talk to people where it is going on. They are glad to warn you. Look for “water buffalos,” a sign of lost or contaminated water. Notice the broad gravel roads up steep hills and the drilling platforms (which require many acres of ground) being reduced to subsoil and then covered with enough crushed rock to support water trucks and rigs in any kind of weather.

Notice miles of forest cut for pipeline right of way, timber production gone for as long as the pipelines are in use. If you go near the drilling rigs, notice the noise and the lights at night. And day or night, notice the flares of the very gas they come to capture. As you drive along back roads, notice the compressor stations which will provide excess light, noise and “odeur de hydrocarbure” for decades for the “lucky” people who live there.

If you are the stay-at-home type, a flight over the fracking fields via Goggle Earth might be the ticket. Order up a town West of I-79 and fly around over the country side at a few thousand feet. Jarvisville, WV, would be a good choice. You don’t have to look hard to find a pipeline, then follow it to the well pads it serves. Keep in mind that fracking is just getting started in WV. If all goes as planned, there will be a drilling pad with roads and pipelines on almost every square mile.

Having environmental concern is certainly proper. There are a lot of things to worry about today. If it weren’t for the Koch brothers and others like them in the hydrocarbon industries who pump millions into disinformation, we’d all agree about global warming. Some 97% of scientists agree it is happening.

What does this development do for property values (look up “property values near fracking” on the net, but don’t forget “property values near sand mines,” because the land is “screwed up” in Wisconsin and Minnesota, with mining of proppant sand for fracking). What about the cost and discomfort due to sickness caused by fracking (look up fracking disease).

It is as though property rights, your right not to be injured by someone else, right to enjoy your peace and quiet is revoked whenever someone wants to frack. Is the energy situation so bad the nation has to cause asthma and abortions to get energy?

Think about it. Environment is a general classification, including all kinds of harm to the natural, biological world, from effects on tiny creatures to redwood trees and polar bears and whales. This concern is a good thing. The human race is capable of making chemicals in quantities which decrease the life sustaining capability of the biosphere. It appears the biosphere has no natural defense, but making money always has a strong offense.

However, people in central West Virginia are worried about particulars. Their concerns are on the ground and right now. It is their lives, their families, and their neighbors they are talking about.

“In the interest of full disclosure,” as they say, this author was a member of a small environmental group, Guardians of the West Fork, before fracking became a concern. The Guardians principal business is cleaning up “acid mine water” from mines abandoned one hundred years ago, using tax money. If you have worked around old mines, oil and gas remains from the first wave of petroleum exploitation running from the 1880′s to the 1930′s and strip mining, as I have, you get a pretty good idea of what mineral extracting industries get away with. You recognize the land goes on forever, giving food, timber, fiber, clean water, and cleaning the atmosphere, but mineral extraction is a flash in time, depreciating the land’s capacity to produce. Understanding this, sort of gives you an attitude.

Alternate energy is desperately needed. And it is being blocked by many of the same people who are benefitting handsomely by reducing our health as well as abridging our right to enjoy and profit from our own property. That’s not an attitude, that’s a fact.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net and www.marcellus-shale.us