A massive shortfall for cleaning up after Big Oil

We need strong, progressive governance, or we will get stuck with these kinds of bills.

There are more than 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells that will need to be cleaned up, and the current production boom and windfall profits for industry giants have obscured the bill’s imminent arrival. More than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells either produce little oil and gas or are already dormant.

By law, companies are responsible for plugging and cleaning up wells. Oil drillers set aside funds called bonds, similar to the security deposit on a rental property, that are refunded once they decommission their wells or, if they walk away without doing that work, are taken by the government to cover the cost.

But an analysis by ProPublica and Capital & Main has found that the money set aside for this cleanup work in the 15 states accounting for nearly all the nation’s oil and gas production covers less than 2% of the projected cost. That shortfall puts taxpayers at risk of picking up the rest of the massive tab to avoid the environmental, economic and public health consequences of aging oil fields. - ProPublica

Big Oil suddenly has issues with methane emissions penalties

This article gets into the complications. I personally don't see a need to back off on anything when it comes to holding Big Energy accountable.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 U.S. climate law abbreviated IRA, primarily reduces emissions through financial incentives, rather than binding rules. But in addition to all its well-known carrots, lawmakers quietly included a smaller number of sticks — particularly when it comes to the potent greenhouse gas methane, which has proven to be a pesky source of increasing climate pollution with each passing year. New research suggests that those sticks could soon batter the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for a third of all methane emissions in the U.S.

An IRA provision directs the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to charge $900 for every metric ton of methane above a certain threshold released into the atmosphere in 2024. The issue is particularly challenging to tackle in oil and gas fields because methane is the primary component in natural gas, and it leaks from hundreds of thousands of devices scattered across the country. In 2022, oil and gas facilities emitted more than 2.5 million metric tons of methane. - Grist

Another methane greenwashing scheme

I hadn't known about this one, which has apparently been around for a while.

Certified natural gas – or methane gas that is purportedly produced in a low-emissions manner – is a “dangerous greenwashing scheme”, a group of progressive senators wrote in a letter to federal regulators on Monday…

Amid increasing public concern about gas usage and the climate crisis, a new industry of third-party gas “certifiers” has cropped up. These companies develop standards that they use to proclaim that certain producers are reducing emissions from their fracking wells, pipelines and storage facilities, and therefore generating gas sustainably.

The companies can then deem certain gas “certified”, “responsibly produced” or “differentiated”, allowing producers to sell it at a premium. Utilities in New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Michigan and Virginia have purchased certified natural gas and plan to pass on the additional costs to customers, the non-profit watchdog organization Revolving Door Project found last year. - The Guardian

The SEC has given crypto a bright green light, and that's bad

A facile, fraught, and above all just plain stupid decision.

Over the past several decades, there have been rapid and fundamental changes in the finance and banking sectors. The banking reforms of the New Deal, which endured up until about 1980 and provided a relative degree of banking and financial stability, were reversed by the neoliberal counterrevolution with an eye toward increasing profits and shredding social responsibility. A new book by world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, shows us the result: a financial system dominated by megabanks and shadow financial institutions prone to instability and crises that at the same time rely on government bailouts.

The neoliberal financial system, controlled by what Epstein calls “The Bankers’ Club,” benefits exclusively powerful people and institutions, is linked to the growing inequality of wealth and income, and is a net drain to the U.S. economy. Nonetheless, bankers not only see themselves as “essential workers,” a view that Epstein shreds into pieces, but as former Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein claimed, many think they do “God’s work.”

The latest development in the evolution of the modern financial system is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of bitcoin exchange-traded funds last month, concluding a decade-long fight and marking a turning point for cryptocurrency. This may be a game changer for the global money system but could also very well lead us to another financial crisis. - Truthout

Don't count on the ultra-privileged for anything

There's still a lot of propaganda out there regarding the ultra-wealthy. Everyone should know better.

Billionaires have been minted at a dizzying pace in the last few decades — in 1987 Forbes counted 140, while in 2023 the tally was 2,640 — and we’ve now returned to the point in the cycle where enormous piles of wealth are passed on to the next generation. “This is how wealth dynasties are formed,” says Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the left-leaning think tank Institute for Policy Studies. The only thing that’s new in 2024 is that the piles of money are bigger than ever.

Not only are there more billionaires today, their average wealth keeps ticking up too, thanks to historic stock market returns. On top of that, heirs are receiving wealth transfers earlier in life, rather than waiting for the death or near death of a family member. All this underscores the truth that having money remains the best way to get more money. Perhaps there’s nowhere that’s truer than in the US, home to the most billionaires, despite the pervasive myth of hardscrabble, self-made entrepreneurs climbing to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. If you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay poor; if you’re born super rich, you’ll probably get even richer...

Don’t hold your breath for an onslaught of billionaire heirs suddenly giving their inheritances away for the betterment of society. One insight from the UBS report is that heirs tend to be much less interested in philanthropy than first-gen billionaires. A theory as to why, according to Collins, is that “the first generation has some confidence in their ability to create wealth,” while the second generation doesn’t. “We know that the second generation, third generation are more concerned about protecting wealth than creating it,” he continues. “They invest a lot in wealth defense; they invest a lot in lobbying.” That means opposing any wealth tax or income tax hikes on the rich, or fighting regulations that would close loopholes that have long allowed billionaires to minimize what they owe to the government. It’s a sign that “the tax system on wealth has become more optional,” says Collins. - Vox

Return-to-office is corporate BS

I've worked in places where one or more managers were, it would be fair to say, rather on the neurotic and controlling side. So I can relate. Perhaps you can as well.

Your manager may suggest that returning to the office is imperative for the company’s success, workplace culture, and overall productivity. However, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that’s bullshit. New research out of the University of Pittsburgh examined 137 of America’s largest corporations and found that return-to-office mandates did not result in significant improvements to firm performance.

“Using a sample of S&P 500 firms, we examine determinants and consequences of U.S. firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates,” said researchers from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. The study found that managers use RTO mandates “to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat,” and concluded that “we do not find significant changes in firm performance in terms of profitability and stock market valuation after the RTO mandates.” - Gizmodo