Petroleum

By Vitoria Avila Fioravanti | – Sao Paulo (Special to Informed Comment) – Beef, oil and veiling and a murdered journalist have catapulted the burgeoning relationship between Brazil and the controversial Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the headlines for the first time this fall, though the two countries have had formal diplomatic relations since 1968. […]

Environmentalism

Climate Crisis will Beggar Us: Big Oil needs to Pay for the Damage it Caused

Yes! Magazine

By Tamara Toles O’Laughlin and Bill McKibben | – (Yes! Magazine) – Climate change disproportionately affects poor people and people of color. They should be compensated for their suffering. This month in a Manhattan courthouse, New York State’s attorney general Letitia James argued that ExxonMobil should be held accountable for layers of lies about climate […]

Climate Crisis

Saudi Oil Giant Aramco’s $1.5 trillion IPO flies in the face of our Climate Crisis Reality

The Conversation

By Mark Shackleton | – The largest oil and gas producer, Saudi Aramco, is due to become the world’s most valuable publicly listed company. The Saudi government is planning to sell a small fraction of the firm’s shares on the Riyadh stock exchange before seeking a listing for 5% of the firm on an international […]

Donald Trump

Trump hands Oil & Gas to Syria & Russia as he claims “We’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump claimed that “we’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East” as a result of his greenlight to Turkey to invade Syria. As usual, no one could understand what he was talking about. Syria and Turkey are not oil states, though Syria was doing 400,000 barrels a day […]

Fossil Fuels

Fueling Global Heating: Our Tax System Rewards the Biggest Carbon Criminals

OtherWords

By Charlie Simmons | – ( Otherwords.org) – Last year, the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates. By Charlie Simmons | October 16, 2019 Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General […]

Democratic Party

Climate Fail: Big Oil is corrupting both Parties in Desperate Bid to Burn more Petroleum

OtherWords

By Daphne Wysham | – ( Otherwords.org) – Burning fossil fuels boils our planet — that much is generally well known. But often these fuels do serious damage before they ever get to market. They spill out of pipelines, poison groundwater, or explode on trains. Even when they don’t, building new pipelines and export terminals […]

Donald Trump

Why Trump let Saudi Arabia and UAE censor his “America First” Speech on Energy

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Sunday the NYT revealed that Trump’s staff ran his May, 2016 speech on “America First” by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their input into the energy passages, and actually altered the text based on their editing. The hollow joke of Trump’s “America first” slogan could not […]

Iran

Iran in Crosshairs Again: It is Always – Always – about the Oil

Michael T. Klare

By Michael T. Klare | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – It’s always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a recent U.N. report about the prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo […]

Featured

Could Trump’s Tensions with Iran, Venezuela Cause Gasoline Prices to Spike?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The tensions between the Trump administration and two of the world’s significant oil producers, Iran and Venezuela, in addition to the campaign of warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya to take the capital of Libya (another oil state) have raised the prospects of tightening world oil production. Then a few days […]