Salon.com > fossil fuel

House supporters of KXL received $56m from fossil fuel industry

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:17:00 +0000

On Wednesday the house voted 241-175 to pass a bill that declares a presidential permit is not needed to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline extension currently under consideration. The Northern Route Approval Act is unlikely to garner enough votes in the Senate to overcome a presidential veto, so the decision on the pipeline -- which would carry crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast -- will likely remain in the president's hands.

Meanwhile, environmental groups have decried Wednesday's House vote as further evidence that Congress has been bought by Big Oil. Oil Change International calculated that supporters of the bill had taken a combined $56 million from the fossil fuel industry, and that individual representatives in support of the bill had on average received six times from oil industry interests than pipeline opponents. Oil Change International highlighted the following findings:

5 groups who shouldn’t be able to vote, according to Ted Nugent

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:47:00 +0000

The American right has so embraced the “makers versus takers” narrative (entirely false from the get-go) that despite a lot of talk about soul-searching and trying to reach out to people who aren't old, white and angry, they're having a hard time keeping their true feelings from the public.

Washed-up, draft-dodging '70s rocker Ted Nugent has never tried to obscure his extremism, and this week he offered an idea that is supposedly related to a budget deal. After exposing his impressive ignorance of the federal budget, especially “entitlements," Nugent offered up a modest proposal:

Let's also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them. That's insane.

Colorado’s fracking fight gets ugly

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

One of the best-known and most often invoked tropes in our political mythology is the one about the distant big-city bureaucrat conniving with a politician and monied interests to undermine the will of Small Town, USA. It's a parable that you will probably hear in some form in the upcoming presidential debates. But while it is a cartoonish cliche, the caricature nonetheless persists because brouhahas like the battle over oil and gas drilling in Colorado periodically reminded us of the parable's general accuracy.

In that fight, things are getting ugly, fast. As I reported a few months ago, for all the national headlines this conflict has generated, and for all the talk of energy on the presidential campaign, the fight over hydraulic fracturing (whose safety was again called into question last week) will be won or lost at the most local of local levels. Already, the industry has been successful in convincing many states to avoid enforcing basic regulations already on the books. Now there's a push to crush new rules before they are put on the books. Indeed, here in the state hosting the first presidential debate - a state with one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world - the distant bureaucrats, politicians and monied interests are deploying every instrument at their disposal to quash local communities' efforts to create basic quality-of-life safeguards.