Today, behind closed doors in Charlotte, North Carolina, legislators from 15 states will meet with the oil and gas industry to discuss so-called “model legislation” as part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The result could be laws that handicap renewable energy targets — while creating loopholes for fossil fuels, written directly by the oil and gas industry itself.

ALEC has faced backlash recently for its role in crafting Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws. Now the organization is taking the same secretive approach to kill renewable energy development across the country.

Oil and gas corporations have a very strong role in politics through groups like Americans For Prosperity, American Petroleum Institute, and, of course, ALEC. Four of the largest oil and gas corporations and two of the most profitable U.S. corporations overall, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, sit on ALEC’s task forces. And so today, according to documents posted by Common Cause, representatives from these and other energy groups will discuss potential legislation that would undermine clean energy standards and ...

The American Legislative Exchange Council’s anti-environment agenda is fueled by none other than Big Oil companies, which sit on ALEC’s “task forces.”

The watchdog group Common Cause published ALEC’s full member list, revealing four of the five major oil companies behind the group’s anti-environment legislation. These four oil companies — Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil — are also the four most profitable, taking a combined $30.6 billion profits in just three months this year.

Koch Industries, ubiquitous in funding right-wing causes, is also one of ALEC’s corporate members, while ConocoPhillips has its own history of funding the group.

ALEC’s agenda includes crafting legislation that kills carbon pricing and renewable energy targets, turns over public lands, and prevents fracking disclosure laws, among other harmful laws.

The latest chapter of Big Oil shaping local and state laws occurs later this week, where state legislators from 15 oil and gas states will meet with oil and gas companies presenting a fossil-fueled vision for the future.

According to the most recent data released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the number of lawsuits brought against governments by companies evoking clauses in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) was 450 at the end of 2011. 

These are only the known cases; most most are kept secret. 

In the many instances in which these lawsuits have been successful, governments have been made to pay fines amounting to tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars or euros. 

The highly controversial BITs – which establish the conditions for investment by companies of one country in another state – have handed multinational corporations an arsenal of clauses with which to fight state regulations against harmful investment. 

In 2011, Argentina held the record of known cases (51), followed by Venezuela (25), Ecuador (23) and Mexico. Most of the claims against Argentina are related to the 2011 financial crisis and many to the privatization of water. In total, Buenos Aires has been fined more than one billion dollars by multinational corporations. 

Last year, Ecuador was forced to pay fines of 78 million dollars to the United States’ oil company Chevron, which claims that the country’s efforts to protect the Amazon from pollution have negatively affected business. 

This year, Argentina may face a new case, after the government moved to regain state control over the country’s biggest oil firm, which had been owned by the private Spanish oil company Repsol for many years. 

According ...

Yesterday, Ecowatch.org revealed that, in September 2008, nearly two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig had blown out in the Caspian Sea— which BP concealed from U.S. regulators and Congress.

Had BP, Chevron, Exxon or the Bush State Department revealed the facts of the earlier blow-out, it is likely that the Deepwater Horizon disaster would have been prevented.

Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.

To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan. Outside the capital, Baku, near the giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names, who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled with explosive methane gas.

Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were arrested and the witnesses disappeared.

Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.

The source of the cable, classified “SECRET,” was a disaffected U.S. soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, through WikiLeaks.org, provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian.

The information found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster. 

The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day: there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster two years later—the cement (“mud”) used to cap the well had failed.

Bill Schrader, ...

Accelerating commodification of water, oil, land, and nature over the past few decades has resulted in a global power play, wresting precious resources away from communities that have lived sustainably with them for centuries. Oil is one example where the domination of multinational companies has led to mass displacement, seeded social conflict, and fundamentally disrupted the relationship between indigenous communities and their environment.

Groups the worlds over are striving to defend an alternate understanding of the earth and how we should treat it, however. They view entities such as oil as part of the global commons -- the set of natural resources, basic services, public spaces, and cultural traditions that should be part of a public trust to be enjoyed by all -- rather than as commodities to be bought and sold. Another way to conceive of these assets is through the Spanish term for them: el bien común, the common good. Behind the commons is the fundamental idea that life, information, human relationships, popular culture, and the earth's riches are sacrosanct and not for sale.

Everywhere, indigenous peoples are claiming their autonomy over their territories, which include the right to self-government and control of everything over, on, and in their lands. At this moment, some 30,000 indigenous peoples from the Ecuadorian Amazon are embroiled in legal battles with Chevron for contaminating their water and destroying the health of entire villages. This past January, a broad-based coalition of U.S. and Canadian groups stalled the Keystone XL Pipeline project and are working to uphold this decision. And for decades, indigenous people everywhere have been defending their lands and the earth's resources in epic battles.

On top of this, communities are working to repair the divisions that corporate and governmental repression has ...

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.  But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere?  Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: ...

Oil prices, which averaged a near-record $103 per barrel in 2011, have risen steadily since the beginning of 2012. In tandem with oil prices, gasoline prices are also rising—from an average of $3.30 ending the week of January 2 to $3.59 last week. Higher gas prices mean that money is flowing out of Americans’ wallets and pocketbooks and straight into the coffers of Big Oil companies. This Center for American Progress analysis finds that each penny rise in the average quarterly (three months) price of a gallon of gas corresponds to a $200 million increase in quarterly profits of the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell.

Since the beginning of the year, the price for gasoline increased 29 cents per gallon. If that average ...

President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 sets a responsible course for rebuilding the economy so that it works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Our middle class is the engine of economic growth, but is threatened by dwindling public investments, a tax system increasingly rigged to benefit the wealthy, a fraying safety net, and assaults on what should be the bedrock guarantees of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The president’s budget protects those guarantees, boosts critical investments, and takes steps toward rebalancing the tax code so that all pay their fair share. And it does this in a fiscally responsible way, charting a path that nurtures the economic recovery while reducing the federal deficit, all without asking the middle class to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden.

President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2013 budget would make taxes fairer by, among other things, eliminating $40 billion in tax breaks over 10 years for oil and gas companies. About one-fourth of the savings would be invested in domestic manufacturing, which would create jobs.

Oil and gas companies are raking in record profits and clearly do not need these tax breaks. The big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made a combined profit of $137 billion in 2011. This beats their previous 21st century record of $136 billion (2011$) in 2008, and ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips were the first, fourth, and 15th most profitable companies on the Fortune 100 List in 2011.

Despite these humongous earnings, however, the