August, 08 2023, 08:40am EDT
Private Equity-Backed Oil and Gas Drillers Saddle Taxpayers With Costly Cleanup Risk
Public could face up to a $380M bill if buyout firms leave western communities with abandoned wells as investors use greenwashing to promote fossil fuel expansion.
Investments by private equity firms in nearly 2,700 oil and gas wells on federal and tribal lands across the western United States could leave taxpayers with a cleanup bill of up to $380 million, according to a new report released today by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Public Citizen.
Without significant changes in financial protections mandated by the U.S. government, the drillers backed by private equity buyout firms on federal lands will only set aside $5.7 million to clean up after the wells are depleted, the study found, a meager 1.5 percent of the potential cleanup costs. The study’s scope includes wells that either have been drilled or are projected to be drilled based on federal drilling permits approved since 2017. The $380 million cleanup bill represents a slice of the total cost of cleaning up from oil and gas drilling on public lands, which has been estimated to be at least $6 billion, and potentially much more.
The involvement of an industry infamous for borrowing money to buy up assets and stripping their value should be of major concern to government officials that oversee oil and gas drilling. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management in July released a long-overdue proposal to strengthen oil and gas cleanup requirements for federal lands. These regulations, once made final, will ensure that oil and gas drillers cannot evade the cost of cleanup. Further legislation is needed to ensure that fossil fuel companies cannot use bankruptcy to ditch their responsibility to clean up oil and gas wells.
“If these companies declare bankruptcy and abandon these oil and gas wells, the public faces major costs, and buyout firms escape with their profit and zero consequences,” said Alan Zibel, an oil and gas researcher with Public Citizen who co-authored the report. “Private equity buyout firms have a history of buying up businesses in declining industries, extracting profits and then filing for bankruptcy once the assets the company owns become worthless. That means federal and state officials must be on high alert as these firms pick up and consolidate oil and gas assets discarded by oil and gas giants.”
The report identified 19 private equity firms, including Blackstone, Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR, and Warburg Pincus, that have invested billions of dollars into fossil fuel companies in recent years. These firms have invested in 35 different oil and gas companies that received permits to drill on federal lands since 2017.
Many private equity firms pitch themselves as environmentally responsible owners and release public net-zero pledges, while much of the industry claims to focus on reducing emissions and mitigating impacts on nearby communities, according to the report. The private equity industry is also playing a key role in efforts to certify and promote methane gas. This strategy would boost production of methane gas far into the future, undermining the transition away from fossil fuels.
“The public bears great costs associated with private equity firms' expansion of their fossil fuel holdings,” said report co-author Nichole Heil, research and campaign coordinator with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “Private equity firms have relied heavily on institutional investors like public employee pension funds to help fund this expansion. However, they have also now shifted the burden of clean up onto taxpayers. These large opaque financial actors are not only worsening the climate crisis, but also exacerbating the state’s fiscal status and harming local communities.”
Colorado currently has the largest potential cleanup bill from private equity-backed oil and gas companies, the study found. The state could see potentially a significant shortfall of $161 million when the time comes to deal with abandoned wells on federal and tribal lands alone. More than 75 percent of Colorado’s wells on federal lands are on lands leased by private equity backed drillers.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Rights Advocates Demand Probe Into Reports That Israel Uses WhatsApp to Target Palestinians
"The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communications via WhatsApp or the groups they join," said a Palestinian digital rights group.
May 18, 2024
The Palestinian digital rights group Sada Social on Saturday called for an investigation into Israel's alleged use of WhatsApp user data to target Palestinians with its AI system, Lavender.
The group, which is affiliated with the Al Jazeera Media Institute and Access Now, accused Meta, which owns WhatsApp, of fueling "the 'Lavender' artificial intelligence system used by the Israeli military to kill Palestinian individuals within the Gaza enclave."
As Common Dreamsreported in April, the Israel Defense Forces has relied on AI systems including Lavender to target people Israel believes to be Hamas members.
At +972 Magazine, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham wrote that a current commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit pushed for the use of AI to choose targets in Gaza. The commander wrote in a guide book to create the system that "hundreds and thousands" of features can be used to select targets, "such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently."
Sada Social asserted that it had found the Lavender system uses WhatsApp data to select targets.
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The mention of Israel's use of WhatsApp data in Abraham's reporting also caught the attention last month of Paul Biggar, founder of Tech for Palestine.
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Others have pointed out that Israel may have acquired WhatsApp data through means other than a leak by Meta.
Journalist Marc Owen Jones said the question of "Meta's potential role in this is important," but noted that informants, captured devices, and spyware could be used by Israel to gain Palestinian users' WhatsApp data.
Bahraini activist Esra'a Al Shafei, founder of Majal.org, told the Middle East Monitor that the reports that WhatsApp user data has been used by the IDF's AI machine demonstrate why privacy advocates warn against the collection and storage of metadata, "particularly for apps like WhatsApp, which falsely advertise their product as fully private."
"Even though WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and claims to not have any backdoors to any government, the metadata alone is sufficient to expose detailed information about users, especially if the user's phone number is attached to other Meta products and related activities," Al Shafei said. "This is why the IDF could plausibly utilize metadata to track and locate WhatsApp users."
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In turn, "by using WhatsApp, people are risking their lives," she added.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told Anadolu last month that "WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government," adding that "Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested."
Al Shafei said Meta must "fully investigate" how WhatsApp's metadata may be used "to track, harm, or kill its users throughout Palestine."
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A first-of-its-kind study published this week shows that levels of toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are now so ubiquitous in the environmental that they have begun building up in the Great Lakes Basin after entering it through rainwater and the air, contaminating 95% of the United States' fresh surface water supply.
Researchers at Indiana University, Bloomington and Environment and Climate Change Canada published the study Thursday, revealing that "background levels" of PFAS, also called "forever chemicals," are so high that atmospheric counts were consistent throughout the basin.
"The PFAS in rain could be carried from local sources, or have traveled long distances from other regions. Regardless, it is a major source of pollution that contributes to the lakes' levels," reported The Guardian on Saturday.
The levels of PFAS in precipitation did not correlate with whether or not an area in the Great Lakes Basin was heavily industrialized, lead author Chunjie Xia, a postdoctoral associate at Indiana University, told The Hill.
"The levels in precipitation don't depend on the population," said Xia. "They are similar in Chicago, which is heavily populated, and at Eagle Harbor, Michigan, where there's maybe 500 people living in a 25-kilometer radius."
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Within the basin, however, levels of PFAS were higher near urban areas.
Twenty percent of the world's freshwater is held in the Great Lakes Basin, while 10% of the U.S. population and 35% of Canadians live in the region.
In 2023, Duke University and the Environmental Working Group analyzed fish samples collected from the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring program for the Great Lakes, and found that eating just one locally caught freshwater fish could be the equivalent of drinking PFAS-contaminated water for a month.
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European lawmakers have proposed a ban that could go into effect as early as 2026, but Reutersreported Wednesday that the law could include exemptions for certain industries.
Last month, the Biden administration finalized a rule setting limits on PFAS in drinking water.
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The state Senate approved the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (LA GATOR) Scholarship Program in a vote of 25-15 on Thursday, with just four Republicans joining the Democratic Party in opposing the bill.
The program would allow the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to create "education savings accounts" (ESAs), which would give families state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition, uniforms, and other expenses.
The grants would first be available to low-income families and special education students, but in the program's third year the ESAs are set to be available to all Louisiana families.
The legislation was briefly shelved this week over concerns about its cost, but Landry, backed by right-wing groups and donors, used television ads to push his party to support the ESAs.
Landry went as far as suggesting lawmakers could revise the state constitution to end a restriction mandating that certain public funds are set aside for K-12 public schools. He called on the state Senate to hold a special convention to do so, in order to unlock funding for the $520 million yearly cost of the LA GATOR program.
Moments before the Senate voted on Thursday, state Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-5) said the bill was "nothing short of an abandonment of public education."
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Landry told the Louisiana Illuminator that the success of the bill was "a big win for the kids of Louisiana," but local school board members, teachers, and superintendents lobbied Republicans ahead of the vote to protect funding for public schools, where a majority of students in the state are educated.
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