In its Sunday Review section on February 21, 2016, the New York Times ran a column titled “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare.” The article’s thesis is summarized in its second-last sentence: “Civilians have died, but in my firm opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had …
Rob Galbraith
Posts by Rob Galbraith
Measuring “contagion” effect of political donations using LittleSis data
While the LittleSis website is a useful tool for researchers, academics, journalists, and activists to explore and map networks of powerful people and organizations, our data is available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This means that anyone can use the data in our database for whatever they …
Industry-tied Department of Energy study finds gas exports will drive fracking, makes no mention of climate
On December 28, Bloomberg reported on a US Department of Energy analysis that found that increasing exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States would result in a 5% decrease in natural gas prices in Asia along with a 1% increase in US prices. The contracted researchers concluded that this would be a …
Oil-financed Senate banking committee poised to greenlight oil exports
Despite signaling earlier this year that President Obama would veto bills repealing the current ban on exporting crude oil produced in the United States, the administration has since walked back that position. Yesterday, Politico reported (subscription required) that White House spokesman Josh Earnest declined to rule out lifting the ban in exchange for other administration …
Astroturf kingpin deploys front groups to support drilling, aided by frackademic Considine
Last week, the Salt Lake Tribune ran an op-ed entitled “‘Bean-counting bureaucrats’ at BLM are locking up Utah’s future,” advocating the opening of federally owned lands to oil and gas drilling. The column, essentially the same as an op-ed that ran a week earlier in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, relies on a report by Timothy …
EIA Monterey Shale write-down invalidates frackademic Considine’s predictions
A little more than a week ago the Orange County Register ran a column by Timothy Considine, the director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming arguing against a ban on hydraulic fracturing in California. Considine claims that fracking in the Monterey Shale could add 557,000 jobs per …
Los Angeles Times interviews fracking expert, fails to disclose industry ties
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Stanford professor of geophysics Mark Zoback in which he argued against a moratorium on fracking in California and lauded the oil and gas regulatory regimes in Pennsylvania and Texas. At the beginning of the article, Zoback is identified as “Stanford geophysicist since 1984, member of …
Senators speak out for LNG exports, bring in big bucks from oil and gas industry
As the west scrambles for a geopolitical response to Russia’s play for the Crimean peninsula, advocates for the oil and gas industry have used the situation to redouble the push to export liquefied natural gas (LNG). Framing the issue as a matter of protecting a fledgling democracy and ensuring security for United States allies, oil- …
“Sustainable” shale center appoints new director
Last week, the Center for Sustainable Shale Development announced it had hired Susan Packard LeGros, a Philadelphia-area environmental attorney, as its executive director. LeGros is replacing interim director Andrew Place, who is also the head of public policy research for Pittsburgh gas driller EQT Corporation. As we discussed in our report “Big Green Fracking Machine,” …
Business group opposing public campaign finance, Unshackle Upstate, is a big political spender
The New York anti-tax group Unshackle Upstate has made fighting the public financing of elections a major priority. Late last year the group published an opposition white paper timed to coincide with the release of preliminary findings of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption (which advocated for public campaign financing), and during …
Pa. DEP and PUC heads keynote gas industry events
This fall, Blank Rome LLP, a Pennsylvania-based law and lobbying firm, held two events titled “Environmental Issues Affecting Midstream & Downstream Oil & Gas Development.” The events, one in Philadelphia and one in Harrisburg, were co-hosted by Hull & Associates, a shale oil and gas project management and consulting firm, and featured a slew of …
Keystone pols have a gas in Manhattan over the Pennsylvania Society weekend
While we have been giving a lot of blog attention to New York State over the past few weeks, highlighting Governor Cuomo’s ties to the business lobbies pushing for natural gas in New York, Pennsylvania’s titans of business and politics paid their respects to the Empire State this past weekend, making their annual pilgrimage to …