Vol. 1, No. 3 Welcome to Eyes on the Ties’ Friday Fossil Fuel Runoff! This weekly series highlights the power relationships behind recent developments in the oil and gas industry. We include links to the week’s stories in oil and gas news with important context from LittleSis, including power maps made by the LittleSis community …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
2013 has been a great year for the Public Accountability Initiative. Our investigations on issues ranging from corrupt greenwashing efforts to on-air war profiteers garnered major media coverage and delivered real impact. We ramped up our blogging activity. We moved into a new office in our home base of Buffalo and added two awesome staff …
The Eyes on the Ties blog has been popping with posts lately and addressing the latest in the news cycle. Kicking off this roundup is Kevin’s research into the negotiating table at JPMorgan as it reached a tentative $13 billion settlement with the Department of Justice. Turns out that negotiating table is little more than …
Harvard University announced this week that Gen. David Petraeus, former director of the CIA and current chair of private equity giant KKR’s global institute, has been appointed as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a unit of the university’s Kennedy School of Government. According to the school’s press …
In recent interviews, Dr. Bruce Pitman, the dean of the University at Buffalo’s College of Arts and Sciences responded to PAI’s criticism of a study published this summer by the school’s Shale Resources and Society Institute. To a WBFO reporter, Pitman characterized claims of SRSI’s poor scholarship as “nonsense”, saying, “We haven’t been able to …
Businesses in controversial industries often turn to the academy for evidence exculpating them for the harm that they do, with trade groups funding “scholarly” reports claiming that their products and business practices are safe for the public. In much the same way that Big Tobacco funded research claiming that secondhand smoke is not harmful, natural gas …