Out-of-State Billionaire Oil Barons Pour Seven Figures into California's Climate-Killing Prop 23

[ensho]

http://www.alternet.org/story/148127/out-of-state_billionaire_oil_barons_pour_seven_figures_into_california%27s_climate-killing_prop_23_


The billionaire Koch brothers who are funding the Tea Party wackos, throw in their chips in an attempt to destroy the state's greenhouse gas emissions laws.


Cutthroat oil barons Valero Energy Corporation and Tesoro Corporation are injecting millions of dollars into efforts to postpone California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32), which requires that the state's greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020, at the ballot this November. That's bad enough on its face, but worse when one considers that both companies are based in Texas. But now they can count the controversial Kansas conglomerate Koch Industries -- which has been quietly bankrolling the Tea Party wacktivists who have been crawling out of the past to forestall the future by any means necessary -- as conspirators in that long-distance crime. Koch just dropped a cool million on Valero and Tesoro's Proposition 23 efforts to wind back the clock on California's green revolution. You're welcome.

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The primary funders of Prop. 23 "are among the nation's biggest polluters, and their California oil refineries are among the top ten polluters in our state," argues the No On 23 committee's fact-sheet. "The fine print in Prop. 23 reveals their plan is to kill 's standards by prohibiting them from being enforced unless unemployment drops to a fixed level that has rarely ever been achieved."

However, the numbers that have been achieved in the name of Proposition 23 are alarming. Out of the over $8 million in contributions the proposers have rustled up so far, 97 percent comes from oil interests, 89 percent has seeped in from outside of California, and 80 percent has come from Valero, Tesoro and Koch. Those instructive statistics alone prove it is not "the people" who want AB 32 killed in mid-stride, it's the corporations, and very few others.

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And after all, how much can you trust a company like Koch, which has been faithfully funding climate change deniers for years, to operate, however remotely, in the public's interest? This is a company that has paid millions of dollars in fines for illegally dumping hazardous waste from the Mississippi River to Texan lakes and beyond. Its subsidiary Flint Hill Resources, which supplied Proposition 23 with its cool million, was forced to pay a $200,000 civil penalty for illegally exporting oil to Canada without government authorization, and thousands more for 10 separate violations of the Clean Air Act. Talk about lunatics running the asylum.
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I'm anti-Baron

pro healing the earth

[Johonny]

1. I hate the California Prop system