Die Jungfreisinnigen wollen das Rentenalter für beide Geschlechter auf 66 Jahre erhöhen und es anschliessend an die durchschnittliche Lebenserwartung koppeln. Damit müssten Angestellte mit tiefen und mittleren Einkommen noch länger arbeiten, während sich Top-Verdienende weiterhin früher pensionieren lassen können. Heute hat eine bürgerliche Mehrheit im Nationalrat die Initiative zurück in die Kommission geschickt. Die Absicht ist klar: SVP, FDP und GLP wollen das Rentenalter erhöhen. Dagegen wird sich die SP entschieden wehren. Es braucht nicht noch mehr Abbau, sondern eine Sicherung der Renten, um die Kaufkraft zu schützen. Deshalb setzt sich die SP auch für eine 13. AHV-Rente und gegen den Rentenabbau bei der Pensionskassenvorlage ein.
«Bereits heute gilt: Wer es sich leisten kann, geht früher in Pension. Das ist doppelt ungerecht, denn die Lebenserwartung von Menschen mit geringen Einkommen ist tiefer», sagt SP-Nationalrätin Barbara Gysi. «Die Situation für Rentner:innen spitzt sich aufgrund der hohen Inflation, der explodierenden Krankenkassenprämien und der vielfach nicht existenzsichernden Renten immer weiter zu», sagt SP-Nationalrätin Flavia Wasserfallen «In der Schweiz leben fast 200’000 Rentner:innen in Armut. Statt über eine weitere Abbauvorlage zu diskutieren, sollten wir endlich die AHV stärken.»
Die AHV ist das Herzstück der sozialen Sicherheit in der Schweiz. Sie stellt insbesondere für Frauen die wichtigste Säule der Altersvorsorge dar. Eine 13. AHV-Rente wäre ein effizientes, einfach umsetzbares Mittel, um den Kaufkraftverlust bei den Renten zu kompensieren. «Stattdessen wollen die Bürgerlichen jetzt das Rentenalter erhöhen – nachdem sie bereits bei der Pensionskassen-Vorlage einen Scherbenhaufen hinterlassen haben. Die SP wird beides entschieden bekämpfen», sagt Co-Präsidentin Mattea Meyer.
De Republica
Heidis Mist
Heidis Mist
Zazim
חלילה צריך לפנות לבית חולים בשעת חירום – שילוט יפנה אותך מיד למקום הנכון לקבלת טיפול מציל חיים. אבל עבור עיישה בת ה-80, שאסור לסבול מסיבוכי סוכרת, ועוד חמישית מאזרחי המדינה, זה לא:
רק לרבע מבתי החולים יש שילוט בערבית והגישה לטיפול רפואי מוגבלת מאוד. עמותת סייק-אופוק פועלת בנושא זה ופתחה בעצומה באתר „זוזים בקהילה“ ליצירת לחץ ציבורי.
, חתמו עכשיו על העצומה להכנסת שילוט בערבית בכל בתי החולים – זה צודק ונכון – וזה יכול להציל חיים:
לחתום על העצומה
יש כבר הוראה ממשרד הבריאות להציב שלטים בעברית, ערבית ואנגלית בכל מכוני הבריאות. עם זאת, בתי החולים אינם מיישמים את המדיניות ומשרד הבריאות אינו עוקב אחר הנושא.
עכשיו הגיע הזמן להציג אלטרנטיבה אזרחית של שותפות וסולידריות מול ממשלה שמנסה לרמוס את החברה הערבית. בואו נתפוס את מינויו של שר בריאות חדש ונבקש ממנו לעשות את הדבר הנכון ולהיות שר הבריאות של כולם – לחצו כדי להוסיף את שמכם לעתירה:
לחתום על העצומה
ל-Sichi-Opok יש רקורד ארוך ומוצלח בקרבות דומים. רק לפני מספר שנים הובילה סייקיק-אופוק, יחד עם קואליציה של ארגונים נוספים, בהצלחה מאבק למען שילוט בערבית בתחבורה הציבורית. זה היה מאבק ארוך, אבל נחישות אזרחית ניצחה.
שם פרטי, בואו נעזור להם לנצח שוב הפעם – למען שוויון, שותפות ולמען הבריאות של כולנו:
לחתום על העצומה
נחוש בדעתו,
אמל וכל צוות זזים – גוני, ראלוקה, יונתן, ענת וסרוג‘
נ.ב – סיכוי – אופוק פתחו את הקמפיין באתר שלנו, הסתובבו בקהילה. גם לכם יש רעיון לקמפיין שחשוב לכולנו? לחץ כאן
SP Schweiz
MEDIENEINLADUNG: Medienkonferenz – Armut ist kein Verbrechen!
Sehr geehrte Medienschaffende
Die Sozialhilfe ist das letzte Netz zum Schutz vor Armut in unserem Land. Sie garantiert Menschen in einer Notsituation das Existenzminimum. Doch seit der Verschärfung des Ausländergesetzes im Jahr 2019 droht Personen ohne Schweizer Pass die Ausweisung, wenn sie auf Sozialhilfe angewiesen sind. Um dies zu verhindern, hat eine breite Allianz die Petition «Armut ist kein Verbrechen» lanciert. Damit wird die gleichnamige parlamentarische Initiative unterstützt, die eine Änderung der aktuellen Gesetzgebung in diesem Bereich fordert. Der Ständerat wird am 12. Juni darüber beraten. Im Vorfeld der Behandlung wird die Allianz die Petition dem Parlament übergeben.
Wir laden Sie gerne ein:
Donnerstag, 8. Juni 2023, 13.15 Uhr
Konferenzsaal, Medienzentrum Bundeshaus, Bundesgasse 8-12, Bern
Im Anschluss an die Medienkonferenz wird die Petition der Bundeskanzlei übergeben. Die Einreichung wird auf der Terrasse des Bundeshauses stattfinden. Die Medienschaffenden sind neben der Medienkonferenz auch zur Einreichung eingeladen.
An der Medienkonferenz nehmen teil:
- Andreas Lustenberger, Mitglied Geschäftsleitung Caritas Schweiz
- Samira Marti, Nationalrätin (SP/BL), Vizepräsidentin der SP-Fraktion
- Benjamin Roduit, Präsident von ARTIAS und Nationalrat (Mitte/VS)
- Christoph Eymann, Präsident der SKOS und alt Nationalrat (LDP/BS)
Aus organisatorischen Gründen bitten wir Sie um eine Anmeldung an medien@spschweiz.ch. Für Rückfragen: Lena Allenspach, Mediensprecherin SP Schweiz, lena.allenspach@spschweiz.ch.
Wir freuen uns, Sie an unserer Medienkonferenz begrüssen zu dürfen.
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
Im Namen der Allianz,
SP Schweiz
Dokument
DeSmog
‘Fire Weather’ Author Recounts Alberta Wildfire Disaster in Terrifying Detail
The costliest disaster in Canadian history took place in May 2016, when a vicious wildfire swept through Fort McMurray, forcing roughly 90,000 people to evacuate a city at the heart of Alberta’s oil sands industry. Seven years later, out-of-control wildfires once again threaten the province, forcing tens of thousands out of their homes and causing air quality warnings across the Western U.S. and Canada — the smoke was even visible all the way in New York City.
Vancouver-based author John Vaillant knows better than most the ultimate causes of these disasters and the lifelong impacts they have on communities. His new book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which comes out June 6, tells the story of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in horrific, page-turning detail. He sees that inferno, and the current western Canadian blazes, as the inevitable result of an economic system reliant on petroleum energy — as well as political leaders, such as newly-elected Alberta premier Danielle Smith, who seem willfully blind to the dangers of a changing climate.
My interview with Vaillant, the highly celebrated author of previous bestsellers The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Geoff Dembicki: What’s your reaction to seeing all of these out-of-control wildfires in Alberta right now?
John Vaillant: These conditions are almost identical to the conditions that set up the Fort McMurray catastrophe. There are two things that are really heavy for me. I know from researching this book that people really suffer and they’re deeply wounded by the experience of evacuating from a wildfire. It’s not over when you move back in. In a way, you can never really trust again. And that’s a terrible kind of uncertainty to have. And most of us are lucky not to have it. When those people see smoke or smell something funny, they go to a different place psychologically than the rest of us.
There’s the physical damage, the psychic damage and then the collateral damage to all the people who witness it. Think of the firefighters who go into a neighborhood and there’s no way to save it. All they can do there is help people run away. The job that they’re trained to do, that they take pride in, that they’re paid to do, they can’t do it because the fire is too big to fight with.
And with residential fires there are tons of petroleum products of all kinds vaporizing. So people are being poisoned. It’s not just wood smoke. It’s serious chemicals. My understanding from interviews I did with firefighters following the 2016 Fort McMurray fire is most of them are resigned to the fact that their lives are shorter now as a result of several weeks of exposure to toxic air.
Dembicki: People always seem to act surprised when these disasters hit, and yet the science has been telling us for years that climate change is making wildfires worse. What do you make of that?
Vaillant: The Fort McMurray fire, and these other fires we’re seeing in Alberta, are a microcosm. We have good data, we have good scientists, we have good forecasts. Then there comes a point where you’re just going about your business, going to school, going to work, and an hour and a half later houses are burning down. Right now evacuations are underway in Alberta. It’s poignant and maddening. I’m really angry because all this was avoidable.
Dembicki: I imagine many readers of your book would be surprised to learn that the first oil sands company was warned about climate change in the 1950s. Why didn’t executives act on this information?
Vaillant: I think you can be told all kinds of stuff and you still can’t believe it until it’s in your face. That’s not all necessarily malicious. I really think there are limitations to human cognition and human psychology. We have not evolved to be able to meaningfully anticipate futures that are really dissonant to what we’re used to.
And so I think, you know, when atomic bomb inventor Edward Teller told the oil and gas industry about the greenhouse gas effect in 1959, executives maybe thought, ‘he’s a genius but he’s also kind of a nut bar, wanting to make these crazy bombs. He’s got some theory about CO2 and ice caps, but you know, that’s not going to happen in my lifetime. And there’s no way my little operation up in Fort McMurray is going to make a difference globally.’ I really think you could rationally, reasonably persuade yourself of that.
But then there’s this other component that is really crucial. There’s this almost kind of psychotic dovetailing of the capitalist impulse with Old Testament Genesis-level entitlement. And when you get evangelical Christianity and libertarianism and capitalism in the same room together, really dangerous scary things happen. Because people get this kind of single-minded righteous fervor. It’s this idea that the capitalist model is a righteous one and that it has its own laws and you have to trust the laws with an almost blind faith.
Dembicki: When the Fort McMurray fire happened it was considered extremely controversial to link that to climate change. But now there’s a study showing that historic carbon pollution from top fossil fuel companies is responsible for over a third of wildfire burn zones across the western U.S. and Canada. Has our understanding of these disasters changed?
Vaillant: Oh, it absolutely has. Certainly in the scientific community that is not captive to some aspect of the petroleum industry, people are clearly seeing the connection. Obviously, there are plenty of people in Alberta who are concerned about climate, who have some understanding of the science. But as far as the powers that govern the province, they are still heavily influenced by oil and gas.
For the rest of the world that is not bound by those constraints, it’s abundantly clear, especially if you talk to any hydrologists or scientists, that the forest has been drying out since the 1950s. We’re already seeing measurable climate change. Glaciers have been in retreat since 1900. We have to be honest with ourselves and I think most people are prepared to do that.
But for people who are dependent on the petroleum industry, that can create a dissonance. It’s very uncomfortable when your whole financial picture is dependent on this industry. In Fort McMurray and the Alberta oil patch, you play with the team. You don’t ask too many questions and you work hard, work overtime and get rewarded — that is, until you’re laid off, or worse.
John Vaillant will be launching Fire Weather at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on June 6 at 7 p.m. See more events.
The post ‘Fire Weather’ Author Recounts Alberta Wildfire Disaster in Terrifying Detailappeared first on DeSmog.
DeSmog
Princeton Maps Reveal US Plans for Massive CO2 Pipeline Buildout
I have been calling the carbon capture CO2 pipeline buildout plan a “publicly-funded sewer system for the fossil fuel industry” for some time. In fact it’s their only lifeline, and in the meantime it’s also really good for greenwashing and TV ads.
A reality check is in order. New analysis here of a major report published by Princeton in 2020-21 reveals a “blueprint” for cutting carbon emissions that includes a Trans-Alaska Pipeline sized transmission pipeline running from New Jersey to Georgia and two or three 48 inch diameter pipelines running in tandem, for hundreds of miles, down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and across the south.
The Princeton mapping exercises have no apparent consideration of people who happen to be in the way. They are aimed at the cheapest solution, the least-cost, shortest distance between two points the pollution source and the dump. The CO2 pipeline buildout is shaping up to be the biggest environmental justice insult ever. Because where will these pipelines be built? Through communities and over people’s land who don’t have the clout to stop them.
An unspoken global dilemma with the pipe dream of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is this: the carbon pollution coming out of smokestacks at power plants, refineries, chemical plants, cement kilns, steel mills, and ethanol plants is often nowhere near the proposed CO2 dumps – deep saline aquifers geologists have scoped out and where people theorize we can put the multi-gigaton CO2 genie back in the bottle.
Meanwhile, the concept of CCS has become a central to “Net Zero” pledges by corporations and governments around the world, including the Biden Administration. The notion has been around for over 50 years, but the legacy, viewed with unbiased goggles, is one of colossal project failures.
NOTE: This article is not detailing the many other problems with CCS – the massive buildout of new chemical facilities on top of old dirty industries in underserved communities, the wasted energy needed to execute the “capture” and compression of CO2, the massive quantities of new chemicals needed, the disposal of millions of gallons of toxic brine that must be pumped to the surface from the saline aquifers to make room for the CO2, to avoid causing earthquakes, and on and on. For more on those problems, see CarbonCaptureFacts and the Center for International Environmental Law for starters.
Here we are talking about a basic practical question: what would it take to build a “sewer system” big enough to handle the carbon dioxide that polluters are currently dumping for free in the atmosphere? What would that pipeline network look like in real life?
Princeton Net Zero America report 2020-21
Shortly after Biden won the Presidency, Princeton University published a 350 slide powerpoint deck and lots of data in a report called Net Zero America, a really ambitious piece of work to back up the Biden campaign pledges around climate change. It looks like an actual “plan” to overhaul our energy infrastructure and help decarbonize our economy, which is the goal.
The Net Zero America Report has a whole section on CO2 pipelines because of course you have to tackle this question if you are serious Princeton-level thinker. The Princeton modelers determined that we need system of pipelines totaling up to 68,972 miles (111,000 km) at a cost of $135 billion dollars by 2050. A JPMorgan analyst took a close look at the Princeton figures and concluded that the proposed massive buildout of CO2 pipeline and CCS infrastructure would unfortunately only capture 15% of current US greenhouse gas emissions:
In 2007, Lee Raymond, former ExxonMobil CEO, made a similar cynical point about the scale of effort that would be involved to build out CCS pipelines. Someone at Exxon had done the math 20 years ago. Speaking just about coal fired power plants, Raymond said:
“…if you tried to inject all the supercritical CO2 that came from all the coal-fired power plants you end up moving more liquids than the oil and gas industry moves today, just for CO2. So it is a huge, huge undertaking. And, again, people — this gets into a lot of the infrastructure issues, people just assume that that can happen. You can’t assume that’s going to happen. And the cost is going to be very, very significant.”
Nonetheless, the optimists at Princeton and CCS advocates in industry, academia and government envision an enormous amount of pipeline being installed in coming decades. Here are the Princeton maps of what needs to be done, downplaying it as smaller than natural gas infrastructure:
A Trans-Alaska Pipeline from New Jersey to Georgia?
What would this look like on the ground? How about for starters: an 800-mile 48″ pipeline down the East coast from New Jersey to Georgia, almost identical in size and length to the massive Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
Below is the route of that pipeline as proposed by Princeton University modelers in a 2021 report, starting north of Princeton, crossing the Delaware River, skirting the Philadelphia suburbs, sliding north of Baltimore, pretty close to Washington DC, the longest stretch in any state through Virginia, then through western North and South Carolina and into Georgia. Quite an ambitious line to draw on the map. In fact, the Princeton team did draw these lines by hand after mapping out the pollution sources. This “trunk line” pipeline would gather all the New England’s CO2 waste and pick up more from cement plants and other facilities along the way via smaller spur lines.
The price tag for just this stretch of pipeline is estimated to be $7 billion dollars (page 25 of Princeton report Annex). The purple line on the map below is from Princeton report depicts a 48-inch diameter pipeline roughly 800 miles long, from northern New Jersey down to central Georgia. For comparison, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is 800 miles long and 48 inches in diameter.
Double and Triple 48’s?
This caught our eye when the Princeton Net Zero America report was published during Biden’s first year in office. Some pipelines on their maps were depicted as massive bars, as in these snazzy diagrams (someone was working late at the Princeton lab). Upon closer inspection of the data, many of these theoretical “Transmission Pipelines” turn out to be two or three tandem 48 inch pipelines, laid side by side for hundreds of miles. The pipeline stretches are numbered on one of the maps and a table in the report list the proposed diameter of that pipe and number of tandem pipelines required, the estimated cost and other stats.
Annex I: CO2 Transport and Storage Infrastructure transition analysis
Annex I: CO2 Transport and Storage Infrastructure transition analysis
In fact, when Princeton scientists did the modeling, adding up the total volume of liquefied supercritical CO2 that would be amassed if these pollution sources were actually “captured,” their computers kicked out fantastical giant transmission pipelines that literally could never exist. So they had to go in and limit the computer to only produce 48-inch pipelines. In many cases this resulted in two or three 48 inchers to carry the volume.
If you look at the technicolor map above, the fat lines get really wide down the center of the country and really start crisscrossing in Louisiana. The scale of the line correlates to volume of CO2 being carried.
Proposed pipeline totals for Gulf states are staggering.
Louisiana
According to the Princeton Net Zero America data report (page 35) the bright blue lines slashing across the map through Louisiana rack up a total of 1,197 miles (1,926 km) of trunk lines, of mostly 48 inch pipe. That’s one and a half Trans-Alaska sized pipelines just in the state of Louisiana! The line drawn down from NE to SW is proposed three pipelines together, let’s call it a Triple 48 – imagine three side-by-side Trans-Alaska Pipelines. The right-of-way would have to be as wide as a highway. On top of the trunk lines, there would be another 1,132 miles (1,822 km) of “spur” lines, gathering carbon dioxide from polluters within Louisiana and from surrounding states. The total for the state is 2,329 miles (3,748 km) of CO2 pipelines to be built by 2040-50.
Mississippi
Stepping east into Mississippi, site of the horrific 2020 Satartia pipeline rupture, the Princeton report shows two trunk line arrays crossing through the state, one in the northwest corner parallel to the Mississippi River and one through the middle of the state east to west. The top one is the Triple 48 that goes into Louisiana. The east-west run picks up the waste CO2 from the 800-mile pipeline and other spurs and is listed as a Double 48 in the Princeton Report. The pipeline totals for Mississippi are 754 miles (1214 km) of trunk lines*, 1,594 miles (2,566 km) of spur lines for a total of 2,349 miles (3,780 km) CO2 pipelines in the state, to be built by 2040-50. That’s nearly a whole Trans-Alaska Pipeline worth of 48 inch pipeline just in Mississippi.
Alabama
Alabama is also laced with CO2 pipelines in the Princeton report. Most of the CO2 waste in these pipes would be from polluters far, far away. The pipeline totals for Alabama come to 416 miles (669 km) of trunk lines, 2,139 miles (3,443 km) of spur lines for a total of 2,556 miles (4,113 km) CO2 pipelines in the state, to be built by 2040-50.
Georgia
Georgia gets three-quarters of a Trans-Alaska Pipeline by virtue of the pipe carrying the carbon dioxide waste from the entire East Coast. Then that is joined by CO2 pipelines from Florida and spur lines north and south that feed into a Double 48 pipeline headed west. The pipeline totals for Georgia come to 563 miles (906 km) of trunk lines, 1,954 miles (3,144 km) of spur lines for a total of 2,517 miles (4,050 km) CO2 pipelines in the state, to be built by 2040-50.
Explore CO2 pipeline plans in other states
- Data for other states is available on this Princeton Net Zero data page. Go to Table 60 in the table of contents which looks like this:
- National
- Alabama
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District Of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
What about Europe?
This dilemma is global, not just in the United States. A 2020 report for CCS transportation infrastructure in Europe lays out a plan as if it’s feasible and used this map of possible pipeline routes and dump sites from a published 2011 paper.
Are there other US CO2 pipeline maps?
Good question. The Carbon Capture Coalition has published maps like the one below for years, in various pro-CCS reports, utilizing a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program called SimCCS. But there are never specifics about the size of the pipelines. The model does estimate cost per mile and seems to trace actual roads, highways, roads, and other rights-of-way.
We at the Climate Investigations Center sued the Biden White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) this year under the Freedom of Information Act to find out how the Administration is using the map below. In the spring of 2021, the CEQ penned a report to Congress that used an abridged version of this map instead of the Princeton maps, without no pipelines depicted in the East or West Coast states for some reason. The CEQ offered no explanation for why this map was chosen. We also sent public records requests to nearly every state and agency that we could think of, asking for any discussion of this infrastructure challenge. Contact us for more information at info@climateinvestigations.org.
The Department of Energy is still using both the Carbon Capture Coalition maps and the Princeton maps in reports such as the April 2023 Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Carbon Management that, with a straight face, posits “Different pipeline network configurations have been proposed by various studies, with 30,000 to 96,000 miles of pipeline expected to be required by 2050. (And remember, all this to only catch a small percentage of point source emissions.)
A February 2022 DOE report, called Carbon Capture, Transport, & Storage – Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment, came up with a scenario that requires 96,000 miles of pipelines. They apparently used Princeton’s data and limited the maximum size of the pipelines to just 30 inches. If you thought Triple 48’s were a problem, it would take about eight 30-inch pipelines to equal the volume of three 48’s.
Meanwhile, other advocates keep creating new maps from the Princeton maps. These images have a life of their own.
So what’s next?
The charge of the CCS brigade continues.
- Billions of dollars in grants are on the way out of the Department of Energy, specifically for CCS infrastructure buildout through funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.
- Three massive projects (Summit, Navigator, and Wolf Midstream) are being railroaded through in the Upper Midwest as local landowners and advocates put up a heroic fight that pits sanity and security against corporate greed.
- The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has proposed that new regulations on these pipelines are needed.
- Over 150 organizations just called for a moratorium on CO2 pipeline construction in the meantime.
Maybe someday the Triple 48 Inch Carbon Sewer will be a tourist attraction down in Louisiana! We doubt it. More likely to be long term liability for people living nearby and a 24/7 worry for first responders who serve to protect them.
The PHMSA report on Satartia, published one year ago, had this ominous warning to “communities in low-lying areas.” Uh, that would be most of us, especially near probable pipeline routes.
The post Princeton Maps Reveal US Plans for Massive CO2 Pipeline Buildout appeared first on DeSmog.
DeSmog
Effort to Give Oil Companies $97 Million Tax Break in Louisiana Halted
For the fifth time, a Louisiana lawmaker has introduced legislation to try to reduce the tax that fossil fuel firms pay on oil they produce in the state. The original version of the bill introduced by Rep. Phillip DeVillier this spring would have cost the state $97 million over the next five years, according to a Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office report.
“It’s just so much money,” said Rep. Mandie Landry, who voted against the bill in the House Committee on Ways and Means and again when it was before the full House. After it passed the House, the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee was scheduled to vote on the bill on May 22, but Rep. DeVillier voluntarily postponed the vote. DeVillier, who received more than $5,700 in donations from oil and gas interests last year, brought similar legislation four times between 2020 and 2022.
The latest bill, HB 172, would reduce the severance tax rate on oil from certain wells from 12.5 percent to 8.5 percent in one-half percent increments over seven years. Rep. DeVillier did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But at the House Ways and Means committee hearing in April, he said the legislation would bring more oil drilling because it would make Louisiana more competitive with the tax rates of other states. “I believe by lowering the rates we’re going to attract more businesses to come and produce oil here in Louisiana,” he said, adding that the increased production would bring more jobs.
While other states have lower severance tax rates for oil — Texas taxes oil at 4.6 percent — Louisiana charges companies less in property taxes and has lower corporate taxes. The state also has a generous tax exemption on horizontal drilling, allowing companies to avoid paying severance taxes on production for the first two years after the well is drilled. That tax exemption has allowed fossil fuel firms to dodge more taxes on natural gas than they pay in the state, according to an analysis by Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies. The state ranks third in the nation for producing natural gas and tenth for crude oil.
This year, Louisiana lawmakers have been trying to work out what to do with a budget surplus. But a financial cliff could be around the corner, in part due to a state sales tax scheduled to end in mid-2025, according to the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. The general fund, where state mineral revenue is directed, is used for higher education, health services, and public safety programs.
“At the end of the day, HB172 is an unnecessary and substantial transfer of wealth to a more-profitable-than-ever oil and gas industry at the expense of the state and our communities being considered as the state hurtles towards a fiscal cliff,” said Jackson Voss, the climate policy coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy. “Passing it would be deeply irresponsible.”
Analyses by the legislative auditor and Greg Upton, the interim executive director for the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies, found that projected increases in oil production stemming from the bill could not override the revenue losses the bill would have on the state and local governments. “In terms of the fiscal impact, I certainly think, and we did analysis on this, the amount of new activity is not going to be large enough to make the fiscal note zero,” Upton said at the committee hearing in April.
Landry too has doubts that lowering the oil severance tax would jump-start the oil and gas industry in the state again. In 1964, mineral revenues in Louisiana made up nearly 60 percent of the state’s budget. But the industry’s contributions to the state have continued to fall, making up less than 5 percent of the state’s budget in 2022, according to Upton’s presentation.
“Oil and gas ran the Capitol for a long time,” Landry said. “It’s not coming back like all these people want.”
Legislation introduced by DeVillier to lower the state’s severance tax on oil has passed the Louisiana House twice — this year and in 2020. During a special legislative session held in 2020 to address Covid-19 response and hurricane recovery, Rep. Devillier introduced a different bill that would have suspended severance tax on certain oil production wells for up to two years. That bill, which was expected to cost the state up to $38 million in revenue over a five year period, passed the House and Senate before it was vetoed by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
“During a legislative session wrought with limited access for the public to meaningfully comment on bills, proponents of this new exemption averred that the exemption would increase oil production and create jobs. Yet no legitimate evidence or testimony supports this assertion, other than the testimony of those with a vested interest through enactment of a new exemption,” Edwards wrote in his veto of the 2020 bill.
In mid-May, the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee attempted to offset lost revenue from HB 172 by proposing to decrease the horizontal drilling tax exemption. In response, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, which has ranked DeVillieramong its “Most Valuable Policymakers,” announced that it had switched its position from being in support of the bill to opposing the legislation. “In its current form, while lowering the fiscal note, the bill would subsidize one sector of the energy industry at the expense of another,” the lobbying group wrote in its weekly newsletter.
The following day, DeVillier pulled the bill from its Senate committee vote. The legislative session ends next week.
The post Effort to Give Oil Companies $97 Million Tax Break in Louisiana Haltedappeared first on DeSmog.
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