Big Oil giants are raking in massive profits while spending massively to defeat I‑1631

Seen those ads urg­ing a NO vote on Ini­tia­tive 1631, fea­tur­ing the likes of Chevron lawyer Rob McKen­na? They’re appear­ing on pret­ty much every com­mer­cial break on local tele­vi­sion sta­tions, and they’re paid for by a few extreme­ly wealthy oil com­pa­nies that real­ly don’t want to be held account­able for their pol­lut­ing ways — even though they’re flush with mon­ey. Lots and lots of mon­ey:

BP [for­mer­ly British Petro­le­um] has hailed its best quar­ter­ly prof­it in five years as it reaped the ben­e­fits of a high­er oil price as well as big­ger earn­ings from its stake in Rus­si­a’s Rosneft.

The UK-based oil giant said under­ly­ing replace­ment cost prof­it — its head­line earn­ings fig­ure — had more than dou­bled to $3.8bn (£3bn) in the third quar­ter com­pared to last year.

Brent Crude prices aver­aged $75 a bar­rel dur­ing the July-Sep­tem­ber peri­od, up from $52 for the same quar­ter in 2017.

Ini­tia­tive 1631 is a pro­posed law cur­rent­ly being vot­ed on by the peo­ple of Wash­ing­ton State. It would put a price on pol­lu­tion begin­ning in 2020 and use the rev­enue raised to accel­er­ate our region’s tran­si­tion to clean ener­gy respon­si­bly and equi­tably. The mea­sure is sup­port­ed by a coali­tion of many hun­dreds of orga­ni­za­tions that includes the North­west Pro­gres­sive Institute.

The Yes on I‑1631 coali­tion is eas­i­ly one of the most diverse polit­i­cal coali­tions in state his­to­ry. It includes busi­ness­es like Microsoft, Expe­dia, and REI; unions like UFCW Local 21, SEIUHealth­care 775NW, AFSCME, and AFT-WA; envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions like the Nature Con­ser­van­cy, civic orga­ni­za­tions like the League of Women Vot­ers, hos­pi­tals, and health advo­ca­cy groups, plus news­pa­pers like The Olympian, The News Tri­bune of Taco­ma, The Her­ald of Everett, and The Stranger.

The NO on I‑1631 cam­paign is doing its best to astro­turf, but the PDC reports don’t lie. Pret­ty much all the mon­ey behind I‑1631 is com­ing from out of state oil com­pa­nies that own refiner­ies here and don’t want to have to pay for the pol­lu­tion they emit. It would detract from their mas­sive prof­its — and they don’t want that.

BP is by far the largest fun­der of the NO on I‑1631 cam­paign, hav­ing sup­plied near­ly $13 mil­lion to bring the clean ener­gy and clean water plan down. Eight years after BP wreaked hav­oc on the Gulf of Mex­i­co when it lost con­trol of its Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil rig, the com­pa­ny is back to mak­ing big bucks from its pol­lut­ing ways.

How­ev­er, BP isn’t the only Big Oil giant doing very, very well. The sec­ond largest con­trib­u­tor to NO on I‑1631, Philips 66, also had a boun­ti­ful third quar­ter.

Phillips 66 beat ana­lysts’ esti­mates for third-quar­ter prof­it on Fri­day, as it ben­e­fit­ed from high­er refin­ing mar­gins, send­ing shares of the inde­pen­dent oil refin­er up as much as 5.4 per­cent in late-after­noon trad­ing. Mar­gins for most inde­pen­dent U.S. refin­ers, which process­es heavy crude from coun­tries such as Venezuela and Cana­da to diesel, gaso­line and oth­er prod­ucts, have been boost­ed as U.S. crude’s dis­count to Brent widened to more than $10 a barrel.

Dit­to for Marathon Petro­le­um, the third largest NO on I‑1631 funder:

Marathon Petro­le­um Corp. made a prof­it of $737 mil­lion in the third quar­ter. The Find­lay-based refin­er released its earn­ings Thurs­day. For investors, the prof­it worked out to $1.62 per dilut­ed share, but was down 18 per­cent from the third quar­ter of 2017.

And Chevron, Rob McKen­na’s patron? Their prof­its are way up, like bigly:

What all these recent earn­ings reports tell us is this: All of these oil com­pa­nies can eas­i­ly afford to clean up their act… they just don’t want to. What they want is busi­ness as usu­al. Their ratio­nale for fight­ing I‑1631 can be summed up by vil­lain Lord Cut­ler Beck­et­t’s infa­mous mantra in the sec­ond and third Pirates of the Car­ribbean movies: It’s just… good busi­ness.

Big Oil can’t buy votes direct­ly because the law won’t allow that, so they’ve set­tled for the next best thing: Spend­ing record sums on ads to con­vince as many Wash­ing­to­ni­ans as pos­si­ble to doubt the wis­dom of invest­ing in a future that does­n’t involve burn­ing fos­sil fuels to gen­er­ate ener­gy for the Pacif­ic Northwest.

If we could eaves­drop on Big Oil’s lob­by­ists and the exec­u­tives they report to, we might hear them say­ing some­thing akin to Beck­et­t’s slo­gan when schem­ing against I‑1631, only tai­lored for 2018: Noth­ing against your clean ener­gy ambi­tions, Wash­ing­to­ni­ans. Defeat­ing 1631 is just… good busi­ness for us.

Big Oil does­n’t want I‑1631 to pass because they’re con­vinced it would be bad for their busi­ness. But what about our busi­ness? Specif­i­cal­ly, our busi­ness cli­mate here in this great green land known as Cas­ca­dia? Well, the truth is, pas­sage of I‑1631 will ben­e­fit our econ­o­my. I‑1631 makes invest­ments that will enable us to gen­er­ate ener­gy sus­tain­ably with­out pol­lut­ing our air and water to the degree we do today. That’s why com­pa­nies like Microsoft, Expe­dia, and REI have endorsed it. They under­stand we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to care for our com­mon home.

The future of the world econ­o­my also rests on efforts to fight the cli­mate cri­sis.

Big Oil? Their entire busi­ness mod­el is based on extract­ing the remains of decom­posed organ­isms, refin­ing them, and burn­ing them to cre­ate ener­gy. Big Oil exec­u­tives know that human­i­ty’s addic­tion to fos­sil fuels is caus­ing cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate dam­age and pol­lut­ing our air and water, but they don’t care. They’re too invest­ed in their ways to change. It seems they’d rather become fos­sils them­selves than dis­rupt (par­don the cliche) their own fos­sil fuels depen­dent busi­ness model.

With the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment under the con­trol of Big Oil’s hench­men, it’s up to the states to lead. Wash­ing­ton can take a big step for­ward for clean air and clean water this autumn by pass­ing this ground­break­ing initiative.

We have a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty to act.

As the old Native Amer­i­can proverb says, we do not inher­it the Earth from our ances­tors; we bor­row it from our chil­dren. We can­not leave a lega­cy of inac­tion and fail­ure for future gen­er­a­tions. Please join us in vot­ing YES on I‑1631.