When the eighth largest economy in the world establishes a landmark greenhouse gas emissions cap, you can bet oil companies are going to try to find a way to knock it down for one reason: money.

When the eighth largest economy in the world establishes a landmark greenhouse gas emissions cap, you can bet oil companies are going to try to find a way to knock it down for one reason: money.

A new report shows the motivation behind one Texas oil giant’s crusade against California’s landmark greenhouse emissions law: big profits from price gouging of drivers.

The report by Consumer Watchdog’s Oilwatchdog.org project shows Californians have endured higher gasoline prices than the rest of the nation while Texas-based Valero  has averaged 37% higher margins on each barrel of oil it refined in California.  The result — $4.5 billion in profits.

That type of price gouging is apparently too profitable a gold rush to threaten with competition from a Green Tech energy sector, which is why Valero is the principle funder behind California Proposition 23. The November ballot measure freezes the state’s greenhouse gas cap until unemployment all but vanishes.

The irony is that Green Tech is the job creation engine of the state, making California tops for green collar jobs in the nation.

Environmentalists have been fighting Proposition 23 on the basis that dirty Texas oil companies want to keep polluting in the state. The bigger truth is that they want to keep price gouging the state’s motorists, and Proposition 23 is a tool to allow the refiners to continue to charge too much for gasoline and make too much profit per gallon. It’s all about dollars and cents per gallon.

According to Consumer Watchdog’s report:

*  Valero’s net refining margins in California have been 37% higher per barrel than those from its refineries in other regions since 2002.

*  Profits have been highest in California for the company during periods of steadily rising gasoline prices; Valero earned more than $1 billion in California refining profits in 2006 alone.

*  Higher than average gasoline prices in the West, created by artificially low supplies during periods of high demand, have been Valero’s recipe for big profits.

Valero’s ability to exact outsized profits from California depends on high pump prices because, unlike integrated oil companies like Chevron, it doesn’t extract crude oil, it only refines oil and sells its products at retail gas stations.  This means that refining margins are central to its profits.

During the recession, Valero has been selling off refineries in the Northeast, but has held onto its California refineries with the expectation that it will resume getting outsized California profits by keeping refined gas supplies tight and charging high prices for gasoline in the state.  

The ability to tighten gas supplies in California – a key component of the price gouging  – will be limited by new environmental rules that support green alternatives to oil and less dependence on gasoline in California. Voters are not yet ready to scrap the greenhouse gas law, but Valero is making it’s run at their hearts and minds — arguing jobs will be lost if the environmental rules take effect.

Californians need to follow the money, all the way to Texas. That says everything about why Valero is backing Proposition 23.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

If you think the Tea Party represents real people who are mad as hell about real issues, you might want to know that it just had its first rally under the Beverly Hills sign over the weekend.

I found out about the rally when I showed up for a 10 o’clock news debate and singer Pat Boone was on the other side dressed in his “Beverly Hills Tea Party” sweater. If you want to know what the Tea Party’s really about, listen to Boone croon about the “free market” and “deregulation” like it’s a new idea.

If you think the Tea Party represents real people who are mad as hell about real issues, you might want to know that it just had its first rally under the Beverly Hills sign over the weekend.

I found out about the rally when I showed up for a 10 o’clock news debate and singer Pat Boone was on the other side dressed in his “Beverly Hills Tea Party” sweater. If you want to know what the Tea Party’s really about, listen to Boone croon about the “free market” and “deregulation” like it’s a new idea.

The patriotic Americans who dressed up like Henry Lee at the rally want us to remember the founding father’s cautions about government power, but their agenda in 2010 is only to turn back the clock to Reagan era deregulation and the Wild West free market that brought us the financial meltdown.  

You have to be a wearing a Beverly Hills Tea Party sweater to be able to say the free market will save us with a straight face–just watch Boone do it.

The sad thing is that these angry people are being taken advantage of by old boy petroleum magnates like the Koch brothers who are simultaneously funding the Tea Party and trying to repeal California’s greenhouse emissions cap. Boone says he never heard of them. I don’t think he’s lying, but that means his head is stuck so far into the landscaping behind his mansion that he can’t see beyond its wrought iron gates.

He’s certainly not seeing what the rest of us are: good people who can’t find a job and are living out of their cars with no food to eat or other shelter to sleep in. All thanks to deregulation on Wall Street. Only the government can help them, but the Tea Party wants to straightjacket it so that it can no longer act to lend a helping hand.

Across America the Tea Party may look like Main Street, but in Beverly Hills you can see where its plan will take us: back to Reagan, Pat Boone, and the policies that play to the interests of folks who can afford homes and office space near Rodeo Drive.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

When Californians angry about oil companies’ attempt to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas emission cap went to confront the oil refiner  behind Prop 23’s power play, they found the Tea Party in their way.

When Californians angry about oil companies’ attempt to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas emission cap went to confront the oil refiner  behind Prop 23’s power play, they found the Tea Party in their way.

What’s an angry populist movement that’s supposed to represent real people doing defending oil companies?

It’s a question the New York Times could have answered in its otherwise excellent editorial today, The Brothers Koch and AB 32. Petroleum magnates Charles and David Koch fund both Prop 23’s greenhouse gas cap repeal and The Tea Party.

While the Tea Party is voicing authentic anger, the money fueling it is coming from petroleum magnates who simply want to profit and pollute at the expense of the rest of us. The Tea Party in California has become Big Oil’s army. Not very populist to me.

If you believe Kansas oil and gas tycoons want to save California jobs through Prop 23, you might as well join The Tea Party. I debated a Tea Party pooh-bah on LA’s NPR station KPCC yesterday. All there is when you strip away the angry talk is a Reagan-Bush plan to deregulate everything.  

That’ why Consumer Watchdog is airing a JumboTron advertisement in Times Square, the largest public square in America, that raises the question: “Are You Mad As Hell? But Think The Tea Party Is Insane?”

The commercial, created by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, calls upon those who believe in progress to use their anger to get the change they voted for. It is insane to let oil companies repeal greenhouse gas emissions caps, and it’s insane to turn the reins of government over to people who would destroy it.

Progressives need to start speaking up and raising some hell. The power of the government is our collective will to deal with the corporate abuses at the heart of the 2008 election. We cannot allow the Tea Party or anyone else to exploit the public’s anger in order to rob us of our ability to deal with the corporate greed and corruption that pisses us off most.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

The Tea Party is on a roll with its upset Senate primary victory in Delaware.  If the rest of us don’t start raising hell, the Tea Party will have us living it.

Are you mad as hell but don’t want to join the Tea Party?  Do you still want to get the change you voted for in 2008?  That’s most Americans, but the right wing is the only wing talking about its anger.

Public outrage is the most powerful force in the world if you know how to leverage it and turn it into power. That’s why I wrote The Progressive’s Guide To Raising Hell, published today by Chelsea Green, to show average Americans how their common anger can be turned into power using the force of public opinion online and offline.  

Award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald made this short video about Raising Hell and its battle-proven, step-by-step tactics that artfully sums up the book’s essence.

I have spent two decades fighting and winning campaigns against insurance companies, Big Oil, utilities, banks, and corrupt politicians. The tactics of turning anger into change are the same regardless of whether you are trying to win a Senate primary, pass a ballot measure or get an insurer to pay a claim.

Change is no simple matter in America politics, as Americans have recently learned so well.

Elections rarely produce the change they promise because too often ballot victories leave intact the ways power is exercised, and on whose behalf. The special interests that fund and curry favor with our legislators may rebalance their party allegiances, but not their self-interest.

Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change. As things grow worse and worse, public rage grows more intense–and so does the energy for making things better.  And in 2010 in America, anger rules, but it needs to be vectored and focused if it is to succeed in fueling the type of change that the majority of Americans believe in.

If progressives walk away, rather than engage, the Tea Party and GOP will capture the popular anger and turn it against government, rather than focus it rightly back on the targets of the 2008 election: Wall Street, health insurers, polluters, the military industrial complex, and the politicians they buy. If we want progress, the kind that polls show 60 percent of Americans believe in, we need to do more than vote every two to four years or wait for Obama to learn the tactics of confrontation.  

We need to make demands. We need to raise some hell. The alternative is giving up the reins of government to a flash mob that wants to do nothing but destroy it.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.