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marathon petroleum
The Cleveland Guardians Are Wearing the Wrong Logo On Their Sleeves
Guardians, by definition, protect and preserve. The company that paid for their shoulder patches, Marathon Petroleum, does the exact opposite, posing a major threat to public health and the environment.
Aug 10, 2024
A few weeks ago, I drove to Baltimore to see my favorite boyhood baseball team for the first time since it changed its name to the Guardians, and I noticed something jarring about their uniforms. No, I’m not talking about see-through pants. I’m talking about the patch on their sleeves bearing the logo of a company whose business is antithetical to the meaning of the team’s new moniker.
Guardians, by definition, protect and preserve. The company that paid for that patch, Marathon Petroleum, does the exact opposite, posing a major threat to public health and the environment. The country’s largest oil refiner with more than 7,000 Marathon and Arco gas stations nationwide, it ranks among the country’s top 50 air and water polluters as well as the top 20 carbon polluters, according to a 2023 report by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Since 2014, the Findlay, Ohio-based company and its subsidiaries have been fined more than $900 million for federal environmental violations. Guardians they are not.
The fact that the Guardians now wear Marathon’s logo may not be news to Clevelanders, but it was to me. My current hometown team, the Washington Nationals, has not rushed to cash in on the sleeve logo craze that began last year after a 2022 labor contract allowed teams to add advertising patches to their uniforms, so I hadn’t been paying attention. Besides the Nike swoosh that has adorned the front of all MLB team jerseys since 2020, 17 MLB teams are now wearing jersey patches from corporations ranging from grocery chains and electronics firms to insurance businesses and energy companies.
Marathon Petroleum partnered with the Guardians because it wants baseball fans to think it’s a good corporate citizen. It is most definitely not.
To be sure, the Guardians are not the only team that has inked an oil patch deal. The Houston Astros (Oxy Energy), Kansas City Royals (QuikTrip), and Texas Rangers (Energy Transfer) also now display oil industry logos on their sleeves. Unlike Marathon Petroleum, however, only Oxy Energy—formerly Occidental Petroleum—and Energy Transfer are among the PERI’s top 50 air, water, and carbon polluters, and only in one category each. Based on 2021 data, Oxy Energy was the 35th biggest air polluter and Energy Transfer was the 34th biggest carbon polluter.
Marathon Petroleum, meanwhile, ranks as the nation’s 48th biggest toxic air pollution emitter, worse than Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company; the 25th biggest water polluter, worse than Chevron and Phillips 66; and the 18th biggest carbon polluter, worse than BP, Chevron, and Koch Industries. Despite its pitiful performance, the company maintains on its website that it is “committed to minimizing [its] environmental impact.”
Beyond its abysmal environmental record, Marathon Petroleum has played a key role in efforts to undermine federal climate-related regulations. In 2018, the company spearheaded a covert campaign to roll back U.S. fuel economy standards, disingenuously arguing that the country produces so much oil that it no longer has to worry about conserving it. If the campaign had been successful, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would have increased by as much as 931 million metric tons by 2035, more than the annual emissions of many midsize countries.
Marathon Petroleum’s logo also enjoys prime placement in the Guardians’ ballpark, which I first noticed when I caught an Orioles-Guardians game in Cleveland on cable earlier this month. A large Marathon logo sits below the baseline between home and first, a half-dozen logos are stacked on a padded column in front of the team’s dugout, and Marathon ads have been rotating through on computer-generated TV-visible signage behind home plate since the company became a Guardians’ corporate sponsor in 2021.
Corporations advertise with sports teams for two main reasons: to build trust and increase exposure. According to a 2021 Nielsen “Trust in Advertising” study, 81% of consumers completely or somewhat trust brands that sponsor sporting events, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. Jersey patches especially attract attention. Nielsen estimates that the average value of the live broadcast exposure a patch sponsor will receive over a full regular baseball season will exceed $12.4 million.
Marathon Petroleum partnered with the Guardians because it wants baseball fans to think it’s a good corporate citizen. It is most definitely not. The Guardians should find a more suitable sponsor when the company’s contract runs out at the end of the 2026 season—one that protects and preserves, not one that endangers public health and the future of the planet.
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Oil Giant Ran 1977 Article Linking Climate Change to 'Widespread Starvation'
"Pestilence, starvation, drought. To know one's product may bring that about, and bury the evidence, is unspeakable,” an expert said.
Jul 18, 2024
A Marathon Oil Company magazine from 1977 predicted that rising temperatures caused by industrial activity could one day lead to "widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities," The Guardianreported on Thursday.
The revelation comes as Big Oil faces a number of lawsuits for covering up its knowledge about climate change, propagating disinformation, and blocking a green transition.
Marathon Petroleum, the largest oil refinery company in the U.S. and a major spin-off of Marathon Oil Company, is among the defendants in one of the most prominent of those cases, City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco et al. The city of Honolulu alleges that Big Oil engaged in a coordinated effort to "conceal and deny their own knowledge" of the impact of burning fossil fuels.
The company magazine, Marathon World, featured the 1977 article, titled "World Weather Watch." Summarizing the work of federal climate scientists, the unnamed author suggested that "industrial expansion during the last century may be affecting the weather through carbon dioxide pollution."
Observers of the fossil fuel industry on Wednesday indicated that the 1977 article fit with a larger pattern of Big Oil's early knowledge of climate change.
"I'm not surprised that Marathon would have documents that shed light on its awareness," Bryant Sewell, a research analyst at the corporate watchdog Majority Action, told The Guardian. "Whether it's Marathon, Exxon, or electric utilities, we have seen a longstanding strategy from these companies of climate denial, disinformation, and delay."
Timmons Roberts, a climate disinformation expert based at Brown University, reacted strongly to the article when The Guardian shared a copy with him.
"Pestilence, starvation, drought," he said. "To know one's product may bring that about, and bury the evidence, is unspeakable.”
It wasn't just Exxon and Shell tracking climate science decades ago.
I found a 1977 company mag from Marathon Oil predicting the climate crisis could cause 'widespread starvation.'
Marathon is now largest oil refiner in US.
My latest in @guardian https://t.co/Y6whc3q2Vd
— Geoff Dembicki (@GeoffDembicki) July 18, 2024
The 1977 article was uncovered by Guardian contributor Geoff Dembicki, an investigative journalist and author of the 2022 book The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change. Dembicki told Common Dreams that he found the article in an archive and it's not available online.
The Marathon article quotes J. Murray Mitchell, a leading climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who warned in the 1970s that carbon dioxide levels could threaten the polar ice caps and have devastating consequences for humankind, as well as other climate experts. However, it also puts forth other possible causes for changes in climate and weather patterns which have since been debunked, according to Dembicki.
Marathon Petroleum, which is in the process of merging with rival ConocoPhillips, hasn't received as much scrutiny for its historical role in climate denialism as Exxon and Shell, two companies that, as Dembicki put it, "privately studied catastrophic climate risks starting in the 1970s and then led public relations and advertising campaigns to undermine the science."
Yet the company, which owns 13 oil refineries and more than 6,000 gas stations in the U.S. and had a net income of nearly $10 billion in 2023, has received scrutiny for more recent events. It was the subject of a 2019-2020 Congressional investigation into a covert industry effort to push the Trump administration to roll back vehicle efficiency standards, following a New York Timesexposé. A group of senators, including Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), called Marathon "one of the most anti-climate companies" in an open letter at the time.
Whitehouse is among the lawmakers pushing the Department of Justice to investigate Big Oil disinformation, which could potentially lead to a federal lawsuit akin to the one previously brought against Big Tobacco. Dozens of cities and states, including Honolulu, have already filed such suits.
The lawsuits face bitter opposition from Big Oil. Industry interests have mounted an unusually public campaign to get the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the Honolulu case, which could be the first climate lawsuit against Big Oil to reach a jury trial.
The majority of Americans support legal accountability for Big Oil for its role in creating the climate crisis, a Data for Progress poll from May showed. Roughly half of Americans even support criminal charges, which have not yet been pursued anywhere in the world, though a case file has been opened in France.
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Thousands Evacuated After Chemical Leak and Massive Fire at 'Cancer Alley' Oil Refinery
"Such events are an all-too-common and exceptionally dangerous reality for those living within fossil fuel and petrochemical 'sacrifice zones,'" observed one researcher.
Aug 25, 2023
A mandatory evacuation was ordered for thousands of people living within a two-mile radius of a Marathon Petroleum refinery in Louisiana's so-called "Cancer Alley" after a chemical leak and massive fire broke out at a storage tank there on Friday.
The temporary evacuation order, which Marathon Petroleum called "precautionary," followed a leak of naphtha—a hazardous and highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture—and blaze at the refinery in Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish, located about 45 miles upriver from New Orleans.
About 8,660 people live within two miles of the refinery, according to Nola.com. One of them, 42-year-old Lashonda Melancon, said she was trying to figure out where to go with her 14-year-old daughter.
"I've got asthma bad and this is not good for me," she said.
People living near the refinery said flames could be seen dozens of feet in the air. The smoke plume from the disaster was visible from outer space.
Marathon Petroleum said in a statement: "The release and fire are contained within the refinery's property and there have been no injuries. As a precaution, air monitoring has been deployed in the community. No off-site impacts have been detected. All regulatory notifications have been made."
However, contained does not mean controlled—the latter means extinguished—and Marathon Petroleum spokesperson Justin Lawrence said the company did not know when the blaze would be put out.
Operational since 1977, the 200,000-barrel-per-day facility is the newest oil refinery in the United States. Marathon Petroleum's three biggest shareholders are the Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, and Blackrock, private equity firms that have come under fire for financing fossil fuel expansion during a worsening climate emergency.
In May, Reutersreported there had been 13 U.S. refinery fires in 2023, the majority of them along the Gulf Coast.
St. John the Baptist Parish is located in what's known as Cancer Alley or Death Alley, a swath of predominantly Black parishes—the Louisiana equivalent of counties—between New Orleans and Baton Rouge containing nearly 150 oil refineries and plastics and chemical plants, many of them located along or near the Mississippi River.
In neighboring St. James Parish, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported an 800% cancer hazard increase due to petrochemical facilities in the parish between 2007 and 2018.
The area is also known as a "sacrifice zone," or place where polluting industrial facilities are built in close proximity to residents—usually people of color or those with low income.
Responding to the disaster, Antonia Juhasz, senior fossil fuel researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote on the social platform formerly known as Twitter that "such events are an all-too-common and exceptionally dangerous reality for those living within fossil fuel and petrochemical 'sacrifice zones.'"
Anne Rolfes, executive director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a frontline community advocacy group, said in a statement that "the petrochemical industry is here in Louisiana for one reason only: To make as much money as possible."
"As long as the state of Louisiana continues to look away from fires and mushroom clouds, these accidents will continue," she continued. "I have been dealing with this for nearly a quarter of a century. There are terrible accidents, workers are burned alive, and the state of Louisiana does nothing."
"Workers and residents are left to bear the brunt of the industry's negligence and predatory expansion that continue to jeopardize our health and safety," Rolfes added.
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