“
Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible.
”
”
Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale)
“
All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
”
”
Joan Didion
“
Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.
”
”
Michael J. Behe (The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism)
“
And false hope is worse than no hope. That’s what I read on Refinery29 anyway.
”
”
Katy Brent (How to Kill Men and Get Away With It)
“
Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.
”
”
Joe Meno (The Boy Detective Fails)
“
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.
”
”
Annie Proulx
“
He couldn’t understand why union rules prevented him from helping others at the refinery, or allowed employees to sleep on the job and then complain at union meetings.
”
”
Gregory Zuckerman (The Frackers: The Inside Story of the New Wildcatters and Their Energy Revolution)
“
The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.
”
”
Mary Karr (The Liars' Club)
“
The liberal political system was shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries, and television sets. It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked.
”
”
Andrei Codrescu (New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City)
“
Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Most
”
”
David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)
“
Effective immediately all fuel, whether in possession of a refinery, a fuel wholesaler, or even your local gas station, is property of the United States government and will only be available to first responders and the military. He stated that all fuel sales to the public would be halted immediately and anyone caught selling fuel in violation of this Executive Order would be arrested.
”
”
Franklin Horton (Locker Nine (Locker Nine #1))
“
I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.
”
”
Joan Didion (Let Me Tell You What I Mean)
“
First Church of the Unleaded God & Ace High Refinery
WELCOME
KEEP OUT
”
”
Neal Barrett Jr.
“
The Hale [telescope] is a refinery for light.
”
”
Richard Preston
“
The beginning of Greater things starts as a seed. Passion, willingness to learn and tenacity is the key to rising above the average and the mediocre. Keep pushing and the refinery of life will bring out the Gold within you.
”
”
oscar bim
“
This is the deep-space commercial tug Nostromo, registration number one eight zero, two four six, en route to Earth with bulk cargo crude petroleum and appropriate refinery. Calling Antarctica traffic control. Do you read me? Over.
”
”
Alan Dean Foster (Alien)
“
The liberal political system has been shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries and television sets. It finds it difficult to deal with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
The air bit into your lungs because it was filled with poisonous gas escaping from the refineries. That sting in the air which made breathing so hard and unpleasant and choked your throat constantly meant that people were making money- much money.
”
”
B. Traven (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
“
Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1))
“
Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.
”
”
Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time)
“
In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.
”
”
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
“
I greet you jar of jam. You glass who once was sand upon the beach, Washed back and forth and bathed in foam and seagull cries, but who are formed into a glass until you once again return to the sea... I hardly give the computer a second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that's a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object. And yet I mean no disrespect for the diatoms and the marine invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make the case of my laptop or the cap of the aspirin bottle- but being mindful in the vast network of hyperindustrialized goods really gives me a headache. We weren't made for that sort of constant awareness. We've got work to do.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.
”
”
Philip Connors
“
By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction—at the very least, New England’s soil did not lend itself to large plantations—but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery: it still held slave auctions in the 1750s and was also linked through its sugar refineries to the West Indies. Even in the 1790s, one in five New York City households kept domestic slaves, a practice ubiquitous among well-to-do merchants who wanted cooks, maids, and butlers and regarded slaves as status symbols. (After
”
”
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
“
That was not all. When the Jamaican government wanted to buy the country’s oil refinery from an Exxon subsidiary, Marc Rich + Co lent it the money. The trading company even helped to fund Jamaica’s team at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and paid for it to send a bobsled team to participate in the 1988 Winter Olympics – whose unlikely journey to the Games was chronicled in the Disney film Cool Runnings.15
”
”
Javier Blas (The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources)
“
Petroleum was hard to sell because it was costly to transport by wagon and smelled terrible in its raw state. Refining it required moving it from Oil Creek to one of the many refineries, most of them small, that sprang up between Titusville and Pittsburgh. But swampy or frozen dirt trails slick with spilled oil played hell with caravans of up to one hundred wagons loaded with thousands of gallons of barreled oil.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
“
Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.
”
”
Marius Brill (Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart)
“
Even without its punitive tax, alcohol cost more to produce than gasoline, particularly since it lacked a supply chain from farm to refinery nearly as efficient as the pipelines and railroad cars of the Rockefeller-monopolized petroleum industry. (By 1882, the Standard Oil Trust controlled 85 percent of the world oil market, one reason the US Supreme Court in 1911 ordered it broken up.22) As with wood compared with coal in Elizabethan London, the cost of delivery disadvantaged alcohol compared with gasoline.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
“
Treating strategy like a problem in deduction assumes that anything worth knowing is already known—that only computation is required. Like computation, deduction applies a fixed set of logical rules to a fixed set of known facts. For example, given Newton’s law of gravity, one can deduce (calculate) the period of Mars’s orbit around the sun. Or given the costs and capacities of tankers, pipelines, and refineries, one can optimize the flow of oil and refined product within an integrated oil company. If everything worth knowing is already known, the problem of action reduces to crank winding.
”
”
Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
“
Each day it’s the same. Wake up. Get dressed. Ride through cheering crowds. Listen to a speech in our honour. Give a thank-you speech in return, but only the one the Capitol gave us, never any personal additions now. Sometimes a brief tour: a glimpse of the sea in one district, towering forests in another, ugly factories, fields of wheat, stinking refineries. Dress in evening clothes. Attend dinner. Train. During ceremonies, we are solemn and respectful but always linked together, by our hands, our arms. At dinners, we are borderline delirious in our love for each other. We kiss, we dance, we get caught trying to sneak away to be alone.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
“
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood of the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on a highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.
”
”
Annie Proulx (Close Range: Wyoming Stories)
“
Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk. But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation. Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black. Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments. Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel.
The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere.
The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported
in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the
”
”
Benny Morris (1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War)
“
The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.
”
”
Lee Sandlin (Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild)
“
The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 to maintain the control of the family’s oil empire. Today this foundation is the most important shareholder of Exxon with 4.3 million shares. Additionally, the foundation has two million shares in Standard Oil of California and 300.000 shares in Mobil Oil. Other smaller foundations belonging to the Rockefellers have three million shares in Exxon, and 400.000 shares in Standard Oil of Ohio. The total asset of this group of Rockefeller companies, amount to more than fifty billion dollars.[20] For a researcher who concentrates on the Rockefeller family, it won’t be difficult to prove that this immensely rich family has played an important role in the American politics of the twentieth century. The drift and decisions of American politics lead directly back to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers immigrated to America from Spain. The best-known member of this family was the influential industrialist, banker John Davidson Rockefeller. He asserted himself as the richest man of his time. Before going into oil transport, he was a wholesaler of narcotic drugs.[21] With an unbridled energy, he set up the Standard Oil Trust, which now possesses ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.[22] John Davidson Rockefeller also bought the Pocantico Hills territory in New York, which is the domicile of over a 100 families with the name Rockefeller. David Rockefeller, an absolute genius in the field of finances, has been managing Chase Manhattan Bank, the most important bank in the world, since 1945. The power of this bank is great enough to bring about or destroy governments, to start or end wars, and ruin companies or let them flourish worldwide, ultimately exerting great influence on the entire human race.
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
Open All Night"
(originally by Bruce Springsteen)
I had the carburetor cleaned and checked
With her line blown out, she's hummin' like a turbojet
Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks
For a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks
Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points
I'm goin' out tonight, I'm gonna rock that joint
Early north Jersey industrial skyline
I'm a all-set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime
Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone
This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you're all alone
Gotta hit the gas, baby, I'm runnin' late
This New Jersey in the mornin' like a lunar landscape
The boss don't dig me, so he put me on the nightshift
It takes me two hours to get back to where my baby lives
In the wee wee hours, your mind gets hazy
Radio relay towers, won't you lead me to my baby?
Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch
Goodnight, good luck, one two powershift
I met Wanda when she was employed
Behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy
Fried chicken on the front seat, she's sittin' in my lap
We're wipin' our fingers on a Texaco roadmap
I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill
With them big brown eyes that make your heart stand still
5 A.M., oil pressure's sinkin' fast
I make a pit stop, wipe the windshield, check the gas
Gotta call my baby on the telephone
Let her know that her daddy's comin' on home
Sit tight, little mama, I'm comin' round
I got three more hours, but I'm coverin' ground
Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours
Sun's just a red ball risin' over them refinery towers
Radio's jammed up with gospel stations
Lost souls callin' long distance salvation
Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer?
Hey ho rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere
Ryan Adams, Nebraska (2022)
”
”
Ryan Adams
“
Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems
that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense
power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing
education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human
civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally
random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress
and misery depression starvation and degradation are
inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage
of the population. The periods of economic stability also
ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom
and among the industrial Western democracies today despite
occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent
corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of
legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business
oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration
of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the
increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources
the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations
the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are
far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms
it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus
the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes
in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while
we may not admire always the personal motives of our business
leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the
good life as it comes down through our native American soil.
You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take
pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety
without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of
American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying
in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the
turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries
and no one will hurt you.
”
”
E.L. Doctorow
“
Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.”17 Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string. Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. “No,” said Cettie, “we will buy just one for all of them.” “But, my dear,” John protested, “tricycles do not cost much.” “That is true,” she replied. “It is not the cost. But if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”18 So the children shared a single bicycle. Amazingly enough, the four children probably grew up with a level of creature comforts not that far above what Rockefeller had known as a boy.
”
”
Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
“
In order of importance: 1. Self, 2. Marriage, 3. Child. Of course all are as important as each other, but neglecting the one before is a disservice to the one after.
- in an interview with Refinery 29
”
”
Jemima Kirke
“
How about,” Jane suggested, “some dumb question as to what a refinery does?” “Good idea,” fired back Col. “What does a refinery do?” Connie asked. Anneena and Col groaned.
”
”
Julia Golding (Secret of the Sirens)
“
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”
”
SRS Engineering Corporation ®
“
This single Koch refinery is now responsible for an estimated 25 percent of the 1.2 million barrels of oil the U.S. imports each day from Canada’s tar sands territories.” The Kochs’ good fortune, however, was the globe’s misfortune, because crude oil derived from Canada’s dirty tar sands requires far greater amounts of energy to produce and so is especially harmful to the environment.
”
”
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
By the 1920s, sugar refineries were producing as much sugar in a single day—millions of pounds—as would have taken refineries in the 1820s an entire decade. With
”
”
Gary Taubes (The Case Against Sugar)
“
the Koch brothers—owned virtually all of what had become under their leadership the second-largest private company in America. They owned four thousand miles of pipelines, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, the Georgia-Pacific lumber and paper company, coal, and chemicals, and they were huge traders in commodity futures, among other businesses. The company’s consistent profitability had made the two brothers the sixth- and seventh-wealthiest men in the world. Each was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2009. Charles, the elder brother, was a man of unusual drive, accustomed to getting his way. What he wanted that weekend was to enlist his fellow conservatives in a daunting task: stopping the Obama administration from implementing Democratic policies that the American public had voted for but that he regarded as catastrophic.
”
”
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
Fred Koch’s political views were apparently shaped by his traumatic exposure to the Soviet Union. Over time, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet acquaintances, giving him a firsthand glimpse into the murderous nature of the Communist regime. Koch was also apparently shaken by a steely government minder assigned to him while he worked in the Soviet Union, who threatened that the Communists would soon conquer the United States. Koch was deeply affected by the experience and later, after his business deals were completed, said he regretted his collaboration. He kept photographs in the company headquarters in Wichita aimed at documenting how the refineries he had built had later been destroyed.
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”
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
In 1997, for instance, the EPA moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of air pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, came up with a novel criticism of the proposed rule. The EPA, she argued, had not taken into account that by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution were controlled, it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
The sign over the gate read: First Church of the Unleaded God & Ace High Refinery WELCOME KEEP OUT
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John Joseph Adams (Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse)
“
What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.” In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.
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Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)
“
The Japanese had poured into Singapore, and the mighty British troops fell apart under the onslaught. Singapore surrendered in seven days, and thousands of British, Indian, and Australian troops were captured and sent to internment camps. “I hear a Japanese submarine even shelled an oil refinery near California! The Americans want to retaliate, but what can they do? They have navy aircraft carriers in Hawaii, but they don’t have long-range bombers to fly across to Tokyo and return to Hawaii.
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Weina Dai Randel (The Last Rose of Shanghai)
“
A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?
”
”
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
“
Hydrotreating is widely used in refinery unit to remove sulfur, nitrogen, and metals from petroleum-based feedstock. The facilities used for the production of petroleum-based fuel such as catalysts, types of reactors, and distillation facilities can be used for the production of green diesel as well.
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Mohammad Aslam (Green Diesel: An Alternative to Biodiesel and Petrodiesel (Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology))
“
During this process, the feedstock reacts with hydrogen in the presence of catalysts at high temperatures (300–400 °C) and pressure of almost 10 MPa. Heterogeneous catalysts like Ni–Mo/Al2O3 and Co–Mo/Al2O3 are used in this process to produce hydrocarbons in the range of C15–C18. Hydrotreatment also results in the removal of heteroatoms like oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur [81]. Green Diesel has a similar chemical composition as that of petrodiesel and can be used in existing refinery infrastructure such as pipelines and storage tanks. It has similar advantages to that of biodiesel in terms of its use in diesel engines without any engine modification. It can be either used in its pure form or can be blended with petrodiesel [78]. Although several other methods are being developed to produce green diesel, hydrotreatment is mostly accepted and is also commercially available
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Mohammad Aslam (Green Diesel: An Alternative to Biodiesel and Petrodiesel (Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology))
“
Kieselguhr, also known as diatomaceous earth, is the remains of tiny marine animals and has a number of other uses: as a filter in sugar refineries, as insulation, and as a metal polish. Further testing showed that mixing liquid nitroglycerin with about one-third of its weight of kieselguhr formed a plastic mass with the consistency of putty.
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Penny Le Couteur (Napoleon's Buttons)
“
In the 1640s, the Jews had a hundred ships plying the sugar trade and the Periera family in Amsterdam owned the refineries that turned the brown sweetener into the white crystal grains everyone desired. Recife became known as “the port of the Jews,” and its main thoroughfare was Rua dos Judios, the Street of the Jews.24
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Edward Kritzler (Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge)
“
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.
Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost.
The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family had become strangers, as had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.
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Rebecca Solnit (Orwell's Roses)
“
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.
Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost.
The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family has become strangers, does had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.
”
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Rebecca Solnit (Orwell's Roses)
“
Officially, the program was for the peaceful development of nuclear energy. The entire world knew this to be a lie, for the simple fact that Iran was blessed with massive oil and gas reserves. Economically, it made no sense to spend billions developing a nuclear program when cheap oil and gas were abundantly available. What they needed were refineries.
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Vince Flynn (Protect and Defend (Mitch Rapp, #10))
“
How long will it be until the two countries I love forgive each other and move on . . . I'm not even sure what there is to forgive. Something about Cuba seizing ownership of oil refineries. It's all so confusing. Why should something as ugly as oil affect friendships between nations?
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Margarita Engle
“
Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price
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Michael Weiss (ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror)
“
Here is America Now: smoke, greasy fumes, the friction of tire rubber, the memory of terrifying refineries with their rubbery rotten-egg smells.
”
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Robert D. Kaplan
“
Where things get really complicated is when the philanthro-capitalists use their money to finance a political agenda that dovetails with their personal business interests or with the interests of the plutocratic class as a whole. The Koch brothers, for instance, have pushed for less government regulation of industry, including state efforts to protect the environment. They are lifelong libertarians who are genuinely skeptical about climate change. They also happen to own a company whose assets include oil refineries, oil pipelines, and lumber mills—all businesses that would benefit from a weakened EPA.
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Chrystia Freeland (Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else)
“
I am fortunate. For instance my house and shop cost me a little over three hundred dollars….” “Three hundred dollars?” Dennis asked shocked. “Yes. In Cuba if you can afford to buy a house you buy it from the government. When you want to sell your house you sell it back to the government and they give you what you paid for it.” “Oh I see and of course the extra you’ve made in profit.” “No senor. You are not allowed to make money from the government. You only get back what you paid. Is this not the same in your country?” “No definitely not. Many people have become very rich from property trading.” “It is not so here. When I or my wife sell our house we will only get back what I paid. Did you know that Fidel Castro in 1960 forced all private property and foreign businesses to be nationalised, all banks, sugar and oil refineries.
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Julian Noyce (Drake's Gold (Peter Dennis #3))
“
In fact, Tung himself was also a businessman. Born in Shanghai, Tung took over his family business after his father, shipping magnate Tung Chao Yung, died in 1981 and managed Orient Overseas, one of the world's leading shipping and logistics service providers. Sitting next to Tung at the meeting with President Xi was Li Ka- shing who made a statement on Oct. 15, calling on the Occupy protesters to go home and not to "let today's passion become tomorrow's regrets." The Asia's wealthiest man did not make it clear whether or not he agrees with the appeals of the protesters. Li built his family business empire from plastics manufacturing and accumulated wealth through real estate, supermarket chains and mobile phone network. Other Hong Kong tycoons, such as Lee Shau-kee, nicknamed "Hong Kong's Warrenn Buffett," Kuok Hock Nien known for his sugar refineries in Asia, and Woo Kwong-ching whose businesses range from Hong Kong's cable TV to the Star Ferry, have all remained mute.
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Anonymous
“
In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, for example, a group of fishing families had lived since 1914 on islands in the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 1998 the Usina Trapiche sugar refinery petitioned the state to take over the land. The islanders say that the refinery then followed up its petition by destroying their homes and small farms, threatening further violence to those who did not leave. When the fishing families rebuilt their homes, they were burned down. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use Usina Trapiche sugar in their products, but until Oxfam’s campaign they denied responsibility for the conduct of their suppliers. Oxfam asked all of the Big 10 food brands to show ethical leadership by requiring that their suppliers obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous and local communities before acquiring land. Nestlé was the first to support this principle fully. Then Coca-Cola declared a policy of zero tolerance for landgrabbing by its suppliers and bottlers and committed to disclosing its suppliers of sugar cane, soy, and palm oil, to conducting social, environmental, and human rights assessments, and to engaging with Usina Trapiche regarding the conflict with the people of the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 2014 PepsiCo also accepted the principle of responsibility for its suppliers. Associated British Foods, the largest sugar producer in Africa and another Big 10 food corporation, is now also committed to the same principle.12 The gains from these policy commitments are more difficult to quantify than in the example of Ghana’s oil revenues, but in the long run they too may be very substantial.
”
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Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically)
“
Biodiesel Plants
In recent years, SRS International Biodiesel, biodiesel washing, factory automation services, turnkey biodiesel refineries and commissioning services, including hanging the biodiesel plants machine is a category launched. SRS International Biodiesel trade scope project consulting and services, process design, equipment manufacture and supply, engineering tools, establishment and after sales service are also included. It's a huge Biodiesel Plants in Temecula, CA. Machinery manufacturing plant and engineering companies: mainly grain, oil, engaged in general contracting of engineering warehouse, storage, Machinery and equipment manufacturing and oil equipment and grain purchases; By deep processing of oil products; Owners turnkey projects realized.
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SRS International Biodiesel
“
I may be child-centric, but that doesn't make me anti-feminist.
In an interview with Garage Magazine, Beyoncé (Queen Bae), who I can safely say is at the top of her profession as a singer and entertainer, said "Of everything that I've accomplished, my proudest moment hands down is when I gave birth to my daughter Blue." Cue the firestorm of criticism! On Mic.com, Jenny Kutner reacted, "Wouldn't it be refreshing for one of the most professionally accomplished women in the world to value her career accomplishments equally?" To which Elizabeth Kiefer on Refinery29 responded, "It would be, if that were the truth for whoever spoke that perfect sound bite of progressivism. Yet, it would be even more refreshing if we allowed women to choose their greatest moment without fear that they were being judged against some ever-moving metric of what it means to be a good feminist."
To which I say "Amen".
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Erica Komisar (Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters)
“
lit white tanks of oil refineries and petrochemical plants. “Well,” said Giordino without any particular expression in his voice, “is now a good time for a chorus of ‘Old Man River’?” “The Mississippi,” Pitt muttered. “That’s Baton Rouge to the north across the river. The end of the line. Why dig a canal to this particular spot?” “Who knows what weird machinations lurk in the mind of Qin Shang?” Giordino said philosophically. “Maybe he has plans to access the highway.” “What for? There’s no turnoff. The road shoulder is barely wide enough to hold one car.
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Clive Cussler (Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt, #14))
“
delight in putting colonies everywhere. The Tadpoles noted the terraforming project on the fourth world with bemusement. There was no shortage of habitable worlds beyond the tramlines either. Why the humans considered an attempt to reshape an old and dry world into something suitable for them was beyond the factions. It looked like an expensive and pointless project to them. Let them waste their resources, if they must, one sub-faction stated. It only weakens them. We will set course for the fifth planet, the Combat Faction said. There was nothing to be gained by trying to understand humans. They were alien beings. Their society and history spoke of nothing, but war. They were too dangerous to be allowed to infest space. And they will follow us. Doubt floated through parts of the Song, but not enough to force a change. The fifth planet was a massive gas giant, one of the largest recorded. And the installations orbiting the giant planet were easy to identify. Cloudscoops and refineries ... if they were destroyed, they’d hamper human reconstruction. It wasn't a direct way to win, but it would work. And it would force the humans to give chase. They’d have no choice. And then we will win, the Combat Faction stated. It will only be
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Christopher G. Nuttall (The Longest Day (Ark Royal, #10))
“
That was a long time I used to sit on my suburb balcony looking over a distant horizon and faraway flames of oil-refineries on the other side of the city’s horse-shoe.
- Vladislav Khalyavkin, The Operator
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Vladislav Khalyavkin
“
You still seeing her (Maddie)?”
“Platonically.” I spat out the word like it was profanity. It seemed acutely unfair to get shoved into the friend zone like a pair of dirty socks after I’d given her enough orgasms to light up a refinery. I shrugged as if I didn’t care. I did care. “Her funeral.
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L.J. Shen (The Devil Wears Black)
“
Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.
Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true. Who could ever pay for the pain of rising day after day year after year in a dim room dancing with cockroaches, and looking out on a street like a sewer of slow death? All her life it felt to her she had been dying a cell at a time, a cell of hope, of joy, of love, little lights going out one by one. When her body had turned all to pain, would she die? Die and poison the earth like a plague victim, like so many pounds of lead?
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Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time)
“
Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
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William Gibson (Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1))
“
It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.
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Gretchen Bakke (The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future)
“
United States oil companies were taking Hitler’s money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs.
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Upton Sinclair (Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels #4))
“
Only such witnessing could have inspired the mildly epiphanic passage in Seeds of Man, in which the clear air of the mountainous borderland all too briefly serves as an antidote to the industrial poisons that had choked the life out of both Okemah and Pampa. As Guthrie recalled it: “The feel and the breath of the air was all different, new, high, clear, clean, and light. None of the smokes and carbons, none of the charcoal smells of the oil fields. None of the sooty oil-field fires, none of the blackening slush-pond blazes, none of those big sheet-iron petroleum refineries, none of those big smoky carbon-black plants. No smells of the wild oil gusher on the breeze. No smells from that wild gas well blowing off twenty million feet into the good air every day.”30
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Will Kaufman (Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues (American Popular Music Series Book 3))
“
There is no industrial smog in Miami. No steel mills, no oil refineries. Heavy industry is cocaine processing, and high technology is money laundering.
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Paul Levine (To Speak for the Dead (Jake Lassiter #1))
“
1997, for instance, the EPA moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of air pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, came up with a novel criticism of the proposed rule. The EPA, she argued, had not taken into account that by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution were controlled, it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms.
So, if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.
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Bill McGuire (Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide)
“
Refiners who used Tidewater were lured away with concessionary rates on Standard Oil pipelines, and Rockefeller swiftly bought up any remaining independent refineries that might be prospective Tidewater customers.
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Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
“
To make sure that the Pennsylvania Railroad didn’t double-cross him, Rockefeller boosted production at his Philadelphia refineries serviced by the railroad—a generous bonus that could be canceled at any moment for misbehavior.
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Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
“
The pivot on which everything turned, at least initially, was James Guffey, who struck “the deal of the century” when he sold much of Spindletop’s oil to a company he had never heard of—and whose executives needed a map to locate Beaumont—Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil producer; the deal made Shell an international colossus. Guffey was backed by and later sold out to the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, who roared into the Gulf Coast fields with a new company it named, appropriately, Gulf Oil, which became one of America’s greatest oil companies. The Pew family of Philadelphia, founders of Sun Oil, swept into Spindletop in a blizzard of activity, laying pipelines, buying storage facilities and so much oil it had to build a new refinery at Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. Another of the companies weaned at Spindletop was the Texas Company, later known as Texaco.
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Bryan Burrough (The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes)
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Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood) rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
“
In 1970 unleaded gasoline only had about 3 percent of the US market. By 1975 this figure had increased to 12 percent, and starting in 1979 the US EPA required all refineries to lower the average lead content in leaded fuels: it fell to just 1 g/gal by 1980, 0.5 g/gal by 1985, and 0.1 g/gal by 1988. At the same time, increased awareness of the health costs of exposures to lead—with studies showing adverse impacts on IQ in children and on hypertension in adults—accelerated the complete phase-out of leaded fuel. In 1985 unleaded gasoline had 63 percent of the market; by 1991 it had 95 percent.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
“
By arguing that home-cooked food is tastier and healthier than industrially produced food, it downplays how the large-scale, efficient bakeries and fish sauce manufacturies in Rome, tea-processing facilities in Buddhist monasteries, herring-packing plants in Holland, sugar-beet refineries in France, and roller mills around the world have improved diets, reduced heavy manual labor, and enhanced the range of tasty foods. Indeed, home cooking and industrial processing form a continuum, using mechanical, thermal, chemical, and biochemical methods to make farm products into something edible.
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Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (California Studies in Food and Culture Book 43))
“
So many things had to happen for these men to arrive at their deaths. Start with the invention of the internal combustion engine. Follow with the development of Europe and the Americas and the rest of the world creating a ravenous appetite for oil, which created oil rigs and refineries and massive wealth for desert princes. Then global supply chains, trade agreements, secure shipping routes, and the law of the sea. Negotiated arms sales, too. Add in the vast edifice of Western science. Computing and radio technology. The space race and the microchip. Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex. And other, subtler developments. American-pioneered methods of high-value targeting. The post-9/11 explosion of private military contractors. It took all of the massively complex, interconnected modern world to bring these men their deaths. It was a shame they were incapable of appreciating it.
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Phil Klay (Missionaries)
“
The cash-strapped Scott didn’t simply agree to stop refining oil but offered Standard Oil a huge fire sale of assets—refineries, storage tanks, pipelines, a fleet of steamships, tugboats, barges, loading docks—in fact, far more than Standard could afford.
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Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
“
Far away, the flares from the oil and gas refineries lit up like a vigilante ceremony demonstrating all the wealth that lay in this hydrocarbon-rich province.
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Soroosh Shahrivar (Tajrish)
“
There will be no more burning flags. No more burning bridges. The only thing we want to see are the flares burning on top of our refinery in the very near future.
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Soroosh Shahrivar (Tajrish)
“
Essentially, GE operates its own social network for heavy industrial machinery. It’s sort of like all these power grids and oil refineries and MRI machines have their own Instagram accounts, but instead of pictures of beaches or food, they’re sharing fuel consumption, hydraulic pressure, usage hours, decay rates. “First there was the consumer internet, and then the enterprise internet,” as Barzdukas said, “and now we’re moving into the third generation: the industrial internet. It’s not just about having our phones connected or our enterprise applications connected and operating on subscriptions models. Now it’s the big machines.” So far GE has built more than 600,000 of these digital twins. And just as social networks changed our world, this third-generation industrial internet is going to transform manufacturing.
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Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
“
at one point Standard Oil owned more than 90 percent of the production of oil in the United States—nearly all of the country’s oil refineries.6 In other words, at Standard Oil’s peak, no one else could even make a competitive product, let alone sell it. This method of establishing market dominance contrasts starkly with how platforms operate today. Platform businesses grow not by acquiring more factories but by connecting more and more users within their networks. In other words, platforms become dominant not because of what they own but rather because of the value they create by connecting their users. They don’t own the means of production, as industrial monopolies did. Instead, they own the means of connection.
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Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
“
Just as oil refineries convert crude oil into products like gasoline, jet fuel, and asphalt, so do solar refineries convert hydrogen into liquid fuels for vehicles, ships, and aircraft and into a whole range of other products, from fertilizer to plastics.
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Varun Sivaram (Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet)
“
And Mrs. Wayne expects us home soon. It’s already past your bedtime.” Fenway shook her head and came back to the present. The Ferris Energy refinery, constantly spewing gray-brown fumes, was an ugly monstrosity in the
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Paul Austin Ardoin (The Reluctant Coroner (Fenway Stevenson #1))
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Refineries donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to our local nonprofits. Why can't they extend that compassion toward cleaning up their sites or conjuring greener alternatives to help out their neighbours? And why don't more of our citizens demand so?
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Stephanie Elizondo Griest (All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands)
“
With phosphate rock from its mines, ammonia from its petrochemical plants, and sulphur from its refineries, Saudi Arabia is also well on the way to becoming one of the world’s largest—and lowest-cost—producers of fertilizer.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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But choosing to believe that anything that happens is in your best interest will turn all of the challenges and circumstances into a refinery that will shape your character and skills, and will develop within you an ability to change the world.
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Joshua Medcalf (Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great)
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TABLE OF GERMAN COMPANIES AND MAIN SS CONCENTRATION CAMPS REPORTED TO BE ACTIVE IN EXPLOITATION OF FORCED LABOR DURING THE THIRD REICH Auschwitz AEG (electronics) [5] Barthl (construction) [5] Bata Schlesische Schuhwerke (leather, shoes, and factory construction) [10] Benton-Monteur-Bau (construction) [10] Berle Hoch- und Tiefbau (construction) [10] Berliner Baugesellschaft (construction) [10] BRABAG (mining, synthetic fuel) [3] Breitenbach Montanbau [10] Borsig-Koks-Werk (coal processing) [10] Charlottengrube (Hermann-Göring-Werke) (tunnel construction) [10] Concordia Kohlenbergwerk (coal processing) [10] Deutsche Gasrusswerke, Gleiwitz [5] [8] Dyckerhoff & Widman (construction materials) [5] Egefeld (construction) [10] Emmerich Machold (textiles) [10] Energie-Versorgung-Oberschlesien AG (electrical construction for Elektrizitätswerk “Walter”) [10] Erdöl Raffinerie Trzebinia GmbH (oil refining) [10] Fürstengrube GmbH (coal mining) [10] Fürstlich Plessische Bergwerks AG (coal processing) [10] Godula (factory construction) [10] Grün und Bilfinger (construction) [10] Gute Hoffnung Janinagrube (coal mining) [10] Heinkel (aircraft components, munitions) [5] [10] Hubertushütte (coal processing) [10] IG Farben—Buna Werke (construction, synthetic fuel) [3] [4] [5] [8] [10] Junkers (aircraft) [5] Klotz und Co. (construction) [10] Königshütte Metallwerke (metal works) [10] Königs- und-Bismarckhütte AG (armored cars and tanks) [10] Krupp (munitions) [4] [5] Krupp—Laurahùtte (munitions) [8] Lasota (tunnel & road construction) [10] Oberschlesische Gerätebau GmbH [10] Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke (construction of synthetic gasoline works) [5] [8] [10] Ölschieferanlagen (oil refinery construction) [8] Ost-Maschinenbau GmbH (OSMAG) (cannon) [2] [5] [8] [10] Pfitzner und Kamper (munitions, loading) [10] Philipp Holzmann (construction) [10] Pluschke und Grosser (construction) [10] Portland-Zement-Fabrik AG (construction materials) [10] Riedel (tunnel and roadbuilding) [10] Rheinmetall-Borsig (munitions) [3] Schuchtermann und Kremer Bau AG (construction) [10] Schweinitz (construction) [10] S. Frankel—Schlesische Feinweberei AG (textiles) [10] Siemens-Schuckert (electronics for aircraft) [2] [3] [10] Union Metallindustrie (munitions) [4] [5] Vacuum Öl (oil refinery) [5] [10] Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke (aluminum) [5] Wayss und Freytag (construction) [10] Zieleniewski (munitions) [10] Zwirnfabrik G. A. Buhl und Sohn (textiles) [10]
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
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Dachau AEG (electronics) [3] AGFA-Kamerawerke [10] Anorgana GmbH [10] Arnold Fischer [10] Bartholith-Werke [10] Berliner Baugesellschaft (BBG) [10] BMW (aircraft motors) [1] [2] [5] [8] [10] Chemiegauer Vertriebsgesellschaft [10] Chemische Werke GmbH Otto Barlocher [10] Dachau Entommologisches Institut (construction) [1] Dornier-Werke GmbH (aircraft components) [2] [10] Dyckerhoff & Widmann (construction) [1] [5] [10] Dynamit Nobel (munitions) [3] [5] [10] Feller-Tuchfabrik [10] Fleischkonservenfabrik Hans Wulfert (butchery, food processing) [5] [8] [10] Formholz [10] Franz Nutzl [10] Gebrüder Helfman [10] Giesing Kamerawerke (optics) [1] Hebel [10] Hess, Ilse [10] Hochtief GmbH [10] Philipp Holzmann (construction) [3] I. Ehrenput [10] IG Farben[10] Dr. Jung [10] Karl Bucklers [10] Keller und Knappich [10] Dr. Ing. Kimmel (generators) [2] Kirsch [10] Klockner-Humbolt-Deutz AG [10] Kodel und Bohm [10] Kuno (munitions for Messerschmitt) [10] L. Bautz [10] Loden-Frey, München [8] [10] Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt München (airfield construction) [2] Magnesit [10] Messerschmitt AG (aircraft) [1] [2] [3] [5] [10] Michel-Fabrik Augsburg [1] München-Allach Porzellan Manufaktur (ceramics) [1] Ölschieferanlagen (oil refinery construction) [8] Praezifix (aircraft components) [2] [5] [8] [10] Pumpel und Co. [10] Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk München (construction) [1] [8] Reichsstrassenbauamt Innsbruck (construction) [1] Sager und Worner [10] U. Sachse-Kempten KG (factory construction) [2] [8] [10] Schuhhaus Meier [10] Schurich [10] Dr. Schweninger [10] Unic [10] Zeppelin Luftschiffbauu (dirigibles) [8] [10]
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
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Platinum, iron, and titanium from the Belt. Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus.
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James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1))
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She had not known then - it had simply never occurred to her - that not everyone had servants or an estate. The rude awakening came when she was a little older and was taken by her father to pay their respects to the families who had lost members in a refinery fire - there were always fires. She remembered the scratch of her Sunday clothes against her skin at the church service that seemed to last for hours, and then the walk along narrow dark streets, delivering toys to bereaved children, followed by the slow realization that whole families lived in houses smaller than a single stable and that some of the children were not wearing shoes even though it was cold enough for boots. It was then that she saw that her papa had two faces, one for family and one for the rest of the world. Over the next few years it came in small parcels of insight, each one more dreadful than the last:
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Beatrice Colin (The Glass House)