Big lies from Big Oil

Big lies from Big Oil

By Tim Wheeler

Labor, environmentalists: Offshore drilling is just a profit scam

The proposal by President Bush and Sen. John McCain to lift the federal ban on offshore oil drilling will do nothing to reduce gasoline prices but will risk permanent damage to the coastal waters and marine wildlife, according to environmentalists and energy experts.

Bush made the proposal June 19. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, earlier made the same proposal to open the way for drilling off the coasts of Alaska, California, Florida and other states where a ban on the practice has been in effect. They claimed pumping offshore crude will provide relief for motorists hammered with gasoline prices zooming toward $5 per gallon.

Tim Hamilton, president of the Automotive United Trade Association (AUTO), a group of 600 independent gas station owners in Washington State, told the World Bush’s proposal is just another giveaway to the Big Oil profiteers.

“Herein lies the Big Lie: That you can drill in the arctic, drill in offshore coastal waters and it will lower the price at the pump,” Hamilton said. “It is a Big Lie because Big Oil already has leases offshore and in Alaska that they are not drilling now.” The real aim of Bush’s proposal, he said, “is to get these leases signed and sealed now while they have the friendliest president in American history in the White House. These are resources that belong to the American people. This is a war between a handful of oil companies and the American people.”

In 2006, Hamilton wrote a report, “Why Gasoline Prices are Headed for $3.50 At the Pump.” Now, he said, gas prices are headed toward $5 per gallon with retailers getting only a miniscule 16 cents per gallon. The winner, he said, “is an illegal, immoral cartel whose only concern is maximum profits.”

Democratic lawmakers convened a Capitol Hill news conference June 19 to unveil their “use it or lose it” bill to force oil companies to either drill for oil on the 68 million acres of lands they already lease from the federal government or lose those leases. Speaking in Las Vegas June 24 Obama strongly endorsed the legislation.

Melanie Duchin, a Greenpeace campaigner in Anchorage, Alaska, told the World in a telephone interview, “The Bush administration refuses to do the math. We burn 24 percent of the world’s oil yet we only have three percent of the world’s oil reserves. Even if we drilled every last drop of oil in this country, we could never drill our way to lower gasoline prices. This is just smoke and mirrors to line the pockets of the oil companies.”

The Greenpeace web site features photos of Duchin helping in the cleanup from the shipwreck of a Malaysian freighter that fouled a pristine stretch of the Alaskan shoreline with thousands of gallons of oil.

Duchin helped spearhead the drive that forced the Interior Department to declare the polar bear “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. It was a step forward, but short of a victory, she said. The polar bear should be designated as “endangered,” she said.

Duchin decried the plight of Arctic wildlife as the permafrost melts, the ice sheet and glaciers retreat, and forests are decimated by the spruce beetle. Entire villages of the native peoples of Alaska are swallowed by rising sea levels, she said.

“This is an issue of environmental justice. Poor people and people of color bear a disproportionate share of the burden from global climate change. We are at ground zero in a global war.”

The answer, she said is shifting to renewable forms of energy like wind and solar power. Sierra Club President Carl Pope responded by announcing his organization’s endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama at a June 19 news conference in Cleveland. Pope and Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, stood together in front of a giant wind turbine at the joint news conference. Pope said they believe Obama “will put America on the path to a clean energy economy that will create and keep millions of jobs, spur innovation and opportunity, make us a more secure nation and help us solve global warming.” Gerard said the USWA and the Sierra Club “are standing together in support of Barack Obama because we all share the common goal of putting America back to work by building a clean energy economy.”

The Sierra Club began running a radio ad across Ohio blasting McCain. “Fact is, John McCain opposes requiring the use of more wind and solar power to generate electricity,” the announcer says. “He argued against incentives for the clean energy industry while demanding billions in subsidies for nuclear power and refusing to impose windfall profits taxes on Big Oil.”

Earlier, the Sierra Club blasted the Bush-McCain offshore drilling scheme. “The truth is that drilling our coasts will not solve our energy problems,” Pope said. “An offshore spill off the coast of Virginia would impact beaches, marine life, and tourism in New Jersey. Lifting the ban would do nothing to reduce gas prices for the average American family. It would take a decade to bring new leases into production and then they would only line the coffers of the oil industry which raked in tens of billions of dollars in record profits last year.”

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

War and warming - toxic in so many ways

“Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.”

This and other useful information is contained in a recent report by Oil Change International. Read it here: A Climate of War.

Oil companies' reason for being

Woo-hoo. We used to have a "quote of the week" feature here at PWW but gave it up because of space limitations and frequent lack of good punchy quotes. Well, here's one:

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions noted that “the world market for oil is not a free market.”

He also pointed out that oil companies “don’t exist to produce the lowest possible price of fuel for our constituents. They exist to maximize their profits for their shareholders.”

Sessions said this at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where top oil execs had been summoned to explain why they're making exorbitant profits.

For some real insights into why, see here and here.

What's wrong with this headline?

What's wrong with this headline: "Exxon Posts Its 2nd-Best Quarter, But It's Not Enough for Wall St."?

Well, the headline is fine, journalistically speaking - actually it makes quite a point. And the point is what's wrong: As Americans around the country are gasping at the gas pump - not from the fumes but from the astronomically soaring prices - Exxon Mobil on May 1 reported the second-highest quarterly profits in its history ... and Wall Street investors were disappointed.

What's wrong is all about capitalism. The article, in the New York Times business section, goes on to quote financial analysts saying things like:

"Investment comes down to expectations, and the expectations were pretty high, especially after BP and Shell reported pretty good outlooks. And Exxon didn't quite deliver."

And:

"The market wants growth, growth and growth."

- that one was from an analyst at Deutsche Bank.

When I filled up my car on Saturday the woman at the next pump turned my way with a sigh and a grimace and said, "I told my kids we're just not going anywhere. We're going to be staying home." I don't think there's too much growth in her family's economy, or in yours or mine.

If we are concerned about the health of our economy, we have to be concerned about growth in the economies of working class America and about growth in sustainable human economies that are in sync with nature.

Exxon's "growth" - and BP's, Shell's, Chevron's, etc. - is coming at the expense of their own workers who create the profits, of folks like the woman at my local gas station and everyone else whose paycheck, if they have one, can't keep up with the soaring prices, and of our planet which is reeling under the impact of fossil-fuel-produced climate change.

What it demonstrates is how capitalism is outliving its usefulness.