As today’s Politico headline makes clear, Democrats are poised this week to grant the oil industry its number one wish — lifting the oil export ban. The fact that they most likely will vote to pass this the same week as the COP21 talks are concluding does make it seem like in DC they are all talk and no action when it comes to caring about the climate over Big Oil.
The big win in question would be a vote to lift the oil export ban. This has been a goal of the oil industry for the past several years and is the stated top priority of the American Petroleum Institute.
As Kenneth Cohen, Exxon Mobil’s recently retired vice president for public and governmental affairs, told the New York Times in October - “The sooner this happens, the better for us.”
ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said lifting the export ban is “number one on my wish list.”
The oil companies want to lift the ban so that they can frack every last bit of American oil and sell it to countries like China who are going to need a lot more oil in the next couple of decades while most predictions have American oil demand staying flat or decreasing.
There is no good reason to do this other than to improve oil company profits. This could result in several more million barrels a day of oil be fracked in the US in the coming decade. And yet now Democrats are saying they want to negotiate on the issue.
In August, Sen. Reid made the following statement, “We should sit down and try to work something out with the people who are so focused on exporting it and those people who are so focused on not exporting it and come up with a deal.”
Why should you sit down and work something out with companies like Exxon Mobil if you are serious about climate change? And if you want to negotiate with oil companies how about for starters you end all government oil subsidies. If they want to frack more and export the oil to China, the last thing that should happen is that Americans are subsidizing it.
Lee Raymond was CEO of ExxonMobil until 2005. According to Steve Coll's book Private Empire, when Raymond was asked if ExxonMobil would build more refineries in the U.S. to help America he replied, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
Of course, we knew that. And so do Democrats in DC. So why are they about to give Exxon a huge gift at the expense of the American people, the American environment and the global climate?