The way in which the nation is buying a concerted propaganda effort on oil drilling is terrifying. This diary should make it crystal clear how false the current memes are. But first indulge me as I describe a clear memory:
In 2000 I took a tour bus to Tiananmen Square. I felt as if the bus were a giant whale swimming in a sea of bicycles. A year later we took the same route in a Towne Car. Over half the space on the route was taken up by cars. Our guide wanted to make a stop to price televisions. We wondered if we were in the same country.
Friedman is indeed right: The world is flat. And beading up on its rapidly-overheating surface are the last drops of ancient sunlight, post-peak oil. There is no American oil, nor--truly--any American drilling plan that could affect what is going to happen to this nation in the next decade. That fate has been sealed by the accumulation of debt and the way in which a super-rich international cabal has raped our nation and our treasury. Follow me.
Oil is traded on a global market. It's still quoted in dollars, but probably not for long. The value doesn't depend on how much we use, or how much we produce, but how much the world uses and produces.Asia is running toward addiction at breakneck speed, anxious to spend the money we owe them.
The whole of Asia Pacific has already surpassed the levels of the USA and Europe and at a much steeper curve (a change since 1965 of 649%. China’s rise seems more gentle because of the scale: if you isolate China and bring the scale down to fit (Chart C9), the frightening rise in that country’s oil consumption is clear. The percentage change over the 40 years is a whopping 3328%.
We owe China and Japan a trillion dollars for Iraq. Our dollar will be worth far less moving forward. To whom would YOU sell your oil?
Oil companies currently have rights to millions of acres of undrilled oil leases. From Environmentalist on this site
In fact, only 17% of the leased areas is in production. So, with about 33 million acres of offshore areas already available to drill and not being drilled, why does the oil and gas industry need to have access to still more? The fact is that nearly 25 BILLION barrels of oil off the coast of the United States is currently available for drilling...and industry is not drilling it. Not to mention natural gas. Most of the natural gas occurring offshore (over 328 TRILLION cubic feet – an eleven year supply at current consumption rates) is currently available for leasing and development.,,Between 1999 and 2007, the number of drilling permits issued for development of public lands increased by more than 361%. And did you see your gasoline costs drop? How about your electricity costs? Propane? natural gas? Uh...no. There is absolutely no correlation between the industrialization of public lands and the price of fossil fuels.
That doesn't, of course, mean they have oil.
Each lease is risky.
The amount of known oil in ANWR is precisely zero...many different entities make many different estimates of how much there may be in the ground there, but until reasonable amounts of exploration are done, those estimates are nothing but guesses. A few of them are educated guesses, many of them are as educated as saying the moon is made of green cheese. Reasonable (as in US Geological Survey - see This Link) estimates are of 7.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Figuring one way, using US consumption at 20 million barrels per day, divided into that 7.7 billion, equals 385 days of supply
In those leases there is no obligation for them to refine or sell the oil in the country in which they find it. The logic is that they are taking the risk, so they should have all the benefits.
If we do open ANWR to oil drilling, where will it go? There are clues in the current distribution. Current estimates say that between 10 to 30% of the current oil from the North Slope goes to Japan. It's not shipped out as crude oil, but as products like home heating oil. Defenders say that California doesn't need the heating oil--but Vermont and New Hampshire families who are getting charity shipments from Venezuela might want some of it.
A second clue to where the oil will go is in the lack of
refinerie construction.
So why hasn't a new refinery been built in the U.S. since 1976? "There have been calls every year this decade for new refining capacity, yet no new projects initiated," said Geoff Sundstrom, a spokesman for AAA, the motorist organization. "Refining capacity has not kept pace with demand for gasoline.
Oil company execs are not stupid. Given the increased use of gasoline here, why no more refineries? They claim it's because of regulation, but they haven't even filed for permits except for one in that time. Perhaps they knew we wouldn't be able to afford the next decade's gas, anyway?
A third clue is the way that the Republican puppets of the oil industry are downplaying the potential danger of offshore oil drilling. A year before Katrina, the USGS was doing seminars talking about a meter or more of bayou that disappeared as the barrier islands sank. Now that information has disappeared from government sources (or become very difficult to find.) The phenomenon is called subsidence
The subsidence has been directly correlated, spatially and temporally, to the extraction of large volumes of oil and gas from the subsurface.
When you pull oil out, sedimentary terrains go down. NOLA was probably a meter lower due to oil drilling, and the loss of the bayou "speed bumps" was a big reason Katrina was so devastating. Do the residents of Key West expect that result?
And of course there is the pollution. You can walk the shores of California and see the nodules from decades-old spills, since we have no real way to clean them up.
Perhaps the most amazing fact of all? Two years ago, John McCain voted against a measure to restrict and keep oil that is drilled here home in our country,