Michael T. Klare, author of
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, among other books, writes
How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State:
The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?
Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies—Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco—got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.
Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America—the Third World—where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.
Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.
Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled.
Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot. [...]
Professor Klare has much more to say.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
Really, this administration thinks that the entire federal government is part of Bush/Cheney 2004. First it was ordering the CIA to pore over Clarke's old testimony seeking inconsistencies with his 9-11 remarks.
Now it is using the Treasury Department to "analyze" Kerry's budget proposals.
The Treasury Department directed career employees to analyze tax ideas proposed by presidential candidate John Kerry and other Democrats after a request from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, officials said Wednesday.
The Republican National Committee posted an interactive feature on its Web site that attaches the largest of those cost estimates to Kerry's plan to raise taxes paid by the wealthiest taxpayers [...]
Although federal law prohibits civil servants from working on political campaigns while on duty, Treasury Department attorneys concluded the work was appropriate, Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said. [...]
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said, "It was coercion. If they had refused to do it and they were made to do it, it's illegal." [...]
I wouldn't mind seeing a Treasury Department "analysis" of Bush's record deficits and projected deficits.
Tweet of the Day:
And now millions of people who bought Mega Millions tickets know what it feels like to vote for the GOP.
— @LOLGOP via Timely by Demandforce
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