Jim Hightower : British Petroleum as Global Corporate Criminal

British Petroleum: the many faces of corporate crime. Photo from BP 50 years in Pictures / TLAXCALA.
British Petroleum:
Recidivist corporate criminal

By Jim Hightower / June 18, 2010

Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you're a strutting peacock -- the next day, you're just another gasping, oil-covered bird.

In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for "Beyond Petroleum."

Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.

From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company] and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco, and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.

And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant's current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities.

In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing "97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors" came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as "egregious" and "willful." In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.

While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could've foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what's delicately called a major "petroleum release" in the Gulf of Mexico.

"What the hell did we do to deserve this?" Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you're not the victim here -- and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP's reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

"It wasn't our accident," the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an "accident," but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP's executive suite.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP's mess was fast becoming America's worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well "is tiny in relation to the total water volume." This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.

Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would've been put behind bars long ago -- if not on death row.

[National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be -- consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.]

Copyright 2010 Creators.com

Source / Truthout

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View From Texas Coast : Stop the Drilling Now

In better days: Brown Pelican off the Texas Coast. Photo from Amber Coakley / Birders Lounge.
BP oil disaster demonstrates
Need to end offshore drilling

...our love for the abundant life [on the Gulf Coast] is so woven into our lives that we can’t imagine what we will experience if it is diminished permanently.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2010

Growing up on the Gulf Coast at the Louisiana-Texas border makes it difficult to consider the BP oil disaster unemotionally. Nevertheless, I will try to sort the facts from my emotional response, and acknowledge my personal and financial interest in the damage this oil gush is causing on the Gulf coast. But if you’re not sickened by the sight of oil sludge-saturated sea life, then this column will not be worth your time to read.

I lived in Port Arthur beginning in 1948 and left to attend college in central Texas in 1962. I returned to the coast many times in the intervening years and began doing serious and regular salt-water fishing there in the mid-80s.

I (along with my wife) own a beach house with six other friends near where the Colorado River joins the Gulf of Mexico. Now when I fish, it is in the estuaries, bayous, and bays in that area, and in the surf of the Gulf of Mexico about 60 miles southwest of Galveston Island.

We share the same marshland wildlife that people on the Louisiana coast enjoy. Brown Pelicans, Sea Gulls, migrating ducks, Whooping Cranes, Bald Eagles, owls, countless other sea birds, Red Fish, Black Drum, Spotted Sea Trout, Flounder, Dolphin, Pompano, Whiting, assorted shark species, crabs, shrimp, bivalves and mollusks, turtles and many other birds, fish, and mammals that thrive along the Gulf Coast.

While our livelihoods don’t depend on the coastal ecosystem, our love for the abundant life there is so woven into our lives that we can’t imagine what we will experience if it is diminished permanently.

Oil-blackened marshes and sea birds and other sea life gasping for oxygen make clear that we are witnessing a vast destruction of life. While BP will pay for the dead workers killed by the explosion on its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, it will not pay for the suffering of the sea birds and sea life, nor does this cold, calculating, greed-driven corporation care. Its view is that the earth and water are there for its exploitation and views to the contrary can be damned.

An exhausted oil-covered brown pelican sits in a pool of oil along Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery, near Grand Isle, Louisiana on Jun. 5, 2010. Photo by Sean Gardner / National Post.
The people along the Louisiana coast are learning firsthand what we hoped never to experience. The loss of a significant amount of wildlife can cause grief as profound as the loss of a family member. As a child, I remember when two whales beached themselves on the coast between Galveston and Sabine Pass. Some wildlife researchers put tents around them and performed necropsies to determine why they died.

They let people into the tents to examine the whales up close. It was the first and last time I touched a whale. From my young perspective, they were several times bigger than an elephant, though I’m sure that they were closer to an even match with a full-grown pachyderm. I was in awe of the large creatures. We walked around their carcasses with reverence.

Before seining by hand with 200-foot nets was prohibited, such activity was great fun for family and friends on holiday weekends. An uncle of mine would always take hold of the lead pole and walk into the Gulf until it was so deep he had to bob up and down using the pole to keep his head mostly above water. He would then lead the procession of helpers spread out along the seine in an arc and start heading back into the shore.

It took everyone -- maybe 20-25 people -- to pull the net ashore to learn what we had caught. There was always much sea life in the net, including some that no one in the group could identify, though some guessed at the name of this creature and that one. The fish we cleaned and cooked for supper and we helped the crabs and other creatures we weren’t afraid to touch go back into the water.

That life is no more because of overfishing, which led to outlawing seining in the 70s. But that government rule and other conservation measures aimed at saving numerous species have saved the Spotted Sea Trout, Red Fish, Black Drum, Flounder, Brown Pelican, sea turtles and other sea life from extinction. At least that was the situation before the BP oil disaster.

We don’t yet know what effects it will have, but we are beginning to get an idea. The one lesson I have already taken from the disaster is that BP is incapable of restoring the sea and shore life that have been killed and will continue to be killed for decades as a result of BP’s negligence and greed.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez leaked about 22.2 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska, despoiling some 1,230 miles of coastline and killing as many as 250,000 birds and sea mammals immediately, along with billions of fish eggs for many years and contributing to reproductive failures in other species for several generations.

In comparison, it is believed that the BP gusher has yielded about 20,000 barrels a day by conservative government estimates. This is the equivalent of 840,000 gallons a day times 56 days (as of June 14), which totals to a conservative estimate of over 47 million gallons, more than twice what the Exxon Valdez spilled, and there is no end in sight.

It is too early to know how many miles of coastline could be affected, but the State of Florida (which appears vulnerable) has just over 1230 miles of coastline, and about 120 miles of Louisiana coast already has been affected.

Scientists estimate that it will take mussel beds fouled by the oil leak in Alaska at least 30 years to substantially, but not fully, recover from the Exxon Valdez disaster, which was caused by the failure of Exxon to repair an expensive, but highly effective, sonar system that would have allowed the third mate (who was at the helm at the time of the disaster) to guide the ship safely through Prince William Sound. No one knows how long it will take the oyster beds along the Gulf coast to recover.

As reported by David Biello in the Scientific American:

More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez foundered off the coast of Alaska, puddles of oil can still be found in Prince William Sound. Nearly 25 years after a storage tank ruptured, spilling oil into the mangrove swamps and coral reefs of Bahia Las Minas in Panama, oil slicks can still be found on the water. And more than 40 years after the barge Florida grounded off Cape Cod, dumping fuel oil, the muck beneath the marsh grasses still smells like a gas station.

Biello reports also that Texas A & M University marine biologist Thomas Shirley has found that there are nearly 16,000 species of plants and animals in the Gulf of Mexico, not counting microbes. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) marine biologist Jane Lubchenko pointed to another aspect of the release of oil: "There are a diversity of types of habitats in the Gulf, many very important in support of a variety of wildlife and fisheries... Many are at risk of being affected..." With these facts in mind, the situation in the Gulf of Mexico looks absolutely dismal.

Already, conservative and Libertarian voices are advancing the notion that BP has no responsibility for this environmental debacle. Rand Paul said, “I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen." David Brooks, the Barack Obama of conservative confabulation, has attributed the cause of the Gulf gusher to the complexity of the technology that exceeds the ability of humans to cope

Boom deployed by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on June 12, 2010 in attempt to protect nearby islands. Photo by Kurt Fromherz / WDSU.com.
To these political voices, no one can be held responsible for such events. They prefer to ignore BP’s long history of recklessness toward its employees and the environment, and its disdain for and venality toward those employees who report safety concerns. Would that we all could get off so easily for our transgressions.

The people and institutions at the top of the economic food chain generally have limits on their accountability, such as the $75 million plus cleanup costs limitation on damages for oil companies who spill oil into coastal waters, which was enacted by a unanimous Congress in 1990 (the Oil Pollution Act of 1990). But those at the bottom of the economic food chain are often dealt with harshly, out of all proportion to their wrongdoing. Just walk into any criminal courtroom in the country to confirm this.

Recently, Dr. Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist and policy researcher at the University of Arizona's Institute of the Environment, and Mary Turnipseed, a graduate student in Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, wrote about a legal doctrine known as the Public Trust Doctrine:

...the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD), established in the earliest days of this country and since expanded through courts and state and federal legislative bodies, provides the power -- and the legal responsibility -- to manage public trust assets in a comprehensive fashion that balances competing short and long-term needs of all American citizens. It's a mandate that if it had been implemented properly would likely have prevented the current catastrophe, and if applied to the full extent of its powers could prevent similar disasters in the future.

Sagarin and Turnipseed, writing for McClatchy News, concluded:

... the Deepwater Horizon spill is a catastrophic failure to protect the public trust. Millions of animals; a $2.5 billion fishing industry and a $3 billion tourism sector imperiled; the toxic legacy of dispersants; and up to 17,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf every day, all are a shocking blow to the value of the coastal and marine resources that are a vital part of our nation's public trust.

BP understands nothing about the public trust.

The world’s recoverable oil reserves are about 1,200 billion barrels. North America accounts for about 6% to 9% of those reserves, and the Gulf of Mexico only a portion of that. Even if we produced all the oil that is currently producible in the United States, it would last from three years to nine years, depending on which expert you believe.

Destroying our coastal environment is not worth a few years of oil production, whether it is three years or nine, or 19 if the experts are way off in their estimates. The facts are that we don’t have to drill in the Gulf of Mexico to get the oil we need until green alternatives become both feasible and abundant.

Among Americans who depend on the Gulf Coast and its waters for recreation, living, and work, few believe that BP should not have to pay for the damage it has done and will continue to do, for generations, to the Gulf of Mexico and its environs from this one incident. Ruining the natural world for oil is not a good trade-off for Americans.

The lesson we should take from BP’s negligence is that green energy should become the “race to the moon” of the second decade of the 21st century. If the government could be the stimulus for winning that race in the 1960s, it can be the stimulus for winning this new race to produce feasible and affordable alternative energy before the end of the next decade. The government, along with entrepreneurs and creative scientists and technologists, can assure that we can continue to lead good lives while we protect the natural world from man-made disasters.

It is time to accept that offshore drilling is as much a certain killer of the creatures in the sea as is overfishing. I agree with the conservative and Libertarian BP apologists on one point -- it is inevitable that such disasters will occur again as long as we allow offshore drilling. We need the same no-nonsense rules that protect specific species to protect all of the sea life in the Gulf of Mexico.

Undoubtedly, the oil companies have escaped effective regulation because of their political power, while fishermen and shrimpers have been forced to accept regulations needed to conserve sea life. Now, we must force our politicians to accept the indisputable reality that oil production in the Gulf is inevitably destructive of the environment.

An end to offshore drilling is the most effective action we can take to protect our coastal waters and environs to ensure that we are taking care of a resource that provides food, recreation, and a way of life for many Americans. And it is equally important to protect all life, whether human or other species, because we are all related, and it is the responsible thing to do.

© Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins

[This article was also published in the San Marcos Mercury.]

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From the Massey Blast to the BP Spill : Fossil Fuels are Killing Us

Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning before sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo from U.S. Department of Energy / Leonard Doyle / Flickr.
Global response emerging:
Fossil fuels are killing us

By Alex Knight / The Rag Blog / May 11, 2010

See 'Government exempted BP from environmental review,' from Democracy Now!, Below.

Just two weeks after the Massey Energy coal explosion on April 5 that killed 29 miners in West Virginia, the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 more workers.

These back-to-back tragedies have brought attention to the fossil fuel industry’s terrible safety record -- in both cases there were known safety violations on site, but the government did nothing to prevent disaster from occurring. See the interview below which explains how the federal government approved this BP rig and many more without conducting the environmental review they are legally obligated to.

Unlike the industry executives attempting to shift blame and avoid responsibility, we must look beneath the surface to discover the deeper meaning of these horrible crises.

Is the universe giving us a warning that fossil fuels are going to destroy us? Because if global climate change continues at the rate it has, in the not-too-distant future we will see many thousands, or even millions more deaths as crops dry up, floods destroy coastal wetlands, and diseases migrate to temperate regions. This is no joke. Families and communities are being destroyed so coal and oil corporations can boost their profit margins.

We need to be open to hearing the lessons that are all around us, especially from those who have been silenced and beaten down by capitalism.

Immediately after the Massey explosion and the BP explosion, was Earth Day -- April 22. And on this date, indigenous and poor people from around the globe were meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change, a grassroots response to the corporate fraud that was the Copenhagen Summit.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was proclaimed “World Hero of Mother Earth” by the United Nations General Assembly in October, hosted the conference, proclaiming “The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet. Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world.”

30,000 people from 140 countries convened and approved the “Cochabamba Protocol," which calls for an International Climate Justice tribunal to prosecute climate criminals, and condemns REDDs which put a price on wild forests and encourage development, along with carbon market schemes. The protocal proposes a Universal Declaration of Mother Earth and demands that industrialized polluting nations cut carbon emissions by 50 percent as part of a new, binding climate agreement.

Global momentum is building towards confronting capitalism in terms of the ecological devastation it is causing. Here in the United States, Rising Tide North America is calling for a “Day of Action, Night of Mourning” this Friday, May 14, to call for BP to pay for all cleanup and long-term ecological effects of their spill, for the abolition of offshore oil drilling, and for “a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.”

[Alex Knight is an organizer and writer in Philadelphia. He is currently organizing with Philly Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and working with others to mobilize Philadelphia for the US Social Forum this June 22-26 in Detroit. He also maintains the website endofcapitalism.com and is in the process of writing a book called The End of Capitalism. He can be reached at activistalex@gmail.com]

Families of miners from Massey Coal comfort each other during candlelight vigil in Montcoal, West Virginia, April 10, 2010. Photo by John Gress / Reuters.
Government exempted BP
From environmental review

By Democracy Now! / May 7, 2010

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well now to the Gulf of Mexico where the enormous oil slick in the Gulf continues to expand. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered a three-week halt to all new offshore drilling permits. Emphasizing that the companies involved had made “major mistakes,” Salazar spoke to reporters Thursday outside BP’s Houston crisis center. He noted that lifting the moratorium on new permits will depend on the outcome of a federal investigation over the Gulf spill and the recommendations to be delivered to President Obama at the end of the month.

SECRETARY KEN SALAZAR: Minerals Management Service will not be issuing any permits for the construction of new offshore wells. That process will be concluded here on May the 28th. At that point in time, we’ll make decisions about how we plan on moving forward. There is some very major mistakes that were made by companies that were involved. But today is not really the day to deal with those issues. Today and the days ahead really are about trying to get control of the problem.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Secretary Salazar added that the existing offshore oil and natural gas drilling will continue, even as public meetings to discuss new oil drilling off the Virginia coast have been canceled for this month.

AMY GOODMAN: Salazar’s announcement comes on the heel of a Washington Post exposé revealing that the Minerals Management Service had approved BP’s drilling plan in the Gulf of Mexico without any environmental review. The article notes that the agency under Secretary Salazar had quote “categorically excluded” BP’s drilling as well as hundreds of other offshore drilling permits from environmental review.

The agency was able to do this using a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act created for minimally intrusive actions like building outhouses and hiking trails. Well, for more on this story, we’re joined now from Tucson, Arizona, by Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!, Kieran. Explain this loophole, how you found it, and what it means for the Gulf.

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, when a federal government is going to approve a project, it has to go through an environmental review. But for projects that have very, very little impact like building an outhouse or a hiking trail, they can use something called a categorical exclusion and say there’s no impact here at all so we don’t need to spend energy or time doing a review.

Well, we looked at the oil drilling permits being issued by the Minerals Management Service in the Gulf, and we were shocked to find out that they were approving hundreds of massive oil drilling permits using this categorical exclusion instead of doing a full environmental impact study. And then, we found out that BP’s drilling permit -- the very one that exploded -- was done under this loophole and so it was never reviewed by the federal government at all. It was just rubber-stamped.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, according to the Washington Post article, in one of its assessments of the agency “estimated that a large oil spill from a deep platform like the Deepwater Horizon would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a deepwater spill occurring off the intercontinental shelf would not reach the coast.” Obviously, both of those -- both of those assessments have proven dramatically off the mark. As many as 250-400 waivers a year for drilling in the Gulf?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s also important to note that when the government says it’s very unlikely this spill will occur, it’s unlikely the spill will reach shore, those aren’t even the government’s own assessments. They’re just repeating what BP, Exxon, and other oil companies put in their drilling applications. And since there’s no environmental impact study, the government never actually does an independent review. So everyone is just repeating the industry’s statements as they rubber-stamp the approvals.

AMY GOODMAN: Reporters questioned White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Wednesday about why BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operation was exempted from the detailed environmental impact analysis last year.

REPORTER: ... Why BP was exempted from the environmental impact analysis?

SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: Yeah, well, I -- the -- there are a series of reviews that have to -- that have to -- you have to go through in order to get drilling permits. The process by which was referenced in that article is part of the review that Secretary Salazar is undergoing.

REPORTER: Robert, does the White House believe it was a mistake, for this categorical exemption to be granted to BP for Deepwater Horizon?

SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: That’s part of the investigation. I don’t know the answer to that.

REPORTER: Ok, so that’s something that you’re looking into presently?

SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: I would say as the President asked Secretary Salazar to undertake a thirty-day review of what happened, that that would certainly be part of the process under which he would evaluate.

AMY GOODMAN: Kieran Suckling, that was Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. Respond to his response.

KIERAN SUCKLING: The White House and the Department of Interior are really sort of ducking their heads on this issue right now because it’s an enormous problem. Especially since just a few months ago the Government Accountability Office came out with the report on MMS’s operations in Alaska, where they also have offshore drilling, and specifically said the agency is not doing these environmental studies properly. They’re avoiding doing them at all. And then they went ahead knowing that the GAO had just done this study and continued to put them out.

So, this is not something new. MMS knew they had a problem. In fact, when Interior Secretary Salazar first came into office, he announced ‘There’s a new Sheriff in town, I’m going to clean up this corrupt agency,’ and instead of doing that, he’s pushed them to put out more offshore oil drilling permits while not cleaning up what is clearly a broken process of doing any environmental review at all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to play a clip of President Obama where he says that oil spills don’t come from rigs, but from refineries. He was speaking on April 2nd, just over two weeks before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Kieran Suckling, your response?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, I mean, I think what the President has said here is actually just very, very critical, because he is repeating, and I suspect without even knowing it, the big lie of offshore oil drilling. For decades, the oil companies and the Minerals Management Services have told us, ‘Oil drilling is safe, it’s fine, that’s not where oil spills come from.’

In fact, that’s the basis of not doing any environmental review is, you simply assert it will never be a problem, therefore, you don’t even have to study it. When it’s true that they don’t leak often, but when they do leak, it’s absolutely catastrophic. It’s very similar to nuclear power plants. They don’t often fail, but when they fail it’s catastrophic. And, therefore, you have to plan for catastrophe. You have to do very intensive environmental analysis, not simply say, ’It’s rare, so we can ignore it.’

AMY GOODMAN: Kieran Suckling, what do think has to happen right now?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, first off, I think that the President should announce a complete moratorium on all new offshore oil drilling. This three-week time-out is really too little, too late. And it’s very important to do that now because the president, under the urging of Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, has planned to open up new offshore oil drilling in Alaska, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and on the Atlantic coast. And that just needs to end. It’s not safe anywhere, anytime.

Secondly, the president should immediately revoke existing oil permits and especially in Alaska. Shell Oil, this July, has... is going to start doing offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Alaska. And if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the relatively warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do this with icebergs and sea ice, 20 hours of darkness in the Arctic oceans. It just cannot be done. If this spill had happened in Alaska, its magnitude would have been10 times worse than has happened in the Gulf.

Then, thirdly, the President should start an initiation of an investigation of Ken Salazar and his role in allowing this to happen. Salazar has been a major proponent of the offshore oil drilling industry. He passed legislation as a senator in 2006 to open up the Gulf of Mexico in the first place to offshore oil drilling. He gets campaign contributions by British Petroleum. And then he walks into this agency he is supposed to reform, and instead of reforming it, pushes it to do even more offshore oil drilling. So Ken Salazar is part of the problem here, not the solution. He should not be doing the investigation of MMS. He should be under investigation for helping to cause this crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kieran Suckling, we want to thank you very much for being with us, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity speaking to us from Tucson, Arizona. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report...

Source / Democracy Now!

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Whores in Washington; Blowout in the Gulf

"Whore of Babylon." Pen and watercolour over pencil. By William Blake (1809) / British Museum.
Blow jobs in DC;
Blowout in the Gulf

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2010

You think that subject line above is just a trick to catch your attention? No, I mean it. Big Oil's provision of whores in Washington to give blow jobs to U.S. officials helped produce the oil well blowout in the Gulf.

The Gulf oil blowout is only on the surface a technological failure. Much deeper and more to the point, it is a political failure.

Or if you represent Big Oil, it was a political triumph -- until the blowout.

(What happened in the Gulf was not a "spill." A "spill" happens when a finite amount of oil is spilled from a ship. The blowout is more like a geyser, a gusher, a volcano. The oil comes from the enormous undersea reservoir of oil. The oil well pokes a hole into the earth's covering of that oil reservoir -- and unless there is a way to cap the blowout, the oil pours and pours and pours.)

In many of the world's off-shore oil wells, there is a remote-controlled "acoustic switch," a shut-off device that is the last resort when the technology malfunctions and a blowout nears. Some countries mandate the acoustic device, and many companies insert them even when they are not required. But the U.S. does not mandate them, and BP did not insert one.

When I say "the U.S.," in this case I mean a division of the Interior Department called the Minerals Management Service. What do we know about it?

This: On September 10, 2008, Charlie Savage of The New York Times reported that,

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

'A culture of ethical failure' pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo. ...

Two other reports focus on ‘a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity’ in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in oil and gas rather than cash royalties...

The investigation also concluded that several of the [Minerals Management Service] officials 'frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.'

In blunter words, Big Oil provided whores to MMS officials who were supposed to be regulating Big Oil.

So MMS prostituted itself in return. And as a result, 11 oil rig workers were killed and the Gulf Coast of the United States faces an ecological and economic catastrophe.

Now that's whoring on a grand scale, far beyond anything the Bible condemns. (Except maybe when it talks about the Whore of Babylon, an empire not so different from the American Empire. Now it's not Emperor Nebuchadnezzar but "private" corporations, recently declared by the Supreme Court to be equal to human beings in their right to free speech by way of making unlimited election campaign contributions, who are the culprits, with the legal "government" turned into johns, tricks, for the Corporate whores. Or maybe it's really the government that has made itself the Whore of Babylon, selling itself to Big Oil? )

The acoustic switch costs half a million dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal. It costs less than that to buy enough whores to keep the MMS happy. Here's the political balance book: Invest a hundred thousand bucks or so to buy whores for the agencies that oversee you, make billions in profit from the absence of oversight, use the billions to invest in election campaigns if some clueless sheriff starts complaining about your whorehouse. A sweet deal, all around.

I forgot to add: Even in the last few weeks, since the Gulf oil blow-out, the MMS has been exempting new oil well applicants from doing environmental impact statements.

Even the Gulf disaster is small potatoes compared to the global disaster Big Oil is cooking up for us, colluding with Big Coal to see how much they need offer to buy the government.

As for a Climate Healing Act from Congress: Senator Graham is whining that the oil blowout is ruining the chances to pass a bill. Why? Because now the Big Payoff to Big Oil, permission to do off-shore drilling, is in danger. Those permits were to pay for Big Oil's tolerating a Climate Act full of other sweet goodies for itself. And without the permits, Big Oil will go home sulking, not ready to pay the house of whores called the Senate enough to buy their votes any more.

There is only one answer to this disgusting, lethal -- literally lethal -- mess. That is public power, enough citizens angry about the poisoning of our planet to blow Big Oil and Big Coal right out of the water.

A democratic blowout. Small "d."

A movement now as powerful as the civil rights movement was 45 years ago, when it forced Lyndon Johnson to bring Congress the Voting Rights Act.

That movement got laws passed, but it didn't start there. It started with nonviolent direct action, civil disobedience. Sit-ins. Marches. Freedom Rides. Freedom Schools. Mass mobilizations.

Who is ready now?

Let me know.

Shalom, Arthur

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director, The Shalom Center; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling: Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism, Torah of the Earth, and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy. The Shalom Center voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click here.]

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Ray Reece : Where's the Outrage?

A dead Portuguese man-of-war floats on rust-colored oil off the Louisiana coast on Tuesday, May 4, 2010. Photo by Eric Gay / AP.
Where's the outrage?
Just more 'Happy Motoring'

Given the other threats currently menacing planet Earth and its so-called civilization, this oil-gash disaster ought to qualify as the ultimate wake-up call to citizen outrage and mass sustained political action...

By Ray Reece / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2010

The recent explosion of the offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico promises to become, in my view, the gravest man-made environmental catastrophe since the U.S. rained nuclear death on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, with Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez bringing up the rear.

Experts are straining to formulate likely scenarios for the subsequent "oil spill," which is actually a gusher on the ocean floor that is spewing an estimated 5,000 barrels of crude per day. The images we're seeing of the oil already on the surface of the water are ugly and infuriating, and they're going to get more so.

They're going to get surreal. They're going to get apocalyptic. They're going to show us devastated beaches and wetlands in wildlife preserves, oil-tainted seabirds, turtles and crabs, destroyed fisheries, and, quite possibly, as a coda not depicted even in Dante's Inferno, the ocean itself on fire, releasing billows of acrid black smoke to the atmosphere.

Given the other threats currently menacing planet Earth and its so-called civilization, this oil-gash disaster ought to qualify as the ultimate wake-up call to citizen outrage and mass sustained political action, indeed to revolution. Likewise, the blown-up oil rig, under lease to British Petroleum, ought to be studied as a perfect paradigm of the agents at work in the looming demolition of life as we know it in the biosphere.

I speak of the agents of "post-industrial" capitalism and globalization in relentless pursuit of economic expansion and further profit for the corporate elite.

No strategy, no technology, regardless of the risk, is off-limits to these operators and their allies in government, so long as said strategies lead to more profit. That's why we're seeing higher-risk oil exploration and production in deep-sea fields where it wasn't profitable to drill before, i.e. before the advent of Peak Oil, i.e. declining conventional reserves, with corresponding increases in the price of petroleum.

That's why we're suffering a clamor for "clean coal" and a return to fashion of nuclear power plants, both of which are riddled with lethal long-term environmental problems that cannot be resolved.

In an honest, soul-searching, intelligent social order, these advanced assaults on the survivability of the planet, certainly including its Homo sapiens species, would trigger a global mass movement toward the revolution above mentioned, a movement demanding the radical reorganization of human society based on the principle, above all, of infinite sustainability of the planet and its biosphere.

That's a daunting phrase, I know. It means taking the longest conceivable view of the future of the biosphere. It means asking and trying to answer a question that is oddly unimaginable to most people even of generally good faith, even to my fellow progressives, much less to corporate masters of the universe like those we might find in the executive suites of British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs, et. al.

The question is this. What must the citizens of the planet do to ensure the survival and well-being of the natural environment -- which of course is their habitat -- not just for centuries into the future, not just for millennia, but for the hundreds of millions of years still remaining to life on Earth before it expires in the furnace of the "red giant" phase of a dying sun?

As preposterous as this question will seem to many, it seems more preposterous to me to evade it, to laugh it off as unanswerable and therefore ridiculous. Each generation of Homo sapiens inhabiting the planet has a sacred responsibility to protect and indeed to enhance it -- not only for the well-being of that generation but for all the generations of Homo sapiens and all the generations of all the other species yet to follow.

To evade the question of how to accomplish that is an abrogation of the moral and spiritual imperative that alone gives meaning to our existence as human beings in the first place.

It's not terribly difficult, after all, to visualize the global society that would have to be established to ensure the perpetual well-being of the biosphere. It's a matter of simple, elementary logic, like, duh, why didn't we think of that before?

The basic objectives are cut-and-dried: (1) maximize efficiency in the production and distribution of life-support resources; (2) minimize waste; (3) do absolutely nothing to exceed the natural carrying capacity of the geographic area under consideration, from the local to the bioregional to the continental and finally the global.

In practice this would mean, at the macro level, an abandonment of the capitalist demand for constant economic growth in pursuit of constant growth in profit. We would turn rather to the cultivation of steady-state economies, with an emphasis not on profit but on local and regional production of life-support commodities for local and regional consumption.

The giant teeming cities and their rings upon rings of exurban subdivisions and freeways to nowhere would gradually be replaced by a new geography of small to mid-size cities and towns that function primarily as market and processing centers for the rings of family and community farms that supply them.

At every turn, we would strive for the highest possible degree of local and regional self-reliance, thus to minimize fuel-burning imports, among other virtues, including full employment in a necessarily labor-intensive economy. We would also strive to eliminate or at least minimize the use of the automobile as the dominant form of personal mobility, opting instead for trains and buses, trolleys and trams, bicycles, horses and shoe leather.

We would be a sociable society, learning to travel and interact with each other again, and learning we like it. We would be a stable society, too, with strict controls on population growth, aiming to reduce the global total from seven billion -- which is where we are now, which is utterly unsustainable -- to one billion, say, which is where we were at the turn of the 20th century.

These ideas are hardly original with me. No small number of conscientious people and organizations in the U.S. and abroad have not only visualized a perpetually sustainable social order but are working today to try to effect it.

One such group is the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, co-directed by Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori. Another is the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minnesota, headed by David Morris.

Still others include TransitionNetwork.org in Totnes, England; Radical Relocalization in Kingston, Ontario; and the World Coalition for Local and Regional Self-Reliance, or WOCO, of whose tiny, nascent, ragtag board I am a founding member.

As for individuals who are focused on sustainability, a pioneer thinker and leading verbal bomb-thrower is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, a now-classic text on Peak Oil, and World Made by Hand, a novel set in the post-petroleum era that lies just ahead. Kunstler is much in demand as a speaker. He also maintains a popular blog called Clusterfuck Nation (kunstler.com), where he posts a fresh diatribe every Monday.

A second writer and speaker who has contributed richly to the literature of sustainability is Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and Dwellers in the Land, among other works. He is now director of the Middlebury Institute (middleburyinstitute.org), conceived in Vermont, which advocates for dissolution of the American empire through state secession from the union, e.g. a Second Vermont Republic.

Effective as these stalwarts may be, however, they do not trouble the thoughts of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world who need to be reached. Among that majority there is not to be discerned the faintest sign of mass outrage over the BP oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico -- or any other threat to the biosphere -- and certainly no reflex toward revolution.

Why? Because the corporate masters of the universe have long since extended their power and control over not just the physical resources of the planet but indeed over the minds, values, loyalties and habits of the people themselves.

How could we expect the youth of America and Japan, say, to rise in outraged revolt over the Gulf oil spill -- its ominous implication for their own futures notwithstanding -- while they sit mesmerized in front of their Sony video games? Ditto the American working class, say, mesmerized by the round and round of NASCAR racing and other so-called sports events produced ad nauseum by the corporate masters.

No moral outrage. No revolution. Just a continuation of what Kunstler calls the benighted culture of "Happy Motoring." This story will not have a happy end.

[Ray Reece is affiliated with the World Coalition for Local and Regional Self-Reliance. He is a former columnist for The Budapest Sun and author of The Sun Betrayed: A Report on the Corporate Seizure of U.S. Solar Energy Development, among other published works. His most recent book is Abigail in Gangland, a novel. He is currently based in Cagli, Italy.]

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Energy Drain : Peak Oil and the Big Spill

Drill, baby, drill:
Time to get serious about energy policy

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2010

Yesterday, President Obama went to Louisiana and met with officials there concerning the growing disaster caused by the explosion of an offshore oil drilling rig. Since the explosion, the well site has poured hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into Gulf of Mexico waters, and according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, it could still be weeks before the flow of oil can be stopped.

President Obama pledged to dedicate all the available resources of the federal government to the emergency, saying, "I'm not going to rest, and none of the gentlemen and women who are here are going to rest or be satisfied, until the leak is stopped at the source, the oil on the Gulf is contained and cleaned up and the people of this region are able to go back to their lives and their livelihoods. We will spare no resource to clean up whatever damage is caused."

And that damage is going to be substantial. It is affecting Gulf fishing grounds and wildlife in coastal areas of several states, not to mention the tourist dollars that will be lost because of oil-drenched beaches. Experts are already saying it is worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, and with the source of the oil unlikely to be capped for weeks, it could be much worse than anyone could have expected.

This makes the "drill, baby, drill" statements of Sarah Palin and her Republican cohorts seem rather stupid. They had assured us that modern offshore drilling had advanced technology and posed no danger to the Gulf or the American (and Mexican) coastlines. They were either very stupid, or lying (or both). As we can now easily see, it only takes one offshore oil rig to create a mega-disaster. Just think of the many more rigs that are out there. How many of them are a disaster-in-waiting?

Of course, the "drill, baby, drill" idea was not only simplistic but ridiculously stupid anyway. The Republican idea seemed to be that there was plenty of oil out there and all we had to do was go get it (endangering not only our coastlines and Gulf fishing, but also our national wildlife preserves). The sad fact is that this simplistic concept could not work even if our government fully embraced it.

We have been pulling oil from the ground for over a hundred years now and ignoring one major fact -- oil is a limited and non-renewable resource. Someday there will be an end to oil production and there's nothing the United States or any other country can do to change that. In fact, many people believe that we have reached, or soon will reach "peak oil" -- the point at which oil production will begin to drop no matter how much drilling is done.

Just look at the chart above. This was not drawn by some left-wing environmental organization, but by the the United States Department of Energy (and agreed with by the Joint Forces Command of the United States Military). It shows another disaster in the making -- one much worse than the current oil disaster, because this one would affect our entire society. If it is not dealt with immediately, it could even destroy American society as we know it.

According to the chart, the world is producing and using nearly 90 million barrels of the world's liquid fuel supply each day. In just about two years, the production and demand of these two fuels will no longer be equal (demand will start to be greater than production). By the year 2030 (only 20 years away), demand will have risen and production fallen enough for there to be a shortage of 43 millions barrels of fuel each day.

This is a serious shortage that will affect every country -- especially the high energy-consuming countries in the industrialized West (that need huge amounts of energy not only to keep their factories running, but also to maintain their high standard of living). The failure of the United States and other countries to find new (and hopefully renewable) sources of energy will result in wars all over the globe to control the dwindling liquid energy resources (the very thing feared by the Joint Forces Command). And there will be no allies in these wars -- it will be every country for itself.

We can thank past administrations in this and other countries for this coming disaster. It will happen because they exhibited no foresight and did not develop a sensible and sustainable energy policy. They have simply resorted to "drill, baby, drill" with no thought of the future consequences.

This makes it very important to quickly develop a sustainable energy policy. This will not be easy and will require a major effort by our government (and other governments). We MUST wean ourselves off of oil and other fossil fuels, and find new sustainable sources of energy. President Obama has a bill to begin that change, and it should be approved. It does not do nearly enough, but at least it is a start.

The focus on energy has recently been aimed at slowing global climate change, and that is an important thing that must be addressed. But the coming depletion of the world's liquid fuels will be equally devastating, if not more so. Fortunately, both problems can be solved with the same solution -- development and use of new renewable and sustaining energy sources.

But we are running out of time to solve both problems. I am left to wonder, do the governments in the world have the ability to set aside their differences and find a solution, or will they continue on their current course and allow the coming mega-disasters to happen? Right now, it looks like the latter.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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The Case for Corporate Accountability: Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria

Now at last it's time for Shell to atone for my father's death

The son of the executed activist faces the oil giant in a human rights trial this week. He seeks understanding rather than retribution.

By Ken Saro-Wiwa Jnr / May 24, 2009

This week, a US court will hear a case that I and nine other plaintiffs filed against Royal Dutch Shell for its part in human rights violations committed against some Ogoni families and individuals in Nigeria in 1995. For some, the case is already being cast as a bookmark in the struggle for corporate accountability, but to me and the other nine plaintiffs it is all that and more.

Fourteen years ago, Ken Saro-Wiwa predicted that Shell would one day have to account for its actions in Nigeria. "I repeat," he wrote in what would have been his final statement to the military tribunal that was to order his execution, "that I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial... the company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come ... there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company's dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished."

My father was prevented from making his final statement to the court and he and eight of his colleagues were tried and executed for their alleged role in the harrowing murders of four Ogoni chiefs including his brother-in-law. The murders divided my family and set Ogoni against Ogoni, providing a convenient excuse for the military regime to arrest my father, detain and torture scores of innocent men and send in a military taskforce whose leader publicly vowed to "sanitise" Ogoni so that Shell could drill oil in my community.

Ken Saro-Wiwa's real "crime" was his audacity to sensitise local and global public opinion to the ecological and human rights abuses perpetrated by Shell and a ruthless military dictatorship against the Ogoni people. The success of his campaign had mobilised our community to say "No to Shell" and to demand compensation for years of oil spills that had polluted our farms, streams and water sources. My father called the world's attention to the gas flares that had been pumping toxic fumes into the Earth's atmosphere for up to 24 hours a day since oil was discovered on our lands in 1958. He accused Shell of double standards, of racism and asked why a company that was rightly proud of its efforts to preserve the environment in the west would deny the Ogoni the same.

In response to his campaign, Shell armed, financed and otherwise colluded with the Nigerian military regime to repress the non-violent movement, leading to the torture and shootings of Ogoni people as well as massive raids and the destruction of Ogoni villages. In an infamous memo, Colonel Paul Okuntimo, the head of the military taskforce sent to pacify Ogoni, boasted that Shell provided the logistics for his soldiers. In one incident, Shell was building an oil pipeline and requested support from the Nigerian military. The pipeline destroyed Karalolo Kogbara's farm and, as she was crying over her lost crops, the soldiers shot her. In another incident, Uebari N-nah was shot and killed by soldiers near a Shell flow station; the soldiers were requested by and later compensated by Shell.

A year after the executions, some of the relatives of what has become known as the "Ogoni Nine" filed a federal lawsuit against Shell in a district court in New York. We felt we would not get a fair hearing in a Nigeria groaning under the very same military dictatorship that had colluded with Shell to violate the human rights of our relatives and our community.

In response Shell, which denied that it encouraged violence against Ken Saro-Wiwa, or other Ogonis, and said it attempted to persuade the Nigerian government to grant clemency to the Ogoni 9, hired the most expensive legal minds to prevent us from holding them to account for their actions in the US. Their filibustering brought 13 years of time, four spent arguing over where they should stand trial.

No doubt Shell will try to present themselves as the victims, whose only interest was to produce hydrocarbons in a "challenging" business environment. But can you be so sure of Shell? This, after all, is a company that, as revealed in an investigation by this paper in January 1996, lied about importing arms to Nigeria. And even its own consultants concluded in a 2003 report that its community development schemes were fanning the flames of conflict in the Niger Delta. Shell declined to publish the results. Moreover, this is a corporation that was widely reported to have misled investors and shareholders in 2004 about the size of its reserves in places like Nigeria.

For that financial violation, the New York stock exchange moved quickly to protect the rights of shareholders and investors and Shell was fined $100m. It took less than two years to hold a multinational corporation to account in a US court for financial violations in a foreign jurisdiction.

And yet it has taken 14 years to bring a case to trial against the same multinational corporation in a US court for human rights violations.

All over the globe, people are becoming better informed about the global economy. People are joining the dots that connect the oil under their farms to the extravagant lifestyles in the west. You can make these connections via cable television in my village even thought there is no pipe-borne water and the electricity mostly comes from a diesel generator. There is increasing awareness of the connections between irreversible climate change and our thirst for fossil fuels. More and more people are now feeling the effects of unregulated corporations.

My father was not against oil exploration and production. He appreciated many of the benefits of capitalism, valued the "can-do" spirit, the innovation and would never deny the right of anyone to seek adequate reward and fulfilment from their risk and sweat equity. But can we continue to put profits before people and the planet? How do we monitor institutions and organisations that have the capacity to operate and organise themselves beyond the regulation and jurisdiction of the current regimes of global governance?

Ken Saro-Wiwa always maintained that Shell would eventually come to see him as their greatest friend. He believed that the day would come when Shell would understand that its social licence to operate is as valuable as its commercial rights. In a competitive and uncertain world where the price of doing business becomes ever more unpredictable, where more players - Russians, Indians and Chinese - are able to compete for drilling rights, it will become ever more important to win the battle for local hearts and minds to advocate for a world run on mutual benefit rather than exploitation.



For the relatives, the trial remains our last opportunity to close this sad chapter in our lives. For 12 years, we have all separately developed strategies to survive, living with the anger and the rage that one's relative was unjustly murdered and that many of the institutions and individuals who were responsible for human rights violations continued not only to get away with murder but also to profit from their crimes.

We have remained dignified while the world has moved on. Few have ever wondered about the emotional or financial welfare of the victims but real lives, real people were destroyed.

In the face of the provocations and psychological trauma of all this, I have tried to maintain a dignified position, worked assiduously to deny myself the right to grieve in order to find a lasting solution to the challenges of the Ogoni and the Niger Delta in Nigeria.

The day after my father was hanged, I was asked my opinion of Shell and I didn't hesitate to answer that Shell was part of the problem and must be part of the solution.

I haven't changed my opinion. I am not interested in retributive justice but a justice that is creative, a justice that enables all stakeholders in this affair to account for and learn lessons from the past so that we can all move forward within a constructive and sustainable framework. We have to remain committed to building the kind of world that ensures that people who live on natural resource-bearing areas are not treated as collateral damage in a senseless race for profit.

With all of its experience in Nigeria, Shell knows that such creative justice is possible and the time for us to move in that direction is at hand.

Source / Guardian Observer

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Cuba: New Petroleum Player on the Field

A worker walks at an oil rig in Havana, Cuba. Photograph: Enrique De La Osa/Reuters
20bn barrel oil discovery puts Cuba in the big league
By Rory Carroll / October 18, 2008

• Self-reliance beckons for communist state
• Estimate means reserves are on a par with US

Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now.

Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba's share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.

If confirmed, it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.

"It would change their whole equation. The government would have more money and no longer be dependent on foreign oil," said Kirby Jones, founder of the Washington-based US-Cuba Trade Association. "It could join the club of oil exporting nations."

"We have more data. I'm almost certain that if they ask for all the data we have, (their estimate) is going to grow considerably," said Cupet's exploration manager, Rafael Tenreyro Perez.

Havana based its dramatically higher estimate mainly on comparisons with oil output from similar geological structures off the coasts of Mexico and the US. Cuba's undersea geology was "very similar" to Mexico's giant Cantarell oil field in the Bay of Campeche, said Tenreyro.

A consortium of companies led by Spain's Repsol had tested wells and were expected to begin drilling the first production well in mid-2009, and possibly several more later in the year, he said.

Cuba currently produces about 60,000 barrels of oil daily, covering almost half of its needs, and imports the rest from Venezuela in return for Cuban doctors and sports instructors. Even that barter system puts a strain on an impoverished economy in which Cubans earn an average monthly salary of $20.

Subsidised grocery staples, health care and education help make ends meet but an old joke - that the three biggest failings of the revolution are breakfast, lunch and dinner - still does the rounds. Last month hardships were compounded by tropical storms that shredded crops and devastated coastal towns.

"This news about the oil reserves could not have come at a better time for the regime," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a Cuba energy specialist at the University of Nebraska.

However there is little prospect of Cuba becoming a communist version of Kuwait. Its oil is more than a mile deep under the ocean and difficult and expensive to extract. The four-decade-old US economic embargo prevents several of Cuba's potential oil partners - notably Brazil, Norway and Spain - from using valuable first-generation technology.

"You're looking at three to five years minimum before any meaningful returns," said Benjamin-Alvarado.

Even so, Cuba is a master at stretching resources. President Raul Castro, who took over from brother Fidel, has promised to deliver improvements to daily life to shore up the legitimacy of the revolution as it approaches its 50th anniversary.

Cuba's unexpected arrival into the big oil league could increase pressure on the next administration to loosen the embargo to let US oil companies participate in the bonanza and reduce US dependency on the middle east, said Jones. "Up until now the embargo did not really impact on us in a substantive, strategic way. Oil is different. It's something we need and want."

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / Source / The Guardian

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Weasels in Congress Plan to Allow Offshore Drilling

Senate Democrats to push bipartisan drilling bill
By Mary Clare Jalonick / September 4, 2008

Democratic leaders in the Senate plan to push a bipartisan energy proposal that would allow for some expansion of offshore drilling when Congress returns next week from a five-week recess.

WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in the Senate plan to push a bipartisan energy proposal that would allow for some expansion of offshore drilling when Congress returns next week from a five-week recess.

The plan that would allow Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina to opt into leasing programs starting 50 miles off their shores now has the support of 16 senators - eight Democrats and eight Republicans.

However, it is expected to face opposition from lawmakers in both parties, and with Congress planning to meet for only three weeks before recessing again for the November election, its prospects are dim.

The proposal, not yet introduced as legislation, would also lift a ban on drilling off the Gulf coast of Florida, invest $20 billion on developing petroleum-free motor vehicles and extend expiring tax credits for renewable energy.

Many Republicans, including President Bush, would like to see the moratorium on drilling lifted along the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Some Democrats are unlikely to support any measure that includes increased offshore drilling.

"This is going to be hard to do, we are under no illusion here," said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who led the negotiations on the proposal with Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. "But we've tried to put something together that is responsible and broad-based and bipartisan, and I think it's got a shot."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is working with the supporters to get it on the floor "as quickly as possible" after the Senate returns Monday, said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "It appears that this proposal is picking up steam on both sides of the aisle," Manley added.

When the proposal was introduced in early August, Reid said he did not agree with every part of it. Manley said Reid still believes drilling "is not the answer to everything" but is a comprehensive approach that could be a way to forge a compromise on the issue.

Six senators signed on to the proposal last week, including Republican Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and John Sununu of New Hampshire. Both are facing competitive re-election bids this fall as high energy prices have become a touchy political issue.

Other Republicans supporting the proposal are John Thune of South Dakota, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Warner of Virginia.

Democratic supporters include Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Carper of Delaware and Ken Salazar of Colorado. Landrieu also is in a tight race for re-election in November.

Source / The Seattle Times

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Drawn and Quartered

The Rag Blog / Posted August 24, 2008

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Oil Drilling, the New ‘Clean’ Energy?

The New York Sun ran this idyllic graphic with its op-ed by Texas state Rep. Myra Crownover, who also owns a drilling company.
Texas state Rep. Myra Crownover -- who owns an oil drilling company -- asserts that 'oil drilling in Texas has had no environmental impact.'
By Forest Wilder / August 19, 2008

Did anyone catch [Texas] state Rep. Myra Crownover’s op-ed in the New York Sun on Friday? I doubt there are many readers of the Sun in Crownover’s North Texas district, but the piece wasn’t really intended for her constituents anyway. In her op-ed, Crownover, who co-owns a drilling company, joins the chorus of Republicans screaming “Drill Here, Drill Now.” Even in that crowd — in which pandering and misinformation have been commonplace — Crownover manages to distinguish herself. Crownover argues that Texas has much to teach the nation about “energy, the economy, and the environment.”

Among her boldest assertions is that oil drilling in Texas has had no environmental impact. Crownover writes:

There is debate in Congress right now as to whether the Atlantic and Pacific Coastlines should be opened to offshore drilling. In Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, we have been producing millions of barrels of oil for years with no environmental consequences. Offshore drilling safety is so advanced that even during Hurricane Katrina not one drilling rig in the Gulf experienced a significant environmental event.

You heard the representative: there have been NO environmental consequences from oil production in the Gulf. Zero. Crownover goes on to state that Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any “significant” environmental problems related to drilling rigs either.

Both assertions are flatly contradicted by numerous media accounts and reports from the federal government, only a Google search or phone call away. Just take hurricanes Katrina and Rita, events that happened in the last three years. For example, a Houston Chronicle investigation found:

[T]he two storms caused at least 595 spills, incidents that released untold amounts of oil, natural gas and other chemicals into the air, onto land and into the water. The quantity and cumulative magnitude of the 595 spills, which were spread across four states and struck offshore and inland, rank these two hurricanes among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Some have even compared the total amount of oil released — estimated at 9 million gallons — to the tragedy of Exxon Valdez.

I called Wilma Subra, the technical assistant for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), to get her assessment of Crownover’s belief that Katrina produced no major oil problems. “There were a large number of rigs totally lost,” she said. “They’re not there anymore. There were a large number of spills. There were pipelines that run from the rigs to the shore that were disrupted. The oil had an impact on aquatic organisms… You can go along the coastal areas and still find residual oil.”

While it’s true that drilling rigs are safer and cleaner than they used to be, spills still occur with some regularity. In 2006, a pipeline linking a rig to the land leaked 21,000 gallons of oil offshore of Galveston. Sometimes oil outfits intentionally and illegally discharge waste into the Gulf. And what about the barge on the Mississippi that recently leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel oil into the river? Or how about the oil spill from a leaking pipeline in San Leon, Texas that happened just today?

It’s as if Crownover is living in some alternative universe.

But you can’t really blame her. The drilling-is-safe/”not-one-drop-spilled” meme has caught fire in the GOP ranks, bandied cavalierly about by John McCain, Fox News talking heads, and a hundred others who’ve read the talking points. Texas elected officials, who speak with some authority about the oil bidness, have gotten in on the act. For example, Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames-Jones, whose agency regulates the oil and gas industry, writing in the Washington Post, urged federal policymakers to “cast off ’70s thinking and learn from the recent experiences of energy-producing states such as Texas.” The impacts on sensitive areas like ANWR, she said, would be “minuscule.”

Contrary to the belief of some, repeating something that is untrue over and over does not make it true.

Source / Texas Observer Blog

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