The oil skimming ships are gone. The booms protecting islands and marshes have been torn from their anchors. Sand bags have been overwhelmed. The headline is that Hurricane Alex is delaying the clean-up. But what is really going on is that Hurricane Alex is making a real clean-up unlikely.
The wave of violence in Iraq on Friday, wherein guerrillas killed at least 27 and wounded dozens, underlined how fragile the country still is. In many ways, American Iraq resembles BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil gusher. In the cases both of Iraq and of Deepwater Horizon, oil men were trying to get a big reserves of petroleum that had earlier been out of their reach. Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of oil had been put off limits by sanctions pushed for in Congress by, among others, the Israel lobbies. The Deepwater Horzizon lay deep under the Gulf of Mexico, under a mile of water and 2 further miles of the earth’s crust– the deepest oil well in history.
In both Iraq and Deepwater Horizon, corners were cut and the people behind them tried to succeed on the cheap. Instead of nearly half a million troops in post-war Iraq, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a little over 100,000, and they could not keep order. Instead of a whole range of safety measures on the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP made do with no relief well and skimped on a number of other key pieces of equipment.
Both Iraq and Deepwater Horizon are long-term catastrophes. Iraq has been destabilized into the foreseeable future. By the definition of the University of Michigan’s Correlates of War project headed by the late David Singer, Iraq is still in a civil war, with civilian deaths likely to range between 3000 and 4000 this year. Despite holding parliamentary elections on March 7, Iraq has been unable to form a government and there is not one in sight. There was no plan B once the Neoconservative fantasy of installing Ahmad Chalabi as a soft dictator was revealed as completely impractical. Likewise, BP had no plan B once its rig blew up and killed 11 crewmen. Top kill, junk shot, etc., all failed. Millions of gallons of petroleum have jetted into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening it with dead zones and extensive damage to coastal marshes. The damage, as with Iraq, will last for many years.
Both the Iraq tragedy and the BP tragedy are testimonies to greed and hubris. They speak of gigantic endeavors undertaken with insufficient forethought and too few resources. They are enterprises that made a handful of ruthless men wealthy, and impoverished everyone else. In the cutting of corners for short term petty profit, in the extractive determination, in the disregard for any rule of law or prudent regulations, these two projects were both stamped with the personality of Dick Cheney (who met with energy corporations and worked tirelessly to remove them from regulatory oversight, so that he is at the matrix of both disasters).
Neither the Iraq catastrophe nor the BP calamity would have happened if we developed alternative forms of energy to replace petroleum.
Many of the attacks in Iraq on Friday took the form of reprisals by militant Sunni Arabs against what they see as collaborators, and some targeted Iraqi and US troops.
Near the Syrian border at Qa’im, gunmen killed 7 Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint. Since caretaker Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has repeatedly blamed Syria for harboring Baathist Iraqi officers, the Qaim attack may well again inflame passions between Baghdad and Damascus.
In Fallujah, guerrillas fired a rocket at a US military base but it landed on three civilian houses and kill 4 persons and wounded 7. Those who want to put a US military base in Fallujah for the long term should keep in mind two words: in and coming.
In Tuz Khurmato north of Baghdad, the scene of much past violence, guerrillas set off a car bomb that killed 8 persons and wounded 69– with most of the casualties being women. The bombing may have targeted the home of Niazar Nomaroglu, a Turkmen provincial councillor.
Another target, in Salahuddin province, had been a translator for the Us military. He was killed as a collaborator by members of his own family. His plight increased the dread of many Iraqis who cooperated with US troops. There are now only 90,000, down from a peak of 160,00, and the number is headed for 50,000 this fall. As their numbers dwindle, both they and their Iraqi allies become more vulnerable.
No, the BP oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico is not your fault, despite what many pundits will tell you. Back in the 1960s when the environmental movement got going, major US corporations responsible for much of the nation’s pollution decided to fight it by paying for television advertising that urged individuals not to litter, thus implying that pollution is produced by anarchic individuals rather than by organized businesses. It was a crock then and it is a crock now.
You did not demand that BP consistently cut safety corners more than any other petroleum company, thus resulting in the Deepwater Horizon calamity, which could end up costing the economy of the Gulf of Mexico literally hundreds of billions of dollars this year.
How much the Gulf oil catastrophe is not your fault can more clearly be seen if we consider the ways in which a BP refinery in Indiana is threatening the Great Lakes with excess pollution.
The BP refinery received permission from the Indiana legislature to increase its ammonia and silt (infested with toxic heavy metals) output into the Lakes. The increased pollution was part of an expansion of the refinery to allow it to process Canadian tar sands. In addition, BP has illegally spewed extra benzene into the lakes (benzene is a known cause of leukemia) and has also repeatedly broken the law with regard to air pollution standards.
You did not ask BP to dump extra benzene illegally into Lake Michigan (the lakes are connected). You did not agitate in Indianapolis to permit the refinery to expand to handle tar sand, which is all by itself an ecological catastrophe. You did not demand that more ammonia and toxic metals be dumped into the lakes. None of these crimes against nature was your individual responsibility.
Rather, the Indiana legislature passed these laws because of ‘legislative capture.’ That phenomenon occurs when an industry that is supposed to be regulated by a legislature instead pays so much for political campaigns that it captures the members and proves able to write the legislation affecting its interests. Legislative capture explains almost everything that is wrong with America today, from the wars to the difficulty in expanding health care, and from inaction on climate change to the high price of prescription drugs.
Legislative capture is not your fault.
In fact, it is mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan, who so lowered taxes on the rich that he allowed them to capture almost all the country’s increased wealth since the 1980s, depriving ordinary Americans of any real increase in the standard of living. Since our filthy rich quadrupled their wealth in recent decades but most of you don’t have 4 times as much money in the bank as you used to, you are competing less and less well with the rich for access to and influence with your elected representatives.
This year a man worth $9 billion died and passed it on to his children without paying any estate tax at all, thanks to the Republican Party. This situation is creating a permanent aristocracy of the sort that in the eighteenth century ruled the 13 colonies in the East and the northern territories of the Spanish Empire in the West, all of which now have congealed into the United States. One of the points of the American Revolution from the point of view of Thomas Jefferson was to make the country safe for middling, yeoman farmers and to prevent the distant colonial aristocracy from taxing us without representation.
Our new business aristocracy, whether Big Oil or Big Banking, taxes us indirectly by legislative capture, by arranging for bought-and-paid-for politicians to subsidize their industries with public tax monies. There is nothing wrong with being wealthy, and often the wealthy have made key contributions to society. But let us face it. Business classes are interested in short-term profit and seldom think in terms of long-term cost-benefit for society. Having a dynamic business class in a society can be a plus if its focus on short-term gain for the company can be offset by other powerful forces in society– labor unions, NGOs, intellectuals and others. But when the business classes get so they own nearly half the privately held wealth, they can overwhelm everyone else and take society in self-destructive directions– as happened with the Iraq War, the economic collapse in September of 2008 and with the oil rig collapse in April 2010.
And that is not your fault.
Now, part of what the pundits are saying when they say the Gulf oil gusher is your fault is that you like to drive your car inexpensively to work, and so you are part of a consumer market that motivates BP to drill. But it is grossly unfair to blame you, the worker, for the difficulty of getting to work by much more efficient rail or for allegedly rejecting electric vehicles powered by .e.g. wind farms.
The US government gives and has for decades given massive hidden subsidies to the petroleum industry that make gasoline seem far less expensive than than it is, and auto, cement and oil corporations successfully lobbied for taxpayer subsidies for highway systems rather than for rail and public transport.
You did not ask them to do that.
‘Oil companies receive special deductions lowering their effective tax rate to about 11 percent, compared to 18 percent for non-oil industries. This has cost an estimated $200 billion since 1968 and, with soaring industry profits in recent years, is growing at an ever-increasing rate. ‘
The cost of licenses for offshore drilling have been mysteriously slashed by the Department of the Interior, a way of transferring you money to the oil companies and of actually promoting offshore drilling, with all its potential to harm you environmentally and economically. Do you remember lobbying the Mines and Minerals Service for that one?
Even the wars you are paying for in the Perso-Arabian Gulf and in Central Asia, as well as the aid given Israel and Egypt, amounting altogether to over $100 billion a year, must be seen as a subsidy to big oil.
And then, the cost of water, soil and air pollution is not figured into the price of a gallon of gasoline. It is charged to the taxpayer in various ways. And, global warming is also not figured into the cost of gasoline.
In fact, the various deep subsidies that you are involuntarily giving Big Oil are being used in part to buy a propaganda campaign to convince you that climate change has been exaggerated and is nothing to worry about. Ironic, ain’t it?
But that is not your fault, either.
People keep saying that wind power is ‘just about’ competitive with oil and gas. But in fact if the true cost of oil and gas were properly calculated, and all the hidden subsidies were removed, wind would be revealed to be much cheaper than these other power sources are. Even solar might make a good showing in that case. (Don’t bother complaining to me about the limits of wind turbines and solar cells; they have those limits because not enough research and development money has been thrown at them by the government and by government-engineered incentives to private business).
The subsidies for petroleum are unlikely to be lifted. This outcome is not because you will lobby congress and the senate to keep supporting big oil with your tax dollars. It is because of legislative capture. Too many elected representatives secretly run on the Big Oil Party ticket. (And no, it is not true that President Obama is more guilty of that than were his opponents).
It would help if the US Supreme Court did not recognize corporations as persons and did not confuse political campaign money with free speech, and if it would allow Germany’s practice of making campaign ads free. Then our elected representatives would not have to spend all their time raising money for television commercials from corporations in return for legislative quid pro quos. But the Court is appointed by the politicians who are victims of legislative capture, and it therefore represents the interests of Big Business.
I don’t know how to turn this thing around. I don’t know how to get free campaign commercials, or less money in politics, or stop legislative capture or halt the enthronement of the New American Business Aristocracy, with its all too frequent focus on short-term profit over long-term public welfare. I don’t know how to stop offshore drilling or wean us all off petroleum-fueled automobiles (I know that such a weaning would in any case decades–but we haven’t even begun). Me, I ride my bike into work 9 months of the year.
I do know that many congressional Democrats see the current tragedy as a once-in-a-century opportunity to reformulate energy policy away from petroleum, and that they will need an outpouring of public support and of public donations to pull that off.
If you don’t support them in this push to begin getting away from hydrocarbons, then whatever follows– will be your fault.
UPDATE 1: Tribesmen blew up oil pipeline in eastern Yemen in area known for Al Qaeda.
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Oil officials familiar with region say Mideast Gulf spill would be handled better than in U.S. Gulf.
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McClatchy gets the story: Since the BP oil leak began on April 20, the Federal government has granted 22 waivers to oil companies allowing them to avoid doing environmental impact studies on their further drilling plans in the Mexican Gulf.
The Department of the Interior’s “Minerals Management Service” has a history of ignoring environmental law. In Congress you have the phenomenon of “legislative capture,” where the corporations get to write the legislation affecting them because they give money to the legislators’ campaigns. But there is also such a thing as “administrative capture,” which is more indirect but has a similar set of motives. Sometimes government regulators actually come out of the corporations they oversee. Or government employees leave the government for lucrative corporate employment and keep their old circle of friends inside. The military-industrial complex and Pentagon contracting depend heavily on such networks.
In the case of MMS employees and Big Oil, some of them have literally been in bed together. I mean, “reform” of this agency involved explicitly stating that the employees couldn’t openly take money from the corporations they oversee!
I want my country back. I want back the country of Teddy Roosevelt, who cared about our natural environment. I want back the country of Harry Truman, who wasn’t afraid to give em hell. I don’t want an administration that authorizes offshore drilling to make political deals with the most despicable forces in American society. I know that Big Oil is making billions in untaxed profits that it uses to buy my government so that it can despoil America the beautiful, and I want my country back.
Do you doubt the reality of global climate change, caused by human beings pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? You are the victim of propaganda and foot-dragging by big oil corporations. Virtually all the peer-reviewed academic articles published on global warming acknowledge carbon-fuelled climate change,, but a majority of press reports quite a scientist on “one side” and another on the “other side.” The “other side” is bought and paid for and lacks a scientific leg to stand on– the equivalent of the “scientists” who denied that smoking causes lung cancer.
Just as Big Oil has attempted to muddy the waters (so to speak) on the dire environmental threat of climate change, so BP actively lobbied the US government against putting in the kind of engineering safeguards that could have forestalled the worst of the present disaster in the Gulf. A whistle-blower now says that more BP drilling platforms are at risk of producing such disasters because the company hasn’t carefully kept the technical information on these platforms that is needed. BP officials are accused of initially lying about the likely impact of the spill and failing to act swiftly to contain the disaster That Drudge and CNN (!) managed to switch the conversation to how fast the White House could respond to BP’s screw-up tells you everything you have to know about corporate propaganda in this country.
The attempts at Gulf oil spill cover-ups track with attempts at climate change cover-up by big Oil. These corporations are not charities, they are not acting in our interest. They are about making money in the short term, and often are willing to take short cuts that are ruinous in the medium to long term. We need to take back our government from them.
As much as 25,000 barrels a day of petroleum is now pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, damaging shrimp and other wildlife beds, ruining beaches, destroying fishing, tourism, livelihoods at a time of 10 percent unemployment over-all. There is a real danger that the slick will get into the Gulf Stream and attack America’s Atlantic beaches, as well.
Why? Because the US transportation system is r=un wrong. 70 percent of petroleum fuels automobiles. First of all, we should be sending most goods around the country on trains, not trucks. There are all kinds of hidden government subsidies for trucking, including the millions spent every year on rebuilding inter-state highways, which are constantly torn up by those huge trucks. But the trucking industry pays only a fraction of that cost. Train transport of goods is many times more efficient, but because government subsidies are harder to hide in that industry, you always have a lot of yahoos complaining about socialism (and usually they get money from concrete and oil interests). And, we should be subsidizing city subway systems and trying to put residential skyscrapers in the downtowns of cities, in hopes people will move back from the suburbs and live near where they work. Washington DC, which is the world’s worst traffic mess, needs what Vancouver has. (Siting skyscraper condos downtown actually reduced real estate costs for residents).
We need to end the hidden government subsidies for fossil fuels and make sure their true cost, including climate change, is built into them.
Moreover, we should be generating electricity from alternative sources or natural gas (of which we have a lot) and then moving to electric and hybrid automobiles. (Natural gas burns cleaner than petroleum or coal and is probably a necessary bridge fuel to the alternatives). Going to electric vehicles powered by natural gas, wind and solar plants would be cheaper than rebuilding all the gas stations in the country. Coal should be banned altogether and its use made a hanging crime.
And, we should be matching every penny of the cost of the Gulf clean-up with a huge government Manhattan project on solar energy.
The environmental and economic costs of the oil spill are huge, but they are tiny compared to the costs of actually burning the oil and spilling more masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you’re not alarmed about your future, it is because you have bought the cover-up of climate change, just as Obama did when he believed what he was told about the unlikelihood of oil spills from ocean platforms.
In the super pro-Israel magazine, Commentary/ here
“… The prospect of a shift in Saudi Arabia’s allegiance ought to alarm even the Obama administration. Saudi Arabia is not only one of America’s main oil suppliers; it’s also the country Washington relies on to keep world oil markets stable — both by restraining fellow OPEC members from radical production cuts and by upping its own production to compensate for temporary shortfalls elsewhere.Granted, Riyadh is motivated partly by self-interest: unlike some of its OPEC colleagues, it understands that keeping oil prices too high for too long would do more to spur alternative-energy development than any amount of global-warming hysteria. And since its economy depends on oil exports, encouraging alternative energy is the last thing it wants to do.Nevertheless, the fact remains that Saudi Arabia has been generally effective as stabilizer-in-chief of world oil markets and has no plausible replacement in this role. And since the U.S. economy remains highly oil-dependent, a Saudi shift into Iran’s camp would effectively put America’s economy at the mercy of the mullahs in Tehran…”
Let us contrast reality to the fantasy that Big Oil projects for us on our television screens. I have long despised the character of the lady in pantsuits, played by Brooke Alexander, who assures us, in the Energy Tomorrow ads, that we really, really need Big Oil’s products. Yeah, like we need a hole in the head. I think Ms. Alexander, who used to play a con artist on As the World Turns, should be required, while speaking, to be smeared with black oil– sort of like Shakira in “La Tortura”– instead of showing off that crisp and supercilious outfit.
I am fit to be tied that President Obama seems to have fallen under that baleful character’s spell, and is planning to vastly expand the scope of offshore drilling– setting us up for more environmental catastrophes, both from spills and again when the stuff is burned and enters the atmosphere as carbon.
So here is the coverage of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by PBS’s Lehrer Newshour, noting that as much as 5,000 barrels a day could be spilled onto the shoreline– killing fish, wildlife, beaches, tourism, and adding insult to injury for many coast families who have still not recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
BP’s first-quarter profits this year, by the way, rose to $6.1 billion from $2.6 billion in 2009!
Contrast that report to this Energy Tomorrow commercial (paid for by the American Petroleum Institute), which plays the following tricks:
1. By saying we need energy from “all” sources, it implies that hydrocarbons must be part of the mix and are as desirable as alternative green energy. But this is a lie, at least in the long term.
2. It ignores the enormous damage to the environment caused by pumping more carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
3. It alleges that Congress has put “much” of US energy resources out of play for development. But all offshore petroleum in the lower 48 if it were drilled could only supply about 400,000 barrels a day of oil. In a good economy the US uses 20-21 million barrels a day, so all that offshore drilling would yield a mere drop in the bucket. That isn’t “much.”
4. It ignores the ways in which increased fuel efficiency would actually reduce US dependence on foreign oil far more than offshore drilling would. PRNewswire notes in connection with the Mercedes Benz hybrid, “According to the EPA, the nation would save 1.4 million barrels of oil a day if just one third of all light-duty vehicles in the USA were state-of-the-art diesel vehicles.”
5. It ignores the environmental damage to beaches and wildlife and tourism of the inevitable oil spills.
BP, by the way, is British Petroleum, a descendant of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Iranian parliament asked for a better deal from the AIOC in the late 1940s and early 1950s (they wanted a 50/50 cut of the profits, which was what ARAMCO offered Saudi Arabia). The AIOC absolutely refused. In response, the Iranian parliament nationalized the AIOC holdings in 1951. It was in order to restore Western Big Oil to its Iranian holdings that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, putting the shah back on the throne as a megalomaniacal capitalist dictator and puppet of Washington. The enraged Iranian public overthrew the shah in 1978-79, establishing the Islamic Republic that has been a thorn in Washington’s side ever since. So, BP’s earlier arrogance helped produce our current crisis with Iran, as well as the massive Delaware-sized oil slick now devouring Louisiana.
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