Tag: oil

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The Coming Republican Disaster

No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would.  Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected.   But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation.  Yes, Trump got elected,  once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.

This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.

When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is.  They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not.  They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country.  They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual.  Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t.  They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative.  Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place.  The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration.  Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.

Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation.  Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly.  Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that.  That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.

I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election.  It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference?  A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions.  Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away.  Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine.  Trump will teach China a lesson.

And so we arrive at the Trump Administration.  I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious.  He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland.  He can’t let China bully Taiwan.  He can’t really end Obamacare.  He certainly won’t balance the budget.

He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.

What will probably happen?

Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician.  If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight.  But it will raise suspicions.  But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.

He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers.  It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture.  Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.

He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more.  This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget.  Dream on.  In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda.  To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling.  The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget.  That should be fun.

Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration.  Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns.  You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through.  Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them?  Will he take on the processed food industry?  Will Hegseth stay sober on the job?  Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?

And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine?  Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is?  And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?

Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit.  It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget.  But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.

The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.

In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America.  With high-paying union jobs.  Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.

The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn.  Don’t forget: crime will go down.

And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both.  And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.

What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration.  Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety.  Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states.  In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him.  But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.

I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again.  If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will.  If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.

One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know,  Donald Jr.  The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.

 

 

 

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Fracking

Fracking was invented way back around World War II, as a means of getting oil to come out of the ground more easily. Back then they used napalm. The process was invented by Halliburton, the company Dick Cheney headed before becoming vice-president.

Halliburton didn’t want you to know what chemicals are used in fracking– besides the millions of gallons of water. Could be benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, diesel fuel, sand. But there was this contentious little law– something about drinking water– that made it illegal for them to inject these deadly chemicals into the ground near anybody’s sources of drinking water. No problem. With former oil executive Bush in charge, Dick Cheney was appointed to meet with oil industry executives– in secrecy– to draft some new laws, one of which gave the oil industry an exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

This is how the system works.

Did you know that in Alberta and British Columbia, you only own the top layer of the ground beneath your house? What’s below that– including any natural gas or oil– belongs to the government. Now, you might think your government would at least make sure that any money to be made from the deposits under your home would benefit you directly. And you might also believe in the tooth fairy.

In fact, you are not entitled to one red cent for any oil or gas beneath your house.  The government doesn’t care about your rights or your property: they will hand over the oil and gas to Exxon or Shell or some other carbon company and they, in turn, will reward the government with “Royalties” they can then spend on things they can give the taxpayer.

And the government’s share of the profits from this mineral wealth guarantee that the government is going to support these industries if you try to fight them.

And do you think the cost of the water used, and the damage to the environment, is an expense to the oil industry? Are you mad?

In the U.S., you might own the mineral rights. You might not. It depends on state law and previous agreements with previous owners. You might very well purchase a property only to discover that you own nothing beneath the surface In principle, just like in Alberta and British Columbia, though, mineral rights to anything below the surface are owned by the property owner.

How can you own part of an oil deposit if it encompasses several properties? Under the “rule of capture”, whoever pumps out the oil first gets it. You snooze, you lose.

Some oil companies have, in fact, been caught digging their wells on an angle in order to pump out the oil below somebody else’s property.

So once again, it’s socialism for the investors– they get to share the property below your house– and free enterprise for the working classes– you have to go out and work for a living. And then you have to pay them for the oil. And then you might find out that your drinking water has been contaminated by the toxins they inject into the ground to free up that oil and gas. And then you find out that you won’t be compensated because Dick Cheney and George Bush saw to it that the oil industry will not be liable for any damage done to your drinking water.

True, but unbelievable.

More on who owns your oil.  But not much more.

Even more.  Better information from Wiki.

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The Un-War

I have said before that there is no “war” on terror. It’s not a war. It’s a series of random skirmishes. But, as I have also observed before, the Republicans would prefer to keep America in a perpetual state of war and they have now succeeded. The Republicans love to say, “sure, in normal times we could respect the constitution, but this is a time of war” or “sure, normally we don’t torture, but this is a time of war…” or ” sure, normally we try to have a fair tax system, but in a time of war, the rich should not have to pay taxes”.  Or how about, normally we don’t steal a nation’s oil reserves, but Iraq wasn’t using them for anything anyway.

There’s a brilliant mind at work here. If you can justify otherwise outrageous policies on the basis of war, why not have a perpetual war. But wouldn’t that be a bad thing? Only if it was a real war. But then how do you get people to believe we are war when we’re not? Simple. There are always terrorists and always criminals. Simply redefine “war” so it looks like something that is always going on. Bingo.

How does it serve their interests? Fear is the Republicans’ best friend. It is through fear that they can abrogate your civil rights, examine your book-borrowing records, scan you naked at airports. It is through fear that they can channel billions of dollars to their friends in the military and the defense industries. It is through fear that they can hide: our enemies cannot be permitted to know how much we spend on security– as if it would make any difference to them– and so, neither can you.

This “war” is not going to end. Obama can’t end it because the Republicans will roast him for being “soft” on terror if he does, and he doesn’t have the guts to take a chance on that. It will not end because there has never not been terrorists and there probably will never not be terrorists, and the Republicans know that perfectly well. They have their dream position. They know that they are sonsofbitches and as long as they can keep America afraid they are confident that Americans will trust them to wield the big stick and do to our enemies what we consider monstrous when they do it to us.

This war is forever. Patriotism, flag-waving, bigotry prevails for now. Trillions will be spent on fighting the phantom menace, ineffectually in the end, because the very definition of terrorism is random violence.

I don’t when or if Americans will ever realize how they have been conned.

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It was Always Really About the Oil

In a rather stunning disclosure, Alan Greenspan, former head of the federal reserve, admits that he urged Bush to depose Saddam Hussein for the simplest of all possible reasons: the oil.

Greenspan insists that nobody in the Bush administration agreed: they were only concerned about WMDs and democracy and human rights. But they also told him that nobody here talks about the oil. They knew that if there was the slightest suspicion of it, the other Arab countries, and the rest of the world, would go ballistic. It is quite possible that they never talked about the oil because they didn’t need to. Everyone understood it absolutely perfectly. Except George Bush who, to this day, seems to believe that it was about democracy and the safety of American citizens.

Keep in mind that America doesn’t have to actually hold deed to the oil to take possession of it. They merely have to ensure that whoever controls the oil is friendly to American dollars and technology, like Saudi Arabia.

In Greenspan’s eyes, it is right and good that the U.S. should take oil from where ever it can be found and use it to generate prosperity and a high standard of living for America and Americans. He is a former (?) disciple of Ayn Rand. America must be strong. It must do whatever serves its own interests. It can take the oil. If you’re too weak to take the oil away from America, then that’s just tough.

There is a pretty kind of logic to this spirit of individualism. It is very, very pretty. It is elegant and slim, because strategic decisions are unfettered by moral or ethical considerations, and should be guided strictly by questions of efficiency. How soon can we get rich? How many bodies do we step over to obtain our goals?

To believe in the myths of individualism and capitalism, you have to believe in “finders-keepers”, for there is no way to justify the possession of oil or air or water on any basis other than “might makes right”.

Or you can believe that we are all in this world together and nobody in particular has any kind of magical title to the world’s resources.

Or, like George Bush, you can believe your own spin: God commanded us to destroy Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a great sinner.

The disadvantage of Ayn Rand’s brand of individualism is that eventually someone stronger comes along and knocks you off the pony and takes it away. And you really have no moral grounds upon which to complain. You can only hope to make yourself strong enough so that you can take it back. And to make yourself strong is to make yourself cruel. The suicide bomber is Ayn Rand’s ultimate legacy: not strong enough to take the oil back, but fully comprehending that the world is really about raw power, individual fanatics are easily convinced that there is meaning in flailing against the machine. In George’s Bush’s gentle dreams– which are not Ayn Rand’s dreams– there can be no comprehension of individuals who give up the possibility of enjoying the fruits of raw power. The only explanation is the lamest one: they must be jealous of our affluence and prosperity and freedom.

Patriotism, in the case of Iraq, is an attempt to convince most people– who do believe we are in this together to a great extent– that the war on Iraq is a moral cause. It is a lie. It can’t be anything but a lie because the war on Iraq is about nothing more than “finder’s keepers”. We found your oil. Now it’s ours. Just try to take it from us.

Ayn Rand had nothing but contempt for religion.  Which is odd, because most of Evangelical America believes in Alan Greenspan.

 

The bizarre thing about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and those backroom fascists who believe in it, is that even the most hard-core capitalist doesn’t practice it when it comes to neighborhoods and families and churches and schools. Everyone knows how long a family would last, or what a neighborhood would look like, or how children at school would behave, if we all actually practiced Ayn Rand’s version of enlightened self-interest. There would be no need to do chores, or clean up your garbage, or keep it quiet after 11:00 at night, or do your homework– if the world works better if I only do what is in my own self-interest.

She is consistent in one respect: there is no need of a god in her scheme of things either. We are quite enough.

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The Scam of Ethanol

From the New York Times, May 15, 2006: A. David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University, published a paper in 2005 with Tad W. Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley stating that the corn-to-ethanol process powered by fossil fuels consumes 29 percent more energy than it produces. The results for switchgrass were even worse, the paper said, with a 50 percent net energy deficit. “I’m sympathetic, and I wish that ethanol production was a net positive and a help to this nation,” Dr. Pimentel said in an interview. “But I’m a scientist first and an agriculturalist second. I don’t think the U.S. will meet its goals with biofuels.” He also said the United States did not have enough agricultural land to displace gasoline with biofuels. “Even if we committed 100 percent of the corn crop to making ethanol, it would only replace 7 percent of U.S. vehicle fossil fuel use,” he said.

I had read something like this years ago, so I was surprised to see and hear numerous articles and news stories praising the idea of ethanol as a gas substitute for North America, and, just maybe, the long-dreamed-of solution to our dependence on foreign oil. I started thinking– am I crazy? Did I dream that ethanol actually takes more energy to produce than it creates?

No.

Even “60 Minutes” recently rhapsodized about the possibility of filling America’s freeways, long after the Saud’s are depleted, with biomass-fuelled cars, without once mentioning that corn is produced with the help of fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, machinery, and transport, all of which consume vast quantities of…. fuel. In fact, if you had to use ethanol to produce ethanol instead of fossil fuels, the absurdity would become clear: it would take 1.5 gallons of ethanol to produce one gallon of ethanol.

In short, ethanol is not cheap, not sustainable, and solves nothing. There is no way America could ever produce enough corn to produce enough ethanol to even begin to replace fossil fuels.

Think that particular study by Pimentel is biased? You would think, then, that defenders of ethanol would be happy to show you different studies that show different results. On the contrary, they tend to damn with faint praise, admitting that corn-based ethanol may never be able to replace, at best, more than 1/3 of our current fossil fuel requirements.

In all fairness, some scientists claim that ethanol can be more efficiently produced. In all fairness, the scientists who say that appear to be employed by ethanol manufacturers. Archer Daniels Midland is the largest manufacturer of ethanol. According to the Cato institute, it costs taxpayers about $30 for every $1 of ethanol produced.

Except one thing: it gives the American government an excuse to bribe farmers in Iowa to support a particular candidate in the early caucuses come election year, as “West Wing” dramatized (Republican candidate Arnold Vinick refused to endorse ethanol and, in this fantasy drama, still won the nomination).

Ethanol is a scam.

Ethanol

The News Gets Worse.

From Cornell University:   An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel’s analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

Some critics point out that, technically, it takes more than one gallon of gas to produce a gallon of gas too.  Sort of.  It appears that the amount of energy required to extract and process the oil used to make the gasoline is greater than the yield.  Like ethanol.  So what we have here is that we are paying a premium to make the fuel portable and usable by cars.  Point taken.  However, that doesn’t change the fact that using corn to make ethanol is not the economic or environmental solution it’s proponents claim, and, even more to the point, even if you used all of the corn crops in the U.S. for ethanol, it still wouldn’t be enough to replace even 1/3 of American  requirements.  (“1/3” is generous– some experts say it is much less.)

The farmer is America’s sacred cow. Literally. So when people say they support ethanol because they would rather give their money to American farmers than Arab sheiks, they have a point, right? Only if you also believe that the RIAA wants to stop piracy of music so it can pay it’s artists and composers. The fact this that most of the ethanol subsidies go to the corporations– like Archer Daniels Midland– that sustain this scam, not farmers who grow the corn, though they undoubtedly benefit from higher prices. Oh– the higher prices…

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The Clampetts are Here

Oil Man

Who owns oil? Oil comes from living material in marshlands and swamps that has been squeezed deep into the earth for millions of years. Some of this material becomes coal. Some of it becomes oil.

So who owns it? The oil companies find this oil, buy some land on top of it, and then suck it dry, like giant mechanical vampires. But oil does not exist in a straight vertical column. It is spread out way down there. It spreads under land that does not belong to oil companies. But our governments have agreed to allow oil companies to suck the oil out from wherever they want, as long as they have the “rights” to a surface area nearby. It is sort of “finders keepers”.

Capitalists think this is great. They think that since the oil company had the initiative and risk-taking bravado to go out there and find the oil, that they should have the right to sell it. What they are really selling is millions of years of organic and geological processes. All of these took place before we walked upon this earth. They belong to everyone, including future generations, and they should be treated more that way. The next time the oil companies holler about “deregulation”, think about that.

In the poor half of the world, corrupt politicians and generals sell their nations’ lifeblood to the West for a mere pittance. We consume most of it and fill the earth with our pollution. We are destroying the ozone. Oil tankers run aground destroying wild-life habitats. Our cities are so infested with automobiles that rush hour now extends from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm.

The Americans are also thinking a lot about water lately. They will need a lot of it in the coming century. There are thousands of golf-courses in California alone. Where is it going to come from? Hey, there’s a bunch of big lakes up here! Let’s just stick a nozzle in one end and pipe it all down to Arizona! You Canadians don’t need to worry: we’ll only take the water that’s on our side.