12-24-08 by dugan
The White House giveaways have been so fast and furious that they’re hard to track. But here are a couple of recent tales that round up the oil industry loot in this lame-duck season–our stockings may be empty, but not Exxon’s (and friends’).
Guest Columnist Timothy Egan in the New York Times:
Well before it was a bumper sticker and a chant at Sarah Palin
rallies, “drill, baby, drill” became the overriding mission of the
political hacks who oversee more than 200 million acres of public land
for Bush. At a frantic pace, they have opened up to oil and gas leasing
canyons of golden slickrock, mesas once known only to hunters and
pronghorn antelope, and little hideaways near the open-aired art
galleries of the Anasazi.
Take what you want, they said — and get
while the getting is good. It was a plunderfest that produced a
gangster culture, with dozens of high-level Interior Department
employees exchanging sex, cocaine and gifts with the industry they were
supposed to be doing arms-length business with, according to a scathing
and quickly forgotten report this year by the agency’s inspector
general.
Egan’s sharpest point is why oil companies are snapping up these leases now, when the recession has left the world brimming with unsold oil:
It would be one thing if we needed the fuel. Of nearly 9,000 oil and
gas permits approved on public land in Utah, barely a third of them
have been drilled. The way this game works is that oil companies buy
the leasing rights — in some case for as little as $2.50 an acre — then
wait for Saudi Arabia to force another oil price spike. Then they
drill.
And the impact on price or domestic supply? Nothing.
Even if all the accessible oil and gas were taken from federal land in
Utah, it would have zero impact on prices, according to several studies.
The second holiday treat for readers is Terry Tempest Williams’ outcry in the Los Angeles Times, "Oil lays waste to the West."
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, riding bareback and backward in the
last gasp of their fossil-fuel governance, are holding fast to their
dictum that what is good for the oil business is good for the country.
In the interior West, we know this is a lie. Just look at Wyoming,
Colorado, New Mexico and Utah and see how they have been laid to waste,
a wide-open wound in America’s failed energy policy.The long
horizon, emblematic of our wide open spaces, is disappearing. Thousands
of oil and gas rigs interrupt the sea of sage. Public lands are pumped
and pimped. Pronghorn antelope, known for their agility and speed, are
no longer running but sitting in the midst of a cobweb of roads — an
act of defiance or resignation, it’s hard to know. When you walk onto
an oil patch, instead of a night sky of stars, oil derricks are lit up
like marquees in Las Vegas, and you can forget you are in Boulder,
Wyo., or Vernal, Utah, or Rifle, Colo.
And for a good laugh after a good cry, here (again) is Robert Greenwald’s Dubya version of "Night Before Christmas"