Disaster Capitalism at the Pump

It's the oil price version of the Shock Doctrine:

... This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation.

There is no doubt that a lot of people have been discomfited and genuinely hurt by $4-a-gallon gas. But their suffering will not be relieved by drilling in restricted areas off the coasts of New Jersey or Virginia or California. The Energy Information Administration says that even if both coasts were opened, prices would not begin to drop until 2030. The only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying to lock up every last acre of public land before their friends in power — Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — exit the political stage.

The whole scheme is based on a series of fictions that range from the egregious to the merely annoying. Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, noted the worst of these on Wednesday: That a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply but owns only 3 percent of its reserves can drill its way out of any problem — whether it be high prices at the pump or dependence on oil exported by unstable countries in Persian Gulf. This fiction has been resisted by Barack Obama but foolishly embraced by John McCain, who seemed to be making some sense on energy questions until he jumped aboard the lift-the-ban bandwagon on Tuesday.

A lesser fiction, perpetrated by the oil companies and, to some extent, by misleading government figures, is that huge deposits of oil and gas on federal land have been closed off and industry has had one hand tied behind its back by environmentalists, Democrats and the offshore protections in place for 25 years.

The numbers suggest otherwise. Of the 36 billion barrels of oil believed to lie on federal land, mainly in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, almost two-thirds are accessible or will be after various land-use and environmental reviews. And of the 89 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie offshore, the federal Mineral Management Service says fourth-fifths is open to industry, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan waters.

Clearly, the oil companies are not starved for resources. Further, they do not seem to be doing nearly as much as they could with the land to which they’ve already laid claim. Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to produce energy. That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska...

Yes, you heard that right. They've already got the oil fields and they're not using them. It's not just the Saudis, it's not just the Chinese demand, it's not just the speculators. It's largely the oil companies creating and taking advantage of a bad situation to shock you, Americans, into handing oil rights over to them in all public lands.

Don't give me the weak-minded lines about the Democrats taking a Carteresque approach to energy. If we had taken Carter's approach to Energy issues 30 years ago we wouldn't be in this trouble today.

What happened to Carter was that he won the undying enemity of the Company by throwing out Poppy and a lot of Poppy Bush's minions from the CIA when he took the job of President. His mistake was he didn't throw out all of them, as well as all the Nixon-Ford cronies left in the CIA and the Pentagon. What Carter had to deal with was a Republican government he thought he could negotiate with for the good of the country.

He was naive and wrong. The Company didn't like his politics, and when he started telling it like it is about oil, they bankrolled the propaganda push for his political demise. The good of the Nation wasn't part of their bottom line.

If we are in an energy crisis now, it's because some very rich people want it that way. They've learned to use crisis to force their agenda. It's called the Shock Doctrine.

The real question is how many Americans will fall for this mind trick. Again.

There are ways to produce renewable energy. Bacteria can turn garbage into octane. With a little financing, we could engineer microorganisms to fix atmospheric CO₂ into hydrocarbon using sunlight and water.

But then the oil companies and their theocratic cohorts couldn't own us.