Snake Oil Indeed

So, I am having a pleasant evening, reading fark.com, when all of a sudden I come upon an article that purported to debunk "three 'truths' about offshore drilling.'

Oh goodie, I thought to myself, more ammo to use against the neo-cons...but rather than the environmentally conscious missive I sought to find, instead I was harpooned into reading an article that made irony hit me on the head with a sledgehammer.

This article was FOR offshore drilling, not against, and this 'editorial' of the TheWashingtonPost.com was supposedly educating me against the lies of the liberals.

Unbelievable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081102145.html

The first 'false truth': "The oil companies aren't using the leases they already have." In other words, that oil companies own some 8,000 odd leases of land, but only 2,000 of those are listed as 'active', or producing greater than 130,000 barrels of oil a day.

But, the article states that oil companies have, "drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market." Thus, oil companies aren't just being lax, they're trying to save our energy day!

Okay, so 6,000 oil leases of oil company land are supposedly gearing up to churn out oil, thus debunking this myth. Honestly, I am kind of an oil peak buff, and I hadn't about this complaint against oil lands. I HAVE heard that oil companies haven't been building new refineries for like, 2o years, and that it doesn't matter how much oil is pumped if we can't refine it. Oh yea, and Katrina knocked out most of the refining capacity America had in the first place. So, yes, building refineries is a HUGE investment, and takes about a dozen years. Oh, wait, I almost forgot...OIL COMPANIES HAVE RECORD PROFITS THIS YEAR. Good time to build some refineries, when we're not deflecting public opinion about that in the first place.

Moving on.

2. · "Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves."

The claim here is that the equipment that measured the oil reserves in the U.S. was seismic, way out of date, and these measurements were recorded in 1987, 1981, and before.

Okay, I buy that. So there's lots more oil than we thought. Will that fix our energy problem. No. Will we still have to wait years, years, before we some of that oil. Yes. So, how is this really a big deal? People DON'T want oil corporations to ruin the last vestige of natural land and ecosystems that we have. Oil corporations WANT the money that oil will give them from our pockets. They don't care about helping the oil or energy crunch. So this point, is moot. We don't want them to drill. So they shouldn't drill.

(Too bad our country is run by two oilmen who have already proved their worth.)

3. "Drilling is environmentally dangerous."


Ohhhhkay. How that is a myth, I have no idea. I'm going to excerpt the entire paragraph they use for reasnoning here. It doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Maybe it will to you. Lemme know.

"Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures. Chief among them is a requirement for each well to have an automatic shut-off valve beneath the ocean floor that can also be operated manually. According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced. That's not to minimize the danger. But no form of energy is perfect or without trade-offs. Besides, if it is acceptable to drill in the Caspian Sea and in developing countries such as Nigeria where environmental concerns are equally important, it's hard to explain why the United States should rule out drilling off its own coasts. "


The bottom line is...I don't buy this editorial, and I just find it hard to believe that someone actually printed this. It is so contrary to what can actually help this country, and not corporate interests, that it once again proves to me that the media does have an agenda, and it dictated by its corporate owners.

Thus, the media should be removed as the only force of America's people, and instead, be replaced with...you guessed...bloggers. Who have nothing to please but their audiences, they can say and do what they want...and there is a blogger community that can self regulated itself, or at least more so than the government and corporation sponsored media that we already have.