An interesting point on the price of oil in today's NYT magazine.

[NNadir]

Occassionally, between episodes of shilling for Bush, the NY Times still produces some thoughtful articles. Here is one on the "out of sight, out of mind" AKA NIMBY attitude they pervades the oil industry.

More than 35 years ago, an offshore drilling rig spilled approximately three million gallons of oil into the waters near Santa Barbara. A massive slick covered hundreds of square miles and killed thousands of birds, seals and dolphins; the white beaches of California turned black with crude. Night after night, the TV networks showed oil-covered birds flopping in their death throes on fouled beaches. Popular outrage was heightened by the attitude of Fred Hartley, president of Union Oil, which operated the offending rig. In Senate testimony, he chided environmentalists and journalists for over-reacting to the loss of bird life.

The Santa Barbara spill was a galvanizing event that raised support for the first Earth Day, hastened the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and led to state and federal moratoriums on new drilling. Today, drilling for oil and gas is barred off 90 percent of America's coastlines...

...The latest battle has not touched upon a depressing fact: every barrel of oil that is not extracted from America must be drilled from someone else's backyard, often with little regard for the consequences. Because our appetite for energy has grown over the decades, new drilling, along with the damage it tends to create, has not been halted; it has been outsourced...

...Take a look at Nigeria, which has the misfortune of possessing more than 35 billion barrels of oil, much of it around the Niger Delta. When I visited last year, traveling through stunted mangrove swamps near Port Harcourt, there was a near-absence of birds, and oil was everywhere - not only dripping from rusty platforms atop the delta waters, but in the water itself, in the air, which smelled of petroleum, and in the gas flares that are a scalding feature of the injured landscape. Because of a host of political and economic ills triggered by the drilling, the Niger Delta is alive not with marine life but with violence - bands of tribal warriors wage an off-and-on war against one another and army troops...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/magazine/18wwln_essay.1.html

I have noted in some threads on poverty and energy that the per capita power demand of Nigerians is 8 watts. All that destruction is not enriching the average Nigerian.

[umass1993]

1. Few in the world know what time it is....

The current MO, of the petroleum industries is to ride the fine line between "We're running out of oil/gas" and "There's plenty of fuel if you let us get to it."

They want to scare the American people enough to let them mine wherever they want, but not enough to cause a panic or stimulate real thoughtful discussion of the issues.

Lee Raymond was just appointed chair of some bs committee to "investigate" the current energy situation. This is a front to lend legitimacy to the position that we should drill everywhere and anywhere.

It is transparent, so transparent. This is why I can't stand to watch the news.

[phantom power]

2. One of the depressing realizations I've had to face...

is that most of the environmental "gains" over the 80s and 90s, that Americans more or less patted ourselves on our backs for, were only local gains. We cleaned up our environment (sort of), but it was only by exporting all our extraction-industries, and other heavy industries, to foreign countries, where they don't have any environmental protections. Toxic metal mining in South America, toxic manufacturing in China, etc...

We haven't yet faced up to the real cost of a sustainable economy. That's disturbing, in a James Kunstler sort of way.

[NNadir]

3. It's very clear that one of the things we've outsourced is pollution.

This benzene business in Harbin is just the tip of the iceberg, even as the ice berg is melting.

More disturbing is the chinese coal explosion, although clearly coal is not something we've cleaned up here either. It's all, on some level, unnecessary.