West Texas Pumpjack, Eric Kounce, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Post No. 10,
Oil Company Greed and Inflation
Russia raping Ukraine is just an excuse.
Oil Company Greed and Inflation
Russia raping Ukraine is just an excuse.
I wrote this as a comment on a Daily Kos diary, mid July 2022. I think it’s worth repeating and updating here.
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Did anyone else see a major oil company executive, a few weeks back, when asked about using Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as an excuse to gouge Americans at the gas pump, shrug and say that the price of oil is set by the international market? I’d really like to know who and when that was. It’s probably somewhere on YouTube. I’d watch it again if I could find it; I need that info to talk to my congressional delegation about it.
American oil companies pay 12 cents on the dollar, 1/8 the actual value, of oil they extract from our public lands. [i] And an International Monetary Fund report cited in Rolling Stone [ii] [iii] [iv] said that direct and indirect subsidies for the fossils came to $649 billion in 2015, while Pentagon spending that year was $599 billion. Yet the fossils think they owe us nothing, and that our public lands oil belongs to them, to sell to the highest bidder anywhere on the planet while we go suck eggs.
You may also have noticed that Grandpa Joe used oil company price gouging as an excuse to open a new round of Federal lands energy leases. Never mind that oil and gas companies are sitting on about 9,000 already-approved drilling permits on federal lands. Never mind his campaign promises to do something about climate change, or that Russia raping Ukraine and the fake inflation [v] [vi] it is (mostly not) causing will be long over before one drop of that new oil comes out of the ground—to be railroaded across the country and sold to Asia, instead of easing prices here.
Part of the problem is that Democratic party leadership are all apparently too old to truly understand the ways climate change will devastate the lives of their children and grandchildren, or, somehow, to care; they are “centerist” or “conservative” dems, and that really means corporate dems, bought and paid for by/beholden to the corporations, particularly the fossils. We need to nationalize the fossils. Unfortunately that will not happen until after the revolution, and I don’t see us taking back the power we never really had until things get a whole lot worse. We could have saved ourselves from climate change. We can see all of the changes we need to make. But we won’t. Civilization, and 6 or 7 billion of us, or of our kids, will die of heat stroke. Thirst. Famine. Wildfire. Storm. And we won’t get off our asses and do anything about it, mostly because the corporations own one-and-one-half of our two political parties.
-- -- --
Here’s a thought: The oil and gas companies are actually largely owned by millions of small investors. Reach out to them, with the message that their corporations switching to clean energy production, e.g. from offshore oil platforms to offshore wind turbines, will be good for the future of their investments as well as their own lives and the future of their progeny, and convince them to go to corporate stockholder meetings and demand to be heard.
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[i] Ryan Moore, “What are Oil and Gas Royalties and How Much is the Average Oil Royalty Payment?” Pheasant Energy.com, Feb. 11, 2022, https://www.pheasantenergy.com/oil-and-gas-royalties/
[ii] Tim Dickinson, “Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending,” Rolling Stone, May 8, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/.
[iii] David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, Baoping Shang, “IMF Working Paper: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates.” International Monetary Fund, May 2019: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509 . Download; see last line of chart on p 35.
[iv] Clayton Coleman and Emma Dietz, “Fact Sheet: Fossil Fuel Subsidies: A Closer Look at Tax Breaks and Societal Costs,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute, July 29, 2019, https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs.
[v] You Are Being Lied to About Inflation | Robert Reich, Feb 28, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi4KMCQuQYE
[vi] #MSNBC #News #Inflation
Robert Reich On 'Rubbish' Inflation Fix | Zerlina. Jun 22, 2022; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfpWZwPCc0s
**********
Did anyone else see a major oil company executive, a few weeks back, when asked about using Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as an excuse to gouge Americans at the gas pump, shrug and say that the price of oil is set by the international market? I’d really like to know who and when that was. It’s probably somewhere on YouTube. I’d watch it again if I could find it; I need that info to talk to my congressional delegation about it.
American oil companies pay 12 cents on the dollar, 1/8 the actual value, of oil they extract from our public lands. [i] And an International Monetary Fund report cited in Rolling Stone [ii] [iii] [iv] said that direct and indirect subsidies for the fossils came to $649 billion in 2015, while Pentagon spending that year was $599 billion. Yet the fossils think they owe us nothing, and that our public lands oil belongs to them, to sell to the highest bidder anywhere on the planet while we go suck eggs.
You may also have noticed that Grandpa Joe used oil company price gouging as an excuse to open a new round of Federal lands energy leases. Never mind that oil and gas companies are sitting on about 9,000 already-approved drilling permits on federal lands. Never mind his campaign promises to do something about climate change, or that Russia raping Ukraine and the fake inflation [v] [vi] it is (mostly not) causing will be long over before one drop of that new oil comes out of the ground—to be railroaded across the country and sold to Asia, instead of easing prices here.
Part of the problem is that Democratic party leadership are all apparently too old to truly understand the ways climate change will devastate the lives of their children and grandchildren, or, somehow, to care; they are “centerist” or “conservative” dems, and that really means corporate dems, bought and paid for by/beholden to the corporations, particularly the fossils. We need to nationalize the fossils. Unfortunately that will not happen until after the revolution, and I don’t see us taking back the power we never really had until things get a whole lot worse. We could have saved ourselves from climate change. We can see all of the changes we need to make. But we won’t. Civilization, and 6 or 7 billion of us, or of our kids, will die of heat stroke. Thirst. Famine. Wildfire. Storm. And we won’t get off our asses and do anything about it, mostly because the corporations own one-and-one-half of our two political parties.
-- -- --
Here’s a thought: The oil and gas companies are actually largely owned by millions of small investors. Reach out to them, with the message that their corporations switching to clean energy production, e.g. from offshore oil platforms to offshore wind turbines, will be good for the future of their investments as well as their own lives and the future of their progeny, and convince them to go to corporate stockholder meetings and demand to be heard.
-----------------
[i] Ryan Moore, “What are Oil and Gas Royalties and How Much is the Average Oil Royalty Payment?” Pheasant Energy.com, Feb. 11, 2022, https://www.pheasantenergy.com/oil-and-gas-royalties/
[ii] Tim Dickinson, “Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending,” Rolling Stone, May 8, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/.
[iii] David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, Baoping Shang, “IMF Working Paper: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates.” International Monetary Fund, May 2019: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509 . Download; see last line of chart on p 35.
[iv] Clayton Coleman and Emma Dietz, “Fact Sheet: Fossil Fuel Subsidies: A Closer Look at Tax Breaks and Societal Costs,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute, July 29, 2019, https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs.
[v] You Are Being Lied to About Inflation | Robert Reich, Feb 28, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi4KMCQuQYE
[vi] #MSNBC #News #Inflation
Robert Reich On 'Rubbish' Inflation Fix | Zerlina. Jun 22, 2022; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfpWZwPCc0s
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