Oil, which over the course of many centuries, in many forms, has been highly beneficial to the human race, has finally come full circle, and is now the curse of the planet. This negative transformation has, of course, to do with the product itself, but even more important, it has to do with the greedy, exploitive companies and their management, that control the industry and suck the product from the earth.
First let’s deal with a present reality of oil. Right now in the state of Texas, courts, bought and paid for by the oil industry have granted easements based on rights of eminent domain to a foreign company, allowing it to occupy, illegally, land owned by American citizens in a cause that will benefit only that foreign company and will poison the land that it occupies and all adjacent land for an indeterminate years to come.
I say illegally, because that’s what these easements are; the land was not purchased from the owners, the easements were ordered by oil friendly courts, allowing Trans-Canada/Keystone to use the land to transport oil through a pipeline that they will build. But like all easements, it gives the holder of the easement no right of control, only a right of use.
The first wrong being done here is that the easements were granted through eminent domain, a right that is supposedly used in this country only to benefit community programs, not private industry. This is sometimes evaded when a private company is doing something beneficial for the community. So far Trans-Canada/Keystone has shown absolutely no interest in doing anything beneficial to any community in the United States. Their only interest is in using property owned by United States citizens to transport their fetid product, the most environmentally poisonous oil ever developed, across US soil, to ports, from which it will be shipped to China. In other words, they will make a profit and the people in their way will get screwed.
To enforce their bought and paid for easements, these oil gangsters have hired local off-duty cops, who have used the equipment, uniforms and weapons of their local police departments to defend the gangsters who are stealing the rights of US citizens. They have even gone so far as to prevent the owners of the land through which the easements have been granted from using their own land, even land, through which there is no easement. Barak Obama, where the hell is the federal government? Why aren’t these gangsters being run back to Canada and the small town thugs (local cops) that they are paying, being charged with the illegal use of city or state equipment?
What fascinates me is that this is happening in a state where every jerk and his brother owns a gun and where they are always braying about how they need their guns to protect themselves from foreign invaders and government outrage. Well, here’s your chance, gunners; a foreign corporation has invaded the hallowed ground of the sovereign state of Texas. Let’s see you stand up on your hind legs and protect your fellow citizens from these land grabbing profiteers who run roughshod over little old ladies trying to protect their family’s ranches.
The punks (cops) for hire have no problem bullying and abusing peaceful protestors who are trying to stop these oil gangsters. Maybe they would be a little more reticent if faced with a group of protesters armed with the automatic weapons that these local hunters claim they need for sport.
But none of this would be a problem if we faced up to the other realities of oil. It is a finite resource and it is a disastrous pollutant.
Despite the millions that oil companies spend trying to sell us on the joys of oil use, and despite the voices trumpeting that false fact that we are on our way to oil independence, the reality is that oil is running out in this country, at least the sweet oil that is most in demand. The truth is that it may last only long enough to kill us, and our children. But that doesn’t keep Mitt Romney from running around celebrating the lie that we now have unending amounts of gas and oil and that we will be energy independent by 2020. This is pure unadulterated bullshit. We will never pump enough of either to make us energy independent, not as long as we do not alter and control their usage.
The great new discoveries of gas and oil come with huge price tags, not just in dollars but also in the form of altered landscapes, contaminated water and poisoned atmospheres. We can no longer jam a pipe in the ground and suck our gas out of pockets in the earth. We must now fract our sub-strata by injecting enormous amounts of water and chemicals. The chemicals putrefy our underground water systems and the water steals from our ability to irrigate our crops.
The oil we now are extracting from the land is no longer pure liquid gold. It is called tar sands oil, a solid, gooey substance, which must be dug up using strip mining techniques or melted in place through the application of steam and chemicals, then mixed with other chemicals in order to force it through pipelines that it will rupture much faster than they currently do and that is already an unacceptable rate. Deep-water oil drilling operates under the most dangerous conditions imaginable and requires super expensive safety systems that, as already proven, are anything but foolproof. None of this stuff is cheap, safe or non-polluting
The new oil centers, according to the hacks that write for oil industry publications will exist in Canada, The Dakotas, Texas and Brazil. The problem with this cornucopia is that it will prove more difficult, dangerous and expensive to extract than any other we have previously tried. The Canadian oil that Keystone wants to pump across our country will be sent to China, and will benefit our country, not at all.
I know that the oil interests and their sycophants love to tell us about all the jobs that will be created by this polluting monstrosity that Keystone wants to run through the most important water source in the mid-west, but it’s all lies. The estimates, depending on who’s doing the lying run up to half a million jobs but the reality, confirmed by loose lipped employees of the oil companies themselves, will actually run to between two and four thousand and they will only be temporary. It doesn’t take too many workers to watch a pipe, until it breaks of course, and then the owners expect the US government to step in and save their incompetent asses.
I love the BP ads that tell us how much BP is doing and spending in the gulf but never mention that they’re only doing it because it was their spill and the government made them. If it had been left up to them every bird, reptile and fish in the gulf would still be up to its ass in oil today.
All the current products and techniques are called extreme energy and for good reason. The techniques are certainly extreme but the costs are beyond extreme. Shell just blew $45 billion and years of prep, when they had to stop drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska because the weather wouldn’t cooperate and that’s just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended).
The whole thing is a mess that will not ever help to reduce the cost of gas at the pump, despite what Ryan/ Romney tell you. Of course that is one of their greatest lies, that Obama is responsible for gas at the pump. Everyone with at least half mental capacity knows that the price of gas at the pump is controlled by the oil companies, their brokers, the wall street gamblers who invest in oil futures and whatever accidents the oil companies run into in any given period. The President has almost nothing to do with directly affecting oil prices or the price at the pump.
So is there any kind of bright spot, any hope of solving this enormous clusterfuck? Sure there is but it doesn’t lie with the oil companies. It should, but like the tobacco industry, they are too busy trying to squeeze every last cent out of their own death dealing business. It exists with the companies that are into renewable energy, it exists with the new developing products that will be manufactured to accommodate that industry. It exists in the innovation and in the research and development that have not even touched the surface of what will be the most important job-creating tool of the next twenty years.
Already there have been 125,000 jobs created in Ohio in the last two years in renewable energy manufacturing. Millions more await.
Coal, the most deadly of the existing energy sources is already all but dead. Oil is on its way out the door. Gas has a chance of surviving if its greedy companies can be kept under control but the real future is in renewables, that will emerge cleaner, cheaper and more conducive to job creation than anything we now depend on.
The question is, will our new government, whether Obama or Romney have the will and the guts to fight the monster companies that are suffocating our nation and poisoning our children?