The democrats allowed a ban on offshore drilling to expire, the Repubican presidential candidates chant is “drill baby drill“, and no one is talking about this. At least half a million gallons of crude oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico. Nice. Gee, wonder why……. oh that’s right, because it’s so environmentally safe to drill offshore.

Excerpts from the article:

Hurricane Ike’s winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent: At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of Louisiana and Texas, according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

With the storm approaching, refineries and chemical plants shut down as a precaution, burning off hundreds of thousands of pounds of organic compounds and toxic chemicals. In other cases, power failures sent chemicals such as ammonia directly into the atmosphere. Such accidental releases probably will not result in penalties by regulators because the releases are being blamed on the storm.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry also suspended all rules, including environmental ones, that would inhibit or prevent companies preparing for or responding to Ike.

The AP’s analysis found that, by far, the most common contaminant left in Ike’s wake was crude oil — the lifeblood and main industry of both Texas and Louisiana. In the week of reports analyzed, enough crude oil was spilled nearly to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and more could be released, officials said, as platforms and pipelines were turned back on.

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My Friends

Who is McCain talking to when he says “my friends?”

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Senior Justice Department officials blocked the U.S. attorney in Colorado from supporting a whistleblower’s suit last year, jeopardizing the government’s prospects for recovering as much as $40 million from a major oil company for its alleged underpayment of royalties.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said Washington overruled his request to enter the case against the Kerr-McGee Corp. A lawyer for the whistleblower said he was told that decision was made “at the highest levels” of the Justice Department, then run by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

“I recommended strongly that we intervene,” Eid said. “My view did not prevail.”

Moreover, McClatchy found that the Justice Department has participated in only a handful of the 80 whistleblower cases brought against the oil industry since 1995.

Whistleblower suits are generally less successful without the Justice Department’s intervention, and if a whistleblower prevails on his own, taxpayers get a smaller share of the damages.

More at McClatchy

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HOUSTON (AP) Exxon Mobil is reporting second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion, the largest quarterly profit ever by a U.S. corporation.

ADDENDUM (Buck): That profit works out to $1,485.55 a second!

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Are Americans stupid enough to believe this shit? Well, yes…..yes they are.

Source: Washington Post

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All the sudden the sprawling suburbs in America don’t look so attractive. Our obsession with buying cheap is going to come back and bite us in the ass. The death of the Mom and Pop corner stores and all the independent businesses that were accessible by foot, or bike was and is a shame. Now we’re going to feel it. Really feel it. The difference between European towns and American towns is the European towns (for the most part) still have their town squares with businesses. For the most part, we don’t. We have Walmart that’s 15 miles out…… a library that’s not accessible by foot, a grocery store you can’t walk to, a park that’s way on the other side of town, a Home Depot that’s next to the Walmart that’s 15 miles out. A Walgreens pharmacy that doesn’t deliver. No local independent hardware store, no Mom and Pop grocery store, no meat market, no independent pharmacist who knows you by name and will deliver your kids meds when they are too sick for you to leave the house. Too bad…….

Oil at $135? That was just the opening skirmish in the “peak oil” wars. The latest smart money? $200 oil in 2010, with gasoline at $7 a gallon. And that is going to turn Americans into car-shunning Europeans once and for all—poor Americans, at least.

That’s the latest gloomy forecast from Jeff Rubin at Canadian brokerage CIBC World Markets, who just a few months ago figured $200 oil would be a thing of the distant future—like 2012.

Mr. Rubin laughs off recent attempts to take the steam out of global oil markets. Saudi production promises of 200,000 barrels a day doesn’t dent the 4 million barrel-per-day decline from aging fields every year, for starters. And it will just be “gobbled up” by increasing domestic consumption in Saudi Arabia, like other oil-producing countries that subsidize fuel.

Read more »

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A congressional committee exploring whether the Bush administration has pushed Iraq oil contracts to U.S. companies released documents Wednesday showing that Hunt Oil Co. officials and U.S. diplomats talked several times before the company signed an exploration deal in Iraq last September.

The documents show that U.S. officials expressed no objections to what the Dallas-based company was doing, despite their later criticism that the exploration deal could undermine Iraqi unity.

Included in the documents were two letters from company chief executive officer Ray Hunt to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board last year outlining his company’s pursuit of an oil deal in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

After the Sept. 8 deal was announced, State Department officials criticized the company for signing a contract with a regional government before the Iraqi Parliament had passed a national law covering participation of foreign companies in Iraq’s oil industry. President Bush, a friend of Mr. Hunt, said he “knew nothing about the deal.”

More at Dallas Morning News

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Keith Olbermann explains the “Enron Loophole” and it’s effect on oil prices.

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My boyfriend has been TRYING to explain to me about this type of trading and what effect it has had on oil prices. He has said over and over that “supply and demand” is not the reason we are paying so much for oil. Here’s an article from Global Research on the subject:

The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. How?

First, the crucial role of the international oil exchanges in London and New York is crucial to the game. Nymex in New York and the ICE Futures in London today control global benchmark oil prices which in turn set most of the freely traded oil cargo. They do so via oil futures contracts on two grades of crude oil—West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent.

A third rather new oil exchange, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME), trading Dubai crude, is more or less a daughter of Nymex, with Nymex President, James Newsome, sitting on the board of DME and most key personnel British or American citizens.

Brent is used in spot and long-term contracts to value as much of crude oil produced in global oil markets each day. The Brent price is published by a private oil industry publication, Platt’s. Major oil producers including Russia and Nigeria use Brent as a benchmark for pricing the crude they produce. Brent is a key crude blend for the European market and, to some extent, for Asia.

WTI has historically been more of a US crude oil basket. Not only is it used as the basis for US-traded oil futures, but it’s also a key benchmark for US production.

Continue reading here

Also, Keith Olbermann had a good report on his show tonight about the “Enron loophole,” and McCain, which was closed in the veto proof Farm Bill that just passed. I’ll try to get video of that.

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From Juan Cole:

McCain is arguing for offshore drilling to lower US petroleum prices in the “short term.”

It is all a big lie, and a dangerous one at that. Our marine environment and our fisheries are already at risk. And the devastation in Wisconsin, Iowa and Mississipi from extreme weather events like flooding is where the US, and the world is going if McCain wins this argument. And McCain has the gall to say he is worried about global warming!

The world uses on the order of 86 million barrels a day of petroleum. That figure is expected to veer sharply upward as China and India go in for automobiles and trucking in a big way.

The United States uses nearly 21 million barrels a day of petroleum and liquified hydrocarbon fuel, or nearly 25% of everything the world produces daily. The US has 5% of the world’s population.

The US produces about 5 million barrels a day of petroleum and another 3 million barrels a day of liquefied fuel. That 8 million barrels a day is only about a third of what we use, so we import the rest. The lower 48 states produced about 4.4 million barrels of petroleum a day in 2006.

If all the known offshore fields were drilled and panned out, the lower 48’s oil production would be increased by 7%. That would be 300,000 barrels a day.

Continue here

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Tell me again why anyone would vote Republican?

Saved by Senate Republicans, big oil companies dodged an attempt Tuesday to slap them with a windfall profits tax and take away billions of dollars in tax breaks in response to the record gasoline prices that have the nation fuming.

GOP senators shoved aside the Democratic proposal, arguing that punishing Big Oil won’t do a thing to lower the $4-a-gallon-price of gasoline that is sending economic waves across the country. High prices at the pump are threatening everything from summer vacations to Meals on Wheels deliveries to the elderly.

More at MSNBC

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In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist with Shell Oil, presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute that predicted US oil production would peak in the early 1970s and then follow a declining curve, now known as Hubbert’s curve. But Hubbert almost didn’t get to give his paper. He got a call from his bosses at Shell, who asked him to “tone it down.” His reply was that there was nothing to tone down. It was just straightforward analysis. He presented the paper, unedited. You can read the whole story here.

Since that time, the oil industry and its political supporters have done everything they can to tone down the message that oil is a finite resource and that we will run out of it some day. Why would they do that? To further the short’sighted, short-term pursuit of profit. In 2004, Shell finally got caught in a lie about the size of its oil reserves. The company had inflated the stated size of its oil reserves to keep stock share prices high because who wants to invest in a company — or an industry — that is going the way of the dinosaurs?

Full article at Alternet

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Like Bro says…….blah blah blah……..more theatrics. Means nothing. Gas will continue to go up up up up.

On a day oil prices leaped to unheard-of highs, senators lined up Big Oil’s biggest executives and pummeled them with complaints that they’re pretending to be “hapless victims” while raking in record profits.

“Where is the corporate conscience?” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked the top executives of the five largest U.S. oil companies.

It’s all about economics, came the reply. Supply and demand. The company leaders tried to shift attention from motorists’ anger over $4-a-gallon gasoline to a debate over new areas for drilling.

More at Yahoo News

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Leahy is right. “Disconnect” is the word for the day.

Oil Execs tell Congress: Don’t Blame Us

It’s wonderful to be rich and be an American resident. You have politicians catering to your every whim. You decide to break the law, the law looks the other way. Man-on-man sex in a public restroom? No problem! Taxes? Who the hell pays taxes?!

And when you decide to hold Americans up at the pump and rob them of their hard-earned money, money earmarked for food or some other essential item, the strength of the mighty U.S. Congress swoops down from above and raps you with a newspaper.

Yep. Wealthy Americans have it tough.

Big Oil defends profits before irate senators

WASHINGTON (AP) — On a day oil prices leaped to unheard-of highs, senators lined up Big Oil’s biggest executives and pummeled them with complaints that they’re pretending to be “hapless victims” while raking in record profits. [...]

It’s all about economics, came the reply. Supply and demand. The company leaders tried to shift attention from motorists’ anger over $4-a-gallon gasoline to a debate over new areas for drilling.

But senators at the Judiciary Committee hearing weren’t having any of that. They wanted to press the executives about public anguish over paying $60 or more to fill up a car’s gas tank.

“People we represent are hurting, the companies you represent are profiting,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the executives. He said there’s a “disconnect” between legitimate supply issues and the oil and gasoline prices motorists are seeing.

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Greed has taken over……..

Hess Corp (HES.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Chief Executive John Hess pulled in nearly $42 million from exercising stock options and awards in 2007, adding to a pay package worth more than $14 million for the year.

Hess, 53, made about $34.5 million from exercising 750,000 previously awarded stock options plus $7.2 million from stock awards that vested during the year, the oil producer and refiner said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Those benefits came on top of a compensation package that included $1.4 million of salary, a $1.2 million bonus, $2.5 million of incentive awards and $9.1 million of stock and option awards. That package was roughly the same as his 2006 package.

More at Reuters

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