Singled Out

WASHINGTON (AP) — Big Oil is once again being called on the carpet. Senior executives of the five largest U.S. oil companies were to appear before a congressional committee Tuesday where they were likely to find frustrated lawmakers in no mood for small talk.

This article was filed an hour ago.
First off, I love tenses. Here, the future is not certain. "Were to appear." Because it will have happened (or not) by the time this article is read by most, but hasn't yet, and can't be counted on. My children were to have gotten up. My class was to have been taught. It's a little dizzying, too, isn't it. The sun was to have arisen... And refreshing -- the polar bears were to become extinct... It lends the option of reading in the present tense what didn't happen... also the reality that whatever we think could be wrong.

Anyway --

The oil companies are being called in to defend their government subsidies.

"The lawmakers were scheduled to hear from top executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell Oil Co., BP America Inc., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips, which together earned about $123 billion last year because of soaring oil and gasoline prices.

Markey, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said he wants to know why, with such profits, the oil industry is steadfastly fighting to keep $18 billion in tax breaks, stretched over 10 years."

Industry leaders say the tax breaks are needed to continue exploration and development. Also, of course, it is said implied that the price of gas will skyrocket if the breaks are lifted...

I always believed that -- that gas prices stayed low because of subsidies. But what if that's not true -- what if gas prices in this country are low because that's the nature of supply and demand -- we have a really big country, and people have to cover a lot of distances -- if the price of gas were a lot higher maybe there would have been a push for public transportation years ago. Just as the technology for the 100 mpg car exists -- and the electric car...

Maybe it's not the pocket change billions the oil companies are fighting for, but keeping the money out of the research of alternative fuels...

It's all speculation. I'm feeling speculative today.

In the article, Bush says that oil companies shouldn't be singled out.
Bush says he'll veto the bill whatever the outcome.

Paint It Black

Last week, a famous British Columbian painter, Robert Bateman, posted a video on Youtube called "Not a Pretty Picture." Bateman has spent his life painting the landscape and wildlife of Northern Canada -- his paintings are in the Smithsonian, and without going too far into it I found one painting listed in an on-line auction for $90,000. They are lovely.



The purpose of the video is to try to prevent the passage of oil tankers through the region. In the video, the 78 year-old artists paints his own painting black.



According to an article in the Vancuver Sun last week,

"Fears over tanker traffic in B.C. waters have escalated since Enbridge Inc. last month rekindled plans for a $4-billion pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat.

If the pipeline is approved, the port would be expanded and crude oil shipped by tanker to overseas markets."

I'll look more into the exploration in BC another morning, but right now I am simply transfixed by this video in which the painter takes one of his own images of the magnificent water way -- filled with whales and birds -- and paints it black.

"We have to think about what can happen to thousands of organisms if there is an oil spill, and we know these can be treacherous waters, from what happened to the Queen of the North and the Exxon Valdez," Bateman said."

Okay -- it looses something -- well, a lot -- to find out the depicted "Orca Procession" a reproduction.

"The picture on the easel is a print, not the original, he admitted slightly reluctantly. It is, however, a digitally reproduced limited edition, probably worth a couple of thousand dollars."

But I love this.

For one thing, he paints beautifully, even as he tries to be ugly with it. His strokes are elegant and his work comes through even here. It's such a violent thing -- the covering over and the blanketing -- an allusion to the image of the landscape after the Valdez spill. Rocks coated, birds coated, a wildlife destroyed.

One of the comments on Youtube said, "oil is a natural substance. The Exxon Valdez disaster was one of the largest so called spills and as little of time as 19 years you have a full recovery. Why? because crude oil is a natural substance. If this substance bubbles up from the bottom of the ocean floor then what. I say lets burn and use as much as possible before it comes to the surface, including off the coast of BC."

But of course, this isn't true. The land and the lifestyle there was devastated and has never returned to what it was. I read somewhere the other day that Exxon is the single most profitable corporation in the history of the free market.

By the way, I looked into oil paint ingredients a few months ago -- vegetable oil; usually linseed, I believe.

Robert Bateman's site is at
http://www.robertbateman.ca/art/arttitlepage.html
The Youtube video is here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKVRuelvJ-s

Unreportable Warfare

This morning, about oil, I learned that if you burn the pools from an oil spill and seal off the hole in the earth, you have only made things worse. The burning releases fumes, vapors and toxins, and leaves a denser crude behind.

Still, this is a common method of clean up for many villages in Nigeria, according to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“The land is devastated. The drinking water and streams are polluted. As it rains, we use the rain water but cannot drink it, because even that is full of crude oil,” youth leader Amstel Monday Ebarakpor told IRIN.

“At every groundwater intrusion, you see seepage. Sometimes you can see oil sheen on drinking water,” he told IRIN. “Crude will be there for the next 50 years.”

Just to repeat: Sometimes you can see an oil sheen on the drinking water.

On 25 January the chairman of the government’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, Bamidele Ajakaiye, told Nigeria’s Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology that there are 1,150 abandoned oil spill sites in the Niger Delta region. Many, communities say, are cleaned like the one in Kedere - if at all.

There seem to be a lot of factors at work.

The largest is the growing unrest in that region. I've written about Nigeria before... Local people steal oil from pipelines to sell on the black market or to heat their homes -- as one would imagine, this is not a very safe practice. Also sabotage against the oil companies is occurring frequently as communities protest the discrepancy between what is being taken from the land and what is being given back to the people of the land. Also -- pipelines are really old. Also -- in the realm of things that are never reported -- doesn't it stand to reason that if the huge oil companies are responding to guerrilla style warfare that by killing and crippling the surrounding lands and people they would be engaging in their own warfare...

Unreportable warfare.

I noticed in the news coverage last year the language of the stories reported made the issue sound very much like a band of thieves and hooligans were set on messing things up for everyone. It concerned me then -- and then the coverage fell off all together. The UN report was picked up be Reuters, but I didn't see it in the Times, and a Google search didn't show it as appearing in any major newspaper.

President Bush will be traveling to Africa this month.

Posted today, on what looks to be a newsish site -- though I can't really decipher, because it's all in Portuguese (I think) -- is a letter to our President.

"Mr President:
Greetings from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) of Nigeria. We trust this letter will reach you and your entourage touring some African countries well.

MEND needs little introduction to you since you must have been briefed after the actions we have taken to address the injustice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria may have affected the oil dependent American economy.

Your trip to Africa comes at an opportune time and indicates the soft spot you have for the people of this great continent. Africa is facing several on going conflicts, almost all are avoidable. Nigeria is at the verge of entering its own mega-conflict even though everyone seems to be in denial. When Nigeria erupts, the lava will spread so fast, far and wide that the human and economic catastrophe will dwarf Darfur."

The letter goes on to outline a proposal for action. It doesn't sound like the kind of letter I would be reading if I was president of the United States.

I wonder if President Bush will read this letter.

I wonder if oil is being used deliberately as chemical warfare.
But really, isn't it hard to imagine a group of pissed off American or European oil workers, hot and sick of being messed with, not saying...



Photo: Dulue Mbachu IRIN photo
Environmental damage from an oil spill in Kegbara-Dere in the Ogoni district of the Niger Delta. Residents say the spill is more than 10 years old and has not been cleaned up.

Happy Birthday, Darwin

Today is Charles Darwin's 199th birthday. Thanks to Wired for this celebratory tid-bit.

Well, nearly two centuries later the Origin of Species is still in contention -- but not survival of the fittest...

''The Pacific walrus is an early victim of our failure to address global warming."
Said Shaye Wolf, a Biologist for the Center of Biological Diversiy which filed a petition last week to have the Pacific Walrus listed endangered. Read the Times article here.
''As the sea ice recedes, so does the future of the Pacific walrus.''








Uncredited NASA photo

Without ice the walrus are driven to land -- out of their usual habitat -- and into the habitat of others...

As many as 6,000 walruses in late summer and fall abandoned ice over deep water and congregated on Alaska's northwest shore. Herds were larger on the Russian side, one group reached up to 40,000 animals. Russian observers estimated 3,000 to 4,000 mostly young walruses died in stampedes when herds rushed into the water at the sight of a polar bear, hunter or low-flying aircraft.

One day before the petition was filed, during a lag in ruling on the listing of the Polar Bear in the arctic, The Shell Corp. was the high bidder on oil exploration leases on some 2.76 million arctic acres. They bid $18,497 an acre, according to the article in the Times.

Shell’s vice president for exploration for the Americas, Annell Bay, said the lease sale was an opportunity to move into an undeveloped region that could help meet an increasing demand for energy. “There’s not many areas like this in the United States,” Ms. Bay said.

There are not many areas like this in the world.

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." -- Charles Darwin