No Gas Tax Holiday, PLEASE

I was so busy complaining about Thomas Friedman's endless sabbatical that I didn't even notice it ended! And his first column, last week, says exactly what I've been mulling about for weeks. In fact, it's the one thing that actually is beginning to change my mind in the election, despite every attempt to stay uninformed and neutral until the general election.

Here's what he has to say. The rest of the article is great too -- he goes on to talk about how upside down our energy policy is -- that we encourage negative behavior and discourage change and alternatives. It's called Dumb As We Want To Be. Link

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

Ships of the Desert

It seems that the price of oil is driving up the price of the camel in some parts of the world. Quadrupled in the last three years.

Paul Krugman said it on Saturday in his blog at the Times, quoting an article in the Financial Times from the day before.

There was a pice on Talk of the Nation on NPR a little while ago that spoke with businesses that were doing well because of the changes in the economy. Pawn shops -- hookers ... and camel sellers!

I've been thinking about alternative modes of transportation lately. I can't help but wonder what I will do if it really costs $100 a week to fill up my tank with gas.


photo link

I learned today that camels live to be about 60-80 years-old. That's a long time to serve.
I'm glad to learn that camels will eat their owner's tent if they get hungry enough.

"“It’s very good news,” says Mr Singh, whose organisation aims to dispel the image of backwardness associated with camel ownership and tries to promote higher economic returns for breeders. “We had started to see camels, even female ones, being slaughtered for their meat. Now they are replacing the tractor again.”

It is too soon to say that the future for camels is bright. Shrinking grazing areas and a lack of investment in fodder trees may thwart a sustainable revival. Inadequate nutrition undermines the resilience of camel herds, making them vulnerable to disease and lowering birth rates."

You can try to go back to where you came from, of course. Of course you are always going there with your new self.


"Camel 2005"
photo by Chuck Henderson

The question is how do we sustain ourselves ...
what kind of world do we want for the future and the future or our children.

Fatal In High Concentrations

This morning, in the World section of the Times, is a story about 200 people who protested the building on a petrochemical plant in Pengzhou. "The protest lasted two hours and was peaceful."

"The protesters oppose plans to build an 800,000-ton-a-year ethylene plant and oil refinery because they believe it will seriously pollute Chengdu's air and water, it said. The refinery would process 10 million tons of crude a year, the newspaper said ... Ethylene is a common industrial chemical that can be fatal in high concentrations."

I'm glad it was a peaceful protest. Of course the only source of the article was the government news paper. Still -- a relief.

I have a new fact for my wish list: number of new plants/refineries/explorations being built today around the world.

I spend a lot of time thinking about spills -- about all that is happening because of the state that we are in. But maybe it is even more alarming and telling to focus on how we continue to build our future.

The Times ran a whole series about China -- Choking on Growth, I think it was called. It talked a lot about the pollution and effects of the mass industrialization taking place there.

Another line from todays article struck me.

"Environmental protests have grown in China, especially among members of the growing middle class concerned about the effect of pollution on their quality of life."

This idea that concern for the environment and health -- the idea that it is a luxury...
of course we know that to be true. People in Nigeria, in Ecuador, are drinking water with oil in it because it is the only water they have.

Still, if the lower class is unconcerned because they want to loose what they have , and the upper class is unconcerned because they don't want to loose what they have and the middle class is shrinking in most of the world...

The First Family of Oil

Okay, I admit it. Until I learned it today, I did not know that John D. Rockefeller was the founder of Standard Oil.

The Rockefeller name is synonymous with wealth and power and America. Of course it's oil.



On NPR this week, Rockefeller great-grand daughter, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin talked about how many members of the family are wanting to push the company -- now Exxon -- to "go green." Goodwin is an economist and professor at Tufts -- she's pushing for changes in the board and in practice.

"There are some pretty scary things happening in the world," she said. "We worry about corporations who don't seem to get it -- we have a particular interest in this corporation because we are so closely allied with it ... it is a major contributor to the income of our family."

"To some extent we feel responsible ... we feel close to it; we care about it."

Well ... yeah. On the other hand, we are all really close to it. Every one of us.

In Washington, John D. Rockefeller IV, Jay, is also pushing for change...
This from a Thursday press release on his website:

Rockefeller’s legislation to provide temporary, immediate relief is modeled after the successful Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which has helped working families and seniors cope with home heating costs. Rockefeller’s bill would give grants to states to provide checks to people who drive 30 miles a day (or an average of 150 miles a week) for work, education, or scheduled routine health care. Eligible families who meet income guidelines similar to those in LIHEAP (in West Virginia, it’s up to 130% of poverty or $26,845 annual income for a family of four) would receive monthly checks of $100 to $165 to help cover gas costs.

...

As Rockefeller noted, “These companies are making huge, unconscionable profits off the hard-working people in my state, and it must be stopped.”

No Comment

''My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,'' McCain said.

The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn't mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

''No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,'' McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he said. ''But also we didn't want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it's more important than any other part of the world,'' he said.

''If the word `again' was misconstrued, I want us to remove our dependency on foreign oil for national security reasons, and that's all I mean,'' McCain said.

''The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.

AP story in the NY Times

Seranade

"With an Xbox controller in his hand, Jones hops in a helicopter and heads to Times Square, where he steals a cab — the terrified passenger jumps out — and cruises down to SoHo before getting back in the helicopter and taking a tour of the oil refineries over in Jersey."

"Grand Theft Auto Steals the Show."
Story yesterday on Talk of the Nation.

I'm intrigued by this minor inclusion in mass popular culture. I was reading on another track entirely earlier this morning -- and article in the London Free Press about how the first commercial oil well is having its 150th birthday. They still use old pump equipment. The noise is referred to as a low breathing -- rhythmic, soothing.

By DEBORA VAN BRENK

OIL SPRINGS -- The oil fields serenade Charlie Fairbank.

From his home, or from anywhere he walks near town, a network of chains rattles, wooden jerker arms groan on their metal hangers, and the pump-jacks squeak as they extract oil from the swampy ground.

They pump at 11 strokes a minute, about the same rate as relaxed breathing.

"They sing," Fairbank says of the endless rhythm. "It's like living by the sea."

From the company website:

The Oil Springs Circle Driving Tour
Oil is an enormous industry spanning the globe. Virtually all trade, travel, agriculture, manufacturing and economies depend on it. The modern oil industry began with a spark in the 1850s and it took off like a brush fire. This fire ignited right here in Oil Springs, Ontario. This incredible tale is told in a whole new way in the Oil Springs Circle Tour. Here you not only see living history, you breathe it too.

It feels to me like oil is the breath in the background for the world right now -- I don't hear it as rhythmic and soothing though -- I hear it wheezing and coughing and with the itch in the chest that comes after an hour without nicotine -- craving more -- wanting more -- romancing the dark world of video violence and consumption...

"Parental Advisory: Your Kids Will Play This Game

Of course, the Grand Theft Auto series is known for letting you beat up cops and have sex with prostitutes than for any kind of emotional maturity.

Then again, it was never intended for children. Many gamers are in their 30s, and every game in the series has come stamped with a "Mature" rating.

Still, GTA IV will find itself in the hands of teens and preteens.

"Pretty much every kid who goes to my school will play Grand Theft Auto, I'm fairly sure," says James Lantz.

Lantz, a senior at Hudson School in Hoboken, N.J., has been playing GTA since he was 11 — and he's psyched for the new one.

Which might alarm some parents. Grand Theft Auto is so associated with the perceived evils of video games that mental-health experts Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson named a book after it: Grand Theft Childhood."

Juxtiposition

Another, if less integrated, series of thoughts today. A friend of mine teaches juxtaposition in poetry -- how just by placement we can make more powerful connections than we could linearly or narratively.


First, my daughter's first grade class is raising chicks -- from eggs. I was worried this would mean eggs would come under fire as dinner food (my fall-back when all hell breaks loose) -- luckily not. Yesterday she told us that you have to wash your hands with soap for a really long time before you turn the eggs. The oil on your hands seals the breathing holes in the eggs and the chickens will die. In the darkroom, you can use grease from your nose to seal a small scratch in a negative. Now these two facts have nothing to do with petroleum, but they do speak to the nature of oil...

I came across a t-shirt in Whole Foods yesterday -- it said, "Insatiable is not Sustainable."

Then two articles in the times today. I'm just going to quote them.

by IAN AUSTEN
OTTAWA — Canadian federal and provincial government officials were conducting an investigation Wednesday into Syncrude Canada, a large oil-sands project operator, after hundreds of migrating ducks that landed in a company tailings pond died.

Water used to separate and process the oil-bearing tar in oil-sands deposits ends up in large ponds and becomes a toxic sludge. Alberta officials said Tuesday that Syncrude had failed to operate noisemakers to frighten away birds. The company also appears not to have notified the province’s government about the birds’ arrival on Monday.

An anonymous tip eventually alerted officials that about 500 birds were in the pond.



by Jim Robbins
“There’s something soothing about hearing a horse whinny and swish her tail,” she said. “You leave on a ride with all the noise in your head and at the end things have quieted down and I have the best way and the most poetic way to write the passage.”

But there is a nearby world that obsesses her, a world she finds unsettling. She and her husband, Charlie Ross, a real-estate broker, recently built a one-room log cabin in Sublette County, more rural and far less rarefied. It offers an expansive, soul-stirring view of the extraordinary Wind River Range and the high plains — but at the same time a window into what she considers Wyoming’s destruction by the development of gas and oil fields.

“I fell in love with Wyoming because it reminded me of Africa,” she said. “It’s beautiful, but a harsh environment and it’s tough to make a living.”
Ms. Fuller has what she calls the good life, Rocky Mountain style.

...

“It’s all been leased,” she said. “It’s all slated for oil and gas development.”

Later we drove past the tiny town of Pinedale, and across public land, where towering steel oil derricks flying American flags slice into the blue sky and a natural landscape once full of antelope, jackrabbits and sagebrush is now a vast industrial landscape. White pickup trucks raise clouds of dust and fierce winds blow tumbleweeds across prairie scraped to bare dirt by bulldozers.

Biologists say that this development could destroy the antelope migration from outside Pinedale to Yellowstone National Park, hundreds of miles north, now the longest overland mammal migration in the Lower 48.

...

She was born into white Rhodesia and came of age during the war for independence by the black majority, who renamed it Zimbabwe. By the age of 6, she said, she had learned how to use an Uzi submachine gun and knew the basics of first aid. She suffered the ordeal of her baby sister drowning, an older brother who died of meningitis and another who died in infancy; she says the cause of death was being born in Africa.

Now she considers herself a messenger who must bear witness to what she sees as the war on the land, with its natural and human casualties.

“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said. It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field. That’s why I wrote the book.”