The price of gas is rising thanks to the number one GOP sponsor: the oil and gas industry. Thank goodness they have come to the rescue of the GOP just when it looked as if they were becoming issueless. Here it is still winter and the rumors are beginning to be marketed by industry analysts who dare to suggest that the rise is because summer is coming. Ha! Other factors mentioned are the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, a new European recession’s failure to materialize, and the U.S. recovery. The main factor, however, is the deliberate jacking up of prices by U.S. refiners.
All the other possible reasons for the current rise in price are just so much hogwash. The oil and gas industry wants a Republican in the White House so that it can return to the days of Dick Cheney and the free-for-all drilling that went on during the “W” administration, “W” standing for Windfall, not wind power. The industry wants to “frack” to its heart’s content without worrying about being convicted of damaging water supplies by being required to list the heretofore proprietary chemicals they use in the process. They want to drill-baby-drill on as many public lands as possible without consequence or responsibility and with maximum profit.
Republican candidates are now shifting their focus to gas prices as a way of criticizing the Obama administration for actually making the industry drill safely. In the name of job creation (temporary as it always is) and increasing supply (until the price of crude is so low it does not make economic sense to keep drilling), the GOP is now sounding the alarm to open up public lands for yet more drilling, even though we are already currently drilling and extracting on domestic soil at an all time high level….under the Obama administration.
What the industry fails to mention is how much water it takes to “frack,” the nickname given to hydraulic fracturing. Anywhere from 400,000 to a million gallons of water is required per well. In the East, where water is plentiful, water usage may not be a huge issue. However, in the West, where water is gold, using it to extract oil and gas is of questionable overall merit. Any true cost-benefit analysis would weigh the impact of water usage against the gain in energy and conclude that as water becomes increasingly scarce, its value for the maintenance of life itself transcends all other uses. After all, water is ultimately more important and valuable than oil and gas, for it is the primary source of life on this planet. Ramping up drilling, especially in the West, for the sake of rising gas prices is only a short term fix, not a long term solution.
Therefore, when you hear another GOP politician call for more unregulated drilling, have a glass of water. Given their plans, in the future it may begin to cost you as much for that glass of water as you are currently paying at the pump for a gallon of gas.
*Desperately Seeking Issues
Showing posts with label oil and gas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil and gas. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Gopher: Pioneer of Split Estate
It must have been the gopher that inspired the split estate law in the West. If you ever tried to plant a garden anywhere there are gophers, they eat it out from under you…literally. That’s what the split estate law [a combination of the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 (SHRA) and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 (MLA)] has wrought. Today, an oil and gas company can lease the land under your garden and “drill, baby, drill” until your well, health, and property values are ruined beyond repair. Unlike the gopher, legally, the mineral leaser’s interests trump your surface rights. You can try to trap, poison, drown, or otherwise dispose of the gopher, but you can’t touch the driller.
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920’s not long after the two acts mentioned above were passed. It has been business as usual ever since. That peculiar expression of hubris that resulted in the Great Depression was revived by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street in the last decade and resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-9. But to many a capitalist the bubble and bust cycle of business is just natural, not something to fix. There are always winners and losers, so why worry about crashes and bankruptcy: they are all part of the market system that always self-corrects.
A lot of these true believers in the market-as-God also believe in property-as-God. They like to trace their arguments to the concept of natural rights. John Locke was one of the first “modern” thinkers to come up with a threesome of them: life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, men are born with certain natural rights that no government can ever take away. Since the founding fathers of the United States, taking Locke’s lead, came up with three of their own (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) this idea of natural rights has had a legacy here in the USA. What makes them “natural” as opposed to legal remains debatable, unless, of course, you see them as the equivalent of appendages or body organs as in everyone has a natural right to a liver and liberty.
What’s interesting is that the Locke natural right of property got left out of the founding fathers’ list. In its place the concept of the pursuit of happiness was added. Maybe property got left behind in 1776 because America promised so much available land at the time that the founding fathers believed land would never be an issue. Or maybe they were worried the Indians would realize that they also could “own” property and hold the founding fathers accountable for large scale confiscation of their lands. In any case, property was not highlighted as a natural (inalienable) right in the Declaration of Independence.
However, as the West was being settled thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849 and Manifest Destiny, the religious thrust behind further confiscation of land by Anglos, as well as the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigrants that came to America starting in the 1840’s, the U.S. Government eventually came up with not only a property right but a “two fer” lease: the split estate. Maybe politicians began to feel that property was something to pay more attention to because not only did industry need more resources and ranchers more land, men were being forced by law to share political power with women the same year that the Minerals Leasing Act was passed (Women’s Suffrage, 1920). MLA passage may be just a coincidence or it may have been a way of placating the men-folk who were eager to have some kind of compensation for their loss.
The split estate seemed like a good idea at the time, just as slavery or denying women the vote seemed like good ideas at an earlier time. There was so much land out west it never occurred to the power brokers in Washington that surface use and sub-surface use could ever come in conflict. Today, now that we are beginning to see the greater interconnectedness of life through ecology, the idea of split estate is obsolete. No knowledgeable person could go along with the continuation of such a law knowing what we now know. Ecology is the thrust behind the abolition movement of the 21st Century. Sooner or later, justice and rightness will prevail. The split-estate law will be abolished, and the idea that mineral rights can take precedence over surface rights will go the way of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is not only ecologically insane; it is morally wrong.
How can it possibly be morally wrong?
I hear a lot of talk coming from the conservative camp that the national deficit is the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations of Americans. It is not the GREATEST threat. The greatest threat is environmental degradation by current high-impact, low-cost, expedient mining and drilling practices as well as excessive hydrocarbon use throughout the United States and the planet as a whole. Water quality, air quality, and fertile land quality are far more critical than our need for hydrocarbons. Moreover, if hydrocarbons are so important a finite resource, we should be preserving as much as we can for use by future generations. You cannot argue about the threat of national debt, a reversible liability, and ignore the conservation of resources if you are concerned for future generations. It simply does not make sense. The present generations should turn to alternative, sustainable, non-hydrocarbon sources of energy now so that future generations won’t have to use energy to cool the planet.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out to the garden and try to figure out how I can get rid of those gophers that keep undermining my organic dream.
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920’s not long after the two acts mentioned above were passed. It has been business as usual ever since. That peculiar expression of hubris that resulted in the Great Depression was revived by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street in the last decade and resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-9. But to many a capitalist the bubble and bust cycle of business is just natural, not something to fix. There are always winners and losers, so why worry about crashes and bankruptcy: they are all part of the market system that always self-corrects.
A lot of these true believers in the market-as-God also believe in property-as-God. They like to trace their arguments to the concept of natural rights. John Locke was one of the first “modern” thinkers to come up with a threesome of them: life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, men are born with certain natural rights that no government can ever take away. Since the founding fathers of the United States, taking Locke’s lead, came up with three of their own (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) this idea of natural rights has had a legacy here in the USA. What makes them “natural” as opposed to legal remains debatable, unless, of course, you see them as the equivalent of appendages or body organs as in everyone has a natural right to a liver and liberty.
What’s interesting is that the Locke natural right of property got left out of the founding fathers’ list. In its place the concept of the pursuit of happiness was added. Maybe property got left behind in 1776 because America promised so much available land at the time that the founding fathers believed land would never be an issue. Or maybe they were worried the Indians would realize that they also could “own” property and hold the founding fathers accountable for large scale confiscation of their lands. In any case, property was not highlighted as a natural (inalienable) right in the Declaration of Independence.
However, as the West was being settled thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849 and Manifest Destiny, the religious thrust behind further confiscation of land by Anglos, as well as the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigrants that came to America starting in the 1840’s, the U.S. Government eventually came up with not only a property right but a “two fer” lease: the split estate. Maybe politicians began to feel that property was something to pay more attention to because not only did industry need more resources and ranchers more land, men were being forced by law to share political power with women the same year that the Minerals Leasing Act was passed (Women’s Suffrage, 1920). MLA passage may be just a coincidence or it may have been a way of placating the men-folk who were eager to have some kind of compensation for their loss.
The split estate seemed like a good idea at the time, just as slavery or denying women the vote seemed like good ideas at an earlier time. There was so much land out west it never occurred to the power brokers in Washington that surface use and sub-surface use could ever come in conflict. Today, now that we are beginning to see the greater interconnectedness of life through ecology, the idea of split estate is obsolete. No knowledgeable person could go along with the continuation of such a law knowing what we now know. Ecology is the thrust behind the abolition movement of the 21st Century. Sooner or later, justice and rightness will prevail. The split-estate law will be abolished, and the idea that mineral rights can take precedence over surface rights will go the way of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is not only ecologically insane; it is morally wrong.
How can it possibly be morally wrong?
I hear a lot of talk coming from the conservative camp that the national deficit is the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations of Americans. It is not the GREATEST threat. The greatest threat is environmental degradation by current high-impact, low-cost, expedient mining and drilling practices as well as excessive hydrocarbon use throughout the United States and the planet as a whole. Water quality, air quality, and fertile land quality are far more critical than our need for hydrocarbons. Moreover, if hydrocarbons are so important a finite resource, we should be preserving as much as we can for use by future generations. You cannot argue about the threat of national debt, a reversible liability, and ignore the conservation of resources if you are concerned for future generations. It simply does not make sense. The present generations should turn to alternative, sustainable, non-hydrocarbon sources of energy now so that future generations won’t have to use energy to cool the planet.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out to the garden and try to figure out how I can get rid of those gophers that keep undermining my organic dream.
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