Where Have We Seen This Before?

Hmmm. Execs from the top five oil companies were called on the congressional carpet yesterday to explain why they've all been using the same cribbed disaster response plan that was apparently originally written for a well located in an Inuit neighborhood a long time ago. Would saying the entire thing was made of weapons-grade awkward be a gross understatement? Yes. Yes, it would.

The second squirming executive at 0:57 is very familiar, but I just can't put my finger on where I've seen him and that look on his face before. Oh. Wait.

Yep, that's it.

Michael told me to write a disaster response plan, but I spilled my gallon can of Cheez Whiz on it. Costco, nine bucks. So I copied this other plan I found on the internet, and if anyone asks about it, two words: Caribbean. Walruses. It could happen. That's five words. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. [/kevin]

In Which We Come to a Sad Realization

Oh, "in which we are dragged kicking and screaming out of denial" might be a more apt title, but the sad sad fact I can no longer ignore is that the Democratic Party exists solely to piss me off. Sure, McCain has ramped up the McNasty in the past few weeks, but he's been spouting distortions and misdirection and, and, what's the word that means the deliberate opposite of the truth? Oh, yes, lies, pretty much from day one of his candidacy. And the best Obama and the Dems can do as the electorate laps it up and runs around the house on a sugar high, crashing into the side tables and wrecking our best knickknacks from that trip to the National Archives, is say nyah nyah, old fart can't send an e-mail, but we sure do appreciate his heroic service to our country. They refuse to hit back hard because they said they'd stay on the high road--as did some other guy, if we recall correctly, some guy named Hero McHonor or something--and by god, they're going to stay out of the mud no matter how much the other guy flings into their faces as he merrily trip-traps into the White House and the country goes around the last bend into the deepest depths of the shitter.

Then we have the brave and mighty House Democrats getting so spooked by the spectre of thousands of Republicans chanting "drill, baby, drill" at the convention and tens of Republicans chanting "drill, baby, drill" at McCain's last campaign appearance that they abandon scientific evidence, economic evidence, and their own good sense and vote to allow offshore drilling that will do exactly nothing to solve either the current energy crisis or the future crises we keep putting off solving by adopting this kind of idiotic no-effect stopgap measure.

Maddow always says it better than I do:

A three-word chant is all it takes to make the Democratic majority knuckle under to a knucklehead position? I'm sure glad we all worked so hard two years ago to put more blue butts in those seats. I'm sure glad Nancy Pelosi has morphed into such a firebrand leader who works tirelessly to right the wrongs perpetrated by years of Republican control.

I'm mostly glad I'm too old to drink much any more, because these motherfuckers would have me under the table every damn night.

McCain's New Rallying Cry vs. Reality: Guess Who Wins?

John McCain went to the Sturgis motorcycle rally yesterday. The salient bits of his address boil down to this:

“We’re not going to pay $4 dollars a gallon for gas (when I am president) because we are going to drill offshore and we are going to drill now. We are doing to drill here and we are going to drill now,” he said.

Awesome. One teeny tiny problem with that, though. The government's own research contradicts him. The Energy Information Administration (the Department of Energy's independent stats and analysis organ) pretty bluntly dismisses the notion that drilling here, drilling now will solve our gas pump price shock any time during the next president's administration. Or the one after that. Or the one after that.

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

And that's a best-case scenario that assumes "local infrastructure issues and other potential non-Federal impediments will be resolved after Federal access restrictions have been lifted." Want a picture? There's also a picture. The green line just above the blue line illustrates the expected gains.

What about all that oil those stupid caribou and polar bears are squatting on in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? That would make a big dent in foreign oil dependence and prices at the pump, right? Uh, no.

The EIA also researched the impact of crude oil production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To put it in scale, ANWR is believed to have a potential for 10.4 billion barrels of crude oil, a little more than half of the projected potential for the offshore areas McCain has proposed opening.

ANWR would add only 1 to 2 percent to the overall world oil supply, said Philip Budzig, who authored the report for the EIA. The report concluded drilling there would subtract anywhere from 41 cents to $1.44 per barrel of crude oil around 2025. That translates to a savings of just a couple pennies per gallon at the pump. Again, in 2025.

Budzig noted that the report was prepared when oil was going for about $65 a barrel. It’s now double that. So, in theory, savings might be double what he projected last year.

So, (a couple pennies per gallon) x 2 = what, like four cents? In 2025 pennies? Are we even going to have pennies in 2025?

What will make a difference right away for all Americans' wallets? Let's see. John McCain says drill here, drill now. All the evidence indicates that magically conjuring fully functioning derricks positioned over every sweet spot in Alaska and the continental shelf will not tide me over to my next paycheck. The McCain campaign, which every day exhibits more and more evidence of being run by first-keg frat boys, has been handing out pressure gauges to mock Barack Obama's suggestion that if people want to reduce their own personal reliance on foreign oil, they should keep their tires inflated.

Let's check back with that notoriously liberal, tree-hugging entity known as the US government.

The Department of Energy estimated in 2005 that U.S. motorists wasted 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline a year from driving on underinflated tires -- roughly 61 million barrels of oil.

The government also offers "Tips to Improve Your Gas Mileage," and if you go through the whole onerous list of things like keeping your car tuned up, changing the air filter, and inflating your tires, you can see a fuel economy improvement of up to 17%, which at $3.96 a gallon translates to a savings of 68 cents per gallon, or over eight bucks per fillup on a 12-gallon tank. Compare the immediate 17% decrease in gasoline consumption you get from tuning and tires to the best-case 7% increase in domestic oil production by 2025 and tell me which makes the most sense in the short term. Then McCain and the 20,000 idiot bikers who cheered him in Sturgis can explain to me why a party that constantly touts self-reliance ridicules the notion of individuals adopting thrifty behaviors when it comes to gasoline. Never mind we're paying half what Europe does. We want ours and we want more, more, more, and we want it to be handed to us on the cheap right now.

Barack? You need to call him on this bullshit now, not "compromise" when the compromise is directly built on the bullshit idea that drilling is the solution to anything but Exxon's quest for the next quarterly earnings record.

Emirates or Exxon: Either Way You Take It in the Shorts

Maddow brought up an interesting point yesterday I hadn't thought much about before--no, I am not obsessed, thank you; I simply recognize quality when I see it--namely, that the drill here instead of buying oil over there camp falsely conflates "domestic oil" with "United States" rather than "US oil companies." In the absence of nationalized oil companies--quelle horreur--opening up the coastal shelf to exploration and production simply provides us the opportunity to pay a US-based multinational corporation for our gasoline instead of paying the Sultan of Oman. A company like Exxon, for example, which just shattered its own US record for quarterly earnings with a staggering $11.7B profit posted in the second quarter of this year. That's billion.

And, she added, most of that profit isn't even coming from sales to the US consumers they currently have under their thumbs. Can this be true? I did some looking. Everyone who is convinced that domestic oil production and gasoline refining are the solution to all of our woes needs to take a deep breath and take a look at this.

A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.

The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

"We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country," President Bush told reporters this week. "We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home."

We need to find more crude oil here at home so we can... ship it overseas in order to fatten ExxonMobil's wallets even more? The argument to increase domestic production would make sense if we had a Department of Petroleum whose revenues flowed directly back into the nation's infrastructure or even just a giant petty cash drawer for little things like schools and up-armored HMMVs. But we don't. What we do have are companies that operate in the global market and will move their product to the area with the highest profit margin. They exist to line their own portfolios, not to alleviate the skyrocketing prices that are gobsmacking low- and middle-income Americans.

The exports were also equal to half the 3.2 million barrels of gasoline, diesel fuel and other petroleum products the United States imported each day over the 4-month period.

Throwing open ANWR and the continental shelf will marginally increase the global oil supply and maybe cause a small, short-term ripple in prices. But don't fool yourself into thinking that adding another million or so barrels to US corporate oil tanks will do anything but give them more options for their export markets and decisions on refining capacity, and provide the opportunity for 11.7 billion to be chump change down the road.

Drilling domestic oil does not mean domestic market relief and thumbing our noses at the sheikhs. It just means more discretionary product in the hands of private companies whose last interest is giving you a break at the pump.