THE TRUTH ABOUT "ABOUT OIL"

Why does it seem as if I spend most of my time these days trying to provide a liberal counterpoint to the increasingly Right leaning columnists inundating our local news sources? It started with Travis Armstrong at the The Santa Barbara News-Press. Then came The Daily Sound with its slow thinking Conservative Turtle. And now we have Noozhawk ... Over the last couple of weeks, local resident Harris Sherline has written two columns about our current oil crisis, arguing that the root of all evil is those pesky environmentalists and that the poor oil companies are really the victims in all this. Please read them yourself here and here to see what I'm saying.

I knew we were in trouble when Mr. Sherline started out his first column with the following:

Congressman Steve King recently observed that The Heritage Foundation has convincing empirical data "that the people that are advancing this cap and trade want to slow our economy down, want to reverse our economy, and they know that if they shut down energy, they back the economy off, and they are doing it all because they worship Mother Nature" (Glenn Beck, "Anwr or Bust!" May 21).

Here's some advice: If you want to provide a "fair and balanced" argument about energy, don't start off by quoting The (right wing think tank) Heritage Foundation and Glenn Beck. That would kind of be like me starting off a column on energy by quoting MoveOn.org and Michael Moore. I may generally agree with these two entities, but you get my point? And likewise with Glenn Beck: I mean, this is the guy who said the following to Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to Congress:

I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies ... I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Well, THIS American does not feel that way! Anyway, there are two major themes that Harris and others on the Right are trying to push lately regarding the oil crisis. First, there is this absurd idea that oil companies are not really making money. Here are a couple of statements that he points to:

» For American companies to compete successfully in the world’s oil market, they must be financially strong enough to carry out huge, complex energy projects that require enormous long-term investments. Exxon Mobil, for example, spends around $1 billion a day just for day-to-day operations and to make the necessary capital investments required to stay in business.

» "Since 2002 the U.S. oil and natural gas industry has earned about 8.1 cents per dollar of sales — exactly the same as all U.S. manufacturing, excluding autos. Not much of a windfall," the editorial said.

This so reminds me of pharmaceutical companies that try to convince us they are really broke due to the fact that they have to spend so much on R&D. Here's my counter: If that was the case, they wouldn't be called PROFITS now would they? The fact is that Exxon Mobile made like $11 billion in profits last quarter. And do you think they spent all that money looking for new oil sources or whatever? No, Exxon Mobil actually bought back about $8 billion of its own stock in the first quarter of 2008. Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I completely understand the oil business, because I don't. But please don't patronize me with this argument that oil companies don't really make money.

The second major point made by Mr. Sherline is that the reason we're paying so much at the pump is due to the fact that bird loving, tree hugging, hippy environmentalists are preventing poor Exxon from drilling on more U.S. land. Here's another excerpt:

» "The Interior Department notes that most of the oil and 40 percent of the natural gas under public lands is off-limits to drilling. That’s about 19 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas," the editorial said.

One wonders what the people who want to prevent us from developing our own energy resources are trying to accomplish. My guess is that, like so many other matters that are critical to the economic well-being of our nation, such decisions are made on the basis of politics, rather than what’s right or is best for all Americans.

As someone correctly pointed out in the comments section of this column, "First of all more than half of the oil leases given to the oil companies have not been developed. It is not due to environment constraint but because the oil companies have chosen to do so on their own accord." That's exactly right, and Joe Biden made the same point on Meet The Press last week. The commentor goes on to say, "the deregulation of the energy companies by the Bush Administration. (The Ken Lay Admendment). Has directly contributed to the futures trading speculation that has raised oil prices way beyond the level that supply and demand would dictate." Well said.

As I stated before, I don't pretend to be an expert in all things oil. But please don't try to sell us this false bill of goods. The reality is that we need to get off (what Bush called) our addiction to oil. And the solution to an addiction is not to get more of what you're addicted to from someone else. Plus, even John McCain's own experts say that opening more land to offshore drilling (for example) wouldn't even help gas prices for about a decade, if at all. No, what's definitely "best for all Americans" is for us to start focusing on conservation and alternative energy ... and we need to start now.

In his columns, Mr. Sherline likes to talk a lot about conspiracies. Well, if you saw the movie Who Killed The Electric Car?, you would know that there actually has been a conspiracy by the oil companies, auto companies, and some government officials to keep alternative fuels off the road.

But, in this case, the conspiracy is real.

GONE FISHIN'

Can liberals like me take a vacation now and then? YES WE CAN!

See you in a couple weeks.

AN OPEN LETTER TO DALE FRANCISCO

Dear Dale,

Before your recent election victory, you and I had a little debate regarding alternative transportation. I was for it; you -- while not against it -- didn't really see the value. Here is a quote from your rebuttal to my comments in which I referred to you as defeatist:

It is not "defeatist" to note that private transportation's overwhelming popularity is due to the choices and convenience it provides. It is far more realistic to work on technologies that improve private transportation--i.e., making it more green--than to continue in a policy of "encouraging" people to "get out of their cars," when there is little empirical evidence that such measures work.

I don't know if you read it or not, but I responded this way:

Why not do both? And what's the evidence that such measures don't work? I've been to Toronto, Paris, London, and Amsterdam in the course of the last few years, and public transportation is just awesome -- and highly utilized -- in those cities. Would you tell them it doesn't work? I might agree with you that a strategy to "get people out of their cars" would be a hard sell "today," but we're not talking about today; we're talking about the future.

Well, it's beginning to look like the future might just be here. In case people may not have noticed, the average price for a gallon of gas just surpassed the $4 mark for the first time in history. And this unfortunate benchmark got me thinking about an article I read a few weeks ago titled Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit. Here's part of it:

With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead ... Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

Now, I wouldn't imagine that Santa Barbara is to this point yet, but it doesn't seem as if gas prices are going down any time soon. Thus, it might be in Santa Barbara's best interest to continue strengthening our public transportation infrastructure rather than going in the opposite direction. Your recent positions, however, don't encourage me. For example, The Daily Sound quoted you as saying the following about dedicated transit lanes:

To me, any practical implementation of the idea of dedicated transit lanes is going to be astonishingly expensive … This would not be the time to be spending upwards of half a million dollars that we don’t have.

When is the time, Mr. Francisco? Should we wait until gas is $8 a gallon? I would ask that -- in light of recent events -- you reevaluate your hard line positions on this issue and consider the changes going on around the country. The NYT article I referenced earlier ends this way:

"Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation," said Joseph J. Giulietti, executive director of the authority. "But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that."

Hmmm, I wouldn't say nobody believed it.

Sincerely,

The Average Man