Fuel Spill Closes Mississippi--and the Door to Off-shore Drilling

Advocates of off-shore oil drilling have been caught flat-out lying again and again about spills and disasters because they know what spills mean--publlic sentiment against their wishes is too much to overcome.

Nearly 30 miles of the Mississippi River from New Orleans southward could be closed for days after a fuel barge and a tanker collided, spilling more than 400,000 gallons of fuel oil, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

[SNIP]

The accident left a sheen of oil over much of the river and its banks, and skimmers have been deployed to suck the oil off the river's surface, Blue said.

However, the spill is much smaller than the ones that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the Coast Guard estimated that more than 7 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Mississippi and nearby waterways.

This kind of story needs to be spread around and amplified--not only can everyday river traffic cause spills of fuel, gasoline, or oil but so can the weather.
Just ask John McCain--who has now cancelled his visit to an existing off-shore oil rig because the tropical storm now moving inland is too strong.

"Dolly" has been rated a category 2 Hurricane--dangerous enough to keep McCain away, who would have reaped the rewards of standing on the deck of an off-shore oil rig in the wind and the rain to show how safe it was.

Instead, Americans got a stark reminder of why oil and fuel spills are so important to remember when it comes to this ridiculous rush towards off-shore drilling. Which, by the way, wouldn't solve anything much at all.

--WS

Offshore Drilling OR North Dakota

Uff da!

Landowners in western North Dakota have a much better chance of striking it rich from oil than they do playing the lottery, say the Stohlers. Some of their neighbors in the town of about 120, from bar tenders to Tupperware salespeople, have become "overnight millionaires" from oil royalty payments.

"It's the easiest money we've ever made," said Lorene Stohler, who worked for decades as a sales clerk at a small department store.

State and industry officials say North Dakota is on pace to set a state oil-production record this year, surpassing the 52.6 million barrels produced in 1984. A record number of drill rigs are piercing the prairie and North Dakota has nearly 4,000 active oil wells.

The drilling frenzy has led companies to search for oil using horizontal drilling beneath Parshall, a town of about 980 in Mountrail County, and under Lake Sakakawea, 180-mile-long reservoir on the Missouri River.

"I have heard, anecdotally, that there is a millionaire a day being created in North Dakota," said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

Kathy Strombeck, a state Tax Department analyst, said the number of "income millionaires" in North Dakota is rising.

The number of taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income of more than $1 million in North Dakota rose from 266 in 2005 to 388 in 2006, Strombeck said. The 2007 numbers won't be known until October, she said.

Well that's great. But remember. The United States consumes about twenty million barrels of oil per day. So we're not even up to a week's worth of oil coming out of North Dakota. But it's a start, isn't it? Especially if some of those millionaires get wise and invest in wind and solar technology for their new abodes.

--WS

Is The Game Afoot?

So, did anyone catch that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi arrived in the US today, and is at Camp David?

President Bush gave a leader from an oil-rich Persian Gulf ally a plum reward on Thursday: a stay at the Camp David presidential retreat.

Bush welcomed Sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to the rustic wooded retreat in the Maryland mountains in typical fashion.

I just checked the White House briefing page, the news page--nothing about this visit. Bush last visited Abu Dhabi in January and paid tribute to Sheikh Zayed, the crown prince's father.

Is the crown prince a go-between to the Iranians? Is something afoot? Or is this just a pleasant courtesy call?

--WS

A special bonus for you--what has Judith Miller (formerly of the New York Times) been up to? Writing about Abu Dhabi, it looks like.

Senator Graham's Stock Sinks Into Nothing

If this video has an annoying ad in it, blame MSNBC.Com. I thought I would try embedding one of their videos, and if it works, maybe we can use more of them. The quality seems better than the standard fare from YouTube.

Basically, Senator Lindsey Graham gets schooled by Joe Biden. If Graham isn't getting beaten senseless by James Webb, he's getting it from Biden. Is there a Senator that hasn't humiliated Huckleberry Graham on national teevee?

Biden debunks some of the debate about offshore drilling, at Graham's expense. Graham seems like a liability to McCain at this point, not an asset.

--WS

Oil Trading and the Fallacy of Offshore Drilling

CBS News attempts to get a handle on what is really driving the so-called oil shortage:

As gas prices skyrocket, attention has turned to public "pits," where brokers trade "oil futures" - the right to buy or sell crude oil at a specific price, on a future date.

But far away from the hue and cry, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil futures contracts are traded electronically every day, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports.

More than 30 percent, experts say, exchanged in so-called "dark markets," the exact size and scope unknown to U.S. regulators.

"If you can trade out of the sight of U.S. regulators, you can manipulate these markets," said Michael Greenberger, a former top staffer at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, which regulates the trading of commodities like oil in this country.

He recently told Congress that speculation is placing a huge premium on the price of oil.

"How much per barrel?" Keteyian asked.

"Well, there have been various estimates - anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent," Greenberger said.

"People can actually corner the market and drive up the price," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "When there is no policeman on the beat, you know that crime can go up."

More and more fingers are pointing at one of the least-known but most powerful foreign exchanges - the InterContinental Exchange, or ICE.

By the end of 2007, the all-electronic exchange accounted for nearly a 50 percent market share of all global oil futures contracts, a total of 138.5 million contracts - up 49 percent from 2006.

I don't know about you, but the idea that 50% of the price may be from speculation alone indicates to me that the industrialized countries of the world better get a firm grip on this issue and put a stop to it. When speculators run up prices like this, the bursting of the bubble that invariably happens on the other side of this thing is usually very painful.

Thank God we have an oil man in charge who knows the issues:

President Bush plans to make a renewed push Wednesday to get Congress to end a long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, echoing a call by GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

Congressional Democrats have opposed lifting the prohibitions on energy development on nearly all federal Outer Continental Shelf waters for more than a quarter-century, including waters along both the East and West coasts.

With oil prices soaring and motorists paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, political pressures have been growing for more domestic oil and gas production.

You mean the $4 a gallon he didn't see coming? You mean, instead of using less oil that drilling for for more oil is the solution? Except that it isn't because there isn't enough oil that could be pumped out to make a difference?

Get control of the speculation and you'll bring the prices down, considerably. And while we're doing that, we need to figure out how to reduce our dependence down to zero by using less, not by ruining the environment, trying to pump a small amount that won't solve the problem.

--WS

Is the World Really Running Out of Oil?

Stories like this break your heart. It's a good idea to be "self-sufficient." It's another thing to be stampeded into that kind of a lifestyle out of fear and ignorance.

A few years ago, Kathleen Breault was just another suburban grandma, driving countless hours every week, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, buying clothes at the mall, watching TV in the evenings.

That was before Breault heard an author talk about the bleak future of the world's oil supply. Now, she's preparing for the world as we know it to disappear.

Breault cut her driving time in half. She switched to a diet of locally grown foods near her upstate New York home and lost 70 pounds. She sliced up her credit cards, banished her television and swore off plane travel. She began relying on a wood-burning stove.

"I was panic-stricken," the 50-year-old recalled, her voice shaking. "Devastated. Depressed. Afraid. Vulnerable. Weak. Alone. Just terrible."

Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare.

[SNIP]

The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents' era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.

By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables. When things start to fall apart, they expect their children and grandchildren will come back home and help them work the land. She envisions a day when the family may have to decide whether to turn needy people away from their door.

"People will be unprepared," she said. "And we can imagine marauding hordes."

So can Peter Laskowski. Living in a woodsy area outside of Montpelier, Vt., the 57-year-old retiree has become the local constable and a deputy sheriff for his county, as well as an emergency medical technician.

"I decided there was nothing like getting the training myself to deal with insurrections, if that's a possibility," said the former executive recruiter.

Do we really need to talk about turning away the needy and insurrection?

My favorite part of all of that is the part about "the stockpiling of guns" because that's exactly what we need to do whenever there is a crisis--succumb to fear and arm ourselves to the teeth so that every single desperate, uninformed person has a gun readily available for use without thinking.


One should always be armed in some way with a firearm. If a person feels the need to "stockpile" a gun, they don't know much about guns in the first place. Repeatedly firing a gun until it wears out, forcing someone to go their reserve gun, and then replacing that when it wears out is the scenario envisioned by the gun stockpiler. Having extra barrels helps. A supply of several hundred thousand rounds of ammunition is always a good thing as well. One can never run out of bullets when defending their home against whatever has forced them to wear out several guns.

The problem with that scenario is this--if you are firing your gun so much that it "wears out" and forces you to go to one of the guns you have "stockpiled" then you aren't in a bad situation. You are in a shooting gallery, and nothing--no amount of preparation and no amount of personal armament--is going to save you.

Instead of stockpiling guns, have a reliable firearm handy that you can use. Ensure you have enough ammunition. Enough means what it really should mean--about three or four hundred rounds is probably enough, but you can be the judge of that. If you are arming yourself for the apocalypse, or the First Battle of the Somme, then the apocalypse and the German machine gunners are going to find you.

We need to have faith in technology and the free market. Technology has gotten us out of plenty of "shortages" of oil. During World War I, it was theorized that the United States had pumped all of the oil it was ever going to pump and that we had arrived at a "peak oil" moment. Since then, we have been through countless panics and scares.

The world is not running out of oil, but it is getting more expensive to pull it out of the ground. We are not running out of it, at least not for another hundred years, if then. We need to cut our dependence on it, and make it last longer but we're not running out of it. Or natural gas. Or hydrogen. Or nitrogen. Everything has a finite supply, but we're not going to run out of these things. The world is also not running out of wind or solar or hydroelectric power. We need better technology to take advantage of these technologies to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and eliminate them altogether to slow down or reverse, if possible, global warming.

We can, calmly and rationally, work our way out of this mess. We don't need fear. We need heavy investment in technology and education. We don't need wars for scarce resources. We need a smarter way of getting what we have to work more efficiently.

For an old woman to live in fear right now is sad, however. A sad indication of just how uninformed people are, and of how a simple issue can be demagogued to death. There is "too much information" out there. Too many people screaming and getting hysterical. The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket nearly as fast as we think it is. But if we're smart, we can do things--reasonable things--to make the trip in that handbasket fairly pleasant.

Say Hello To a $5 Gallon of Gas

MSNBC.COM - BREAKING NEWS: White House says Saudi Arabia does not see a reason to increase oil production

Translation: The President has no powers of persuasion, nor does he have any influence with a country that has been aligned with his family for decades.

Meanwhile, the Oil Companies Get Richer

What a heartbreak...

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said Thursday record crude prices helped its first-quarter profit climb 17 percent to $10.9 billion — the second biggest U.S. quarterly corporate profit ever.

But the results still fell short of Wall Street’s lofty forecasts, and its shares fell more than 4 percent in morning trading.

The company’s refining operations limited the company’s overall earnings growth because crude prices for crude oil rose even faster than the rise in prices that drivers see at the gasoline pump.

It's tough to make obscene profits from the misery of others.

But even at $10.9 billion, the profit ranks as the second biggest for a U.S. company — the only bigger result in a three-month period was the $11.7 billion Exxon Mobil posted in the final three months of 2007.

Ouch! That's gotta suck. And remember--this is a profit from something we don't make here. This is a profit from selling something bought somewhere else. It's a sad day when the biggest profit ever is from something that forces us to keep our troops stuck in the Middle East. It's a sad day when America doesn't make anything except for debt anymore.

Already, record crude prices have produced bountiful first-quarter profits for several of the other major oil companies, despite higher costs and lower results from refining.

BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe’s two biggest oil producers, posted combined profits of $17 billion earlier this week — $9.08 billion for Shell, $7.6 billion for BP.

BP’s earnings surged 63 percent from a year ago; Shell’s rose 25 percent.

Last week, ConocoPhillips reported a 16 percent rise in net income to $4.14 billion. Like BP and Shell, the third biggest U.S. oil outfit far outpaced industry expectations.

Chevron Corp., the No. 2 U.S. oil company, is expected to continue the trend. It is scheduled to report first-quarter results Friday.

You'd think they'd feel the need to start cutting their profit margins so that consumers could keep buying their products. Don't hold your breath.

Remember when the oil company executives were called to Capitol Hill? Remember when there was a controversy about whether or not they should raise their hands and swear to tell the truth? I think we need another trip to the Hill to explain why they're making so much money when they should be making a more modest profit. Hell, by my way of thinking, these guys should be losing money or breaking even--and begging for cars that get better mileage.

How Do You Like Your Surge Now?

Apparently, the Iraqis in Basra are not willing to let their corrupt government in Baghdad try to stop their lucrative siphoning of oil supplies.

(CBS/AP) A bomb blast destroyed an oil pipeline in the southern Iraqi city of Basra Thursday and rockets continued falling on the U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, as suspected Shiite militants continued to defy an order by the country's prime minister to surrender.

Despite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ultimatum for militia members to lay down their arms and sign an agreement to abandon violence by Friday, government troops in Basra were having trouble making inroads into neighborhoods that the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army has controlled for years.

Residents spoke of militiamen using mortar shells, sniper fire, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades to fight off security forces.

That's right--al-Maliki gives them a "Bring 'Em On" wannabe tough guy ultimatum and forgets to make sure he has people adequately guarding both of the main pipe lines, and the insurgents against his government decide to blow one of them up. That's what this was all about--the bureaucrats in Baghdad thought their Shia brothers in Basra were stealing too much oil, so they decided to try to put a stop to it. And, like every schoolyard taunt, everyone's got a fat lip and a ripped pair of corduroys and nobody gets a cupcake for lunch.

What caused all of this? The Christian Science Monitor has this excellent article from September of last year--and in it, you can see that what al-Maliki is doing is driven by corruption and greed, nothing more.

At the entrance to the headquarters of the South Oil Company (SOC) in Basra, a sign dating from when Saddam Hussein nationalized the oil industry in 1972 reads: "Our oil is ours."

Inside, an exasperated senior official, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, describes the onslaught by parties and militias intent on controlling the company by forcing their loyalists into key management positions. Some are beholden to the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad, which is controlled by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the dominant Shiite coalition to which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki belongs.

"There is an invasion by parties and militias … we are a mouthwatering prize," he says, adding that recently 8,000 people, most of them illiterate, were pushed on to the company's payrolls.

The power plays extend to Basra's ports, too, often contributing to anger and a sense of injustice among the province's estimated 3 million people. In the town of Abu Al-Khaseeb, south of the city, the newly rich are building palatial homes next to mud huts. The mansions often belong to those who have been able to cash in on the brisk business in the town's Abu Flous port, which is one the province's main four ports and is widely considered to be controlled by the mafialike family, Bayet Ashour, and certain militias.

"You can only work at the port if you join a militia. I thought about it, but then my two cousins who had joined were badly wounded in a clash. So now we just sit home and shut up," says resident Jalal Ali.

Last month, armed tribesmen forcefully brought oil production to a standstill at the Majnoon oil field, 38 miles north of Basra city, after the SOC refused to meet their demands for jobs in the area. An official at the company, which controls oil exploration and production throughout southern Iraq, confirmed the incident.

Many are also profiting off the oil by tapping right into the pipelines.

SOC's oil pipelines are regularly sabotaged and drilled into to steal crude and smuggle it outside Iraq, says the unnamed official at the company. Many in the province even accuse Gov. Muhammad Mosabeh Waeli's Fadhila Party, whose partisans dominate the oil protection force, of colluding with the smugglers. Mr. Waeli has vehemently denied the charges, calling them "a smear campaign orchestrated by pro-Iranian parties."

Now that the pipeline has been blown up, nobody gets to tap into it. That's how that works. When one faction moves in Basra, others emerge and begin striking out. Remember--it's farther from Baghdad to Basra than it is from Washington D.C. to New York City. Events in one area shouldn't really affect the other, except that the opposite seems to be happening. Shia militias are suddenly reforming and resuming their old ways. The power struggle is apparently starting anew after a brief respite.

CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports the Green Zone, not long ago one of the safest areas of Baghdad, has become in recent days one of the deadliest.

In a visit to one of the foreign embassies inside the area, Logan says she and her crew had to quickly move into protective bunkers four times within one hour due to the relentless rocket fire. She says all non-essential movement of personnel within the Green Zone has been restricted.

The U.S. military said Wednesday that 16 rockets had slammed into the U.S.-protected Green Zone. One soldier with the U.S.-led coalition, two American civilians and an Iraqi soldier were wounded in the attacks, it said. At least 11 Iraqis were killed elsewhere in the capital by rounds that apparently fell short, police said.

A Pentagon official said reports from the Basra area indicate that militiamen had overrun a number of police stations and that it was unclear how well the Iraqi security forces were performing overall. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, remained in Basra to supervise a crackdown against the spiraling violence between militia factions vying for control of the center of Iraq's vast oil industry, located near the Iranian border. The events threatened to unravel a Mahdi Army cease-fire and spark a dramatic escalation in violence after a monthslong period of relative calm.

You're darned right al-Maliki is in Basra--he wants to escalate this into full-scale civil war.

Yes, but what the likes of John McCain, Uncle Bimbo, Michael O'Hanlon and the rest of the peanut gallery doesn't understand is that the surge--which was intended to provide the Iraqi government a respite from the violence so that it could get its act together and govern more effectively by reconciling political differences--was a fucked up strategy to begin with. Political pressure forced us to make a deal with the devil and kick the can down the road. Well, before we could get to the fall elections, al-Maliki decided he needed to hit his enemies in Basra in order to squeeze more money out of the exportation of oil. Couldn't they sit on this guy until the fall election? Because if there's one person who deserves the blame for blowing McCain's chances this fall it's al-Maliki. I guess their little visit didn't go so well.

This is one of those times when it would be nice if the pundit media could drop any pretense that the surge is working and explain to everyone how Shia on Shia violence is now a real factor in what we do. All they have to do is start looking at what the working media is telling us from Iraq and start dealing with reality. Forget the Sunnis and AQI--this is going to get deadly. By the time they're through, Iraq's oil producing infrastructure might collapse completely, and all because no one could figure out how to distribute the spoils so that everyone could get a taste of the action.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Noticed this a little while ago. Calling them "outlaws" is what? The new strategy for unifying the country? How pathetic.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Forty-two people were killed Thursday in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq's Interior Ministry said, the latest casualties in three days of clashes between militias and Iraqi security forces.

Iraq's offensive against what it characterizes as "outlaws" of hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia began Tuesday in Basra, Iraq's second largest city.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has been overseeing the operation in southern Iraq, has given militants an ultimatum to surrender their weapons by Saturday.

The fighting, which also saw Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone -- home to the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi government -- come under fire, has threatened to unravel a delicate al-Sadr cease-fire credited with reducing bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites.

I just don't think they're giving up their guns on Saturday, or any other day.

How audacious can this mendacious asshole get?

KKKarl Rove was on Fox News Sunday this morning, whipping a new fear pony in an effort to bolster support for perpetual occupation of Iraq - If we leave, oil prices will skyrocket.

If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy?

Seriously. He said it with a straight face, too. Never mind that he has been stunningly wrong on pretty much everything except the most effective methods of election rigging, we should believe him now!

Of course, he is still peddling the "al Qaeda could take over" meme, too. Even though everyone with two functioning neurons to rub together realizes that the notion is ridiculous. Iraq is 70% Shi'ite, and al Qaeda is a Sunni fundamentalist group. Just as there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before the US invasion, there will be no al Qaeda in Iraq after the US withdraws. They will either be slaughtered by Iraqis or they will flee for their lives.

And besides all that - the American presence in Iraq has had the exact opposite effect on oil prices. Instead of listening to the bullshit he spews, lets take a look at what the numbers say:

Now that Americans are (finally!) catching on to the terrorism fearmongering as a cause for continuing the occupation of Iraq, the GOP has been forced to come up with a new bogeyman to flog in support of perpetual war. It's in our economic interest to stay the course!

Never mind that we undoubtedly could have made great strides toward weening ourselves off the fossil fuels tit if we had spent all those billions on a Manhattan Project type alternative energy development program.

Fortunately, I think the whole "nothing to offer but fear itself" bidness is about played out. People are slowly shaking it off, pulling their No Fear t-shirts out of the bottom drawer, and telling the bastards to piss off.

Someone get a copy of the memo to Karl, because he obviously didn't read it the first time it was issued - Fear doesn't sell any more. No matter how you package it.