(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

On a day oil prices leaped to unheard-of highs, senators lined up Big Oil's biggest executives and pummeled them with complaints that they're pretending to be "hapless victims" while raking in record profits..

"Where is the corporate conscience?" Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked the top executives of the five largest U.S. oil companies.

It's all about economics, came the reply. Supply and demand. The company leaders tried to shift attention from motorists' anger over $4-a-gallon gasoline to a debate over new areas for drilling.

But senators at the Judiciary Committee hearing weren't having any of that. They wanted to press the executives about public anguish over paying $60 or more to fill up a car's gas tank.

"People we represent are hurting, the companies you represent are profiting," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the executives. He said there's a "disconnect" between legitimate supply issues and the oil and gasoline prices motorists are seeing.

The executives, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the hearing room, said they understood people were hurting, but they tried to blunt the emotion with economic analysis.

Profits have been huge "in absolute terms," conceded J. Stephen Simon, executive vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp., but they "must be viewed in the context of the massive scale of our industry." And high earnings "in the current up cycle" are needed for investments in the long term, including when profits will be down.

"'Current up cycle,' that's a nice term when people can't afford to go to work" because gasoline is costing so much, replied Leahy with sarcasm.

My favorite part is the coda:

"Is there anybody here that has any concerns about what you're doing to this country with the prices that you're charging and the profits that you're taking?" Durbin asked.

The titans of America's oil industry sat quietly for a moment.

"Senator," replied Exxon's Simon, "We have a lot of concern about that. And we're doing all we can to put downward pressure on prices."

Nationalize the oil, or at least regulate it as a utility on a federal scale, make the fuckers invest in refineries in the US for now, invest in real alternative energy sources, none of that ethanol scam bullshit, ban oil futures trading. Demand transcripts of closed meetings of the Cheney Energy Task Force and impeach impeach IMPEACH.

FUCKERS.

Comments

[signamax.livejournal.com]

they do it because they can
if you want nationalize industry - you better live in socialist world.
it won't happen here in any near future

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

of course they do it because they can, that's the machinery of every monstrous oligarchy ever. I know nationalization won't happen here, all this "government" cares about is the profits of their oil pals. That's one of the many reasons I don't want to live here.

[signamax.livejournal.com]

so you won't

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

doesn't make me any less furious. unlike this White House I am not really down with le deluge apres moi.

[signamax.livejournal.com]

why it does not make you less furious
you can't make the whole world a better place anyway
so

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am furious because it's wrong and monstrous. I feel anxious because of how it might affect me directly. Moving out of the country can alleviate the latter, but what possible impact would it have on the former--which is rooted in my ideas about ethical living, my sense of social values and justice, and my capacity for empathy?

[signamax.livejournal.com]

no-no
I understand that feel affected directly or indirectly

do you have in mind another working form of social functioning?

it is always a trade between personal freedom and free trade and social "fairness".

it is up to an individual to decide what suits him/her better

can you decide for another individual?

[cos]

In principle, having the government own or manage basic infrastructure, including utilities, increases personal freedom. So it's not always a trade between personal freedom and "free trade" (a misleading term) and social fairness. Sometimes it is, other times it isn't. We all have more personal freedom because the government runs the courts, than we would if courts were privatized. We have more personal freedom because the government owns most of the roads, than we would if they were mostly private.

[signamax.livejournal.com]

thank you for correction me in terms of wording...

however i disagree with you "in principle"

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

can you decide for another individual?

oh my god Max, spare me the post-sovok paranoia--"if we don't let free market run its course, IT WILL BE COMMUNISM"

Are your individual rights, like, totally violated by taxes that go to subsidize state highways, libraries, fire departments, and--in normal countries--health care?

Also, am I to take your plea for the endangered individual to infer that you are totally down with corporate personhood, courtesy of mismanagement of the 14th amendment? I don't actually think that corporations are people, and therefore don't give a fuck about violating their rights.

[cos]

Note that oil has never been anything resembling a "free market" except in the early days of wildcat wells in Pennsylvania. If you're talking about any period in history when Pennsylvania was no longer the world's primary exporter of oil, then oil is already semi-monopolized *and* an instrument of foreign policy, and large aspects of it are not "market". My comment below about full nationalization being politically impossible has nothing to do with an ideological position for or against "free markets"; that's a complete nonsequitur that signamax is introducing that demonstrates either that he knows almost nothing about the oil industry and its history, or that this ideology is so important to him that he focuses on it regardless of relevance.

I recommend this book.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

also I can think of plenty of more acceptable forms of social functioning--you know, most nations manage to strike a balance between the bezpredel of corporate greed where the oil lobby that is so disgusting that the old Soviet caricatures of "evil capitalists" don't do them justice get filthy rich at the expense of everything and everyone else, and Gulag Nation.

[signamax.livejournal.com]

exactly what I am trying to tell - it is always a balance

and it is a never a fair balance
it is always skewed once side or another

overall, I think that corporations are evil. I do think so.
However, for some reason once you press on it too much you human rights become violated as a bystander effect.
once you let them free too much - they start to violate human rights.

basically, I have never seen or heard about real balance you are talking about.

[gotmahmojo.livejournal.com]

Stay the course!

[dcart.livejournal.com]

We already have people deciding that for another individual. You don't really believe the fiction of "free markets" and the "invisible hand", do you? Our current oil and gas prices...as well as everything else in our economy is decided by policy. The current policy prioritizes the needs of oil company executives and shareholders over the needs of the rest of the country. Changing that policy doesn't make anyone more or less free. It's just another change in policy.

[(Anonymous)]

Nationalising = socialising. Is that really what you want/are asking for?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

um, yes, anonymous dude/dudette. why, did you think you would open my eyes to the hidden meanings of the term, and the blinds would fall from my eyes, and I would shriek and shrink back from The Great Red Satan?

I'd settle for it being regulated as a utility on a national scale, too.

[zerodivide1101.livejournal.com]

I'm not smart enough to participate in this discussion, but this did make me lol.

no more oil

[sinthome.livejournal.com]

i'd settle for congress telling the oil companies to go fuck themselves with massive federal investment (about what we spend on war) in green technologies. oil is a dead technology and we don't need it any more. we could solve a lot of our political and global problems by giving up on oil.

and i'm for 100% government regulation of services and industries. just give me more services and you can have my whole paycheck.

[cos]

I'm pretty sure that nationalizing them (aside from being basically impossible at the moment, because only a very very small portion of the population would stand for it) would cause prices to at least temporarily spike up. Much better would be a war profits tax (call it "windfall profits tax"), and spending that money on stuff that would make people hurt less (like health care - reduce cost of insurance, at least) and some of it on developing more renewables and more efficient transit.

[neverdreamofme.livejournal.com]

"none of that ethanol scam bullshit"
Seriously. Ugh.

[pyoor_excuse]

This brings up a whole variety of concepts about unfair pricing - and believe me, in the UK where I'm paying over £1 a litre (normally around £1.13 - so nearly $9 a gallon, roughly).

I'm deeply frustrated by the fact that what was once vaguely disposable income (and quite some of the non-disposable) is now poured into the pockets of the corporates.

I'm frustrated by the lies and waste of money that is the oil companies 'renewables' research. Hydrogen fuel cells are a complete waste of space and time. Ethanol fuel derivatives aren't though; however we're not ready for them. Using stuff that we need for food as fuel is just dumb. But research - and lots of it - into the ways to convert wood and other waste into ethanol for fuel (on which there are lots of ideas) is what's needed. It also has the advantage that a huge environmental burden (i.e. that of replacing lots of automobiles with new ones) can largely be avoided.

While nationalising (aww, look at me the little socialist who misses her nationalised rail, post & power) the oil industry, or strict regulation might give a transient downturn in prices - this was going to happen eventually anyway; places are reaching peak oil - we're just effectively getting a glimpse into a future we're not ready to face.

What's apparent to me though, is how much our society needs to change. I commute 15 miles every day, I can't do it on public transport (because not only isn't there any that's appropriate, it's so unreliable here as to be laughable) - and at some point that's going to have to stop :-/

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am all for more local economies, better public transport, etc., but I also gotta say that if the government was taxing the hell out of me for gas, but if that was paying for free healthcare and education, I would be much more into that than the scenario in the US where my money is lining the pockets of oil robber barons.

[pyoor_excuse]

So would I ;)

tbh - free healthcare is the one thing in the UK I've remained truly proud of. The NHS struggles on, underfunded, understaffed and underequipped, but still provides - on average - really excellent care. Especially if you're critically ill.

But we no longer have free education; we pay for tutoring and have low-interest loans. Free university level education went the way of the dinosaur here, sadly, as I stood holding my 'grants not loans' sign :-/

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

YES.

[cos]

Peak oil happened several years ago.

It was never going to be a hard peak, because there are many sources of oil of different convenience and quality. For example, there were many known drilling sites that would have too low a pressure and thus require pumping rather than simply drilling a hole, and would produce a kind of oil much harder to make useful stuff out of, such that for example it would cost $50/barrell to produce. Since the OPEC target for a stable price up until a few years ago was to keep oil between $23-$28, these sources were simply not counted, because they were not viable. Why spend twice as much to make the stuff as you could sell it for? But now they can be very profitable.

As the amount of spare production capacity in the world decreased to near zero, prices started climbing rapidly, and as prices climbed, new sources of production were made viable. So the amount of production keeps going up, but it's responding to higher demand, and if demand weren't high enough to push prices up then by definition this extra production wouldn't be happening. Therefore, by definition, the amount of *spare* production capacity remains low.

During the 1970s oil crisis, production capacity was about 25% higher than world demand. It was a political crisis: oil exporting countries had the option of producing more oil, but chose not to.

Sometime earlier in this decade, that era ended. When the difference between capacity and supply got under 2%, the way production can be increased changed fundamentally. Instead of a choice on the part of oil exporting countries, it became tied to price: increase the price we're willing to pay for oil, and production will increase to match. That's when, I'd say, we hit "peak oil". Because there's no hard peak in sight, and peak oil was always about cost, not about actually running out of the stuff.

Note: Iraq is a wrench. With Iraq's production, we might have delayed peak a while. By going to war, they took Iraq out of production for a number of years, hastening peak oil. If Iraq gets brought back into the system stably, it could either cause a short term non-peak (and temporary collapse of prices), or give us a "pause" where oil prices remain stable for a while, until we hit the new peak point.

[pyoor_excuse]

My personal opinion is that Peak Oil's been and done; but I've not seen any actual evidence on that side (I've not particularly looked, either). I tend not to state that on the basis that I think people are more likely to argue with it, and I can't be arsed. Once people have accepted Peak Oil's a real issue, then I'll start working on Peak Oil's been and done.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am confused. What exactly does "been and done" mean? I think it's a British colloquialism that I am not getting the full nuance of...

[pyoor_excuse]

Sorry, that's my hideous abuse of English. Comes off quite well in person (and particularly if you're English or well versed in English 'culture'). Essentially in this case I mean it's already happened.

[sinthome.livejournal.com]

nice analysis. i am actually enjoying the rise in oil prices as we are nearing the tipping point when it just isn't that expensive to invest in and use feul cells, solar, wind, etc. i'd like to see oil double again the next few years, and cut into non-essential travel/transport (especially airline).

walk, ride your bike and take the bus or other public transportation and suddenly the price of oil doesn't hurt so much. and stop buying goods that need to be shipped long distances (bananas). eat local. and turn off unused lights. this "crisis" is a problem we can solve by simple measures.

[cos]

I find the rise in oil prices extremely troubling for several reasons.

One, it shows that we weren't forward-thinking enough as a society, and neglected developing renewables for too long. I can't know for sure, but I feel like even if oil prices had stayed under $50, we would be making that big shift now - as it seems we're going to. So given another decade, we could be ready with enough new energy technology to withstand reduced oil production without a price spike.

Instead, it's coming at a time when we still desperately need more oil to make our world function. People riding their bikes and taking the bus are not going to make a dent in this need, certainly not a dent large enough to compensate for, say, China's burgeoning demand. So oil prices will continue to spike, because we're not ready, because we didn't prepare.

What does that mean? It means the incentive to despoil every last bit of the earth that we might extract some oil from is growing almost exponentially. Not because having those last few bits of oil will really make a big difference in the scheme of things, but because whoever does it, be it a company or a country's government, will make tremendous profits. Oil shale, tar sands, deep see drilling, all sorts of stuff that would've been money-losing in the past now become some of the biggest moneymakers on the planet. By hitting peak oil unprepared, we're further dooming our environment, and it's the rising price of oil that'll do it.

Secondly, it means something else: We can't prevent the price spike, and it's an extreme regressive tax. Regardless of what you personally do for transportation, the price of cheap goods will go up and/or wages stay down, disproportionately at the lower end. Energy is the lubricant of society, culture, and the economy, and high energy prices are like wooden shoes in the gears. It's not just buying local fruit vs. faraway fruit, it's everything. It determines how likely an ocean biologist from Brazil is to travel to Woods Hole for a fruitful collaboration; how many African bands will get to tour the US; and so many other things I couldn't possibly think of them all, let alone list them. High energy prices are, on balance, devastating for our freedom, our culture, our science, our opportunities to meet and learn about and get along with the rest of the world, to come up with new ideas (and new foods and kinds of music and literature and art). And it will hurt the poor more than those who can afford it better.

And even public transport: If you can have a car, driving is already by far the cheaper option. The cost of a trip on public transit is many times the cost of gas for a similar trip by car, almost everywhere public transit exists. Except for those few places where you can't practically drive or park (like downtown Boston), public transit is a luxury. But as gas prices go up, the price of driving goes up closer and closer to the cost of public transit. Governments respond by increasing the cost of public transit, too, partly because energy costs are higher. Several years ago, a round trip from central Cambridge to Davis Square (something I do often) cost $2.50 by T, or 25 cents in gas if I drove. Today, it's $3.40 by T, or 75 cents worth of gas.

[sinthome.livejournal.com]

regarding public transportation: cheapness is a market concern, not an environmental concern. i don't care if it's "cheaper" to drive. it's cleaner, and that's a cost not easily measured in dollars and cents. and i'm poor and it's most certainly NOT a luxury to ride the bus every day. it's that kind of thinking that perpetuates platitudes that "americans love their cars."

besides, there are bazillions of dollars to be made in the transition to clean technologies. uncertainty creates risk which creates opportunities for the accumulation of wealth. society is never forward thinking enough to avoid price spikes probably because it's the price spikes which drive the transition to new technologies. when it becomes expensive enough to maintain an old technology when there is another product at a similar (but higher) price but that also has "value added" benefits, society usually makes the change to the newer more expensive technology. like hdtv. the side benefit of hdtv is that we free up all that wireless bandwidth, but we should not see freeing up the bandwidth as the driving force behind the transition. people have simply come to accept the cost of cable coming into their homes, and if they could have a new TV with higher resolution for a few thousand dollars, most people don't mind making the change. not everyone can afford to make the change, but they are swimming against the tide.

energy is not the lubrication of society: communication is. now, you could argue that energy lubricates communication through transportation technologies, but you absolutely cannot argue that energy == oil and without oil society grinds to a halt. there is so much energy out there not being harnessed that oil is but one small drop in the bucket.

high energy prices are not devastating to "freedom." that's too vague an assertion to prove true. the biologist who needs to fly from brazil to woods hole is putting co2 in the atmosphere that's creating the problem he's probably studying in the first place. freedom to me is something more like the ability to think and express myself freely. i'm not being denied freedoms because i can't afford to travel to the moon or mars. it's simply too expensive and too risky. if the cost of oil prevents non-essential travel, then so be it. we need to reconfigure how we think about what we consume and the cost of that consumption on the environment. if what we want to consume in this global culture is "african bands" then perhaps we need to rethink what it means to "want" in this context, and what it means to think of "freedom" as that type of consumption.

[cos]

Hmm. I think you're resorting to very simplistic interpretations of what I said (in same cases actually contradicting what I said), that prevent you from thoughtfully engaging it. I can't really respond, but I hope you'll read my comment again with a more open mind.

ugh.

[sinthome.livejournal.com]

your response is why the internet still lags behind the university and other public forms as a platform for meaningful exchange (read: not inferior to, but lacking in the conventions of polite and intelligent exchange). i read your comment 3 times and responded as thoughtfully as i could. i was not "resorting" to "simplistic assertions." i was trying to do what think is useful: take arcane arguments and interrogate them in terms of practical consequences.

Re: ugh.

[cos]

Interpretations, not assertions. Your comment isn't simplistic, but it's responding to a series of very simplistic (and inaccurate) interpretations of what I said. For example, nowhere do I "argue that energy == oil and without oil society grinds to a halt", and I really cannot come up with an intelligent response to someone who thinks that I did.

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

The per-trip cost of commuting by car or public transport also depends on whether you already have an insured vehicle or not.

I am very lucky - my town subsidizes bus use. Outside the limits of the local bus routes, I can go a bit farther for $2.00 per trip. If I lived outside the local route, I could get a bus pas for $30/month. This is still cheaper than renting and insuring and gassing up a car, although again I am lucky that Zipcar is an option for $5/hour. But I haven't had a car for a few years now partly because I haven't felt comfortable with the initial cash (or financed) output required. If I had a car, I'd also have to pay for parking once I arrived.

My situation is not typical and I see your point - in many places, there isn't public transport at all. But if our culture were not so insistent on the necessity of owning cars that require gasoline, there may have been more investment in public transit by now.

[cos]

Owning a car is a very different decision from whether to use a car for a particular trip when you have one. In my case (and, I suspect, a very large number of other people), not owning a car is just not an option. However, I'd be quite happy not using it most days. But in a month when I'm feeling pinched for money and try to save money by driving to places I could use the T to get to, those drives account for a significant portion of the gas I use. This usually happens when I'm working on political campaigns and trying to scrape by on something like $300/week or $1500/month. At other times, when I am not trying to save every dollar, I take the T a lot, and my car sometimes spends weeks at a time without moving.

I looked at the numbers a couple of years ago when I had a copy of the Cambridge city budget (because I was working on a city council campaign), and based on resident permit revenue, I concluded that more than half of Cambridge residents own cars that are kept in Cambridge. That's a lot of people who probably regularly face a choice of whether to take the T or drive. What do they choose? There are a number of incentives, but cost is surely one of them. If taking the T cost less than driving, people would choose it more often.

[dg76.livejournal.com]

amen!

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

and impeach impeach IMPEACH

impeach, try, remove

then

indict, try, convict, sentence