Practical Religion

There are many things about religion that confuse me. But I do understand the urge to pray to a god for intervention when a situation is going badly. So I understand why these folks in Dublin, GA are asking god for help:

A Dublin church group plans to gather pump-side Saturday and pray for the gas prices to drop.

Mabry says he can remember when gas jumped from under $1 to $1.50 and says, now, with prices reaching almost $4, he says he plans to ask God for help.

And this isn't the first time his congregation has gathered at Kroger's gas pumps.

"If it doesn't drop down to nothin' but ten cents, I'm happy with that. But what I really want to believe God to do is drop down $1.50, hey, I'm glad with that, too," says the pastor.

http://www.13wmaz.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=124242

Of course, it isn't going to work. They fail to understand one simple fact: oil companies bought off god a long time ago.

Oil's Swell

I've said many times that the SCOTUS's "Citizens United" decision was the worst thing that ever happened to American democracy, allowing corporations to pump unlimited money into elections. And the oil industry has decided to start buying their candidates directly:

The American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As CAP’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News. “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” As Bloomberg pointed out, oil-supported political action committees like the Independent Petroleum Association of America overwhelmingly donate to Republican candidates.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, API spent $6.7 million on lobbying alone last year, after clearing $7 million in 2009. In 2010, API was the seventh most prolific spender in the oil and gas industry, following ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Koch Industries and BP.

API’s turn toward direct political donations is doubly problematic because, in addition to acting as the industry’s chief lobbyists, the institute runs technical committees that set standards for the oil industry. In its official report, the commission that investigated the BP oil spill found that API was too “compromised” to be setting industry standards. “Because they would make oil and gas industry operations potentially more costly, API regularly resists agency rulemakings that government regulators believe would make those operations safer, and API favors rulemaking that promotes industry autonomy from government oversight,” the commission found. And this was before API decided to begin directly supporting candidates!

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/24/api-direct/

(please, go read the entire article)

The oil industry has had an incredible amount of influence on our government for many decades, and certainly has a number of members of congress in their control already. But they've decided they want more. I had wondered how the industry would react to Obama's proposed cuts to subsidies and increased alternative energy funding, and now we know their response: buy more politicians.

I'm sure you've all seen yesterday's 'big news' that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker got punked into a phone call that he thought was from energy magnate David Koch. Embarrassing? Maybe; but is anyone really surprised? I'm willing to bet that David Koch has a long list of politicians that he can call up who are all too willing to do his bidding. He and his cronies have decided that they need to buy the rest of the seats to ensure that they can dictate policies.

The simple fact is that we're already screwed by our oil dependence. Our entire economy (especially food and transportation) swings with every change in the price of a barrel of crude. Just look at the price of gas in response to the uprising in Libya. And of course, the environmental costs of climate change. But the very biggest threat is the very real "peak oil" problem. We're pretty much done using up all the cheap, easy to reach oil reserves. Our country desperately needs to move away from a fossil fuel based economy, but that will require government action. And those who profit most from the status quo are determined to prevent any action.

Bow down before your masters.

Act Surprised

So a lot of the "blogoshpere" is outraged that congressman Joe Barton (R-TX, of course) felt the need to apologize to BP. He actually said "So I apologize" for the creation of a $20 billion escrow fund, which he called "an illegal shakedown".
Outrageous? Yes. Surprising? No.
Congressman Barton has received $1.4 million from the oil and gas industry. He's merely saying what he's been paid to say.
In Texas, the oil spill is considered an 'act of god' because the oil companies are god.

Added: Barton has issued a pathetic written statement:

"And if anything I said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

Apologizing for an apology? I'm sorry, but that's just sorry.

Oil Rules

(cartoon from Outside the Interzone)

I've had absolutely zero enthusiasm for posting about serious topics lately. It's all too damn depressing, and bitching in a blog post doesn't improve my mood.

Take the gulf oil spill (please), an environmental disaster of epic proportions. It's the inevitable result of our oil dependant society, and a system that rewards corruption. Cheap, profitable oil is sacred, and government regulation is seen as an obscene abomination to be removed or avoided at all costs. BP ignored the old proverb about "an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure", choosing to scrimp on safety valves to reduce costs and increase profits. It was cheaper to buy looser regulations.

So it's somewhat positive that the Obama administration is making an attempt to reform the Minerals Management Service, an agency with the conflicted agenda of both promoting and regulating off-shore drilling:

The Obama administration is proposing to split up an Interior Department agency that oversees offshore drilling, as part of its response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, The Associated Press has learned.

An administration official who asked not to be identified because the plan is not yet public said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will urge that Congress approve splitting the Minerals Management Service in two. One agency would be charged with inspecting oil rigs, investigating oil companies and enforcing safety regulations, while the other would oversee leases for drilling and collection of billions of dollars in royalties.

Currently, the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department, is responsible for collecting more than $10 billion a year from oil and gas drilling and with enforcing laws and regulations that apply to drilling operations.

Some critics have said the two roles are in conflict and are one reason the agency has long been accused of being too cozy with the oil and natural gas industry.

An internal investigation in 2008 described a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by workers at the agency. The investigation by Interior's inspector general found workers at the MMS royalty collection office in Denver partied, had sex with and used drugs with energy company representatives. Workers also accepted gifts, ski trips and golf outings, the report by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jYP7GoO9ldJALdGGRcHuadmF3y1gD9FKIM1O0

OK, it's really only a small step. The regulators and the industry were (sometimes literally) in bed together, and the results are now washing upon the shore. Separating the regulators from the promoters would at least encourage a moderate level of oversight, and a slight increase in safety.

But it's not going to solve the problem of our societies oil addiction: no winning politician is going to campaign on a platform of "we need to raise the price of gasoline" in the face of "drill, baby, drill". We'll have a nice little moratorium as the result of this disaster, then expand off-shore drilling as soon as the headlines have been forgotten.

And nothing I post on this little blog will have the slightest impact on that truth.

Summing it up

Got this graphic in my email this morning from Mark Hoback at The Aristocrats , and I just had to post it. I imagine you'll be seeing it on a lot of blogs today. Great job, Mark!

Like the Twang of A Pedal-Steel Guitar…

….we shot out through Boulder City, over the dam, and down through the wide, carved bowl of a valley on the way back from Sin City. To the west, the jagged, craggy boulders that gave the dam its original name – Boulder Dam; Boulder Dam, dammit, before that 3^rd-to-the-worst President got his mitts on it and re-christened it Hoover, after himself. He’d probably be proud to look out over this valley, strewn with settlement-camp looking trailers and small truck-stop cafes, modern-day Hoovervilles offering what help they can to passerby.

To the east, more mountainous upthrusts of a different geology, whiter, more chalky looking, but still hemming a fragile, blacktop thread down the western edge of the high Arizona desert.

Small burgs – Dolan Springs, Cyclopic, Chloride, Grasshopper Springs, Santa Claus – cain’t hardly even call them towns, they zip by so quickly at 80-plus miles per hour under a searing blue shield of sky dotted with puffy clouds. I, and hundreds of other weary travelers wind our way home. There is a slight hump in the road at Golden Springs, where to the west you can spin off onto state route 68 and head once again for some riches if you still have some cash.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty smooth ride, with a water bottle snugged in beside you and a hot desert sun shining above. There’s nothing on the AM/FM dial except Mexican mariachi music, which is good enough to hum along with, but you lose the cadence when you can’t sing along because you don’t know the words, let alone the language. Luckily out here you can’t get the ubiquitous Jeebus-preacher stations common to middle-of-nowhere America; probably because this high desert is hell already, so why would those Men of God waste their time trying to radio the damned that live out here? So you stab at the SEEK button, and what to your surprised ears do you stumble across, but KNPR, the Vegas National Public Radio outlet.

A-and, while you wend your way down this two-lane, then four-lane tar-line, you hear the Studio360 program du jour, which is a celebration? discussion? what have you? concerning the 50^th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road,” a particularly good talk-fest for a long, lonely highway such as this.

Apparently, you learn, this is the silver annum of this now treasured American classic, which brought a be-bop, beatnik enthusiasm to the rich American travel experience, building on J.F. Cooper’s Gleanings, Twain’s Huck Finn, and updating Steinbeck’s angry grapes for the hipper generation. Doc Thompson covered it too, in his wild escapades across the desert to our American Cibola in the West; and there are probably many more epic trip stories that aren’t even reminders in your brain while you speed along, listening and learning.

After all, isn’t there a famous quote that says to understand America, you must imagine a vast space moving? Isn’t that what America is all about? The hustle, the bustle, the to-and-fro, the give-and-take, the dog-eat-dog of it?

Kerouac’s prose hints at some of that, but also puts it on the path to individual discovery. In this case, as so many others, through the American road. The journey. The path. That’s right, the road trip. Spiritual descendent of the pioneers in their covered wagons, only now we’re not blazing an original trail, we’re following a pre-determined one, laid down by highway engineers who based their original surveys on long-traveled dirt trails and Conestoga buggy paths. So, what Kerouac understood, was with the path already in place, that henceforth with each road trip, the trail-blazing, the pioneering had to take place in the mind of the individual, and furthermore, that the individual had to simultaneously both understand and to deny that; to understand that they were on their own individual trip, as well as following an arc or ribbon on society’s trip.

Wow. Heavy. And, given that you never even read the book until you were thirty, and thought it only so-so, it’s just the kind of meanderings you might expect from a four-hour jaunt across a harsh, unforgiving landscape, in society’s current chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, air-conditioned, stepping-out-over-the-line vehicle – the American automobile.

And further, you’ve just ridden this conveyance to the epitome of American extravagance and waste, Las Vegas. The city of the Strip, but where moving sidewalks, escalators and bridges (both above and below ground) have so transformed the walkability of the casino area that it is virtually possible to navigate the entire area without setting foot into the fresh air if you desire. Where the mob took a cue from Disney Imagineers and have remade the city into one giant façade of realism, from the faux-cobblestone streets of the Paris casino to the sparkling fountains of Caesar’s and the Bellagio, to the giant aquarium-in-the-walkways of the Mandalay Bay casino or the re-done tower that would have Gustav Eiffel quaking at the knees.

Granted, everyone knows that Vegas is a complete fantasy. We (meaning everyone who visits) accept, and even encourage that. Walking the Strip this morning, amongst the current edifices are dozens of construction cranes and towers, hurling up even more thousands of rooms into the area, making the Vegas downtown look like Shanghai or Dubai. Hell, between those three cities alone, I bet much of the worlds construction talent is earning paychecks to pour more cement and build more monuments for the masses than the pharaohs ever dreamt of harnessing.

Like I said, a fantasy. And all roads, even Dean Moriarty’s, lead to Vegas, or some other Eldorado on the hill.

But I’m a simple guy, and out here in non-fantasy-land, we’ve got some, ummmm, bumps in the road. Some potholes, if you will, in the Kerouac Zen dream of Americana.

First, let’s talk about energy.

Last week, OPEC, said that they will probably increase output by 500,000 barrels of oil per day. Now for most people, OPEC is synonymous with Saudi Arabia, but that’s not true. There are 12 current member states, and they don’t all send every damn bit of oil to the U.S. of A. So, we’re not going to get all of that 500 K barrels of black gold. But, let’s suppose we did get all of that. How much is that worth? Not monetarily, but in what we can do with it.

Now 500,000 bbl/day divided by 20.8 million bbl/day current use in the US comes to 2.4% of our energy needs per day. In other words, even if the U.S. got all that extra oil, that extra oil would power the country for about 35 minutes, give or take. Oh yeah. We aren’t going to get all that oil; that oil is to be sold worldwide. Maybe we’ll get 25% of it, so it’ll power us for about 8 and a half minutes or so. All that blather and conferencing from the OPEC members will give us (realistically) enough juice to run our society for about as long as it takes me to cook an omelet.

Now, given that OPEC controls much of what’s known to be left in the ground oil-wise, and given that stated U.S. policy going back to Carter (hell, back to FDR) has been the unobstructed, inevitable dynamo of growth in America – which relies almost exclusively on oil – doncha maybe kinda think, just for a minute, that WE, as a matter of national policy, were ah, I don’t know, a teensy-eensy bit short-sighted by placing all our eggs in that basket? That maybe we shouldn’t have built our entire worldview (driving everywhere, easy-to-grow food, new-and-amazing medicines and medical discoveries, the heat for our damn houses) on something that’s halfway around the world?

Oh, that’s right. We weren’t placing all our eggs in that basket, because up until 1973 or so, the good ‘ol U.S. was the worlds largest supplier of oil. We had barrels, tens of barrels, millions and billions of barrels or that black, goopy shit. We supplied the world! We could encourage economic growth, of our country and others, based upon the supply to the world, of all of that greasy stuff. And, because we had that supply, which powered us through WWII and gave us victory there, and built us into the worlds’ economic powerhouse, we were like that cat that didn’t eat just the canary, but the whole damn aviary.

Until, one day, we weren’t. We’ll discuss that in the next post, and maybe touch a little bit more on the future of the Kerouac dream of the open road.