77 Drilling leases canceled in Utah

Good News! One of BushCo’s Midnight Regs has been stopped. From MSNBC:

The 77 leases were for areas near Arches and Canyonlands national parks, Dinosaur National Monument, and Nine Mile Canyon, which is sometimes called the world’s longest art gallery for its collection of ancient rock-art panels.

In its first action to overturn Bush administration policies on energy, the Obama administration on Wednesday said it will cancel oil drilling leases on more than 130,000 acres near two national parks and other protected areas in Utah.

“In the last weeks in office, the Bush administration rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases near some of our nation’s most precious landscapes in Utah,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters. “”We need to responsibly develop our oil and gas supplies to help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but we must do so in a thoughtful and balanced way that allows us to protect our signature landscapes and cultural resources.”

Below is one of the areas where leases had been sold to drill nearby..Canyonlands National Park.

Oil up, Dollar down.

Now I get it..the price of oil is tied to the value of our Dollar. So with the Buck hitting an all time low, everyone is investing in Oil? From the IHT writeup:

The immediate catalyst for the spike in energy prices is the drop in the value of the dollar. Currency traders are selling dollars and buying euros to take advantage of the difference in interest rates between the United States and Europe.

The dollar weakened, continuing its steep decline of last week, and the euro rose to a record $1.5274 in early New York trading. The dollar also fell to its lowest level in three years versus the yen.

“The question for oil is where is the dollar going,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director at PFC Energy, a consulting firm in Washington. “That’s going to the main market mover in the short term.”

The question really is..when does it all come screeching down around our heads?

Consumption of gasoline hits 16 year low

My first knee-jerk response to the title of the RawStory writeup was this:

No shit sherlock.

Seriously..when the price of everything we use or need to live is rising and wages are stagnant or non-existent if your on unemployment..you will use only what you need to use of anything..including petrol. From the RawStory article:

In the last six weeks, US gasoline consumption has fallen 1.1% from 2007, despite the ever-present increase in cars on the road — the largest drop in 16 years, excepting declines that followed 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

Fearing inflation, investors have poured money into commodities, pushing oil prices close to their adjusted value high of $103.76 in 1980, the Wall Street Journal Monday notes.

Katrina was a blip on the screen because such a huge section southern portion of the US was under water and quite a few refineries were hit by Katrina or the resultant deluge of water. The rest of the writeup:

“As refiners pay more for the oil they use, gasoline prices have gained sharply in recent weeks to an average of $3.13 a gallon in the week ended Feb. 25, up 40% from $2.24 a gallon in January 2007,” adds the Journal. “That’s stoking worries that prices will rise even more sharply as demand gets a boost from the approaching vacation season, when more Americans take to the road. Some experts predict gasoline could cost as much as $4 a gallon this summer.”

The rising price of gasoline has also pushed some consumers into fuel-efficient vehicles.

“Pinched consumers also are speeding up their shift to more fuel-efficient cars,” the article notes. “Sales of large cars dropped by 2.6% in 2006 and by 10.5% in 2007. In January, they plummeted 26.5% from a year earlier, according to Autodata Corp.

Dealers are also selling fewer minivans and large SUVs. Small car sales in January were up 6.5% from 2007, according to a survey by Autodata, the article notes.

I hope the idiots in Detroit are paying attention now too..quit making those fucking huge SUV’s and gas guzzling mofo’s ok? Big Oil can bite me..those bastards will still make record profits..

Repubs Block Energy Bill while Dems stand and watch

The Dem’s have a majority right? So how is it that they can NOT override a filibuster by the freaking Repubs? From WaPo via TruthOut:

By a narrow margin, the Senate today failed again to block a Republican-led filibuster on an energy bill as GOP leaders made a stand against a $21.8 billion, 10-year tax package that would have extended incentives for wind and solar energy and reduced some tax breaks for oil companies.

Such horseshit indeed! The Dem’s are the most unorganized bunch of dipshits I have ever seen. They can’t find their arses with both hands half the friggin time.

Ah..the catch was the tax part of it. Seems the Rethugs support corporate welfare for those big Oil companies. From the WaPo piece:

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he would introduce another version of the energy bill, without the tax package, perhaps as soon as today. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the revised bill would get wide bipartisan support.

So, they just cave in once again to the Rethugs..I am so sick of this shit I could scream my dear reader. I am losing my patience. I can not support a party that gets their dicks knocked in the dirt time after time again. God forbid the corporate welfare wagon come to the end of the line. Again from WaPo:

The 59-40 vote — one vote short of the margin needed to end debate and clear the way for a vote on the measure — came after warnings from the White House and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (N.M.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that President Bush would veto the bill because of the tax component.

At least we can count on BushCo to stand with their cronies as usual..lovers of all things corporate welfare-ish. Oh, and the one vote short? Democrat, Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), voted against ending the filibuster.

Fucking DINO.

"The biggest environmental crime in history"

That, my dear reader, is the title of the Independent article I read Sunday evening in my inbox. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was about British Petroleum..aka BP. It’s the description of a Canadian drilling project which environmentalists and people with a modicum of common sense brand BP’s method of ‘extraction’. From the Indy article:

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

For decades, technology has tried to figure out a way to extract the oil from these tar sands. Evidently someone is tired of waiting wouldn’t you say? Another precious resource will be sucked up in order to extract this oil:

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers – up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

BP is lying its collective ass off when it says anything about using a ‘less damaging’ method of extraction. It would cost them more money and BP is nothing if not cheap when it comes to safety and environmental concerns, judging from their past history of fuck-ups and..ahem..accidents. GreenPeace’s climate and energy guru has said this about BP and the tar sand extraction plans:

“It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. For BP to be involved in this trade not only flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it should not be being developed at all. You cannot call yourself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and involve yourself in tar sands extraction.”

If none of this pisses you the hell off…consider the logic of BP’s PR executive regarding the project:

“These are resources that would have been developed anyway.”

Sumbitches.

Take a gander at the remains of the BP plant in texas after BP cut corners on safety and employees were killed because BP knowingly allowed safety problems to go uncorrected in order to pad their…bottom line.

I wrote about the original refinery explosion here which killed 15..count em..15 employees. BP eventually only had to ante up $373 million for the lives of their employees lost in this TX refinery explosion and subsequent coverup. I wrote about that here in October of this year.

Now, the bastards are going to kill an area the size of Wales and England combined..and get paid handsomely to do it. So people can drive their big friggin SUV’s and have gas to put in them among other things..

Tags: BP, Tar Sands Oil extraction, Alberta Canada