Environmental Outlook: Oil Subsidies and the Future of U.S. Energy Policy
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-01/environmental-outlook-oil-subsidies-and-future-us-energy-policy
President Barack Obama is calling for an end to tax breaks for oil companies to help finance clean-energy research projects. As part of our Environmental Outlook series, we look at the big business of oil subsidies and their role in U.S energy policy.
Guests
Kate Gordon
vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress
Jack Coleman
The Managing partner at EnergyNorthAmerica, LLC and a former federal lawyer for energy policy issues
Amy Harder
reporter, The National Journal
Comments
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In the recent financial crisis, the American taxpayer bailed out huge banks and businesses.
Currently the American taxpayer is unemployed and our country in a near debt and deficit
crisis. I think the oil and gas companies should bail out taxpayers now ! After-all the
taxpayer has given huge subsidies to them for many years. What is the difference between
an auto company repaying us and the oil industry repaying us. We just haven't asked them !!
Those of us living in oil and gas country (especially the Rocky Mtn states) live daily with the results of some other important but often unmentioned subsidies for those industries: the impacts on American public land, and on the air and water in the communities where they're extracted.
Where I live in New Mexico, gas-well pads are spaced relatively sparsely compared to other places, but still we have huge issues with dust from disturbed soils (which also has recently been linked to global warming and early snowmelt,) with the degradation of our air from the numerous vehicles running around servicing these wells (and I have yet to figure out whether the petroleum burned by those trucks is included in calculations about the supposed efficiency and cleanliness of gas) and the poisoning of our ground water by frac'ing fluids. Also, because the BLM is understaffed, regulatory compliance is questionable.
The gas wells in my county are drilled on acreage cleared for the purpose in old-growth pinon and juniper forests--1200 yr old trees in intact ecosystems, lost for these wells. I don't feel America has truly weighed these losses (which should be recognized as subsidies.)
More on subsidies/corporate taxes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/business/economy/02leonhardt.html?hp
Cost to the environment, pollution and its cost to human health as well as to that of our eco-system, should be factored in when taxing the oil companies who have been subsidized through the roof over the last 100 years. Let some of these billion dollar making ceo's subsidize their drilling plans. And this oilman guest Jack Coleman sounds like Oliver North and cannot seem to give a straight answer. His response that the world "has always had problems" when asked about today's global warming and environmental devastation is the typical spin-response line. Enough already.
The Peak Oil issue was not correctly addressed by your guests when a caller brought it up. Peak oil is a peak in the effective daily production rate while the panel responded with a discussion of reserves in the ground. A 100 year supply of nonconventional sources like oil shale doesn't matter if the rate of extraction can't meet what we are used to from light sweet crude, or if the ratio of energy returned over energy invested is much lower.
Please see recent reports like from the US Department of Defense Joint Operating Environment Report last year which contains:
"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD."
That's why the military is looking so hard at alternative energy sources.