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POPSArctic goo isn't Oil--but what ISit? "It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter. "It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism." "If it was something we'd seen before, we'd be able to say something about it. But we haven't ...which prompted concerns from the local hunters and whaling captains." The stuff is "gooey" and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, Brower said. "It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department. "It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.
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POPSOil and Indians Don't Mix 
Wally Hickel, the former Governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. "Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast." explained the governor and pipeline magnate, "Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn't make it yours." The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years. I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron's toxic dumping. Chevron's lawyer told me, "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States? ... They have to prove that it is our crude," which, he noted with glee, "is absolutely impossible." Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive. That's why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, unlike their brothers in Peru,
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POPSDrillers eye oil reserves off California coast Californians have generally opposed drilling since a platform blowout in 1969 splashed 3 million gallons of black, gooey crude oil on 35 miles of beaches around Santa Barbara, killing otters and seabirds. The destruction of shoreline and wildlife sparked activism and led to the creation of the Coastal Commission. But when gas prices peaked a few months ago amid cries of "drill, baby, drill" at rallies for GOP presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin, 51 percent of Californians said they favored more offshore drilling, according to a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.
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POPSRFK Jr. on Palin's Big Oil infatuation Now John McCain has chosen as his running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a diligent student of Big Oil's crib sheets. She's something of a flat-earther who shares the current administration's contempt for science. Palin has expressed skepticism about evolution (which is like not believing in gravity), putting it on par with "creationism," which posits that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. She used to insist that human activities have nothing to do with climate change. "I'm not one ... who would attribute it to being man-made," she said in August. After she joined the GOP ticket, she magically reversed herself, to a point. "Man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming," she told Charles Gibson two weeks ago. Meanwhile, Alaska is melting before our eyes; entire villages erode as sea ice vanishes, glaciers are disappearing at a frightening clip, and "dancing forests" caused by disappearing permafrost astonish residents and tourists. Palin had to
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POPS Sarah and the Earth--Incompatible Her deplorable environmental record was such common knowledge that John McCain couldn't have missed it, even if he napped through his vetting committee's report. So if the McCain/Palin ticket is elected, you should know what to expect. Although John McCain may once have openly refused to subscribe to the beliefs of the Republican Party's religious right, famously describing them as "agents of intolerance," his selection of Sarah Palin is a message (and not just to the party's fundamentalist right): If you thought that he understands the need to kick our fossil-fuel addiction and address global warming, if you believed his promises to build a green economy, forget about it. A McCain/Palin administration, just like the one before it, will continue -- and this is the best-case scenario -- to fiddle while the planet burns.
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POPSBush Gov’t involved in Sex and Drugs and Oil and Roll: UPDATED “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length,” Devaney said. (hahahahahaha) The reports describe a fraternity house atmosphere inside the Denver Minerals Management Service office responsible for marketing oil and natural gas that energy companies barter to the government in lieu of cash royalty payments for drilling on federal lands. The government received $4.3 billion in such royalty-in-kind payments last year. The oil and gas is then resold to energy companies or put in the nation’s emergency stockpile. …read on
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POPSGreenpeace Activists Arrested Protesting Oil Sands in Northern Alberta “Today we brought our message to the perpetrators of this environmental crime with a clear message to put the brakes on the tar sands,” Hudema said. The tar sands use more water than any other Alberta user. Current projects are licensed to remove more than 450 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River each year, about two and a half times the amount of water used by the city of Calgary each year. After use, the water is so contaminated with toxic chemicals that it is stored in toxic tailings ponds so large that they can be seen from space. With today’s demonstration, the Greenpeacers targeted the same sludgy six-square-kilometer tailings pond where 500 ducks drowned in April, despite environmental regulations that require Syncrude to have wildlife deterrents in place. “We take a lot of pride in having systems in place to prevent birds from landing on settling basins and storage ponds,” Syncrude’s Katinas said at the time. “So we’re very saddened and sorry that
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POPSAnd they said the war wasn't for the oil “We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.” SURPRISE, SURPRISE---NOT!
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POPSThey're Baaack--Juan Coles take on Amerikan Big Oil in Iraq Thanks to Ratilfar...Maybe he clipped it too but it deserves all the spreading it gets...excellent column by Juan Cole: Bush and Cheney clearly went into Iraq primarily in order to put US petroleum firms in precisely this favored position. The US power elite wanted this outcome and connived actively at it. As Alan Greenspan put it, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Poor Iraq has been looted, occupied, and disrupted by the industrialized West for a century because of the curse of its oil wealth. The Iraqi Petroleum Company was until 1929 the Turkish Petroleum Company since it began in 1912 with a concession from the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq before the 1917 British conquest. The victors of World War I used their victory to leverage themselves into Iraqi oil. The Ottomans had thrown in with Germany and Austria in 1914, and were defeated by the victorious allies. Iraq was considered a s
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POPSDeals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production. There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry. Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil pric
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POPSChange We Can Stomach--I Big Ag on the downslide? Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer. In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.
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POPSCartoon Hero Will Save the Day “In the past three months, average consumer spending on energy came to $663 billion, or 6.5 percent of total consumer spending. A year ago, it represented 5.8 percent.” In simple terms: “If gasoline breaks through $4 a gallon by Memorial Day, that would mean spending on gasoline would have risen by $100 billion since the beginning of the year, or roughly the size of the tax rebate checks going out.” According to Monday’s Providence Journal, “The United States, with the lowest fuel efficient vehicles and longest average commutes in the world, is the only major industrialized country to witness a surge in oil consumption since the severe oil shortages of the 1970s and the 1980s.” While European nations have taxed fuel to pay for other more efficient forms of transportation, the U.S. has taken an Underdog approach to the problem; swooping in with borrowed cash to pay the ransom oil companies demand on our transportation and heating needs. Next week President Underdog will begin mai
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POPSFilthy Lucre
Alaska's oil-happy pols are ensnared in scandal However the scandals fall out, environmentalists can actually look forward to a cleaner brand of politics emerging up north. Squeaky-clean governor Sarah Palin (R) called the legislature into special session and got a new oil-tax law that raised taxes and tightened loopholes. And a new statewide poll shows both Don Young and Ted Stevens trailing likely Democratic challengers in this year's election.
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POPSArctic Oil Bonanza Worries Alaska Native Native groups and environmentalists most fear a serious oil spill in the Chukchi. The MMS itself estimated in the environmental impact statement authorizing the lease sale there was a 40 percent chance of a spill of at least 1,000 barrels or more over the life of any single oil development project in the Chukchi. “If oil spills under ice in the middle of January there is absolutely nothing they can do about it,” said Rick Steiner, an oil spill expert at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “There’s a large stretch of time when they would be producing oil and have no way of cleaning up a spill.” A legal challenge to the validity of the MMS’s environmental impact statement is under way, and a similar suit temporarily halted Shell’s plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea last summer. Drilling opponents are pessimistic about their chances of putting a stop to the rush into the Arctic. “Maybe there can be something worked out, but at this time it really doesn’t look that way,” sa
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POPSThe next time you fork it over at the pump remember the $40.6 billion Exxon got It’s a simple fact of life. Oil companies need huge profits to counter the insane wishes of the citizenry like alternative energy, universal health care, demcoracy and human rights. The current system in which the government taxes the middle class (and a token tax from the wealthy) to give back to the rich via no-bid military contracts and Homeland Security is under attack by grass root movements and radical authors. Democracy is a terrible thing for corporate profits and that’s why corporate America supports the most ruthless dictatorships in the world. Show your support for a corporate world by buying a gas guzzling SUV or still better… a motor yacht! Buy, buy, buy anything you can before our resources run out and finally be a good corporate citizen
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