Huge Oil Tax breaks in the Pipeline, (where's Bubba now?)

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Dardedar
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Huge Oil Tax breaks in the Pipeline, (where's Bubba now?)

Post by Dardedar »

DAR
Bubba was a lunatic on NWA that said Big Oil didn't get subsidies, and then he said they didn't get big ones. And then he ran....

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Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
By Edmund L. Andrews
The New York Times

Monday 27 March 2006

Washington - It was after midnight and every lawmaker in the committee room wanted to go home, but there was still time to sweeten a deal encouraging oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"There is no cost," declared Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was presiding over Congressional negotiations on the sprawling energy bill last July. An obscure provision on new drilling incentives was "so noncontroversial," he added, that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it.

Mr. Barton's claim had a long history. For more than a decade, lawmakers and administration officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have promised there would be no cost to taxpayers for a program allowing companies to avoid paying the government royalties on oil and gas produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf.

But last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. And that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful.

"The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. "Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil - it's like subsidizing a fish to swim."

How did a supposedly cost-free incentive become a multibillion-dollar break to an industry making record profits?

The answer is a familiar Washington story of special-interest politics at work: the people who pay the closest attention and make the fewest mistakes are those with the most profit at stake.

It is an account of legislators who passed a law riddled with ambiguities; of crucial errors by midlevel bureaucrats under President Bill Clinton; of $2 billion in inducements from the Bush administration, which was intent on promoting energy production; and of Republican lawmakers who wanted to do even more. At each turn, through shrewd lobbying and litigation, oil and gas companies ended up with bigger incentives than before.

...snip

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032706G.shtml
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Post by Barbara Fitzpatrick »

As long as short-term profits trump long-term consequences... We should have started phasing petroleum out 30-odd years ago, when it was obvious that oil had "peaked" - and we STILL haven't started (seriously) moving to alternates, even though we are getting closer and closer to the anarchy and chaos that will come if we run out of oil before we've replaced it as a fuel/power source. If parents behaved the way our political leaders do, the human race would be gone in one generation. Babies are expensive and don't even begin producing income for a minimum of 15 years in first world countries (& not as much as they cost, even then), at least 5 years in 3rd world countries - the current corporate solution would be to kill them, reducing the outgo (and increasing stock values on Wall Street).

Bubba hasn't been on NWA for a long time - before Christmas, I think. I always thought he was logging in from Iraq, myself - he seemed to me to be desparately justifying being over there. I hope something hasn't happened to him.
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Post by Dardedar »

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Post by Barbara Fitzpatrick »

It's scary how fast "civilization" ran through petroleum. My grandfather, as a young man, sold lumber to wildcatters in OK and TX to build derricks and housing, back when exploration was still a "seat of the pants" industry. Oil peaked about the time my older son was born. We didn't start seriously (or at least as serious enough to notice there's a problem) thinking about alternatives until my oldest grandson was born. Millions of years to make, hundreds of years to use up. Insanity.
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Post by Hogeye »

No surprise here. When rulers own the airwaves, they abuse it; when rulers own the Gulf ocean floor, they abuse it. So you either take the libertarian solution - don't let the State own anything - or the naive statophile solution - try to get your "good" tyrants in power, who will solve all problems and stay in power forever and ever amen.

I don't really worry about "peak oil," since it is a self-solving issue. When petroleum gets too expensive, people will switch to something else. Perhaps ethanol, but who can predict the future market? People who worry about peak oil are like someone in 1850 worrying about peak whale oil: rather ridiculous IMO. That said, the transition would be quicker and easier if States did not subsidize oil by massive military expenditures.
"May the the last king be strangled in the guts of the last priest." - Diderot
With every drop of my blood I hate and execrate every form of tyranny, every form of slavery. I hate dictation. I love liberty. - Ingersoll
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