Oil drilling ship in the Gulf of Mexico, January 28, 2008. ---KM&G-Morris, Flickr
by Ann Garrison
In "To drill or not to drill, for oil and gas, on the Outer Continental Shelf?", I reported on the last of four Interior Department hearings on the Bush plan to extend oil and gas drilling leases into all 1.7 billion ocean acres of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.
The oil and gas interests still lobbying for Bush's Draft Proposed Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program, 2010-2015 argue that oil and gas corporations need to drill wherever there's domestic oil, to free us from dependence on foreign oil controlled by hostile foreign regimes.
I myself harbor absolutely no fear of dependence on foreign oil, or of hostile foreign regimes, and never even give a thought to either, except in response to the Warriors on Terror, or the oil and gas lobby, both of whom I do fear, almost as much as I fear financial terrorist Government Sachs.
Big oil has, quite recently, made it clear that they have no plans to curb oil exploration, drilling, and production, or, of increasing their barely perceptible investment in clean, renewable energy, despite the pleas of environmentalists, or endangered peoples.
Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said, in April 2009, that he expects global energy supply to remain 80% hydro-carbon based forty years from now, in 2050, as it is now.
More domestic drilling, whether in the Outer Continental Shelf, or the Interior, will only feed the dirty energy infrastructure sustained by perpetual war, in the Middle East and in Africa.
Americans pay the highest gas taxes in the world: federal taxes, more than half of which go to the largest and most lethal military in history, to fight the War on Terror.
Oil and gas interests now largely motivate U.S. escalation of covert wars and millitary operations in Africa, which, as of December 2007, surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.
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