From The Raw Story
By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took on Senator John McCain’s insistence that offshore drilling is the answer to our energy problems.

“We need to drill here! We need to drill now!” McCain recently demanded.

“The administration’s own Department of Energy says the effects of drilling now wouldn’t even be felt until 2030,” Stewart objected. “Unless we could somehow whittle that figure down?”

“Oil company executives say that it could be as short a time as one to two years,” McCain has stated. On another occasion, he suggested it could be just “a matter of months.”

“Drilling offshore has already saved us!” Stewart exclaimed. “Cyborgs from the future have been sent here to drill offshore to prevent Osama bin Laden from killing John Connor!”

Stewart acknowledged that even Barack Obama, who was insisting in June that “my job is not to go with the polls,” has now announced that his own plan “does include a limited amount of new offshore drilling.”

“Damn!” said Stewart, but he added, “To be fair, Obama released an energy plan that included a comprehensive list … touching on everything from investing in alternative energy to turning off your lights to making sure your tires are inflated.”

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From The BBC News

A serious oil supply crisis is looming, which could push prices above $200 a barrel, a think tank has warned.

A “supply crunch” will affect the world market within the next five to 10 years, the Chatham House report said.

While there is plenty of oil in the ground, companies and governments were failing to invest enough to ensure production, it added.

Only a collapse in demand can stave off the looming crisis, report author Professor Paul Stevens said.

“In reality, the only possibility of avoiding such a crunch appears to be if a major recession reduces demand - and even then such an outcome may only postpone the problem,” he said in The Coming Oil Supply Crunch.

Lack of funding

Prof Stevens warned that investment in new oil supplies has been inadequate as oil firms prefer to return profits to shareholders rather than reinvest it.

Furthermore, oil producing cartel Opec has failed to meet plans to expand its capacity since 2005.

Read more Oil

From The Consortium News
By Jason Leopold

John McCain, who once was regarded as a top Republican ally of the environmental movement, has embraced an energy plan nearly identical to Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy, which was drafted largely by industry executives and which pushed their desire for more oil drilling and nuclear power.

Now echoing those views, McCain declares repeatedly, “We need to drill here and we need to drill now.” Beyond opening up large tracts of protected coastal waters for oil exploration, McCain has called for a massive expansion of nuclear power.

“If I am elected president, I will set this nation on a course to building 45 new reactors by the year 2030, with the ultimate goal of 100 new plants to power the homes and factories and cities of America,” McCain said during a campaign stop at a nuclear power plant in Michigan on Tuesday.

McCain’s current positions on offshore drilling and nuclear power dovetail with the policies of the Bush administration and mark a sharp break between major environmental groups and McCain, who previously used his environmental credentials as proof of his maverick ways.

As McCain abandoned his opposition to offshore drilling in June, Sierra Club political director Cathy Duvall said McCain “is using the environment as a way to portray himself as being different from George Bush. But the reality is that he isn’t.”

The Sierra Club, which is considered the oldest and largest environmental organization, has even begun running ads criticizing McCain and favoring Barack Obama.

Read more Energy Plan

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he will produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane, the gas emanating from manure, that he might even qualify for a renewable energy tax incentive.

The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious “gas tax holiday” and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure—a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.

Not surprisingly, this new McCain is not quite as accessible to the press as the earlier version, partly because he resents the media attention devoted to his Democratic opponent and partly because he no longer is so eager to answer every question a reporter might pose. He prefers to listen to the cheers of eager boobs who believe him when he says, “We’re not going to pay $4 dollars a gallon for gas because we are going to drill here and we are going to drill now!”

But should he ever stop yelling and start thinking again, there will be plenty of questions awaiting him, including these:

Senator, if you truly think we should be doing “all of the above” to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, why have you voted against every recent Congressional measure to encourage renewable energy sources?

If you still worry about the effects of climate change, then why do you now emphasize drilling for additional oil offshore rather than energy sources that don’t create greenhouse gases? And why do you continue to talk about so-called “clean coal,” which doesn’t actually exist ?

Read more Drilling Plan

From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

I have a 2001 Honda Civic CX. Just like most Americans, I have for years been racing that car around ignoring speed limits, accelerating out of intersections, racing ahead at light changes as if I were coming out of starting blocks, ignoring things like checking my tire pressure, and so on.

Two weeks ago, though, I read about eco-driving, and thought I’d give it a try. I filled up the tank, took a lot of crap out of the trunk that I’d been lugging around for no good reason, set the air pressure at the manufacturer’s specs, changed the air filter (it was pretty clogged), changed the oil to fully synthetic, and started driving conservatively. I stuck to the posted speed limits on local and highway, used my cruise control wherever possible to avoid needless accelerations, kept a good distance behind other vehicles to avoid unnecessary braking, avoided fast accelerations, turned off the engine altogether when stopped at a light or in traffic jams, and gave myself plenty of time to get to appointments.

The result: My mileage leapt from 27 mpg to 38.5 mpg! For the math challenged, that’s a 42% improvement in gas mileage!

I know from earlier experience when I owned a Chevy Nova, and I let the muffler go too long, that I could do even better if I poked a little hole in the muffler. Reduce the back pressure on the engine, and while it might run a little noisier and have a little less kick on a hill, you’ll boost your mileage another 5-10% on a small-engined vehicle.

Read more Right On

From The Pgh Post Gazette
Editorial

The change in position by Sen. Barack Obama, the putative Democratic nominee, on tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and allowing offshore drilling is one more episode in a sad political dance around the gas pump.

The precipitous rise in the price of oil over the past year is a key factor in Americans’ economic misery. It has not only caused them to curtail their activities but also been responsible for the rise in food prices and the terror with which some are contemplating their winter heating bills.

The obscene profits earned by the oil companies, epitomized by ExxonMobil’s $11.68 billion second-quarter haul (the highest ever for an American company), coupled with government’s unwillingness to tax them appropriately indicates the unholy relationship between the oil companies, Congress and a White House headed by oilmen President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Given the centrality of the fuel price issue for Americans, both Sen. Obama and the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, feel compelled to address the problem.

Mr. McCain takes the oil company line, speaking to their fondest remaining wish, drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Obama was opposed to both, but now may be weaseling a bit in his position on offshore drilling. Last week he said he could support some offshore drilling if it were part of a compromise energy package.

Read more Oil and Politics

From Mother Jones
By Laura Rozen

One muggy evening this summer, Qubad Talabani, the 31-year-old son of the president of Iraq, was chatting over drinks at a Dupont Circle bar when his BlackBerry rang. “It’s Ray Hunt,” Talabani said, looking at the caller ID on his phone. The Washington representative of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government apologized for the interruption, and turned away to take the call.

His caller is a man who has no trouble getting his phone calls answered at any hour, anywhere in the world. A Bush/Cheney fundraising Pioneer, a member of Bush’s President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the president of the Dallas-based Hunt Oil company, Ray Hunt is the kind of Texas oilman with easy insider access to the Bush White House. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also heads the first American oil firm to have received an oil exploration contract with the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, announced last September. As such, he has come to epitomize one of the more glaring contradictions about the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq and its oil wealth. Namely: If the Bush administration, as it proclaims, supports passage of an Iraqi oil law that would share the country’s wealth across ethnic and regional divides, why do Bush-linked companies keep getting Kurdish-area oil concessions that bypass the Iraqi national government?

Hunt Oil isn’t the only one. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that another Bush administration insider, Richard Perle, had approached Talabani seeking an Iraqi Kurdish oil concession on behalf of a consortium involving Turkish oil companies and the Kazakh government. “The K18 concession, which is estimated to hold 150 million or more barrels of oil, would potentially be operated by Houston-based Endeavour International,” reported the Journal. The Hunt Oil and Perle-Turkish-Kazakh ventures are among more than twenty oil contracts signed (with dozens more under consideration) by the Kurdish Regional Government, in a process conducted largely in the dark. As troubling, several of the proposed Kurdish oil deals would financially benefit key Washington figures with close ties to the Bush administration.

Read more Kurdish Oil

From Think Progress
By Ali

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has made his complete reversal on offshore drilling a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, insisting that expanding offshore drilling into protected areas would lead to more oil supply on the market “within a matter of months” — regardless of the Energy Information Agency’s projection that oil would not reach the market for nearly a decade and “would not have a significant impact” on oil prices.

Though more drilling won’t help Americans save money at the gas pump, it has certainly helped McCain win massive campaign donations from Big Oil. A new report by Campaign Money Watch shows that contributions to McCain from Big Oil skyrocketed directly following his June speech in Houston, when he pledged his support of offshore drilling before an audience oil executives. The report notes:

In Texas alone, June oil and gas-connected donations to McCain’s Victory ’08 Fund, his hybrid fundraising venture with the RNC and state committees, reached $1,214,100.

Of that total, $881,450, or 73 percent, came after June 15. McCain announced his position in favor of offshore drilling on June 16.

The report notes that these enormous contributions represent a seven-fold increase in donations, compared to McCain’s 2000 campaign:

Read more Big Oil Donations

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Forced to cancel a planned visit to an oil platform off the Mississippi coast last week because of inclement weather—and the untimely leaking of hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil by a shipwreck in the vicinity—John McCain finally got his photo op at a Bakersfield derrick on July 28. Speaking on site, the Arizona senator delivered extraordinarily good news to the beleaguered gasoline-consuming public as he explained why we must drill offshore.

Based on briefings that Senator McCain says he received from “the oil producers,” he said, “There are some instances [that] within a matter of months they could be getting additional oil. In some cases, it would be a matter of a year. In some cases it could take longer than that, depending on the location and whether you use existing rigs or you have to install new rigs, but there’s abundant resources in the view of the people who are in the business that could be exploited within a period of months.”

The prospect of significant new petroleum resources that could be available so soon would be excellent news—aside from the obvious impact of burning still more oil—if only what the senator said was true. But what he said actually made no sense whatsoever, as a statement about the future development of domestic oil, the alleged need to increase drilling off our coasts or the resources that such drilling might produce. So let’s unpack that McCain statement (which was overshadowed by the news that his dermatologist had just removed a small lesion from the 71-year-old melanoma survivor’s right cheek).

It may be true that “existing rigs” could produce additional barrels of domestic oil immediately, whether on land or in the ocean, as Senator McCain suggests. If so, he might want to ask his friends in the oil business why those rigs aren’t producing more oil now, at prices above $140 a barrel. An existing rig by definition is a rig that is operating legally on property already leased for exploration—and can produce oil unencumbered by any environmental constraints on drilling. In case the senator doesn’t understand, an existing rig is where someone has already drilled a well.

Read more Oil Hoax

From Tom Paine
By Robert Scher

Who is really going to benefit from opening up our coastal shores to oil drilling? You, or Big Oil?

Follow the money and get your answer.

Last month, Sen. John McCain changed his position on coastal oil drilling. And all of a sudden, the fossil fuel crowd took a big liking to his campaign. The Washington Post reports that even though “oil and gas executives have not traditionally been a major source of campaign money for McCain,” in June McCain took $1.1 million from oil and gas corporate executives — five times more than in the previous month.

Why? Because while coastal drilling amounts to nothing in regards to lower energy costs for you and me, it does amount to a fat giveaway to Big Oil.

You may say, so what? Who cares if oil companies do well, so long as they increase the supply of oil and lower prices for me.

Except that there’s not nearly enough oil off our shores to lower the price of oil (both the White House and McCain concede, when pressed, that opening up the coasts for drilling won’t lower prices.)

And there’s no reason to expect that oil and gas companies would be in any rush to use the leases and actually drill.

Read more Coastal Drilling