oil

According to a new report commissioned by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, maintaining all the current U.S. restrictions on oil and gas drilling through 2030 would cost the country $2.36 trillion in gross domestic product over the next 20 years.

This represents more than half a percent decrease in the economy every year for two decades, and drilling supporters are seizing on the numbers. However, some economists say the report ignores too many factors to be taken seriously.

If the U.S. government changes nothing about its approach toward energy and global warming, the nation's energy consumption will grow 14 percent by 2035. Fossil fuels will retain a relatively high share of that total, and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy will increase by 8.7 percent.

Those are the latest long-term projections described by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency on Monday.

The findings highlight a need for federal regulations if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced as Congress is considering and members of the international community are demanding in Copenhagen this week. The findings also suggest that state efforts to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use will begin to pay off.

My grandchildren began to influence me when I realized that policy makers were ignoring the message from the climate science, or rather that politicians were developing the fine art of greenwash — they would say favorable words about the environment and stabilizing climate, but their actions were inconsistent with that goal.

Politicians would be happy if scientists just tell them there is a climate problem and then go away and shut up. Let them decide what they want to do.

But I decided that I did not want my grandchildren, some day in the future, to look back and say, “Opa understood what was happening, but he did not make it clear.”

What is clear is that we cannot burn all the fossil fuels. There is a limit on how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere.

Non-profit groups from 18 developing countries called on Saudi Arabia to "stop playing an obstructionist role" in the current climate change negotiations in Barcelona, claiming the oil kingdom's delaying tactics will hurt the world's poor.

"Developing countries need all the support they can get," said Wael Hmaidan of IndyACT Lebanon and founder of the Arab Climate Alliance in a statement issued Wednesday. "It is unfortunate to have a country among their ranks that is weakening their positions."

Saudi Arabia considers a climate change deal in Copenhagen "a threat to its oil trade," the groups said. They claim that to disrupt negotiations, the delegation has tried to remove language that would support vulnerable countries, among other tactics.

"Saudi Arabia's preferred outcome is no outcome," Hmaidan told SolveClimate in Barcelona.

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While Louisiana struggles to restore coastal wetlands ravaged in large part by decades of oil and gas drilling, its senior senator is leading the effort to lift the ban on drilling off Florida's Panhandle.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is a co-sponsor on legislation by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to open up new areas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. Introduced last month, Senate Bill 1517 would allow drilling in federal waters 45 miles off the Panhandle's coast. Current law bans drilling within 125 miles of Panhandle beaches and 235 miles of Gulf Coast beaches south of Tampa.

Opposing the Murkowski-Landrieu plan is U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a longtime foe of offshore drilling. He joins other Florida leaders worried about drilling's impact on the state's lucrative tourism industry, which in 2008 alone generated more than $65 billion for Florida's economy and $3.9 billion for the state in tax revenue.

"This isn't even thinly veiled," Nelson said. "It's an oil industry bailout plan. And it's Alaska and Louisiana's senators plan to boost their own revenues in tough economic times. But even in the toughest of times, there are some things states shouldn't sell out, like Florida's economy and environment."

Why is Landrieu pushing the plan?

She says it's out of concern for rising oil prices, though the U.S. Energy Information Administration says drilling in areas that are currently restricted would result in negligible savings to consumers.

Meanwhile, Landrieu and Murkowski are among the top congressional recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

The first thing I noticed was that although we were just 20 miles south of where I started, the temperature was a good 15 degrees hotter.

The smells of tar and sulfur permeated the air. After a while, my eyes started to burn and itch.

I wasn’t in Nigeria or Iraq or Venezuela. My guide, Jesus Torres, otherwise known as JT, had taken me to Wilmington, Calif., in Los Angeles County, just 20 miles south of the L.A. beach town where I live.

Wilmington is home to 53,000 people – 45,000 of them Latino, 24 percent below the national poverty level – living in the midst of oil wells, oil refineries and the Port of Los Angeles. It was one of the stops on the Toxic Tour of Los Angeles that the organization, Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) leads. The group advocates around issues of environmental justice showcasing how our dependence on fossil fuels has impacted low income neighborhoods across the country.

Of the more than 2 million barrels of oil refined in California each day, 650,000 of them come from five refineries in the Wilmington area run by BP, ConocoPhillips, Tesoro and Valero.

America’s increasing reliance on Alberta’s tar sands directly challenges President Obama’s vow to break the U.S. addiction to “dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive” oil.

For this reason, the world’s largest energy project will likely dominate political discussions between Canada and the United States for a long time.

Seven years ago, Canada quietly surpassed Saudi Arabia as the United States’ major supplier of oil by rapidly exploiting shallow deposits of a tarry bitumen that industry calls “difficult oil.” This badly degraded, unconventional resource has little market value unless extensively upgraded and refined. It won’t even move through a pipeline without being diluted by light oil.

A switch from bloody light oil to dirty heavy oil has many defenders. For starters, Canada’s tar sands, the world’s second-largest petroleum reserve, are a vast and secure resource. No money spent on Canadian bitumen would be redirected to fundamentalist sects or Middle East insurgencies.

But replacing Saudia Arabia’s tainted light oil with bitumen is no direct pipeline to energy security. It’s more like switching your family’s mortgage from Countrywide Financial to Bear Stearns.

The million-barrel-a-day project, which produces the world’s most expensive oil, is creating monstrous environmental problems.

University of Utah student, Tim DeChristopher arrived at the BLM building in Salt Lake City last Friday intending to join some 200 other people protesting the Bush administration’s decision to auction oil and gas rights on federal lands near some of our most iconic national parks. Then he had one of those profound insights that change people’s lives forever.

As Tim put it in his online statement:

Which presidential candidate is best equipped to give America an effective and moral foreign policy and to ensure our economic security?

The truth is, oil, not presidents, control our foreign policy. That has been the case for a very long time. For all the good it has done, oil has perverted our relationship with other nations, tempted us into behaviors not worthy of our ideals, and cost us enormous loss of life and treasure.

We have come to a point in the election season where the courage of the candidates and the intelligence of the voters are being severely tested. So far, the candidates are flunking. The public’s grade is pending.

The test is about oil and national security.