Bush Eases Environmental Rules on Gasoline

[KNOWTHIS]

Using the "gas crisis" as a front to decrease standards and experts say it won't help the prices much anyway.

www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-5781224,00.html

Under election-year pressure to reduce surging gasoline prices, President Bush on Tuesday halted filling of the nation's emergency oil reserve, urged the waiver of clean air rules to ease local gas shortages and called for the repeal of $2 billion in tax breaks for profit-heavy oil companies.

Still, experts said Bush's actions wouldn't have much impact on prices at the pump. The president warned that motorists would have to dig deep into their pockets all summer long.

Bush urged lawmakers to expand tax breaks for the purchase of fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles, a politically popular measure that's also supported by environmentalists. He also directed the Environmental Protection Agency to use its authority to temporarily waive air quality laws in states if that would relieve a local gasoline supply shortage.

[Swamp Gas]

Of course, it is the evil hippies and environmentalists, not the USA threatening and attacking Oil-Producing nations, and Oil company greed, that are the cause of high gas prices.




guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2006/04/rep-blackburn-environmental-extremism.html

BLACKBURN: HIGH GAS PRICES THE PENALTY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISM

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- "Americans can thank environmental extremists and their allies in Congress for high gas prices," Representative Marsha Blackburn (TN-7th District) said today.

"People want to know why gas prices have gone up," Blackburn said. "The answer isn't so complicated. Worldwide demand for oil has increased, hurricanes have knocked out some of our refining capacity, and thirty years of environmental extremism has brought domestic oil exploration to a virtual halt."

"Prices wouldn't be so volatile had we been exploring for oil on American soil and expanding our refining capacity as our population grew. But there are those in Congress who've fought tooth and nail to prevent any and all domestic oil exploration for thirty years. Today we're paying at the pump for their extremism."

"If we want to see gas prices stabilize then we're going to have to open up areas like ANWR to oil exploration and actually encourage refinery construction. As a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, I know there are those across the aisle who've always placed the interests of environmental groups above American drivers and that's not likely to change soon."

"I intend to put pressure on those in Congress who've created this mess and hope my colleagues will join me."

[KNOWTHIS]

Of course, it is the evil hippies and environmentalists, not the USA threatening and attacking Oil-Producing nations, and Oil company greed, that are the cause of high gas prices.

It has nothing to do with a profiteering war in Iraq explicitly designed to ‘reduce’ the production of oil just to hike the prices for OPEC. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the explosions of those pipelines were inside jobs as well. It also has nothing to do with internal memos from corporations like Texaco revealed by whistleblowers that prove that they want to shut down refineries on purpose for the same reason.

They just want to ease standards to increase profits and push for drilling in Anwar which would likely only provide us with a lousy six months worth of oil anyway. I thought we were supposed to be weaning ourselves off of the resource? How does more domestic drilling do that? I also just love it when they complain about the high costs of research and production when they get billions of dollars in tax breaks & subsidies. They receive more corporate welfare than any middle class or poor American could ever dream of getting. When right-wingers bitch about socialism and the re-distribution of wealth they should be focusing on that and not struggling citizens on food stamps. Of course it was the food stamps that Congress just had to cut.

It's so damn sickening!!!!


People who need it the most get shafted while the people that have more cash than they could ever spend get obscene amounts. Have you seen what these guys earn, the size of their bonuses and what they retire on? It’s all done by taking advantage of hard working Americans at the pump.

And they always seem opposed to subsidies for developing and producing alternative fuels.

[KNOWTHIS]

Does it sound like they're in any big hurry to extract this oil? Of course we're told it's because of the "insurgent attacks".

Rebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happen

When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway.


A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt.

The project, called the Fatah pipeline crossing, had been a critical element of a $2.4 billion no-bid reconstruction contract that a Halliburton subsidiary had won from the Army in 2003. The spot where about 15 pipelines crossed the Tigris had been the main link between Iraq's rich northern oil fields and the export terminals and refineries that could generate much-needed gasoline, heating fuel and revenue for Iraqis.

For all those reasons, the project's demise would seriously damage the American-led effort to restore Iraq's oil system and enable the country to pay for its own reconstruction. Exactly what portion of Iraq's lost oil revenue can be attributed to one failed project, no matter how critical, is impossible to calculate. But the pipeline at Al Fatah has a wider significance as a metaphor for the entire $45 billion rebuilding effort in Iraq. Although the failures of that effort are routinely attributed to insurgent attacks, an examination of this project shows that troubled decision-making and execution have played equally important roles.