Good Green Technology Depends on a Healthy Oil Industry
I was watching the television on Saturday night and would you believe there was a commercial about alternative energy? I was amazed. Alternative energy education right at home in my living room! As I sat there on the couch staring at what I believed was most likely the next neo-liberal campaign for conservatism, and not a truly educational 30-second bit, I was surprised by the ending comment and commercial sponsor: Chevron.
So I decided to dig a little deeper into the idea of major oil companies investing in alternative energy. Actions certainly speak louder than words. Yet what I found to be the reality is that in this eco-revolution, the push for renewable and sustainable energy is mostly financed by the oil industry. www.alternative-energy-news.info
Let’s take a look at oil companies and their profit.
Throughout the oil and natural gas industries only about 1.5% of the stock is owned by company executives. This is what Shapiro says about the ownership of the other 98.5% of oil company shares: “The data show that ownership of industry shares is broadly middle class, with the majority of industry shares held by institutional investors, often on behalf of millions of Americans through mutual funds, pension funds and individual retirement accounts.”
Almost 43 percent of oil and natural gas company shares are owned by mutual funds and asset management companies that have mutual funds. Mutual funds manage accounts for 55 million U.S. households with a median income of $68,700.
Twenty seven percent of shares are owned by other institutional investors like pension funds. In 2004, more than 2,600 pension funds run by federal, state and local governments held almost $64 billion in shares of U.S. oil and natural gas companies. These funds represent the major retirement security for the nation’s current and retired soldiers, teachers, police and fire personnel at every level of government.
Fourteen percent of shares are held in IRA and other personal retirement accounts. Forty five million U.S. households have IRA and other personal retirement accounts, with an average account value of just over $22,000. The people that make the profits listed in this study are people just like you! Kevin Colby kevincolby.com
The prospects of renewable-energy companies soared with oil prices, but the global credit crunch and the easing of energy costs have brought them back to earth with a thud.
With banks reluctant to lend and their stock prices tumbling, many green-energy concerns are struggling to find the long-term funding they need to expand in a capital-intensive industry.
The sector’s problems have been compounded by the skid in oil prices to below $70 a barrel from more than $147 in July 2008. The sudden reversal in crude prices has removed — at least temporarily — a key rationale for investors to pump billions of dollars into alternative fuels, industry analysts say.
The result: At least in the short term, a slew of projects from palm-oil-based biodiesel plants in Indonesia and Malaysia to wind farms and solar projects across the U.S. and Europe may not be able to get funding. Tom Wright wright@wjs.com
On September 16, the House passed the Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act, H.R. 6899. Nancy Pelosi says “The legislation is a bold step forward, helping end our dependence on foreign oil and increase our national security. It launches a clean renewable energy future that creates new American jobs, expands domestic energy supply–including new offshore drilling, and invents and builds more efficient vehicles, buildings, homes, and infrastructure. It will lower costs to consumers and protect the interests of taxpayers. It is a comprehensive strategy, and the product of bipartisan compromise. It offers Republicans who want a comprehensive approach the choice to make sure Big Oil pays its fair share”.
The problem with anything Nancy Pelosi says is that she is a ha’bitch’ual liar; even the CIA will back me up on that one. Nany Pelosi’s economic policy has destroyed California, is now destroying the country, and she insists corporate America and the working tax payers foot the bill.
Let me back up that statement: 40% of all workers in California are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal , whose births were paid for by taxpayers. Over 33 percent of illegal aliens in California are living in garages. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal. Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking crops, but 29% are on welfare.. Over 70% of the United States annual population growth (and over 90% of California , Florida , and New York’s) results from immigration. 29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens. To top all that off, more then fifty percent of the population of California is employed by the government.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi also stated that she “will not allow a vote on the floor of the United States House of Representatives to address energy reform and offshore drilling” while we are in the midst of rising fuel costs and a 70% dependence on foreign oil, but in another speech at St. Anthony’s Church in San Francisco she said told an audience of illegal and legal immigrants that they were “very, very, patriotic”. She also said enforcement of the immigration laws by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents was “Un-American.”
Nancy Pelosi has demonstrated a complete unwillingness to act as the people’s agent. Instead, she has stubbornly opted to stand on ideology and partisan politics instead of heeding the will of the American people.
Congress, devoid a stated agenda and seemingly incapable of bipartisanship for the peoples’ benefit, continue their short sighted campaigns which impair economic prosperity, homeland security, promote socialist entitlement, attack the sanctity of marriage, pledge amnesty for illegal aliens and inject political correctness as a justifiable means to counter common sense and logical thought.
Allow me to continue, I think Al Gore must come from the same Washington mold. “The most vulnerable part of the Earth’s environment is the very thin layer of air clinging near to the surface of the planet, that we are now so carelessly filling with gaseous wastes that we are actually altering the relationship between the Earth and the Sun – by trapping more solar radiation under this growing blanket of pollution that envelops the entire world,” said Al Gore In what was one of his most dramatic speeches in memory at the U.N. Global Warming conference of 159 nations in Kyoto, Japan. Applause filled the halls of the Kyoto International Conference Center as Al Gore says “We must achieve a safe overall concentration level for greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
The DRUDGE REPORT calculated that Al Gore burned more than 439,500 pounds of Jet A fuel, or 65,600 gallons, at a cost of more than $131,000 on his 16,000 mile day trip, just to deliver the warning/warming.
In 2007 the U.S. Population was 306,000,000 with a daily fuel consumption of 20,680.000 gallons of fuel. During the 72 hours of Al Gore’s trip he burned 65,600 gallons; 1475 times more then the average person burned during the same 72 hour period; Al Gore himself burned enough energy in those three days to power a town the size of Montz, Louisiana. This kind of hypocrisy is a daily staple to Al Gore.
Al Gore defends his extraordinary personal energy use by telling critics he maintains a “carbon neutral” lifestyle by purchasing “carbon offsets,” but the company that receives his payments turns out to be partly owned and chaired by the former vice president himself.
Gore has built a “green money-making machine capable of eventually generating billions of dollars for investors, including himself, but he set it up so that the average Joe can’t afford to play on Gore’s terms,” writes blogger Dan Riehl.
Gore has described the lifestyle he and his wife Tipper live as “carbon neutral,” meaning he tries to offset any energy usage, including plane flights and car trips, by “purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere.” But it turns out he pays for his extra-large carbon footprint through Generation Investment Management, a London-based company with offices in Washington, D.C., for which he serves as chairman. The company was established to take financial advantage of new technologies and solutions related to combating “global warming,” reports blogger Bill Hobbs.
I could continue my attack on Washington politicians and their incompetence until every one of them was named, but that would leave me with nothing to talk about tomorrow, so I will end with a piece on Ted Kennedy. The great architect of health care reform. Wait a minute, is this the same Ted Kennedy who was driving back to Edgartown, the main town on Martha’s Vineyard, from a party on Chappaquiddick when his car careered off a narrow bridge and into a creek killing Mary Kopechne, the former secretary to Senator Kennedy’s late brother Robert.
Not the same Ted Kennedy that failed to report the incident to Martha’s Vineyard police until the next morning, some eight hours after the accident, saying he was in a state of shock when he emerged from the creek and confused by “a jumble of emotions” and that he had not been drinking. This guy is competent?
There are many reasons for the current financial meltdown. As usual, the left is blaming free markets and calling for more regulation and/or nationalization. But the situation was not caused by free markets. To the contrary, the situation was caused by government. If a physician misdiagnoses the problem he is bound to provide the wrong prescription and make the patient worse, not better.
Kind of like Barney Franks misdiagnoses of our financial market. Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefited from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank’s gay lover, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.
Since Fannie Mae arrived at the epicenter of the financial meltdown that destroyed the U.S. economy, Barney Frank has been avoiding questions about his sexual relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s gay lover and assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which held jurisdiction over Fannie Mae. Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they were taking anal pains to avoid getting caught in a conflict of interest. The humorous critic would most likely agree.
The world will never see a true green technology if left to Washington and politicians who serve better to destroy then to unite, the effort must be investor and consumer driven. The oil industry is responsible for 53 percent if green research and development only because they make a profit and in turn invest a great deal of that profit back into such programs with a high degree of certainty that they will generate more profit for more programs. The Government does not, never has, and will never make a profit in any industry, let alone the energy sector!
A study of the industry’s upstream investments–the part of the industry that deals with finding oil and gas and extracting it from the ground–found $195 billion was invested in 2004, up $30 billion from 2003, but reserves remained flat. “More than anything else, what it’s telling us, is that oil and gas companies are generating enormous revenues and cash flow, they are investing in increasing amounts of green technology and exploration, but are having an extremely difficult time finding supply,” said Tom Biracree, senior financial editor at John S. Herold.
Over the past 25 years, oil companies directly paid or remitted more than $2.2 trillion in taxes, after adjusting for inflation, to federal and state governments—including excise taxes, royalty payments and state and federal corporate income taxes. That amounts to more than three times what they earned in profits during the same period, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Department of Energy. Scott A. Hodge Jonathan Williams
With Chevron, BP, Exxon-Mobil, and Shell reporting record profits, the Tax Foundation reminds us in its latest Fiscal Fact that the biggest beneficiaries of gasoline sales are federal and state governments, not the oil industry: Paul L. Caron
Remember, it is people like Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Barnie Frank, and Ted Kennedy who are spending that $2.2 trillion.
I am left wondering how effective a government managed green program would be. How would these programs effect my pocket book and the overall economy. I guess I will look to our welfare system, the conduct of our elected officials, and California for the answer.
According to the Treasury Department’s 2002 Financial Report of the U.S. Government, the total expenditure for social welfare in 2002 was slightly over 4 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of $10.48 trillion, the monetary total of the domestic goods and services produced by the United States.
Political Bunker
Daily Political News
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
