Last night I attended the FERC hearing and many citizens pro and against LNG made it but FERC did not. Comments continued anyway with speakers allotted five minutes apiece. One of the pro-LNG commentators was Harry Abel who actually spoke the words ‘trickle down’ with a straight face. I kid you not, he even inferred that a ‘trickle’ from the Jordan Cove LNG terminal might increase church membership…

Really, it is a testament to marketing that people will actually vote against their own interests and believe, in the face of decades of empirical evidence to the contrary, that supporting these investor owned projects will trickle profits down to the little people. Why not let the people share in the downstream profits generated by the kilowatts produced? More importantly, why don’t people demand to participate in the revenue when tax subsidy in the form of tax credits provide the meat behind any investment in centralized power production?

Instead, we buy, hook, line and sinker, every time, the notion that backing these projects will benefit the community beyond the construction period. We might as well just stand with our tongues out waiting for the ‘trickle’ to land and hope its enough to prevent dehydration. Oh, yeah, and lets not forget to be really, really, grateful for the crumbs thrown to our little community.

Trickle down, honestly I almost threw up… the best trickle down your going to get is in the ground water!

Naturally, I spoke about decentralized energy, a tried and true concept employed widely and successfully in Europe and entirely left out of the Draft EIS report.

Please watch this if you are in doubt about oil and offshore drilling and American’s funding a free lunch for oil companies

President lifts offshore drilling ban
A few weeks ago, President George W. Bush lifted his father’s 1990 executive order banning offshore drilling for oil along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts. He then demanded that Congress end its own 1981 federal prohibition against energy exploration offshore and on other federal lands as well. The president’s stated reasons for opening up these protected areas to oil companies are to help bring gas prices down, and to help make the U.S. independent of foreign oil.
It was easy to debunk both reasons the president gave, and expose them as lies intended to manipulate public opinion. By now, everyone has heard that it would take at least ten years to bring new leases into production, and twenty years for them to reach peak production, so new platforms won’t make any contribution toward solving our current economic problems.
Furthermore, the amount of oil produced from the continental shelves would be such a small fraction of total U.S. consumption that it would not make a real difference in the supply, and so new leases won’t have any affect on the price of fuels even twenty years from now. And is there enough obtainable oil in the continental shelves to free the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil? Of course not.
The big oil companies don’t want more oil. They aren’t using the leases they have now. Over the past five years, the number of domestic drilling permits has nearly doubled, and there are some 68 million acres already leased to big oil companies that have never been drilled on.
The oil giants don’t want more oil. More oil would likely kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Here is what Clifford Krauss of the New York Times said: Exxon is the world’s largest publicly traded oil company. Its second quarter profits rose 14 percent, to $11.68 billion, compared to the same period a year ago. That was the greatest profit ever recorded by a corporation in a three month period, and it beat the previous record of $11.66 billion set by Exxon in the last three months of 2007. (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/business/01oil.html)
Drill more oil wells to increase the supply of oil and force the price of fuels to go down? The oil giants do not want more and cheaper gas at the pump — they want their profits to keep right on setting records.

What do the giants want?
If the oil giants don’t want more oil, then why do they want the coastlines and Arctic opened up to leasing and exploration? They are after three things. They want to prolong their profiteering, so what they need is a long-lasting supply of oil, a steady supply rationed out to keep those record profits coming as long as possible.
They also want to grab all the low-hanging fruit, the cheapest and easiest oil. It’s far cheaper to drill off the shores of California, Oregon and Washington, than in distant deserts or in the remote and frozen north.
But what it really comes right down to is this: The oil industry is pushing for unfettered and unregulated access to America’s coasts, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and wilderness for drilling. They want license to drill in America’s most precious and pristine natural areas, places where they are forbidden from drilling now, and with very good reason.

Good reasons for the ban
The prohibitions against offshore oil drilling were imposed for good reasons, and one of those reasons was the Santa Barbara blowout of 1969.
It had started out to be a routine operation. It was Tuesday morning, January 28th, and about five miles off the coast, and a pipe was being extracted from a deep well beneath the Union Oil Company’s offshore drilling rig “Alpha.” But because not enough drilling mud had been pumped back down the well to compensate for the sudden build up of natural gas at extreme pressure. The gas ripped open the well casing and made huge cracks in the sea floor around the well, an event that’s called a blowout. For eleven days, immense amounts of oil and natural gas under great pressure blasted from the blowout and violently roiled the surface of the ocean around oil rig Alpha.
More than three million gallons of thick, gooey oil coated 35 miles of the famously beautiful beaches of the Santa Barbara Channel. The oil on some beaches was six inches deep. Eight hundred square miles of ocean were impacted. Kelp forests were devastated. Thousands of seabirds died in the oil, along with innumerable fish and intertidal invertibrates, dolphins, seals and otters. (www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/Papers/SBOilSpill1969.pdf)
That happened 39 years ago. Today we are proudly told that such disasters are a thing of the past because of advancements in technology. It is true about the technology. It is highly advanced, but human error is still the same old human error. Take for example the Exxon Valdez disaster.
On March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground in the Prince William Sound in Alaska splitting its side open and spilling 11 million gallons of oil. The oil slick was said to be eight miles wide, and it contaminated about 1,300 miles of coastline. Around 250,000 seabirds, nearly 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales died as a result of the spill. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/24/newsid_4231000/4231971.stm)

Besides equipment failure and human error there is always the threat of natural disasters. The best technology in the world cannot prevent natural disasters. Proponents of offshore drilling like to claim that no oil leaks or spills occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita in 2005. Here is a snippet from Think Progress: Sen. John McCain: “I’m aware that off the coast of Louisiana and Texas there are oil rigs, as we well know, and those rigs have survived, very successfully, the impacts of hurricanes – hurricane Katrina as far as Louisiana is concerned.”
McCain is wrong. According to press reports, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita “tore through the Gulf of Mexico’s offshore oil and gas fields, toppling production platforms, setting rigs adrift and rupturing pipelines.” The U.S. Minerals Management Service reported that the hurricanes totally destroyed 113 offshore oil platforms. (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/18/mccain-rigs/)
The reality from the U.S. Minerals Management Service: “As a result of both storms, a total volume of 17,652 barrels (or roughly three-quarters of a million gallons) of total petroleum products, of which 13,137 barrels were crude oil and condensate, was spilled from platforms, rigs and pipelines. 4,514 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs.”
(http://sierraclub.typepad.com/compass/2008/07/offshore-drilli.html)

The point is that there is no such thing as immunity from disaster when you have gigantic oil platforms operating off your coast. Offshore oil drilling involves a variety of great risks. That’s why Governor Kulongoski signed into law a bill banning offshore oil and gas exploration on the Oregon Coast. That happened last year, on June 22, 2007,
All three governors of the west coast states, Ted Kulongoski, Chris Gregoire and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have repeatedly emphasized their opposition and vowed to fight drilling as part of a three-state ocean health agreement announced July 29th of this year.

What can we do?
The answer to our energy problems is not more drilling off our coasts. What we need is a rapid conversion from our dependence on burning fossil fuels to the full exploitation of unlimited, nonpolluting energy sources and the creation of a culture of energy alternatives and efficiency. Alternative energy technologies exists, they work amazingly well, and other countries are using them now.
We are staring into the face of catastrophic climate change. The time has arrived. We must make the necessary changes. Alternative energy and energy efficiency can make the U.S. independent of imported fossil fuels, clean up the environment, and protect the oceans.

Editors note: My special thanks to Bob Fischer for taking this weeks ‘duel’ in The Sentinel, not surprisingly he did a great job.

In 1943 US Intelligence learned that a fast, maneuverable German jet was being produced in the Messerschmitt factories that would deliver a crushing advantage over allied forces during World War II. Racing against time, Lockheed Martin engineers bunkered down in Burbank, CA to produce the first production jet fighter, the P-80.
Lead by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, only 33, twenty eight engineers, in make shift tent offices working around the clock under cover of secrecy, often fighting bitterly even violently, took sketches from the drawing board and mounted the engine to the frame in only 143 days. The P-80, or Green Hornet as they called it took to the air January 8, 1944 and erased any advantage the Germans once had. The P-80 advanced America into the jet age.
That legendary effort heralded the renowned Skunk Works and developed the U-2, the F-117 and perhaps most famously the SR-71 Blackbird, a Mach 3 high altitude jet whose wings glow a warm cherry red at velocity. The development of the Green Hornet dubbed the Lulu Belle illustrates what America can do in the face of incredible odds or more importantly what a handful of people can do when they work together toward a common goal.
The Skunk Works story always gives me a thrill and epitomizes everything I have believed America is about. What came out of the Skunk Works and other heroic efforts over our history are so miraculous as to be indistinguishable from magic. They are why I am proud to be an American and so confused that we seem unable to solve the energy problems of our time.
The technology exists now to end our dependence upon foreign and finite resources. The technology exists now to enable us to derive all our energy from renewable sources if we just pay attention to what is being done in other countries and decentralize. Instead we keep talking about building new coal powered plants or nuclear powered plants to ‘bridge’ the gap to independence.
Rather than pitch some tents and hunker down and bring electric vehicle technologies to maturity we are talking about importing LNG and drilling offshore and in delicate national reserves to continue old technology. For unexplained reasons we believe it is easier to build 19,000 miles of high voltage lines than it is to implement microgrids. We seem to think it is easier build the infrastructure necessary to import foreign resources and drill offshore than to advance into the next age.
Archaeologists often attribute the collapse of complex societies to resource depletion. America, a complex society, is certainly suffering from resource depletion right now. However, what leads to collapse is less resource depletion but more a failure of leadership to adapt to changes brought about by resource depletion. America has in its heritage the ability to enter the jet age in only 143 days in order to prevail and now, if we are to prevail, we must dig in not tethered by old thinking and enter a new age of energy production and consumption and we have to do it together.

Offshore drilling will not produce oil for ten years or result in savings at the pump. Nevertheless, opening ANWR and the coastlines to drilling are going to be the new GOP mantra.

This past week heralded a stunning example of the dangers of designing an economic policy dependent upon outside resources. Just three days after Governor Kulongoski inaugurated the new $20M airport terminal and delivered a $624,000 check to build an air traffic control tower, Horizon Air announced they will cut service to Coos County.

One of only two carriers servicing the area and flying only to Portland, Horizon cited growing fuel costs and concerns about future demand in the area in its decision to vacate Southwest Oregon Regional Airport. Horizon’s abrupt and unexpected exit also illustrates the consequences of tying publicly owned infrastructure to privatized essential service. In the end, it is not the needs of the public but the bottom line, the profit margin for company shareholders that dictates our quality of life here on the Southern Oregon coast.

Experts predict $7 per gallon gasoline by 2010 and that fuel costs will exceed food costs in the typical family budget. By that time, if the remaining carrier pulls out of SORA it will not matter because no one will be able to afford a ticket anyway. Of course, according to Gov Kulongoski’s speech last week, the airport terminal was more about bringing people in than travel or air freight which brings me back to our dependence upon outside resources.

As I have written before, exports create jobs and imports eliminate them. Continued strategy of enticing imports, “if we build it, they will come”, whether its foreign liquefied natural gas, container ships loaded with Asian products and produce or jet setting tourists and golfers is not going to promote a sustainable, full employment and independent local economy.

As resource competition increases along with future energy demands transportation, like air and rail, will not be the only essential services cut to rural America including Coos County. Electrical generating authorities are warning that load demands may not be met by 2011 and just as Horizon cut service to small communities while maintaining more profitable urban routes, unregulated investor owned utilities will make similar cost saving decisions in delivering rural power.

To grow an independent economy with full employment we must keep as many of our dollars local as possible. As oil prices rise our spending habits are being altered for us, forcing us to make choices we would never have considered two years ago and rolling blackouts will force our hand as well. Instead of reacting to outside conditions beyond our control we should begin by making proactive decisions on our own terms now.

There are abundant, underutilized renewable resources at our disposal. First and foremost we should buy local food grown and raised by area farmers and ranchers. Encourage grocery stores to stock and offer local produce or buy at the farmers’ markets. Forego ornamental shrubbery and plant fruit and nut trees and encourage gleaning and community harvesting. The fewer miles food has to travel to get to your table the better it is for the local economy.

Wind is a plentiful local resource and community owned wind projects have been proven to be more beneficial to communities than corporately owned projects. Producing energy locally provides more long term jobs and increases the tax base which allows dollars to be reinvested in the area to fund health care, education, transportation and maintain infrastructure, all on our own terms.

Coos County has been operating below production capacity for some time because of insufficient demand for local goods and services in favor of imported goods and services. An almost 8% unemployment rate is a consequence of government investment in imports over infrastructure, unrestrained free trade and local spending habits. Exporting our dollars through the purchase of foreign fuel, electricity, food and even fines for petty traffic violations leaves less money to increase competitive local production and create jobs.

To enact these types of changes requires community involvement and progressive leadership. Attend city council and county commission meetings. Read the budgets, ask questions, assess whether that tax dollar investment will rebuild our economy. Consider running for elective office, we have four Coquille city council positions up for election this November. Get involved because what we also learned from the embarrassing Horizon Air departure is that you cannot leave matters of significant public interest in the hands of just a few.